My Devon

Hoping to use the region's many hills as a shield, Neha takes Noreen Masud's A Flat Place to Devon, and stumbles across the hole she left behind. 

–

A few months ago I abducted A Flat Place, wrapped it up, and took it on a weekend trip to Devon. 

I had actually bought it a few days after its release, but then sat around for ages being too afraid to open it in case the pages spilled. Or in case their surfaces turned out a little too reflective, and I would end up catching sight of some sticky, emotionally stunted, back-of-the-throat thing I didn't really want to look at. Frugality ultimately won, as it tended to do with me. I had paid for it and for postage, so I'd better get a grip and read the damn thing before I made a habit of buying treasures and stashing them away in protective rings like a keenly studious fairy. I even took a long time with this, trying to write about A Flat Place without writing about things that happened to the person writing it. I knew from experience: being written about was tiring, being written about as a person things had happened to was exhausting.

I even thought about where I would read it, and pored for hours over my list of Places. Westbourne and Wallingford were out because nothing had happened in them. I did not want to drag my overweight check-in baggage into the Hilton like a walking stereotype, I wanted those carpets to stay pristine. I considered going to one of those flat places Masud's book mentioned and possibly seeing a puffin, but ruled it out in a second: I would end up lost, cold, and miserable. And because me curling up and dying on some moor with A Flat Place in hand would certainly end in more than one academic thinkpiece. I knew I had to return to Devon, and its uninspiring collection of mediocre hills.

When I told a friend, he said: "I didn't think you liked nature writing, let alone like it enough to take it on a solo vacation into, er, nature." He wasn't entirely wrong: I had once called the police on a fox. Though it wasn't that I didn't like nature writing, I just didn't like nature. 

Never could I forget my tutor's face when I raised a hand in class and told him I had no idea what the anthropocene was, and agreed with a friend that it sounded like a thing Godzilla would fight. I once wrote an essay about the sustainability of pigshit, because I couldn't think of another renewable fuel source. For the longest time, I believed the moon turned up once a month like a period, or very regimented mirage. So I got his practicality and grasped the underlying point. That perhaps eloping into the hills with a book about flat things - this book about flat things, and those hills - might be a little too much to deal with right now. 

Masud, in A Flat Place, calls cPTSD a "hole in the head". I ended up making pages of notes about the book that weekend, but the words HOLE IN THE HEAD were outlined in permanent marker and underlined thrice. In that half-price off-season holiday cottage nestled in the site of trauma, detached from the boundless monotony of the valleys, I felt the words HOLE IN THE HEAD bubble up every twenty minutes. A little hitch in the landscape, a tear in the ribbon, a realisation that in the years since you left, you had become the topographic vacancy you started out wanting to fill. I found myself making coffee, cleaning up the dingy windows, narrowing my eyes at sheep, all the while thinking - HOLE IN THE HEAD. The thought seemed the only thing left alive in this new Devon which looked as though it had been empty for years: a dusty, white-sheeted place. I stared accusingly at the book - the HOLE IN THE HEAD, wanted to ask it where it would sleep, and if it didn't mind taking the sofa. 

Like Masud, I started out with less than half an idea about what cPTSD was, when I was diagnosed in early 2021. I too thought it referred to war, bombs, the Bad Things all over the world I was privileged enough not to touch. Going even further, I assumed it exclusively applied to trauma experienced during one's formative years, something that fundamentally affected a child's growing brain. But I did not fit that criteria either: my early upbringing was about as idyllic as it could get in a petro-state. What I'm trying to say is that I decided I did not 'deserve' cPTSD as the result of a handful of years in my late teens and early twenties. PTSD, yes, sure, but Complex? You had to be joking. 

"It is possible to know something you are not allowed to know. Very gently and deeply, like a whale passing beneath a boat, a long animal just under the surface," wrote Masud. 

Knowing things I was not allowed to know: it was what I spent my years in Devon being good at doing. It was all I knew, having arrived in the country at 18, bushy-tailed and full of newborn anger and delirious excitement, only to come face-to face with this big, bleary-eyed statue of an imperial general smack dab in the centre. Redvers Buller, whom I never forgave for having looked me in the eye that day. All of us transplanted into that grey shard of Devon, we were symptoms of our environment, looking desperately for something to fix our boneless resignation to the way things were and will remain. So did I, though I took it too far: the South West was not a flat place, but there was only so high you could climb. 

The first time someone broached the topic with me that perhapsmaybepossibly there might be something along the lines of PTSD at play, that even Devon had its claws, I laughed in his face. Devon was -  yes yes, HOLE IN THE HEAD, but one of the few things I cannot dislodge from the center was how that sentence looked in the harsh cafè lighting, how pale and drawn, how I felt so goddamn awful that I could have made anything, anyone look like that. So I laughed, rolled my eyes, and asked "have you gone mad?"

(He was a better person than me. The effort it must have taken, to resist the urge to say no, but you clearly have.)

A year later, they put it down on paper, though I laughed at the doctor too. 

"It's not constrained to childhood trauma or war. And with you, it's not even just the violent act, or acts," she explained, having waited patiently for me to stop cackling, kind enough to not point out that I couldn't exactly say "no thank you" to a medical diagnosis like it was a second helping of pudding. "It was the inescapability of it. You had nowhere else to go. The things you turned to, that you were told to trust, turned away. Wasn't that the case? Everywhere you turned, it was there, wasn't it? Anything you turned to, wherever you reached out to, for years."

