Bars of light sneaking through the blinds. Creeping across an arm, silver threads of hair hypnotic. Morning talk shows, snowy teeth. Sips of water. Not too much now.
Standing, legs apart. Tipped forward, cheeks held open. A quick stream into the toilet bowl. The hissing brand. Skin bubbling and stripping. Oh, no.
Speckles of sun on floorboards. Midday movies and American doctors. Women stalked by men they trusted, problems sorted in an hour.
Warm stripes sidling over her back. Coarse rug against her legs. Detective novels. Red herrings and ingenious solutions. A burst of needles. The fresh knife up and in. Twisting. No. Please, no.
White slashes dissecting the bookshelves. News theme music trumpeting. Look busy in the kitchen.
Pulled from sleep. The consuming ache inside – outside? Her body? Her mind? Slinking to the lounge room, closing doors.
Eaten away. Sinews, tendons. ‘Who am I?’ Raw. Gore. ‘Where have I gone?’
Throwing her body about. ‘Fuck. Fuck.’ Beating at the floor. ‘God … oh, someone.’ Pulling at her hair and face. Beseeching the night, ‘Please, please.’ Howling at the darkness, ‘Fucking, fucking, take it away!’
The days. The lounge room. The doona and pillows. The litter of tonics and pills. The novels. The television.
The evenings. The dinner prepared in shifts. The plates of food on the coffee table. The conversation. The collapse on the sofa. The sound of dishes. The television.
The nights. The lonely pain. The crying. The retreat. The television.
The seconds. Minutes. Hours. Days. Weeks. Months.
I can’t do this anymore. Her thoughts calm and collected. Reasonable.
The diagnosis was inadequate, the treatment ineffectual. Her ceaseless symptoms were more severe than the symptoms listed under ‘vulvar vestibulitis’ on the net. The constant suffering of a different order to the women whose words she had read: the women who despaired solely about pain with intercourse. If only.
I can’t do this anymore.
Maybe it would be a relief for Duncan. Maybe he would – secretly, guiltily – be glad to be rid of her. He had never bargained for this: no sex and endless crying, all the unspoken appeals for help. The inadequacy of his response.
Why not, then?
Freedom from the sensations that invaded and colonised her thoughts. Release from the images in black and red: a bloody piece of meat, that gaping maw beneath, a mouth biting and shredding. Escape from that voice inside: you are useless; you are pathetic; no-one can help you – no-one wants to. An end to her violent nights: a city stormed; a woman with a cloven head fucking incessantly, unproductively; animals murdered, then raped.
No more horror on waking: it is me. I am the dreamer.
The smoke coiled around her, exotic and sultry. She closed her eyes and inhaled. Recreated the dream, its sensations and atmosphere. Dark, but the awareness of walls on every side. A temple. Claustrophobia. I am alone and terrified. I take a step, arms outstretched, and touch a cold surface. Trace its intricate carvings upward and feel them slant in, towards me. I breathe in, but there is no air. I shout, but there is no sound. I remember: I have brought this on myself. I am buried; I will die here. Oh, what have I done?
What had she done? Shudders rippled up her body, settling in a knot around her neck. Wait. She needed to have the suffering brimming at the edge of her mind, but she also wanted to sound strong. She held the sobs in her throat. Lowered the flimsy barricade of her will and allowed the pain to consume her until she became the scream at its core. Little left of Alice but the knowledge that she must appeal to a force in the face of which she was nothing.
Now. Do it now.
She opened her eyes and intoned.
‘O goddess of men, O goddess of women, thou whose counsel none may learn!
Look upon me, O my Lady, and accept my supplication,
Truly pity me, and hearken unto my prayer!
Cry unto me “It is enough!” and let thy spirit be appeased!’
Her own cry rose to her mouth. Sh. Quiet now.
‘How long shall my body lament, which is full of restlessness and confusion?
How long shall my heart be afflicted, which is full of sorrow and sighing?
Unto thee therefore do I pray, dissolve my ban!
Dissolve my sin, my iniquity, my transgression, and my offence!’
There was more, but it was all she could manage. She let her body fall back into the pillows and wrapped the doona around her. Pulled it over her head. Released the sobs lodged in her throat. Allowed her tears to soak the cotton till it moulded to her face, wet and salty. The raw complaint between her legs the same.
