Glitches

Though a glitch is usually a reference to a surge of current or a spurious electrical signal, its extended usage refers to irregularity in behaviour. An anomalous twitch in the system, these days even a human being can glitch, at least that’s how Kate saw it. She sensed things happening that did not fit the regular pattern, that were out of step with the parameters of ordinary life. Of course, in and of themselves, these things could seem quite ordinary. The slightest change in temperature, the tiniest breeze lifting the hairs on a forearm; weather, gravity, all of those natural forces can cause doors to slam or paper to float from the mantelpiece; light bounces, reflects, refracts, dazzles, casts shadows of absence.

Looking back, the glitches had appeared long before Kate had chosen to name them. The flickers of another face reflected in the mirror. The certainty that she had heard a voice behind her, only to turn and find nothing there. The trouser-leg that had belonged to Mummy, but became attached to some other unknown person, smiling down, keen to brush her from their clothes. And when Mummy pulled a goofy face, Kate never laughed. Hidden in the folds of her mother’s teasing laughter, Kate heard distance, a dislocation that rendered her mother lost, unknowable, mad. Kate would scream and shout until her mother stopped, but teasing was a big thing in their family. That hidden face was always there waiting to terrify Kate with its lunacy.

The family put her sensitivity down to a vivid imagination. ‘Always has her head in the clouds,’ they used to say, and Kate was always staring at the skies, searching the clouds for patterns, tracing creatures in the cumulus, reading the rain in the nimbostratus.

The first glitch she remembered clearly was when she was around eight. The woman next door had cancer. Kate had just finished reading The Witches and when she walked past her neighbour, gardening without her wig, one long wisp of hair floating above her head, Kate had screamed and screamed. Her mother had been mortified, but she hadn’t seen the woman’s eyes. The woman had looked up from her gardening and stared at Kate. There had been something there, dancing in her pupils, little beckonings of flame whispering a desire for deeper familiarity. Kate could still feel the echo of that scream. She knew that magic was real. She had urged her mother to lift the spoon from stirring the soup and lift it she had. She understood the power of suggestion.

Once packed off to school, her imagination contained by a campus, there had been other girls who talked of things that didn’t make the strictest sense: spirits, God, all of it bursting from that energy of youth that coats the world in wonder. Kate used to pray and feel the certainty of answer - her body humming to the tune of an other-worldly touch - but not all of it felt right, or good.

The shower on the far left at school was always cold. They said a girl had committed suicide there. When a group of exchange students were visiting from Hungary, one girl had started her period right there in the shower. Kate had been in the shower next to hers, divided from her only by the thin curtains that would stick, slick and see-through, to your skin if you touched them. She had seen the blood run around the girl’s feet, turning into the plughole. That night, the girl’s yellow pajamas, covered in teddy bears, had a dark blood patch, thick and ugly between her thighs.

There was something about the prep room too. She used to curl her feet through the radiator pipes and stare out of the window. Bright strip light from the house pooled out onto the grass turning shadows into distinct lush blades. No one ever seemed to walk beyond the light. It led nowhere. The hedge marked a division between the school and the abandoned hospital. If she stared long enough, she could still see posters on the wall. There was one of Princess Diana.

The house library, that stood in shelves either side of the desks, was meager. The books were all old text-books, hard-backs whose covers had been mislaid, torn paperbacks, the odd Mills and Boon. She sat alone, after lights out, watching the shadow eat up the grass blades, sensing the smell of iron and iodine creeping through the shadows from the old hospital, wondering if the eyes she felt watching her belonged to Princess Diana. She was in the light under a gaze she could no longer distinguish.

She too believed it was only her imagination. It had to be.

When the old girl came back and dragged sleepy girls from their beds to witness her new faith in The Lord, Kate hung back. Kate’s God embraced the skies, made sense of all she could not. She didn’t want to be in that room whilst the girl sang hymns that everyone joined in with, whilst she lay her hands on the thirteen-year-old sinners wanting attention more than forgiveness. The stench of mass hysteria seeped under the door of the usually abandoned prep room. She wanted to take solace in the mysteries of God, but the extremities of collective belief forced the breath from her lungs. She lay awake long into the night listening to the gibberish of what she hoped was overexcitement, not speaking in tongues. This darker, older God might join the other girls into a chorus that taunted her solitude, but he would not touch her with his Pentecostal flame. Tears of confusion stung her tired eyes.

