I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death Read online

  Somehow, though, I am on this plane and I am heading towards a different man. I have, in short, no idea what I’m doing. I ought—or so it seems to me—to be moving into a flat in Cambridge. I should be oiling the chain of my bicycle. I should be going up and down the steps of the university library, carrying books and periodicals. I should be starting my PhD. I should be sitting in my usual seat, opposite my friend, who is at this very moment embarking on his own PhD, alone, without me.

  Instead I am here, on my way to Hong Kong, because four months ago, I went to look for my degree results, which were displayed on a board, and instead of the result I had been hoping for, the result I needed to secure postgraduate funding, the result I had wanted and worked for, I had nothing near it. Nothing even close. Something, I realised, as I turned away from the board, as I stumbled down the steps, as I climbed back onto my bicycle, ignoring the calls from other people, had gone terribly, horribly wrong.

  So here I am. I will not become an academic; I will not be staying at Cambridge; I will not see my friend for a long time. I will not be doing a PhD on the deceptively marginal roles of women in medieval poetry.

  My thesis, which would have argued that the anonymous poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was female, will remain unwritten. I have, for months now, ever since my plans caved in, caught glimpses of the poem, as if out of the corner of my eye, and have had to turn away from it because its loss from my life is too great. The celebratory meal, interrupted by the fearfully courteous giant. The poet’s lingering, admiring description of his physique (“For of bak and of brest al were his bodi sturne/Bot his wombe and his wast were worthily smale”). Her luxurious indulgence in colour and decoration, pattern and textile, the way she—I was always so sure she was a she—deftly distracts you, like a conjuror, from the central mystery with an array of handsome men and their clothes, their armour, their beards and their somewhat ridiculous fights. The intriguing and modern-seeming way she would change tense in the middle of a stanza. And the doltish Gawain, who has no idea what he’s got himself into, who overlooks the old woman at the castle, entirely missing the whole point of the confusing web spun around him.

  It has all gone. I must shut the door on it—and her. I liked my connection with her, through the words of the story. I relied on it. I felt as though I had reached back through time, down through the pages of the book, and taken hold of her hand. But I must give her up. I won’t read the book again for many years.

  At the time, as I fly across the Pacific Ocean, age twenty-one, it feels as if something crucial to my very existence—a heart, a lung, an artery—has been snatched away from me.

  —

  In a year or so, I will realise that the mess I made of my finals was nothing of the sort; in a few years more, it will seem to me that it was a merciful escape. That my guardian angel, glancing down from her cloud and seeing me cycle to my exams, perceived what might happen and let slip a celestial spanner that well and truly jammed my works.

  The truth is that I would have been a terrible academic: I am too volatile, too skittish, too impatient. Once I had written my paean to the Gawain poet, I would have been miserable poring over ancient manuscripts in a library for the rest of my life. The opacity of Middle English would have driven me mad. I wouldn’t have made a good teacher either. I’m haunted, for one thing, by a stammer: how could I have stood up at the front of a class? How could I ever have thought I could deliver a lecture? I would have been beside myself with boredom and rage and frustration within a month or two, probably left Cambridge and done something else. Maybe I would have ended up in Hong Kong anyway.

  Of course I don’t know this as I sit on the plane. I’m still submerged in panic and grief, still mourning the loss of what I felt was central to my identity. My grades, and my ability to produce them out of a hat, were the only thing I had, the only thing I was good at. I was not amiable or affable and never would be, I had strange and unruly hair, I was verbally challenged, I had mysterious neurological problems but, from my early teens, this was the kind of alchemy I could pull off: you were given the work, you revised the work (hard, very hard, with timetables and test papers and clocks and early starts and late nights, with notes and highlighters and index cards), then you reproduced it in an exam hall. And then—abracadabra!—you received a piece of shiny paper saying you had passed Go, you had won two hundred pounds, you had a get-out-of-jail-free card.

  It had worked for years, this formula. It had taken me through two comprehensive schools (one frightening and bewildering, one less so), then on to Cambridge, through my first year and second year, and then, suddenly, in my third, final and most important year of all, the spell stopped working. It wore off.

  What I wish I had known, age twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.

  You need to expect the unexpected, to embrace it. The best way, I am about to discover, is not always the easy way.

  So, I am heading to Hong Kong. Because I have to get away. Because I don’t speak any languages, besides inept German (Ich habe alle meine Hausaufgaben gemacht). Because Britain is in the grip of a recession and there are no jobs, especially for someone with an unremarkable degree in English literature. Because Anton, who went out to Hong Kong a while ago, has written to me and said: come, you’ll easily get a job here, you can stay with me. Because this appears to be the best thing to do. Because at twenty-one, it seems a perfectly feasible plan to leave and go all the way across the world with just a rucksack and no money and the promise of a place to stay. Because why not? What else do I have to lose?

  —

  There is no warning—just a sudden clunking noise and the sensation of a cold wind flowing through the cabin.

