Nicole Kidman stars in: 'The Astronaut Dropped'

64. My Turn Now

2008-06-24T11:00:59+00:00

I couldn’t sleep.

“You can’t sleep, can you?”

“No! I can’t sleep! Who the hell are you anyway?”

“Sleeplessness.”

“Oh, right. Hi. Great! That’s all I need: another imaginary pain in the arse! Here’s an idea: sod off! Some of us are trying to sleep around here!”

“Yes, I’m imaginary alright! No getting away from that one! So, what are you thinking about?”

“Stupid question! We won’t get on too well if you don’t get smart! After all, you’re the only person paying attention. Who else is listening around here, if not you?”

“What are you thinking about?”

“If you must know – although I know you already know and you’re just trying to make sure that I stay awake! – then I’m thinking about being unable to sleep, about being alone, about the entire town knowing I’m crazy and that I see things, about the whole town knowing I’m easy, about being a stalker and about the fear I put in others and all because I was lost inside and tried to hold on to a myth of my own making, about my bloody interfering mum, about being a little girl in Flagstaff and how simple life was, about my brother (wherever he is!), Lizzie (wherever she is!), and about where I’m going to go from here, and about James and why I feel nothing towards him right now, when for so long I was feeling such intensity! Oh, and about Kidman – and how much I thought I loved her when all I loved was who I desperately want to be! And I’m thinking about the fact that I can’t sleep, when I feel so achingly tired! So desperately tired! Oh, did I mention that already? Anyway. That do for you?”

“Thanks. Listen. I’ll let go if you will.”

“Let go? Of what? Hey, you implying I’m touching myself? Now you listen, some girls do and some girls don’t! This girl don’t!”

“All that stuff you’re thinking about. I’ll let go if you will.”

My head was reverberating. I had that momentary disjointed feeling when you think that your mind has just slipped slightly out of your head – it happens just before you fall asleep. That slight inner slide of different properties. I felt it and something inside said "yes" to sleeplessness and we both let go together. Delicious and, because I was so tired, slightly painful too, like hands were roughly dragging me down into sleep.

Then a new disjointed feeling. At some point I woke up and looked around me at the dark shadows of the room. I was awake, and yet something made me feel that I wasn’t awake. There must have been a full moon outside as I could see the outline of things in the room. But something was different. All the shadows looked different – something about the perspective was odd. Also, my body felt different. Light. Unbound. Severed in some way. Disjointed in some way, yes. Then my hand moved…

63. The Loneliness of Lovelessness

2008-06-09T08:34:44+00:00

Loneliness is that little bit of you that looks out at the world and sees a lack of connection; lovelessness is that bit of you that looks down into the heart of you and sees a lack of connection with the world in all that you are.

Is this what I’m experiencing right now? The loneliness of lovelessness?

I walked. My head empty, aside from images that flitted at the edges of my mind but never really made themselves present. Images of things that had happened. Over these months. Over the years. Flashing by like advertising hoardings. All peripheral. Nothing really felt, but all taken in and understood on some level. My head simply looking at the road ahead. Empty. Everything oh so peripheral. Now, I couldn’t even say what those images were, or rather, my mind won’t go there, it won’t seize any of them, it will only summarise for me in a curt and vague fashion.

If loneliness is apt to simper, then lovelessness screams. And here are my screams. What is this life of mine, my screams wonder? What has it been? What is it now? And where is it going? It all just seems like pockets of effort placed in so many different directions, all turning out to be useless, worthless. Every route has rejected me or I have rejected it. Only for me to turn round and find myself facing a route that seems even more alien, even more unlikely. Alongside it all, there’s the sense that everything is wrong. That I’m so far away from where I want to be. And that no direction takes me any closer. That I’m lost. That I’m in a maze. Impetuous feeling, or ill-considered impulses, all based upon some slight thing, or else some gaping nothing, driving me on to greater losses and a greater sense of loss. Those blasted billboards! Everywhere in life! Every route I take just another superficial advert, drawing me in, only for me to find that there’s nothing at the heart of them but deception and empty promises. Even the sense of loss inside of me seems lost. I don’t even know if I can trust how that feels! Although I know I can’t get rid of it. Maybe I’m not lost, maybe I’m found, maybe I’m right where I want to, right where I should be, but I just don’t know it! Sweet holy bejesus! What a head-fuck that would be! What a head-fuck it is! So I can’t even create paragraphs. That would imply structure. How do I structure my sense of loss? How does a maze look on paper, when you’re still stuck in it?

