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

by Maggie O'Farrell

  I am aware, first, of being pulled sideways, as if on a sleeper train. The current is drawing into itself, gathering together, with abrupt and decisive force. I right myself in time to see the beach pulling away from me, like disappearing theatre scenery. At this point, I don’t worry too much. The sea is unpredictable—I know this. It will be fine, won’t it? This is a riptide, I tell myself, a narrow gully of current, pulling out to sea. I’ve never been in one but have heard about them. I even drew a diagram of their workings, once, in a distant geography lesson, with different-coloured pencils to highlight the opposing directions of water.

  I see Will lying on a towel, his book propped open. I see the ladies in their saris. I see the elephant, standing now, trumpeting water into the air, spattering its striated sides, the two minders, their brooms. All reeling away from me, faster than I’d ever imagined possible. I’m swimming to the best of my strength but I’m far out from the shore now, travelling fast, and my strokes are ineffectual. It’s as if something or someone is holding me back by the bikini strap, halting my progress, sneering at my attempts to escape.

  It comes back to me that to escape a riptide, one must swim parallel to the shore. All right, then. I turn myself ninety degrees and, at the same time, there is a rushing sound, like that of rain on a tin roof. I turn. Behind me is a wall of water, a wave larger than any I have ever seen, its top just tipping over, cresting white. I don’t even have time to cry out, to shout, to call for help. I see it and, a split second later, I’m in it. It crashes over me, it seizes me, it shoves me under. I’m caught, like a doll, like a puppet, in its muscle, in the eye of its storm. I feel myself pushed down by the back of my neck and I remember a swimming teacher at school demanding that I dive, leap off the edge of the pool, split the surface of the water with the top of my skull. I wanted to but found I could not. I vacillated there, hands clenched, feet clinging to wet tile, the teacher pushing down on the back of my neck. I can’t, I said, from under his hand, and the teacher frowned at me and said, there’s no such word as can’t, and I remember being floored, baffled by the stupidity of this reply. No such word? Of course there was. It was a contraction of two words, sure, but still a word: everybody knew that.

  The wave turns me over, like an acrobat, like St. Catherine in her wheel. I feel my feet lift, feel my body invert, my head pooling with heat and pressure. There is a sharp blow to the side of my face and my eyes, shut tight against the salt, streak with technicolour, my teeth snapping together over my tongue. The noise inside a riptide is astonishing, a rushing, deafening rumble of water, air, pressure, force.

  I have no idea which way is up, which way is the right way, how far out I am, whether I’m heading towards the shore or open sea. I flail with all my limbs at once, like someone falling through space, hoping to feel something, to orient myself, to find air. The wave still has me in its grip, rushing me forward. Then I feel pebbles grating against my side. I’m rubbed, like sandpaper, along the bottom of the sea. I press my hands, my feet, against it and push off and up, breaking the surface, gasping, coughing, retching.

  I lift my head. I’m back, on the beach, in India, in knee-deep water, between sky and sea, in the life I thought I’d left—and barely any time has elapsed at all. I feel as though I’ve slipped through a fissure, like a person kidnapped by fairies, as if I’ve been away for years and returned to find that everything has stood still. I crawl forwards, through the surf, spitting out water, pushing wet ropes of hair out of my eyes.

  The scene is utterly unchanged. Like Brueghel’s Icarus, falling into the waves in the far corner of the painting, my misfortune has not been noticed. Everything is as before: the ladies in the sea, the goats wending their way down the fire-coloured cliffs, the elephant being led up the beach.

  I try to stand up but it seems that I can’t, not yet, so I kneel in the shallows, letting little harmless waves surge past me, back and forth. I straighten my swimwear, watch the water drawing the blood off my skin and whirling it away, as if it has need of it, as if it has some purpose in mind for it. I look about me, at the mimosa trees showering the ground with their yellow dust, at a cirrus cloud illuminated at its frayed edges, at the borders of the empty towels on the sand, the way their rectangular redness pulses against the ochre earth.

