Читать книгу Duet - Carol Shields - Страница 8

Richard’s friends are random and seasonal. There are the friends he swims with in the summer and the casual sweatered football friends. There is a nice boy named Gavin Lord whom we often take skiing with us but forget about between seasons. There is a gaggle of deep-voiced brothers who live next door. For Richard they are interchangeable; they come and go; he functions within their offhand comradeship. In their absence he is indifferent. And, of course, he has Anita.

Meredith’s best friend is a girl named Gwendolyn Ackerman, an intelligent girl with a curiously dark face and a disposition sour as rhubarb. She is sensitive: hurts cling to her like tiny burrs, and she and Meredith rock back and forth between the rhythm of their misunderstandings; apology and forgiveness are their coinage. It is possible, I think, that they won’t always be friends. They are only, it seems, temporarily linked together in their terrible and mutual inadequacy. After school, huddled in Meredith’s bedroom, they minutely examine and torment each other with the nuances of their daily happenings, not only what they said and did, but what they nearly said and almost did. They interpret each other until their separate experiences hang in exhausted shreds. They wear each other out; it can’t last.

For a quiet man, Martin has many friends. They exist, it seems to me, in separate chambers, and when he sees them he turns his whole self toward them as though each were a privileged satellite. A great many people seem to be extraordinarily attached to him. There are two babies in the world named after him. Old friends from Montreal telephone him and write him chatty letters at Christmas as though he really might care about their new jobs or the cottages they are building. His university friends often drop in on Saturday afternoons and, in addition, he hears regularly from his colleagues in England. He is not an effervescent man, but when he is with his friends he listens to them with a slow and almost innocent smile on his face.

His closest friend at the university is Roger Ramsay who teaches Canadian Literature. Roger has a fat man’s face, round and red, with a hedge of fat yellow curls. But his body is long and lean and muscular. He is younger than we are, young enough so he is able to live with someone without marrying her, and he and Ruthie have an apartment at the top of an old Gothic house which is cheap and charming and only a little uncomfortable. Posters instead of wallpaper, ragouts in brown pots instead of roasts, candles instead of trilights, Lightfoot records instead of children. A growing collection of Eskimo carvings and rare Canadian books.

Ruthie St Pierre is small, dark and brilliant; assistant to the head of the translation department in the Central Library. They both smoke the odd bit of pot or, as Roger puts it, they’re into it. We love them, but what we can’t understand is why they love us, but they do, especially Martin. In this friendship I am the extra; the clumsy big sister who is only accidentally included.

My closest friend is a woman named Nancy Krantz. She is about my age, mother to six children and wife to a lawyer named Paul Krantz, but that is strictly by the way. Nancy is not really attached to anyone, not even to me, I admit sadly. I am an incidental here as well.

She generally drops in unexpectedly between errands, usually in the morning. She almost, but not quite, keeps the Volkswagen engine running in the driveway while we talk. She is in a rush and she dances back and forth in my kitchen with the car keys still jingling in her fingers. I cannot, in fact, imagine her voice without the accompaniment of ringing car keys. Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.

We talk fast, both of us, as though we accelerated each other, and there is a thrilling madness in our morning dialogues. Nancy has always just been somewhere or is on her way to somewhere – to an anti-abortionist meeting, to a consumers’ committee, to a curriculum symposium. And into these concerns, which in the abstract interest me very little, she manages to sweep me away. I stand, coffee cup in one hand, wildly gesticulating with the other, suddenly stunningly vocal. The quality of our exchanges is such that she enables me to string together miles of impressive phrases; my extemporaneous self reawakened. I pour more coffee, and still standing we talk on until, with a loud shake of her key ring, Nancy glances at her watch and flies to the door. I am left steaming with exhaustion and happiness.

Today she has come from a committee which is fighting rate increases in the telephone service. It is her special quality to be able to observe these activities as though she were a spectator at a play. She can be wildly humorous. This morning, as a footnote to her recital, she delivers what I think to be a stunning theory of life, for she has discovered the mechanism which monitors her existence.

Every month, she tells me, the water bill arrives in the mail. The Water and Sewerage Office informs her how much money she must pay and, in addition, how many gallons of water her household has consumed during the month. But that isn’t all. Underneath that figure is another which is even more fascinating, the number of gallons which she and her family have consumed on the previous billing.