The great aching taunt of it all is that I know, deep down, in my very heart, that all I want is one thing. For someone to direct their love towards me and for me to direct mine back at them. I don’t want my headlights to see empty adverts that merely flash by; I…

62. A Rat Loose in the Corridors

2008-06-05T13:42:57+00:00

I’m an accident. Lord, how I blunder around! I wonder sometimes what drives me. What is it that drives me into the disasters that populate my life?

There must be something in me that’s – what’s the right word? – lateral? angular? skewed? bevelled? lurching? Something that kinks every decision I make as it turns from thought to reality, so everything I try to shape comes out all crooked and bashed and basically unusable. Sometimes just subtly so. Other times my disasters feel grotesque in size, unwieldy obelisks in my arms.

As I walked towards the café, I was taken with all the movements of life around me, all unpredictable and surging, and all just that little bit ahead in time, compared with how I sensed time in my own head. So many different directions, so many speeds and inclinations, so many attitudes and stances – the look and feel of people can be so overwhelming when you’ve spent times away from them; they can seem so trapped in patterns, yet so forceful as they commit to those trapped little patterns. A woman pushed a buggy while her baby tried to throw things out onto the pavement, a boy looked at me and smiled as he floated across the road in a slow-mo manner, an old man paced the kerb waiting for something and when he saw me he pointed up at the sky and winked. Yep, they had some strange patterns in this town, and some strange inclinations! But what was my pattern? To me, it stuttered. It was a broken line, something of disparate colours, something started but without clear direction. To others? Who knows! Perhaps something lateral, angular, skewed, bevelled or lurching? Yeah, any of those would be just about right!

Maybe this had happened before, but when I entered the café I was momentarily the centre of attention. The café wasn’t very busy, so perhaps that was why I was conspicuous when I entered. One of the seats had Mrs Ormsley there with an older man and a small girl. I didn’t see her notice me, but what I did see was that her face looked downward and she looked slightly embarrassed. Was that something to do with me? Well, no reason for me to think that it was. Unless, of course, she knew about my night spent with James? Could she know? Surely he wouldn’t tell her? Why, in fact, would he tell anyone? I ordered from the counter and the waitress behind it – one I had seen several times before – seemed to be sniggering, and when not sniggering she seemed to have a rueful smile on her face. Yes, when other people moved, time seemed one step ahead of me. In this instance, there was a joke that I wasn’t aware of. “A nice pot of tea, is it?” the waitress said. “That should stop you from feeling spaced out!” Spaced out? Odd choice of words! But this is an odd town,…

61. Lizzie Says Oestrogen Is Airborne

2008-05-13T10:49:47+00:00

Lizzie says oestrogen is airborne. Then she follows up this statement with an explanation of the distaste this fills her with by writing an onomatopoeic word that contains around 25 consonants, about three vowels and a platoon of belligerent exclamation marks so long and angry-looking that they could probably successfully invade Russia, armed with nothing but one explosive-looking dot each. Yes, Lizzie would be pleased to know that her expression of emphasis has not been lost on me.

She announces this information to me in a letter. The first in a while actually.

