Monthly Archives: August 1999

Sleep

There has only been one occasion in my life when I have truly been afraid to sleep.

I have a difficult sleep clock. I think it runs on a twenty eight hour cycle. If I’m left to my own devices, I quickly slip into a routine of going to bed later and later and waking up later and later too. I tend to push myself too far: I work and work in the evenings and don’t know when to stop. I look at the clock at one in the morning and I know I can get another hour or so in before I go to bed. Then the next night it’s half past one, then two, then three, and before I know it I’m not waking up until one o clock in the afternoon and I can’t sleep at all at night because by the time I’m tired, the birds are singing and the sky is blue.

I suffer from insomnia. I was suffering badly from insomnia last summer. Unusual, as I tend to suffer more in the winter when the nights are long and the daylight hours are short. Sunlight tends to force me to wake up earlier, acts as a corrective to my Martian rhythms.

Insomnia. My sister had some sleeping pills. As children we both had M.E. Part of our bullshit “treatment” for M.E. was prescribed sleeping pills – the theory going around at the time was that M.E. sufferers were getting “the wrong kind of sleep,” shallow dream sleep instead of deep body-repairing sleep.

I’d never really bothered to take the sleeping pills during the “treatment,” they didn’t do anything for me except make me feel even more exhausted, and besides, by that time I had learnt to see through doctors who were making things up as they went along.

But I started taking the sleeping pills because I was sick of the insomnia, frustrated that I was missing half of the summer because I couldn’t make myself wake up early enough to see it.

I quickly became locked into a different cycle: sleeping early and waking late, exhausted and dull of brain. I must have been getting a good twelve hours sleep every night. The pills were tiny, but I am a small person, and I was overdosing without even realising it. When I didn’t take the pills I wouldn’t sleep until late because I had risen late because I had taken the pills.

A month, maybe, of this, of my mind cushioned in a haze of medication, too dull to realise what was happening, too stupid to pick up on all the subtleties of human behaviour around me that I use as a protective shield. I got hurt, sucked in, made a fool of more than once in that month, and I was in too much of a haze to see what was going on around me.

I was working at a pub at the time. People buy you drinks at pubs. One Friday night I had a single vodka and orange before I came home. I forgot, took my pill in the vain hope that I would get to sleep early, manage to wake before midday.

As I lay in bed my heart began to race. I think it must be like that when you take speed, or sniff poppers. I could feel it pounding against the wall of my ribcage. I tried to muffle it with a pillow clenched to my chest. Still it pounded. Louder, louder. I couldn’t sleep for the pounding. I couldn’t get up either.

That was the most frightening part of it. I lay in bed and my limbs were so heavy I felt as if I’d turned to soft stone. I thought someone was sitting on me; an incubus smothering my chest under his weight.

I began to drift towards sleep. Every time I got close to sleep I ceased to breathe. Terrified, I struggled to remain awake, my heart thudding erratically, jerking, a pulse throbbing inside my brain. I thought I was going to swallow my own tongue. And I couldn’t move. I couldn’t call out, I could barely summon the energy to think.

I kept telling myself, just don’t sleep. Don’t fall asleep because you won’t wake up.

I don’t remember what happened. I think I must have slept eventually. Just that I’m still here. In that drugged state, I really thought I was going to die.

I didn’t ever take any more sleeping pills after that. And I never will again.

The dark

In spite of a family-wide aversion to spiders, my worst childhood fear wasn’t arachnoid in shape. My worst childhood fear had no shape. It was the dark.

Rather it was what lay within the dark, in the privacy of my bedroom late at night. The shapeless, nameless, formless terror of whatever Lovecraftian monster lurked beneath my bed or haunted the shadowy hollows of the badly shut wardrobe, watching me from the gloom.

It is the biggest cliché of them all. And the truest. Mostly I imagined zombies waiting outside of my door for the right opportunity to jump out and attack (though why exactly they would wait outside my door, I have no idea).