She has noticed something: since she and her husband Paul have been married, the number of gallons has gone up every month. There have been no exceptions over eighteen years, not one in eighteen years, twelve billing each year. By thousands and thousands of gallons she has gone steadily up the scale. It is inexorable. She and the meter are locked in combat. She would like to fool it once, to be very thrifty for a month, use her dishwater over again, make everyone conserve on baths, flush the toilet once a day, just to stop the rolling, rolling of the tide.

It has become a sign to her, a symbol of the gathering complexity of her life. Tearing open her water bill she finds her breath stuck in her chest. Travelling from gallon to gallon she is inching toward something. Is there such a thing as infinity gallons of water, she has wondered.

But recently it has occurred to her that she will never reach infinity. One month – the exact date already exists in the future, predestined – one month there will be a very slight decrease in number of gallons. And the next month there will be a further decrease. Very small, very gradual. It will work its way back, she says. And it will mean something important. Maybe that she is reverting to something simpler, less entangled.

She doesn’t know whether it will be a good thing or bad, whether she is frightened or not of the day when the first decrease comes. But she sees her whole life gathered around that watershed. It may even mean the beginning of dying, she confides to the rhythm of her chromium-plated key ring.

Winter is about to fall in on us. Early this morning when I woke up I could almost feel the snow suspended over the backyard. Outside our window there was a dense gathering of white, a blank absence of sun, and through the walls of the house the blue air pinched and gnawed.

Downstairs in the kitchen I made coffee, and I was about to wake Martin and the children when I heard a thin waterfall of sound coming from behind the birch slab door leading to the family room. I opened it and found the television on.

Richard and Meredith were sitting on the sofa watching. All I could see from the doorway were the backs of their heads, the two of them side by side, Richard leaning slightly forward, his hands on his knees. The sight of them, the roughed fur of their hair and the crush of pajama collars, and especially the utter attentiveness to the screen, made me weak for a moment with love.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked hoarsely.

‘Shhh,’ Richard rasped. ‘They’re getting into the Royal Coach.’

‘Who?’ I asked, and then remembered. It was Princess Anne’s wedding day.

‘How long have you two been up?’ I asked.

‘Five o’clock,’ Meredith said shortly, never for a moment taking her eyes off the picture. ‘Richard woke me up.’

‘Five o’clock!’ I felt my mouth go soft with disbelief.

‘It’s direct by satellite,’ Richard said.

‘But it will all be rebroadcast later,’ I said with sternness, feeling at the same time wondering amazement at their early rising.

‘It’s not the same though,’ Meredith said.

‘They leave out half the junk,’ said Richard.

(Would Anita Spalding be watching too? In the Birmingham flat, linked through satellite with Richard? Probably.)

While the coffee breathed and burped in the kitchen, I sat on the arm of the sofa watching the glittering coach drive through London. A camera scanned the crowds, and the announcer reminded us how they had stood all night waiting. The London sky looked tea-toned, foreign, water-thin.

‘I thought you didn’t like Princess Anne,’ I challenged Meredith.

‘I don’t,’ she told me, ‘but this is a wedding.’

Later, when Martin was up, we ate breakfast, and I told them about Princess Margaret’s wedding. There was no satellite in those days, so we didn’t have to get up at five o’clock to watch. Instead, a film of the wedding was shot in London and rushed into a waiting transatlantic jet.

We were at home in our first apartment; Martin was writing the final draft of his thesis. It was just after lunch, and Meredith, who was very young, had been put into her crib for a nap. Our television was old, a second-hand set with a permanent crimp in the picture.

The camera was focused on a bit of sky off the coast of Newfoundland and, while Martin and I and millions of others stared at the blank patch, a commentator chattered on desperately about the history of royal weddings.

Finally a tiny speck appeared on the screen. The jet. We watched, breathless, as it landed. A man leaped out with an attaché case in his hand – the precious reels of film. Fresh from London. Rushed to the colonies. I remember my throat going tight. Stupid, but this man was a genuine courier, in a league with Roman runners and, though Martin and I were indifferent even then to royalty, we recognized a hero when we saw one.