But once again the postman turned-up, delivered his letters and disappeared again without me hearing a car engine or a hint on gravel! How does he do that? Pigeon post? If I’d heard him arrive I’d have asked him to take me to the neighbouring town so I could get my car. I’ve been here five days now and I’m getting a bit low on food. Well, wine! Well, wine and cheese biscuits actually! Well, okay, wine, cheese biscuits and toffee swirls! Things are really getting desperate here!

Anyway, Lizzie says that five of our friends have announced that they’re pregnant in just the last month. Whenever she writes the word ‘pregnant’ she puts it in italics – pregnant – it makes prenatal motherhood appear like some bug that’s doing the rounds, or some highly unsalubrious job somewhere beneath prostituting, toilet-cleaning and voluntary charity work. A couple of these pregnant friends - she says - were doing that naff waiting nonsense and mumbling about getting through the initial stages to the ‘safe period’ – Lizzie speculates that this makes no sense, that surely having your period is when you actually know it’s safe! Then – she says – these pregnant women would whitter on about how difficult it was ‘to keep it all quiet and only tell a handful of around 50-odd close family, friends and work colleagues’, while others – she said - just blurted it out ‘before the semen was even dry’, as she put it, and then they said that they shouldn’t really be saying anything, yet with no hint of regret just relish, and that they should really be waiting until the ‘safe period’ - even though they’d just copulated the night before, they said they just ‘felt different’, that they ‘just knew they were, well, you know …’. Lizzie says that she would complete the sentence for them. ‘Pregnant?’ Lizzie would ask, with a mixture of disgust and abhorrence. So, Lizzie says she needs to get away from the city just in order to avoid the high levels of oestrogen in the air – she says there’s a hormone monitor on Hope Street and it’s been in the red for weeks! Soon she’ll be in the sun again, I muse. The south of France, the south of Spain. Lizzie loves going south. Ask any man. In all this rambling, she fails to tell me which of our friends has fallen pregnant. Not…

60. Breaking a Promise – Part Two

2008-06-10T14:51:45+00:00

I shouldn’t be communicating with anyone at all - that was the promise I made to myself when I moved into this house. And it was a promise I made for my own good.

No technology meant no temptations. No TV and DVD player meant I couldn’t watch old Kidman movies or hear news of her. I couldn’t feed my obsession with information. No telephone meant I couldn’t make unwanted calls to her agent. Being out in the wilderness was to keep me away from the mainstream media and the general gossiping conversation which is the staple diet of cities. All would play their part in ensuring that I didn’t infringe my court order. If I infringed then the stakes for me would be high. Next court appearance would see me end up in jail.

Jail! I remember the words being said to me in court. I was amazed at the sound of them! For them to be directed at me! The shock! The shame! How had it all come to this? What had I been thinking? What had I been doing? How could I have sunk so low? How could it all have gone so wrong that I was on the verge of being locked away for the good of another? Who had I become?

The internet connection in Mordan House was a gamble though. A security blanket, of sorts, yes – like I said at the start of this blog, just in case I needed to find out what was going on in the outside world. But I was always worried about having it, lest I should exploit it by using it to try and contact her.

I haven’t though! Really I haven’t! This blog has been everything! Believe me!

Wasn’t it Lotte Lakeside who asked me in one of her comments on this blog why I hadn’t let my best friend Dizzy Lizzie email me? Why she had to go through the rigmarole of sending physical letters when I could send her an email address? You see, I couldn’t let Lizzie know I was connected to the internet! She would have worried. I’m not sure she would have trusted me to keep from contacting Kidman.

Kidman? Well, Nicole. She had always been Nicole to me before Mordan House. Only the Imaginary Kidman was called Kidman. But, really, Nicole had never existed. There was a space inside of me, a vacuum, and her shape seemed to fit it. What a deception for us both! No, she never fitted that empty space. I cajoled and kneaded the properties and the idea of Kidman into such a shape that it seemed to fit. I jammed it into the space as best I could. And it was Nicole Kidman – the real Nicole Kidman! – who suffered as a consequence. She felt the physical and emotional pain of my trying to make her fit the shape of my needs.

