Category: Ill

How many years is it now? More than ten. It was another time. Things were completely different then. There’s a kind of brain injury you can get when you fail to recognise people. People you know. People you should know. I don’t think anyone could recognise us – not me, not you. I don’t think we could recognise each other, and I think that’s what held us apart, our faces worn away. You were no one at all, and I, likewise, was no one.

Ten years ago, more. I was ill, you were unemployed. Or was it the other way round? Was I unemployed? Were you ill? Ill, unemployed, we’d fallen from the world. Both of us, fallen. I don’t think we liked to see it in each other. I think we wanted to see anything but that. Anyway, you had your excuse – or was it me? – your illness. And I had mine – was it mine? – unemployment.

You said my trouble was that I was ill. And I said you were ill because you were unemployed, you had nothing to do. Didn’t you have your business? The recording studio – what had happened to that? You’d placed it in the hands of your business partner, you told me. He was willing to take sole charge. He sent you cheques, you trusted him. He was half in love with you, you said. He’d do anything for you.

And now you had all the time in the world. Time for – what? Going to cafes in the late afternoon. Into the cafes, a pot of tea to last you all afternoon. Take a bit of sun. Sit out in the sun. Or in, in from the rain and the cold. The seasons turned. You were always there, talking to this person or that. And I was always there, wasn’t I? I wanted somewhere to go, somewhere away from the house and its distractions. The cafe, for the afternoon, when you were there, talking with the others. A pot of tea – that, for the whole afternoon. I’d make it last, until the switchover of the waitresses. They’d forget to charge me. The new shift would think I’d already paid. The old shift thought I’d pay the waitresses of the new shift … And you, why were you there? What did you want, drinking tea, taking the sun or sheltering from the rain?

One day you saw me, or I saw you. One day you – or was it me – emerged from the small crowd who gathered there. Who introduced us? Who told one of us about the other? There we were, talking. There, and as though we’d always known one another. You were ill, you told me. I was unemployed, I said. And I thought you were ill because you’d given everything up, because you were resolved to do nothing with your life.

You’d done too much, you said, you’d been too busy. A job in the South, near Brighton, and then one in the North, nearer home, and then the recording company you set up with your dad’s money. You wanted some time out, you said. You wanted to think about things. What were you going to do with your life? What did you want to do?

I said I thought that running your own business was enough. Who wouldn’t want to run their own business, setting their own hours? You’d overseen the recording of a famous TV programme, hadn’t you? You produced the session? That’s what you told me. And you’d begun recording your own album, hadn’t you? You’d cut a few songs. You had some more songs written, or you’d write some more, that’s what you told me, wasn’t it? But you weren’t in a hurry, you told me. You wanted some time out, and besides the business could run itself. Your business partner could run it, you said, I think that’s what you said, one afternoon or another.

I was unemployed – I’m sure of that. You were ill, you told me, and you said you saw some of that illness in me. I said I was just unemployed, that was all, and that illness followed from unemployment, unless you’re careful. You told me you felt tired all the time, that you couldn’t do anything, and I said I thought that was because you were doing nothing, because you weren’t busy enough. You have to have a plan, I said, to get through the day. You have to be careful of having too much time. But you said I was ill and you could see it, and we had a similar illness, if not exactly the same one. We were both ill, you said. You could see it in me, and I knew I could recognise it in you, my ailment, you said. Was I ill? I wondered.

The days were all exactly the same. The afternoons. Every day was the same; every day, in the morning, the cafe, then I walked, then, later in the afternoon, again the cafe, where you were. I’d see you there, talking to this person or that person, as I’d seen you for some time. There was a security guard who liked to talk to you, I remember that. He had epaulettes. I thought it was some fancy fashion thing, that he was some kind of fashion victim, but it seems he really was a security guard whose shift had finished, and that was where he ended up, like us, in the cafe.

Soon, others could see it, there was something between us. We’d become accomplices. We shared something. Even the security guard could see it. He liked you, that was for certain. He liked to sit next to you. He called you by your full name which no one ever used. Your full name … it sounded too intimate. As though you shared a secret. But, in truth, it was we who shared the secret, you and I. I knew your secret name, you knew mine. I knew how to undo your name, and you mine.

We were ill, unemployed. And we were the most ill, the most unemployed, wasn’t that it? Things were hopeless for us, wasn’t that it? We’d been beached and stranded in life, wasn’t that it, by the shore, on the coastal sands?

How many years is it now? Ten? More than ten? More than ten years … set adrift in my life. A part of my life adrift in my life. A kind of floater in the eye. What happened then? What happened back then? Something is buried there, back then. Something important, important for me to know. A kind of secret. Something I knew then I do not know now. Something I knew … or that knew me. A kind of secret I was locked in, that kept me, rather than the other way round. I lived in a kind of secret, as between parentheses. A life in brackets, enclosed, that had become exceptional … in that there was nothing exceptional about it. In that it was the most ordinary life of all.

