A Very Private Life

by Michael Frayn

  A happy time

  The feeling of complete solitariness remains with her for hours afterward and terrifies her, driving her indoors to sit silent and shivering in a corner of the room among Noli’s other women.

  The idea comes to her that she is perhaps just a naturally depressive person, and that if she could cure her depression on the purely chemical level everything would be all right, or at any rate would seem so, which might in any case be the same thing. So next afternoon she takes four of Noli’s happy pills before she leaves for the sea-grass yard. She starts to laugh as soon as she sees the bales. She’s not sure whether it’s the fact they’re composed of sea-grass which seems so ludicrous to her, or the fact that some of the piles are high, and some of them are low. She could weep at the highness and lowness of the piles—it’s the sort of thing you could break your heart over—but she decides to laugh instead.

  And Noli! His baldness is a joke, a tragic joke—imagine someone in the inside world having no hair on his head! The hair’s grown sideways, out of his ears, instead of upwards through his scalp! And the lines on his face! She puts her head on his shoulder and cries with laughter, unable to look at them. What a world! What a world! Deft as a surgeon, passionate as a politician, he prepares the body. She lies there, sobbing with laughter. An arm lies flung on the sea-grass on her right side. Hers, no doubt! Another is scattered about on the left. Hers again! A shining red pate hovers just beyond her chin. Not hers! Away he stokes, this mighty stoker. And she loves it! Gasps with pleasure! Gasps with laughter at her pleasure! Gasp, gasp—and what with one thing and another, scarcely a chance to draw breath! Might choke! Stop, stop! Think about something less helplessly funny. Think about Red Pate, King of the Stokers! Who is he, for example? There’s a question! Thinking about it, she feels she may never stop laughing ever.

  That

  And that really does seem to be that.

  She goes back to the palace in a curious post-laughter mood, finds the surprised queen sitting on the steps outside, and without any forethought sits down next to her and begins to talk about Noli. She tells her everything, starting with the laughter, and how she feels everything around her is a dream, working backwards till she gets to the first time she saw him in the holovision chamber. Then she works forwards again, until she gets to her decision to leave and retreat to the unreal world of home.

  The surprised queen sympathizes, particularly with her paradoxical remarks about the unreality of the real world. “Tana, tana, tana,” she says, shaking her head and clicking her tongue. “Ei, ei, ei!” She in her turn confides in Uncumber, telling her all she knows about Noli. At any rate, she says a lot, pouring the words out at an unbelievable speed, and every tenth one “Noli”; and the more she says about him, the more surprised she looks. Uncumber nods gloomily and sighs in sympathy. Then she says her piece about Noli again, readjusting it all slightly in the light of her decision to leave, so that it takes on a more elegiac tone. The surprised queen does much the same. They discuss Noli up and they discuss him down, and the conclusion they reach is that he’s a charlatan and a layabout and a womanizer and really just a little boy at heart—unless it was the price of food that the surprised queen was talking about all the time.

  Uncumber feels greatly cheered and lightened by this heart-to-heart talk. She says good-bye to the surprised queen, and without a word to anyone else she starts off to walk to the rocketport on the other side of the bay, to get a rocket home.

  On the road

  It is late afternoon when she sets out. She walks through the town and out along the dirt road which leads in the direction the rockets go as they papoom down to earth. She walks quite briskly, anxious to get to the rocketport before nightfall. But when night comes she is obviously nowhere near it; the road goes on and on into the darkness, and the rockets papooming by sound just as far above her head as ever. It’s unbelievable that there can be so much space between two points so close together! She’s never imagined the world was built on such a scale! Even her long rocket trip out never prepared her for the size of the world as experienced by the pedestrian.

  She walks on, staggering with tiredness, following the road only by its comparative lightness among the darkness of the surrounding woods, until even that fails and she begins to wander off it and stumble over unseen obstacles at the edge. Then she feels her way into the forest, feels out a patch of ground, and stretches herself out on it to sleep. How far she has come since that first night among the trees! she reflects. To feel the bare ground with her hands! To sleep on it, with nothing but the trees and the outside air around! In spite of her aching weariness she is elated at the freedom she has won herself, and lies down happy.

  But the happiness has evaporated long before dawn. The ground soon becomes torturingly hard, and she is bitten all over by insects. The worst thing is the cold. It creeps in upon her, and she cringes into a ball to escape from it. She daren’t move, for fear of letting it reach some new part of her body. But she can’t keep still because of the hardness of the ground! And when she does fall into a shallow dream (about being cold) she starts wildly awake again with the idea that she saw something move in the darkness. No doubt it was part of her dream, but the fear remains with her. She scrambles to her feet and back to the roadway, where she runs on the spot and beats her arms about her until the sky grows grey and the dirt road shows clear enough through the forest for her to continue on her way without stumbling. She is hungry, so hungry that it hurts. The hollow pain gnaws away at her confidence. The feeling that she will soon be back in her own soft little room, her adventures over, recedes; it’s clearly going to take her several hours to get to the rocketport. She realizes that she is at her lowest point yet. From being in touch with the whole civilized world when she was at home, she declined to the little circle of kings and queens in the palace, and from that she has come down again to being entirely on her own. She feels overwhelmingly sorry for herself. As she trudges hungrily along the grey road under the lightening sky, she begins to sob.