I’ve always slept with the lamp left on. I still do. I know how to control my imagination these days. I know there are no monsters, no real ones.

But it’s all very well denying my fear by the light of day. It changes when I am alone, working late at night. Instead of monsters I imagine intruders, burglars, rippers who break into houses and murder families in their beds.

It’s very late right now. And I can hear noises outside.

Decay

I have a very specific terror. My only genuine, uncontrollable, unstoppable terror. I am afraid of death.

I indulge this fear by writing novels about vampires and immortals. A silly game.

It’s more specific than that. I am scared of dying without my affairs in order. I don’t want to die alone. I am literally terrified of dying without having finished a book. What if they all read what I’d written so far, and thought that was all I was worth?

This fear hinges into another. Decay. I fear decay.

I spent a long time being vegetarian, but occasionally I became vitamin deficient and have to give in. Not good for the soul, this torment. I looked at a chicken leg yesterday and saw the bone sticking out. I didn’t see meat. I saw a dead thing, human flesh pared from the bone. I freaked at the dinner table. Completely freaked. My throat tightened up. I couldn’t eat anything, I had to leave the room.

Let’s return to my childhood bedroom, the setting for so many of my terrors.

My bedroom is in the attic, and our house has a large garden. In the garden live squirrels. The squirrels occasionally climb into the roof space and scratch around behind the plasterboard walls of my room.

I am scared that a squirrel will die in the roof space, and then I will start to smell its decomposition.

My sister was away on tour not so long ago. While she was away, her room began to smell. Like mould. Organic decay. The smell seemed to be coming from under the floorboards.

Agitated to a point where I could not leave until I had found the smell, I proceeded to convince myself that a rodent had died and was decaying beneath her floor, and that we would have to pull the floorboards up to get it out, because we couldn’t leave it there, could we?

I was frantic, it was late at night and I was in need of sleep. How could I sleep with that thing decaying in the room below?

The smell turned out to be milk spilt in the bin.

But the squirrels are still in the roofspace. My father doesn’t like the squirrels in the roof space because they might chew on the electric cables and short a circuit or cause a fire. He says he should put poison pellets in the roof to get rid of them.

I won’t let him, because I know what will happen. They will die in there, and begin to rot.

I am more afraid of a few dead squirrels than I am of a house fire.

Body horror

I knew a girl who was afraid of being sick, in case she choked on her vomit and died. I met an old woman in hospital who was so afraid of being sick she didn’t eat for six weeks.

My father can’t stand the sight of blood. If he cuts himself, no matter how small the cut, he gets faint and agitated. Sometimes he even passes out. He doesn’t like needles either.

When you’re asked to have a needle put in your arm, they always tell you you’ll just feel a prick, that it’s nothing like a bee sting.

Needles are more intrusive than stings. The thing about being stung by bees is that you can scream. I’ve only been stung once, and certainly would scream if it happened again. But not being able to scream is worse. You can’t very well scream when they want to stick a needle in your arm.

I always thought it was stupid to be afraid of needles. I was very brave as a child and bore my vaccinations with a certain amount of bravado and curiosity. Then I fell ill with M.E., and the doctors at the hospital wanted to do every conceivable blood test they could think of. I can’t even count the number of times I was in the outpatients section of Nottingham City Hospital, waiting to have my blood sampled by these vampires, knowing it was going to leave me with a huge bruise and a weak arm. But I got through it. Just.

Then I had my brace. I was a late developer. I must have been about nineteen when my brace was fitted. My teeth had a big gap at the front, and one of my canines had failed to grow down and instead had grown sideways inside my gum. This meant they had to operate.

I don’t think I have a particularly low pain threshold, but when it comes to my teeth, I most definitely do.

The brace was very painful when it was tightened, and I would be upset for several days after. The fear kicked in after about six months to a year of wearing it. I started to panic. Every time I thought of the brace on my teeth my heart would race and I would become asthmatic.

