Asunder (11 page)

‘In fact, they even had their own monogrammed china,’ Pam said, gesturing towards our plates.

With a fork I pushed aside my remaining food until a dark blue seal came into view: CLOCK AND WATCHMAKERS’ ASYLUM.

Jane shoved away her plate and leaned back in her chair. In order to compensate for her rudeness I kept eating though I wasn’t used to large breakfasts and felt increasingly full. Just as Pam was starting to tell us about the dejected Welshman who had planted a hazel tree that still flourished to this day despite creating a digression in the garden, Jane turned to me and said, as if the women weren’t there, ‘Marie, I’d like to return to London.’

‘Now?’

‘Yeah, I don’t want to stay in this town for another hour.’

‘But we haven’t seen anything.’

She shrugged. ‘You can stay if you want but I’m leaving. I don’t like the vibe.’

‘What vibe?’

‘I’m not going to stay another night, here or anywhere.
You
can.’

‘Well no, not if you don’t . . . ’

Pam rose from her seat and began to clear the table. Sam remained seated, staring uncomfortably downwards.

‘You can stay,’ Jane repeated. ‘But I’m leaving.’

‘No, no, I’ll come with you . . . ’

We excused ourselves from the table, or rather, I excused us both, and climbed up to our room. Faded in the daylight, the floral print looked less zealous and oppressive. It was a shame to be leaving.

‘Are you sure?’ I ventured one last time.

‘You can stay but I’m out of here. These women seem nice enough but I know when to read the signs. It’s like when the pilot says, “The weather at departure is stormy and the weather at our destination is stormy and we wish you a very safe flight.”’

For some reason I started laughing, which seemed to push Jane further towards the edge, and I had to bite my lip as I folded my clothes into a bag. Before zipping up her toiletries case, Jane grabbed the remaining tea bags from the tray and threw them in.

Despite the awkward turn of events, the women shook our hands warmly and told us to please return, mentioning that their home looked especially nice in summer. Jane mumbled something incoherent, I said thank you a couple of times, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief, no doubt, once the door closed behind us.

As we wound our way back to the train station, circling the town centre one final time, I caught sight of the spires of the cathedral in the distance, now a hulking, majestic reproach.

The train hurtled past a cluster of industrial buildings only a shade darker than the sky. I thought of the patient returned to his asylum, and imagined the sound of different bells jangling in and out of tune, and of clocks attempting to realign their ticks and their tocks, preferring to imagine only non-human sounds, exercises in futility like trying to light a cigarette without cupping it from the wind. I wished we hadn’t sent him back. Next to me Jane thumbed through a magazine, occasionally humming a tune to herself, one I didn’t recognise, and only once did she look up, to show me a picture of a woollen black cape, saying they were coming back into fashion that winter. When we reached Euston station she asked whether I’d mind bringing her bag home and promptly jumped on a bus to Camden to go check on Lucian.

A moth flew past my face almost as soon as I entered the flat, safe, so far, from the deadly strips lying in wait. I clutched half-heartedly at the air, aware it’d already flown off, and headed to my room, where my landscapes were waiting in the dark.

The sky that Sunday was marine blue in its upper regions, crossed by boatmen in white, and an empty waveless grey further down, as if the sun were uncertain what to give the last of November. As I walked the side streets of Pimlico I was struck by the emptiness of my path. I knew that part of town on weekdays and now saw that much of its life would withdraw come the weekend. Yet the place wasn’t entirely empty, I soon discovered, for there ahead of me was a tramp kneeling on his blanket, a large red-and-green checked affair that occupied most of the pavement. I felt I was crossing someone’s living room and intruding on a moment of privacy; he sat very still, a soiled paperback in one hand while the other gripped the neck of a large bottle of Lucozade. He didn’t look up when I walked past, his head more or less at the height of my thigh, and I made sure not to step on the frayed edges of his blanket though from what I could see they were used to being trodden on. At his side a handsome bull terrier, some kind of Staffordshire and American pit mix, was sprawled out at half-mast alert, drowsy but attentive. In the tenuous light the broad curvature of its head looked especially soft and I longed to stop and run my hand over its fur but my instincts told me to keep walking.