The real Nicole Kidman? Even as I type the words I wonder…

59. Kidman’s Gift – Part Six

2008-06-10T14:50:27+00:00

I sneaked out of the bed and away from him. After all, who was he? What did I know of him? He was a stranger, lying large and heavy and heaving with unknown life, right there beside me, and I had to get away from him.

My mouth was horribly dry and distasteful, my stomach queasy, and my head felt bruised inside. How much exactly did I drink? I had absolutely no idea!

But that was not the question that I really needed an answer to. That was not why I had to get out of bed. Yes, I needed to get away from this ‘James’ person, but I also had something else to do. I threw a dressing gown on and a pair of slippers and went out of my suite of rooms and into the main hallway of Mordan House. I looked everywhere, it seemed. Everywhere logical, at least. No sign. Then I glanced out of a window to the front of the house. There she was: close to the trees on the other side of the driveway. Kidman.

I walked over to her, my arms folded, not indignantly but self-consciously, only just holding together the great fragility I felt inside. Soon, I was standing behind her and she stayed with her back to me.

“How could you do that? Why did I let you do that? That was my moment. My moment to be me. And it became your moment. It shouldn’t have been your moment. How could you do it to me.”

I said the words in a slow and measured manner. The emotion in my voice was restrained. The words were conceived and executed so as to get an answer, not a response.

But Kidman responded and answered in a way I had not anticipated. She spun round so quick that I found myself stepping back. Her voice had that sing-song quality that it took on from time to time, jovial, but laced with sparks that could ignite at any moment. In her eyes, something demonic smouldered.

“Well, what exactly could I do? When I entered the room, there it was, extended like a pirate’s plank – he wanted action, and action was what he needed from you. But you weren’t exactly going to give it to him, Steph, were you? No man wants to be screwed as if he’s in a Walt Doesn’t film …"

“Doesn’t? Oh, yes. Disney.” Disney. This threw me. She’d mentioned this to me when she first appeared. As a homage to the Scots using ‘disnae’ to say ‘doesn’t’, she would refer to Walt Disney as Walt Doesn’t. It put me on the back-foot though, and I felt my mind was racing to catch-up with what she was saying.

“… and did I feel like a hungry shark as I circled below that plank waiting for food! Here’s what we did in bed, Steph. Listen, you’ll like this. I started off by giving him a minky, but it went a…

58. Kidman’s Gift – Part Five

2008-05-12T12:20:30+00:00

I don’t know when, but at some point I’m sure that a white light ghosted by on the other side of the window behind me.

Who does it seek out, this dead, dropped presence? And what does it want from what it seeks? Do other similar dead presences haunt this world, haunting the night skies above our heads? When we’re not fully aware of this world and when our senses are dulled? That sheen of light that we sense behind us as we walk in the dark – is it a streetlight, a headlight, a light from a window? Or is it a dead aura, a hanging presence in the sky above, just glimpsed between those buildings, momentarily glimpsed between those trees, vaguely detected far off in the distance just to one side of that church’s steeple? And there, on the opposite side of the sky from where the sun is setting, suspended above that roof? Or there, just above that hill? Could that be a human form, shining white, but with a black face that reveals no form, no detail, no soul? And why does it just hang there? Is it looking at you? Could it be looking at you? What does it want? Is it moving? Did it move just then?

