I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death Page 2

  So, when the man put the binocular strap around my neck, even though he was saying something about wanting to show me a flock of eider ducks, I knew what came next. I could smell it, I could almost see it there, thickening and glittering in the air between us. This man was just another in a long line of bullies who had taken exception to my accent or my shoes or godknowswhat—I had long since stopped caring—and he was going to hurt me. He meant to inflict harm, rain it down on my head, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  I decided I must play along with the birdwatching game. I knew that this was my only hope. You can’t confront a bully; you can’t call them out; you can’t let them know that you know, that you see them for what they are.

  I glanced through the binoculars for the length of a single heartbeat. Oh, I said, eider ducks, goodness, and I ducked down and away, out of the circle of that strap. He came after me, of course he did, with that length of black leather, intending to lasso me again, but by this time I was facing him, I was smiling at him, gabbling about eider ducks and how interesting they were, did eiderdowns used to be made of them, is that where the name came from, were they filled with eider-duck feathers? They were? How fascinating. Tell me more, tell me everything you know about ducks, about birds, about birdwatching, goodness, how knowledgeable you are, you must go birdwatching a lot. You do? Tell me some more about it, about the most unusual bird you’ve ever seen, tell me while we walk because is that the time, I really must be going now, down the hill, because I have to start my shift, yes, I work just there—you see those chimneys? That’s the place. It’s quite close, isn’t it? There will be people waiting for me. Sometimes if I’m late they’ll come out to look for me, yes, my boss, he’ll be waiting. He walks up here all the time too, all the staff do, he knows I’m out here, he certainly does, he knows exactly where, I told him myself, he’ll be out looking for me any minute now, he’ll be just around that corner. Sure, we can walk this way, and while we do, why don’t you tell me some more about birdwatching, yes, please, I’d like that but I really must rush because they are waiting.

  —

  Two weeks later, a police car drives up the winding track to the guesthouse and two people get out. I see them from an upper window, where I’m wrestling pillows into their cases. I know straight away what they are doing here, why they have come, so even before I hear someone calling my name, I am walking down the stairs to meet them.

  These two are nothing like the policeman at the station. They are in suits, their demeanours serious, focused. They proffer badges and documents to my boss, Vincent, with faces that are still with practised, skilled neutrality.

  They want to talk to me in private so Vincent shows them into an unoccupied room. He comes in with us because he is a good man and I am only a few years older than his own children, whose cries and shouts can be heard from the back lawn.

  I sit on a bed I made that morning, and the policeman sits at an ornamental wicker table where some guests like to take their morning tea; the policewoman seats herself next to me on the bed.

  Vincent hovers in the background, muttering mistrustfully, pretending to adjust a crystal hanging at the window, to wipe non-existent dust off the mantelpiece, to rattle the fire-irons in the grate. He is a former flower child, a Haight-Ashbury survivor, and has a low opinion of what he calls “the fuzz.”

  The police ignore him, in a polite but preoccupied way. They are interested, the woman tells me, in a man I encountered recently on a walk. Would I be able to tell them exactly what happened?

  So I do. I start at the beginning, describing how I passed him early on the hike, how he headed off in the opposite direction, then somehow appeared ahead of me. “I don’t know how he did that,” I say, “because there isn’t a short-cut, or not one that I know of.” They nod and nod, listening with a measured intensity, encouraging me to go on. Their eyes never leave my face: I have their absolute attention. When I get to the part about the binoculars strap, they stop nodding. They stare at me, both of them, their eyes unblinking. It is a strange, congested moment. I don’t think any of us breathes.

  “A binoculars strap?” the man asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “And he put it around your neck?”

  I nod. They look away, look down; the woman makes a note of something in her book.

  Would I be willing, she asks, as she hands me a folder, to take a look at some photographs and let them know if I see him there?

  At this point, my boss interrupts. He can’t not. “You don’t have to say anything, you know, you don’t. She doesn’t have to say anything.”

  The policewoman is putting up her hand to silence him, just as I am placing my index finger on a photograph.

  “That’s him,” I say.

  The detectives look. The woman notes something again in her book. The man thanks me; he takes the folder.

  “He killed someone,” I say to them, “didn’t he?”

  They exchange an unreadable glance but say nothing.

  “He strangled someone. With his binoculars strap.” I look from one to the other and we know, we all know. “Didn’t he?”

  From across the room, Vincent swears softly. Then he walks over and gives me his handkerchief.

  —

  The girl who died was twenty-two. She was from New Zealand and was backpacking around Europe with her boyfriend. He was unwell that day so had stayed behind at their hostel while she went off on a hike, alone. She was raped, strangled, then buried in a shallow pit. Her body was discovered three days later, not far from the path where I had been walking.

  I only know all this because I read about it in the local newspaper the following week: the police wouldn’t tell me. I saw a headline in a newsagent’s window, went in to buy a paper, and there was her face, looking out at me from the front page. She had light-coloured hair, held back in a band, a freckled face, a wide, guileless smile.

  It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I think about her, if not every day then most days. I am aware of her life, which was cut off, curtailed, snipped short, whereas mine, for whatever reason, was allowed to run on.

