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

by Maggie O'Farrell

  —

  A Buddhist mountain: I had pictured a steep, mossy incline, hung with mist, a path through bamboo and gongtong forests, a peak disappearing into sky. I had imagined pilgrims in robes, red-painted monasteries with plangent, clanging bells. A scene from the calligraphic brush of a Chinese artist.

  The reality isn’t far off, if you overlay that image with hordes of pilgrims and tourists, some carried in bamboo sedans by porters, some in astonishing shiny high-heels, inching their way up the stone-cut steps. The path is, in places, so crowded that it becomes necessary to stop and wait for the bottleneck to ease. The steps are uneven and ever-so-slightly too small for an entire foot. I have to watch every one, make sure my toes connect.

  Emeishan is one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains in China, and the highest. It is, according to the battered guidebook that rides in the pocket of my backpack, regarded as a bodhimanda, or place of enlightenment. It has no fewer than seventy-six monasteries, one of which was China’s first Buddhist temple.

  The sacred summit is ten thousand feet above sea level, to be reached by more stone-cut steps. On a bus through the hummocked limestone landscape of Kunming, a man with blond dreadlocks and a tenuously fastened sarong took my fingers in his and told me, with closed eyes, that the climb to the summit of Emeishan is the physical manifestation of a koan—a paradox or challenge that leads to enlightenment. I nodded and, after what seemed a decent interval, reclaimed my hand.

  Anton is climbing the mountain with me. We have left Hong Kong and are going back to the UK. I am heading for London, where I am hoping to find work on a newspaper or a magazine. I need to start my life: I need to find a path for myself, to find a job that sets me on the right course or, in fact, any course at all. I have to find work that will pay my rent, cover my tube travel, and doesn’t bore me to the point of screaming, so that I have the headspace and the energy to come home in the evenings, perhaps, maybe, possibly, to write. But how to pull off such a trick, such a balancing act? I haven’t the faintest idea.

  So I am heading back to Britain, slowly and circuitously, spinning out the journey for as long as my money will last.

  We are travelling overland, through China, through Mongolia, across Siberia, then Eastern Europe, ending up in Prague in a month or two, where there is a twenty-four-hour bus to London. And there the rest of my life will start. Somehow. The Prague bus is as far as my plans go. I have no job, no home in London. I will arrive there in a matter of weeks, to sleep on a friend’s floor, armed with cuttings of articles I wrote for Hong Kong newspapers. I am, as I climb the steps of Emeishan, hoping for the best.

  When we are hungry, we stop at one of the monasteries along the way. The monks feed us noodles and rice, steamed vegetables, pale squares of tofu. If it’s late, they will find us a bed in a dormitory or, if we are lucky, a wood-partitioned room to ourselves. If the humidity becomes too much, we dip our hands, our heads into the ice-cold streams that flow down the mountain. Every now and again, we encounter a phalanx of grey-brown macaque monkeys. A Dutch woman we met at the base of the mountain warned us about these creatures. “They will fly at you,” she said, “because they know tourists carry food in their backpacks and they will stop at nothing to get it.” She rolled back the sleeve of her sweatshirt to reveal a set of deep scratches, made by sharp, insistent fingernails. “You see?” she said, and we nodded gravely. We did see.

  The monkeys sit in the trees, on the tops of walls, lying in wait, watching our approach with intent, shrewd eyes. I remember the technique my sisters and I perfected with a particularly menacing black Labrador that lay across the pavement on our route back from school: I tell Anton that the only way is to get our retaliation in first, to show the monkeys we are bigger and scarier than them, before they have a chance to try anything. He looks doubtful. When we come across a group crouching beside a small pool, eyeing us with a calculating stare, I lunge forward, baring my teeth, stamping my feet, yelling at the top of my voice. The monkeys scatter like marbles, scrambling away from the water’s edge, vanishing up trees, around boulders, over walls. The clearing is silent, deserted, the only sound the bubbling of the stream.

  “A bit much?” I say.