And I think you, too, knew the secret. That it was wrapped around you, too, that it drew us together back then, and now in my memory. We shared something that you called illness and I unemployment. We shared it and it held us together and apart from one another, kept each in orbit around the other like double stars.

You received sickness benefit, I remember that. The cheques came from your business partner, but you were also on benefits, as I was. I lived on my unemployment cheques, and you on the sick.

I should try and get on the sick, you told me. You’d get more money on the sick, that’s what you said. You wouldn’t have to go in so often, you said, because I’d told you how I disliked going in, how I disliked the dole office. The queues! The long queues! And the despair! Such unhappiness there. Such unhappiness in me when I was there, when usually I was content, or at least half content, numbed. And having to explain what I’d been doing for the past two weeks – no work, of course, nothing earned, and what I would be doing, what kind of work I was looking for.

How I disliked it!, I explained to you. You should go on the sick, you told me. I wouldn’t have to go in except for once every three months. That’s what you did, you told me – you went into the benefits office every three months with a doctor’s note. Your doctor was very sympathetic, you told me. I could register with her, you told me. She’d be sympathetic with me, too. She’d send me to the counsellor, who had an office in the cellar.

You had a friend, you said, who had the same doctor, who’d got sheltered accommodation. She was ill, really ill, you said, but she’d got a flat, quite a big one, and lived there on her own. That’s what I could get, if I wanted one, you said. I could register with the doctor, get a sick note (you’d have to see a counsellor, you said), and then get sheltered accommodation, a flat, you said. You’d help me.

What happened next? Then what happened? I remember … but what do I remember? I feel confused. I feel I’ve lost something. Part of my life has broken away. Part of me. But it’s important, I tell myself. I need it. I need to understand what happened.

Ill and unemployed. Unemployed and ill. Did I get myself a flat? And you, what happened to you?

Fallen. We were both fallen, but in the end you fell farther, I remember that. I rose again. But you – you kept falling, I remember that. You thought illness was a kind of ruse, didn’t you? That you could gain a few months by it, a few years, living on your benefits and the cheques of your business partner? You thought you could take some time out with impunity, that you could see out the 90s and the new millennium as though at the end of everything, at the mouth of all rivers, didn’t you? But you fell a little further, didn’t you? The illness hollowed you out too far. You fell too far, didn’t you? The illness fell inside you and hollowed you away.

You disappeared. I saw nothing of you; and when I asked, no one had any news. Did I ring you? I must have received no answer. But then I’ve never liked phones, I still don’t. Disembodied voices. Voices in the air. Did I call on you? Did I kock on your door? But you lived a long way away, two bus rides, and I’ve never liked to travel, I still don’t. Until – when? when was it? I heard you’d been sectioned, that you were in the mental hospital. How had you wound up there? Sectioned – and in the mental hospital, that’s what I was told.

I shuddered that morning in the winter sun when I heard. Shuddered. I was on my way up. Somehow – an upward eddy – I was on my way up, rising in the winter sun. I wasn’t ill, not any more, and I wasn’t unemployed. I don’t think I’d recognise you, if I saw you again. I don’t think I’d know your name.

We had illness in common, was that it? Or it was illness that filled that space between us, that absence of possibility. I was unemployed, and you – you’d dropped out of employment. You’d had an operation, and then it came, the illness; you didn’t return to work.

I met him once, your business partner. He was half in love with you. He said he’d run the business, and what mattered was that you got better. You said you wanted no phonecalls from him, nothing. Just a monthly cheque. Taken out of the accounts so it wouldn’t alert the benefit people, from whom she also recieved a monthly cheque.

I was impressed: you were ready to be seriously ill. To see it through to the end. You said it had been brewing a long time. You’d worked hard, you said, you’d built up the business, you and your partner. But it was waiting all along, you thought, and from your teenage years. You showed me a photo. You as a teenager, long haired and made up. You played keyboards in a band. You toured the workingman’s clubs.

But you were ill then, you said; it had already begun. Staying with your uncle and aunt, you said. They didn’t want you there, you could feel it. Down by the sea – Brighton, it was. And then you’d come back up North, got a job. Went out with a gangster, you said, who told you how to fiddle the banks. You had a whole secret identity, another you, with another account. And bought two houses, and received two lots of benefits.

Very clever, the whole thing. But now the illness had come. You were ready to be ill, there was no avoiding it. A serious business. You had to wait for illness to pass through you and away. Had to lie down and wait, to welcome it in your own way, to affirm it in its passage. And then you’d rise, one day, ready for the world. Ready as you’d never been, knowing the illness was in you, you said.