  I never knew if they caught him, if he was convicted, sentenced, imprisoned. I had the distinct feeling, during the interview, that those detectives were on to him, that they had him, that they just needed my corroboration. Maybe the DNA samples were incontrovertible. Maybe he confessed. Maybe there were other witnesses, other victims, other near-misses, who gave evidence in court: I was never asked and was too green or, I suspect, too shocked to pursue the matter, to call the police and say, what happened, did you catch him, has he been put away? I left the area not long afterwards so can never be certain. All this happened long before a time of ubiquitous and instantly available news. I can find no sign, no trace of this crime on the internet, despite numerous searches.

  I don’t know why he spared me but not her. Did she panic? Did she try to run? Did she scream? Did she make the mistake of alerting him to the monster he was?

  For a long time, I dreamt about the man on the path. He would appear in a variety of disguises, but always with his rucksack and binoculars. Sometimes, in the murk and confusion of a dream, I would recognise him only by these accoutrements and I would think, oh, it’s you again, is it? You’ve come back?

  It is a story difficult to put into words, this. I never tell it, in fact, or never have before. I told no one at the time, not my friends, not my family: there seemed no way to translate what had happened into grammar and syntax. I have, now I think about it, only ever told one person, and that was the man I would eventually marry, and it only came out years after we first met. I told him one evening in Chile, as we sat together in the refectory of a travellers’ hostel. The expression on his face was one of such deep, visceral shock that I knew I would probably never tell it again, verbally, in my lifetime.

  What happened to that girl, and what so nearly happened to me, is not something to be lightly articulated, moulded into anecdote, formed i
nto a familiar spoken groove to be told and retold over a dinner table or on the telephone, passed from teller to teller. It is instead a tale of horror, of evil, of our worst imaginings. It is a story to be kept battened down in some wordless, unvisited dark place. Death brushed past me on that path, so close that I could feel its touch, but it seized that other girl and thrust her under.

  I still cannot bear anyone to touch my neck: not my husband, not my children, not a kindly doctor, who once wanted to check my tonsils. I flinch away before I even register why. I can’t wear anything around it. Scarves, polo necks, choker necklaces, any top or blouse that applies pressure there: none of these will ever be for me.

  —

  My daughter recently pointed to the top of a hill, seen on our walk to school.

  “Can we go up there?”

  “Sure,” I said, glancing up at the green summit.

  “Just you and me?”

  I was silent for a moment. “We can all go,” I said. “The whole family.”

  Alert as ever to the moods of others, she immediately caught the sense that I was holding something back. “Why not just you and me?”

  “Because…everyone else would like to come too.”

  “But why not you and me?”

  Because, I was thinking, because I cannot begin to say. Because I cannot articulate what dangers lie around corners for you, around twisting paths, around boulders, in the tangles of forests. Because you are six years old. Because there are people out there who want to hurt you and you will never know why. Because I haven’t yet worked out how to explain these things to you. But I will.

  LUNGS

  1988

  Credit 1

  It is late, near midnight, and a group of teenagers are out at the end of the quay. The town lies across the bay, a necklace of lights strung along the sand. The harbour is a place where they congregate: it is always possible to find others of their kind here, without prior arrangement. Something of its liminal nature, its space between land and sea, seems to draw them, especially at night.

  They are out late. They are bored, in that mind-shrivelling way peculiar to this stage in life. They are sixteen or thereabouts. They have just sat their first set of exams and are waiting for the results, waiting for the summer to be over, for the new school year to begin, waiting for their futures to take shape, waiting for their shifts to end, waiting for the tourists to leave, waiting, waiting. Some are waiting for bad haircuts to grow out, for their parents to allow them to drive or give them more money or clock their unhappiness, for the boy or girl they like to notice them, for the cassette tape they ordered at the music shop to arrive, for their shoes to wear out so they can be bought new ones, for the bus to arrive, for the phone to ring. They are, all of them, waiting because that is what teenagers who grow up in seaside towns do. They wait. For something to end, for something to begin.

  Two of them have been out together, broken up, got back together. Some can drive but others haven’t yet started. One smokes but mostly they don’t. They are not the ones at school to do drugs or drink to excess or sleep around.

  All of them have summer jobs, of varying descriptions, serving the tourists who clog the town in these months, like sand in a shoe. Two of the boys work as litter-pickers on the golf course; a girl serves ice-cream from the van at the beachfront.

  One of these teenagers is me. I am working evenings as a waitress in a golfing lodge. As I sit there, on the cool volcanic stone of the harbour wall, feet dangling over the drop, I can catch the scent of the hotel on my hair—cigarettes, reheated food, chip-pan oil, the beer spilt on my cuff. The smell of catering and bars and other people’s holidays.

  When one of the other girls suggests jumping off the harbour wall into the water below, it doesn’t make me particularly uneasy. There have been times, with other people, when it has been possible to feel the group dynamics shifting and tilting to a dangerous angle. If someone comes up with a dare or turns on another person or suggests something perilous, illegal or both, the evening can veer off course. The girl who demanded that we jump aboard a slow-moving goods train. The boy who climbed on top of a disused carousel, slipped and spent the rest of term in plaster. The girl who dropped lit matches into all the municipal rubbish bins along the seafront. The pair who let down the tyres and removed the windscreen wipers from the headmaster’s car.

