RESTLESS | Stella Gray

Before the chemical of her life was irreversibly shifted, Jane didn’t notice the swallow dancing on the breadth of sky above her. Cloned cumulonimbus clouds densified into the horizon revealing the expanse of space around Jane’s office. As she trudged up the purple carpeted steps of Johnson’s real estate firm, she examined the granulating cardboard from the lukewarm coffee cup in her fingers. “Well, that’s what I said: it’s ridiculous that they don’t sell Coke, only Pepsi,” whined, nasally, Jane’s colleague Rachel. This saga can only be described as extended. “Morning ladies,” Mr. Johnson’s face shone like a taut, oil-slicked skin balloon.

Back home after work, Jane stood in her front room window, her bowl of leftover tomato pasta, off-centre in the microwave, mildly gyrating to the low electric hum. She was staring at the parched grass by the road, overlain by a sandy light. There was evidence of an attempt at cultivation in the rusting trowel hiding in the shadow of the low brick wall perimeter and a clay pot brimming with weeds, all squished in and dying. Also, Jane’s reflection in the window, mounted on endless black; she exhaled, a round patch of condensation obscured her mouth so only her eyes looked back, the skin around them loose, the life unrecognised and muted.

Jane stared through the glass, into the dark, and saw her father’s cold mud eyes observing her.

Sports day: hot 8-year-old tears glisten her cheeks.

A giant leech, moist with clammy hand sweat in her little fingers takes the form of an egg and spoon. Staccato gasps as her body tires from crying accompany ecstatic, miscellaneous background screams and tinny 80’s top of the pops. Her dad turns around and walks away, his tall, suited frame mountainous. Salt crystals form on Jane’s cheeks as she steps into the placid air of a shadow. A blank fires and Jane sweeps all ambition into a drawer.

As Jane stood quietly in the rocking waves of memory, another day of non-being settled on the furniture in her bedroom like sound-proof foam.

That night as Jane slept her normal heavy sleep, a swallow nestled in the soffit of her roof. A beetle bustled out of its dense feathers and into the room through the open window. It charted the wall and ceiling and reached her bed. Then, staring up at her giant legs, it pierced the shiny desert of skin and was engulfed seamlessly. Multiplication began: Jane’s skin, like that of a conservatory roof, cast a warm glow on the tiny, jet-black bodies exponentially budding off one another above the glazed, pulsating, deep red ballroom floor of muscle. They trickled all around her legs, until they struck a white-hot nerve, electrifying Jane’s spine and wrenching her out of sleep. Immediately Jane was aware of the crisp existence of every crawling beetle. She raked at her skin desperately; she had to get up, get out, move, move. 

Shrouded in an unbearable sensory fug, Jane grabbed her dressing gown, descended the stairs and went out of the back door into the cool night. The streetlights added a golden haze to the road as her focus warped back and forth, turning right, she felt the nerves down her legs fizzing as the beetles swarmed. One foot in front of the other. The pavement was solid beneath her bare feet, she rolled each step like she was turning the earth, pulling the streetlights towards her, parked cars enlarging and passing. With each step, the beetles began to melt like salt crystals. Jane relaxed her forehead and breathed in the heavy midnight air.

Back home, she stopped to look at the picture of her late mum, suspended on the wall, cast in the lilac light of early morning, eyes green and sharp like hers grinning at the camera. Grinning at her dad, before grief carved deep, permanent lines of pain in his face and twisted his discourse to cruelty. Since Jane’s mum had been slotted into a frame and her memory boxed, it was easier for Jane to be the same: reliable and unchanging.

Just a part of space moving back and forth. 