And I was ill too, you said. You saw it in me. There was a kind of vacancy, a void. You knew it there. It was what we had in common, you said. We had to let ourselves be ill, you said. You knew the lingo, you’d visited counsellors. And didn’t he say, your counsellor, that he thought you were a saint. What you’d put up with, he said. You were saintly, he said, and that he was in love with you.

Because you were pretty, you always had that – your looks, of which you were neglectful, and marvellously so. Because you could neglect them. No make up, no fancy clothes. You smoked rollies and your voice was deep. At night you’d pick at your face for hours, you told me. Smoking rollies and surfing the net (you’d just got connected).

It was illness that drew us together, you decided. The illness in each of us recognised the other. It was time to be ill. To let ourselves be ill, you believed in that. For illness to work through us. That was the summer, you said. Our summer would see our illnesses sprawl. We would be ill together, she could see that. We had to be ready to be ill, to let ourselves be ill. For it to pass through us.

Very well, I thought. For I was feeling ill. Tired, too tired. Thick headed (as I am today, once again on the brink of summer), and that wasn’t right, was it? She agreed; it wasn’t right. We were ill, the pair of us. And ready to go inside and wait. Ready for the room with blue and pink wallpaper. Ready for the futon. We would have to pace ourselves. I was not to write and she was to take no phonecalls. Days would pass, weeks, and it would be good for both of us, to let ourselves be ill.

You had another ill friend. She’d got sheltered accommodation, not far from the room. We visited her there, in the darkness, a traffic jam outside. It was still and calm in the flat. The rooms were dark. What did she do all day?, we asked her. Watch TV, she said. Read. Catch up on her reading. Clever people like us always get ill, she said. She’d been a businesswoman, she’d worked in the world. Now it was her time. Her time to be ill.

Just as it was our time, you said later. We’d been tough on ourselves, you said. And now we had to be kind. We’d probably be ill all summer, you said, and then we’d see.

You were ill and I were ill – but which one of us was iller? I went out, it is true. Round the block, past the alcoholics, up the road. Outside – though I was tired, thick with tiredness, and the air seemed heavy. But you – you wouldn’t leave the room. And for how many weeks?

But we went to the doctor, didn’t we – the same one? One, then another to the doctor, once a month. Wasn’t it you who recommended that specialist to me? Didn’t you send me to her? You knew the diagnosis she would make. You told me what to say, and I said it. The same diagnosis – it was no surprise. And thereafter I was to see her once a month, in the basement of the surgery.

A bus ride away, a long walk – because we’d faked our addresses, hadn’t we? To be able to get into the surgery that specialised in our condition, as it was now. Our condition, the pair of us, identically ill, intimate in our illness. As I remember, we offered you a room at the house. You were to move in, we said. We were concerned. You had a room upstairs from me. We made up the bed. But when you came, you didn’t want it. You never felt welcome enough. You felt we didn’t want you there. But we did, we said so.

You doubted us, and you stayed in my room. Not to take up space, you said. In my room, and your grey, unused car outside. When was it broken into? We followed the trail of the burglars, picking up broken CD cases. I was afraid, paranoid. You said it was part of the illness, that you too were afraid. But I saw no fear in you. You were defiant, angry.

Weeks passed, and little happened. I wanted to watch films, but you found them too loud. You wanted to play computer games. I wanted to try to exercise, despite everything. You laughed at that. Weeks passed – a whole summer. On a day like today, bright and sunny, I said we should go on a picnic and you took the hamper from the boot of your car.

Out to the Ees, to a field at its edge. It always felt like going back in time going there. Ruined buildings. Overgrown grass. A bit like Tarkovsky’s Zone on the edge of Chorlton. Open space, wide skies. And that summer – how long ago? – a haze like a delay in time, as though one moment could not free itself from another. Outside, but you wanted to go in.

You were agoraphobic, you said. It was part of the condition, you said, and didn’t I feel it? Both agoraphobic and claustrophobic, you said. And liable to panic attacks, you said. Out in the air, the open air, it was too much for you – the space, the wide sky, the summer haze. I thought: I’m trapped in illness with you. I thought: we’re both ill, and this is insane.

But that insanity carried us along for a few more weeks. Months, perhaps. To the end of summer, perhaps. And longer, even – to the beginning of autumn. It was madness. Thick tiredness, heavy days, and no going out. The walls of the room. The futon, the computer stand, the television, the sofa: that was our world.

And illness thickened inside us. We were dazed. And only a small window open to let the air in. Summer outside, the hazy sky, but we were too dazed for summer; we missed it. Weeks passed, months. Were we good for one another? Was this how we should live?

And then you left, and went back to your house. You needed money, I think. Needed to sell your houses, I think. For in a former life, another life, you were a landlady and businesswoman. Once upon a time, both of those, and successful, with two houses – one sizeable, divided into flats – and at what age?

