I spent a lot of time looking at the yellow roses on the wall. They were a comfort and a temptation. By crossing my eyes I could make one flower coincide with its identical neighbour, and so produce the optical illusion of space opening up. I knew I was supposed to keep absolutely still, but squirming didn’t count. When I was only inches away from the wall and the yellow roses, I would cross my eyes so that the wall seemed to recede, leaving the flowers floating. Then I would slowly, naughtily, reach out a finger, and come up short, prevented from entering the space that my mind could see and yearn for.
When I gazed at the yellow roses and let them float freely while the background colour of the wallpaper fell away I was scratching primitively towards transcendence, towards an understanding of the unreality of what surrounds us. The experience was at that stage desolating, and I turned against it. One day I tore the wallpaper away from the wall, at the edge of a seam. After that it wasn’t possible to superimpose two flowers and open up a space that wasn’t there, since the torn and curling strip broke the illusion. I knew I was being naughty when I tore the paper: I waited for punishment but none came. It gave no pleasure that illness kept me safe from disgrace. I had the evidence of my crime permanently close, and that was punishment enough. For the time being it put paid to any mystical inklings.
It may have been partly for the protection of the wallpaper that one day the bed was moved away from the wall, like the ones in a hospital, so that I could be attended to from both sides. This was a milestone of more significance for the carers than the patient, and not just because it made their tasks easier. It defined me actively as an invalid, rather than someone who happened to be ill without an end in sight.
Blizzard of attachments
In the meantime, the long meantime, even Peterkin wasn’t allowed on the bed, small as he was, light as he was. He would inevitably jump up and down, and cause me pain without meaning to. Until I was sentenced to bed rest he might just as well have been a made-up creature. I had tyrannised the poor soul, with no thought of his having a life outside the parts I made him play. The age gap, seventeen months, was just right to set him on a track of slavish devotion to the first-born, and to delay the time that he learned to know better. Only when I was immobilised and Peter was out of my power did I begin to absorb the fact of his separateness. Before then he had only been a small (and reversible) step up from imaginary, as far as I was concerned.
He had been another person all along, potentially a sidekick rather than a rival, an asset not a liability, but in my infant egotism I hadn’t thought of that. Luckily he hadn’t lost his desire to please me, and would bring in treasures from the garden that was now his exclusive domain.
I hadn’t noticed him enough to feel threatened before I was ill, and we weren’t in direct competition even now. The prisoner in his bed, having his meals brought in on trays, cajoled into eating each modest mouthful, and the toddler in the high chair left to feed himself, could hardly resent each other. There was none of the enforced sharing that brands brotherhood on the older party. It’s the appropriated toy that does the damage. The loved object forges a bitter bond, when it turns up missing an ear. The favourite comic is the culprit, defaced with an alien crayon. It’s the blocked path to the breast, usurper smugly at suck. None of this applied to us as brothers. Fashions in motherhood played a part in the area last mentioned. By the time Peter came along, Mum had been persuaded that bottle was best. The nipple remained my symbolic possession even when I’d been weaned from it.
Peter would come to see me but keep on the other side of the room, as if any closer approach would be too stimulating for me. He would wave at me rather solemnly, from the far side of the crevasse which divides the sick from the well. Some days he would steal up to me with his hand clenched, and then open it to reveal one of his toy soldiers, which he would slip between the sheets with me where Mum wouldn’t see, before trotting off to explore his wider world. He was leaving one of his troops with me as a sort of hostage, a kindness which almost made me forget my stubborn lack of interest in games of conflict. Normally the only soldiers I liked were the ones to be dipped in my egg.
I wish I could claim that illness sheltered me from the blizzard of attachments, so that I freely recognised Peter’s claims to equality, but it isn’t so. Later on I would have to invent techniques to hold onto my dominance, but for the time being Mum belonged to me without question. I was her priority. Silence on my part could bring Mum to my side at least as quickly as Peter’s cries could draw her to his.
Sometimes Mum read to me, poems and stories. All my time was bed-time and every story was a bed-time story. More than once she read me a poem about a little girl who didn’t eat properly. She grew thinner and thinner until she was as thin as a piece of paper. Mum read it in the ominous tones suitable for a cautionary tale:
Oh, she was so utterly utter!
She couldn’t eat plain bread-and-butter,
But a nibble she’d take
At a wafer of cake,
Or the wing of a quail for her supper.
Roast beef and plum-pudding she’d sneer at,
A boiled leg of mutton she’d jeer at,
But the limb of a frog
Might her appetite jog,
Or some delicate bit that came near that.
The consequence was, she grew paler,
And more wishy-washy, and frailer,
Ate less for her dinner,
Grew thinner and thinner,
Till I really think,
If you marked her with ink,
Put an envelope on her,
And stamped it upon her,
You could go to the office and mail her!
Perhaps this was her way of blackmailing my appetite, on days when I was sated by half a boiled egg, or a quarter, or a single teaspoonful, days when I was disenchanted even with magic bananas.
Something in my character stopped the poem from working on me as Mum must have hoped. At first when she recited the poem and added at the end, ‘You wouldn’t want that to happen to you, now would you?’ I was terrified by the thought. But as the days inched by, the fascination of the idea grew on me in secret. Then when Mum said, ‘You wouldn’t want …’ at the end of the reading, I whispered ‘Oh no!’ but I was secretly infatuated. The idea of dwindling to nothing held a strong attraction for me, which I now see as the magnetic pull of austerity in a previous life.
There was one story that made us both weep: Paul Gallico’s Snowflake. There was plenty of food for Hindu thought in that story of transformation and essence, if I’d noticed, but I took my cue from Mum and wept. How sad and how beautiful it was, the story of the little Snowflake and her pear-shaped water drop of a husband, her progress from snow bank to river to millstream to estuary to the sea. And however much the Snowflake was jostled or scalded, she was aware of a backdrop of love. When Mum reached the end of the story, her voice vibrated in a way I had never heard before.
Eight physical signs