Sleep

Sleep

I’m not sure if anyone likes mirrors very much. Certainly, seeing yourself, something that you would naturally never do, suspended in a piece of glass, and following your every move exactly, isn’t comforting! I’ve been trying to think about my early memories of them, but I never had one in my room as a child – there were plenty in my house, but for the life of me, I can’t remember one in my childhood bedroom. Nobody in my family was particularly image-conscious, so I never spent much time preening myself in front of them. But they weren’t alien to me, dotted around the house, there in case we needed to remind ourselves what we looked like.

 I think you need to understand what kind of child I was for this story to make sense. I was always strange, I think. Maybe it was due to my genes, or some sort of long-forgotten emotional trauma, or even my mother’s devoted attitude to parenting (never leaving me alone for more than two minutes). Me, I think it was just a case of ‘the wrong place at the wrong time’. (That’s a metaphor, obviously, for an over-active imagination, a strange genetic makeup and the way I was raised coming together to give me all the trouble I had). Retrospectively, I think that I must have had a sleep disorder: my mother was convinced that from the age of about two onwards, I simply didn’t sleep. Certainly, I hated it when the lights were out – I’d lie there, winding myself up until I was too afraid to shut my eyes and too stubborn to cry. I wouldn’t sleep a wink and I’d promptly do the same thing the next night. My mother eventually picked up on this, and I was dragged to a huge number of ‘specialists’ who were meant to diagnose my ‘problem’. They diligently compared notes, accused one another of being wrong, then came up with some so called ‘bright ideas’ (none of which helped in the slightest) and referred me elsewhere. I think I just grew out of it when I was about five: I don’t remember anything unusual after I started school.  Maybe, with hindsight, not being able to shut my brain down was the first curse of having such an overactive mind, and it was being stretched academically that helped to calm it down. (Well, academically stretched once they worked out that I could actually read before I got there). But I had a healthy, normal childhood for a good many years after that, and everyone, me included, thought that I’d just grown out of ‘that silly phase’.

Looking back, things started to go awry in my third year of secondary school. Up until then, I think I’d settled in quite well, with no pressing troubles and plenty of friends. Certainly, we all did things that most 13 year olds do: talk about (gratuitously violent, X-rated) films we claimed to have watched, irritated everyone else in the school and made some (occasionally) very accurate guesses as to what drunkenness and sexual encounters were ACTUALLY like (we were 13 –  pubescent imagination has no limits). If I were to sum up this period of my life, I think I would probably settle for the word ‘bluff’. But I was thoroughly enjoying myself: the work wasn’t too hard, and my friends and I got into plenty of healthy mischief. All things considered, though, I didn’t think that early secondary school was a good time to admit to being afraid of the dark. It hadn’t been constant at all: in fact, it hadn’t worried me for years, not since I stopped playing childish make-believe and actually went to sleep at night. But when I was 13, it came back with a vengeance. One night, for some unknown reason, I couldn’t bring myself to shut my eyes, and so I just lay there, listening to the night-noises in my house: the eaves settling, the central heating, the grey roar of the motorway. I turned my head towards the darkest corner of my room, and, no doubt due to some half-forgotten story, I thought I saw something a shade or two darker than the rest of the room. Oh, it sounds laughable now, a young teenager’s mind playing tricks on him; his imagination or an old sweater or something. I think I knew in my heart of hearts that it would turn out to be either one of those things if I was weak enough to turn on the light. But I refused to do that – maybe, deep down, I enjoyed being scared. So, that night, I pulled the covers up over my eyes, and just lay there, with the darkness pressing in around me and my mind amplifying every tiny noise to deafening levels. Quite what I was hiding from, I didn’t know then, and I certainly know now. Doubtless, some damn-fool therapist would try to tell me: something deliciously Freudian, no doubt, like the latent power of my mind, or doubts over my sexuality. In fact, I’m certain that that classic failsafe the Oedipus Complex would come out to play. Either way, that first night was the template for the next four years or so. I wonder now why I didn’t just sleep with the light on – that surely would have fixed everything. But I didn’t want to compromise my masculinity. Machismo is everything to a 13 year old, and I thought that by admitting a weakness, and not trying to fix it, I was losing ‘man-points’, as we called them. But after a while, lying in the dark became more of a dogma than a decision. I thought that if I fought it early on, it might make me stronger later. I promised myself I wouldn’t cave in. I refused to let my panic win.

