‘… I can recognise you anywhere, my darling, even the faintest glimpse of your silhouette and I know it’s you … ’ Her gaze is inescapable.
I did clearly remember being outside that night, but I acted surprised and didn’t say anything. The rest of my somnambulistic meanderings were there but cloudy, yet I had no recollection at all of what she told me next. Like most dreams it had vanished upon waking. What happens to all those dreams we forget? Where do they go? Do dreams not form memories? Or do they wait for us, committed to some dark recess of our minds, like memories we suddenly recall?
‘I opened the door and you were standing there in a daze. I said very softly to you, “Come to bed, sweetheart.”’
I must have locked myself out; I could hardly have planned ahead for when my mind chose to set off with my body on one of its night-time adventures.
‘… I just took you gently by the hand and led you back to bed. You really were fast asleep on your feet … You do know that you must never wake someone in the middle of sleepwalking?’ She said it as if I were likely to bump into sleepwalkers on a regular basis. ‘The shock can be so terrible they never recover their minds. They can have a heart attack.’
A shiver goes through me. I glance down. I hate dirty feet and my soles are pitch black. There is the proof from being out on the landings. I want to bathe at once.
My parents caught me several times in the middle of the night fiddling with the latch and chain on my way out the front door. They also told me that I spoke in my sleep, fairly loudly, even shouting. I was afraid of what I might have said, that I might have betrayed my inner world.
‘Oh, what was I saying?’ I would ask, trying not to sound too alarmed, and I’d yawn for effect.
‘Nothing we could make out, just gibberish. Do you remember anything, dovey? Anything at all?’
I gave a little shrug. I have no idea why I didn’t want to admit to my mother that I did in fact remember walking on the landings at night. Perhaps I was afraid that if I admitted this, then she’d think I had only pretended to be asleep, in which case I had been misbehaving, wandering about alone at night, barefoot, catching cold. But if you didn’t know what you were doing because you were asleep, were you still being naughty?
Yet in my mother’s voice I sensed a deeper concern. Because I talked in my sleep and went sleepwalking and often had nightmares, did she think there was something wrong with me – the way she worried about herself?
A theory has it that one of the functions of sleep is to make emotional sense of traumatic events in our lives and neutralise them. When this fails, you are doomed to have repeated nightmares. I had night terrors and thrashed about suffocating in my sheets right into adulthood. I kicked in my sleep and could be quite dangerous to be near. I knew when I had had these night terrors – when I woke up in the morning and even my stubbornly affectionate cat had fled to the couch in another room.
But when I was sleepwalking as a child, I felt completely safe. I had no fear of the dark; no fear of the unknown; no fear of the world out there. When I was awake, I was afraid of almost everything.
I am told that sleepwalking is a sign of sleep deprivation; your body has such a deep desire for sleep that it keeps your mind in dream mode even though it has released your limbs. What kept me awake at night as a child? And why did I go outside? Was I running away or was I looking for something?
Why do we dream at all? Or perhaps, the bigger question is: why must we wake up?
I wondered what my father thought of all this, but by the time my mother woke me in the morning, he’d already be at work, having left as usual with his sandwich box and thermos flask long before the rest of the family rose. My brother was already at school. It was just me and my mom in the kitchen; me and my mom alone, the way it often would be over the years.
My mother had long auburn hair in those days, which reached down to her shoulder blades, hair full of life that bounced when she walked. She was a trim woman with an angular, slightly boyish body. She dressed in slacks, never dresses; a real bluestocking, she said of herself proudly. She smelled of English Lavender, the talcum powder she used to soften her skin, and a faint aroma of fresh, soft, green moss, and of camphor, and the fragrant sharpness of pine needles. Her arms were covered in freckles; sun damage from when she was a girl growing up on a farm on the edge of the Kalahari desert. Her name was Shirley. She was born in 1925 in Vryburg.
Mommy had two round patches on her right breast, like bullet holes, but white like the flesh inside a coconut, so smooth the skin seemed brand new. When I asked her why her skin was so different there, she said they were scars from an operation. She often complained her breasts were sore and I wasn’t allowed to rest my head on them, ever. Her tummy was also sensitive, and I had to be careful if I played on top of her.
Her face wasn’t yet as harrowed as WH Auden’s (it would be when she reached her sixties), but there were plenty of creases already, because her face was always busy with her feelings, and she chain smoked. She had deep frown lines, not from frowning so much as from lifting her eyebrows when she spoke.
Mommy could only raise hers together. I trained myself in front of the mirror to lift one brow at a time – left, right, left, right. I wanted to see how high I could make my eyebrow go without moving another muscle on my face. The shape my single raised eyebrow made at its highest elevation was like the invention of a new musical note. I tried to imagine what sound it stood for; a sort of crystal ping came to mind.
My face didn’t have the faintest line or blemish then, but I could see blue veins running under my skin, which was sickly white because I almost never went outside to play. If I raised one eyebrow while pulling the other one down, I got a crease above the nose and a comical expression. Then I started on my ears. That was more difficult, especially if I wanted to keep my mouth straight. But I got it right, eventually, juggling my ears individually. I could amuse myself for quite some time isolating bits of my face. Flaring my nostrils was easy, but how many people could also make the tip of their nose waggle left, then right? I could make my upper cheek shudder and my eyelid twitch out of control as if I were having some kind of fit.
Where did I get such an idea? Or was it just a child’s irresistible compulsion to pull all kinds of faces, to make itself ugly-faced, to discover what can be said or hidden with purely a look, like the silent violence of a smile withdrawn.
Soon I was ready to impress my mother with my new talents. I wiggled my eyebrows and my ears as fast as I could. Ping, ping, ping. Mommy laughed, but in a dismissive way. ‘Don’t do that. You look daft,’ she said, and the corners of her mouth turned down.
I thought maybe I should pull out all the stops and do my lying-on-the-floor-having-a-fit routine, with my arms and legs flailing about. But something told me she wouldn’t like that either. I might have done something like that once before and she had shouted at me.
‘Children can be awfully cruel, making fun of people,’ she said. I didn’t understand. I didn’t see the connection.
She said the boy who lived in the flat next door was just such a perfect example of the cruelty of children; naughty and thoughtless, which amounted to the same thing. She had nicknamed him Turtle because he was chubby and round and had stumpy limbs. She loathed him. ‘Horrible, horrible child,’ she’d say. But I mustn’t hate Turtle, mustn’t hate anyone ever, she said. I should even be kind to critics and art dealers. But she had to admit, she simply couldn’t abide the sight of that little blighter. Turtle had done something unforgivable.
In our block, adjacent flats on the ground floor shared a rectangle of garden between their balconies. A chameleon had been living in ours for over a year. One day Turtle stamped it to death and destroyed most of our garden. ‘Just for the fun of it!’ my mom cried. A chameleon! Was there any creature more harmless in this whole world? Her hands were shaking. My father’s hands shook too, but that was for a different reason.
I used to watch that exotic