Then she lost her virginity and there was no more room for God’s solace. Something about her sexual awakening brought the glitches out. Every man she looked in the eye contorted. She saw their faces as they might appear above her, taking pleasure in her. It didn’t matter who the man was, how old they were, how pretty they were, bearded, clean-shaven, stubbly, moustached. All of them revealed their other faces. Some closed their eyes. Some had a vein that grew thick and angry across their foreheads. Some opened their mouths. All of them empty, these silent faces thrust closer and closer. The normal face, the sex face, the normal face, the sex face, flicking backwards and forwards at an unnerving rate, like a facial tic, a twitch, a contorted moment, a break in the current of expected expression: a glitch.

She spent the best part of a year in a permanent state of embarrassment, her cheeks flushing a painful red. Looking any man in the eye became agony. But then it passed. A phase. Just her mind adjusting to this new insight into the sexual undercurrent of life. Just her vivid imagination. She could see no other explanation. Why she imagined these things, she didn’t know. She didn’t like the idea that she wasn’t in control of what her body saw or heard or thought, as if she were a mere observer, not a subject who acted, but a serf on whom life was enacted. But any sense of life held in God’s embrace tumbled into a world where survival replaced evil. The glitches were perhaps simply what was really going on under our skin, in our minds. She was, she decided, merely empathic at a level potentially dangerous to herself.

But despite the comforts interpretations of imagination and empathy could bring, the glitches did not stop. Maturity did not bring the stability of the even keel. One of the worst was during her second daughter’s birth.

‘If you don’t push harder that baby’s never coming out,’ the midwife yelled at her. ‘Just push with the pain.’ She was a stout black woman, her soft features held in a wide-eyed frown.

Kate hadn’t been in pain, but no one was prepared to listen. From one to six, then eight midwives at least, all crowding in, making their opinions known. They cut her with their sharp little scissors and stuck a ventouse on her baby’s head. The midwife pulled so hard she was half-way across the room. And Kate had been angry with them all. She had just wanted them to go away. There was nothing wrong. She knew there was nothing wrong. What were they doing there, all of them? And then the baby had come out. It slid, slick and grey upon the bed, the umbilical cord flattened beneath its belly. It had looked like a doll. A still, rubber doll.

The baby had almost seemed to flicker as she stared at it, lying on its front. It seemed to swell in and out of focus, like something seen at the edges of vision or maybe at the dead centre of the blind spot. She reached out her hands only for it to be whisked away, its first screams in the arms of someone else. None of it felt real. And the pain of dislocation, of disassociation, was so strong it overwhelmed everything. Rather than being like a dream, it was more like realizing everything was a dream: reality merely cohesive myth; her baby nothing more than a shadowy embodiment of a wish.

Of course, quite quickly, the feeling passed. A quiet guilt crept into Kate’s need to see the baby’s fingers curl about her own. But this could all be put down to psychology. Post traumatic stress from the birth, or post natal depression. The word glitch, however, that she had chosen to describe such moments, suggested something entirely other. Something wrong not with the perceiver, but with what was perceived. Which moments were the ones she could trust? The ones that fitted in with what others said about the world they perceived? Or the ones that flittered across nerve endings like the broken signals of a distress call?

From then on, the glitches seemed to manifest most around her children. She wondered if they were strongest there because the children were what she cared about most. They focused her mind like nothing else - all her senses primed to hear, see, smell, taste them before all other things.

There was the time her eldest shot across the road on her scooter without looking. Brakes screeched, Kate had shouted the panic of her terror, and suddenly there was her little one alive on the other side of the road, tears streaming down her face, but unhurt, not even grazed. There had been another flicker somewhere between her daughter in front of the car and her daughter crying on the pavement. How had she survived? How could it, could she, be possible?

Sure. All of these things could be explained and are explained to someone every day. Kate knew what people would say. They would go back to the old platitudes of imagination, of exhaustion, of the fallible workings of the human mind. But the image of her dead grandmother on the train platform, hunched, waiting to climb awkwardly into the carriage, didn’t have to be a trick of the grieving mind. The impossibility of seeing her daughter survive that near crash could be more than shock. Slowly, and over a terrifying number of years, when daily life could not distract her, Kate found herself developing new theories to account for the glitches. They felt like portents, revealing the world as the monster of her own invention.