Once by the river I slowed my pace and breathed in the heady mix of Thames air and car exhaust, the traffic moving more in time with the water than on weekdays. There was no hurry so I could wander; Daniel and I hadn’t set an hour. He had begun working at his Tate most weekends, a decision that so far had benefited both his finances and his writing, he said, since the relatively empty rooms allowed him space and time to think outside the confines of his home, and had he gone to a library he wouldn’t be making the extra cash.

It’d been years since I’d visited Tate Britain and as I walked beneath the row of bare chestnut trees that ran parallel to the river, every now and then stopping to take in the view of the few barges napping on the muddy Thames, I tried to remember which Pre-Raphaelites were in the collection, probably most of its finest specimens, but after a few minutes of envisioning pale knights and expressionless beauties, in my mind all with the same porcelain face, draped in medieval colours, I started to think about how strange it would be to see Daniel in their midst, and how his own irregular geometry might jar with the paintings around him, and from his lameness my thoughts shot back to the major story of his life, one he rarely mentioned, not his marriage, not his poems, not his catalogue of poet friends in other countries, but the one he told me shortly after we met.

It had begun with a headache, he said, one of those headaches that stamps out nearly every impulse and emotion, the pulse of an imp inside your brain. The headache arrived with the morning post, half a dozen envelopes scattered on the floor, nothing of interest a tiny voice told him, yet he bent down to gather them all the same. Just as he reached for the final item, an electricity bill, he felt a bolt of pain behind his right eye. He stood up, straightened his back and dropped his shoulders, but the pain was still there.

He placed the envelopes on his desk and got back into bed. He would wait for the headache to pass. After an hour, he called in sick to work and took two aspirins; a few hours later, he took two more and began to sense that something heavy and impenetrable had sprung up around his head, a complex fortification that pressed into his temples. He tried sitting up, lying down, one pillow, four, reclining at a ninety-degree angle, or at 130. As the afternoon stiffened around him, Daniel said, he imagined an immense ship sailing towards him, a ship carrying all the headaches he’d ever had in his life, closer and closer until its keel grazed the top of his head.

Day two was no different. He went to see his GP, who said it would pass. Yet on day three, the ship felt heavier. By day four, Daniel was desperate. The only thing that helped, just a little, was to chew strong peppermint gum on the side where it most hurt, behind his right eye. Along with this and extravagant amounts of aspirin and ibuprofen, he had tried every remedy he could think of: tiger balm and eucalyptus oil, hot washcloths and bags of ice, pressure showers and deep-tissue massage, a Chinese acupuncturist, a German reiki man. He wore sunglasses, avoided screens, monitors and the printed word. He wrapped a kerchief tightly around his head, otherwise it might split open. He tried whatever remedy people happened to put forward, from his local newsagent to the woman at Boots. Everyone had an idea. None of them worked.

At home, he felt outside time. Despite the painful fortress that imprisoned him, he refused to stay immobile. His search for a cure, a wise word from somewhere, wasn’t going to happen while he lay in bed, so at least once a day he put on his sunglasses and went hunting for a solution.

Soon his extended family was discussing his condition. His cousin Lucy recommended a headache doctor she had once seen in Harley Street. Daniel went to this doctor and ended up parting with £135 for the man to tap his skull, shine lights in his eyes and wade through three pages of questions. He was sent home with a jar of ointment and a box of beta blockers. He rubbed the ointment into his temples, took the beta blockers. Nothing.

Day six, he ran into a friend on the street, Paul, who worked at the gift shop at the British Museum. It was he who told Daniel about the Hungarian hypnotist somewhere off Marylebone High Street who had cured his wife of chronic back pain. This man was an expert in pain, he’d said, knew how to make it vanish. On the spot, Paul called his wife and got the Hungarian’s number. Daniel was on the next bus to Marylebone.

The Hungarian had thick white hair and blue eyes that seemed to hold half the sky. He wore rings, four fluted bands of silver, two on each hand, and wasn’t particularly tall. Yet he carried himself proudly, Daniel said, as if he were taller.

