Blissful Space

Music:

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 14: III. "The Suicide" ("Three Lilies")

Malcom Arnold: Symphony No. 5, Mv. II

Content Warning:

Mental illness theme, Sex references 

Transcript

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Blissful Space

The location of St. Margaret’s rest home was an isolated one. It had a curious, nowhere quality: it wasn’t a part of anything, it wasn’t connected to anything. It was its own little hermit kingdom, a citadel for the old and ailing.  

            The main road nearby produced a distant but continuous stream of white noise, a sort of spectral racket, which rose from the long column of trees and hedgerow bordering the road. St. Margaret’s was situated off this main road, and down a shadowed, winding lane, at the end of which was a gated entrance and a long, eerily immaculate path running straight up to the threshold of the building itself. The path cut right through a huge space of open lawn, featureless except for three unvisited birdbaths. These birdbaths gave off an air of unbearable loneliness and seclusion: they sat so far away from each other, so far away from anything, living or unliving.         

            Possessing only a ground floor, the main single-storey structure made up for its lack of height in spread square feet. Its corridors, in their unpredictable lengths and random-seeming design, formed a tortuous nexus: from above, the building looked like a game of scrabble, as though new blocks, new wings, were constantly being added to the original construction, as though the sprawling structure were effecting some angular and insidiously gradual expansion across the land on which it had originally been built, nearly fifty years ago.      

            Either side of the reception entrance, where the white-lettered, capital-lettered façade gloated above, there were two narrow patches of garden where two very little bronze birches made their sluggish upward crane towards the sun. There were also snowdrops, bright white in the dark earth, and two small rose bushes. The roses were peach-orange and blood-red respectively. Both bushes were barbed with ferocious thorns, each one a little empire, humble in extent but vicious in character. There were also vegetables. There were fragrant tomatoes and shy squashes. And cabbages which attracted many white butterflies. The butterflies mated on the great leaves, their white wings back to back, the male lodged inside the female, and they laid their eggs on the leaves, little corn-on-the-cob casings which hatched into ravenous caterpillars. The tiniest alien movements would be observed inside the misted pods after which the egg casings would promptly vanish without trace and, in their place, there would be a sticky, persistent family of insatiably hungry caterpillars clinging to the leaves’ underside. And then, over the next week or two, the cabbage leaves, so much like the ears of some strange, green, huge, hidden creature, would become ragged and holed with missing sections. And then there would be a few, concealed chrysalises- not all the caterpillars would make it to this stage of course- and then more butterflies. The cycle occurred and reoccurred with indifferent, indomitable efficiency.      

            One morning, Dominic, cardiganed as usual though the weather was quite hot, came into the mess hall and discovered the newest resident, Elise, not eating her breakfast. Dominic had been a care assistant for three years. St. Margaret’s was the only place he’d ever worked in his current role. He was forty-five years old, divorced, gay but mostly celibate. He hadn’t yet met Elise but he’d been informed by Veronica that she was quite depressed. “Moping” was the word Veronica had used. 

While Dominic was well-liked, well-known for his kindness and gentleness, Veronica was infamous for her impatience and lack of tact. He had taken what Veronica had told him with more than a pinch of salt. She wasn’t a liar, nor was she prone to exaggeration, it was just that her way of framing the truth was somehow invariably prejudiced, as though she were incapable of seeing the world through anyone’s eyes but her own. She was a tiny, spectacled, humourless woman, thin as a rake, with a disapproving resting face. 

Dominic was heavy-set but handsome. He had an unforcedly vital manner and plenty of Irish good nature. He was tending towards hirsute and had bright eyes. He was one of those people that, when they spoke, caused a little tingle of warmth in the person they were speaking to. He had a voice which caressed the brain. 

