A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

  ‘Excuse me,’ I replied – it’s funny how you come over all formal in dreams, where you wouldn’t in real life – ‘Excuse me, but I really haven’t the faintest notion of what it is you are referring to.’

  ‘You’ve been attacking men.’

  ‘Oh, yes? What was I after, their wallets?’

  ‘No. It seems you were after sex.’

  I began to laugh. The man frowned; I can remember the frown even if the rest of his face has gone. ‘This really is too transparent,’ I said, a frosty actress in an old film. I laughed some more. You know that moment, like a break in the cloud, when you realize inside a dream that you’re only dreaming? He frowned again. I said, ‘Don’t be so obvious.’ He didn’t like that, and went away.

  I woke up grinning to myself. Thinking about Greg and the cats and whether I should have got pregnant, and I have a sex-dream. The mind can be pretty straightforward, can’t it? What made it think it could get away with something like that?

  *

  I’m stuck with this rhyme as we head in whatever direction we’re heading:

  In fourteen hundred and ninety-two

  Columbus sailed the ocean blue

  And then what? They always make it sound so simple. Names, dates, achievements. I hate dates. Dates are bullies, dates are know-alls.

  *

  She was always confident of reaching the island. She was asleep when the wind brought her there. All she had to do was steer between two knuckles of rock and run the boat aground on some pebbles. There was no perfect sweep of sand ready for the tourist’s footprint, no coral breakwater, not even a nodding palm. She was relieved and grateful about this. It was better that the sand was rock, the lush jungle a scrub, the fertile soil a dustheap. Too much beauty, too much verdure might make her forget the rest of the planet.

  Paul jumped ashore, but Linda waited to be carried. Yes, she thought, it was time we found land. She decided to sleep in the boat at first. You were supposed to start building a log cabin as soon as you arrived, but that was silly. The island might not prove suitable.

  *

  She thought that landing on the island would make the nightmares stop.

  *

  It was very hot. Anyone would think the place had central heating, she said to herself. There were no breezes, no change in the weather. She watched over Paul and Linda. They were her consolation.

  She wondered if the nightmares were caused by sleeping in the boat, by being cooped up all night after having the freedom to walk around all day. She thought her mind could be protesting, asking to be let out. So she made a little shelter above the tideline and began sleeping there.

  This didn’t make any difference.

  Something terrible was happening to her skin.

  *

  The nightmares got worse. She decided this was normal, as far as you could use the word normal any more. At least, it was to be expected, given her condition. She had been poisoned. How bad the poison was she didn’t know. In her dreams the men were always very polite, even gentle. This was how she knew not to trust them: they were tempters. The mind was producing its own arguments against reality, against itself, what it knew. There was obviously something chemical behind it all, like antibodies or whatever. The mind, being in a state of shock because of what had happened, was creating its own reasons for denying what had happened. She should have expected something like that.

  *

  I’ll give you an example. I’m quite cunning in my nightmares. When the men come I pretend not to be surprised. I act as if it’s normal that they should be there. I call their bluff. Last night we had the following exchange. Make of it what you will.

  ‘Why am I wearing white gloves?’ I asked.

  ‘Is that what you think they are?’

  ‘What do you think they are?’

  ‘We had to put a drip in your arm.’

  ‘Is that why I have to wear white gloves? This isn’t the opera.’

  ‘They aren’t gloves. They’re bandages.’

  ‘I thought you said I had a drip in my arm.’

  ‘That’s right. The bandages are to hold the drip in place.’

  ‘But I can’t move my fingers.’

  ‘That’s normal.’

  ‘Normal?’ I said. ‘What’s normal nowadays?’ He couldn’t find an answer to that, so I carried on. ‘Which arm is the drip in?’

  ‘The left. You can see that for yourself.’

  ‘Then why have you bandaged my right arm as well?’

  He had to think about that for a long time. Finally he said, ‘Because you were trying to pull the drip out with your free arm.’

  ‘Why should I want to do that?’

  ‘I should think only you can tell us.’

