Nicole Kidman stars in: 'The Astronaut Dropped'

Oh yes, I was foolish alright!

I supose it took a hold of me later than I should have expected. I woke up around 4.30 in the morning, unable to breathe.

I could feel it all inside of me. Dust. Dirt. Everything I'd scuffed and kicked-up in moving in and trying to get settled. All the twisted offshoots of the house's indolence gathered and swirled around in some dirty soup, right inside of me, and it all buzzed in my windpipe and my throat like grubby infected little flies!

It was a typical and well-known infiltration and I felt it powerfully. Asthma demanded that I eke out every particle from my system in its own concoction of spew and bile. I felt the sheer keen hatred I possessed for this great sticky net within my lungs, that drags in and traps every toxic grain and then endlessly churns up the great mess of it all. Yes, it heaves that net in a great storm inside, every muscle of my body gradually beginning to know the demands of the fight! I'd known the feel of this kind of obnoxious billowing since I was a little girl. So familiar and so entirely despised!

I sat in the dark watching all these unfamiliar shadows twist and turn, watching every object gradually give up something of its physical shape as morning approached vaguely and with great indifference. Or maybe it seemed to struggle just like me.

After a time, I got up and sat in a chair and tried to fall asleep with my head elevated to stop the bile spilling through me. I stayed in the dark though - my eyes were so tired and raw. As I sat there, dozing, rolling fragments of thought cascaded through my mind. Every thought and feeling rolled from side to side, the struggle driving me between optimism and pessimism and tired old thoughts of my past that I'd thought myself to be long done with.

This new life that I longed for would not be mine without a struggle - maybe countless struggles. But was I up to it?

This thought came over me like an intrusion of someone else's thinking and I raised my head with the sheer force of it. As I did so, something caught my eye in the direction of the closed curtains of my living-room. A blanch of light, gliding across the curtains' fabric but from outside my window. Round and large it coasted - no, ghosted - from one side of the window to the next. When in the centre of the window it stopped momentarily as if momentarily but deeply scrutinising the little moment that is me and my life. I dared not move - physically, I'm not sure I could move! After I watched it disappear, tears came into my eyes. I didn't need them to come out and down my face, because they dripped down inside, down into all the spew and bile in my lungs to join the struggle. I recall grabbing my knees as I sat there on that chair, grabbing and holding on, longing to be the smallest little inconsequential unnoticeable ball!

As fatigue began to take over, my senses too raw and frazzled to gather the strength even to monitor the to-ing and fro-ing of the inner fight, I doubted my own question even as I fell asleep for hours.

That's what it was, a sunny day – and in January, for crying out loud! Ever so sunny, in fact. A trickling breeze, a silvery sheen over everything and, in the air, a vague intuition of warmth like the light touch of a stranger - or a stranger thinking about touching you, perhaps. In short, the day looked great and it felt great too. Out of place and out of season, but these are the times we live in. All disrupted, mangled, tilting gently down to destruction. But, in my mind, the day was pleased with me, happy for me and smiling down and all around. The day itself was like a great, approving, knowing wink in my direction.

Basically, the city of Glasgow had been killing me. A small city in many ways, certainly when you compare it with Phoenix in Arizona, where I grew up. But small can be snug, enveloping and friendly. But that smallness can turn to claustrophobia when your breathing apparatus is as faulty as mine. I’d lived in Glasgow for a year and a half, yet eventually the city seemed to have a pillow over my face and was trying to choke me out of existence. Noxious fumes, double-glazing, bed bugs and carpet bugs, dogs and cats and all other four-legged vermin - the whole caboodle was lining up like murderers on the Orient Express, each set to strike a knife into my lungs. Yes, this US of A girl had great friends in this adopted city, but all around me great enemies too. Asthma has always been a problem for me, but short forays into the countryside – into the sizzling empty deserts of Arizona when I was back home - have always left me feeling that there is space in the world where I’m allowed to breathe; where not every draw-in and draw-out need be a struggle, or taken with inhaled gases in my system to aid me. Cities were killing me; the countryside would save me and allow me to flourish.

So I, Stephanie Fey - born in little old Flagstaff, raised in sprawling Phoenix, then adopted by the Scottish city of Glasgow – took on this great crumbling, down-at-heel, decrepit building called Mordan House that has only three small rooms that are habitable and that lies a 40-minute drive from the nearest town.

Aside from the three useful, frequentable rooms, the rest of the building consists of a wide, dilapidated stairwell covering two upper floors and a couple of rooms in the basement. All the upstairs rooms are wide and high, mostly empty and echoing, even to my breathing it seems. It’s all just endless corridors that I still haven’t quite explored. I think there’s a handful of narrow stairs up on the top floor that lead to an attic – but I haven’t investigated that far, by any means. Also, the house shows all its layers; all its history, all its entrails, are exposed: generations of wallpaper occupy all the rooms, from dim and distant past to quite recent; floorboards and old carpets and scraps of underlay of various antiquity are a bizarre patchwork across the floors; objects covering hundreds of years randomly litter the place like the house has avidly collected memorabilia of its own long life.

But I haven’t really made it clear what I’m doing here at this particular house. I haven’t bought it, but I’m not renting it either. It’s a deal with the owner, Mr McKay. He leased it to the lefty-leaning hippies, and when they disintegrated as a group, he thought it the best time to level the place and build lavish homes. The building is probably unsalvageable in its entirety, but knocked down, levelled and with a new construction on the site of the old, then ramshackle hell could turn to regeneration heaven! So, while McKay gets the engineers and builders in place, I’m looking after it. I don’t have to do anything, just be here for 8 months and let him know if anything occurs that should concern him. Simple-wimple, easy-peasy!

Of course, at the news of my plans city-slicking friends giggled behind their hands and metropolitan family members were aghast behind hands that rubbed their brows. Screw them. They’re not part of me anyway. This is just a land that I frequent, and they’re just people that I sidle up to from time to time. None of it is really me. Same for America and all the cronies I know and am related to there. All of that’s no more a part of me. I feel alienated from that land as much as this one. It’s all just old dust on my shoes, and faces longer engrained in my memory, longer habituated, and therefore a bit longer forgotten. Yes, I’m quite cold that way, and none of that’s knew about me. Look, I knew it was a whacky decision. I knew it was a gamble. Especially for a lipstick-loving, shoe-embracing, shower-twice-a-day gal like me, well-known for her notable and much-admired collection of exotic and intricately-fashioned underwear! But when you feel you’re dying, you lash out in all sorts of ways. Isn’t that true of us all? And I’m only 30 – I should have years and years ahead of me. I think I want to have years and years ahead of me.

But before you think me to be living entirely in a frozen, unlit tomb that creaks and wanes at every movement of mine, and where I mope and frown and indulge in heartless thoughts, think again. The three rooms are, if I say so myself, quite lovely and cosy. Even Philip would approve of them if he were here – if he knew where I was. The rooms are warm, sumptuous, silent - except for the times when I blast out music to my well-oxygenated heart’s content! – and a haven away from the coal-black, visored face that floats through these premises at night. And something in me is happy here. For the most part. It’s the rest of the house that feels the cold and, I suspect, generates the cold too.

And, of course, the sun is still there in the day. Most days. Praise God for that! Insanity would have drawn me into its dark hole long before now if it wasn’t for that. It’s only at night that things get cold – cold like space – and the dead heavens arise in my corridors and the gloved hands of the astronaut seek me out. So the world gets warmer as it tilts towards destruction. Consoling us and duping us.

So what of my first encounter with him? I should, I guess, say something about that.