As I sat there on the floor, I could see such dead apparitions all across the world, everywhere drawn to emptiness. Smelling it out and hanging above it in the night, staring coldly and blankly, and drawing it all into itself. The cash machine mugging with its vicious threats and its drawn weapons. The gang consuming pills and booze on the street as they watch with avarice the women walking by. The man sitting in his flat, hands rung-out and brow tight, staring at the names of all the people who have wronged him. The bombers pulling their ingredients together in-between prayers to the elevated image of their own reflected hatred. The family friend manipulating language and action to sexually destroy another’s soul. The one car speeding through its second red light, the one driver intent on suicide, empty of any thought for others: “I am all that matters,” he thinks, “I am all that matters”. The woman thinking of that moment and that day and how to fill them up, how to enact something physical within them, while the future lies dead at her feet, and while everything inside echoes dull and hollow. The buying and selling and hoarding, the buying and selling and returning and exchanging, the buying and selling and throwing away and buying again. The knowledge of things, of bits, of stuff, of nonsense. The gun. The invasion. The rhetoric. The locked door. The overflowing bin. The acerbic lie. The empty fatness and the empty thinness. The empty muscle. The empty face. The dead hands. All of it. All of it the dead ghost-men hang over and feast on, ingesting ever more deadness.

What do they want, these dead, dropped presences? What we…

57. Kidman's Gift - Part Four

2008-06-11T10:31:38+00:00

Where was Kidman?

Where was she, in amongst the time it took to drive to Mordan House and within the endless beck and call of conversation between me and James, and the sweep of stuff and nonsense that moved so quickly by the car windows? Where was she as we arrived at the house and I found James walking me to the front door? Where was the sound of her feet under the crunch-crunch of our two pairs of feet on the gravel? What space and time did we leave for her to enter the house before we closed the door behind us, and, if time and space enough were left there, then did she use them effectively? And if she did indeed follow us in, then where was she as we moved into my suite of rooms? Did she sneak in there too as that door was closed behind us also? Where was she when he kissed me? Where was she when I let him? Where was she when I kissed him back? Where was she when every pore of my skin opened for the sunlight of another’s touch? Where was she when two forces, unique and separate, succumbed to the allure of dropping weapons, removing armour, and allowing all the particles of each other to get mixed-up forever, never to form quite the same two individual people again once they had finally regrouped? Where was her red hair when my red hair so completely nourished the needs of a man’s mouth and governed the movements of his fingers? Yes, where was Kidman? To each other we were both made of just water and mouths, drinking with amazement at each other’s generosity, all the while a hot desert lay around us spurring us on with its threats of drought. But where was my own giver of liquid, my refreshment, my sustenance? Kidman. Where was her body when my body felt a lightning conductor of hardness electrifying it, a dichotomy in amongst all the subtleties and softness? Where was she when my muscles flinched, creating another hardness, but this one of resistance, and where was she when I realised that my sudden tension indicated that I needed a breather?

I was aware of myself pulling away from James and the bed, and frivolously pressing down my hair as I stumbled for the door of the bathroom, but I don’t remember seeing Kidman. Yet I felt her to be somewhere, but I just couldn’t quite see her. Where was she?

I closed the bathroom door and gripped the wash-hand basin tightly, breathing hard as I looked into the mirror above it and into my own face. At the very least, it bore some startling similarities to the face I held in my mind’s eye. But so markedly different in some respects too: my face looked so loose upon my bones, like an ill-fitting rubber mask containing great ghost-holes of eyes, haunted caverns with the most pathetic pool of dirty water way…

56. Kidman’s Gift – Part Three

2008-05-01T11:22:08+00:00

The ‘battle’ started with, of all things, a handshake.

Now, on the surface, this would seem so formal as to be irritating to any woman who was encountering the man who sends her pretty wild, as James does to me. But, under the circumstances – remembering my stupidity when he’d visited Mordan House, and remembering how offended he’d been – a handshake was almost a romantic gesture. Certainly, to the outside viewer, it would definitely have appeared peacemaking, even if they couldn’t buy into all the romance malarkey!

The image of James was swimming slightly in my vision, floating on a gentle sea, so much so that I couldn’t quite focus on him. Alcohol was deadening every nerve ending, making them all jarred and unsure of themselves. I could imagine them squabbling for ‘first rights’ on what reality actually meant and what it looked like. And there was me, in the middle of it all, just wanting some little thing that I could be sure of and my senses and intellect were giving me nothing!