He had a gift for care work. He was good at the job and he enjoyed that he was good at it. Part of it was that he wanted to please, he was desperate to please, anyone and everyone he could. Perhaps he wanted to please a little too much, was maybe a little too eager. What was a deficit in Veronica was a surplus in Dominic. Of course, there are so many ways to be imperfect. And, in fact, there were a number of residents who didn’t like Dominic, who, for whatever reason, seemed upset with him and preferred to avoid the subject of him altogether. For someone so apparently likeable it was deeply strange that he should have this reticent minority of sceptics. Dislike of Veronica was unanimous and universal. It was a peculiar comfort to the residents, this unity, this undividedness of opinion on Veronica. Certainly it was something to bond over. What you saw was what you got, you knew where you were with Veronica.                             

            That morning, Dominic went over to Elise and spoke to her. She seemed really wretched, his heart broke immediately upon encountering her. She was a vision of perfect sorrow. For a while, his only purpose in the world was to reach this woman, to coax some kind of response, some kind of brightening out of her. At first, she didn’t look up. In fact she barely reacted at all to his voice. 

At sixty-seven, she wasn’t as old as the other residents. People can age a great deal in their late sixties and look indistinguishable in years from their septuagenarian counterparts. But Elise, though she trembled quite a bit and was clearly a vulnerable person, looked noticeably younger than everyone else in the mess, less faded. It was a scene dominated by white hair and wheelchairs. Of course, as in any well-populated situation, not everyone present was in the best of humours, but good mood, a certain level of laughter and warmth, did prevail amongst the majority. Elise was strikingly, upsettingly set apart from all this. She was morose, isolated. She inhabited her own solitary realm, a realm of which she was the sole inhabitant. She was unable to respond to even the friendliest overtures. Some of the other residents had tried talking to her but they had all been powerless to reach her, to break the forcefield of grief within which she was encompassed.  

Her eyes were not quite open and her head was bowed, her flat expression cast down towards the earth. She never looked up. Since entering it, she had barely scanned the room, as though her present environs were a source of pain to her, even to look at briefly. It was though she preferred to remain locked inside her own head, a part of some imagined, some interior landscape. She was still mostly mobile, used a cane on occasion. But no cane or stick of any kind partnered her that morning. 

She sat in her chair, stooping. Behind her and around her, her long, dark hair fell in a tousled cascade. Her skin was bad, particularly on her arms. Not only was it very creased and wrinkled- so far, this seemed to be the worst that age had done to her body- but it was marked variously in lacerations, crustings, and bruise-like discolorations. 

            “Elise…Elise…” Dominic said. He tried to urge her bowed head upwards, her gaze off the floor. On the untouched plate before her, there was a small sausage and a piece of unbuttered toast cut into triangles. There was a sachet-packet of brown sauce and a tiny, single-use jar of raspberry jam. The paper lid of the brown sauce was unpeeled and the chequered lid of the jam jar had not been unscrewed. “Why don’t you eat something, Elise? Get something in you. My name’s Dominic by the way.”

            Still she did not react. He quietly tutted, thinking to himself that he shouldn’t have used her name. He should have pretended that he didn’t know her name and then asked her what it was. 

            “Can I get something else for you? What’d you like? Name it and I’ll get it for you…” 

            A mumble.

            “What, dear?”

            The same mumble.

            “Sorry, Elise, I can’t hear you.”

            “Greengage jam,” she said, still quietly but at last audibly. 

            “Greengage jam?”

            “Wilkin and Sons Limited. And a tigered loaf.”

            “A what loaf?”

            “Tigered. A tigered loaf of bread.”

            Dominic pondered this request. He drew a sharp intake of breath and scratched his head. 

With decorous intention, he placed a palm on her back. To the touch she felt so gaunt and stiff and lifeless. The hand was heavy and manly, it wasn’t like a woman’s hand, made for different things.      

            “Alright, Elise. I’ll get those for you. I can’t leave the home now but I promise I’ll bring them for you tomorrow. I promise, I’ll make it my mission. How does that sound?”