  The second day

  As the day wears on she becomes very familiar with the surface of the road, since she scarcely lifts her eyes from it. It is cracked and crazed in places by the drought, and ridged by the roots of trees. There are many dry potholes, through which the occasional load-carrying vehicle thumps and crashes as it roars slowly by. The drivers of some of these vehicles shout remarks at Uncumber as they pass. One of them stops and opens the door of his cab, gesturing for her to climb in. But there is something about the way he grins at her which makes her frightened. She shakes her head, turns off into the trees, and waits there until he has gone.

  She thinks bitterly about Noli as she trudges along. He should have realized what I felt, she thinks. He should have guessed that much. He should have had some inkling, if he’d had any real feeling for me at all. The grievance nags at her; she can’t think of anything else. He should have realized, he should have guessed, he never really cared. The thought thuds through her brain, keeping step with her feet, and, as the day grows hotter and she grows wearier, becomes jumbled and meaningless; he should have, never really realized he should have guessed or realized, cared or realized, thought or guessed, he should have, never did, he should have. And then it straightens itself out and pounds away at the simple heart of the proposition: he should have, should have, should have, should have …

  Her legs ache, her bare feet are raw and tender in spite of all her walking along the seashore, and she has to sit down. The sharp hunger pain in her stomach has gone; all she feels now is a strange dreamlike lethargy. She has the idea that she will sit there indefinitely, until someone finds her, or the world ends, or some other external event intervenes.

  And when she does at last get under way again she regrets it almost immediately, for a hundred metres farther on she finds herself faced with an impossible decision—a fork in the road, and not the slightest indication which turning to take. Her irresponsible lightheadedness persists; and, gigglin
g, she arbitrarily chooses the right-hand road, starts down it, after fifty metres changes her mind for no particular reason, and returns to take the left-hand fork.

  She really has surrendered herself now into the hands of some greater power outside herself, she thinks. She feels considerable confidence in that power. It will surely provide the rocketport soon; and if it doesn’t, it will provide something else—another palace or another town, with food and drink and human company. The sun passes its zenith and burns slowly down westwards through the sulphurous sky. It is quite late in the afternoon when she hears very clearly the noise of a rocket taking off. The sound is borne on the sultry breeze and seems to come from behind and to the right of her. That greater power which set her on the left-hand road has misled her.

  But it makes up for it. Peering vaguely about her, trying to decide what to do, she sees that the greater power has provided, almost exactly in front of her, a path leading into the forest in precisely the direction from which the noise of the rocket came. She starts down it with total confidence, choosing her way with what seems to her a sure instinct at every intersection. And indeed, before her confidence can finally flag, she sees the shape of buildings through the trees ahead!

  When she reaches the buildings, however, they turn out to be windowless and doorless, with not a sign of human occupation. She can hear machinery throbbing, roaring, and whining inside. She finds the pipes through which the raw materials clatter and gurgle on their way into the factory, and more pipes through which the product hums smoothly out. But of drink, food, shelter, and human company—not a sign.

  At this disappointment she collapses against one of the throbbing conduits and cries with frank despair. When she at last gets to her feet again, of course, she finds that her legs have become stiff and that every step is intimately painful.

  The path, as she now sees, stops at the factory. She returns to the last intersection and tries a new tack. But it all seems much less unambiguous now; at each new intersection she is filled with uncertainty, entirely abandoned by the greater power which had chosen for her previously. The path gets narrower and more overgrown, more obviously going nowhere. It’s becoming harder to see the path at all, in fact; night is already drawing on. She thinks that she will walk until she falls, and then lie there until morning.

  But the greater power has not entirely deserted her. Suddenly in the twilight she sees a complex tangle of dusty wires and pipes. It looks familiar, but at first the significance of it eludes her. She gazes at it dully, bowed by the leaden weight of her shoulders. Then, with something like a flash of light inside her head, she remembers. It’s exactly like the wires and pipes she saw the day she went out through the airlock, those many years ago! She must be near a house! A proper house, with proper food and proper beds, where proper people live!

  With desperate energy she follows the conduits through the trees, wading through undergrowth and flailed in the face by overhanging branches, until indeed she comes to the point where they dive down into a low windowless building, its walls almost hidden by the vegetation of the forest. With the help of an overhanging branch she scrambles up onto the flat roof where the travelling houses land, to find the airlock.

