That’s my best guess.
It stopped as suddenly as it had started. The madness, I mean, the terrible dream. Or rather, switched its assault from the body to the mind. In actuality, no doubt, I was lying supine in a state of unflattering partial dress on the unjudgemental bathroom floor. In the terrible dream, however, I was back at Penelope’s gaff in Manchester with the words ‘forgive you’ opening me – how can I describe this? – separating my ribs and filling them with unbounded, mentholated space. Space. Can you be filled with space? Is it just me? I could see the inside of my head. It was an area big enough to seat every being in the universe, an infinite amphitheatre overarched by . . . well, a sky, I suppose, one of icy and sunlit blue, going on, as you might expect, forever. Vertigo? Sort of. The vertigo of bliss. (Gunn should make a note of that for a title. The Vertigo of Bliss. That’s got to be a title for something. Not this, obviously, but something.) In any case nothing I’ve felt before, angelically or otherwise. Still at the Manchester table, still observing the concrete particulars – Penelope’s bare feet up on the chair next to her; the coffee rings and half-done Guardian quick crossword (14 Down: To forgive? (6); she’d fill it in later, no doubt); the open back door with its colour-riot and smell-festival; the buzz of a passing bluebottle; my own hand, the Marlboro with inch-long ash smouldering between first and index – still, as I say, there. But released, too, simultaneously, as it were, into a realm from which it was possible to both feel what I was feeling and observe myself feeling it. And what I was feeling is water to this language’s net, evidently. Hugeness. Internal hugeness. Room inside for . . . well, one hesitates to say this, but, for everything. Is there any other way of saying it? Bear with me, I’m searching . . . Searching . . . Nope. Room inside for everything. The discovery of infinite inner space, belonging to me and in which I ceased to matter. In this terrible dream my fingers grip Penelope’s table edge, my feet hook around its mock Queen Anne legs – I’m convinced that without such precautions my own infinite lightness will see me carried up, up, passing immaterially through Penelope’s ceiling and the floors and ceilings of the three flats above, up, up into the blue, filled with space, emptied of all but terrible bliss, permeated with the knowledge that I am both nothing and everything, a minute speck with the capacity for infinite expansion . . .
Wearing, isn’t it. And that’s just hearing about it. Meanwhile, back at the actuality ranch, I was very much regretting having turned the bathroom’s lights on. Inset halogens surrounded prone me with interrogative stares of piercing brightness. It would have been lovely – it would have been absolutely the thing – to have got up and crawled or staggered back to the unlit bedroom with its forgiving shadows and soccer-pitch sized window filled with London’s dusk. It would have been just what the doctor ordered. Instead, wide-eyed and inert, I lay on the bathroom like a mute patient unable to tell the approaching surgeon that the anaesthetic hadn’t worked, that when the buzzing blade entered, I would, actually, feel it.
Nor was that the end of it. Oh dear me no. Betsy – yes, Betsy Galvez – stands in her bathroom gripping the rim of the sink and staring into its large, bulb-rimmed mirror. Her eyes are raw and her make-up is fractured. Tears, you see. Every now and then a part of her rises up and looks at the other parts with contemptuous clarity. Downstairs, her eighty-three-year-old mother sits in her chair with bits of her mind abandoning her by the hour. There’s a home help during the day – but Betsy handles the evenings and the nights. And it is evening now. Mr Galvez wants the old girl out and in a home. Ridiculous, he says (the smell of piss and medicine, the deteriorating mind, the ice cream in the handbag, the idiotic and impotent rages), since they have the money to pay for the best. But Betsy (would you believe it, our Betsy) is wedded to caring for the old woman because . . . Because . . .? I don’t know.
‘I don’t know!’ I believe I screeched out at the bathroom’s brilliant eyeballs, trying, at the same time, to get to my knees – failing.
In any case, there’s Betsy at the mirror. Her mother has just slapped her across the face. Betsy doesn’t know why. ‘Why’ is a concept sliding into irrelevance in relation to her mother’s behaviour. The old woman, Maud, had dropped dessert all over her blouse. They’ve tried getting her to wear a bib, but she won’t have it. Therefore these mealtime messes. Banana mashed with clotted cream and sprinkled with pungent ginger. The old woman will eat virtually nothing else. (Betsy gags, these days, preparing it, having seen it far too many times in other form at the end of its journey through her mother’s bowels. Mr Galvez won’t even be in the room when the old woman tucks in. Betsy understands. . .) Anyway. Bending to mop-up her mother’s blouse, Betsy received a stinging slap across her mouth and a look of purest hatred from the still piercing octogenarian eyes. I hate you. Maud had said. You’re a dirty thief. You think I don’t know where all this money comes from? You’re nothing but a thief. You’re wearing my cardigan. D’you think I’m blind? And Betsy, for once, had been unable to bear it. Unable, for a moment, that moment, with her mouth bloody from Maud’s in-turned garnet and diamond cluster, to bear it. She had run upstairs, on fire with hurt and choking on unswallowable knots of tears, until, safe behind the bathroom’s locked door, she had taken her place before the mirror and let herself weep.
Without much surprise, by the way, I found that I was weeping myself, right there on the bathroom floor. No flailing or wailing, just strangely cooling and continuous tears. Somewhere in the back of myself, I remember, panic was politely trying to get the rest of my attention.
‘As long as I have strength,’ I find myself saying, in Betsy’s wobbling voice. ‘As long as I . . . Oh, Mummy . . .’
‘Who on earth are you talking to you insane man?’
Harriet to the rescue. Thank Hell.
‘You’re sick’ she said. ‘Your head’s on fire. We should call the doctor. Let me call the doctor.’
‘No doctor,’ I said. ‘I don’t need a doctor.’ Get her to take her clothes off, I thought, as a fresh wave of fever broke over my bad-tempered flesh. Get her to strip and – and – just anything to blot this rubbish out.
‘Is this what it’s going to be like?’ I said to those blazing bathroom bulbs. ‘Things you didn’t know? The three faces of Eve and so on? Sybil?’
‘What?’ Harriet asked. We’d made it to the bed and she’d managed to get my bespattered trousers off. ‘Declan darling I’m afraid you’re rambling.’
Indeed. Each image opened yet more space in the already limitless arena. The blue sky doming it stretched on, endlessly clear. A sudden flash – something that should have been entirely subliminaclass="underline" One naked man and one naked woman standing in a warm evening mist looking up into the boughs of a fruit-heavy tree; a look at each other; a hand squeeze; a grin . . . I wanted it to stop. Oh I wanted it to stop.