In a Strange Room

by Damon Galgut

  Faye Dunaway for me, Caroline says.

  Even Anna joins in. Julia Roberts, she says, and we’re all laughing. But the levity doesn’t last long. In minutes it dawns on Anna that we’re not going back to our hotel, and she starts to moan and protest. I want to go back to the beach, she cries, I want to finish my holiday. You have no right to do this. When I tell her the police will come looking for her there, she falls temporarily silent, but then she starts up again. Just give me my money-belt, give it to me. You can’t have it. Give it to me and drop me at the side of the road. Fortunately she’s wedged in at the back between Caroline and Paula, or she might make a break for it. Do you see what they’re doing, she yells at the taxi driver, they’re kidnapping me, they’re criminals, they’re thieves.

  This taxi driver, whose name is Rex, has seen a thing or two over the last week to astonish him. He’s come up to the hospital ward a few times and witnessed Anna in action, but she’s setting new standards today. When we get to the clinic I ask Rex to come in with us, just in case we need an extra hand. When she sees the room where she’ll be sleeping and hears that a nurse will be in the spare bed to keep watch, she goes berserk. I demand to leave right now, she shrieks, and makes a break for the door. I stand in her way and grab hold of her wrists and for half a minute we grapple silently together in a pantomimic frieze for the benefit of the open-mouthed Rex. I am, in this moment, physically afraid of her. She has power far beyond her muscular strength, there’s a lunatic gleam in her eye. But she finally relents and slumps and then, once I let go, lashes out in a screaming fit, punching the walls and kicking the door, before collapsing in a howling heap on the bed.

  All through the drive back to the village, Rex relives that moment. Pow, he says to himself, crash. He makes kicking, punching movements and shakes his head in wonder. It’s safe to say he’s never witnessed anything like it. A year or two later, out of the blue, he will send an e-mail to me in South Africa. In part it reads, how is your work going on. I hope that you may sell lots of books. I’m fine and do good business. I always remember your good words, your words are a great knowledge to me. In future if you publish a book you should write about that girl, who wished to die.

  She is heavily sedated now and much calmer than she was in the government hospital. But this doesn’t stop the endless stream of abuse, the accusations of failure and neglect, as well as the demands for various items. There is a telephone in the clinic where patients can make calls on credit and she rings him obsessively at the hotel, numerous times each day, with an inventory of requirements for his next visit. She wants her shoes, her money, her rucksack. He isn’t willing to hand any of these over, for fear of what it might lead to, but what he can bring he does. There is never a thank you, only a litany of charges against him, which he hears out wearily. You’re stealing my things, I’ll have you arrested. You’re so cruel and selfish. I hate you, I’ll never speak to you again.

  For the first time there are paid hospital attendants to watch over her and this means that he doesn’t have to be there every day. He’s happy to keep some distance between them. So he checks in for an hour each afternoon, then heads back to the room, but there’s not much chance for rest. Instead there are frantic preparations for Anna’s return. In consultation with her partner and family back home, it’s been decided that she will be accompanied by Dr Ajoy and the other friendly doctor from the hospital who helped orchestrate her escape. Arranging tickets and visas at short notice for them is a devilishly complicated business, involving faxes to the South African embassy and the airline, with all sorts of supporting documentation, some of which must come from home. But it’s all finally resolved and the evening arrives when he can bring her rucksack to the hospital, along with her passport and ticket, and say goodbye.

  After everything that’s gone before, the moment is somehow small and empty. Her attention is not on him, but on her luggage, which she must instantly unpack and check and re-order. You see, he tells her ruefully, everything’s there, nothing’s been stolen. The different bags of clothes with their little labels are a sad reminder of where the journey began.

  She comes outside to say goodbye. She’s wearing the shoes she’s been demanding for so long and appears almost serene. The high tide of madness has receded, leaving behind this translucent husk of a woman who nearly resembles his old friend. But not quite. There is a chilly reserve between them, which covers over a gulf so huge that it can perhaps never be bridged. Nevertheless, he finds it in himself to embrace her. Goodbye, he says. Take care of yourself.

