FULL OF SCORPIONS IS MY MIND

The day might be beautiful, but the night is ugly—a new terror, inhabited by evil spirits, phantoms, corpses, the worst of man’s imaginings.

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(Picture, Eating Spider People by Zdzislaw Beksinski)

A young girl from the country is to come and stay in London with an older, disabled suffering from night terrors. Her job is to sleep on the sofa at the end of his bed and to be there if he requires a glass of water, some tranquillisers, or, as a last resort, an ambulance.

The girl is nineteen, shy, and barely speaks. But she has worked in a care home, and her mother is an experienced nurse. The granddaughter of the older man’s cousin, she has never met him before, and he barely knew she existed. But for the next few nights, she will be watching over him, as the man’s wife is away.

At two in the morning, she is woken abruptly by his screams and tends to him with a wet towel, water, and calming medication. He is dreaming, as he does most nights, that he has been returned to his childhood home, now a bombed-out, burned wreck from which he is unable to escape. This, he understands, is his body, where he is now trapped.

The day might be beautiful, but the night is ugly—a new terror, inhabited by evil spirits, phantoms, corpses, the worst of man’s imaginings. Being alive at all is dangerous, if not horrifying, and the body remembers what the mind can’t bear. It’s amazing that anyone gets a good night’s sleep. Nothing ever goes smoothly with the three devils of sex, eating, and sleeping. Who can do all three without angst, misstep, or shame?