Now that I have gained the freedom of the dark garden, the next thing—the fourth—is interior and domestic. By the light of a small lamp in the corner of the kitchen, made dimmer still by being placed behind the microwave, I prepare rice, fish and vegetables, wielding my knife gently to avoid slicing a fingertip.
I am cooking the dinner.
“I’m delighted you feel up to it, darling,” says Pete, with enthusiasm, when he comes in from work. “We can have something edible for a change.”
Pete, despite having had to do a lot of cooking, has neither started to enjoy it, nor become any better at it. He sits on a chair in the kitchen and watches me as I put the pan of rice on to boil, and lay the fish on a plate in the steamer, sprinkling it with thin strips of ginger and spring onion. I am making Chinese Steamed Fish.
“Cooking is so stressful,” he says. “Take rice, for example. It ought to be impossible for rice to boil dry and be undercooked at the same time, but it isn’t.”
“Don’t be silly,” I say. “It’s completely in accord with the laws of physics for rice to boil dry and be undercooked at the same time. Anyway, all you have to do is look at it now and then, to see how it’s doing, and it won’t.”
“That’s exactly what I object to,” says Pete. “All this ad hoc adjustment and using your judgement. Cooking isn’t rigorous.”
“But you like making cakes,” I point out. I mix soy sauce and sesame oil together in a little pan, and heat it gently.
“Cakes are different,” replies Pete. “You mix up all the ingredients in a set formula and bung them in the oven at gas mark x for y minutes. None of this sloppy top-of-the-stove nonsense. Take that Nigel Slater omelette recipe. It said, ‘Cook until the underside of the omelette starts to brown.’ How was I supposed to know what the underside was doing—it was underneath.”
“Well, it still wasn’t a bad omelette,” I say, because I aim to be encouraging, as I take the sauce off the heat.
“Recipes don’t contain enough instructions,” says Pete. “They could do with a few more Do-while loops.”
“What?” I ask.
Pete explains about Do-while loops. They are programming commands in the computer language FORTRAN.
“Look,” I say, lifting the lid of the steamer and poking inside with a knife, “could you stop talking a minute, or set the table, or something. I’m trying to exercise my judgement on this fish.”
THE FIFTH THING is risky. Not all the variables are within my control. An unexpected encounter could send me back to the darkness to burn for several days. But I yearn to attempt it.
So I put on my boots, hat and coat, and this time I open the front door rather than the back, and step into the night-time close.
A person watching me would be puzzled by my trajectory. First I walk flush to one side of the driveway, pressed up against the bushes, and, when I reach the pavement, turn sharp right. Then I meander up the close, weaving across the road from side to side several times. When a car approaches, I leap behind a convenient shrub, or, if there is not one to hand, take to my heels.
The explanation is not, in fact, obscure. My next-door neighbours have a security light over their garage door, white, intense and horrible, easily tripped by casually passing down the drive unless one shimmies close to the furthest side. In the street I snake between street lights, not wanting to pass directly underneath their beams. Car headlights are the worst, particularly the newer bluer kind. They pierce my body like a pair of steel spears, drilling into my organs, into my bones themselves. So as I walk the night-time close I am constantly on the alert for the thrum of an approaching engine. Sometimes a waiting, idling car or the tripping of a security light mean I am trapped, and have to lurk suspiciously in some shadowy place for ages before I can make my way back to the house.
I have never walked by night in the African bush. But I wonder whether my nocturnal navigations of the close bear certain similarities in the variety of potential hazards, the constant vigilance for large predators, the need for careful and circumspect advance.
The sixth thing is fun. From the dark far end of our long through-lounge, Pete in an armchair between me and the TV, the screen reflected in a carefully positioned mirror, I watch The Apprentice.
I give myself up to it with total delight. I roar with laughter, shout out rude comments, become rampantly partisan, practically expire with tension during the final Boardroom scenes. Because of the mirror, I get to know all the participants backwards, their right and left sides reversed, so when I see a photograph in the newspaper, it is always unsettling.
The seventh thing is small, but significant. I exchange my bulky under-trousers for tight black leggings beneath my silken skirts. This is very nearly a convincing fashion statement. About the nether regions, I feel suddenly, shockingly normal.
Between each small advance, days pass. The majority of my time is still spent in darkness, keeping company with electric voices. But there are holes appearing in the covering, like the activity of moths upon a blanket. I can come downstairs for one hour, then two hours at a stretch. Slowly, unevenly, the holes are getting larger.
I often miscalculate my next move. I am playing a game with snakes but no ladders; frequently I slither back towards the first square on the board, and must restart the slow, laborious ascent. But at least there is change, there is movement. Stasis has been left behind.
One thing has been found that helps me, mentioned in a scientific paper that Pete tracks down online. It does not put an end to my ups and downs, but at all stages it takes the edge off my reactions.
The substance is beta carotene. It is a very powerful anti-oxidant, used to help various light-sensitivity conditions, because it partly mitigates the damage set off by light in the skin. To obtain any effect, according to a man who is a member of the British Porphyria Society, one has to take a lot. I have twenty pills a day. This is about one hundred times the recommended daily allowance, and I do hesitate before I begin, there being various vague hints online about liver damage. I try to get clear medical advice on whether it is appropriate to take in my case, and what precautions or monitoring would be wise, but no one is prepared to give a definitive opinion. In the end I decide I have little to lose.
There is one side-effect—shortly after taking it, the skin becomes slightly orange. I do not mind. Often, there’s not enough light to see me properly anyway, and when there is—the orange look is favoured by WAGs and TV celebrities, even certain politicians, so why should I object? Mine, however, is only a pale mandarin-yogurt imitation of such deep-toned, fruity complexions.