            Perhaps it was nothing more than courtesy that made her finally look up, nothing more than the necessity to acknowledge this kindness, the first she had been shown in this place. Or maybe it was curiosity, maybe she was curious to discover the face that went with the caressive voice she had just been listening to and which had shown her such kindness. In any case, she finally looked up. She looked right into Dominic’s bearded, kindly face, right into the brown twinkle of his eyes. 

            “Thank you,” she said. 

            It was a genuine, specific thank you. And yet, at the same time, in a way, it seemed to float, disembodied, separate, lone. It was like she was saying thank you for more than just the jam, like she was saying Thank you for being you. She liked his face. In an instant she fell in love with him, with the touch of his hand, with his voice. That tingle. It was the tingle that clinched it. For a while she felt it everywhere, everywhere inside her. 

And the next day, just as he had promised, Dominic brought her both the greengage jam and the bread she had requested, purchasing them from a farm shop where he correctly believed they might be found. The outside of the loaf was more like the skin of a leopard or a jaguar than a tiger. It had a cracked orange appearance and, in places, it was spotted in such a way as made it look almost charred. Rather than being rectangular and over-neat in dimensions, it was round and tapered and asymmetrical and seemed more real therefore. 

            She ate an untoasted slice of the loaf with a bit of butter and a lot of greengage jam and found it to be exquisite. Her palate immediately received that tartness, that bitterness that she loved so much. She loved the struggle of the sugar through rank upon rank of the fruit’s tart green gooeyness. Never in her life, as far as she knew or could remember, had she ever tasted anything sweeter. Even if this hyperbole was imagined and unearned, she was quite willing to bestow it on that piece of bread with butter and greengage jam. It seemed utterly real to her. The taste was of kindness and safety. Of being attended to. Cared for.  

            Her love for Dominic was real. She wasn’t sure of it at first, she didn’t trust it. She weighed it, she weighed her love for him in figurative hands and found it weighty, substantial. Of course there was that awful word: “crush”. But this wasn’t a crush, she didn’t feel inclined to describe it that way. To describe it this way seemed like diminishment to her. No, this was altogether something else, something more serious.

            Intrigued by this woman, with her long, dark hair and her fondness for greengage jam, Dominic looked into her background. Each resident had a dedicated file in the office. Elise’s was the thickest by far. The documents within detailed her turbulent life-journey, her legion mental and physical health struggles. She had experienced major depressive episodes, hallucinations, psychosis. Her main issue was hoarding. She’d hoarded up multiple properties and suffered evictions. There had been run ins with landlords, with local councils. She’d attempted to restart her life several times: there would be periods of vigilance and wellness during which she didn’t hoard, followed by terrible, snowballing relapses. When money could not keep up with her compulsion to acquire, she’d shoplift, and this of course got her into trouble with the law. 

            At the conclusion of the court case that had directly preceded Elise’s arrival at St. Margaret’s, the judge had been compassionate to Elise’s struggles. No criminal sentence was passed, nor a mandatory stay in psychiatric hospital required. The judge ordered that Elise not continue to live unassisted, that she relinquish her domicile, move into St. Margaret’s rest home, and continue to take advantage of the psychiatric help on offer. 

            There were images in Elise’s file. There were interiors barely recognisable as interiors, the floors, walls, ceilings, all impossible to make out: all that could be discerned in the images was a dizzying proliferation and accumulation of clutter, too many things to look at, the contents of ten houses heaped in every available bit of space in the room, forming towers that rose all the way to the ceiling. As he leafed through the file, Dominic kept wincing, and muttering things to himself like “Goodness crikey” and “Holy Jesus”. He was completely gripped as he perused her history, as he ventured deeper into the dark woods of her being. For a while, there wasn’t a single other thought in his mind. He was completely consumed by thoughts of this woman’s life, its scenes and stories, its facts and information. And then, gradually, his thoughts began wandering to other places. People he knew or had known, people whom he was reminded of by Elise’s dossier. In the neighbourhood where he had spent his youth, there was a woman who used to come out of her house at night. She’d cower indoors during the day: she’d papered her windows in several layers of newspaper, she’d covered her front door in duct tape. Later, when she started knocking on neighbours’ doors, a van came and took her away. In Elise’s notes, Dominic read of childhood abandonment, no father, absent alcoholic mother, coming home from school to an empty house that would remain empty for days at a time, spending long periods of time unattended, addictions to a variety of medications, abandoning one of her own children. Her phobia of the piece of music “Fur Elise”. A variety of superstitious beliefs, in particular an obsession with clairvoyancy.  

