Patience

On that particular wonderful afternoon of arrival I remember after seeing the whiteness within the whiteness of the wall the whiteness overall began to operate as a glare and I could see retinal images left behind by the glare for when one sees an unbroken field of any sort mind-animals of some variety begin to cross to stampede across that field.

I saw giraffes lions wildebeest and all the other creatures from the framed poster in the long corridor of Wild Animals of the African Savanna I saw them as cut-out outlines moving as if held up by a puppeteer on invisible strings.

Although I did not see as many pictures within the white of the wall as I did within the dark of inner-eyelid-after-lights-out-black I still saw plenty of aggressive faces of creatures snarling mostly snarling but sometimes roaring biting screeching and rending with their sharp white teeth.

They shifted around within themselves these creatures not from minute to minute but from moment to moment a left eye looking rightwards becoming a right eye looking directly towards me or a high nostril becoming an eyebrow whilst a dim chin-shadow became a mouth with a dark gullet ringed by white and sharp teeth.

Sometimes they changed scale and what had been a laughing-sarcastically chimpanzee became a circle of elephants gathered benignly around a waterhole or the dark heads of wildebeest fording a foaming river against the paper white background of Africa became the characteristic spots along a cheetah’s magnificent spine.

Although they not infrequently contained scenes of copulation African nature documentaries were apart from performances of ballet which Sister Muriel loved the one kind of television programme the Sisters permitted us to watch on the bulbous grey screen rarely wiped and so usually dusty of the television with woody-looking grille over the circular speaker in the corner the television of the Refectory.

I caught and hoarded a lot of words from David Attenborough’s nature documentaries including Life on Earth just as I did from Humphrey Carpenter and others on the radio in the Sisters’ Office and Mrs Beatles’ long and winding cassettes and most of all from the Sisters’ lunchtime readings of dapple-dawn-drawn Gerard Manley Hopkins and blissful Julian of Norwich and often-changing Cardinal Newman and other approved Catholic silencers of noisy-chewing ever-chatting children but also I caught fear from the wordless wild- ness of animals that really existed beyond and south of the ward.

For many years I had nightmares of being abandoned outside on the paper white ground of Africa and being as a result taken for carrion by the vultures who seemed to feature at some point in every documentary as Nature’s refuse collectors fighting with the earthbound scavengers hyaenas over the ribby remains of a carcase.

I could not convince myself upon waking that in the wild on the grassy plains of Africa I would not be taken for already injured and therefore practically dead meat and would instead be recognized as a living fearsome creature.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that above my metal-sided cot of chipped white gloss in the middle of England vultures had circled in the eyelid-dark for three or four years.

At times in amongst the wall-animals I saw images from my Christmas and birthday cards the black and white dog of Schulz who is called Snoopy throwing a snowball or Snoopy who my mother must have known I would adore typing up a birthday message on his typewriter sitting on top of his dog kennel that must be very large inside and perhaps contain several floors below ground to be large enough to contain all the sports gear Snoopy possesses let alone all the clothes and costumes and his vs the Red Baron biplane.

Snoopy-in-the-wall was occasionally oppressed by the wildness not to say the lack of civilization meaning sense of humour meaning sense of irony of the creatures from the poster and the permitted nature documentaries. This is not to say or imply that among the other children more mobile and less fortunate than me that I felt in any way like Snoopy among the animals. I was quite content and happy with all of them except knife-loving Charlie and would not have wished any of them to grow up or be taken away except knife-loving Charlie.

I was more fortunate more lucky than most of the other children because I knew how to entertain myself and because I had found a way to find myself entertaining not by doing anything or getting anything new to occupy my attention but just by being able to sit and see how much was going on that was hilarious and tragic and ironic and painful within an activity that most of the children would have seen as inactivity.

This had not been a choice and so it is nothing for which I can take credit or of which I can be proud and it is only in the years since Jim and what happened with Jim that I have found myself able to stop wishing for arms that could lift hands that could grip legs that could step and toes that could tip.

Because I am now so full of experience and potential experience and because that experience is itself so full even thinking of what I used to think about my lack of experience is enough to think about for a week.

I am never bored.

Reprinted with permission from Galley Beggar Press. To purchase the book and/or browse other Galley Beggar Press titles, click here. Buying directly from independent presses is one of the best things you can do to support them.