Looking back now, I’m sure developing a sudden, irrational fear of the dark at the age of 12 wasn’t a good sign for my mental health. My problems all seemed to escalate after that, aided and abetted, no doubt, by the re-emergence of my trusty old sleep disorder. I began to suffer with depression, which I could ignore up to a point if I kept busy. Plus, nobody would have taken a 12 year old with depression seriously. It’d just be ‘teen angst’, or ‘growing up’, or maybe the most worrying, ‘only your imagination’. I could pretend it was any one of those, and I think I did, until I reached about 14 or 15, when things got dramatically worse. My insomnia reached a sort of fever pitch, where I would actually just not sleep for nights on end, then stagger, zombie-like through school. When I made it home, I would snatch a few hours sleep in the afternoon, and then lie awake, night after night in the dark, eyes wide open, boring a hole into the ceiling. I jumped at every tiny noise, real or imagined, and I begged for oblivion to come for me. What’s worse, I started to exhibit some worrying symptoms of a fundamentally damaged psyche (extreme paranoia, manic laughter for no reason, inexplicable physical violence directed at people that looked smug, or happy, or satisfied, even spending hours washing my hands because I touched an animal). I started smoking, pretending to enjoy the heady feeling. I smoked openly, hoping someone would notice; maybe ask me if I was alright. I largely used smoking as something to do on those long sleepless nights, focusing on the smoke so I wasn’t thinking about anything else. My mother must have noticed the stink of tobacco in my room, but chose to ignore it, no doubt thinking to herself that “boys will be boys”. Nevertheless, I firmly maintain that all this was leading up to what happened next.

One night, having lain awake for hour after countless hour, I realised I needed to urinate. I knew I couldn’t sleep with a full bladder, but I also knew that I would only wake myself up further by emptying it. I tried to ignore it, but nature won, so I dragged myself out of bed and staggered to the bathroom, the light burning my tortured eyes. I glanced habitually around at the room that I could have drawn with my eyes shut. There were some hideous brown and yellow tiles on the floor, which showed a pattern that you had to look for to be able to see. The bath was on the right as you walked in, veiled with the mildewed and translucent shower curtains. The bathroom cabinet (complete with mirror) was on one wall, directly opposite the shaving mirror over the sink. I finished, and started to wash my hands in the sink, and automatically glanced up into the little mirror. In it, behind me, I saw myself. Standing behind my own reflection.

My family told me that I screamed. That part, I don’t remember, but can only assume that it was when I looked into the eyes over my own shoulder. The rest of the events are burnt into my memory. Ostensibly, what I saw - but couldn’t have seen - were my own features, but twisted and distorted. I – it - was wearing an ugly expression, more like a smirk or a sneer than my smile. But the eyes... I won’t be rid of them, no matter how long I live. They were the worst of it all. They were filled with cold anger, devoid of any of the tiredness etched into my real face. They looked darker, and were staring steadily into my own.

It felt like hours that I stood there, unable to move, barely breathing, but it can’t have been more than a heartbeat. Something, to this day I don’t know what, broke the spell. I turned round. Some deep, primal part of my brain had balled my hands into fists. I threw one of them at where this... apparition should have been. I can vividly remember my fist hitting the cabinet with a bittersweet crunch. The world seemed to slow down – the cracks spread out like a spider web from where my fist hit the glass, and the world split into a  myriad of tiny mirrors, all showing something different. I did the same to the other pane of the cabinet mirror, the pain building slowly in my hand and the blood starting to flow down my wrist. The last thing I can remember is doing the same to the little shaving mirror, but by then, I was starting to fade. I saw myself for the last time, in the thousand tiny mirror shards as the world shifted, and I became dead to it.

I was woken up by the door being kicked down. Yes – I was woken up. My family had heard me screaming, then three little thuds, followed by a bigger one as I hit the floor. I was told afterwards that it was like a scene from a B-movie – me lying on the floor, with splintered mirrors and blood everywhere. My mother panicked, as people like her are fond of doing, and called an ambulance. (Completely unnecessarily, I thought.) I only realised afterwards that it wasn’t just the injuries that were worrying her.

When in hospital, I did my best impression of someone with PTSD, which I suppose now wasn’t hugely far from the truth. I was very heavily tranquilised, so I mostly enjoyed sleeping untroubled. I say untroubled, I was regularly disturbed by a carousel of (unspecific) ‘experts’. They asked me countless strange questions, about my likes and dislikes, my relationship with my parents, my friends, with figures of authority.  They generally didn’t give too much of a reaction to whatever I said, but a few things got to them. One was how much I hated mirrors – they always shifted a bit when I said that, so I said it a lot.

After a couple of weeks, they moved me here. It’s just another hospital to me. Quite a few ‘specialists’ sat with me at the beginning to ask the same questions all over again, but that stopped after a while. It’s quite peaceful now that they’ve finally left me more or less alone. I’m getting plenty of sleep now. Deep and dreamless, just the way I like it. But the ‘specialists’ say some strange things on the infrequent occasions when they do talk to me now. At the moment, they keep asking me why I attacked that simpering nurse with the crucifix and the birthmark. That’s nonsense, for a start. That kind of behaviour’s for mad people.

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