I couldn’t take it off and that scared me. The brace left me under the thrall of a set of people who made decisions about my body utterly beyond my power.

In a Cronenbergesque set of fantasies I began to imagine myself as some kind of cyborg. Machinery taking me over from within. Sometimes I would wake from a nightmare wanting to claw at my mouth, rip out the mess of wires from my teeth. Even today I still have nightmares that I still have a brace.

The fear of needles finally surfaced. I had already developed an anxiety towards them during my teenage years with all of the blood tests I had to undergo at the hospital. Then as I had all kinds of operations to correct my teeth within a short span of time, I rapidly came to the point where the sight of a needle approaching my mouth turned my knuckles white and filled me with dread.

When I had my brace taken off, I cried with relief. I was a very bad girl and didn’t wear my retainer. And the last couple of times I’ve been to the dentist, I’ve insisted on having fillings done without an anaesthetic.

Bees and wasps

Arachnids and insects. Two different evolutionary branches. The same small bundle of chitinous nastiness in practical terms.

Wasps. There’s something my friend (lets call her Katy Kitten) doesn’t like. Lots of girls don’t like wasps. The standard feminine reaction to bees and wasps at my secondary school was to run away screaming loudly with flapping arms. Just to enrage them further, as everyone well knows.

I never did that. I preferred the “stay perfectly still and pretend it’s not there,” masculine reaction. Or should I say, “I’m frozen with fear and I’m trying not to show it.”

Why are my fears so closely linked to the space where I slept as a child?

Summer in my childhood attic bedroom was much too close for comfort. I always left my window open all night just to breathe. Wasps nest in the eaves below my room. They would float up lazily through my window. Often I would awaken to an irritable buzzing as they banged against the glass pane, trying to get back out.

I was always taught never to move. Sometimes this knowledge leads me into difficult scenarios.

Many times during the summer the wasps in the eaves caught me naked.

In the middle of getting dressed in the morning, there they are, buzzing around my face, my bare legs, investigating my exposed armpits when I have paused in mid-action at the sound of their wings.

They drip venom on my sheets whilst I squeeze my hands into fists and remain statue-still until they have satisfied their curiosity, flown back out of my window on other errands.

Never scream. Never flap. Some fears come too close to comfortably indulge.

Sneinton

Sneinton is an odd area close to the city centre that’s split in two by a huge cliff. The top half of Sneinton is balanced on the peak of a hill. Terraced council houses squat on steep slopes beneath the masculine ego of a block of flats at the very pinnacle of the rise.

My grandparents lived in this part of Sneinton. All of the houses built into the hill have deep dark basements lined with glittering stone. Cats patrol stepped gardens adorned with redcurrants, gooseberry bushes and greenhouses.

There’s a windmill too. Green’s Mill, with an attached science museum featuring a huge magnet stuck all over with blunt nails, and a glorious glowing plasma ball that small children tease with their hands. You can go inside the mill and watch the corn being ground, buy the finished product in small stamped hessian bags.

Below the mill there’s a children’s park with a huge slide built into the side of the slope. Bruised grownups too large for the narrow silver trough get stuck in the bends half way down. At the bottom a gigantic wooden climbing frame is waiting. Bridges and catwalks hang swings and tyres. Children used to crack their heads and graze their knees on the tarmac floor until a thick layer of cork and bark chip was spread beneath the frame. In damp springtimes poisonous toadstools grow insidiously in the playground mulch. Watched by wary grandparents, children run rings around fairy fungi in the shadow of the windmill.

This part of Sneinton is the rich part of Sneinton. Petit Bourgeois, affluent working class families and rising ethnic households all live here. The elder generation too, the real Nottingham folk who’ve struggled up from their thirties roots in the former slums of the Lace Market. The women who smoke like dragons and wear pink mule slippers with bits of fluff on the front, satin night-gowns with fur trims, and own small white yapping Pekingnese dogs. These are the women who formerly worked in the cotton mills and factories and are dying slowly of emphysema and lung disease from the fibres, and the same folk who call you “Darling,” “Love,” and greet you with a husky “Ay up me duck.”