  Suddenly the plane is falling, dropping, plummeting, like a rock thrown from a cliff. The downwards velocity is astonishing, the drag, the speed of it. It feels like the world’s most unpleasant fairground ride, like a dive into nothing, like being pulled by the ankles into the endless maw of the underworld. My ears and face bloom petals of pain, the seatbelt cutting into my thighs as I am thrown upwards.

  Around me, the cabin is shaken like a snow globe: handbags, juice cans, apples, shoes, sweaters rise from the floor. Oxygen masks swing like lianas from the ceiling and human beings are tossed into the air. I see the child from across the aisle hit the roof, feet first, his mother arcing in the other direction, her black hair fanned out around her, her face more disgruntled than afraid. The priest next to me is thrown upwards and out of his seat, towards his rosary beads. Two nuns, their wimples billowing, are flung, like rag dolls, up to the lights.

  The air is filled with screaming, with curses, with prayer. A man with blood coursing out of both nostrils starts to yell in a language I don’t understand, gesticulating wildly. Drops of blood scatter from his face to mark the seats, the ceiling.

  Still the plane falls. An air hostess crawls along the aisle. She is screaming, her hat askew, her hair spilling over her shoulder. Another crew member, a man, coming in the opposite direction, stumbles over her blindly. He is shouting about masks, about how we must put them on, but he is thrown upwards before anyone can hear him.

  What I feel is not so much calm as numbed resignation. I think: so now this. I think: this is one of the worst things I have ever seen. I think: we are going to die, all of us, right now. We will hit the ocean or the ground at speed and we will explode like cans of soda. There will be nothing left. Total obliteration.

  There is an odd relief in being alone. I glance around at people clinging to their companions, their relatives, crying, screaming, holding on tight. I grip the seat arms and tell myself, here it comes. There is no flashing of life before the eyes. No final rec
koning takes place, no onslaughts of wisdom, no last-minute wishes or requests or prayers. I don’t think about all the other times I have managed to hoodwink this moment, slip from its grasp. I am suffused, preoccupied, distracted by the physical, the deafening noise of the aircraft, of people’s panic, the assaulting drag of the fall, the bracing of my body for the inevitable impact.

  At some point, the priest must have taken my arm because when we stop falling, when the plane seems to come up against something, we are all violently thrown upwards again before finally levelling out, and I feel the clench of his fingers near my elbow, his rosary beads pressing into my flesh. In a day or two, Anton will ask me what the strange row of marks on my arm is, and I will look down and see them, a novena of bruises.

  —

  When we land in Hong Kong, most of the passengers are taken away for medical treatment, including my priest. I carry his bag for him to the door of the ambulance. When we say goodbye, he places his hand on my head and mutters a blessing in Latin. Although I am no longer a believer, although I have rejected that whole part of my upbringing, I stand there on the runway, under his hand, until it is over.

  I can still feel the imprint of his fingers on the top of my head, like the circlet of an invisible crown, when I come through the gate to find Anton waiting for me. He looks different, wearing a loose white cotton shirt, his hair shorn close and dark to his scalp.

  I get a job two days later, coaching school children in English literature, easing them towards good grades. I sit in a partitioned booth above the harbour and help them through Romeo and Juliet, through Seamus Heaney’s naturalist, through the motivations of Arthur Miller’s salesman. I teach a girl, who is about to be sent to a boarding school in Hertfordshire, how to use a knife and fork. She asks me to help her choose an English name and I attempt to steer her away from “Winsome” or “Delicate,” which she has found in the dictionary. I take Cantonese lessons: yat, yee, sam, sei, ng. I eat congee every morning at a street-side stall. I swim in the South China Sea and pick up shells with my toes. I travel up the side of a peak in a slant-floored tram. I consider the newspapers, the features, the interviews, the book and film reviews, and ask myself, that? Could I maybe do that? I write letters on frail-skinned blue aerogrammes. Anton teaches me to use a single-lens-reflex camera and I go out with it and photograph everything—people taking their caged birds for a walk, old ladies doing t’ai chi in the morning, mah-jong players in the park, children dressed up as dragons, the flattened ducks in restaurant windows, the trams, the neon scribbled in the dark sky, the pyramids of durians and tanks of tofu in the night markets. I join the British Council library, scrabbling together the necessary forms and photocopies and proofs of address. I tread the carpet along the rows of Fiction A–Z and think: I can read whatever I want. The realisation arrives like a gale, lashing past me, almost making me stagger.

  No more courses, no more curricula, no more exams for me.

  I take out three books and, days later, I’m back, taking out three more. Books stack up in our tiny apartment, by the bed, in the bathroom, in the galley kitchen. I take out books by people I’ve heard of but have never had time to read, books by authors I’ve heard speaking on the radio, books translated from far-flung languages, books by people who are still alive, books I’ve seen in the pages of newspapers, all the books, in short, which didn’t appear on my degree course. I read as I walk to work, I read on the underground trains, I read between my students’ slots, I read in the bath, watched from the ceiling by the leucistic gecko I have tamed, plying him with aphids I pluck from the window-boxes.

  And, one night, in the monsoon season, when the rain is a constant, lulling hum outside the windows, when our clothes, the windows, the pictures are growing mould in the humidity and it’s too hot to sleep, when I have been reading subversive versions of European folktales, I get the urge to put down some words. I get up, find a pencil, open an exercise book at the table and, as Anton sleeps, I start to write.