‘What did you expect?’ she demanded, her voice harsh in the small room. ‘A goddess descending in a moon boat? A revelation? A frigging miracle?’
‘Alice?’ Shuffled footsteps. ‘Alice!’
Ena’s voice came through the door. Alice kept her eyes trained: the serial killer was about to strike.
‘Alice.’ The voice insistent. ‘Are you there?’
Pen, now Ena. Why couldn’t they leave her alone?
‘Alice!’
She hit the off button. Drew her feet under her, wincing at the stretch and stab, then pushed herself up. Breathless. She was so weak these days.
Ena took her in as she opened the door. ‘Alice. My dear.’ The long t-shirt and leggings. No bra. Hair unbrushed, unwashed. Alice knew what her face looked like: pale and worn, eyes dark-ringed, lips chapped. ‘My poor love.’ Ena’s arms came around her and Alice breathed in the familiar scent of butter and sugared spice. Before she was aware that she would even begin, she was crying. ‘Come on now. Let’s go inside.’
‘I’m sorry, Ena.’ The words broken.
‘You’ve nothing to apologise for.’ Ena walked her to the sofa. ‘Now, what’s most comfortable for you?’ She sat herself down. ‘Why don’t you lean on me?’ Alice slid into her sideways pose, crying harder and falling against the older woman’s shoulder. Slid down further so her head was in Ena’s lap. Ena stroked her hair. ‘My poor dear. It’s no better, is it?’
‘It’s never better.’ She had to say it. ‘Oh, Ena, I don’t know how long I can keep going.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I can’t deal with this pain anymore. I can’t.’ The sobs harder. ‘It’s like a hole that’s sucking me in. Until there’s nothing left of me.’
‘What else, my dear?’
She was a baby in her mother’s arms. ‘I need it to stop hurting, but everything makes it worse. Everything. And I’m so tired.’ Ena rocked her gently. ‘I can’t go on anymore. I can’t.’ She stopped talking. Let herself cry and wail and moan while Ena rocked her. The minutes passed until there was nothing left but the pain, and Ena.
‘You know the scariest thing?’ Her voice calmer now.
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s that …’ She hesitated for a moment. How could she say it? ‘When I think about doing something to myself, it’s the most logical thing in the world. It’s only now, when I’m telling you, that I can see how close I come’ – the words in a rush – ‘and that terrifies me more than anything else.’
‘It is awful, Alice.’ Ena’s voice was sympathetic. ‘The loss of all that you feel is yourself. The impossibility of continuing.’
‘You sound like you know what I mean.’
‘Well, I know what it is to live with pain.’
‘Oh, Ena, I forgot.’ Alice looked up at her face. The white hair that was, when Alice met her, still auburn. ‘You know about the kind of pain that never goes away.’ She considered all the years she had known Duncan’s mother. Her support – which had only grown stronger since Joan’s move to the other side of the country, how many years ago? Six? Seven? – her steadiness and constancy. ‘It’s hard when you’re in agony but it’s invisible.’
‘Maybe it’s a blessing.’ Ena’s voice was thoughtful. ‘Imagine how it would be for other people to be conscious of your pain all the time. Their helplessness. And your own guilt at being the cause of their suffering.’ Then, ‘I know that Michael felt helpless around me.’
Ena did not talk about her dead husband often. The heart attack when she was herself still dealing with a torn and broken body, and trying to meet the demands of a small child.
‘You never complain, though. You’re so brave,’ said Alice. ‘Maybe I exaggerate it.’
‘No, Alice.’ Ena’s voice was certain. ‘I know you and I know pain. You are not exaggerating. You have probably been underplaying it, if anything.’ Alice felt lighter at the words. ‘Have you considered that you might be just as brave as me, but that your pain is simply more severe?’
‘I don’t know.’ Another thing she could not understand: how do you measure pain? ‘It’s impossible for me to gauge. The whole thing is so peculiar – why I am even in pain at all – that I feel like something must have gone haywire inside me. As if it’s not me living my life.’ I sound crazy, she thought, but Ena nodded.
‘Yes, I know that feeling. I remember having to get used to this body that no longer worked properly. Sometimes I felt I was possessed. Or that I was an imposter.’
‘I didn’t think anyone would understand.’ Alice sighed. ‘It’s so good to talk to you.’
