Glitches Read online

  That day, you get on a tube. Nothing strange about that. Normal stuff. Riding a tube to Stratford with your three-year-old daughter, whose curls and smile are pretty enough to get admiring glances. You sit opposite a middle-aged Chinese couple. They smile sweetly at your daughter and you and as you turn away you see them engaging in conversation in Mandarin probably, you don’t understand. You are reading an advertisement for vitamins, your arms wrapped tightly around Amy’s waist. The middle-aged Chinese man is now rummaging in a pocket and before you know it, the Chinese lady is holding something out to Amy. It looks like a sweet.

  Amy turns to you expectantly. Can she take it?

  You are not sure. You have not been asked if it is ok and part of you worries about this. Really people should check with the parent if it’s ok to offer sweets or anything to your child and suddenly you feel nervous about Amy accepting something from people you don’t know. Then you worry that perhaps this is a racist thought, that you are reacting to their foreignness and not the offering itself and you feel the weight of the watching eyes as the train speeds on through the tunnel.

  You refocus on Amy and see there is nothing you can do; Amy has already taken the sweet. She is holding it out for you to open.

  The sweet is wrapped in plastic, all pink and yellow, and you think perhaps it would be best to try to figure out what is inside before you open it. But all the words are in Chinese apart from ‘Delicious Candy’. You realize you might now be appearing rude. Really, what were you thinking? Someone would want to poison your child for no reason? Don’t be ridiculous, it’s just that you don’t know what you are giving her, and the two English builder types beside you are peering over their Suns and giving you sideways glances.

  What the hell, you open the packet. Inside, the sweet is a rectangle of sugar-coated squidgyness, a jelly sweet, and you now just hope that Amy likes it. It might be embarrassing to have her spit it out. Really it is touching that someone thinks she is sweet enough to give her something without even knowing her and so before she shoves it in her mouth you make sure she says thank you at least twice.

  Amy puts the sweet in whole and when you ask if it is nice she nods her head. That’s great. You feel a sense of relief. This has all gone well. Everyone has behaved so nicely to each other and your insane mental wanderings down the line of poisoned sweets and abduction have been calmed.

  Then, just as you are stroking Amy’s hair, smelling its familiar, sweet and sweaty smell, loving her, treasuring another tiny moment in a life that is rapidly growing beyond you, she starts to choke. At first you aren’t too worried. She’s always been a choker; she likes to put too much in her mouth. The sweet will come back up and it will all be fine, but she keeps on choking. Her face is bright red. Her eyes popping a little from her head. Suddenly everyone is looking your way.

  ‘Amy,’ you shout, ‘Amy.’

  The men beside you have put their papers down.

  ‘Pat her on the back, love, quick.’

  From the corner of your eye, you can see the Chinese couple looking at each other, their eyebrows creased with worry and, you think, anxiety.

  You hit Amy on the back. Her lips are now tinged with blue. She’s making horrible gurgling sounds and her whole precious life flies by in front of you. The weight of her in your arms, her limbs plump and trusting. Tears are streaming down her cheeks. Her eyes plead with you. ‘Amy, Amy.’ You can’t let her go. You hit her again, harder, and the sweet flies out of her mouth and hits the floor millimeters from another passenger’s shoes. It’s brown and sticky and you tear your eyes away from it, staring into Amy’s face, waiting. ‘Amy, Amy, breathe, Amy, breathe.’ Waiting in the way you waited for her first cry after she came spooling out of your womb, waiting to hear that such a rude awakening had truly brought her into life.

  And then she cries, huge rasping, gulping cries, and you hold her to you, tears now falling from your eyes held tight shut against her as she throws her arms around you. You want to stay there, but the carriage judders to a halt and the doors beep and before you realize you are sitting at your stop someone has pressed the passenger alarm and you are surrounded by people all asking if Amy is alright, pressing in on you.

  One of the newspaper men has stood up and is yelling at the Chinese couple, ‘What did you give her? What the fuck did you give her?’

  ‘It just a candy,’ the lady says. You can hear the shaking in her voice.

  You don’t even know how you are taking anything else in, you just want to get out of there, for everyone to go away.

  ‘Is everything ok, Madam?’ It’s an underground worker.

  ‘Yes, yes, she’s fine, I just need to get off now.’

  You stand up and the crowd seems to sway with you. Clinging on to Amy you step off the train.

  ‘Looks like you’re in shock, love, would you like to come and have a cup of tea? Do you need to report anything?’

  ‘No, no,’ you say, but you aren’t sure, you don’t even know what happened any more, you are just so glad that Amy is there and ok and you don’t want to let her go ever again. She is still crying, loud enough to dampen all the other noises of people walking past. Several times you are nudged by people trying to get on with their day and then right in your ear, the man from the tube who shouted at the Chinese couple leans in and says to you, anger still bitter in his voice, spit hitting you with the words, ‘You stupid bitch. Don’t take food from strangers. You hear?’

  ‘Sir, Sir,’ the underground worker is intervening, his arm raised towards the man’s arm, ‘Let’s stay calm here.’ And then the man is off and you are left there on the platform, your legs feeling ready to buckle. As the crowd subsides, you see the Chinese couple, waiting.

  ‘She ok?’ the lady asks.

  ‘Yes,’ you say, ‘Yes, she’s fine.’

  ‘So sorry,’ she says. And they both nod at you and walk away down the stairs and finally you find you can move again and you brush off the underground worker and walk down the platform to the stairs heading out of the station to the nearest café you can find, your face full of Amy’s hair now wet with tears, both of you breathing heavily, snatching at life with panic still fluttering in your chests.

  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 aro
und 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 cl
imb 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.