  I realise I am going through one of those moments that I have had all my life. It has all the shock and surreality of déjà vu but without the hint of foresight. It’s as if I am suddenly missing several layers of skin, as if the world is closer and more tangible than ever before. Everything is presenting itself in colours and at a volume so vibrant, so lurid, it’s as if a dial has been turned up. The noise of people talking by the path makes me want to cover my ears.

  The first time I felt this I was around five. It would have been wintertime because I was wearing pale pink mohair mittens and was buttoned into a woollen coat, the collar of which was a worn, faded velvet. The mittens were threaded through the back of the coat on a length of elastic. (I have, as I write this, the distinct feeling that my grandmother knitted the mittens; this is more than likely.) I was outside the local shop, one hand circling the wooden door handle and I was swinging back and forth, letting my free mittened hand meet the other, then fall away. With each swing, the elastic stretched between the mittens tugged and pulled on my back.

  I must have been waiting for my mother, who would have been inside, buying groceries—this was the mid-1970s, a time when leaving small children on pavements outside shops was perfectly acceptable.

  I remember that, as I swung back and forth, something shifted or settled upon me, some extra depth of vision. A sudden recalibration or bifurcation of my perceptions took place. I could see myself both from above and from within. I had a sense of myself as minuscule, inconsequential, a tiny moving automaton in a wide scene, and at the same time I was acutely aware of myself as an organism, a human microcosm. I could feel the interlocking stitches on my mittens pressing into my fingers as they clutched the door handle. I could feel the grain of the wood beneath those endlessly repeating stitches. I heard the crackle of my hair against the inside of my hat, could feel the cold air entering me, tunnelling into my body, and I could see it leaving me in a visible stream. I acquired a simultaneous sense of time as a vast continuum and an awareness that my stretch in it would be short, insignificant. I knew, in that moment, and perhaps for the first time, that I would one day die, that at some point there would be nothing left of me, my mittens, my breathing, my curls, my hat. I felt that conviction for the first time. My death felt like a person standing there next to me.

  On the beach in India, as I sit there in the water, something similar is occurring, except it’s different, as it is every time. Instead of an intimation of mortality, what is solidifying, taking root inside me, is something else, a welding together of this place with the sensation of a near-miss, an escape from something beyond my control. The feeling of having pulled my head, one more time, out of the noose becomes intermingled with, indivisible from, the mimosa trees, the goats, the wave that turned me over, the toasted-resin smell of cinnamon bark.

  I haul myself out of the ocean and stagger up the sand. When Will sees me, sees my bleeding forehead, my grazed side, he leaps to his feet.

  “My God,” he says. “What happened to you?”

  “The sea,” I say, inarticulate, flopping down onto the ground. “A wave.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” I lift a corner of the towel to dab away the blood. “I’m fine.”

  CIRCULATORY SYSTEM

  1991

  I’m walking through the littered field of a festival. Strains of music, snippets of conversation, exhaled nimbuses of smoke thread themselves around me. The sun is low in the sky but I can still feel its heat on the round bones of my bare shoulders, the bridge of my nose, the base of my neck. The parched, cracked ground beneath my boots reverberates with a pummelling bass from a distant stage.

  I’m looking for my friends. We arranged, m
onths ago, to meet here, in these fields, on this day, at the tail end of summer. It seemed a viable scheme, when we talked about it, perfectly possible to find each other among these hordes, these fast-food vans, these stalls selling tie-dye, embroidered bags and woven socks.

  These friends and I have been apart for what feels like a long time, over the long university break. I have been working, as a ticket-ripper, a beer-glass collector, a fetcher, a sorter, a general dogsbody, at an arts venue, where I was required to wear a sweatshirt of leprechaun-hair orange. When the job finished, I tied the sweatshirt in a knot and tossed it to the dog, who has a deep but forbidden love of ripping up fabric, and took off for Spain.

  I have slept on trains, swum in river gorges, written postcards to a boyfriend who is far away, working in the States for the summer. And now I am back, in this English field, with my rucksack and dusty boots, looking for my friends. If I don’t find them, I won’t have anywhere to sleep tonight: they will bring the tent, they promised me. Without it, I’ll be under the stars all night.

