A Town Unlike Alice
HIERONYMO'S MAD AGAINE
Cathy: “There's more than just a walk in the woods going on, isn't there Alice? Your face is stiff and set. Can you tell me what you feel?
Alice: “Blank boredom and horror.”
Alice walks as if her feet were raw with blisters and her thigh and calf muscles locked in painful cramps. She walks as if on the brink of tears, pitifully, like a smacked child dreading a further smack. She is determined not to give way but her lips tremble and her eyes are wet.
Cathy: “You're blundering rather than walking. Are you feeling ill?”
Alice: “Yes.”
It is as if talking hurts as badly as if her mouth was caught in barbed wire. Cathy almost expects to see the blood and coil of barbs. She feels helpless, what has Alice done to herself?
Cathy: “You're reacting as if this walk was the most hateful thing you've ever forced yourself to do in your life. Can't you ever be kind to yourself?”
Alice: “No.”
Cathy: “But you seemed fine at first, pointing out details like the way great thick oak branches writhe.”
Alice: “I can't see the whole thing, only bits and glimpses, I can't keep up being fine.”
Cathy: “You're wrecked. Have you been forgetting to take your Stelazine?”
Alice: No,, I took one – no, I didn't take one this morning. Sorry.”
Cathy: “Don't apologise to me! Look after yourself, be kind to yourself and give yourself the medicines you badly need. Permit yourself to be looked after I that way however hard on yourself you are in other ways. Deal?”
Alice, hands in mac pockets and boots tramping the aggregate of snow lumps and turrmeric yellow gravel in a staggering rhythm, glances warily at Cathy. Cathy's face with its dark violet eyes and white skin is kind, for all the exasperation in her voice. Alice persists alongside Cathy and listens to her, but very nervously. Cathy might go on to talk to the others and then all the blank boredom and horror will surge back and overwhelm Alice. She replies:
Alice: “I suppose so.”
Cathy: “Apart from that you're persistently and deliberately unkind to yourself. You must hurt a great deal, and the more it hurts the worse you are to yourself. So this isn't a walk in the woods, it's a private purgatory and the more you try to generalise yourself as taking a walk, the more you stub yourself against your own admitted unkindness, until your brains bleed with the effort of trying to appear normal!”
Tears pour down Alice's cheeks, tears at her painful isolation being understood and acknowledged, tears for her body dark in its mackintosh moving clumsily along the snowy woodland track but in company. In company, at last, with someone who can guess why she's suddenly been overwhelmed by blank boredom and horror. Cathy's kindness and effort to understand have included Alice in the group, which they have drawn ahead of, now they slow, Alice dries her eyes and turns with a shy, apprehensive smile as the others catch up. But they are halfway through an animated conversation about the significance of Gretel eating gingerbread, and Hansel going to be eaten, with its sexual significance, by the wicked witch, so they sweep up Alice and Cathy. Cathy joins in, the loose gang proceeds into a sudden opening onto bleached and snowy grassland under a wider sky. Alice cannot utter a word of her sorrow and Cathy's relieving of it, but then, Alice hasn't told people what the matter is since she was little, she has always kept it to herself, tried to soldier on regardless but drawn increasingly apart from other people. Every unuttered sorrow, problem or hurtful happening has thus separated her from other people and set her and her secrets apart. Now she's so far apart it would take weeks to explain herself, but then, Cathy's kindness makes a short cut to inclusion for Alice, and temporary relief. So, dark in her mac and occasionally catching an eye and smiling, Alice stumbles along in a proximity to the others that is nevertheless approximate. Cathy keeps a protective eye on her, they reach the road and gritted pavement and turn into the approach to the railway station.