  I shook my head. He went away defeated. But I gave as good as I got, didn’t I? And the next night I took them on again. My mind obviously thought I’d seen off that tempter too easily, so it produced a different one, who kept calling me by name.

  ‘How are you tonight, Kath?’

  ‘I thought you always said we. That is, if you’re who you pretend you are.’

  ‘Why should I say we, Kath? I know how I am. I was asking about you.’

  ‘We,’ I said sarcastically, ‘we in the zoo are fine, thank you very much.’

  ‘What do you mean, the zoo?’

  ‘The bars, stupid.’ I didn’t really think it was a zoo; I wanted to find out what they thought it was. Fighting your own mind isn’t always an easy business.

  ‘The bars? Oh, they’re just part of your bed.’

  ‘My bed? Excuse me, so it isn’t a cot and I’m not a baby?’

  ‘It’s a special bed. Look.’ He flicked a catch and folded one set of bars down and out of my sight. Then he pulled them up again and latched them shut.

  ‘Oh, I see, you’re locking me up, is that the idea?’

  ‘No, no, no, Kath. We just don’t want you to fall asleep and roll out of bed. If you had a nightmare, for instance.’

  That was a crafty tactic. If you had a nightmare … But it would take a lot more than this to trick me. I think I know what my mind is doing. It is a sort of zoo I’m imagining, because a zoo is the only place I’ve seen reindeer. Live, I mean. So I associate them with bars. My mind knows that for me it all started with the reindeer; that’s why it invented this deception. It’s very plausible, the mind.

  ‘I don’t have nightmares,’ I said firmly, as if they were spots or something. I thought that was good, telling him he didn’t exist.

  ‘Well, in case you started sleep-walking or something.’

  ‘Have I been sleep-walking?’

  ‘We can’t watch everybody, Kath. There are many others in the same boat as you.’

  ‘I know!’ I shouted. ‘I know!’ I was shouting because I felt triumphant. He was clever, that one, but he’d given himself away. In the same boat. Naturally he meant in other boats, but he – or rather my mind – had tripped up.

  I slept well that night.

  *

  She had a terrible thought. What if the kittens weren’t all right? What if Linda gave birth to freaks, to monsters? Could it happen this soon? What winds had blown them all here, what poison was in those winds?

  She seemed to sleep a lot. The flat heat continued. She felt parched much of the time, and drinking from the stream didn’t help. Perhaps there was something wrong with the water. Her skin was falling off. She held up her hands and her fingers looked like the antlers of a fighting stag. Her depressions continued. She tried to cheer herself up with the thought that at least she didn’t have a boyfriend on the island. What would Greg say if he saw her like this?

  *

  It was the mind, she decided; that was the cause of it all. The mind simply got too clever for its own good, it got carried away. It was the mind that invented these weapons, wasn’t it? You couldn’t imagine an animal inventing its own destruction, could you?

  She told herself the following story. There was a bear in the fores
t, an intelligent, lively bear, a … normal bear. One day it started digging a great pit. When it had finished it broke a branch from a tree, pulled off the leaves and twigs, gnawed one end to a sharp point and planted this stake in the bottom of the pit, sticking upwards. Then the bear covered the hole it had dug with branches and undergrowth so that it looked like any other part of the forest floor, and went away. Now where do you think the bear had dug its pit? Right in the middle of one of its own favourite trails, a spot it regularly crossed on its way to drink honey from the trees, or whatever it is bears do. So the next day the bear lolloped along the path, fell into the pit and got impaled on the stake. As it died it thought, My, my, this is a surprise, what a curious way things have turned out. Perhaps it was a mistake to dig a trap where I did. Perhaps it was a mistake to dig a trap in the first place.

  You can’t imagine a bear doing that, can you? But that’s what it’s like with us, she reflected. The mind just got carried away. Never knew when to stop. But then the mind never does. It’s the same with these nightmares – the sleeping mind just gets carried away. She wondered if primitive people had nightmares. She bet they didn’t. Or at least, not the sort we have.