  —

  At the summit, we are woken in the middle of the night by mice that have gnawed through the cotton of my bag and are rustling purposefully about inside a packet of crackers. It’s still too early to go outside and watch the sunrise so Anton and I choose this moment to have an argument. We bicker half-heartedly about a range of topics—his refusal to stay in a certain hostel, my loss of temper beside a lake earlier in the week, how I’m always reading instead of talking to him—until I accuse him of being indecisive. We are off: we have the bit between our teeth. He counter-accuses me, in a wholly unprecedented move, of being secretly in love with my friend, the man who gave me the compass, which is currently stowed in the bag the mice have broken into.

  There is a moment of shocked, suspended silence in our panelled box of a room as we lie, not quite warm enough, in all of our clothes, under a heap of quilts.

  “What,” I demand, in an unsteady voice, in the middle of the night, in the oldest Buddhist monastery in China, a sacred place where people come to gain enlightenment, “makes you say that?”

  Anton is steely, numeric in his reply. “You write really long letters to him,” he tells me. “You’re always trying to find phone-boxes to call him. It’s odd, you being so close to another man.”

  “How dare you,” I bluster, stumbling from the bed with an outraged flounce, “accuse me of such a thing?”

  We watch the sunrise, along with a few thousand other people, who pose for photographs that make it seem as though they are cupping the sun in the palms of their hands. Then we catch the bus down the mountain, and as we travel, side by side, mostly in silence, I begin to feel strange. The petrol fumes from the bus seem to invade my throat, the grind of the steering, the smell from the crate of flapping chickens across the aisle, the creak of the leather seats all conspiring to make me feel headachy, queasy, dizzy. Have I picked something up from the sacred mountain?

  —

  Out of the rickshaw and up the hospital steps, Anton supporting me, my arm around his neck. Through the door and we are confronted with a scene from Dickensian London, from a First World War film, from a nightmare. The foyer of the hospital is filled with people: literally, filled. There isn’t a chair, a square foot of floor or wall space that isn’t taken up by a human form. There must be a hundred, two hundred people crammed into this waiting room. People sit, lined up, along the reception desk; others lie on mats or flattened cardboard boxes on the floor, asleep or just moaning lightly to themselves. Children, cradled in the arms of adults, wail. A man sits, his swollen leg propped on a birdcage, cracking sunflower seeds between his teeth, spitting the shells to the floor.

  Beside me, I hear Anton swear softly.

  We stand in the doorway for a few minutes, unsure what to do. Should we stay? Should we head back to the hotel? Should we take a seat or rap assertively on the closed window of the reception desk?

  A man in a white coat picks his way through the crowd and stops in front of us. He puts a weary hand to my forehead, he pulls up my lips, as if I am a horse, and examines my teeth.

  “Stomach?” he says to Anton, in English.

  Anton nods.

  “You pay?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Dollars?”

  Anton digs in my money belt and shows the doctor the wad of my emergency-only American dollars, ordered and collected from a bank in Hong Kong before I left. I hadn’t thought I’d ever need them, had almost not bothered to get them, but a woman I worked for had told me I shouldn’t go to China without them.

  “Okay?” Anton asks.

  The doctor nods, takes me by the arm, leads me through the maze of people.

  I am hooked up to a drip, using a needle from a medical kit I bought in Kowloon: there is a minor tussle about this, between me an
d the nurses. I am given antibiotics to rid me of the parasite, enormous mustard-coloured tablets I have to wash down with huge gulps of water. They flush out the amoeba, along with most of my gut lining. In a few months, when I am living in London, I will be sent to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases because I am still pale, anaemic, still losing weight. The doctor there will ask me what medication I was given and, when I tell her, she’ll blanch.

  “What?” I will say. “What’s wrong?”

  “Those are only used here for…” She stops her-self.

  “For what?” I ask.

  “Well…” she frowns at her screen “…horses.”

  I stare at her. Then I laugh.

  The doctor shrugs. “They worked, I guess. I mean, you’re still here.”