  NECK

  2002

  When I am seized suddenly and roughly from behind, my first thought is that it’s someone I know. An acquaintance is here, in Chile, by amazing and unaccountable coincidence, and has seen us, walking beside a lake, and has come up behind us to say hello, jumping on me in a playful fashion.

  Then I see Will’s face and know it’s nothing of the sort. There is a machete being held to my throat. Its long blade glints in the evening sun. I can feel its cool, metallic caress against my skin, the insistence of the stranger’s grip, pinning my arms to my sides. In the disturbing intimacy of the embrace, his breath, laboured and hoarse, grazes my ear. Even though I can’t see him, I sense that he’s about my height and dark-haired. He hasn’t washed for a while. I am aware of the onion-tang of his armpits, the steel of his belt-buckle in the small of my back, the tremble of his hands. He is scared, Will is scared, but I feel strangely removed, as if this isn’t really happening, as if we haven’t been apprehended by a machete-wielding man but are continuing with our lakeside walk.

  Will is angry too, I see, at this interruption, at this escapade. His face is white and scowling. I have known him for ten years, have been in a relationship with him for three, and I can see the whir of thought through his brain, can read it like ticker-tape coming out of a machine: a machete, my girlfriend, a man, smaller than me. He looks pissed off. He looks murderous.

  We are in the first week of a long trip through South America. This little town, beside a lake, at the base of a volcano, is our second stop. After this, we plan to head for the hills, travel deep into the Andes, where we’ve been told there is a place with a thermal spring and a farmer who will let you sleep in his barn.

  Will and I have just bought a flat in London, a red-brick end-of-terrace, with a tiny rhomboid of garden out the back. A railway line runs alongside it, trains lumbering past in obverse directions, making the walls tremble and shudder, the windowpanes rattle.

  When we found it, it was semi-derelict, unused for years, the boards caving in, the Edwardian floral wallpaper slumping to the floor, the gas lamps leaking deltas of rusty red effluvia down the crumbling plaster. While we are in South America, the flat is being re-floored, rewired, revivified (or, at least, we hope so: missives from the builders are infrequent and unspecific). We will, we anticipate, return to electric lights, to floors that don’t give way beneath our feet, to white walls, radiators, hot water, to opened-up fireplaces and a working oven. We have nowhere to live while this transformation takes place so, rather than finding a temporary place, we have decided to come travelling until our flat is ready. It works out cheaper, we reasoned, to live in South America than renting in London. We would take our work with us: we could write on the run and email articles back to Britain. The perfect plan.

  Except that now a man is holding a machete to my neck and crooning, “Dinaro,” into my ear. “Dinaro.” Then, in case we don’t understand: “Money.”

  Will doesn’t move. He is standing in front of us now, his body tense and coiled.

  “Give him money,” I croak, the blade pressing down on my windpipe.

  He still doesn’t move.

  “Will,” I whisper, as the man gets a fistful of my hair and forces me to my knees, the machete grinding closer to my throat, “please. Give him the money.”

  I see Will glance at the machete, at the man, at me kneeling mutely before him, a blade held to my exposed neck, like some strange enforced marriage-proposal tableau, and I know he is still assessing whether he can tackle this situation in kind.

  “Please,” I say again.

  I see him relent. He reaches slowly into the pocket of his jacket. I remember, irrelevantly, that back in the hostel bedroom we debated whether or not we’d need coats before we went out. Was it cold? Did it look like rain? Were there clouds in the sky? Should we take a walk by the lake before dinner? Why not?

  Will holds out some notes. “Let her go,” he says.

  The man darts forward to snatch the mon
ey and the movement causes a sharp yank to my scalp. Through the pain, I glimpse a shock of black hair, a mouthful of stained teeth, jeans, a torn sweatshirt. He is young, younger than me, and clearly sleeping rough. What possessed us, I wonder, to take a walk in such a lonely, windy place?

  The money does not please him. He stuffs it into his back pocket with a grimace.

  “Mas!” he yells, slapping the ground with his machete blade. “Mas!”

  He cleans us out. We had, only that day, been to the bank and changed a whole wedge of travellers’ cheques: we were about to head off into the Andes and would need the cash. We had more money in our pockets and bags than we’d ever carried before, at any time in our travels. The man takes it all from us, pulling it out from the various places in which we’d stashed it. We hand it to him, in exchange for my neck, its arteries, its tendons, its muscles, its trachea, its oesophagus, for it all to remain in its current unbreached state.

  He doesn’t let go of my hair. He keeps it wrapped around his fist, throughout the robbery: his every twitch, his every movement causes my scalp to smart with pain. When we have no more money, when our pockets and wallets are empty, there is a suspended, triangular moment as the three of us look at each other. Me at Will, Will at the man, the man at me. What now? we are all thinking. He is holding the machete in one hand, my hair in the other; his pockets are full of our money. The wind whisks around us, pleating the surface of the lake, smashing the trees back and forth in the darkening sky.