  She didn’t believe in God, but now she was tempted. Not because she was afraid of dying. It wasn’t that. No, she was tempted to believe in someone watching what was going on, watching the bear dig its own pit and then fall into it. It wouldn’t be such a good story if there was no-one around to tell it. Look what they went and did – they blew themselves up. Silly cows.

  *

  The one I had the argument with about the gloves was here again. I caught him out.

  ‘I’ve still got my gloves on,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, humouring me but getting it wrong.

  ‘I haven’t got a drip in my arm.’

  He obviously wasn’t prepared for that. ‘Ah, no.’

  ‘So why am I wearing my white gloves?’

  ‘Ah.’ He paused while deciding which lie to tell. It wasn’t a bad one he came up with. ‘You were pulling your hair out.’

  ‘Nonsense. It’s falling out. It falls out every day.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid you were pulling it out.’

  ‘Nonsense. I only have to put my hand to it and it falls out in great hanks.’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said patronizingly.

  ‘Go away,’ I shouted. ‘Go away, go away.’

  ‘Of course.’

  And he went. It was a very devious thing he came up with about my hair, a lie as close to the truth as possible. Because I have been touching my hair. Well, that’s not surprising, is it?

  Still, it was a good sign that I told him to go and he went. I feel I’m getting on top of things, I’m beginning to control my nightmares. This is just a period I’ve been going through. I’ll be glad when it ends. The next period may be worse, of course, but at least it’ll be different. I wish I knew how much I was poisoned. Enough to put a blue stripe down my back and feed me to the mink?

  *

  The mind got carried away, she found herself repeating. Everything was connected, the weapons and the nightmares. That’s why they’d had to break the cycle. Start making things simple again. Begin at the beginning. People said you couldn’t turn the clock back, but you could. The future was in the past.

  She wished she could put a stop to the men and their temptations. She thought they would stop when she reached the island. She thought they would stop when she gave up sleeping in the boat. But they only became more persistent and more cunning. At night she was afraid to fall asleep because of the nightmares; yet she needed rest so much, and each morning she woke later and later. The flat heat continued, a stale, institutional heat; it was like being surrounded by radiators. Would it ever end? Perhaps the seasons had been killed off by what had happened, or at least reduced from four to two – that special winter they’d all been warned about, and this unbearable summer. Maybe the world had to earn the spring and autumn back by good behaviour over many centuries.

  *

  I don’t know which of the men it was. I’ve started closing my eyes. That’s harder than you think. If you’ve already got your eyes closed in sleep, try closing them again to shut out a nightmare. It’s not easy. But if I can learn this, then perhaps I’ll be able to learn putting my hands over my ears as well. That would help.

  ‘How are you feeling this morning?’

  ‘Why do you say morning? It’s always night when you call.’ You see how I don’t let them get away with anything?

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘What do you mean, if I say so?’

  ‘You’re the boss.’ That’s right, I am the boss. You’ve got to keep control of your own mind, otherwise it’ll run away with you. And that’s what’s caused the peril we’re in at the moment. Keep the mind under control.

  So I answer, ‘Go away.’

  ‘You keep saying that.’

  ‘Well if I’m the boss I’m allowed to, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’ll have to talk about it one day.’

  ‘Day. There you go again.’ I kept my eyes closed. ‘What’s it, anyway?’ I thought I was still pursuing him, but this may have been a tactical mistake.

  ‘It? Oh, everything … How you got yourself into this situation, how we’re going to help you get out of it.’

  ‘You really are a very ignorant man, you know that?’

  He ignored this. I hate the way they pretend not to have heard the things they can’t deal with. ‘Greg,’ he said, clearly changing the subject. ‘Your feelings of guilt, rejection, things like that …’

  ‘Is Greg alive?’ The nightmare was so real I somehow thought the man might know the answer.

  ‘Greg? Yes, Greg’s fine. But we thought it wouldn’t help …’

  ‘Why should I have guilt feelings? I’m not guilty about taking the boat. He just wanted to drink beer and get off with girls. He didn’t need a boat for that.’