It took Elise only a week to finish the jam. At the end of that week, the urge to hold onto the empty jar was extremely strong. It sat on the table before her, a vessel relieved of its contents, purposeless, but no less meaningful in that moment than it had ever been, more meaningful in fact. Broken things, functionless things- these were her favourites. Her appreciation for them was so unique. They yearned for her hands, they yearned to be touched by her, they wanted to be possessed by her. Only when they became useless did they depend on her. She gained a purpose while they lost theirs. That was the reality she had built for herself, her way of making meaning in an arbitrary, oppressive world. She was a collector, that’s how she had always thought of herself, not that she had an illness. She was really keen on this empty jar, not only what it represented, not only the memories and associations attached to it, but its very being, the miracle of the cylindrical glass and the silver lid and the perfect, printed label.

Were it not for Dominic, she wouldn’t have had the strength to part with it. He gave her that strength and inspired some forceful grace which helped her see that it was right to discard the jar. So, with her assent, he took it away. He washed the jar and carried it straight to the bottle bank. At the top of the tall bin, a ring of darkness waited to receive new items. I’m hungry, it seemed to say. Dominic fed the jar into this dark, circular mouth and the jar fell, unseen, making a brief, glassy clatter as it joined what was already inside the stomach of the bin.

It always took residents a long time to learn their way around St. Margaret’s. Some, in all the time they were there, never managed to fully familiarise themselves with the place’s labyrinthine layout. Elise was no different. But she was quite happy to lose her way walking from her bedroom to the mess room, or from the games room to the chapel, if it meant that Dominic had to come to her aid. Dominic, always cardiganed, was always quite willing to put his arm around her and escort her wherever she wished to go. Sometimes she had her cane, and sometimes not. 

            Once he’d helped her get to where she wanted to go, he would often have to leave. But Elise always asked him to stay with her. On any occasion when they found themselves thrust together, Elise would attempt to prolong the encounter. And it always surprised her a little whenever Dominic did stay with her, when he chatted with her or watched the television with her, or when he played chess with her, or when, in the austere chapel for example, he simply sat beside her in the unlovely stillness, each one of them as silent as the other, neither one daring to disturb this co-created quiet.

            Dominic enjoyed being with Elise. He felt extremely warm towards her and it was a source of pride that he had helped her to make such encouraging progress. 

            But then there started to be whispers, words of speculation in hushed voices. It was a well-known fact that Dominic was always eager to please. But what Elise didn’t know about Dominic was that he periodically devoted himself to particular residents before moving on to others, before choosing a new favourite. Veronica had her own suspicions about what was going on. For the most part it was a secret between Dominic and the residents. No-one ever saw the manager; she remained all day in her office and never came out. The door was always shut. It was therefore safe to assume that she knew nothing about Dominic’s activities.    

For a month or two at a time, he would make one resident the main focus of his affections, of his time and his energy: he would go the extra mile for them, he would spend far too much time with them, he would make them feel pampered and special, he would procure requested items for them and even buy gifts for them. (In the past, gifts had included books, gardening equipment, fishing rods, spirits, tobacco). He would show immense partiality to them and them alone, for one, two, maybe three months. And then, after a while, he would grow bored and dissatisfied and he would search for a new resident to lavish with this increased attention and privileged treatment. 