You left to manage your affairs, to prepare things. It was autumn, and you drove away. And I, what did I do? Fell deeper into the arms of illness. I was more ill, but then, gradually, woke up. I began to wake over the days and weeks. Woke and – went back to work. You had disappeared from my life. We were bad for one another, you said. And after all, you can’t spend you whole life on benefits, you said. But from where had you found your strength? From where did it come?

I stopped visiting the doctor in the basement, though I still have the book she lent me. She was a specialist in our condition, you had said. But what condition? Illness evaporated. Illness fell from me, and I flew through the days like a missile. ‘So you’re better’, you said on the phone. Better? I’m not sure I was ill, I said. ‘Oh you were ill. And so was I’.

Very well, I thought, and remembered a friend of hers who was far more advanced in illness than us. That friend who lived and breathed illness, and whom we visited once in her sheltered accommodation. We were getting ill too, we said. It’s the world, she said, it’s terrible. She had been a businesswoman, too, but no longer. The inside had opened to enclose her.

Days and nights passed in her flat, alone in her flat. Sheltered accommodation for the long term ill. Is that what we wanted? To draw a shelter over our heads and stay there from year to year? We were all ill, she said, all of us, everyone out there. She gestured to the traffic jam outside the window. Everyone’s ill, if only they realised it. I think she thought of herself as a pioneer, or like Pound’s poet as the antennae of the race, quivering sensitively ahead of the rest of us.

We saw one another at Christmas, and then, after that, not at all. You’d had a breakdown, I’d heard. And things got much worse. I won’t remember it here. But you were locked up, weren’t you? And I, on the other side of the city, was getting on with my life, as they say. Walking up and down the road, past the alcoholics. Walking to give a shape to my days, an orientation.

Had the illness gone? Had it disappeared into the sky? It was watching us all, I thought. Just as the woman had said in her flat. We were all ill, even the mothers who pushed babies along in three wheeled prams. Even the media types in cafes. Ill, and the illest one was ill for us, for all our sakes, there inside her sheltered accommodation.

Ill at home for a fifth day, and a pale, seemingly sourceless light is everywhere. I recognise it; it has come to find me: white, indifferent light. White light like maggots writhing when you roll away the bin, alive in itself somehow. Trying to live in its own way, but such light lives only across kitchen work tops and empty baths. Such light, known to the ill, the unemployed is the great neutral medium of the everyday, interposing itself so that only it can be seen, passing like river fog across the clean surfaces of our houses.

Who has seen it? I saw it all the time once. A seeing that needs a great training, months of preparation. Until: there it is: the thickness of the everyday, the day as what neither begins nor ends, but flows across the work tops and the silver taps. I think to enter it fully would be to forget. But I’m not yet ready. Somewhere, I am sure, there are great sages of the everyday, great voyagers, who travel everywhere in the white light, unafraid. I imagine they are drinking. I imagine they drink constantly, night and day, but that that is how they hold themselves into the light.

You can never see it face on, I tell himself. Never directly. It must come towards you, like a shy animal. You have to be still enough, marooned enough, that it might drift towards you. And where your mouth was open, it will be filled with gossamer. And where your eyes were open, cotton wool wads. And your ears sealed by buds of light.

You should drink, I tell myself. Drink sweet, stale beer open in cans on your floor. Stale lager, cheap – an obscure brand from the German supermarket: others, you know it, in Old Europe are drinking this. Others, elsewhere, voyagers in white light are drinking the same cheap Aldi lager – in Hungary, say, or in Albania. They would understand you there. They’d understand it was Old Europe you were reaching, the same white light over rust belts and radioactive zones.

Or you should eat. The discount Greggs, selling stale goods from the region. 7 stale teacakes in a bag. 7 Gingerbread men, or 7 Lardy cakes. Lardy cakes open the way. Wrappers and crumbs on the sofa open it up. Lie down in the afternoon, full of sweet stale cakes and sweet stale beer. The day is passing, but your day is going nowhere. The day passes – but is it really passing? How to reach up and stir the sky with a stick to find out? The clouds have the thickness, you imagine of mashed potato.

And everywhere, white light and not a chance. White light, bland and shadowless – the great noon of life as it turns in itself. The great noon, nobody’s climax, when the day climbs to the plateau of the afternoon that you will cross with the aid of 4 cans of sweet beer and 7 stale cakes. Isn’t that what white light brings to me, and today? Isn’t that of what it reminds me?

Listen to Felt in the afternoon. Keep the TV turned on, with the volume down, and listen to this Felt album or that, it makes no difference. Felt in the afternoon: perfect. You are stranded – the day has stranded you, and so are Felt, who are with you. You and Felt. You and the TV on and Felt and half finished cans of sweet, stale beer and cake crumbs on the sofa. Is your life over? Did it ever begin?