  I tell my children about these things, now, and they look at me, wide-eyed. You did that? they ask. Not me, I say, but someone I was with. There will be times, I tell them, when you’re teenagers and you’re out and someone will suggest something that you know is a bad idea and you will have to make a choice whether to join in or leave. To go with the group or against it. To speak up, to speak out, to say, no, I don’t think we should do that. No, I don’t want this. No, I’m going home.

  I have never found it difficult to abandon a group, to go against the alpha male or female. I have never much cared for gangs, for social tribes, for fitting in. I have known since I was very young that the in-crowd isn’t my crowd; they are not my people. So it isn’t that which propels me to unfold myself up there on the harbour wall, to scramble, then stand up in the light breeze blowing in off the sea and say: “I’ll do it.”

  It is more a desire to do something—anything—that pulls me out of the repetitive mundanity of a sixteen-year-old’s life. To differentiate this day from all the others in the endless chain of days I’m living through. It is a desire to immerse myself in the water, that other element, the dark and shifting shape at the base of the harbour wall: I can sense its depth, its mass, its cold, waiting power, even though I can’t see it. To hope that it can remove the taint of the hotel, the dining room, the husbands who size me up when I ask for their dessert orders and say, in front of their simpering wives, “I think I’ll have you.” It is a job from which you come away soiled, queasy, stinking of the deep-fat fryer. It is a job in which you may be felt up by several members of a golfing party as you silver-serve them vegetables, and it takes everything in you not to invert the fork you’re holding and drive it into their thick wrists. It is a job during which a chef might very easily drop his kitchen scrubs and waggle his hips at you, his dick disconcertingly pink and bald inside its nest of black hair, and you are meant to shriek and laugh. It is the older waitresses—the ones who do this full-time, for a living, not just as a summer job—who are allowed to pick up a napkin and slap it down on the dick in question and say, put that away and leave the lassie alone. It is a job in which the kitchen porter might get a fancy for taking a skinned oxtail and, because he has found out that you are a vegetarian, come up behind you as you are bending into the ice-cream freezer in the lightless outhouse and tie your wrists together with its cold, gelatinous length.

  It is all these things and more that propel me to my feet. At sixteen, you can be so restless, so frustrated, so disgusted by everything that surrounds you that you are willing to leap off what is probably a fifteen-metre drop, in the dark, into a turning tide.

  The sea is calm tonight. It roils with a smooth, oiled motion below us. I slip off my shoes. I don’t look down.

  The drop is faster than you might think. There is a rush of air, like a gush of wind through a suddenly opened door, and then I am enveloped in another world, swallowed by the sea.

  My ears roar, my sinuses fill, my mouth and eyes sting with salt, my shirt floats up around me, like wings. I must have hit the water at an angle because one side of my body throbs. The water is black: an absolute dark, this, an ur-dark, aphotic, without a glimmer of light. I open and shut my eyes and there is no difference, no alteration.

  I am still sinking, down and down, slower and slower, and I think that soon I will reach the bottom, that my feet will come into contact with silty sand and then I will be able to push off, push back, return to the surface, to my friends, to my life.

  No sand can be felt. I pedal my feet, stretching out my toes like a ballet dancer—but nothing. I am still sinking, or at least I think I am. Su
rely it can’t be this deep.

  Enveloped in water, I realise something. My coordination, my sense of spatial orientation is not as it should be. A childhood illness has resulted in sustained damage, as neurologists have said, to those parts of my brain involved in movement and balance. The people up on the harbour don’t know this: a move here a few years earlier has meant that they were spared the sight of me in a wheelchair, disabled, a special-needs case. I have impairment to a number of neurological functions, one of which is the ability to sense where things are or should be and my place among them. I have lost this unconscious function and I must rely instead on visual clues: proprioception, it’s called, the ability I lack. So I can’t reach out for a pen while talking to someone else. I need to stop, look, direct my hand, and only then can I connect palm with pen. If the visual clues are removed, for whatever reason, I am flummoxed, I am helpless, I am—in short—at sea.

  It is also why, if I happen to fall into black, lightless water late at night, I will have no sense of which way is up, no way of orienting myself towards air.

  I have wondered, since, what was going on up there on the harbour wall. How long it took them to realise I wasn’t resurfacing. Whether, after their initial whooping and cheering, they started chatting again, whether they fell silent after however many seconds, whether they watched the surface of the water for me to emerge. We didn’t talk about it afterwards: it was too much for us, then, the danger too large, too close.

  I flail about down there, beneath them all. I struggle one way, thinking it must be to the surface, then the other. At this point, your lungs start to burn, your pulse races, your heart tripping into an allegretto time signature, aiming to alert you to the situation, as if you haven’t noticed that you are about to die. You have an urgent need to cough but you know you mustn’t, you cannot. Your thoughts are monosemic: It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. And then: It’s not okay, it’s not okay, it’s not.