            Having made up his mind to move on, he would become cold and distant to the current candidate. Quite often, this abrupt change in attitude would leave the resident bereft and alarmed. And sometimes they accepted it with good grace, with gratitude for its lasting as long as it did, as though they had never believed that it would endure for very long. These relationships were affairs of sorts, dalliances, romances, and they weren’t utterly without a sexual component. No sexual acts took place between them, of course, but there was always a kind of longing, a mutual awareness of that which was absent, which could not help but be sexual in a way. Sometimes, very occasionally, Dominic lay with them. In these scenes, scenes of somnolence rather than desire, each body represented to the other what it pined for, what was missing from lives which passed without much edification.

            Dominic formed these curious, temporary bonds with both male and female residents.

            Of course, Elise was more vulnerable that many of the other residents. Certainly she was more susceptible to heartbreak. But she was also younger, her hair had not yet turned white. In some ways she was braver, more hardened, more aspirational than the rest of those in residence at St. Margaret’s.

She wanted to take her relationship with Dominic further, in fact it was her sincerest wish to do this. She lay awake one night, pondering the matter. There was a low breeze blowing outside: this was the night’s huge and tender respiration. It caused the curtains to swing softly from their rail and chilled the whole room. Elise liked to be a bit chilly. Bolted windows and doors were a phobia of hers, and she found a certain kind of airless indoor warmth especially unpleasant, even panic-inducing. She lay awake, thinking, not sleeping. She was supine, duvet-covered, her head on her pillow. But not sleeping. 

The entire world seemed to tense and shudder with revulsion at the sudden copulation of two cats. One harrowing shriek leapt high, followed by about a minute of vicious, coital noise.

She remembered once, when she was a young woman, she had taken off all her clothes. It was dusk, there was still some light outside, coming in through the window. In the memory, she had looked out of the window, at the skyline, at the skyline of the city where the light was most intense. Though still quite intense, the light was of a dwindling intensity. Fast-dwindling. Then, she had taken off all her clothes and climbed into the bed, naked. The man in the room with her had seated himself opposite, in a window seat, with a drink. The clothes formed a pile on the wooden floor. Without words she had spoken to the man. He had come over to her and taken off his clothes and climbed into the bed. Then what? What had happened next? Sex, she presumed, relations. But she couldn’t remember for sure.

So that’s what she did, the next morning. She took off all her clothes and climbed into her bed. She waited. When she didn’t make an appearance at breakfast, Dominic came to her room. He knocked on the door and said her name. He didn’t enter the room. He stood outside, on the other side of the door, saying Elise’s name. She was so nervous, so tense. She quivered, like a baby, naked like a baby, under the bed sheets. Old and naked. 

“Come in,” she said, her voice hoarse but audible. 

            She closed her eyes, pretended to be half asleep. Her body, her naked body, remained hidden. 

            Dominic came in. The first thing he did was open the curtains. This meant that he was standing on the other side of the room when he turned around and saw Elise sit up. Her cane stood against her night table, propped diagonally up. She slid herself up, her back against the headboard of the bed. The headboard had slats. The headboard slats felt uncomfortable against her back. 

            Dominic watched, breathless with disbelief, as she gathered up her old, long breasts in her hands. Then she pushed the sheets down, down past her pelvis, as far as her knees. It seemed like a long way, like the sheets had a long way to travel. Then she opened her legs. Her skin was bad, deathly pale, with several patches of damage. There were scabbed areas, sections where the skin was coming off in flakes.   

            “Come and rub me,” she said, in a voice hoarser than before.

            Dominic stood still, barely blinking. For a moment, it looked like he was going to agree, like he was going to rub her. Instead, he threw up on the carpet. There wasn’t very much vomit, which was a good thing. After all, he hadn’t vomited because of anything he’d consumed. No, it was simply an expulsion in a moment of surprise and disgust, an unexpected bodily response to an unexpected event. 

            Dominic staggered out of the room and fetched something with which to clean up the vomit.

