In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,72
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