  You too. Enjoy the rest of your trip.

  Or some such words. Whatever they say, it is in breezy phrases like these, phrases without content, or perhaps too much. Then he is driving away from her, with Rex at the wheel, looking back one last time at the solitary, lost figure in the twilight.

  It’s only now that the full force of what’s happened begins to hit him. Until this point he has been constantly in action, at the receiving end of calamity, with no chance for reflection. It’s like a hurricane has blown through his life, flattening every structure, and in the aftermath the silence and vacancy are immense.

  There is nothing to do, but his body struggles to accept it. He is constantly on edge, constantly prepared for crisis. He sleeps badly and lightly, and wakes long before dawn. The days are empty and he doesn’t know how to fill them. Gradually he moves out of his head and starts to see what’s around him. He notices his own face again, how much weight he’s lost, the fixed stare of his eyes.

  Mostly he sits around, talking to Caroline, or goes for stumbling walks on the beach. His body slows and eventually accepts the aimlessness, but inside, deep down, it’s like an engine with a missing part, forever turning over, screaming in the same high gear.

  News comes to him from South Africa. Anna is safely home. Then she’s booked into the clinic. A great many of her friends can’t or don’t want to see her, they’re too horrified by what she’s done. At first she has tried to dismiss her stunt in India as a small upset in an otherwise wonderful holiday, but eventually acknowledges the full extent of the disaster. She’s in constant touch with Jean but it’s not clear where that liaison is heading.

  Most of this information reaches him through Anna’s girlfriend, with whom I have long tearful conversations almost every day. She continues to see Anna regularly at the hospital, even though they’ve agreed to separate and see what the future brings. She’s in need of comfort, which I’m scarcely able to offer, and she extends comfort of her own. Sometimes she asks advice. On this score I don’t hold back, let go of her, I say, she’s going to kill herself one day. I know it’s true, she’s like a bomb that might go off at any moment and I want the space around her cleared.

  All of this, the confusion and frenzy around Anna, is now on the other side of the world. He is not responsible, not accountable, any more. But of course in another way he will always be responsible for what happened and that knowledge is burned into him like a brand. At least she didn’t die. He imagines what would have followed if she had and how the rest of his life would be different.

  Among other things, he talks over this subject with Caroline in the weeks that follow. She is the only other player left from the drama they’ve just been through and they cling to each other for consolation. They keep each other company in a bickering, dependent way, almost like family. She has now become his friend, though he didn’t seek her out by choice. On an arbitrary morning their lives were pushed together and fused by fate. She could have walked away when she heard me shouting, or kept her distance like the others did, and perhaps by now she wishes that she had. But instead she came up the stairs and into the room and since then she’s taken up station in a corner of his life.

  But this makes for a fraught and uneasy alliance, he feels he owes her a debt and at the same time resents that obligation, he wants to leave this whole experience behind, to erase every trace of it, but she’s there every day to remind him. And she’s carrying her o
wn pain and loss, which have become grafted onto Anna and by extension onto him. She’s in a bad state like him, not sleeping well, given to bouts of weeping. But she also seems to feel, though she doesn’t say it aloud, that he’s in some way a solution to her troubles, and he shrinks from that silent expectation. He has failed Anna, he will fail her too.

  But his time here is drawing to a close. In just a month or two it will be unpleasantly hot, already a lot of local businesses are shutting down. He is leaving soon, meeting another friend in Bombay and travelling north, to the mountains. Caroline has tried to persuade him to stay, why don’t you meet your friend, she says, and come back here. No, I tell her, I have to move on. In response she books her own ticket home for a day before his departure. This date is coming closer, and he needs it, the leave-taking, as a climax and conclusion.