  I walk one way, I walk another. I buy a dry falafel wrap at a food stall and chew it, looking into the faces of everyone who passes by. I climb to the highest point of the field, where people are standing, arms aloft, holding on to the strings of coloured kites, which dip and tug in the air above us. If you erased the kites from the scene, these people would look like visionaries, fanatics, gazing into the sky, arms held up in appeal, in awe.

  At the yell of my name, from behind me, I turn and the day is transformed. No longer am I alone, in a field, in late afternoon, with the weight of my rucksack: I am swept up, carried along. Two of my friends seize me by the arms, by the hands. They have been looking all over for me, they say, they were getting worried. But here I am. They divest me of my bag and pull me to a huge tent, illuminated by lights, whole constellations of them, where music stretches at the canvas, vibrates in the guy ropes, where a whole group of people I know are standing, calling to me, waving their hands.

  We are hard up against a circular wooden barrier, beyond which two horses in feathered bridles trot tightly around the ring, a bare-chested man standing on their backs. There is the familiar, stiflingly anhydrous scent of sawdust. The man on horseback flips himself, landing with his palms on sleek, mottled haunches. Someone passes around a bag of salted nuts, a tepid water bottle: these, I accept; the frail-papered joint and sweating beer I do not. A girl is shouting in my ear about a dress, a flat, a fish, a trip to London. I can’t follow the story, can’t connect these nouns in this blizzard of noise. In the narrow corridors of spotlights above our heads, figures on trapezes appear and disappear.

  When a man in leather trousers, black fedora and matador’s waistcoat takes to the ring, we clap, we cheer. He holds a bristling bouquet of daggers high in the air. When he calls for a volunteer, the boy next to me—I know him well, he goes out with one of my closest friends—claps me on the shoulder and yells, “Over here!” He is drunk, I see, his eyes wild, unfocused. His girlfriend, my friend, frowns, pulls on his sleeve, tells him to stop. I know I could refuse. I could walk away, I could demur, shake my head, step back into the crowd—the moment to do this is now—but when the spotlight scythes through the crowd to find us, I nod. I shuck off my jacket and climb over the barrier into the magnesium glare of the lights.

  Why? Impossible to say now. Because I am still only a teenager? Because I am so relieved to be back with my friends, to see that my life with them does exist, that I hadn’t dreamt it up? Because sometimes I get weary of being the only sober one in a crowd? Because part of me wants to know what it’s like out there, in the heat and the light? Because why not? Why not let a man you’ve never met, a man you have no reason to trust, throw a fistful of knives at you?

  As I walk towards the man, chaperoned by the blinding, quivering disc of light, I realise that he is Spanish, which seems an odd but somehow fitting coincidence, given that I have just this week returned from Spain. Of course he’s Spanish, I’m thinking. What else would he be? Also, I’m remembering how much I hate being the focus of attention, how uncomfortable it always makes me, how prickling, how searing it feels to have everyone’s eyes upon me. How, as a child, I used to dread the singing of “Happy Birthday,” the waxy flare of candles before me, the gaze of so many eyes directed at me; it used to make me want to cover my face, duck under the table, run from the room.

  I am guided by a sequinned assistant to a circular board. I am buckled there, by the wrist, by the ankle, and an image of Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” four-legged, grave of face, apparently unaware of his nudity, flits through my mind. I think about the day when my faraway boyfriend and I measured our heights and arm spans and discovered that my legs were two centimetres longer than my arms. You go against the theory of human geometry, he’d said, frowning, preparing to measure me for a second time, as if hoping to find this defect ironed out.

  I look up, across the ring, to see the man in the fedora flexing his hands, readying his stance. He holds his knives in one hand. In the other, he grips a single blade, by its tip, as if assessing its weight, its heft.

  Then the unbelievable happens. The assistant steps towards him with a dark length of cloth. A scarf, I tell myself, a headband. She is going to fasten it about his neck, his forehead, to aid concentration, to make sure he isn’t distracted from the task in hand.