Sometimes, in the day, you have had to keep the house clean. That was your duty: hoover the floor, and cream cleanse the sink after you’ve done the washing up. Scrub the silver hob back to silver. Let the silver taps shine silver again: do you remember what the son was charged to do in Hal Hartley’s Trust? Do you remember how he failed in his tasks, and how he was punished?

But they don’t understand, the workers, the able bodied. They don’t understand – how can they, who lack your perspective upon the day, who do not know the white light? What can they know, who drive from here to there, who work? Time has not given itself to them. Time has not opened itself as wide as the sky. Time does not allow them the vistas it has given you, as over a salt marsh: the whole, white sky.

7 stale Chelsea buns. 7 squashed eclairs, with yellow cream. In truth, they go the quickest, almost as soon as the shop is open. There’s always a queue, very long. A queue, and you’ll be lucky if there are gingerbread men left. Sometimes, you make do with white, stale baps, but they don’t fill you, and they’re not sweet. Or seven unsweet finger rolls. Or a single loaf of brown bread that is hard when you tap it. Toc toc.

It’s only on your own that the white light will reach you. On your own, but if that means alone enough to be no one, no one in particular. The day, like an office, has its functionaries. The alcoholics on the corner are as interchangable as bureaucrats. They have equivalent dreams, equivalent nightmares; they are all exactly the same, closer or farther to the heart of white light.

And you, who are you, alone, but with no secrets to share, with nothing to recount? White light flows through you. Light passes through your permeable body. When you cough you cough clouds of day. When you walk along the street, it is the day that walks, having hardened itself into a body, a life. Having lain itself into the course of your life like a glacier in its valley.

Like a Bela Tarr film, the narrative of your life is so attenuated, so given to stretches of nothingness, ghost landscapes, you can gather nothing together. What happened? You remember an atmosphere, a climate. It was always light. There was light everywhere. But that is a screen memory. Light does not happen, it is the way things happen. Light is what retreats from things, for the most part. It is the withdrawal of light that lets us see, and speak, and listen.

But sometimes it comes over you to blank things out. Now nothing happens, least of all your life. Nothing whatsoever: can you imagine that? It drifts through you, eventless. Drifts, and without knowing itself, seeks itself. Seeks, by forgetting it has sought and every other memory it might have had. There can be no plans. No anticipation. The absence of hope, and of all relation to the future.

Indifference, that’s what’s required. Perfect indifference to itself. A kind of sphere turning in its indifference. Can you imagine wanting nothing at all? Being lost from all orbits? Wandering out and out, lost comet?  But there’s no need to imagine it, since you are part of it. I think it is you who I can scarcely imagine. You. But the light’s brought you back to me. Or it’s taking me back, all the way. Fifteen years … longer. Sweet beer on the sofa. Sweet stale beer, and crumbs from 7 sweet, stale cakes.

In the summer, she lies sprawled, legs stretched out in the patch of light. In the winter, tucked up like a hen. Totem, watcher, I brush your hair from my notebook. 

I wrote, I am ill. The cure: the strength to write, I am ill. And those words on the page, surviving me and surviving my illness. Survival: they have left me behind. But then: I wrote them, I formed them. The words, I am ill.

Cured in the space of the page. Cured as one page filled, and then another, cat hairs brushed away. But no page as perfect as the first. No sentence as perfect as those first words: I am ill.

For a long time, I was sick. How will you say it? For a long time, sick, sick and unemployed – how to say it? For a long time, sick, I was unable to speak. For a long time, unemployed, speech abandoned me. Months passed, and then a year; then another year, but time could not be marked.

Fallen, lying on the stairwell, afternoon sun through the window. Shafts of light, dust motes, and you with the cat who lay herself in the light. With her, seeing that her black coat was full of grey hairs and brown ones.

A notebook open. Notebook with cat hairs. What did you write? Nothing of consequence. Nothing significant. It was enough to write. Enough that writing was possible. Speech, of a kind. Directed to whom? I reread nothing. I wrote without rereading. No certainties. This voice was not mine. It was a voice, and that was enough. A voice, not mine, to which writing abandoned me just as I was abandoned to time.

Writing, enunciated by no one, possessed by no one, just as when I spoke, I only quoted others who spoke, and I tried to live only as I thought others might live. A voice, a life, the one abandoned to the other. One abandoning itself to the other. But it helped. It drew me back to life.

Helped – words were not indifferent to me. Was that it? But I want to say, too, that it was their indifference, the way they stood up, apart from me, the way they might speak to anyone that helped me.

A notebook without significance, closed, unread. And yet it spoke in everyone’s language; words remained, even as I seemed not to remain. Even as I lived like a series of people, and not a person.

Reborn without coming to myself, reborn, but differently each time. Out of phase, always that. A series, not a man: always that.

And the notebook? Words without worth. Unread words. And yet – a single notebook. A single sheaf of pages. And word patiently after another. One word – another, abandoning itself in my notebook. Pages that lived for me. Pages in which the days consented to be marked.

