I Am, I Am, I Am

by Maggie O'Farrell

There is nothing unique or special in a near-death experience. They are not rare; everyone, I would venture, has had them, at one time or another, perhaps without even realising it. The brush of a van too close to your bicycle, the tired medic who realises that a dosage ought to be checked one final time, the driver who has drunk too much and is reluctantly persuaded to relinquish the car keys, the train missed after sleeping through an alarm, the aeroplane not caught, the virus never inhaled, the assailant never encountered, the path not taken. We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall. As Thomas Hardy writes of Tess Durbeyfield, ‘There was another date . . . that of her own death; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?’ If you are aware of these moments, they will alter you. You can try to forget them, to turn away from them, to shrug them off, but they will have infiltrated you, whether you like it or not. They will take up residence inside you and become part of who you are, like a heart stent or a pin that holds together a broken bone.

I have been working, as a ticket-ripper, a beer-glass collector, a fetcher, a sorter, a general dogsbody, at an arts venue, where I was required to wear a sweatshirt of leprechaun-hair orange. When the job finished, I tied the sweatshirt in a knot and tossed it to the dog, who has a deep but forbidden love of ripping up fabric, and took off for Spain.

I need to start my life: I need to find a path for myself, to find a job that sets me on the right course or, in fact, any course at all. I have to find work that will pay my rent, cover my tube travel, and doesn’t bore me to the point of screaming, so that I have the headspace and the energy to come home in the evenings, perhaps, maybe, possibly, to write. But how to pull off such a trick, such a balancing act? I haven’t the faintest idea. So I am heading back to Britain, slowly and circuitously, spinning out the journey for as long as my money will last.

After he had sailed around the Mediterranean in 1869, Mark Twain said that travel was ‘fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness’.

When you are a child, no one tells you that you’re going to die. You have to work it out for yourself. Clues may include: your mother crying but then pretending not to; your siblings being kept away from you; doctors looking at you with an expression of concentration, gravity and a certain fascination; nurses avoiding your eye; relatives travelling great distances to visit you. Hospital isolation rooms, invasive procedures and groups of medical students are also reliable signs. See also: great presents.

On such a night, I am awake. My watching nurse has said that, no, I cannot listen to another side of a tape: I must sleep, she says, I need to rest. My headache pulses away, a bright, daemonic metronome. I look out, always, from behind its blinding white mask. The noise of the television from the ward has ceased, so I know it is late; it is deep into the night. Am I falling into sleep or something else when I hear the noise in the corridor outside? Footsteps, the fluting voice of a child, a rhythmic noise like a toy being dragged along the lino. The child says something in a high, enquiring tone and the nurse tells him to be quiet. ‘Hush,’ she says. ‘There’s a little girl dying in there.’