  On one of those last evenings, when they’re eating dinner together, she says to him, what happened to me in Morocco, the accident we had there. You know, where I lost my husband.

  Yes.

  I haven’t told the story yet. I’ve told some of it, just the basic facts. But the whole story, what actually happened, I’ve never told to anybody.

  Yes, he says, and he can feel what’s coming. It makes him sick to the heart, he wants to run, but he stays where he is.

  I would like to tell the story just once, she says now. I want somebody to hear it, then I might be able to leave it and walk away. Do you know what I mean.

  He nods, he knows exactly what she means. Whatever the story is, he knows it will be terrible and he dreads taking it on. But after what she’s gone through on his behalf, how can he refuse.

  They put it off till a couple of days before her departure. At her request they go down to the beach one evening. The sun is beginning to sink into the water, the clouds are full of colour. They find a place away from other people, close to a little stream and a clump of palm trees, and sit on a log. I don’t know how to start, she says, I’ve written some of it down and I thought I might read it to you. But when she takes out her sheaf of papers it all feels wrong, too wooden and formal. Just tell me, I say, just tell me what happened.

  Almost as soon as she begins to speak, she’s quaking and trembling. It happened thirty years ago, but it’s as if she’s living it again in this moment, and it becomes like that for him too. Her story travels into him, his skin is very thin, there’s no barrier between him and the world, he takes it all in. And even afterwards when he wants to get rid of it he can’t do it, in the weeks that follow as he tries to leave Goa and the village behind the things that he lived through there will recur in an almost cellular way, haunting him, and Caroline’s story is part of it, joined somehow to Anna, all of it One Thing. Yet what can you do with a story like this. There’s no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear sky one morning and take away everything you’ve built, everything you’ve counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you.

  His onward journey is like an endless running away. He meets his friend in Bombay and they travel northward together. Orchha, Khajuraho. By now it’s full summer and the heat on the plains is like a furnace, so they head up into the mountains, to Dharamsala, where they languish for a few weeks.

  In all of this he tries to behave like an ordinary traveller, marvelling at what’s around him. But he hardly ever manages to lose himself, mostly he is stuck in one place in the past. The physical world feels substanceless, like a drab dream from which he will wake up into a dirty hospital ward.

  He hears from Anna a couple of times. The first e-mail reaches him a few weeks after he’s left Goa. Full of misspellings and strange sentence constructions, it’s a note of apology for what she’s done. She says that she’s left the clinic and is staying with her family in a nearby town. She doesn’t tell him more about the state of her life, though he continues to hear a little from her girlfriend. He knows, for example, that she can’t make up her mind about what she wants, whether to stay involved with a woman or to keep her connection with Jean. Jean is going to come to South Africa, then he isn’t, then he is. Meanwhile, once she’s spent this time with her family, Anna will be moving out of the house she shared with her partner and into a flat on her own.

  But before this can happen she’s back in the clinic again. She is still suicidal, she’s still a mess. She weighs fifty five kilograms and is starving herself. She is burning and cutting herself again. A lot of her friends still won’t have contact with her, and some who do have a secret compact with death themselves. She has acquired an otherworldly halo, both attractive and repellent, she has gone beyond some fatal threshold and managed to return.

  She writes again after a few weeks have passed. She’s out of the clinic once more and has realized, she says, that whenever she feels suicidal she needs to get help. She sounds calmer now, more composed, or perhaps it is the flatness of depression. Jean is with her and they are touring around. We get on really well, she says, I’m delighted that he has come to visit. There seems to be a future for us as a couple. She adds that she will be going back to work in a couple of weeks and ends by saying, take care my friend and hope one day you find it in your heart to forgive me.

  He doesn’t reply, simply because he can’t. There is no desire to punish her, any more than a means to forgive her, what happened has put them beyond that. He doesn’t know why she can’t see it herself. They are in a place where language has no purchase and, whatever happens, he doubts that this will change. The closest he can come to Anna is in speaking to her partner, which is how he still thinks of her, although technically she isn’t that any longer. She still loves Anna very intensely, but while Jean is in town she is keeping away. He asks what will happen once Jean has gone. Will you try again with her.

