In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,57

can see that she’s lost all sense of time.

At some point in that long day, perhaps in the street, perhaps when they get back to the room, she says it. The revelation comes casually, without weight or significance, but it wipes out the surrounding world. You know, I was going to kill myself on the train.

What.

That’s why I was looking for the medication. I was going to take all of it, then lie down to sleep.

You’re not serious.

Yes, I am.

We look at each other and I see how serious she is.

But why, I say, why.

She shrugs and laughs. Since this crisis broke some of their old closeness has returned, in their room upstairs at the station they have guffawed uproariously at the sound of the train timetables being broadcast over speakers downstairs, it’s all too absurd to be taken seriously. That morning in town she’d bought him a book in which she’d written, I love you very much my friend, and the words had felt renewed and true. Everything that has weighed them down has lifted, there is a lightness to their companionship that goes back many years, so that both of them seem stunned by the announcement she’s just made. I don’t know, she says, puzzled.

I suddenly felt like dying.

He can’t answer this immediately, perhaps he never can. Ever since he’s known her there’s been this talk about killing herself one day. It never comes up in a dramatic way, more as a casual aside in conversation. He remembers asking her, for example, how she imagines she might look when she grows old, to which she immediately replies that she never will be old. She is always planning her funeral, telling her friends to play this piece of music, or to have the service in that particular church, and her tone at these moments suggests that she herself will be present, a spectator at the event. It’s hard not to feel manipulated when she speaks like this, and it’s hard, too, to feel constantly alarmed by a threat you’ve heard so many times over. Besides which, why would somebody like Anna, in perfect physical health, loved and admired and desired by so many people, want to die. There’s no plausible reason, so that even now, when he can see that she means it, he can’t quite get a hold on what she says. And in any case she’s instantly off on some fresh upheaval, knocking over the lamp or losing the keys to the room, and it all becomes one ongoing crisis he’s trying to contain. That’s how it is with Anna, death at one moment, farce the next, and it’s hard sometimes to distinguish between the two.

It’s a couple of days before he can bring himself to speak about it and even then he does so tentatively, approaching the question in a circle. Did you think about what you were doing to me, he asks her. Did you think about what it would be like for me to be left alone with your dead body in India.

She considers the matter seriously for a while, then nods. Point taken, she says.

Incredibly, the medicine arrives in the morning. There’s a knock on the door and a man is standing outside, holding the little black bag. Anna seizes it from him, her relief is like joy, the means of her death feels like life to her today.

Now they can resume their journey and after leaving effusive messages of thanks for Mr Hariramamurthy they travel on to Hampi. This is a day away from their starting point in Goa, to which they still intend to return, but meanwhile they plan a short sojourn in this extraordinary site. The ruins of an ancient Hindu empire spread across a massive landscape of boulders and weird hills, like a kind of ruin in itself. You could spend days here, just wandering, but almost immediately the recent equanimity starts to unravel. Anna can’t cope with the setting, the desolation echoes something in her, she’s soon back in her familiar pattern. No sooner have they arrived at one spot than she wants to rush on to the next, nothing contains her, nothing holds her in. This place is shit, she tells him, I want to go back to Goa.

There’s nothing for it but to cut the stay short. He books tickets on the train for the next day. They’re only due to leave at nine in the morning, but she’s already up at five o’clock, making a