            There wasn’t much of a shift in Elise. It was as though, for her, the spell could not be broken so easily. Her eyes maintained the same questioning look, the same look of coy hopefulness. A troubling, uneasy serenity. She didn’t change her position. She closed her legs but she did not hide her breasts.  

            She wasn’t quite sure what she had expected. She hadn’t expected sex, not necessarily; only some recognition on Dominic’s part that she was serious about him. That her intentions became known, that was all she had wanted. She had never expected that they would be a normal couple, a normal married couple. She had hoped that perhaps he could take her away from this place and bring her to live with him, wherever he lived. That would have been good, she thought to herself, that would have been a good way to finish, a good note to end on. She would die in ten or twelve years but, in the meantime, she could be with Dominic every day. She would be waiting for him when he got home.   

            “You don’t want this?” Elise said, in the hoarsest voice of all, while Dominic was cleansing his vomit from the carpet.  

            “I’m…” he calculated his response, carefully. “I’m engaged, Elise,” he said vaguely. “I’ve got a fiancé. We’re getting married in June.” 

            “Oh,” Elise said. Now she covered her breasts. “You might have been more transparent about the matter.” Gently reprimanding him, her voice seemed to shed some of its previous hoarseness. It sounded a lot less hoarse than before.  

            “Yes, I should have told you. I suppose…I suppose I didn’t want to embarrass you. Or myself. I didn’t want you to think that I thought you had the wrong end of the stick when you hadn’t. Do you see what I mean? But it turns out you did have the wrong end of the stick, and I had the wrong end of the stick. And now I’ve embarrassed the both of us. We’ve each embarrassed ourselves to a shocking degree. I’m so sorry.” So many first and second persons. I and you, I and you.  

            “Yes,” Elise replied. “Things have tuned out so badly, haven’t they? What an incredible disappointment this has been.” 

She said all this with the eeriest neutrality. 

            Neither of them said anything for a time. The noise from the main road was at its loudest. It drifted from nowhere into everywhere. There was some birdsong as well. Not much. A just-audible murmur of natural, diurnal music from the trees. The birdbaths on the great lawn remained unvisited. The water remained in the bowls, untouched and undiminished.

They were approaching the thirty-ninth minute of their second session. The first Dominic had devoted entirely to his homosexuality; this time, after about fifteen minutes of considerable hesitation, other things began to drift to the surface, things he was sure he would never discuss but which seemed, of their own accord, to will themselves into articulation. All of a sudden, he was talking about Elise. And then Julia, and Heather, Vincent, Brian.

            Returning to Elise, his latest catastrophe and the reason he’d left St. Margaret’s, Dominic said: “I didn’t think she’d react that way…I didn’t think she’d…you know, think I was…you know…serious about her, or think I felt that way about her.”

            “What do you think is behind this pattern of relationships?” the therapist asked.

            “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” he was pensive here. He often took pauses, pauses which he used to select his words as carefully as he was able. Within these pauses, he would always smile and then inhale and exhale quite deliberately. He never rushed himself, never allowed himself to feel rushed. He permitted himself as much time as was needed. “I mean what do you think made you do this, made you want to do this?” (Like Dominic, the therapist also favoured cardigans).          

“I don’t know. I don’t really have a relationship with my parents, my marriage was a disaster. I occasionally have sex with men, you know, I visit bathhouses or whatever, but I can’t…I don’t really know how to form relationships with them. With men, I mean. I suppose I’ve experienced more than my fair share of chaos and…impotence in my life. I guess I wanted to be in control for once, you know? I wanted to be the one to say when it finished and when it ended. And I guess I supposed that because they were old and helpless and, at their, you know, at their time of life, there wasn’t the prospect of much happening to them, that they wouldn’t mind being used a little bit. Anything’s better than being neglected…that was my thinking.”

At Elise’s fortnightly appointment, the first since Dominic had handed in his notice, Elise was eager to discuss what had happened.

            “I was let down very badly this week.”

            “Oh?”

