Sheltered

Did we suffer? I’m not sure. Or rather, I don’t think suffering was something any of us endured in the first person. Suffering belonged to no one in particular. We were dazed, that is all. Tired – too tired to worry the world was leaving us behind.

From what were we sheltered in our sheltered accommodation? The city – its vastness – all around us. The city, and the pressure of its regeneration: we were cut some slack, were allowed a few years before we had to become worthy of its transformation. How tired we were! How lost! But for all that, sheltered. Weeks passed – months, but we were safe.

Sometimes inspectors would visit us. Sometimes we’d be called in to justify our benefits. How to abject yourself? How to appear as pitiable as possible? They called us clients, but we were dependants. The city tolerated us; the city indulged us. Everywhere regeneration, except in sheltered accommodation. Everywhere people buying their council houses, except for us, except for the ones who lived in darkness.

I liked my flat. Was it mine? I liked the flat through which I was passing. When they showed it to me, I thought: here I will have time. Here is peace. And when they left me there, and closed the door, I thought: I will fill it with nothing; I’ll leave no mark. It is a flat for the ill, and I am ill, just as others will succeed me who are also ill, one after another, in a long series. There are many of us, and we live sequentially. Many, one coming after another, and each of us in this flat.

I thought: the spaces of this flat ache with suffering. But suffering is not mine. No doubt I will lie here in darkness day after day, but my suffering will slowly be lifted from me. This is what it is to have space. It is what it is to have fallen from time. These rooms are totally empty, but for suffering. The rooms suffer, but I do not suffer; I have delegated suffering to this space, this time. I have swapped places with this expanse.

I knew others were ill in their flats all around me. The agoraphobe, who liked Denton Welch. The depressive. We knew each other; we passed by each other, each of us stranded. But I imagined that each of us had made an exchange in the dark, in our flats. Suffering was elsewhere, and we were each inhabited by the expanses of space, and by a time broken from time.

My ailment was tiredness, a great tiredness. My hands were not mine; I could barely lift my arms. What actions could I cause? But tiredness freed me from the great questions: how was I to make my way in life? There was no way. There was here, the space in which I lay down and the flat took my suffering from me.

No community. No friendships, either – or friendships had worn thin, too thin. Associations – bumping into this person or that, but never a knock on the door, and only rarely a phonecall. Once, for a short period, the depressive found a lover; after three days, he proposed to her; he wanted children. But on the fifth day she realised his madness: he was an alcoholic; drunk, he would promise everything. But in the morning, hungover, and before the off-licenses were open?

And so she fell away from him. She fell back to her flat, her solitude, but not without pain. For a time, we spoke every morning. She rang me, every morning until I could bear it no more and unplugged my phone. I wanted my solitude; wanted the space to ache with the suffering I had relinquished.

Then, for a time, when his symptoms lifted, I used to go dog walking with the agoraphobe. We walked an old, half-blind collie through the fog, and talked about Denton Welch. Do you remember that passage where he puts a peppermint on his chest to watch it rise and fall? He remembered. I remembered. And wasn’t Welch ill, like us? Didn’t he die at 31?

We left our meetings to chance. Never did I ring him, or him me; I didn’t know his number. Entirely to chance: he was afraid to enter the cafe to which I would go every day, but would wave to me from outside. Sometimes I knew I’d see him, and took a seat by the window. But sometimes, he would just appear on the street where he did not belong, coming towards me like a lost man.

For weeks, though, he’d stay in his flat. And sometimes I, too, couldn’t summon the strength to go out into the day. I wanted to remain in confined space; the day was too vast, the sky … I stayed in. I stayed in the darkness, my few possessions leaving the rooms of the flat nearly empty and bearing no mark of my presence.

But was I there? Sometimes I had the sense that to be loved, really loved, would mean that I was seen in my absence, as the one who’d changed places with the indifferent space of the flat. But sometimes, it was that the rooms of the flat should be seen without me. Only then would I be known and perhaps loved. Only then, when I was one of the great succession of the ill.

I lay slumped on the old sofa. I lay feverish in bed. For a time, I was determined, like the stranded Crusoe, to keep track of the passing of days. I thought to make marks on the walls of my flat.

But then, gradually, as week fell into week, and whole months came to resemble one another, I saw there was no point, and I might as well drift, and that this was the gift of the flat and the gift of my illness. I have an alibi, I thought. I have a sicknote. Everywhere around me, the city is transforming, but I do not need to be transformed.