  She fastens it deftly, quickly, over his eyes.

  A blindfold, then.

  At this point, I realise I may have made a mistake, taken a grave misstep.

  I’m not quite sure, as I stand there, how all this came about. One minute I was alone at a music festival, with nothing more complicated to worry about than where I would sleep that night; now I’m strapped to a board and a sightless man is preparing to throw knives at me. How can this have happened?

  The assistant is back beside me. She is holding a hammer in one hand. Her shoulders are broad beneath the flesh-coloured mesh of her costume. Her face is screwed up, serious, her lower lip held in her teeth. Her lipstick is applied, thick as butter, to a line drawn slightly outside her natural lips. It gives her an avid, omnivorous air. I try to look into her eyes, to read my fate there, but she doesn’t meet my gaze. Sweat glimmers on her arms, her brow. I want to ask her something, anything. Is this going to be all right? Can you promise me I’ll survive? Does he ever make a mistake?

  She raps the hammer, once, twice, on the board, down by my ankle, yells an incomprehensible syllable over her shoulder, then ducks out of the way.

  The noise is like the approach of an insect, the whirring of tiny wings. A knife appears, seemingly engendered by the air, next to my foot. Its tip is embedded, several centimetres deep, in the board.

  I had, I think, up until that point, always believed that circus acts were exactly that—acts. Inherently theatrical, deceiving, duping. Tricked up for the audience, a clever conjuration.

  There is no doubt, though, of the authenticity of this knife. Or this one, appearing at my knee, or this, next to my thigh, the other ankle. There is a formula to it, I realise, a rhythm. The assistant cracks her hammer in the intended place, a judge bringing down her gavel, gives a shout, and the man—an impossible, unthinkable distance away—lets fly. It is an auditory trick, this. The man is listening, intently, behind his blindfold, his head on one side, then throwing at what he divines is the source of the hammering. What a feat, what an ability, to drive a knife through space, through a fuse of sound, to pierce such a specific point.

  A knife plucks at my dress, near my waist, producing a scowl on the face of the assistant. She shouts something at the man, in an admonishing tone, out of their usual rhythm. The following knife, up near the chest, gets the same response, and I realise what the assistant is saying: demasiado cerca. This phrase I recognise. “Too close.” She is ticking him off, like a parent, like a teacher, letting him know he is off course, too close for comfort.

  I cannot look to see the man take aim now. My head is filled with the anatomical
drawings I had to reproduce, not so long ago, in biology exams. Major veins in blue, major arteries in red, spreading like river deltas through the chest, up the neck, down the limbs, just beneath the casing of skin. The man is demasiado cerca to me, to my arteries. He is too close. I look across to where my friends are but I cannot see them outside this girdle of dazzling light; I look down at my feet, which seem very far away, and the sawdust. I try not to recall how it used to be sprinkled on the floors of butchers’ shops when I was a child. To soak up, to absorb. How I hated to be taken into those places, always begged to be left outside. The cold, congealed forms that hung from hooks or lay, beached and leaking, inside the chill glass of the cabinet. The fake grass surrounds of the display. The cloying, ferrous air. The fluttering plastic ribbons over the door to the back, concealing whatever might lie beyond.

  The assistant is banging her hammer, an unquiet spirit at a seance, near my head, and the noise sets up a ringing in my ear. The tinnitus of the terrified. A knife thuds into the wood by my neck and I think, I may not make it, I may not, and pinned like a lepidopterist’s sample, I imagine the scene: the colour, incarnadine, crimson, claret-dark, the pulsing of the gush, the flood, the screams. Another knife enters just above my head, tweaking at my hair.

  And then it is over. The assistant is unbuckling me and I am activating my arms, my legs, I am peeling them away from the board and I run, not stopping to acknowledge the applause, away from the light, the assistant, the man, away from the board, where lies a vacancy, a doppelgänger, myself, picked out in blades.

  HEAD

  1975

  Credit 5

  Does a near-death experience I don’t remember count? This one is from my early childhood, a time predating recall. My mother, of course, tells it to me, as we move about her kitchen together.