  In several more years, I will be travelling in South America with Will. In a hotel room in La Paz, I will be woken by nausea, by fever, by an all-too-familiar scraping, clenching, serpentine pain. I eat a banana and it passes through my digestive system in thirty-two minutes: I time it on my watch. I will shake Will awake.

  “I think I’ve got another amoeba,” I’ll say to him, through set teeth.

  “Huh?”

  “An amoeba. As in amoebic dysentery.”

  He will go out in the early morning into the streets of La Paz to find a pharmacy, armed with a piece of paper, inscribed with the name of an equine antibiotic.

  BLOODSTREAM

  1997

  Occasionally, but not that often, I think about the person I was in my mid-twenties. I consider her. I try to recall how it felt to be that age. What were the frameworks of her days, the patterns of her thoughts? I am as far from her now as she was from her childhood. She is the median line between me and my birth.

  Sometimes it’s hard to capture her essence, impossible to remember what it was like to keep forging ahead in the face of such flux and instability. Other times, however, I might be walking down a street with my children, holding one by the hand while trying to catch up with another and simultaneously listening to what the third is saying about the Scottish referendum (my children have divergent and incompatible walking styles—one likes to lag behind, another to sprint ahead, and the other to walk right next to me, so close that I’m often tripped by our tangling feet). We will be moving along in our assorted fashions, when I will be hooked by something—the specific timbre of a decelerating underground train, a particular guitar riff coming out of the window of a basement café, the feeling of cold fingertips curled inside a pocket—and I will sense her as if she is on the pavement with us.

  There she goes, walking by, in her weather-insufficient tights, short skirt and bright blue trainers. She has cut off her hair—it doesn’t entirely suit her—and bleached the asymmetric fringe. She has a pager in her belt, a book in her bag and a lidless pen leaking ink into the lining. She walks fast; she is probably late. She needs a multi-vitamin, a square meal, a place to live. She has moved no fewer than nine times since she arrived in London. She can fit her possessions into a single backpack. She gets sore throats, swollen tonsils. She stays out late, doesn’t sleep much, fails to purchase even the most basic of groceries. She runs out of money before payday every month.

  She has recently left the man she’d been living with, shouldering her bag and walking down the stairs. The circumstances were dismayingly pedestrian, soap-operatic in their mundanity: she had knelt beside the bed to search for a shoe and seen instead the loop and catches of a bra. She knew before she touched it. A flesh-coloured bra, not her size, not a style she ever wore, bought from a shop to which she had a particular aversion. A surprisingly practical bra, under the circumstances—no wiring, no embellishment—and ingrained with the sanitised scent of fabric softener. The kind of bra that a sporty, organised, no-nonsense girl might wear under a smart blouse. A girl who does her laundry on a regular basis, buys clothes to last and takes herself on healthy outdoor excursions. A girl who is, in short, her diametric opposite, in every way.

  She confronted him, in a lowered voice, so as not to alert their flatmates to the situation. At first her boyfriend tacked wildly. He’d never seen the bra before, it was nothing to do with him. He had no idea where it had come from. It was probably hers. Could she have forgotten she’d bought it? It belonged to a visitor. It arrived here by mistake. It must be his sister’s.

  Pausing in the act of cramming sweaters and dresses and books into her bag, she laughed. Bullshit, she said loudly, momentarily forgetting the other people in the rooms around them. That, she pointed at the bra, flung wide on the boyfriend’s desk, wouldn’t fit your sister in a million years.

  He stopped disowning the bra. He stood up. He got defensive, angry. He said, yes, all right, there has been a woman. There have, in fact, been several. He accused her of always working or reading or sitting at her desk writing (or, as he put it, “typing”). She never had any time for him. If she wasn’t out, she was distracted by something else. He was losing his sense of self, his sense of worth, and needed to find himself again. He ended this speech with the words: “I did it for us.”

  This closing sentence has provided her and her friend Eric with much comedic mileage during the more boring moments of their jobs (of which there are many). They like to tack the phrase on to acts of an entirely self-serving nature, the more selfish the better. Extra points are awarded for slipping it into conversation in front of a more senior colleague, which isn’t hard to do because pretty much everyone is senior to them.