  ‘I don’t think the boat’s central to the matter.’

  ‘What do you mean, not central? I wouldn’t be here without the boat.’

  ‘I mean you’re offloading a lot on to the boat. So that you can avoid thinking about what happened before the boat. Do you think that’s what you might be doing?’

  ‘How would I know? You’re meant to be the expert.’ This was very sarcastic of me, I know, but I couldn’t resist it. I was angry with him. As if I was ignoring what had happened before I took the boat. I was one of the few people that noticed, after all. The rest of the world behaved like Greg.

  ‘Well, I think we seem to be making some progress.’

  ‘Go away.’

  *

  I knew he’d be back. In a way I was sort of waiting for him to return. Just to get it over with, I suppose. And he had me intrigued, I’ll admit that. I mean, I know exactly what’s happened, and more or less why and more or less how. But I wanted to see how clever his – well, my own, really – explanation would be.

  ‘So you think you might be ready to talk about Greg.’

  ‘Greg? What’s it got to do with Greg?’

  ‘Well, it seems to us, and we’d like your confirmation on this one, that your … your break-up with Greg has a lot to do with your present … problems.’

  ‘You really are a very ignorant man.’ I liked saying that.

  ‘Then help cure me of my ignorance, Kath. Explain things to me. When did you first notice things were going wrong with Greg?’

  ‘Greg, Greg. There’s been a bloody nuclear war and all you want to talk about is Greg.’

  ‘Yes, the war, of course. But I thought we’d better take one thing at a time.’

  ‘And Greg is more important than the war? You certainly have an odd system of priorities. Perhaps Greg caused the war. You know he’s got a baseball cap that says MAKE WAR NOT LOVE on it? Perhaps he sat there drinking beer and pressed the button just for something to do.

  ‘That’s an interesting approach. I think we could get somewher
e with that.’ I didn’t respond. He went on, ‘Would we be right in thinking that with Greg you sort of were putting all your eggs in one basket? You thought he was your last chance? Perhaps you were laying too many expectations on him?’

  I’d had enough of this. ‘My name is Kathleen Ferris,’ I said, as much to myself as to anybody else. ‘I’m thirty-eight years old. I left the north and came to the south because I could see what was happening. But the war pursued me. It came anyway. I got in the boat, I let the winds carry me. I took two cats, Paul and Linda. I found this island. I am living here. I don’t know what will happen to me, but I know it’s the duty of those of us who care about the planet to go on living.’ When I stopped I found I’d burst into tears without realizing. The tears ran down the sides of my face and into my ears. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear. I felt I was swimming, drowning.

  Eventually, very quietly – or was it just that my ears were full of water? – the man said, ‘Yes, we thought you might be seeing things like that.’

  ‘I have been through the bad winds. My skin is falling off. I am thirsty all the time. I don’t know how serious it is, but I know I have to go on. If only for the cats. They might need me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you mean, Yes?’

  ‘Well, psychosomatic symptoms can be very convincing.’

  ‘Can’t you get it into your head? There’s been a bloody nuclear war.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said the man. He was being deliberately provocative.

  ‘All right,’ I replied. ‘I may as well listen to your version. I can feel you wanting to tell me.’

  ‘Well, we think it goes back to your break-up with Greg. And to your relationship of course. The possessiveness, the violence. But the break-up …’

  Though I’d been meaning to play along with him, I couldn’t help interrupting. ‘It wasn’t really a break-up. I just took the boat when the war started.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But things between you … you wouldn’t say they were going well?’

  ‘No worse than with other blokes. He’s just a bloke, Greg. He’s normal for a bloke.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘What do you mean, precisely?’

  ‘Well, we called in your files from the north, you see. There does seem to be a pattern. You like putting all your eggs in one basket. With the same type of man. And that’s always a bit dangerous, isn’t it?’ When I didn’t reply, he went on, ‘We call it the persistent victim syndrome. PVS.’