Worthless words, long forgotten. I never reread them. But to write. To be dispersed by the infinitive, to write. Dispersed, but in a way, now, that affirmed my fall, the dispersal of time. The stairwell, the cat in a patch of winter light. I wrote; sentence bound itself to sentence. Wrote, and by that binding, time caught up with itself.

I would like to speak, tell that to your counsellor. I would like to say a single word.

Unemployed and sick. Sick and unemployed, you were sent to a counsellor. I would like to speak, and in my own voice: did you tell her that?

I’ve been abandoned. I’ve abandoned myself: did you tell her that?

But who has abandoned you? Not ‘I’ – not you. Then how to speak, even, of your abandonment?

To be abandoned to speech – but how is that possible? To speak, to exert your pressure on the words you would say: how can you accomplish that?

Unemployed, sick, you might begin to keep a journal. But what is there to record? What is there to say? Days pass; weeks, and without event. Weeks pass – but what does the week mean to you, unemployed one?

Arbitary markers of time. Markers of what does not pass. How to write of that non-passing? How to record it, what fails to complete itself as time?

Wasn’t that your cure? Wasn’t that how you reclaimed speech for yourself? To write, but not to complete writing. To write as you spoke, fragmentarily, and without owning words.

Abandoned speech. An open notebook lost in the carpark. Let the sun read as it crispens the pages. Let the rain read as it blurs the ink.

Months and then years, falling into unemployment. How far would we fall? Always further, as the welfare state drew itself to a close and the city regenerated around us. And we the dregs, the last ones, sick from unemployment, unemployed because we were sick, and switching from sick benefit to unemployment benefit and back again: how did we manage to outlive our use?

No solidarity: that, too, was falling away. Some of us were captured by the counsellors. Some of us decided to ‘work on themselves’. But this was to confuse one kind of sickness with another. Didn’t they understand, those who sat silently and asked us to talk, that we were sick from time, from the withering of time?

Speak: but what were we to say? The word ‘I’ did not belong to us. And the word ‘us’ designated in vain the solidarity of which we were incapable.

‘Work on yourself’: when did counselling culture arrive among us? Who asked for it? True, in the cafes and the scrappy countryside along the river, there were some who had dropped out of work because they were in search of something else. But didn’t they understand that to drop out could only break them from the forward movement of time? To drop out, to get sick, was to become sicker still, to fall back into the stagnancy that separated each moment from itself.

Work on yourself. And when you’ve detached yourself from time? Work on yourself. With what borrowed energy will you bring time to yourself. Work on yourself, and be unworked. Errant one, satellite passed beyond the solar system, you will not be able to signal back to the other world.

What, now, was to happen? How was anything to get done, when it was an effort simply to change the channels on the television? Stagnant time, time lost from its streaming: in what ox-bow lake were we stranded? Who marooned us in a time without minutes?

Say the words, I am sick. Say them, try to let them reach you. Say the words, and let the ‘I’ you speak awaken the ‘I’ who speaks. Awaken him, the speaker, the agent, who can coincide with what he says. But you are already lost. Fallen, in advance, from the words you might once have been able to say. How can you speak but in mimicry of the others? How can you but repeat the speech of those who have not yet fallen?

What would you like to say? What words would you like to bring to speech? – The word ‘I’. ‘I’: that would be enough. To say the word, ‘I’ – but that is impossible. ‘I’ – you say it without being able to say it. Quoted word: ‘I’. Cited from the lives of others. Once, it was possible for you to say the word ‘I’. And now?

‘I …’: word that speaks nothing. Cited word, monument that stands alone in the desert. ‘I …’ mouthed without completing that word. Scarcely a word, but a breath. Scarcely language but the word of concrete, the word of white skies. I would like to say the word ‘I’: say that to your counsellor. I would like the word ‘I’ to reach me: say that.

Quoted life, life in quotation marks. We were your doubles, you who drove home from work in the evenings, you who stepped from the bus in your suits. We quoted you; all our effort was to hold ourselves between quotation marks. That was our effort: to simulate life. To draw ourselves together so we could imitate the way you could attach the word ‘I’ to a statement.

To own speech – but was it possible? To speak for ourselves? We quoted our counsellors back to themselves. We spoke in their language, or in the language of those who were active and able. But in truth, we had fallen beneath speech as we had fallen beneath time.

How could we distinguish foreground and background, the important from the unimportant? Nothing emerged to be said. Nothing, with no urgency, needed to be spoken. If we spoke among ourselves, it was with a fragmentary speech. If we spoke, it was only by failing speech, by words that could not reach themselves.

We did not stutter, or stammer. But with us, language stammered; we spoke and were joined by another speaking. The words undid themselves in our mouths. Fragmentary speech: how could our sentences reach their ends? How could our statements join themselves to the word ‘I’. ‘I think …’, but we thought nothing. ‘I would like …’, but we wanted for nothing.