By contrast, lower Sneinton houses their poorer relations. The ones who didn’t get better pensions and whose children never made it a rung up the class ladder. The streets are a warren of dilapidated, graffiti covered shops and run-down terraced housing. Broken windows boarded over, groups of kids wearing puffer jackets with their hair scraped back with styling products and tied in scrunchies. Beat up cars. Curry houses. No gardens for miles, and on every available space the territorial marker pen of teenagers; “Gary is a puff”; “Daz and Millsey are gay”; “Tracey woz ere ‘9T9″. This is an area rife with crime and violence and vandalism.

There’s still a sense of community in Sneinton, but like most suburbs in Nottingham today, that community is fragmented. New folk move in, old folk die or move on. The elder generation of curtain twitchers all seem to know each other from way back when – but they don’t mix with the ethnic families, or the rough white families who come to live in the council houses with their six squealing kids and two dogs. Some people are quiet, and go relatively unnoticed. They keep their noses clean by not yelling in the streets at night or parking their cars in front of other people’s houses.

Some interesting sorts manage to live here without being bothered. There was a story in the paper not so long ago reporting on a woman who lived in Sneinton who was sentenced to jail. The police were called out to her house one summer after repeated complaints from neighbours regarding a potent putrid smell issuing from her open windows.

The ensuing search revealed a boarded up cupboard under the stairs containing a decomposing corpse. The corpse, later identified as her common law husband, was estimated to have been dead for some five or six months.

Her story goes; she came back home after work to discover two prostitutes in her house who claimed her partner had become over-excited and died of a heart attack. They then forced her to help them conceal his death by boarding up his body in the cupboard beneath the stairs. The woman continued to live in her house with the body of her partner decomposing behind the cupboard door until the police arrived at her house later that year.

Not a rare event for Sneinton, stories of curious murders and skeletons discovered in closets appear in the local paper on a regular basis. Because amongst all of those solid, upstanding affluent working class people I think there are just one or two Fred and Roses lurking.

Arachnophobia

A few weeks ago I ran a bath. I stepped in and sat down, and there, floating in the water between my legs, rather too close to my pubis, was a wriggling spider. I stood up again very quickly and swore. But I didn’t scream. These days, I can control the screaming.

You know what cured me of my fear of spiders? Watching Arachnophobia. Believe it or not. Before I watched Arachnophobia, I was afraid enough to break out in a sweat – jumping at spider-shaped shadows, squealing on sight.

I couldn’t sleep if I knew a spider was in my room. No matter where they had run to, no matter how many pieces of furniture I had to shift or dark spaces to light up, I had to know they wouldn’t come back. That all went away after I watched Arachnophobia. I got tough. I started kicking some spider butt.

It was a very literal and immediate transformation. I think it was the final scenes, the ones where the walls of the house are burning, and they’re covered in little spiders, and then the scene where the father is in the cellar with the mother spider, and the spider is thrown against a wall and electrocuted on a fuse box.

I went upstairs to my bedroom. There was a spider on my wall, sitting there, looking for a fight.

Big ugly eight-legged bully.

Instead of shrieking and finding something large to throw at it, or calling my father to kill it, I finally managed to do the sane thing.

I got a glass and a postcard and trapped the little bastard. Chucked it out of the window. I was so proud of myself.

I’ve never looked back since. When spiders are in the house, I’m the tough one. I’m the one who gets the little idiots out of the bath. Who sweeps them off my sister’s wall. I’m the one, who sometimes sits and stares at the enemy with a detached fascination, reaches out a finger to poke a still, chitinous leg.

I still can’t sleep with them in my room though. Particularly if they’re on the ceiling. If they are on the ceiling, I think they’re going to drop on to me as I sleep.

I think they’re going to crawl in my ear.