  “I ate a sandwich,” Eric will murmur into his phone from across the office, “and I did it for us.”

  “I bought some new shoes in my lunch-hour,” she will message him, “for us, of course.”

  “I went to the gym last night,” he will say in a loud voice, “and I want you to know that I did it for us.”

  It has been two years since she got off the twenty-four-hour bus from Prague in a damp bus station in London. It has taken her this long to find a job that doesn’t seem like a cul-de-sac. She is working as an editorial assistant on a newspaper. She answers phones, she opens post, she calls critics to remind them that their copy is due, she tracks down the IT man if computers misbehave, she fetches page proofs, she checks captions, she visits the picture desk to find photographs, she tidies—cupboards, shelves, in-trays, chairs, desks, drawers. She does whatever people ask of her and, in return, she badgers them gently, politely, to let her write something for the paper. She counsels editors, assistant editors, critics, sub-editors on the phone, in the smoking room, in the alcove by the photocopier that everything is going to be all right. It is a job with long hours, indistinct boundaries, diva-ish personalities, twists and turns of panic, steep learning curves, feverish in-house gossip, urgent deadlines, days with no lunch and then days when she is taken out of the office for hours at a time by an older colleague, who will ply her with expensive food, then quiz her about something that’s happening in her section. Her days are filled with changes of management, made over everyone’s heads, dry sandwiches, redundancy paranoia, coffee machines, security passes, rides in lifts, slews of book proofs, late-night tube rides home at the end of press day, peculiar freebies (a reflective bag, paperweights with the heads of authors inside, wellington boots that don’t quite fit, chocolate toolkits and once, out of the blue, an astonishingly expensive German fountain pen—which I still have).

  So, her ex is right, in a way. She is out at work a great deal. She is distracted. When she is at home, which isn’t often, she is usually writing (“typing”). She has started something that she is telling herself is a short story. Just a short story. It is, the last time she checked, more than twenty thousand words and getting longer all the time. When she meets her friend Will for a coffee—they are friends at this point, good friends, very good friends, friends who call each other every day, who see each other once or twice a week, friends who perhaps take a shade too much interest in the ups and downs of each other’s love lives—and he asks her what she’s been writing, she tells him
about her short story, her long short story. He looks at her, in his penetrating way, narrowing his eyes, and says: you’re writing a novel.

  No, she says, shaking her head, of course not, I could never do that, absolutely not, whatever gave you that idea?

  Late at night, when her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend calls for her to come to bed, for God’s sake, she murmurs absently, in a minute. The house is so quiet, the flatmates all asleep, the work of the story so absorbing, so satisfying in a way that nothing else ever has been, the words scrolling out from under the flashing cursor, the paragraphs opening out from each other, like Matryoshka dolls. Then, suddenly, it’s three a.m. and she’s blindsided by exhaustion and exhilaration, and she crawls into bed, thinking about her story, unable to find the path to sleep, listening to the sounds of the city waking up.

  —

  She has waited the requisite time: she knows it takes months for the virus to appear in your blood. (Does it hide somewhere, she wonders, like a pantomime villain, behind a door, up a chimney, in the leaves of a tree?) As with anyone who grew up in the 1980s, she knows the rules, the risks, the causes. She still remembers the grim governmental warnings on TV, with falling tombstones and rock-flaying chisels.

  So, she is taking herself off to a clinic for the blood test. Not a prospect to relish, this, but something to be got through. She wants to be sure that her ex-boyfriend hasn’t passed anything on to her, hasn’t deposited anything sinister in her bloodstream.

  She has persuaded Eric to come with her, to get tested alongside her. Eric walks the distance from the tube station to the clinic door, talking, gesturing, tugging at the ends of her scarf.

  At the clinic, there is an administrative fluster. The receptionist cannot countenance that Eric has arrived without an appointment. “The thing is,” he said, snatching off his sunglasses, “my need is greater than hers.”