            “A very promising relationship seemed to be developing between myself and Dominic, the Dominic who works here. At least, he did work here, until quite recently. I’m told he doesn’t work here anymore. He led me on, you see. He is engaged to be married. It’s a shame. I was really in love with him. I was really serious about him.”

            The psychiatrist, ever calm and ruminative, didn’t say anything. She offered Elise the necessary signs that would assure her she was being listened to. The psychiatrist’s eyes remained quite objective but her lips came together in a mysterious smile. There was worry in there too. But, for the most part, her smile masked the worry and only showed to Elise what it was helpful to show.   

            Two days ago, there had been an incident involving Veronica. She had been in a particularly sour and ungenerous mood one morning. Naturally, since propositioning Dominic, Elise had returned to being morose and stubborn. Veronica, typically impatient, had tried to hurry Elise along. Somehow the subject of Dominic came up. Aloud, Veronica reproached him for his sudden absence and Elise vaguely mentioned that he was engaged to be married. Dominic isn’t engaged, Veronica said, no way. Elise didn’t like that Veronica was calling Dominic a liar. That’s what he told me, Elise had said, and I believe him. Dominic isn’t trustworthy, Veronica replied, he’s a liar. And Elise had snapped. She had snapped so abruptly. A fork went flying, in such a way as seemed almost accidental. But then she had picked up her breakfast plate and smashed it on the floor with such savage intensity that there could be no ambiguity about her intentions. The sound was tremendous, turning every head in the dining room. In Veronica, the suddenness of the outburst had produced a startled look Elise had never seen before: a terrible stare of abject horror and surprise. It was dreadful to be the cause of such an appalled wide-eyedness. Elise had then erupted into sobs. Her nose got very snotty and her mouth seemed to be brimming with too much spittle: therefore she produced these unusual sticky grunting sounds, as well a sorrowful murmur of monologue, most the words inaudible. There it all lay, on the wooden floor, in ruins: pieces of plate, pieces of toast. 

            “I’m not sure I can survive this,” Elise said near the end of the session.

            “Survive what?” the therapist asked.

            “The heartbreak. It’s been one heartbreak after another. One damn heartbreak after… do you know what I miss most about living amongst a hoard? It’s all the things there are to look at. You sit in the middle of a room, a room like that, a hoarder’s room, and it’s not very comfortable, I’ll grant you that, but there is so much to look at. You bear the stench, and the rot, and the rats. If you can learn to bear the stench and the rot and the rats then you’re no longer afraid of death. You’ve made friends with death if you can bear the rats and the stench. But my point is…my point is…it…it keeps you safe from yourself, to have that many things to look at and ponder. When the eye is that entertained, when there’s such an abundance of stuff, when there’s a thing, an object, a story, a memory, in every single square inch of a room, there are times, sometimes, when you really feel that you’ve made the right choice, that you’ve…that you’ve struck bingo by choosing to live like this. You don’t need anything else. I didn’t need anything else. It was enough. You see, most rooms…I mean, all the rooms in this place, my own room, they’re all so so empty. There’s nothing to look at. They’ve got nothing in them. So much space being wasted. It’s a waste of space. Normally when people use that expression they are reproaching something, or someone, for being there. They are concerned that the space is being occupied by something when it could be empty. When there could be space, blissful space. But, to me, space is never wasted while it’s occupied. There’s nothing blissful about space, it’s unoccupied space that is the real waste. And I can’t get used to the waste, the space, the space-waste in the rooms where ordinary lives are lived. I can’t bear it. I can’t…bloody stick it. I can’t stick it. The waste, the space. I’ve got nothing. I’ve got nothing. Nothing. Not even a jar. Not even a shard of crockery from the plate I smashed. Not a single hair off Dominic’s body. Nothing. I’ve got nothing. I’ve nothing above me, nothing behind me. I’ve got nothing underneath me. Nothing to my left, nothing to my right. Nothing. I want to leave this place. I want to get out of here. Can you take me away from this place? Can you take me out of here? I feel I’ve made such a fool of myself.”