In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,54
trip goes on. The little romance has become a relationship, if only in her mind, and this despite the fact that he, Jean, refuses to become intimate with her. Her real life in Cape Town seems to have been annulled. More alarming is that Jean seems to have no idea of how ill she is, he treats her condition as a bad drama that’s been foisted on her by manipulative people, you must just believe in yourself, he’s been telling her, and you’ll get better, you don’t need to be taking all these pills. She repeats these insights wistfully, hoping that I’ll agree, but what she doesn’t tell me is that he’s also been feeding her hash and cocaine and huge amounts of alcohol. She is noticeably looser when she returns, more obviously frayed at the edges, and this dissolution seems to feel like freedom to her, something she must pursue in order to get well.
In this dangerous state we head off, leaving Jean and Goa behind. I have some misguided notion that movement might be good for her, that the feeling of life passing by might suspend her internal clamour. And things are all right at first. There are a few days in Cochin, a cruise on the Kerala backwaters. But by the time they arrive in Varkala, a clifftop town far to the south, the strain between them is beginning to tell. Anna has to be ceaselessly attended to or she lapses into depression. She can’t sit still for even a few minutes without becoming profoundly agitated. She’s always breaking things or bumping into furniture or falling down. The talk about Jean is incessant and insane. Likewise the unpacking and repacking of her rucksack, which has long since lost its amusement value. When she’s left alone for even a short while she gets into potentially harmful interactions with strangers along the way. On one occasion, for example, she has a physical fight with a peculiar Swiss woman who’s mistreating a kitten on the beach, and another time she allows a shifty-looking older man, staying at the same hotel, to give her a body massage in his room.
In all of this he is constantly running behind, anxiously cleaning up or checking on her. He has begun to feel like a querulous maiden aunt, always worried and unhappy, and she has started to play the other part, of the innocent unfairly put upon, her wide eyes startled at the upset. Under the actual words they speak another dialogue is in progress, in which she is somehow a victim and I the nagging bully. I don’t like this role, I try to pull back from it, and there are times when I am genuinely unsure which of us is out of touch. Besides which, he’s afraid of a moment of truth, because he has no real power over her. If he tries to exert his authority and she refuses to obey, well, what could he do about that. If she walks out the door with her bag, telling him to get lost, he would have no recourse but to plead. Then they might both see where the power lies.
It’s begun to feel to him as if a stranger has taken up residence in her, somebody dark and reckless that he doesn’t trust, who wants to consume Anna completely. This stranger is still cautious, still biding her time. Meanwhile the person that he knows is visible, and sometimes in the ascendant. Then he can speak reasonably to her and feel that she is hearing, or laugh with her about something funny, or enlist her on his side. But the dark stranger always appears again, peering slyly over her shoulder, doing something alarming, and the softer Anna shrinks away. At moments the pair of them are there together, the sister-Anna and her scary twin, and they jostle each other for the upper hand. It’s an uneven battle, the stranger is certainly stronger, but I keep hoping the pills will vanquish her.
I’m not a patient man by nature and the struggle is exhausting. My tolerance reaches a tipping point one afternoon when she wanders in from the beach, her face slack and empty. I stare at her for a moment, then ask quietly, are you stoned.
Yes, she says, smiling. Some guy out there offered me a toke.
He loses his temper. There has been irritation and upset till now, but this is something else, an explosion fuelled by despair. That’s it, I tell her, you’ve