We watched him race, satchel in hand, across the landing field and then into a flat terminal building where the projector was oiled and waiting. There was a moment’s black-out, and the next thing we saw was the Royal Coach careening around Pall Mall. Miraculous.

While I was telling Meredith and Richard this story over cornflakes and toast, their eyes were fixed on me; they never miss a word. The genes are true; my children are like me in their lust after other people’s stories.

Unlike Martin, whose family tree came well stocked with family tales, I am from a bleak non-storytelling family. I can remember my father, a tall, lank man who for forty years worked as inventory clerk in a screw factory, telling only one story, and this he told only two or three times. It was so extraordinary for him to tell a story at all that I remember the details perfectly.

A single incident fetched from his childhood: a girl in his high school tried to commit suicide by leaping into the stairwell. My father happened to be coming down a corridor just as she was sailing through the air. On impact she broke both her ankles and promptly fainted. This brought my father to the point of the story, the point as he conceived it being that the act of fainting was a benefice which spontaneously blocked out pain. He didn’t explain to us why the girl was trying to take her life or whether she managed to live it afterwards. He seemed oddly incurious about such a dramatic event, and it must have been his bland acceptance of the facts which restrained us from asking him for details.

It is one of my fantasies that I meet this suicidal girl. She would be about seventy now – my father has been dead for ten years – and I imagine myself meeting her at a friend’s. She is someone’s aunt or family friend, and I recognize her the moment she touches on her attempted school suicide. I interrupt her and ask if she remembers a young boy, my father, who rushed to her when she fell and into whose arms she fainted. Yes, she would say, it happened just that way, and we would exchange long and meaningful looks, embrace each other, perhaps cry.

From my mother I can recall only two frail anecdotes, and the terrible thin poverty of their details may well account for my girlhood hunger for an expanded existence.

Once – I must have been about four at the time – my mother bought a teapot at Woolworth’s, carried it home, and discovered when she opened it on the kitchen table that it was chipped. It was quite a nice brown teapot, she later explained to us, and it might have been bumped on the door coming out of Woolworth’s. Or, on the other hand, it might have been chipped when she bought it. Should she return it?

She never slept a wink that night. After a week she had still not made up her mind what to do, and by this time she had broken out in a rash. It attacked the thin pink meat of her thighs and I can recall her, while dressing in the closet one morning, raising the hem of her housedress and showing me the mass of red welts. But I don’t remember the teapot. She kept it for a year and used it to water her plants; then somehow it got broken.

Her other story, frequently told, concerned a friend of hers who greatly admired my mother’s decorating talents. The friend, a Mrs Christianson, had written to Canadian Homes suggesting they come to photograph our house for a future issue. For a year my mother waited to hear from the magazine, all the while keeping the house perfect, every chair leg free from dust, every corner cheerful with potted plants. No one ever called, and she came to the conclusion in the end that they were just too hoity-toity (a favourite expression of hers) to bother about Scarborough bungalows.

That was all we had: my father’s adventure in the stairwell, which never developed beyond the scientific rationale for fainting, my mother’s teapot and rash and her nearbrush with fame. And a sort of half-story about something sinister that had happened to Aunt Liddy in Jamaica.

My sister Charleen, who is a poet, believes that we two sisters turned to literature out of simple malnutrition. Our own lives just weren’t enough, she explains. We were underfed, undernourished; we were desperate. So we dug in. And here we are, all these years later, still digging.

On Tuesday Martin felt a cold coming on. He dosed himself with vitamin C and orange juice and went to bed early. He turned up the electric blanket full blast and shivered. His voice dried to a sandy rasp, but he never complained. It is one of the bargains we have.

Years ago, he claims, I put him under a curse by telling him that I loved him because he was so robust. Can I really have said such a thing? It seems impossible, but he swears it; he can even show me the particular park bench in Toronto where, in our courting days, I paid allegiance to his health. It has, he says, placed him under an obligation for the rest of his life. He is unable to enjoy poor health, he is permanently disbarred from hypochondria, he is obliged to be fit. So he went off to the university, his eyes set with fever and his pockets full of Kleenex.

