Safe

copping tools, keeping house, self-deceptions, misapprehensions

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Leafing through the sticky laminated pages of a Toolstation catalogue on a weekday afternoon, I watch the men come and go, apprentices and their bosses, fathers and sons, all covered in plaster dust, spattered with paint, while a little sparkling corona of light encircles my mind’s eye, if I can put it that way, the tell-tale sign of an imminent spell of dissociation. The floor manager wears earrings made to look like machine screws. She berates a younger member of staff for overcharging one of the men for a pair of Stanley ‘Warrior’ Safety Boots. I’m about to hand her a slip of paper and forty British pounds in exchange for item #13567: a wall-mountable carbon monoxide detector with a sealed-for-life battery, good for a minimum of ten years, a length of time that I can scarcely comprehend, but which – I’m sure – will pass at a nauseating pace.  

Recently, I keep dropping things – keys, gloves, wallet – and catching myself about to perform freely associative tasks, so to speak. Watering the houseplants with a boiled kettle; putting a cup of freshly poured coffee in the fridge; cracking eggs directly into the bin. Like one of Jean Rhys’ digressive heroines, I walk around with a permanent headache, off-kilter, a gritty texture in my mouth. Looking in the mirror, I pull at my lips and scrutinise my face. My pallor is off; my gums seem inflamed; that freckle looks cancerous; and so on. Then there are the sleep problems. Most nights, for the past two months, I wake at 3 a.m., on the dot, from nightmares so intense and comically obvious in their symbolism (dead dogs, dead dads, past loves) they practically elicit eye-rolls.

What’s more, peculiar occurrences keep happening during the day which give reality the texture of a dream: a parcel arrives at the flat, addressed to a Mr. A. J. K., the words ASHES TO GLASS stamped on it. A quick Google search confirms the obvious. When someone you love becomes a memory, turn that memory into a treasure. It seems inconceivable to me that one would, say, input the wrong house number when arranging shipment for the bedazzled cremains of a dead relative. A. J. K. It sounds suspiciously like ‘a joke’. But it isn’t. Looking for an answer to these unusual goings-on, I convince myself that the flat has a carbon monoxide leak, that I’m slowly being poisoned, losing my mind in the process.

Naturally, there’s no preexisting detector, and I’m not prepared to enter into a back-and-forth with the landlord – a man so laissez-faire about the condition of his property that he doesn’t mind if the walls leak during heavy rain – hence this decisive field trip to Toolstation. The floor manager with screws in her lobes stops scolding her coworker to serve me. She seems familiar. Have we met before? No, it’s only a likeness: she reminds me of my first boss, a biker named Cheryl, who took sadistic pleasure in watching her juvenile male employees scrub the greengrocer floor by hand, while she chain smoked cigarettes at the front door. ‘That’s where boys belong,’ I remember her saying, ‘on their knees.’

Screw-earrings interrupts my reverie to say that, happily, item #13567 is in stock. Not only that, the product has received dozens of five star customer reviews. ‘Good choice!’ she says, pivoting the chip-and-pin toward me. I consider making a joke about how those customers knew whether the carbon monoxide detector actually worked without first exposing it to carbon monoxide, but decide not to, because it sounds like something a very unserious person would say, and sadistic Cheryl’s wrath was so easily incurred by unserious boys and our dumb jokes, and I can’t uncouple the memory of Cheryl’s face from this stranger’s, what if she makes me scrub the Toolstation floor, in front of the Warrior Boots brigade, no less? I just mumble thanks, pay the forty, and stride across the sleet-covered forecourt, my head tied to a tether tied to my wrist, or so it seems.

Back at the flat I’m disappointed, rather than relieved, to find that there is no gas leak, according to the five-star detector. It winks its tiny red LED light at me every two minutes, as though to prove it isn’t sleeping on the job. Carbon monoxide poisoning would have made perfect sense: I am unwell because of someone else’s negligence, I am paying someone fifty percent of my income in order to be killed, a scenario that I invented, I suppose, because it seems to justify the righteous indignation of an entire generation. But, no. I can’t pass the buck for the nightmares and delirium, and the dead really are arriving at the front door.

This paranoia – that there’s an invisible cancer working its way through the living space – is mirrored in a twitchy, effervescent compulsion that I have to clean. As my somatic and mental wobbliness increased, so my base level of cleanliness has spilled over into an obsession: urgent mopping, dusting, bleaching, vacuuming. I throw myself to my knees in a haze of white vinegar spritz and chemical spray, wielding rags. I plump already plumped pillows, right-angle already right-angled objects, buy and replace daffodils and irises the second they start to wilt. It’s as though I’m keeping the flat in a permanent state of show-offy domestic competence, waiting for a guest who will never come.

‘A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside,’ says Sasha/Rhys in Good Morning Midnight, ‘and that’s all any room is.’ Like any anxious focus on particulars, my frenzied nest-making is, surely, a kind of introversion, an attempt to reduce the architecture of the world to four magnolia walls, cream carpets, a door, a window or two… Lording over this fiefdom of fresh flowers and soft furnishings, I try to convince myself that the foundations, as it were, remain intact. This is a fantasy, of course, one which is sustained – as most fantasies are – by a malignant and corrosive denial. How else to describe the conviction that one can be safe, and clean, and hidden, while the great animal of history cavorts through the streets, dripping blood and fire?