‘What is problem?’ he asked.

Daniel removed his sunglasses and pointed to the right side of his head, describing the pain that wouldn’t go away.

‘No problem,’ the hypnotist replied.

He then sat down and motioned to a stool across from him. Once Daniel was seated, he was instructed to look into the man’s eyes, into his eyes and nowhere else. That was easy. As Daniel stared into the black pupils and their surrounding blue, he began to see a land of old forests and lakes, where clouds tiaraed round treetops creating ephemeral crowns, and houses wore hats of chimney plumes . . . For a second he thought he heard a woman yelling in a foreign language in another room, but blocked out the sound. And as he gazed into the distant landscape unravelling within that panoramic pair of eyes, the man asked him to count backwards from ten.

‘Ten, nine, eight . . . ’

From up close the hypnotist had a sweet, nostalgic smell, like black cherry tobacco. Daniel was tempted to lean forwards, he said, and inhale more deeply, but found he could not move.

‘Seven, six, five . . . ’

He was still aware of the Hungarian’s breathing but could no longer see any landscapes in his eyes. His pupils had turned into two round black hats floating on the surface of the bluest water.

‘Four, three, two . . . ’

Once Daniel had finished pronouncing numbers ten to one, he had no idea where he was sitting, whether he was sitting at all, nor where he’d lain his hands, knew not whether they were at his sides or in his lap, and he couldn’t feel his legs either, whether they were crossed or straight, whether he was still wearing shoes.

From somewhere deep and remote, like halfway through a mountain tunnel, he heard the voice of the hypnotist asking him to repeat,
Head does not control me
.

‘Head does not control me . . . ’

‘Head does not control me.’

‘Head does not control me . . . ’

After this, said Daniel, he couldn’t remember anything further. All he knew was that many minutes had passed and that he had travelled to a foreign land and returned.

A clapping of hands. The clanking of rings. Sounds from the street. The trance was over, his ache had vanished. His head could breathe again, the ship and the fortress had fallen away. After six leaden days, he had forgotten what it was like to be free of pain. And now, he was reminded.

‘Thank you, my friend, thank you,’ Daniel said, patting the Hungarian on the back.

The Hungarian raised a hand and said, ‘No problem.’

‘How much do I owe you?’

The man asked for £120, looking away as he said the amount, as if discomfited by monetary matters. Overflowing with gratitude, Daniel gave him an extra ten. The Hungarian beamed. They shook hands. Daniel put on his coat and started to walk towards the door. With the first step, and then the second, his left leg felt heavier and fell behind the right. He gave it a shake and continued, but again that leg fell behind. He tried putting the other foot first. But something wasn’t synchronised. His feet refused to walk in the way they had for the past thirty-four years. He looked over at the hypnotist.

‘No problem,’ the man said.

Daniel limped out of the room and started down the stairs, clutching the handrail. Even the surface of each stair felt wrong, as if the world had redrawn its geometry. Out on the street, it was the same. He checked the pavement and saw it was even. It was his left leg that did not want to cooperate. It kept falling behind. Again, he tried placing that foot down first, then bringing the other forward. But the moment he stopped trying to coordinate them, the limp returned.

After a few days, he went back to Marylebone.

The hypnotist shrugged and said, ‘Temporary. No problem.’

Over the next few weeks, Daniel sought out experts across London. They measured each foot and leg, tapped and weighed them, asked him to walk at different speeds, took X-rays and scans. Every doctor concluded the limp originated from his head. There was no asymmetry anywhere in his body, no trauma, tumour or inflammation.

Whatever the truth, the limp was there to stay. His headaches were gone but in the rewiring, Daniel said, something else had come undone. He had traded in the headache for the limp and, when it came down to it, life was more tolerable with the limp. After his visit to the Hungarian, and to this day, he has never suffered another headache. But every deficit of his, he told me, everything he hated in himself, would be spelled out in that gap between his feet.

He returned to the Hungarian many times. At first the man kept saying,
No problem
, and then one day he was gone. A week later an Austrian dentist hung a sign, changed the doormat, and set up shop in the space.