People

One of my biggest fears is people. But is shyness a fear or just a temperament?

People react to their own nervousness in different ways. Some people talk lots when they’re nervous. They gabble, waffle, crack jokes, say embarrassing things and come to a grinding, flushed halt.

Other people don’t talk at all. I’m one of those people. The people who talk when they are nervous tend to get the wrong impression of me; they think I’m cool, calm, collected, and a bit of a bitch. But really I’m not saying anything because the words just won’t come out. I can’t even think of something logical or clever to say. I’ve been the target of many a workplace vendetta because I’m quiet. People get so paranoid about silence.

Sometimes I’d just rather not talk. Talking takes such brainwork. Trying to second-guess what the other person is feeling, trying to respond in the right direction as not to make a disagreement. Because really I just want to be liked.

Ratus ratus

I’ve never been afraid of rats. My mother’s mother is afraid of rats. She can pick up a wolf-spider in her bare hands, but rats, mice, or anything of a vaguely similar appearance terrifies her. Bats make her shudder.

When my sister and I kept hamsters she would never go into the same room. For years our dining room was off-limits because of the tiny furry creatures living in cages on top of the piano. Even guinea pigs bother her. She’s getting worse. Just lately, the squirrels in the garden have started to make her twitch.

She won’t call rats and mice, “rats” and “mice”. Instead she calls them longtails, endowing this pitiful stray collection of rodents with some mystical quality to terrify through a magical name. Anthropologists call it totemism or fetishism.

“I tell you what did me,” she has explained to me more than once with a wheeze. “When I was young I walked past the site of a factory that was being torn down. There were longtails everywhere. Dead longtails in piles, and live ones running all over the road as the factory came down. Ever since then I’ve always been funny about them. They’re horrible, dirty things.”

I think rats are quite sweet. I once saw a little girl holding a pet rat. The rat was almost as big as her.

Last week we were eating in a restaurant down by the river. There was a water rat scurrying around in the grass on the bank.

The rat was very paranoid. It was terrified of people.

Altophobia and agrophobia

My sister is afraid of heights. I, on the other hand, love heights. When I was small I would climb up to the top of the eight-foot climbing frame in the back garden and jump off just for the hell of it. I would swing on the tree-swing until vertigo overtook me, and I’d snap back on the rope, weightless for a fraction of a second.

The Ferris wheel? Rollercoasters? Wild horses would have a tough job dragging me away (and I’d probably enjoy it if they were going fast enough). I almost did a bungee jump once, except my miserable friend wouldn’t lend me the money to pay for it.

But my sister? I’d dance at the top of cliffs, waiting for her to join me. I’d watch her get stuck half-way, clinging to clumps of grass and squealing that she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, she had to go back down but she needed help in case she fell and broke something.

People are afraid of different spaces, in different ways.

My uncle is claustrophobic. He won’t go to the cinema because he panics in the darkened theatre in front of the flashing screen. Rooms enclose him, trap him, make him nervous and short of breath. He spends a lot of his spare time out of doors. Funnily enough, he isn’t afraid to crawl under the thin space below a car and tinker with the mechanics. I am. I’m scared to hell it will fall on me.

I think sometimes I have agoraphobia. But I don’t think that’s the word for it. I enjoy huddling up inside. Sometimes I’m reluctant to leave the house. But then again I suppose sometimes I really like to go out for pointless walks.

Not long after I started university I began to have miniature panic attacks. They never went further than difficulty breathing and a painful constriction of the throat, but most usually they would happen when I was walking through town to get to class on a busy day. Too much space, too many people. The vastness of all I saw left me dizzy.

You know, I don’t understand it at all. I’m fine on aeroplanes. And I love standing over a huge city looking down on everything.

Agoraphobia? I’m not sure. It was more the confusion of the people all around, the colours, and the faces. Like a migraine, something to do with all the sensory input and the release of adrenaline.

You know what? I can feel my throat going now.