  I don’t know, she says. I don’t know what she wants. I don’t think she knows herself.

  Even in these conversations language will never be enough. What she’s been through is a special kind of heartbreak. She has looked after Anna, taken care of her, for almost eight years and there is no doubt that without her Anna would have died long ago. Yet now she has been sidelined, shoved into the wings, by Anna herself and by others allied with her. Anna’s family, who have never liked the idea of her being with a woman, have seized on this alternative future with a man and are pushing it delightedly. But I saw how it was with Jean and I know there’s nothing there, no future and hardly any past.

  How little future will soon be revealed to everybody. The message comes just a few days later. He has known for a while now, since she made her attempt in Goa, that she will kill herself one day, and only the time and the circumstances are uncertain, and yet when he reads the words they still hit him like a physical force that propels him backwards in his chair. Anna is dead. On the day after Jean’s departure she took a massive overdose of pain-killers while she was alone in her apartment. Her sister became concerned when she didn’t return phone calls and got a locksmith to open the door and found her lying on her bed.

  There is more, but the words are blotted out by the fog that has filled the room, erasing time. The last two months never happened, she is sleeping on that bed in Goa, he has just seen the medicine wrappers on the floor and realized what she’s done. He jumps up in shock and rushes out into the street. It’s as if he has somewhere to get to, something urgent to do. He wants to call for help, he wants to grab hold of somebody passing and tell them to find the doctor, he wants to keep her alive. It takes him a moment to understand that the news is irrevocable, it cannot be undone. Not now and not ever, because the dead do not return.

  Even then his journey isn’t over, though in another sense it ended long ago. He considers returning to South Africa, but in truth he doesn’t want to, and what would be the point. So he continues travelling, or running away, up into the high mountains, to Ladakh. He only does return home, in fact, a month or two later, when there is a genuine threat of nuclear war between
Pakistan and India, and his fumbling, half-hearted exit feels like a fitting conclusion to the story.

  So he is not in Cape Town to see her body laid out for viewing in an open casket, or the huge service that overflows from St George’s cathedral, all the spectacle and public grief that she so ardently wanted, and that she seemed to think she’d be around to witness. He hears about these things, of course, and they evoke a sad, angry dread in him, like the news of an earthquake on the other side of the world. But the closest he comes to her again is a silent confrontation with a bag of ash and bones, all that’s left of her after the cremation. This is at her girlfriend’s house, the first time he goes to visit. He stares at the bag and pokes it with his finger. Shakes his head in amazement. It seems bizarre, to the point of bitter laughter, that a human being can be reduced to this.

  A couple of years later, when he’s travelling in Morocco, he spends a night in Agadir and takes a taxi the next morning to a dusty hillside outside town. He has intended to buy flowers but hasn’t managed to find any, so he arrives empty-handed. The day is burning hot, he hasn’t slept properly the night before, he has a bad headache. You want me to wait, the taxi driver asks him. No, come back in half an hour. Is it enough time, half an hour. Yes, it should be enough.

  He imagines he will easily find the spot and pay his respects and leave, but it doesn’t happen as he imagines. The taxi driver has dropped him in the wrong place, so he has to walk part-way down the hill. When he finds the European cemetery the gate is locked and he has to shout for somebody to let him in, and once inside he’s lost. The graves spread chaotically in all directions, with no clear logic, no plan. He stumbles up and down rows of headstones, names swimming past, and more than forty-five minutes have gone by when he arrives by chance at the one he’s looking for. It’s all exactly as Caroline told him, the cracked slab with its inscription, its final enclosing dates. Next to it, on the left, is a nameless brown hump of earth, the grave of a woman, a friend who was killed in the same accident. Her family didn’t have the means to bring her body home or to memorialize her properly.