Knots

Instinct said to let go. Sitting there in the light from the desk lamp, wrapped in the thick black cardigan that always meant “Leave me alone, I’m thinking,” the veins on her hands standing out from the skin like knotted cords, her instinct told her to untie the bindings, let loose the triple strand of raffia that held this thing together.

Instinct told her. Her head told her. Somewhere in her stubborn will she heard the voice say no. Not yet. Not defeat just yet.

The fear that came to grip her with “What if?” curled its fingers round the resolution of her mind. Lifting up her hair, twisting it into a thick rope at the back of her head, the fear breathed a long and gentle “No” against her neck and she longed to stretch her arms out wide and answer “Alright, then. No.”

She liked to sit and look out on the night-time street, lit poorly by street lights. Quiet enough by day, in these long slow hours between midnight and the dawn, the street was paralysed in rest. The only sounds would be the whirr of the fan in her laptop and the drip of the cistern in the bathroom. On odd occasions, she would have music playing to keep her company while she could not sleep. Piano pieces. Scales, chords, harmonies. Counterpoint. Howard Goodall at the back of her mind telling her things she already knew instinctively, and him not that good a pianist or even musician.

These times in the silence, with her hair falling forward, and the veins in her hands standing up proud and swollen with the blood that carried too much sugar, too much alcohol to sleep, she emptied out her mind, typing words on the keypad as though she were wringing notes out of a keyboard.

A street light directly opposite, across the road, between twin windows in the terrace that faced her; the blackness of the sky, not even stars visible; the pool of light from the desk lamp falling onto the white surface of her desk; she submerged herself in this aquatic night existence like a fish that lurks at the bottom of the ocean. Blind and prehistoric, surviving on instinct, unknown.

Knots that pulled things after her, like the tail of a kite, were slowly coming undone beneath the movement of her fingers. Deftly, she was working out the snags and loops, freeing coils of string or rope, not looking behind her to see the trail she left. Working along, she still had no idea if this was an ordinary knot or if, one day, she would reach the point at which she began; whether this was a series of flukes with no connection, or whether the braid was infinite, a loop embedded in her DNA.

At times like this, with silence in the night sky and no interruptions from beyond the enclosure of her cardigan, she would cease the unknotting for a moment and stare into space. The anaglypta on the wall in front of her, left behind by a previous occupant, painted cream and, within the small patch visible to her, apparently random in its pattern of splodges and swirls embossed onto the paper, would draw her eyes to lose their focus. Stepping back as far as she could go and still be able to see the definition on the wall, she knew that this pattern would occur too regularly to be random; put there by a machine programmed to repeat in carefully measured segments. Edge to edge, separate pieces cut from the same roll could even be lined up to match; to keep the pattern endlessly repeating.

Staring at the wall, her instinct told her to close her eyes, to leave behind the patterns and the knots, to keep tight hold of the rope of her life and not unravel the braid too much.

Instinct told her to let it go.

The tangled web of deceit and inaccuracy; the sliding truths that served to hide the absolute truth of her life; the desire to maintain privacy; all were easier to manage in daylight, with the world as an audience, an army of detectives prying into her business. An excess of knots, stretching behind her, circling around her, camouflaged reality. She did not want the unknot of herself to be seen. Not until she was ready.

If a person took the loop of their life, if they took that double helix twist of their DNA, it could seem that every time they tried to unravel the snags, they would come in at some new beginning. Every new beginning, as the saying goes, is some other beginning’s end. Each new beginning was where you came in; every other beginning’s end could only be the place you left.

Wrapped in her cardigan in the silence of the middle of the night, listening to her instinct telling her to let it go, she picked up pen and paper again; she opened up a long-neglected file of words strung together into sentences, paragraphs and chapters; the rope of her life stabbed through each page in the middle, holding them all together. She understood that she had unknotted enough to continue, for a while at least. She could shuffle the pages, make a new story from the old.

Her hands still smelled of garlic, from making the lasagne for dinner. She had rubbed lemon juice onto them, she had washed them in antibacterial hand wash, but the smell of garlic was still there.

Downstairs, in the dining room and in the kitchen, were the traces of that meal. The plates with tomato sauce and cheese sauce slowly congealing, growing hard; the dish with the last remains of the lasagne waiting to be heated up for lunch, but destined now to be thrown away; the wine glasses with the pool of red at the bottom, the last dregs that couldn’t be drained.

In the bedroom to the back of her, in the silence, he slept.

In the morning came daylight and she was curled, still in the black cardigan, resting from the untying of knots, on the small sofa in the corner of the office. Car doors slammed and ignitions sparked in the street beyond her window. People leaving for work while she sat on in this house.

In the kitchen, he had cleared away last night’s debris and stacked dishes in the dishwasher. He had left a note on the whiteboard by the back door.