I know the power of the casual curse. I have only to look at my children to see how they become the shapes we prepare for them. When Meredith was little, for instance, she, like any other child, collected stones, and for some reason we seized on it, calling her our little rock collector, our little geologist. Years later, nearly crowded out of her room by specimens, she confessed with convulsions of guilt that she wasn’t interested in rocks any more. In fact, she never really liked them all that much. I saw in an instant that she had been trapped into a box, and I was only too happy to let her out; together we buried the rocks in the back yard. And forgot them.

Another example: Furlong, reviewing my first book for a newspaper, described me, Judith Gill, as a wry observer of human nature. Thus, for him I am always and ever wry. My wryness overcomes even me. I can feel it peeling off my tongue like very thick slices of imported salami, very special, the acidity measured on a meter somewhere in the back of my brain. Furlong has never once suspected that it was he who implanted this wryness in me, a tiny’ seedling which flourished on inception and which I am able to conceal from almost everyone else. For Furlong, though, I can be deeply, religiously, fanatically wry.

Just as for me Martin is strong and ruddy, quintessentially robust. But by the end of the week he was ready to give in. ‘Go to bed,’ I said. ‘Surrender.’

Three days later he was still there, sipping tea, going from aspirin to aspirin.

I brought him the morning mail to cheer him up. ‘Just look at this,’ I said, handing him a milky-white square envelope.

I had already read it. It was an invitation to Furlong’s lunch party in celebration of his new book. A one-thirty luncheon and a reading at three; an eccentric social arrangement, at least in our part of the world.

I squinted at the date over Martin’s shoulder. ‘It’s a Sunday, I think.’

‘It is,’ Martin said. ‘And I think–’ his voice gathered in the raw bottom of his throat, ‘I think it’s Grey Cup Day.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘I’m sure, Judith. Look at the calendar.’

I counted on my fingers. ‘You’re right.’

He muttered something inaudible from the tumble of sheets.

‘How could he do it?’ I said.

‘Well he did.’

‘He can’t have done it on purpose. Do you think he just forgot when Grey Cup is?’

‘Furlong’s not your average football fan, you know.’

‘Nevertheless,’ I said, breathless with disbelief, ‘to give a literary party on Grey Cup.’

‘For “one who embodies the national ethos,”’ Martin was quoting from a review of Graven Images, ‘he is fairly casual about the folkways of his country.’

‘What’ll we do?’ I said. ‘What can I tell him.’

‘Just that we’re terribly sorry, previous engagement, et cetera.’

‘But Martin, it’s not just us. No one will come. Absolutely no one. Even Roger, worshipper though he be, wouldn’t give up the game for Furlong. He’ll be left high and dry. And there’s his mother to consider.’

‘It’s what they deserve. My God, of all days.’

‘And he’s so vain he’ll probably expect us to come anyway.’

‘Fat chance.’

‘I’d better phone him right away.’

‘The sooner the better.’

‘Right.’

‘And Judith.’

‘What?’

‘Make it a firm no.’

‘Right,’ I said.

But I didn’t have to phone Furlong. He phoned me himself late in the afternoon.

‘Judith,’ he said, racing along. ‘I suppose you got our invitation today. From Mother and me.’

‘Yes, we did but –’

‘Say no more. I understand. It seems I’ve made a colossal bloop.’

‘Grey Cup Day.’

‘Mother says the phone’s been ringing all day. And I ran into Roger at the university. Poor lad, almost bent double with apology. Of course, the instant we realized, we decided on postponement.’

‘That really is the best thing,’ I said, relieved that I would not have to admit we put football before literature in this house.

‘We’ll make it December then, I think. Early December.’

‘Maybe you should check the bowl games,’ I suggested wanting to be helpful.

‘Of course. Mother and I will put our heads together and come up with another date. Now I mustn’t keep you from your work, Judith. How is it coming, by the way?’

‘Well. I think I can honestly say it’s going well.’

‘Good. Good. No more novel-writing aspirations?’ he asked, and for an instant I thought I heard a jealous edge to his voice.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You can consider me cured of that bug.’

‘That’s what it is, a wretched virus. I can’t tell you how I envy you your immunity.’

‘It was madness,’ I said. ‘Pure madness.’

‘That was Furlong on the phone,’ I told Martin when I took up his supper tray. Soup, toast, a piece of cheese. He was sitting up reading the paper and looking better.

‘And? What did he have to say for himself?’

