Nicole Kidman stars in: 'The Astronaut Dropped'

I mean, I’m just me. I’m just nothing very much. But I’m nothing bad. I shouldn’t get all of this. I don’t deserve any of it. Do I? I know what it feels like to be me and it doesn’t cause anyone any harm. It’s just stuff and nonsense and gobbledegook and mess, but that’s where it ends. There isn’t really anything much in me that gnarls and bites or lashes out or schemes or any of that horrid old stuff that people seem to be full of.

And I’m out of time and out of place and I shouldn’t be in any of these places, or any of these circumstances. Yet, damn it, here I am! This isn’t my home. I also know that that place over the sea isn’t my home. I don’t know where it is.

I suppose it’s in here, in these words – but this is all askew and screwed-up and nothing that anyone can relate to or understand. Even to me it seems confused and out of step with everything around me. It seems so right but so utterly wrong at the same time. Identity. God, life’s so much easier if you don’t want one, or have much of one! If you just want to fit-in and not stand-out. But if you want to be yourself then that’s all you’ll find. Find yourself and all you’ll find is you, and you’ll hear every thought echoing down through the great caverns inside of you. Once it’s there, you’ll never fill it in, never forget it or step away from it. The world will always look far away and people will always sound dim and distant, and every time they speak you’ll find yourself stretching to hear and to understand. And there will always be an echo to every thought and every feeling and every hope and every intention.

All I want is someone with some vision for me, some belief in me, and some desire at least for some belief in themselves. Damn this stinking 21st century world with its lack of anything! What does it have? Bits of this and that, all fragmented and unrelated, all distracting and bombarding but without any meaning.

So I’m here. And all I feel absolutely heightened is my loneliness.

Why would Philip do that to me? Why would he?

Look at those trees out there in the dark and the way they take everything that every climate has to throw at them. They stand firm, they waver but they don’t fall.

Stand firm, Stephanie, stand firm. The wind can’t blow forever, can it?

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. 

I remember running. Out in the woods around this house, the sunshine flashing and flickering through the trees, the breeze cooling me then stepping aside so that the sun could warm me. And, for the most part, after the sight of the astronaut's distant shape, that was the character of my first three weeks in this house. My lungs opened and the country air washed them clean of allergy and irritation. I wasn’t so much jogging as scampering childishly. I would just go out in my normal clothes, but then find myself running down hills, or running up hills desperate to see what the view was like from the top!

The remaining part of that time was taken up with getting settled into my three rooms within the house. My own slender bits of furniture and furnishings were mixed with the house's existing pieces dotted around and pulled together into those rooms. And a strange mix they are too! The grungy sidles up to the antiquarian, which leans against plain old kitsch, which, for its part, nestles against the threadbare, the utilitarian and the gauche! No wonder I'm cracking up! But here and there - more in the trinkets and the odd flourish - I see signs of me in this room. You might not. But you don't know me.

And so I started to feel at home. Or rather, 'homely' in this house. Whether it will ever be home or not lies in the gloved hands of a certain apparition!

I think if it hadn't been for those three weeks, I'd have been back in the city long before now. But I started to see glimpses of who and how I could be. Once vision sets in, you're in trouble. People can get through life quite happily if they have no vision, but once it appears on the horizon and there is any degree of clarity to what's seen, that's when the stakes are raised. What was I to do? Run from a ghost, only to then be haunted by my own ghost - the ghost of possibility, as opposed to the ghost of actuality? Yes, I remember running, but I hope in my own life I have stopped doing that. Running now will take me somewhere - closer to the vision on my own horizon. Writing about that time begins to bring it back - the negativity that I showed a couple of posts ago starts to disappear. Moses knew this feeling - waters stepping aside in order that a dream can be seen and realised. During those early weeks, I missed aspects of my old life, but more like a craving for a Mars bar - annoying and tempting, but you wouldn't change your life for it! And now I miss that old life like a Milky Way - quaint and vaguely familiar, but the thought of eating it makes you slightly nauseous!

Having set this scene, I now need to dispel it. Because of course the astronaut returned. At this point, with only a few indistinct and fleeting impressions, I had no sense of what I was dealing with. What I envisioned: the occasional frisson brought on by a rare and momentary impression, was something I could handle, mentally and emotionally. What I wasn't prepared for was the complete identity of my house-companion.

I can hear the words that came through the blackened visor still and when I think of them they make my fingers tsnes - sorry, it makes my fingers TENSE. I've dreamt of those words too, and when they are in my dreams the desperation in that mechanical, muffled, monophonic voice always induces me to wake with a shriek and with my flesh sticking to the bedsheets. And inside I’m running again, but this time I’m running to get away, running up an emotional hill to see if I can feel anything clearer and less claustrophobic at the top of it.

"Your turn now! It must be your turn now! Your turn!" his voice says, and I know that it is talking to me, that it wants something from me. And that desperation, that anguish, terrifies me. Somewhere deep down, I know that it will eventually get what it wants.

Tomorrow, I'll relate my first full encounter with the astronaut. Am I looking forward to that? Truth? Don't know.

The house tonight is quiet. The house is locked-up tight. My own doors and windows have been double-checked. I'm comfortable. I'm sleepy. I'm feeling secure. This feeling is beautiful. This is what I live for. This is what I moved for.

Good-night, everyone and no-one.

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.

I can still recall the cold of that night as I slept fitfully in my car. There was a frozenness inside and most definitely across and inside of my skin. I guess these two frozennesses touched, the inner and outer, across some divide - some sinewy divide like an ice bridge, if I can call it that, connecting those two different frozennesses that all our lives are capable of.

My first  sense of oneness in ever so long and it had to be the oneness of different frozennesses! Such hardness, oh calloused little life, such cold brutalness!

Is this a true memory, the one I seem to have of the twitching curtain? I seem to recall glancing out of the car, perhaps trying to discern how far I was into the night and how far from morning, and seeing a curtain in the house I was parked outside of twitching.

Light. Thin envelope of yellow and white and orange energy. So far over there, but scorching my eyelids with promise. Not that the light melted anything across me or inside me. It just seemed to peer through the window of my car,  contemplate the chill within and then the curtain closed over again. The merest blink of an electrical eye.

That's what I seem to remember. But did that actually happen? Or did I just long for it? And did it happen twice? Once with a downstairs window and once again with an upstairs window?

Oh, the ambiguity of a twitching curtain! A glimpse of light that gives nothing that is needed or necessary.

And, of course, I’ve spent a couple more nights asleep in my car outside of that  house since that time. That was just me being silly though. Being in the house and thinking that I'd heard something. Spooking myself unecessarily and then finding myself in my car and tearing away from Mordan House as if banshees were on my tail!

Did the curtains twitch on those occasions too? I remember wondering this on several occasions.

In time I would have the answer.

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.