“Please write something today.”

Knots tightening in her stomach, she stood at the fridge, holding the door open, waiting for inspiration. Knots tightening in her knuckles, she held the door in a fist too tight for the job. Knots of resentment building in her throat, she fought the urge to scream.

Presumption. Instruction. The unknot of herself curling and entwining, looping and strangling as it crossed over and around itself to build a knot of such complexity that she might never work it loose.

She closed the door to the refrigerator and went upstairs.

She undressed and stepped into the shower. Water flowed in rivulets down her skin. She watched it as it flowed over the backs of her hands and down her fingers. The same fingers untangled her hair, rinsing out shampoo, working conditioner through the strands. The jets of water from the shower head pounded her shoulders and her back and washed away the soap.

Cleansed and purified, dressed in the trappings of daytime, she sat back down at the desk. Sunlight streamed through the window and her fingers danced across the keypad.

Presumption. Instruction. Writing to order. “Please write something today.” The knots pulled tighter; the moments of her life on the quantum loop of time crossing and recrossing to bring up memories and actions; fodder for the something she would write.

Boredom sat flat across the top of her head. The words spilled out of her mind, through her dancing fingers, to lie across the electronic page.

Tall tales and rumours; molestations of fact; these were the tools of her trade, while he walked out into the world and regenerated urban decay.

She hated the knots of herself. She envied her own talent. She resented his calm acceptance of what she was, what she had to do. It hid behind the knots while she poured out words through the sieve-like web the knots created. Macramé of the mind.

Regenerating the decay of her life, she populated her stories with 30-something couples at endless dinner parties, worrying about their children’s schooling, enjoying the benefits of their high-powered careers. Mocking his colleagues, who were too flattered to find themselves in there to risk acknowledging what lay behind the words.

He wanted her to be famous. He wanted to be the one who had encouraged her. His investment had been to support her, to be the one who made the money in the traditional rat race way. He wanted some return in the imagined glamour of a literary soiree, an award ceremony, a book signing. He wanted the cachet of having his wife’s work discussed on the Newsnight Review. Maybe even for his wife to be on the panel discussing someone else’s work. Unpicking the knots of somebody else’s psyche.

The knots of his own web had her entombed, like a fly he was waiting to devour.

She wrote. She was already a month behind deadline. Writing to order, to reach the post beyond which she could dictate her own terms and conditions. Five novels in, and then she would be able to write.

The detail of petty lives; the everyman quality to her novels; five novels in and she would be able to do away with all that clutter. The unknot of her was waiting to be reformed into a different pattern of loops and crossings.

Piles of papers surrounded the laptop, filling the desk with notes and timelines. The deconstructed lives of each of the people she was manipulating on the page. The build-up of detritus to create a civilisation. She loathed and resented every moment of this creativity.

The unknot of her was the risk. The mania that denied the fear of baring all and failing.

He would never understand that, with his “Please write something today.” As though that was all there was to it. Write something, anything, satisfy my vicarious need for fame and glory. Live the life I never had the guts to.

She stopped. All the time she wrote, she barely thought of what she was doing, her mind filled with rants and screeds of vitriol against the life he had ordained for her; the life she had complied with. She stopped at the words “Live the life I never had the guts to.” She stopped because she was living his idea of a dangerous life, full of the risk of failure, beyond his understanding of stability and responsibility.

Behind all the knots, between the loops and crossings of her life’s eternal cord, there was a life she wanted to live but didn’t have the guts to. She heard it, there in those words directed at her from him; directed at herself by herself.

It was safer for her to live someone else’s idea of a life of danger. It was safer to play this game of writer from behind the tangle of frustration and rage that kept her from living her own idea of risk.

She was tired of knots. She was tired of knot theory. She was tired of the mathematics of life and the rage of not living.

She deleted everything she had written; the manuscript that was a month behind deadline, that was almost at the point of completion, disappeared. She picked up the sheets of paper with character sketches, biographies, timelines; she neatened their edges and fed them into the shredder. She destroyed the fake world she had been creating; the one which resembled all the others she had ever written. There was nothing she could do now about them. They were on bookshelves and in people’s minds; it was too late to erase them.

The naked page before her, its cursor blinking in the top left corner, waited to be clothed in different words. Sick to the stomach with the poison of her life, she began to construct another reality.

She would write something today, and the words would create a different kind of knot. Packed fibres from earlier branches that she would now cover over with other material. Imperfections and weaknesses that might splinter under stress, but that also might give her life a veneer closer to the truth.

The naked page was before her. Its cursor was blinking in the top left corner. Without the structure of acceptable fiction, she didn’t know what to write.

Her hands still smelled of garlic.

She listened to her instinct and let go.

© J R Hargreaves December 2006