Queuing in the discount Greggs for a packet of gingerbread men. Queuing in the discount supermarket for a fourpack of sweet beer. Carry home your shopping in a plastic bag: that was already enough. Something to eat, something to drink, and draw the curtains against the day. Eat, drink, and the half-darkness, the afternoon on the old sofa in front of the TV.

Before I was ill, I was unemployed. Or was it the other way around? Illness, unemployment: I switched from one kind of benefit to another. Lost in illness, I became unemployed. Or was I ill because of unemployment, because there were no jobs or because I never wanted one?

What did I do all day, every day? How did I occupy my time? But I didn’t occupy it. I’d fallen; time passed me by; there was nothing to do. Days passed – weeks, and nothing. I think I once kept notes. I jotted down symptoms for my doctor. Today I feel A., today, B. But it was always the same; why write, unless it was to wear out writing as I had worn out life?

There was television, of course. The structure of my day, its frame. At 1.40 Neighbours; at 7.00, the news. But at other times? Antique shows and magazine shows. Was I part of the target audience? But if the programme makers knew of me, long term unemployed, long term sick, it was only as it is known in principle that the signals sent via our broadcast media on earth will reach one day a distant planet.

It was X. who got me diagnosed. I was tired, she saw that. She took me to a sympathetic doctor, who referred me to a specialist. I had to lie about my address to get the appointment, but my own doctor was no help. In the basement of the surgery, the specialist explained about by illness. She suffered from exactly the same, she said.  She wanted our illness to be taken seriously. How long did I want to be signed off? For the rest of my life, I thought.

X., meanwhile, was becoming more ill. For a time, she went to a counsellor. She spoke about whatever she liked every week to a young man in the backroom of a church. He was supposed to keep silent, but one day, he said, I admire you so much. You’re remarkable. He’d fallen in love with her. He told her she was a martyr. But in truth she was ill, and falling towards breakdown.

Her tiredness gave way to paranoia and panic attacks. She became violent, and after a time, she was committed. Then the diagnosis: she was bipolar. Bipolar! How had that happened? Now there was a rift between us. We had different illnesses, or rather, hers had taken her on another, serious course. She had a new life now, attending the hospital every day. And I knew again what I had suspected: I was ill from unemployment, and unemployed because I was ill: they were one and the same.

How can the weak help the weak? I thought X. was strong – she drove a grey Saab with a toolkit in the boot, she owned two houses and a recording studio. But then, in the weeks before her breakdown, she sold her car, and one of her houses. One day, we took hundreds of her CDs to the secondhand shop. She was getting rid of everything, but for what? For what was she preparing herself? I heard, in the end, she gave up her house for sheltered accommodation. She gave up everything for illness, to let illness be illness. She wanted to be alone.

Now there was nothing to keep illness from finishing with me. There was nothing to divide us. My strength had failed; I accepted this. I lay beneath time; this, too was welcome. I slept a great deal; I kept the curtains closed against bright light, but otherwise illness was gentle. I thought: this would be a way to die, like falling asleep in the snow. Even suffering seem to have little to do with me. True, I was tired, infinitely tired, but this tiredness did not seem my own.

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.

Ill, and the city is spreading all around us, in all directions. Ill, and the city is bigger than us and how will we ever escape it? Ill from the city. Illness – from the city, and by way of the city. You’ll never leave, said the city, and you won’t even stand upright. You’ll never get up, said the city, you’ll never be vertical again. Lie down – accede. Lie down, give up, I’ve won and you are mine. Lie down – you’re mine.

Are we ill from the city? Are we sick from the city, and the extent of the city? It’s everywhere, and who are we, lost in the afternoon, getting off the bus into the day. The city – everywhere – and who are we who go to and fro beneath the day? Give up – get sheltered housing. Give up, find a flat you’ll never have to leave. ‘Doctor, I’m ill, I can’t get up …’

I’m going inside, you said, I’m never coming out. In – and never out, you’ll have to come to me, the world will have to come to me, I’m staying in. I’m inside and the world is everything outside, the light across the windows, the traffic jam on the street. Inside – that’s where I am, I’ve given up, you know where to find me.

The specialist’s office was in the basement. I was sent to her because of my symptoms. ‘We have an in-house specialist’, said the G.P. Very well; I’d see her – I was happy to see her. I’d been feeling tired for months, and worse than tired. Anything – I’d do anything. Down to the basement, where there is a multiple choice to fill in. When do I feel most tired? Do I feel pain? Do I ache anywhere? ‘Everywhere’, I wrote, across the boxes. I ached everywhere – I was tired. No pain, unless pain was that diffuse throbbing which filled my whole body.

