I Am, I Am, I Am

by Maggie O'Farrell

  We were taken around Rome and then to Pompeii, where I put my hand to the groove in a two-thousand-year-old drinking fountain, worn smooth by long-dead people leaning into the jet of water, seeking to slake their thirst. We were let loose among the winding paths of Capri; we climbed to the smouldering summit of Vesuvius, in mostly unsuitable footwear, the gummed edges of my shoes hoarding grains of volcanic ash. I would find them later, at home, scattered across the carpet of my bedroom. I would pick them up, carefully, obsessively, saving them in a glass jar: my own piece of Italy.

  That school trip not only fed but gave a focus to the restlessness I’d felt all my life. At last I had found a way to satisfy it, to meet it; at last I understood it. It had baffled and confounded me for years, the dissatisfaction, the constraint of the everyday, the tedium and scratchiness of routine, the irritating prickle of sameness.

  When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was read to me and Alice sighs, “Oh, how I long to run away from normal days! I want to run wild with my imagination,” I remember rising up from my pillow and thinking, yes, yes, that’s it exactly. The school trip showed me that it was possible to ease this longing, to sate it. All I had to do was travel.

  After he had sailed around the Mediterranean in 1869, Mark Twain said that travel was “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Neuroscientists have been trying for years to pin down what it is about travel that alters us, how it effects mental change.

  Neural pathways become ingrained, automatic, if they operate only by habit. They are highly attuned to alterations, to novelty. New sights, sounds, languages, tastes, smells stimulate different synapses in the brain, different message routes, different webs of connection, increasing our neuroplasticity. Our brains have evolved to notice differences in our environment: it’s how we’re alerted to predators, to potential danger. To be sensitive to change, then, is to ensure survival.

  Professor Adam Galinsky, an American social psychologist who has studied the connection between creativity and international travel, says that “Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.”*

  I sensed this, at an instinctive level, at age seventeen. That unassailable flood of novelty, the stimulus of uncharted territory, the overload of the unfamiliar, with all synapses firing, connecting, signalling, burning new pathways. I have never forgotten that bus ride from the airport into the centre of Rome, my first sighting of the city. And I have never lost the thrill of travel. I still crave the mental and physical jolt of being somewhere new, of descending aeroplane steps into a different climate, different faces, different languages.

  It’s the only thing, besides writing, that can meet and relieve my ever-simmering, ever-present restlessness. If I have been too long at home, stuck in the routine of school-runs, packed lunches, swimming lessons, laundry, tidying, I begin to pace the house in the evenings. I might start to cook something complicated very late at night. I might rearrange my collections of Scandinavian glass. I will scan the bookshelves, sighing, searching for something I haven’t yet read. I will start sorting through my clothes, deciding on impulse to take armfuls to the charity shop. I am desperate for change, endlessly seeking novelty, wherever I can find it. My husband might return from an evening out to discover that I have moved all the furniture in the living room. I am not, at times like this, easy to live with. He will raise his eyebrows as I single-handedly shove the sofa towards the opposite wall, just to see how it might look. “Maybe,” he will say, as he unlaces his shoes, “we should book a holiday.”

  Ever since that school trip, I have travelled as much as I can, whenever time and money allow. I was determined that having babies would not change that. I wanted to bring up my children to be travellers, to be curious about the world, to experience other cultures, other places, other sights. I would, I was sure, strap them on to me and off we’d go.

  My son was a tiny baby when he first flew in an aeroplane; he was one and a half when I took him to live in Italy, where everyone assumed he was a girl because of his red coat and yellow curls. This trip, age seven, is his first outside Europe.

  —

  We are still making our way to the platform, which doesn’t seem to be getting much closer, and we are talking about the line of breaking waves that we can see in the distance. I am telling my son that there is a coral reef circling the island, that the seabed is quite shallow until you get out there, when I feel the sandy bottom of the sea fall out beneath my feet.

  I pedal my legs, treading water, keeping us afloat. My son is still talking in my ear, still holding on to my shoulders, unaware that we are now no longer walking.

  I eye our destination, the platform. I estimate that I can probably make it. The man we met said it was walkable, after all, didn’t he? Maybe I’ve just hit a deep patch, a hollow, and I’ll find higher ground again.

  So I continue, swimming now, with my son on my back. He has been having lessons back at home, lining up on the side of a London pool with the other children, bathing caps on. I am always able to pick him out by the shape of his neck, the arch of his brow, the stoically anxious expression on his face as he rises out of the chlorinated water. He can do half a width, he can float on his back, he can retrieve plastic sharks from the pool floor. What he can’t do yet is swim, here, in open water like this.

  I swim and swim, my arms working, my legs kicking behind me. I focus my gaze on the platform, which is rising and falling before me, its silver steps leading up to safety. Every now and again, I stretch down my leg to see if I can touch the bottom. I can’t.

  I keep swimming. The muscles in my arms and legs are burning, tiring. My son clings to my shoulders, oblivious, chatting, exclaiming. I have to keep reminding him to kick his legs, like his swimming teacher taught him, to help me out.