There were words spoken between us, yet I can’t remember any of them. The words didn’t seem important – it seemed more important that words were being exchanged and how they were being exchanged: kindly, sensitively, and in a conciliatory fashion. James was a blur of darkness and light: darkly tumbling hair and white skin gently rocking in my vision as he spoke. Yet one thing that I couldn’t deny was the sense that was beyond what my corrupted body was able to detect, and that was that I felt something warm from him. There was something right up against me, close and familiar, in his words and presence.

I recall little droplets of words. Something about getting home. Something about my car. Something about alcohol. Then a look in his eye – a split-second of look, and one of the few that my mind was able to capture, process and hold onto. I’m not sure what it said, but it was focused and complete like a ball. There was something in it that I liked, but, at the same time, made me shiver slightly.

Then I was walking and I think there was a flutter of hand on my arm as we walked towards his car. James was going to give me a lift back to Mordan House. I’d be in his car. I’d be in his company. He’d be in my house.

I’m sure that I glanced behind me at some point to see if I could see Kidman. Was there a hint of her dress somewhere in the distance, in the dark, ghosting our steps? I can’t be sure that this was the case.

Did I feel her presence though? That unmistakeable essence of Kidman, that fire, that bravura, that steeliness, that gentleness? Yes. Completely. All the time.

Want to read more? Read the whole story by clicking on the first blog called Prelude and start clicking forwards using the tabs above…

55. Kidman’s Gift – Part Two

2008-04-30T19:21:05+00:00

The noise of the bar bombarded me as we entered the main door. After so much quiet living in Mordan House for nearly four months, after the silence of the town library, even the genteel rise and fall of voices in any of the town’s cafes, a bar full of people and music felt like being dropped from a helicopter into a war zone.

Voices scrambled around as if for dear life, and struggled with each other in noise-to-noise combat. It was a colossal war of sound and I almost held my ears at every aural explosion that sounded around me. Kidman just smiled, wiggled as she walked and bounced on her heels slightly as we pushed our way through the people and towards the bar. It was then that I realised how terrified I was, how much I wanted to turn tail and run, taking the consequences for desertion; willing to face the firing squad rather than endure this.

So, what kept me there? Kidman’s hand. Her hand was holding mine and guiding me through the people – if not for this, I’d have been in a corner of the bar already, knees tucked-up, body shaking, thumb in mouth, and with, probably, the distinct scent of urine emanating from a leak in the lady cupboard. Kidman, man, Kidman! She was getting me through this, as best she could. And I was holding on, as if she were a rifle or a shield, or a locket containing the hair of a loved one.

We reached the bar and Kidman nudged me to get the barmaid’s attention. Kidman looked at my face and I saw her recognise the fear that was there. She grinned falsely, but as a different kind of nudge to get me to smile, even if I didn’t feel a smile anywhere inside me. So I did. It felt horrible, like lobbing a grenade into the crowd.

Before I even had the chance to try and get the barmaid’s attention I heard her voice and looked up with surprise. She was looking at me. She saw me! I was curiously amazed at being noticed, at my absolute visibility in such a place of visual violence, and I swallowed and tried to remember how to speak.

Kidman said: “Bourbon. And water. A stiff double too, so hit me.”

“Uh, one double bourbon and water, please.” Bourbon? Where did that come from? When had I last been in the States and ordered Bourbon? “Or whiskey, I should say. And a glass of red wine.”

I did it! What a sigh came out of me, but what a jangle was still going on at the same time! Shell-shock is a terrible thing: one minute you’re all laughter and confidence, then some totally thoughtless prick slams down a paperclip and you’re suddenly behind the sofa playing with your bottom-lip! Yes, the barmaid cocked her head slightly when I mentioned the bourbon, and there was a degree of choosing of wine and whiskey…