Besieged and smothered by them in my childhood; my parents and my brother always with their noses in books; force-read to at bedtime; bombarded with messages about how books are every child’s best start in life. Every book I come near – though it’s usually they who sidle up on me like the frotteur with bad breath on the crowded bus – is a punishment, floods me with fear and loathing. I hate their smell, their weight and shape when a Christmas or birthday present, beautifully wrapped, lands in my hand. I hate the sham delight my parents make me display to smiling uncles when they thrust it at me, with that creepy sideways glance for my parents’ approval.
And now I’m back in the nightmare, in a room lined on every side with books, with no window and no door, just shelves and shelves and shelves of books. Their stern spines glare at me. When I swing on a shelf with all my body weight, it topples, sure, but only to reveal another shelf behind, it too crammed with books. Each shelf I pull down is the same, and soon there’s no floor to be seen, and I’m wobbling ankle-deep, sobbing, on layer upon layer of tumbled books. Some fall open, and from their smug pages the letters, letters, letters jeer at me like hyenas, and I’m sure I can smell their carrion stench. Each time my feet slip down between them, their tough bindings and sharp corners scratch my legs. I feel my last strength slip away. Panic turns my limbs to great planks I can barely lift.
Then suddenly I’m through, past the last shelf. No more books. I’m free.
But it’s worse, much worse. Not the peaceful stillness I crave. No, it’s a boiling, writhing, seething horror, the unshaped, untold, unstoried terrors of existence.
I vomit up a scream. There’s no way out, no road for me to run down, out of this trackless horror.
Moray McGowan, a Hiberno-Scottish silverback, wrapped chocolate, delivered mail, dug trenches, picked fruit and baked boiler insulation, taught for forty years at universities in Germany, the UK and Ireland, and now shuffles between the marshlands of Somerset (UK) and the jungles of Berlin.