  He can’t swim, is what is going round and round in my head. He can’t swim. He can’t swim and I’ve brought him out here because of what someone told me. He can’t swim, and I’ve brought him out into deep sea on the advice of an idiot.

  Actually, it’s me who is the idiot. I grew up near the coast, with a lifelong sea-swimmer for a father, who would call out to us, when we were paddling or practising front crawl in the shallows of the Irish Sea, the same sentence: “Stay in your depth!” Always those words would ring in my ears, stay in your depth, but being the child I was, I used to take great pleasure in stepping just that little bit too far, feeling the stones and sand of Donegal beaches fall away from my toes, until I’d hear his voice calling me back.

  I should know better. Have I never heard of tides, of water depth changing, of the sea’s unpredictability, of sand banks that dip suddenly and steeply away? Have I allowed myself to be so lulled, so infantilised by the ever-present, always anticipated service of this luxury resort that I have surrendered my free will, my judgement? What kind of a mother am I, putting myself and my child in danger like this? I am chiding myself, cursing myself, as I swim, flailing now, all notion of strokes gone, just trying to stay afloat. I go under, the weight of my child pressing me down, but I struggle back and I hear my son, still talking.

  It seems very important not to let on, not to communicate to him that we are in trouble, that we might not make it. I don’t need to turn my head to know that my husband is too far away to help, and how could he leave the sleeping baby, anyway? If he dived in to rescue us, she might wake up, she might cry, she might—God forbid—crawl towards the water.

  All in all, it is an impossible situation and I am the worst kind of idiot. What I would give now to be back on the beach, to be back at home, in London, with both my children safe and sound, never to have seen this place, this beach, this distant platform, never to have met that guest who told us we could walk it, never to have loitered with him by the breakfast buffet.

  I go under again, my arms now so weak that they have no traction on the water. I have no muscle strength, no stamina; I have
damaged quadriceps, inhibited reflexes, enervated bi- and triceps. What was I thinking? We’re going under, it’s happening, my eyes smart with salt, my head is subsumed by choking, foamy sea. Is my son above the waterline or is he down here with me? I can’t tell. What I see, however, through the greenish, sun-shot depths of the saline water, is the base of a ladder. Two silver steps, which appear, then disappear. Appear then disappear.

  I give a kick with my legs, two, I stretch out my hand. I miss. I kick again, stretch, and this time I reach it. I grasp the bottom rung, I pull myself towards it. I haul us up out of the water.

  The light, the noise of the waves, the sound of my son, still, incredibly, talking, rush in on me. He climbs off me and up the ladder onto the platform, where he runs from one side to the other, exclaiming. I hook my arms around the ladder, and breathe and breathe and breathe.

  * * *

  * Brent Crane, “For a more creative brain, travel,” The Atlantic, 31 March 2015.

  CEREBELLUM

  1980

  Just before the end of the summer holidays, I woke up early and the world looked different. The colours of the rug, the curtains, the lampshade were more vibrant: they were pulsing, like a heart, like a sea anemone. The bedroom appeared to be suddenly at an angle, the floor tilting, the windows cantilevering into the outside. The ceiling was like a film of floating liquid above me, a distant and blurred meniscus, and I was far below, in some mysterious depth. Nothing was static. Everything shimmered and shifted. I had the sense that my sister, in the lower bunk, was miles away.

  For a while, I lay there, arms by my sides, and took it in. The light, the colour, the motion. O brave new world.

  After watching my bedroom dissolving and re-forming, I went to get up but when I raised myself off the pillow a sensation burst open inside my head. It was a pain so severe, so pure, that it was as if someone was sounding a high soprano chord somewhere behind my eyes. It was a pain that stretched my head to bursting point, as if my skull was a balloon overfilled with water. It was a pain that had colours—white, yellow, streaks and jags of red—and a personality. It was like being in the company of a needy, irascible person, who insisted on embracing me too tightly, yakking in my ear, who never left me alone for a moment, who took over my life, who spoke for me and never let me go.

  I have never felt pain like it, before or since. It was edgeless, it was perfect, the way the shell of an egg is perfect. And it was invasive, colonising: it sought, I knew, to take me over, to replace me with itself, like a bad spirit, like a fiend.

  A day or so later, the pain intensified, gained strength and focus, and it seemed to me that my hands were acquiring minds of their own. They began to waver and swing, like the limbs of the tow-headed, dirndl-wearing puppet that hung from our bedroom ceiling. I reached across the sink for my toothbrush and somehow my hand connected instead with the wall, with the air, with the wall again. I tried to pick up a pencil but my fingers refused to grip. Messages from my brain, from the part of myself I then thought of as my soul, didn’t seem to be reaching the relevant limb. Transmission lost.

  “Look,” I said to my mum, “look at this.”

  By the time the GP came—and he came to the house, on a rare and urgent home visit—an uncontrollable tremor had gripped my legs, my neck, my head, my arms.

  What I remember with a needling clarity is being summoned downstairs to see the doctor. I took the stairs a step at a time. The GP, a man who had known me since I was little, stood watching, attentive, stock still, his bag in his hand, my mother beside him. Neither spoke as I came down towards them, my legs buckling under me, my hand flailing for the banister. Their faces floated in my field of vision, the swirled orange and brown hall carpet behind them, the light coming in through the opaque glass of the front door, the grey-beige of the doctor’s mac, the thin gold strand of his pocket watch stretching over the front of his waistcoat.

