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Around then the doctors finally took me off tramadol and I experienced my first proper sleep, morphine-free. I remember waking with a sense of profound joy, awash with the novelty of feeling deeply rested. Unbelievably restored, at peace. All traces of the orange cable-stitch wool had gone away and the sunlight was streaming through the thin patterned curtains around my bed, a pattern of blue oblongs and squares which I had, it seemed, been studying and reinterpreting for years. For the first time the material looked fresh, normal – just cloth – not an omen, or pictures, or a metaphor, or a maze.
It was time to move into the unknown.
CHAPTER THREE
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What hath night to do with sleep?
John Milton, Paradise Lost
The rehab ward was no place for sissies. I learnt that in the middle of my first night, woken from sleep as if for a hostile interrogation. Two nursing assistants arrived in my bedspace with a flourish, switching on the full-strength fluorescent examination light overhead, pulling the curtains noisily shut behind them, stripping back my blankets. It was somewhere in the small hours; there were other patients asleep a few feet away in the same room.