‘I’m glad. But I’m also sorry I haven’t been as available as I might. I didn’t realise it was this bad. And I wanted to give you and Duncan space while things were so difficult.’ Alice still did not understand the way Ena tiptoed around her son. Or Duncan’s subtle distance from his mother, who was always so warm and sweet.
The familiar pressured ache brought her back to her body. She rolled sideways and out of Ena’s lap. ‘I must go to the loo.’
‘Why don’t I get us a drink while you do that? A cup of tea, that always helps.’
Alice watched Ena as she walked to the kitchen doorway, the awkward lurch at each step. She wondered when she had stopped noticing.
When she came back, the room was washed with light and the cups were already on the coffee table. Ena had realised she couldn’t sit on the kitchen chairs. The little kindness brought fresh tears to her eyes.
‘Can you tell me what the pain is like?’ Ena placed herself at one end of the long sofa, leaving the remainder free.
Alice sipped at the tea. Held its astringent comfort, for a moment, in her mouth. ‘It’s hard to put it into words. Sometimes it’s burning – but it’s not the usual kind of burning. It’s like …’ It was so hard to find words for the sensations. ‘You know how you go each year to have sun damage treated?’ Ena’s skin was littered with freckles and with other markings, some browner, some paler than the surrounding skin.
‘Yes.’
‘And you know how he freezes the spots?’ Alice had a plantar wart treated once, the cotton bud, loaded with liquid ice, drilling a deep ache into her foot. Years ago, when she had never imagined a pain so intense could last longer than those little minutes. ‘Well, that’s how it feels. A freezing that’s on the edge of burning. When you can’t tell the difference, you know? Only it’s worse because it’s spread all over.’
‘And how often is it like that?’
‘It can be for hours at a time.’ The horror spilling from her mouth now, now that she was released. ‘But that’s just one kind of pain. There are other ones too.’ How to tell Ena of the relentless grinding at her body and her spirit. ‘I never have a moment without pain. It’s day and night. It’s endless.’ The small sob was involuntary. ‘Oh, Ena. It’s as if this guillotine came down on my life and chopped it into two parts. I don’t know who I am. And I want to go back to who I was. But I don’t know who that is anymore.’
‘You were a lovely, intelligent woman and you are still a lovely, intelligent woman.’ Ena reached across and gripped her hand. Squeezed it tightly.
‘Really?’ Bitterly. Sadly. ‘It doesn’t feel that way to me. I feel useless. I am useless.’
‘Is Duncan being supportive?’ Ena’s voice tighter.
‘As much as he can be.’ Alice felt the heat in her cheeks; the reluctance to confide too much. ‘It’s hard for him, you know. Hard to empathise when he hasn’t had pain that never goes away.’
‘Yes.’ Ena’s smile was wry. ‘He’s not so good with weakness – or what he perceives as weakness, anyway. But he is a good man, I think, fundamentally.’
Alice looked at the cover of the book. Woman’s Mysteries. M. Esther Harding. One of the handful given to her by Joan during the first flush of her mother’s passion for all things Jungian. These are old, but good. Let me know what you think! Back when Joan wanted to share her discovery with her daughter. Before she got the message that Alice was distinctly uninterested. The book had rested for years in a cardboard box holding the other mouldering tomes: Jungian texts on symbols, archetypes and dreams – even feminism. A copy of I Ching had been stuffed in there too, an unsuccessful birthday present. And a pack of tarot cards. The only item Alice had ever looked at was the cards, years ago. Their images drew her into another world and she hid them away in case she couldn’t return to her own.
Duncan’s judgement when he carried the box into her new home: A lot of mumbo jumbo. And, in reference to the books: Isn’t Jung a little passé?
Not to Mum. But she bit the words back, before they could escape. Watched him push the box into the alcove and shut the doors on it.
She had been thinking of her mother more. Imagining her embrace. Because, reduced by suffering, she was a child again? Her mother messaged her daily and rang her every few days. Offering comfort rather than analysis. Finally. But she was so far away.
Strange that in her extremity Alice had been drawn to this past. That she had found the old box and dragged it from the alcove, its seams splitting with age. The book had sat on the top, an invitation that she accepted. She had flicked through its pages and stopped at the invocation – the hymn to Ishtar – its words speaking to her. For her.
