Nicole Kidman stars in: 'The Astronaut Dropped'

It was two days later when I left the hospital, and when I did nurse McKay looked at me the way she did when I used the laptop computer: as if I was a bit of technology with a glitch in it that she couldn’t quite fathom. But I saw that look as if it was far away and behind Perspex.

I would love to be able to tell you how I was thinking at this time, but I’m not sure what element of me was in control of my movements. If I knew, then I would ask that part of me to sit down at this laptop in Mordan House and write for me. I was aware of some part of me deciding that it was time to leave the hospital. Also, I was aware of thinking that Mordan House is where I would return – and this was nothing to do with the fact that I had a kind of contract to look after the place; I wasn’t aware of feeling any obligation to that role and responsibility. One thing I can own up to feeling was a kind of calmness inside, a sort of light-headedness too. And this seemed to be carrying me along somehow. This inner sense seemed to be surveying all these little decisions and felt at ease with everything that was happening. It was as if it was aware of a gentle centre and it was conscious of retaining that centre even as events around me changed. It never lost balance and it never became contaminated by feelings and impressions around me. It floated and retained all its attributes and its shape, no matter what it came into contact with. As keenly as it watched events around me, I watched it. In a sense, it was the essence of my recuperation and I needed it to be strong and calm; I needed it to stay true no matter how things changed around me. And it did. But still, the element of me that was making those actual decisions and carrying them out eluded me.

So, it brought me to here – and the simple cloud inside me surveyed all and was comfortable with it. Even being back in Mordan House things seemed fine. The house looked distant around me – not so up-close and pressed up against me. Even at night I still felt the presence of the house – that well-known presence of death, dereliction and of ever-present, ever-alive damage – but it didn’t touch me. It hovered close-by. It pushed against some force-field that it couldn’t get through. In all the time I had been in this house its presence had owned and buffeted me. And now my head was above the dark liquid of its vacuum. I was a person in this house and not a person owned by this house.

Having said all of this, I spent a great deal of time outside of the house, walking mostly up and down the Clansman – the near-by mountain that I had dubbed the ‘Clansman’ due to knowing no other name for it. Being summer-time now, most of the days since I got back have been sunny and dry. There’s been the odd day of deluge or of intermittent spits of rain, yet I can deal with those. You learn to do just that when living in Scotland.

In fact, the first day I got back here from the hospital I dropped my bags in the hallway of the house, closed the door and went straight for a walk. Noticing that my car – yes, remember I left it dented against a tree? – was in the driveway, headlamp fixed and shape all straightened. Lizzie, of course.

And it’s been like that ever since. Convalescing is a time of looking at flowers and their proud open faces, their tall stems, the way breezes shape and inspire them; while inside, the convalescent nurtures broken stems, frayed and closed petals, and worries at the wind damaging their already haggard, feeble face. So it has been for me. I look at the world around me, and I slowly, slowly hope and allow myself to be more like the natural objects of this world.

Yet it’s not that there are entirely no hang-ups from the past. I have found that I avoid the nearby town. Instead I drive an extra forty minutes to another town where I get the provisions that I need. I can’t even tell you why I avoid the town. Of course, they have judged me and laughed at me, but I don’t really feel anything very much towards that. Not at this time anyway. Yet whenever I find that I need to get some shopping I find myself avoiding the place.

So, I can’t tell you how I got here to this place both inside and outside, but this is where I am.

It might be useful to mention also that on the first day when I got back here I noticed a telephone plugged in to a socket in the hallway. Also, in my suite of rooms there was a portable television. Lizzie had put them there, obviously. I saw them and they looked curious to me - oddly dead, but with this potential to be alive. Is that me, right now? Am I plugged in and capable of so much, but I just haven’t been switched on yet to realise what I was made for? I can’t say. I can’t even tell you what I thought of the telephone and television when I saw them – especially after having lived so long without them. No, I really couldn’t even begin to tell you.

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

Convalescing is a time of looking at flowers and their proud open faces, their tall stems, the way breezes shape and inspire them; while inside, the convalescent nurtures broken stems, frayed and closed petals, and worries at the wind damaging their already haggard, feeble face. So it has been for me. I look at the world around me, and I slowly, slowly endeavour to be more like the natural objects of this world.