  As I reached the last stair, he turned to my mother and said: “You need to take her to hospital.”

  Shortly afterwards, I was lying on the examination couch of a consultant paediatrician. He asked me to grip his forefinger, as hard as I could, to follow the path of a small torch, to touch my nose with my thumb, to place my left hand on my right shoulder. He touched each of my feet and asked: “Left or right?” He smiled at me, even though I got everything wrong, and then he told my parents to drive me to the neurology department of the National Hospital in Cardiff.

  Did I know the danger I was in as I sat in the back of the car, wrapped in a crocheted blanket, on my way to the big hospital, as I watched the city reel past the car windows? Now that I have children of my own, I view this scene with an altered perspective. I am aware of the panic my parents must have felt on that drive—I can taste it—and as they carried me in through the automatic doors of that hospital, as they sat in the office of the neurologist, as they watched me being admitted and wheeled away.

  I have no memory of how my parents behaved, whether they let their feelings show. I was locked inside a casket of pain, of fever. I remember the neurologist’s room, much larger than the kind doctor’s, the toys stacked up in baskets, a particular purple dressing-gown with a fuzzy nap to it, the silver watches pinned upside-down to the nurses’ chests, the way they patted my inner arm to bring up the veins, the pinch and then the sucking draw of the blood test, the cochineal shock of what appeared in the syringe. Did I sense my peril when relatives arrived, from far away, to see me, to stand beside my bed and look down on me? Or when two doctors from Great Ormond Street in London were summoned to examine me? Or during the lumbar puncture, when I was turned on to my side and held down while they drew fluid from my spinal column, the paper sheets frothing around my face as I struggled? Or the point at which I could no longer move at all, not even to gesture that I was thirsty, that my head hurt, that I needed the toilet?

  Our house was a twenty-mile drive from the hospital and my parents had two other children, who needed to be fed, cared for, taken to and from school, as normal; it was term-time and my dad had to go to work. One or other of them came every day, to be with me, but there were stretches of time when I had to get used to being alone. But it was a strange, unsettling kind of alone because a nurse was stationed beside my bed, twenty-four hours a day, for whenever my parents weren’t there. She fiddled with monitors and thermometers and occasionally shot out of her seat to check my pulse. Other sick children, I knew, were in the ward down the corridor. This row of rooms, faced on one side by a car park filled with late-summer sun and on the other by windows with inaccurately rendered cartoon characters, were a whole other story.

  —

  When you are a child, no one tells you that you’re going to die. You have to work it out for yourself.

  Clues may include: your mother crying but then pretending not to; your siblings being kept away from you; doctors looking at you with an expression of concentration, gravity and a certain fascination; nurses avoiding your eye; relatives travelling great distances to visit you. Hospital isolation rooms, invasive procedures and groups of medical students are also reliable signs.

  See also: great presents.

  —

  The part of the brain that governs motor control, the cerebellum, is tucked in at the base of the skull under the cerebral hemispheres.

  It does not initiate movement but plays a crucial role in its coordination, timing and precision, receiving and processing messages from the spinal cord and other sensory parts of the brain. It also has some involvement in cognitive functions, such as language and attention, as well as the regulation of fear and pleasure responses.

  In appearance, it differs from the rest of the brain: it is covered with fine, parallel grooves whose texture brings to mind the throat of a blue whale. The cerebellar cortex is one continuous layer of tissue, folded into tight accordion pleats. Deep inside these folds numerous neurons are arranged in a regular formation, which give the cerebellum its enormous signal-processing abilities.

  Our b
rains are a mass, a web, of interconnecting cells, which are lit up, like strings of fairy-lights, by communication. We are, at our very core, in our very essence, animated by circuitry, by the transmission of information.

  Human brains have upwards of 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons. These, if looked at via a powerful microscope, resemble nothing so much as a tree, with a trunk (the axon) branching out into numerous filaments (the dendrites). The axon trunk of one neuron fits between the branch dendrites of its neighbour; the gap between is called a synapse. Neurons zap messages to each other at lightning speed across these gaps or synapses via minuscule electrical currents. Every single thing we do or say or react to is a result of neurons passing along electricity. If these neuron cells fail to communicate, if the electrical currents between axon and dendrite stop working, if the synapses don’t conduct, for whatever reason—injury, illness, age, a stroke, a virus—your body does nothing. It falls silent, it comes to a stop, like a clockwork toy that has wound down.

  Damage to neurons, axons, dendrites and synapses in the cerebellum results in disorders in fine and gross movement, motor learning, eye movements, balance, posture, speaking, reflexes, an inability to judge distances and to know when to stop. Long-term effects of cerebellar damage may also include oversensitivity, impulsiveness, irritability, ruminative and obsessive behaviours, deregulated responses to fear, sensory deficits or acuities, disinhibition, dysphoria (a profound state of unease or dissatisfaction), sleep disturbances, migraines, visuospatial disorganisation, tactile defensiveness, sensory overload, and illogical thought.