I wasn’t able any longer to walk around energetically as I had before I was blind, so I took account of that and ate carefully. I had fluctuated in size all my life but this fat felt doomy. It was solid and already old; it was hard like lamb fat. I could imagine it white and solid over the cold grey stew of my inner life. My limbs were no longer of any shape. They fell like sacks and settled oddly; sometimes I had to pull my legs across one another with my hands. I had been used to sitting with my longish legs crossed twice, at knee and ankle, for comfort.
I couldn’t sit in normal chairs without worrying that I might stand up with the chair stuck to my uncontrolledly voluminous arse. Yet at the start of 2008, when I went to my uncle Clem’s memorial service, before starting on all those high-dose prescription drugs, I had been able that morning to touch my forearms to the floor when I touched my toes, meet my hands behind across my back, and stretch so that my head lay on my calf when I sat on the floor with my legs in a V. I had had long slimmish legs and feet that I could fit into proper shoes. I had had flexible arms, not legs of mutton. I wanted to look nice for my surprisingly dead handsome uncle and his great-nephews and niece, my children.
Something was rebelling, now, only a few months on. I looked out of my body as does Winnie the buried woman from the pile of rubbish in Beckett’s Happy Days. My head came through, but even it was thicker, to look at.
I was not asking for the old ranginess in my fifties. I was just baffled by yet another thing gone quite so quick, another lost identifier. Fram is right to say that it is vain to mind the loss of what was never certainly mine in my appearance.
But the loss of usability, on a sudden, is a blow. I now had mass of a sort I felt unable to control, and was absurdly weak, for a woman who has lifted, carried and walked all her life. I was moving with the slow barging diffidence of a learner lorry driver who can’t yet work his mirrors. I knocked into people.
They did not always like it.
I got called names, or whistled at, ironically. I was twice asked in the street if I wanted a fuck. That makes you jump if you can’t see.
I avoided going out as much as I could.
On sunny days I saw less, after all, and I was ashamed of exposing even my clothed physical self.
I began to treat myself, as I have done periodically throughout my life, as the ugly person I had often felt like. I did it with practised dissociative skill.
I spared friend and stranger the sight of me.
I worried especially about this for my daughter. A pretty girl may not want a raging corker for a mother; but nor does she want a tired sow with lost eyes, who holds the wall when she feels her way along and appears to have shrunk from six feet down to five and a bit as she bends over her stick.
After the tentative suggestion of internal flooding after my fit, the judicious doctor wrote a prescription, which I took round the corner, paid several pedigree cats for, remembering that blepharospasm is a private matter medically (and drugs for its treatment therefore need a private prescription), and kept on obediently putting them into my mouth twenty-four times a day. I never less than liked this doctor. I never wasn’t interested by his method and levelness. I would say that I had perhaps wasted his time, to the tune of many cats. I have time too, though I have been conspicuously less good at selling it.
That August after the fit, Fram shook away the end of that academic year to tend his garden. Our son and I were at first in Edinburgh, at the Book Festival, fitting as many authors as we could into a day. It’s a pursuit that baffles me and makes me shy until I am in my son’s company when it feels just right. I suggest this is because he is an author born, whatever he chooses to do with it, and certainly he is a born reader, and to see with his ears or hear with his eyes has become one of my most reliable forms of escape from myself and the forms of thought that ambush me when the world’s sap sinks.
After Edinburgh, we went through to Glasgow and on to Oban, with a man named David from a local car firm. He heard our voices, kindly assumed it must be a first visit north and made a special stop to let us pet a Highland bullock, having explained to us that the haggis were all roosting indoors at this time of day.
Hamish the flamboyantly hairy orange bullock lived outside a teashop. He stood at the edge of his paddock, head over the fence, asking for sweeties. He had that look animals do have when every bit of them is fluffy. Just his wet rubbery nose and his pink tongue weren’t; and his strict galosh-like hooves. He was stroppy but inert and wanted something sugary before putting out. Under his long fringe, below his shaggy orange poncho, his forehead was fluffy, his shanks were fluffy. His orange pelt was backed by orange fluff, felted itself in orange fuzz. He glowed in his wet green paddock under the purple hill. How many hotels and provincial galleries hold paintings developed around that Scottish field of colour?
Hamish was apparently silly and actually indulgent, a creature-witness to the daftness of people, a sharer of the joke that it is to be shut up inside a body.
Like Ormiston my cat, who will lie on his back in his cat-suit of creamy fluff and display the centre parting through his foggy fur from chest to prettily lilac but now podded scrotum, and observe one with an expression that defies anyone to assert the dignity of their own embodiment, Hamish had the look of affront that goes with being of cuddly aspect.
Fram knew early in our time together that I was as much an animal familiar as a socialised person. I don’t mean that we related to one another through animal names like the disturbing couple from Look Back In Anger, but he recognised me at once for a companionate moth-eaten lion, with big paws twitching in its sleep, in the corner maybe of St Jerome’s study in a painting, or on a deserted gatepost in Scotland, tiredly rampant as though missing only the drinks tray or trolley from her front paws, or toothless but dancing and shaggily maned at a sooty stone fountain in Italy, moss clothing her where the water has for so long fallen. There are elements of St Jerome to Fram, the care for books, the asceticism, the poring close over text, the burned thinness as breakable as charcoal.
Part of being safe in love is being known and fully seen. The urge not to be known is superficial as well as primitive; facile and destructive compared with the need to be known, that increases as friends die and the world changes, that makes of the loved one an environment in which to root and come into leaf. The urge not fully to be known is the urge to recreate oneself and that is the urge to escape, as dangerous as a rip tide and as hard to harness or control. I lost worlds in their firm orbits when I left him, and now am trying to make on the wheel just a thin bowl to hold myself level within. I see this in the thaw, as I look at the true story of my life, which I thought I could leave resting under the chill light of a protective, eventually weighty, snow.
The mower is moving to and fro along the terraced levels of lawn at the back of the big house here on Colonsay. It has been too wet to mow for more than ten days but today the sun has been bright since six. Last night it was still light at ten and there is more than a month to go of lightening evenings and light nights.
After the fit but before the next failure of the body, I received a visit from a friend. Many friends we made when we were very young we would not make now. She and I are close but we leave views aside, or I prefer to. She does not so prefer, which is in itself a view. My own view has calmed, intensified, deepened since I have seen less. I’ve always been chary of views, in the plural. I think of them often as places in which to position yourself, to be seen to be positioned, places in which to stand still and get stiff not seeing very much and not thinking about what may be perfectly visible from the inward eye without so much fuss and noise and sending of highly opinionated postcards from the car park of the view.