That first restless night marked an epoch in Jane’s life. Every evening afterwards, the swallows nestled into her roof as the acrid sunlight of dusk confirmed the approach of a sleepless night. Jane got to know the soft hush of trees in the small hours and the distant rumbling of roads to faraway places. Days merged like the iridescent swirl of an oil spill, exhaustion seeped into Jane’s bones as every movement became laboured, and people rushed past constantly in organised lanes of unfaltering purpose. It took Mr. Johnson, his face glistening above her: “Oh Janey, you asleep on your desk was really not part of my five-year plan for this company.” Jane left the office with her meagre box of desk items in hand, the wizened leaf of a parched houseplant flapping ecstatically with each step. As she shut the car door with a manufactured thud, unaware whether she had been fired or had quit, Jane decided that tomorrow morning she would book a GP appointment. 

“Yes, so, Restless Leg Syndrome is pretty common in women your age. We classify it as a sleep disorder, I’m sure you can understand why.” The doctor looked at Jane, then the clock, and then his phone screen where email notifications rolled in aggressively like a slot machine. “I want you to take this drug, Ropinirole. Let’s try 250 micrograms once daily for two days and then we’ll increase it if it goes well. Okay Jane?” He smiled earnestly, passed her a prescription slip and then focused back on his computer screen. His knee jogged up and down, dissipating the air particles around it so they seemed to usher Jane up and out of the room. 

Jane stared at the white circular pill in her hand, propped up by her fleshy palmar crease. She imagined being flattened, slowly; absorbing the pill as she became perfectly two dimensional. A tiny white streak in a strange human blanket. 

That night, as Jane fell into a numbing sleep, the lilac light of the small hours once again laid its gentle film over the frame of her late mum, green eyes glinting.

In the morning, Jane rose and conducted an arm-curled newborn stretch: she knew what she wanted to do.

Jane slipped into smooth, cool water. Her arms cut through silky jelly. She was held by the water she hasn’t swum in since her mum died. Deep, sub-aqueous green beneath her flicking white feet, the colour of blood sapped away and muted by the prismed water surface. Body submerged, Jane swam forward; gentle waves lapping her face. Tsunamis for fine chin hair. Early morning pale April sunlight warmed the back of Jane’s head; she closed her eyes as she swam. This was familiar.

Then, a tiny splash. Like a failed skimmed stone: abrupt, diagonal. 

A flash of white in Jane’s peripheries. Reaching the end of the pond she turned, facing the reflected runway of pale morning sun. A dark silhouette emerged: two pronged. Wings took shape, a streak of rust stroked into the movement. 

The riskiest flight for swallows, a millimetre too low and the water flexes its weight: engulfing, sinking.

As Jane swam, she felt their beating hearts and her own, beneath the surface. Some deep flicker had brought her down to the water that morning. Emerging from the water, Jane’s skin shone in the sunlight and her heart continued to beat. 

Heavy sleep stayed as Jane gradually increased her dose of Ropinirole. 250 micrograms, 500 micrograms, 1 milligram. Every morning, she made her way down to the water and then filled her days with living.

One Tuesday she went to St Anne’s art shop with the burgundy and gold panelling outside. She remembered going age seven, clutching her mum’s hand as the burgundy arch passed above her head and the smell of turpentine, linseed oil and dust came in warm wafts. Now, as she traced her fingers along the deep oak drawers, the air of possibility drifted out in all the different colours of the paints inside. The brushes were laid out in perfect cylindrical hills.

She slipped some into her bag.

The shopkeeper at the front hadn’t seen.

White fluffy hair backlit by a lamp; Jane noted how like St. Anne she looked. Canvases. She took one out of the stack, her fingers gripped the tight white weave. The cellophane wrap made an unsticking noise from her sweating fingers as she shoved it under her arm. She left the shop, the little brass bell ringing observably. 

When she got home, she laid her new treasures on the bed. For a moment she felt separate from herself. This intractable body had stolen in the light of day.

Grasping a brush, paints and canvas she came back to herself. Making a palette of blue, grey and yellow she began to paint, sliding thick globules of colour across the woven surface in long streaks. As the painting made its passage from her mind, the pond she swum in began to spread out onto the canvas, watery reflection leaking out into the white space. When it was finished Jane wrote a note:

Hi Dad,

Hope you’re well.