‘All a mistake. He never thought of Grey Cup. So don’t worry, Martin. It’s been postponed. Way off in the future. Sometime in December.’

‘We might even be snowed in with luck,’ he said going back to his paper. ‘Anyway, that’s the end of that story.’

Story, he had called it. He was right, it was a story, a fragment of one anyway. A human error causing human outcry and subdued by a human retraction. A comedy miniaturized.

It’s the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It’s throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping; our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don’t like to admit it, sometimes it’s the only thing.

Names are funny things, I tell Richard. We are having lunch one day, and he has asked me how I happened to name him Richard.

‘I liked the “r” sound,’ I tell him. ‘It’s a sort of repetition of the “r” in your father’s name.’

‘And Meredith?’ he asks. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I tell him, for the naming of our babies is a blur to me. Each time I was caught unprepared; each time I felt a compulsion amidst the confusion of birth, to pin a label, any label, on fast before the prize disappeared.

Meredith. It is, of course, an echo of my own name, the same thistle brush of ‘th’ at the end, just as Richard’s name is a shadow of Martin’s. Unconscious at the time; I have only noticed it since.

‘I’m not sure,’ I tell Richard. ‘Names are funny things. They don’t really mean anything until you enlist them.’

Now he confides a rare fact about Anita Spalding, introducing her name with elaborate formality.

‘You know Anita Spalding? In Birmingham?’

‘Yes,’ I say, equally formal.

‘Do you know what she does? She calls her parents by their first names.’

‘Really?’

‘Like she calls her father John. That’s his first name. And she calls her mother Isabel.’

‘Hmmmm.’ I am deliberately offhand, anxious to prolong this moment of confidence.

But he breaks off with, ‘But like you say, names are funny things.’

‘Richard,’ I say. ‘Do you know what Susanna Moodie called her husband?’

There is no need to explain who Susanna Moodie is. After all these months she is one of us, one of the family. Every day someone refers to her. She hovers over the house, a friendly ghost.

‘What did she call her husband?’ Richard asks.

‘Moodie,’ I tell him.

‘What’s wrong with that? That was his name wasn’t it?’

‘His last name. Don’t you get it, Richard? It would be like me calling Daddy, Gill. Would you like a cup of tea, Gill? Well, Gill, how’s the old flu coming along? Hi ya, Gill.’

‘Yeah,’ Richard agrees. ‘That would be kind of strange.’

‘Strange is the word.’

‘Why’d she do it then? Why didn’t she call him by his first name?’

‘I don’t know,’ I tell him. ‘It was the custom in certain levels of society in those days. And there’s her sister, Catherine Parr Traill. She called her husband Mr Traill. All his life. Imagine that. Moodie is almost casual when you think of Mr Traill.’

‘I guess so,’ he says doubtfully.

‘I like to think of it as a sort of nickname. Like Smitty or Jonesy. Maybe it was like that.’

‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘I suppose it depends on how she said it. Like the expression she used when she said it. Do you know what I mean?’

I did know what he meant, and it was a common problem in biography. Could anyone love a man she called by his surname? Was such a thing possible? I would have to hear whether it was said coldly or with tenderness. One minute of eavesdropping and I could have travelled light-years in understanding her.

It was Leon Edel, who should know about the problems of biography if anyone does, who said that biography is the least exact of the sciences. So much of a man’s life is lived inside his own head, that it is impossible to encompass a personality. There is never never enough material. Sometimes I read in the newspaper that some university or library has bought hundreds and hundreds of boxes of letters and papers connected with some famous deceased person, and I know every time that it’s never going to be enough. It’s hopeless, so why even try?

That was the question I found myself asking during the year we spent in England. My two biographies, although they had been somewhat successful, had left me dissatisfied. In the end, the personalities had eluded me. The expression in the voice, the concern in the eyes, the unspoken anxieties; none of these things could be gleaned from library research, no matter how patient and painstaking. Characters from the past, heroic as they may have been, lie coldly on the page. They are inert, having no details of person to make them fidget or scratch; they are toneless, simplified, stylized, myths distilled from letters; they are bloodless.

There is nothing to do but rely on available data, on diaries, bills, clippings, always something on paper. Even the rare photograph or drawing is single-dimensional and self-conscious.