She knew no experience shared with another was ever remembered in precisely the same way and no one person’s memory was ever recollected in quite the same way twice. Versions upon versions of moments mounted up into a blur that mocked the certainty of history. But perhaps this complexity really masked something much more simple. Kate felt certain she couldn’t be making the whole world up, because she couldn’t see how she could invent what she didn’t know. Surely she would invent something kinder? If she couldn’t imagine a world without poverty or pain wouldn’t she at least invent a world that treated her with less cruelty? But if she was not creating her own reality, if she was not the one smoothing out the bits that didn’t fit, who, or what, was? Or perhaps she was colluding in something bigger than herself? Unable to process the parts that refused to fit the pattern she helped to create a false reality? But the possibility that her children might not exist opened a dizzy pit of horror beneath her. Stepping back from the brink of that solipsistic descent grew harder and harder.

But the glitches didn’t stop. Her hand fell empty through the air when expecting the firm grasp of another’s flesh, as if, when reaching out to others, she lost depth perception and came inches short of connection.

Things coincided with her presence. Walking home on a dark night, streetlights had been known to click off as she walked beneath them. Paper cups blowing across empty streets took on the scuttling of rodents until she stared at them and their shape shifted back to what you would expect rather than fear. Everything seemed to cohere, but nothing made sense.

Most of the time, the demands of daily life were enough to keep such thoughts at bay, but the sleeping mind is less distracted. She began to have nightmares. She was staring at the skies again.

At first, she would be walking across a field somewhere, surrounded by beautiful countryside, her children and husband with her. The sun would be at her back. The grass so vivid, she could make out fine vestiges of spider web, the last dwindling drops of dew. Her children ran out across the field, around each other, around her and her husband, laughing. Their hair bouncing with the rhythm of their joyful steps. She would reach out and take her husband’s hand and breath came free and easy in her chest like a smile that stretched the width of her body.

Then came the clouds. At the initial darkening it felt as if the sun would reappear, the cloud merely passing, as clouds do. Even so the children’s laughter was diminished. They would pant back the breath lost in their game. Kate’s hand fell to her side and above them came the terrible sound of tearing, of ripping, but of something so large, every tiny tear was magnified into a scream of sound. The whole of the heavens were torn apart, the sky broken with a jagged gash.

Kate would look down, desperate to pull her children towards her. She would grasp them tight in her arms, the smell of their hair, the sweetness of their sweat, so precious. But the sky was not done. The gash was growing. Her arms tightened around the girls, but suddenly they were not there. Her arms would fall in upon themselves, passing through stuttered projections of light that had no substance and then blinked out. Gone. Her husband too, gone. And the sound of the tearing sky would fill her whole body as the world around her emptied of anything known and there was nothing but a howl of loneliness. The ark of all her imaginings, of all the stories promising a wholeness of repeated experience, was broken open, was nothing, nothing more than hot air.

Once this dream began, glitches found their way into everything. Always, there it was, the thing that didn’t fit: the delicate leer of fingers rasping the pocket of her jeans as an old man squeezed behind her in the supermarket queue; the spark of recognition when seeing another only to draw closer and see no corresponding light; the drone of airplanes in empty skies; pianos abandoned on side streets; items of shopping bleeping across the scanner bearing no resemblance to those she put in her trolley; cars screeching to a halt as she walked across clear streets; the fear of those limp arms reaching into her days and brushing careless fingers through her children’s hair.

She began to forget things. The floor became sticky, overrun with the slimy dartings of silverfish. Clothes were washed but dried unhung in bundles, her whole family walking in crinkled, mildewed cloth. Things ran out. There was no toothpaste but endless tins of tuna. No bread, but several pats of butter whose edges were fast thickening with the yellow of age.

Her children hugged her more, as she sat twitching, staring off out of the window at the sky, waiting for the last story she had any faith in to come true.

So Kate’s children grew, and they and her husband left her, but still she waits, looking out of the window like the figures she imagined so long ago staring out of the abandoned hospital. A glitch in the story of her own life, she no longer fits anywhere but amongst others for whom our collective truth is revealed as nothing more than a bedtime story told to keep out the darkness of chaos. She is a glitch, medicated into silence; a head in the clouds.