  The door of the airlock, however, turns out to be blind. There is no visible way of opening it from outside, and no way of drawing the occupants’ attention. She hammers on it with her fists, hammers until her fists are bruised; kicks until her blistered feet can kick no more. The door remains as blind and blank as ever. If she puts her ear against it she believes she can hear the faint, distant sounds of the holovision. There are people inside, all right. But evidently they are unable to hear her. Or unwilling to.

  She rests for some time against the airlock and then hauls herself to her feet. From the edge of the roof she can just make out the line of conduits continuing into the forest. She climbs painfully down from the roof and follows them, holding on to them with both hands at every step, as if they were life itself.

  It is entirely dark when she finds the next house, by stumbling painfully into the side of it. Once again she drags herself up onto the roof and crawls about on her hands and knees, feeling for the airlock. When she finds it she almost sobs with relief; there is a microphone grille next to it!

  She leans towards it, not knowing what words will come out of her mouth when she speaks.

  “Hello!” she says in a high, desperate voice which she scarcely recognizes. “I’m sorry to trouble you. I think I’m lost. Hello? Is there anyone there? Hello?”

  She puts her ear to the door and listens. Not a sound. But suddenly a light comes on, a floodlight illuminating the whole area of the roof. She jumps back, shading her eyes. Glinting above the door is the lens of some sort of camera. It moves about, looking her up and down.

  “Hello!” she says to the lens gratefully. “I’m lost. I’m hungry. Can you help me, please?”

  Still the lens stares at her. She panics. Perhaps it doesn’t understand the language.

  “Holovis,” she tries desperately. “Hovi … Nek taomoro Noli…. Papoom …”

  She gazes at the lens pleadingly. It stops moving, and she hears a hissing sound. She just has time to wonder if this is the noise of the door opening when a terrible stinging fire strikes into her eyes, her nose, and her throat. She staggers back, choking and pressing her hands into her eyes to hold down that maddening pain.

  They are spraying gas at her. To get rid of her. Of course! She’s seen her father do it, too, when suspicious-looking outsiders come to the airlock door.

  She falls off the roof in her blindness, and when the pain has begun to subside feels her way back along the conduits to the next house. Once again it refuses to open to her. She tries a fourth house, and a fifth; and against the wall of the fifth house she finally sinks down, totally exhausted. She huddles up to it to spend the night. At least she wasn’t driven away here. And she feels slightly less lonely near to other human beings, even if they are on the other side of soundproof walls and entirely unaware of her existence.

  She falls into the terrible muddled sleep of exhaustion, tormented by dreams of pipes and wires that lead on and on through the trees. Somehow, the pipes and wires are also the coldness of the night and the hardness of the ground, and they pass through and through her.

  After an hour or two she is waked by some new sensation which she can’t for a moment separate out from her deathly coldness. Some cold presence is touching her with a hundred tiny fingertips all over the exposed parts of her body. It’s some sort of spray! It’s water spitting down over her, like a fine cold showerbath! She is soaking wet from head to foot!

  It terrifies her. At first she thinks it must be coming off the house, and moves away. But still the spray comes down as hard as ever. Is it some dreadful precipitation from the trees? It’s too even, too widespread. It’s from the sky itself! The sky itself is leaking! It’s the phenomenon she has heard about in her lessons at home—rain!

  She huddles against the house wall, trying to press against the warmth and dryness of the life within. She realizes, with dreadful suddenness and finality, the truth about her situation: once you’ve got outside the inside world, you can never get back in!

  A moral

  With unbelievable slowness the night passes, and the first grey light seeps among the trees. The forest is full of dank mist and the endless, steady murmur of the rain falling among the branches. Everywhere it comes soaking finely through the canopy of vegetation and drips heavily off the trembling leaves.

  Uncumber presses her cheeks against the wet stone of the house and strokes it, groaning. She is shivering uncontrollably; every bone in her body aches. But her lassitude is more overpowering than ever. She decides to get to her feet, but no response comes from her limbs at all. They are set rigid, and she knows that if she does manage to move them her aching joints will be more painful still, and she will disturb the cocoon of sodden clothing which has been slightly warmed by contact with her body.

&nb
sp; When she does at last stand up it is even worse than she feared. The warm wetness round her becomes cold wetness, and her legs refuse to carry her. She collapses against the wall with a little cry, burying her face in her hands. She finds she is giggling in a nightmarishly silly way. There is something about her doll-like weakness and the pointless accidental misery of her situation which is painfully ridiculous.

  Once again she has a strong desire to surrender, to sink back to the ground at the foot of the wall again and wait in the rain for better times. Clearly she must take hold of the conduits and follow them through the forest in the hope that they will lead to something. But it seems unbearably cruel to separate herself from the proximity of the people inside the house, still asleep in their warm, dry, comfortable atmosphere, or perhaps drawing their evening meal from the tap, or watching the early-morning holovision shows.