And if one does enlarge on data, there is the danger of trespassing into that whorish field of biographical fiction, an arena already asplash with the purple blood of the queens of England or the lace-clutched tartish bosoms of French courtesans. Tasteless. Cheap. Tawdry.

That year in England I was restless. I started one or two research projects and abandoned them. I couldn’t settle down. Everything was out of phase. My body seemed disproportionately large for the trim English landscape. I sensed that I alarmed people in shops by the wild nasal rock of my voice, and at parties I overheard myself suddenly raucous and bluff. It was better to fade back, hide out for a while. I became a full-time voyeur.

On trains I watched people, lusting to know their destinations, their middle names, their marital status and always and especially whether or not they were happy. I stared to see the titles of the books they were reading or the brand of cigarette they smoked. I strained to hear snatches of conversations and was occasionally rewarded, as when I actually heard an old gentleman alighting from his Rolls Royce saying to someone or other, ‘Oh yes, yes. I did know Lord MacDonald. We were contemporaries at Cambridge.’ And a pretty girl on a bus who turned to her friend and said, ‘So I said to him, all right, but you have to buy the birth control pills.’ And then, of course, I had the Spalding family artifacts around me twenty-four hours a day, and on that curious family trio I could speculate endlessly.

It occurred to me that famous people may be the real dullards of life. Perhaps shopgirls coming home from work on the buses are the breath and body of literature. Fiction just might be the answer to my restlessness.

‘I think I might write a novel,’ I said to Martin on a grey Birmingham morning as he was about to leave for the library.

‘What for?’ he asked, genuinely surprised.

‘I’m tired of being boxed in by facts all the time,’ I told him. ‘Fiction might be an out for me. And it might be entertaining too.’

‘You’re too organized for full-time fantasy,’ he said, and later I remembered those words and gave him credit for prophecy. Martin is astute, although sometimes, as on this particular morning, he looks overly affable and half-daft.

‘You sound like a real academic,’ I told him. ‘All footnotes and sources.’

‘I know you, Judith,’ he said smiling.

‘Well, I’m going to start today,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been making a few notes, and today I’m going to sit down and see what I can do.’

‘Good luck,’ was all he said, which disappointed me, for he had been interested in my biographies and, in a subdued way, proud of my successes.

Notes for Novel

Tweedy man on bus, no change, leaps off

beautiful girl at concert, husband observes her legs, keeps dropping program

children in park, sailboat, mother yells (warbles) ‘Damn you David. You’re getting your knees dirty.’

letter to editor about how to carry cello case in a mini-car. Reply from bass player

West Indians queue for mail. Fat white woman (rollers) cigarette in mouth says, ‘what they need is ticket home.’

story in paper about woman who has baby and doesn’t know she’s preg. Husband comes home from work to find himself a father. Dramatize.

leader of labour party dies tragically, scramble for power. wife publishes memoirs.

hotel bath. each person rationed to one inch of hot water. Hilarious landlady.

Lord renounces title so he can run for House of Commons, boyhood dream and all that.

My random jottings made no sense to me at all. When I wrote them down I must have felt something; I must have thought there was yeast there, but whatever it was that had struck me at the time had faded away. There was no centre, no point to begin from.

I paced up and down in the flat thinking. A theme? A starting point? A central character or situation? I looked around the room and saw John Spalding’s notebooks. That was the day I took them down and began to read them; my novel was abandoned.

After that I was too dispirited to do any writing at all. I spent the spring shopping and visiting art galleries and teashops and waiting for the end to come. I counted the days and it finally came. We packed our things, sold the Austin, gave the school uniforms away and, just as summer was getting big as a ball, we returned home.

Martin is better. Still on medication, but looking something like his real self. Today he went back to the university, and the house is quiet. For some reason I open his desk drawer, the one where the wool is.

It’s gone. Nothing there but the wood slats of the drawer bottom and a paper clip or two. I look in the other drawers. Nothing.

I hadn’t thought much about the wool while it was still there. I’d wondered about it, of course, but it was easy to forget, to push to the back of my thoughts. But now it has gone.

It has come and gone. I have been offered no explanations. Was it real, I wonder.

My hands feel cold and my heart pounds. I am afraid of something and don’t know what it is.