I’ve been swimming with swallows lately. Thinking of Mum.

With Love,

Jane

Jane was connected to her dad by a nerve that fizzed and stung with a deep, aching grief, rendering her solitude comfortable. Yet she still packaged the canvas up.

The sense that Jane’s mind existed inside her like a white-hot ball bouncing around in folds of skin, began to take hold. She was repulsed and captivated by it.

Exercising this biology, she wore miniskirts, she could imagine tight knit fascia and fibres of muscle beneath her skin. In the evenings she liked to look at her body in the mirror. Before, she had always dressed and undressed as swiftly as possible, acknowledging all of herself only when necessary. But now she looked at this whole human. A vessel of organs, blood and impulse. Impulse: what led her to the supermarket next day.

The light inside the shop fizzed and quivered, emanating from every shiny commodity. Jane walked through the fresh food aisle; the waxy vegetable air clung to her bare legs as she took in all her fleshy peers pondering over the fruit selection. She made her way through the meat aisle, colder, glassier. She had goosebumps on her legs now. Finally, special buys. What came next wasn’t planned.

Today they had a selection of tinfoil barbecues, roast chicken crisps, various enormous Tupperware; Jane remembered her ex-boyfriend cooking on a disposable barbecue, his neck taut, back hunched and backlit by pale sky, everything washed out by dry summer heat. She could feel the stinging loss of his attraction wafting away like hot, putrid steam. He handed her a one sausage bap as he bit down on his on his own: four-sausaged. “Thanks.” She felt like a hollowed case of human, stuck to the earth by a film of gravity.

But today she embraced the full atom-pushing, air-displacing, magnetism of her presence as she took off her top and revealed to the shop floor her body.

Breathing and alive.

Pride summoned a dignified smile; she had grown these pendulous bulbs and carried them around with her all her life. Inhaling deeply, she made eye contact with a man standing by the spices and fresh herbs. His forehead sported a film of sweat as he diverted his vision away, bustling back to the lettuce.

“Morning Jane. So how are you doing?”

“Sleeping so much better. They’ve really worked, I think.”

“That’s great. And remind me - you’re on the 1mg??”

“Yep.”

“Have you noticed, any change in your behaviour, or personality?”

Jane looked at the GP’s face. His expression was unfazed, mostly.

“What do you mean?”

“Ropinirole has been known to have some side effects, impulse control disorders specifically.”

“It’s been in the news recently that some women, similar age to yourself, have been with these,” his voice trailed off, as he looked about the room searching for words.

“Behaviours.”

His eyes flicked to her bare legs. Goosebumps again, the tiny fibres flexed and contracted beneath her skin.

“What do you mean?”

“So things like gambling, binge eating, hypersexuality.”

Every division of space came into acuity. The room was deafeningly still as the GP searched for eye contact.

Leaving the surgery, dose of Ropinirole retracted, her white-hot mind left her body again, flying frantically above her as she walked home.

Before this dopamine agonist took hold of her neurology, any risk taken was confined to her beam of vision: a blank corner the condensation of all the breathless gasps and skipped heart beats. Whilst on the drug, the thrust of instinct had rendered Jane an unacceptable member of society. On the news she saw that this had happened to others, lives exploded under amplified impulse.

This flitting chemical, binding, releasing, agonising, antagonising. Motivating us towards the attainable, the unattainable.

The drug was out of her system by the next morning. She rose, the sky outside her window huge and clear. Beginning again. Life suspended on the surface of a silken elixir.

Stella Gray is a student doctor at the University of Liverpool. Gray is currently studying literature and medicine at the University of Edinburgh on her intercalated year. She has a keen interest in the medical humanities, narrative medicine and ethics and through the study of these subjects hopes to deepen her understanding of the humanity in medicine.

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