No. Endeavour is too strong a word – there’s too much effort implied by it. I plan? No. I attempt? No, still effort involved. There’s no effort in me that I’m really aware of. I hope and I allow. Yes, I hope and allow. I mostly fail. But, for humans, becoming natural is a life-long pursuit – not just something that you do for a month or so after an asthma-attack that hospitalizes you. 

That night – the night of no gravity and the astronaut’s invasion of my home - Lizzie did the right thing and used her mobile phone to call for an ambulance – “I did the right thing!” she exclaimed with girlish glee when she told me what she’d done. That night of my full-blown asthma attack, Lizzie also found my inhaler and tried to squeeze it into my mouth, pressing down on the trigger to try and get some of the chemical into my system – “I used the entire canister!” she exclaimed and then chewed her bottom lip with worry.

They are probably the first things that I remember being said to me after I came round in the hospital. Although I had come round several times before then, I didn’t remember doing so. Apparently I slept for a week and all I vaguely recall are the occasional blur of faces moving round my bed in those fitful awake states. Who were they? Hospital staff? Lizzie? Both I guess. That’s if they are real recollections at all! I mention them at the same time as roundly doubting them.

I had been exhausted for so long. I see that now. My brain had been bulging frantically with thought, clamouring noises and congested feelings all colliding inside me, so much emotional and psychological pounding going on - oh, for I really don’t know how long. Since the time things started to go wrong with Philip? Certainly from the time when things did indeed go wrong with Philip. And all growing through my obsession with Kidman – poor, poor Kidman! – and this house, this damned house that I’ve returned to. I’m better here though. Now that I look back I see how much I was trying to climb over a wave of feeling that was desperately trying to drag me down. What a battle inside! Eventually, what a defeat for me, too! I thought I was holding it together, but something inside needed to feel that way – even in the face of the opposing forces rising up against me. What else could I do? The urge to survive was strong, but the damage inside was stronger. That’s all clear as crystal to me now.

I suppose I need to tell you what has happened over the last month or so. It’s been so long since I last wrote an entry. The last entry I wrote soon after regaining consciousness. I convinced a nurse to give me access to a laptop for a few days. She was nervous about it. she could see I wasn’t fit enough for it, but I had to write about what had happened. I had to tell myself and anyone out there about Lizzie seeing the astronaut! About it all being true! True! When it was completed – all without Lizzie finding out – I made my first expedition from my hospital bed to post-up the entry with nurse McKay assisting. After that, she grew stern and obdurate: “No more writing until I was strong enough!” She had no idea what I was writing, but she didn’t like the idea of it all the same! Some of you may be thinking: “Hey, hold on, so why you writing again? That’s a backward step, huh!” Yeah? You think so? Well, shut your damned mouth you piece of reader shit! That’s what I say. But I also say: perhaps you’re right, perhaps you really are, oh dear and lovely, considerate reader of mine.

But, you see, things have changed since that last entry – spectacularly changed, I should say! - and I need to tell you how.

One conversation between me and Lizzie will answer a lot of it, so let me wind back to a few days after I’d regained consciousness and after I’d posted-up my last entry. I was starting to get a little bit of strength back and I could pull myself over to the chair in my hospital room with some ease, and I would sit there and start to imagine being normal again. A key part of recovery: imagining stages that are ahead of you and starting to move towards them. Lizzie came in and she was delighted to see me sitting up and out of bed. After, of course, pretending that she didn’t see me!

“No, no, it can’t be true! Stephanie Fey dead? Why didn’t the nurse tell me, instead of letting me walk in here to find the bed empty? What have they done with my friend? I need to see her rotting, stinking corpse in order to say goodbye to the stupid bitch! I really do! Until I smell her dead old bod I’ll never feel that I’ve said farewell to the dunder-headed idiot! And she seemed to be getting better too! She seemed stronger. She seemed to be recovering. Oh, it’s oh so cruel! Cruel, I tell you!”

“Yes, Lizzie. Okay. Ha ha,” I drawled.

Then she looked over at me in the chair. “Ah, there you are! Not dead? Bummer!”
She sat on the edge of the bed and we talked about how I was feeling and a number of forgettable, pleasant nothing-very-muches.