Maybe the books held other rewards. Maybe the dreams she now recorded each morning held clues. Where else could she find knowledge or understanding when it was absent in medicos and their textbooks? When the internet only gave her forbidding words that offered no easy answers, like ‘vulvodynia’ and ‘non-bacterial cystitis’, only drew her into the suffering of other women, who repeated her own questions: Does anyone know a reliable treatment? Why does nothing work? She could not afford to be proud or dismissive. She would search wherever she could to find some way to crack the code of her mysterious disorder, some way to understand herself.
Was she so different from her mother, after all?
Lying on her stomach, books and paper the spokes of a wheel, herself its hub. Vulvar vestibulitis … vulvar vestibulitis … vulvar vestibulitis … the words spinning the wheel of her mind into giddiness. Vulva: the site of her pain; vestibule: … vestibule, what? Vestibule … vestibule … dictionary anchoring … wheel slowing … ve … slowing … vesti … slowing and …
Stopped. Vestibule: an antechamber … lobby … A transitional space? And porch of a church … Entry to a holy place?
Scanning words that come after … vestment … vestry … and back, skimming pages, to venerate – was this connected? Flipping the pages … reverend … revere … Were these?
Returning to vestibule. Now, a chamber or channel communicating with others. The mouth; the inner ear, and that labyrinth at its core; the opening to the vagina. All these passageways between inside and outside. All these vulnerable, in-between places. Mind snagging: entry points to a holy place? Meeting point of humans and gods?
Eyes caught by vesta, higher on the page. Returned, again, to the primary-school class. Myths of ancient Rome. Gods and goddesses. Sun through the skylight illuminating the word on the board. Vesta.
The pad at her hand, the here and now: notes jotted just yesterday, drawn from that drowsy memory.
Vesta, virgin goddess:
Turning to the dictionary: Vesta, Roman goddess of the hearth and household. Then vestal … chaste, pure … vestal virgin … Reaching for the book that came to mind. There … Plutarch. Taken as young girls from their families, made vestal virgins. Her hand flicking to the half-remembered words.
That they should vow to keep a Lease of their Virginity, or remain in a chast and unspotted Condition, for the space of thirty Years.
Thirty years tending the sacred flame and whipped if it died. Buried alive if they broke the vow.
Chastity. Did they choose to take it?
A lithe young body dragged from a weeping mother. Smaller sisters and brothers grasping at bare legs. Was their sister lost to them? Was it an honour for the family?
The vestal virgin the gateway to holiness? The hearth its threshold?
Virgin … that other meaning. That challenge to its modern understanding. The anthropology stack. Where? Holding the pile firm from the top. Sliding out The Mothers and the book beneath. The Golden Bough. Skimming the tabbed pages. Scribbling in her pad.
James George Frazer & Robert Briffault: correct translation of Greek word parthenos (e.g. applied to Artemis) not ‘virgin’ but ‘unmarried woman’ or ‘unwed’ – not woman without sexual experience, but one who was independent.
Her pen scoring the page: independent. Fixing it in her mind.
This changed things. Permitted paradox. Vesta, the patroness of virginity; Vesta, known as ‘Mother’; Vesta, inspiration for a cult with phallic emblems. And Artemis, chaste yet fruitful, goddess of childbirth. The other one … Virgin goddess Ishtar, ‘the Prostitute’.
A link between virginity and holiness? Where did it come from, centuries before Christ?
Christ.
The dream that had made even less sense than dreams usually do. Stretching for her journal. Scanning … scanning …
Here.
I am a prostitute. Though I can’t have intercourse I am in high demand because I am so sexy. I have a boyfriend & I have a little lamb that I saved from slaughter. It follows me everywhere.
The rush of meaning quick. Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow … Virgin Mary and Jesus, the Lamb of God.
She, herself. Virgin and prostitute? Sexual priestess – vessel for the divine?
What on earth did any of these whirling, spinning, weaving thoughts have to do with this pain? This suffering?
Slow down. And breathe. Finish them off, the thoughts. Let them settle where they need.
So. A portal. Where did it lead? An entrance. How could it be crossed?
Scanning the wheel of papers and pages. Dragging the bits and pieces towards each other. Images, ideas, memories, thoughts all swirling together. Letting them coalesce. Feeling them point, like an arrow, to that book – Woman’s Mysteries – that tab – that quote. Philo of Alexandria:
For the congress of men for the procreation of children makes virgins women. But when God begins to associate with the soul, he brings to pass that she who was formerly woman becomes virgin again.
Ah, of course…
Visited by gods. Made virgin, once again.