7. An Account

Written for George Ttoouli's creative non-fiction seminar, term week 8.

What I remember was the quiet. In spite of a tendency, stronger than in most boys my age, to solitary play, games of imagination, my days were still the hubbub of noise typical of children: chattering classrooms, the omnipresent television.

My family wasn’t really religious, except in the wishy-washy Anglican way typical of New Foresters; the place seemed to breed ambivalence. When I asked my parents what exactly happened to us when we die – after my grandfather’s death from cancer; I was three – I received the comforting answer that: We go to Heaven. During the next few years, marked by the constant, poisonous malice and ritual humiliation only children are capable of, I would bring out this answer repeatedly, as if my classmates, cynical beyond their years, should be cowed and swayed by its total obviousness.

It’s perhaps appropriate that the contextual details refuse to slot exactly into place: I must have been somewhere between the ages of 8 and 12, between Years 4 and 6, and it continues to escape me whether my friend Jon had been confirmed, at that point, like his mother, into the Catholic Church. I know that I spoke to him enough times about death, as if he were an expert on the subject. But this must have been earlier, at a moment when Jon wasn’t around to reassure me with erudition inherited from Oxford-educated parents.

The constant psychic violence my peers meted out had begun keeping me awake. It was one night, when my eyes had remained shut in the dark for three hours. Thoughts rattled in my exhausted head like pennies in a shaken jar. I have the impression that the last trail of thought had been about animals. It’s difficult for me now to count the numbers of pets who had died during my lifetime: a ginger tabby, a rapacious golden retriever, perhaps four marbelled goldfish, a mischievous guinea pig, and a rabbit who would be given an identical replacement years later are the only ones that come immediately to mind. I was wondering, I believe, as to whether I could rejoin them in the afterlife I had so vividly pictured (which following the cliché, involved lots of clouds.)

I had already begun to ask what exactly underlay these visions, this belief: exactly what evidence was there for God’s existence? The question recurred to me, developed: if, as it seemed, God left no fingerprints on His Creation, could the believers be wrong? And then, the answer landed like a sneaky blow to the abdomen: in that instance, there was no God. Before I could even formulate it, the train of thought started itself moving, shaking my entire nervous system. I thought, with enormous reluctance, my way through it: logically, in that case, there could be no afterlife. Thus, there was the possibility that, when death came, I would simply cease to exist. The black behind my eyelids seemed to thicken, spread. I puzzled, with the shocked compulsion of a trauma victim, what, then it would feel like. It wouldn’t. There would be no me to feel it.

That sudden vision of not merely total darkness, but total and utter nothingness, seemed to manifest bodily: a vespertine flower of a vaccuum opening up in the depths of my stomach, my mind and nerves reeling, scrabbling to get away from this sensation, but knowing that it was inside me, in the most literal sense. The end, whatever happened, and in whatever form, would come eventually; the body that was carrying me forward in time – the movement I took for granted, even, at times, enjoyed – was also bearing me inexorably toward the grave. I saw, as vividly as any afterlife seen, its own dissolution at the hand of worms, insects, soil-borne microbes; the scattering of my proteins through the dirt.

And what I remember was quiet: the weak streetlight filtering through the curtains, the apparent disappearance even of the uneasy creaks and gurgles of the house. I used to believe that nameless creatures lurked for me in the gloom, and that if I shut my eyes they couldn’t harm me. Now there was nothing but the darkness, waiting to swallow me up.