Then, later, the diagnosis: there’s no question about it. I have it myself, you know. So the specialist. She had it too! We both had it, the pair of us! And my sister has it, she told me. She stays in bed. Someone else is looking after her children. The specialist tells me how to handle my symptoms. Take it easy, she says. Plan everything when you have strength so that when you feel weak you are not overwhelmed with worries. Arrange your life so there’s no panic. Very well; why not.

It’s common to highly successful people, she tells me. I laugh. ‘I’m hardly successful’. Highly motivated, intelligent people, then. ‘I’m hardly intelligent’, I said, ‘and motivated? I don’t think I’m that’. Wasn’t that the problem? Wasn’t it the lack of motivation that was the illness? Wasn’t it the draining away of motivation, of all forward movement, a life that had lost its grip on the future. Is it really an illness?, I asked her. It was an illness, she said, and I saw that for her it had to be an illness. We were both ill, physician and patient. Both of us – ill.

She lent me a book. ‘Read this’. It was full of practical advice and cartoons. The list of symptoms was endless. All this was one illness? Then it was everything and nothing, this illness. It was like hysteria or neurosis – a name for everything. Home on the bus. I can’t stand the bus. I get off and sit on the wall, alcoholics around me. Are they ill? Is it the same illness? Then, I walk along the narrow pavements. They’re all ill, I thought, looking around me. Everyone’s ill, I thought, I know their secret.

Do they know of it – their illness? Probably not, I thought. They haven’t been diagnosed, I thought, and laughed. They haven’t been diagnosed by a fellow sufferer, I thought. It takes one to know one, I thought. But I’ll diagnose them, I thought. I will diagnose them all. I’ll put notes through their letterboxes: you’re ill! – and crosses on their doors. We’re all ill! We’re all tired! Time’s passing us by, it’s over! There’s no forward movement! Nothing’s going to happen! Nothing’s ever going to happen, not now and not ever and we’re all ill!

You were in sheltered accommodation, you said. A woman brought your meals a couple of times a week. ‘I don’t go out much. I can’t go out’. We drank tea in your flat that evening at rush hour – the cars were jammed outside. ‘I’m too clever, my doctor says’. Too clever – but for what? Who was she, cleverer than us, who had to be kept away from us? She kept herself away. ‘I don’t go out much. I can’t’.

Outside – you were frightened of the night and frightened of the day. Food was brought to you, money came to you. Your flat was dark. When we spoke, it was in darkness. I had promised to call on you. A mutual friend had said I should phone and call in on you. ‘You’ll get on. She’s interesting. Besides, she doesn’t see anyone. She could do with company’. In the evenings she smoked pot. Where did she get it? ‘A friend sends it to me’. The flat stank of it. ‘I need it. It keeps me calm’.

What did we talk about? Of your former life and your present life. Of your intelligence. You were very bright, you were convinced. ‘I read a lot’, you said, so I brought you books. We’d talk about them. ‘One day, when I get better …’ you would begin. What then? What would you do, you who’d come back to this city after a breakdown, who’d put on so much weight and now never left your house? What would you do, with your panic attacks and exhaustion. ‘I ache – all the time’.

You saw the same illness in me, you said. I went for tests. ‘They don’t know what it is’, I said, ‘but I do feel tired’. You told me of your doctor. ‘Go and see her. She’s really nice’. I saw her, a large benevolent woman in a shared practice a bus ride away. She asked me some questions, I knew what to answer. Would I, too, get a flat in sheltered accommodation and a woman to bring my meals? Was that what I wanted – to disappear for a few years, to live inside for a few years? I was sent to a specialist. The diagnosis was confirmed. I was to attend counselling sessions.

‘I thought so’, you said, ‘I thought there was something wrong’. I remembered The Magic Mountain. ‘I don’t think I’m ill’, I said, ‘just tired’. You thought I was ill. ‘Don’t fight it’. I looked around me, the flat was dark, outside, the rush hour traffic. It’s true – I was frightened of it, the outside; I wanted to stay inside, in a flat of my own, in the darkness. ‘I’m not ill’, I said, and that was the last time I visited.

Not ill – but what was it I feared? Why not admit to it, and fall into the arms of illness. Why not claim the sick instead of the dole for a few years? I had the diagnosis, a sympathetic G.P. … I could sign off the rest of my life and live inside. I was tired, my limbs ached. I was afraid of everyone I passed. I got off the bus, panicked. Was it contagious, your illness? Had it contaminated the books you gave back to me?

Several times, your voice on the answering machine. You were hurt and drowsily high, as you were in the evenings. Your voice – temptation. I left the room when I heard it. I left it and went outside, to prove that I could. Outside! Terraced houses in both directions. I was frightened and thought of others, too, who were frightened, who’d given up on sleep and on waking up. Thousand of them. Thousands of us, all over the city, stranded and sheltered.