Then I said what had been on my mind since the moment I opened my eyes. I had wanted to ask her this for days, but I had no courage to confront it. Now, I did: “Before I passed out in Mordan House. You mentioned something to me. aAbout something you saw above the trees. You remember?”

“Oh, yes. That. Kids! What pricks!”

“Kids? What do you mean? What exactly did you see? You said you saw an astronaut. A shining astronaut? Wasn’t that how you described it?”

“It was late at night. I didn’t know what I was seeing, of course. I saw it though when I went back to Morbid House to get some women’s things for you. Right there, it was. Waving in the breeze.” And she waved her arms around like children when they pretend to be the wind in school plays.

“What?” I asked suspiciously, now dreading what it was she was going to say. “What did you see?”

“Of course, at the time it looked like an astronaut or something. But I could see what it really was!

There was an uncomfortable moment. Lizzie looked away as if she knew what I was thinking. I wondered for a moment if she did know. I looked away too. Then Lizzie said: “A balloon thing. It was a balloon. You remember those Michelin man things – those big inflatable white figures that advertised those tyres? One of them had been attached to a tree outside of your house. It was a prank. I’m sorry. I hated having to tell you, but I wasn’t sure if you remembered what I said that night. I hoped you hadn’t.”

I said nothing. Had I survived in order to get here? In the hope that it was actually all real? And not just a disturbed, damaged imagination? Only to find this. I felt sick. Totally and unforgettably sick. So sick that I almost did feel like throwing-up. I must have changed colour because she put one hand on my hand and with the other she played with the corners of the bed.

“Listen,” she said. “I’ve been to the local town out your way. What’s it called? Monck? Ponck?” I shook my head. “Anyway, I’ve spoken to a couple of people there. And I know a little bit about what’s been going on. It was a just a daft prank. Some of the children had heard what was being said about that house and what you were seeing there. Hell, it’s just what was being said – I mean, how important is that! Only you can know the truth! The local garage had one of those balloons left over from years back and they put it there as a laugh. Ha ha, huh!”

The truth? So she thought I would know. Me? Huh! That’s a laugh! Isn’t it, reader? What a bleedin’ giggle! Funny girl, this Dizzy Lizzie, funny girl!

Funny also that I suspect that it was this thought of the astronaut being real and another person having seen it that sustained me to this point, that allowed me to get the rest, the internal healing, that I needed. And where had it got me to? Another point arrived at of pointlessness, that’s where! Another joke of life! The astronaut that Lizzie had seen had just been a shiny white balloon from an old advertising campaign from years ago!
She saw the look on my face – although I can only presume what it was: despair, blankness? In response to whatever that look was, she scowled at me and kicked one of the legs of my chair.

“Screw it! Screw the bleedin’ lot of it!” she said in a typically fiery and hardship-slugging way. That was Lizzie: she slugged hardship; hardship always doubled-up at one of her slugs. She knew where to hit hardship so that it hurt.

“I want you to read something,” I said. She cocked her head at me like a little bird in a tree that has just heard a curious sound. “Read?” Yes, it was the thought of reading that made her cock her head, much more than the thought of what it was I wanted her to read. Reading was not quite Lizzie’s thing. So I told her about my website, my blog from a haunted house: Nicole Kidman stars in ‘The Astronaut Dropped’. I kept the details of it to myself and just told her where to find it and to read it. She bit her lip and fiddled with her hands. It was a challenge for her, I knew.

It was a challenge for me, also. To let Lizzie read my innermost thoughts and delusions. But she had been there at the height of my traumas over Philip and over Kidman – surely she could handle it! Or would she think that I had gone so far that I was beyond saving? Was it different to think of it all on the outside? But to see it all from the inside, would that be too much for her?

My answer came slowly, but also rather quickly in a way. It was a week before I saw Lizzie again and then I bumped into her by accident.

You may wonder why I don’t seem more downbeat about all of this? About Lizzie disappearing after reading this blog? About the astronaut again becoming a self-evident delusion of mine? Because so much has happened since I started to convalesce. So much that has meant that I need to start writing again. What’s the most important thing that has happened that I can tease you with? What, what, what? Yes, probably that: the man who has fallen in love with me. That’s probably the most important thing. I’m loved! And I’m going to tell you all about how it happened!

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