"No, there were some grea–" I tried to describe all that was good. The people who shared the haunted house with me, who made my ghosts their neighbours, who didn't have to, but did anyway. Then I remembered my partner's wide-eyed, sky-blue what can I do, tell me what I can do. The chafe of my best friend's carpet as she bandaged the knuckles I kept tearing apart. The drawn face under the light, the quiet perhapsmaybepossibly it was PTSD. What could any of them have done in the face of such a beast? What had I done if not drag them in, and then fail them to boot? 

My last year in Devon had been air and static, unfeeling. A little hut on no-man's land, a joint security area just beyond the Exe, a lonely, suspended place between signal towers. I couldn't stand it, so I tried my hardest to cling onto the reasons I loved it, tried to medicate it into re-existence with the forced-cadence of a pacemaker. Things down throats, up noses, on stages, a self-driving hearse chasing a long-buried dragon. 

A feature of cPTSD, one that sets it apart from traditional depictions of PTSD, is the dull intensity with which its emotional flashbacks grasp you. Not like being yanked off the ground by a giant, but rather sinking quietly into the bog you never realised was beneath your feet in the first place. There was never a thing that terrified me about Devon, there was only ever a quiet, creeping mass taking over everything.

HOLE IN THE HEAD, I thought, legs tucked under me in my favourite café. HOLE IN THE HEAD. I had thought I was so good at putting Devon to rest. Masud's book started telling me things, god, that weekend, the damn thing didn't shut the fuck up. I loved it for that, though for those three days I wanted to scream at it. It peeled off the world-weariness I preached and postured but didn't practice. I had always thought: learn to anticipate the punch, or else slip and roll with it. A Flat Place shook its head, said - it's all incongruent, there is no universal object permanence when it comes to holes. So holes in the head are just that: holes. Vacant spaces I spent so long sticking my head into, going yoo-hoo like an insufferable American cartoon, trying to spin air into silk.

The first night, I dreamt this old guy. Not for lack of another name, Moses. The remnants of the half-forgotten, never-known Al-A'raf: you cannot see me! But look at the mountain. If it remains firm in its place, only then will you see Me. Then when the Lord approached the mountain, He leveled it to dust. It was not a religious awakening: there was none for me to awaken to nor return to. Rather, Moses appeared as a winking Abrahamic coagulation, a mapmaker who never turned up again. Pointed at the hills, scribbled over the wavy lines and said Devon wasn't the flat place, Masud never said Devon was the flat place, but I think you were, are, and will be. Something vital within you died here. This valley is your graveyard too, a Calvary of whatever is left of you. 

I woke sweating and terrified, staring at A Flat Place tangled within the sheets. Bingo, it said. Every time Devon tried to turn the deep, healing red of a childhood scab, you dutifully stuck your grubby fingernail under it and peeled it off. Look at you. You're doing it as we speak. Look what it has done to you. 

And with the same melodramatic bloody-mindedness that got me here in the first place, I picked the book up and hurled it out of the window. 

I hope it hit a sheep, gave it a hole in the bloody head, I thought mutinously, and went back to bed.

The next morning, I crept over to the next door neighbour's garden to retrieve it. Spent a few minutes sellotaping the little tear in the corner, brushed away the dirt, and read it all over again. It didn't apologise and nor did I, though it said: "the topography expressed my experience of a world which, continually, turned human faces into disconnected bundles of colours, my friends’ voices into sounds which drifted without touching me."

I had thought I would weather A Flat Place because even after the diagnosis, I never felt a disconnect from people, because I was still extroverted and irritating and fizzing with the desire for human connection, as I had always been. Because I did not like flat places, or hilly places, or really any place at all. It wasn't as if the book burned Devon down like some kind of universal vacuum cleaner, leaving me there to watch flames eating its flat, black, starless sky. But what it did was this: carefully take off my rose-coloured glasses, and say this ground has swallowed you whole. 

There was a gutting relief in realising that nothing except Devon had ever seemed to matter in the slightest. I had assumed it was my fault, that I was looking at things wrong, that I was maintaining unhealthy attachments to traumatic sites, prioritising warped perspectives. A left-behind Lazarus, slowly going insane inside a cave of his own making. But A Flat Place did not call me crazy. A Flat Place was not the kind of book that called you crazy. It was the kind of book that lay in the wide-open field beside you, and instead of making a snarky comment about how you've managed to get lost with three maps and a GPS, it would ask you what it was you were looking at so intently. 

And when you say, "oh - the big sky", A Flat Place would ask why. And when you say, "– because there is nothing ahead", A Flat Place would nod, and know exactly what you meant. 

It was the kind of book that left you there in the cheapest holiday cottage in Devon, cursing it and rocking it on the floor in turns, all the while thinking take it back. Masud's flat places were beautiful in their own right: thready and expansive and monumental in their secret ways. Devon too, my meaningless parking lot where life inexplicably seemed to go on without a care. Shopfronts buzz-click-hissing open when the sun went up, armies of students bustling about, a familiar eye here and there, the hills, the valleys, the views, all gleefully entangled even in the grey. It was all so lonely to watch, to feel excluded from even though I had never wanted to return. It had mattered to me, and I had never mattered to it. I was no hole in any place's head because A Flat Place was right, there was no universal law of equivalents. I hadn't seen it. I would have stood there for decades, trying to micromanage every goddamn twig and leaf, watching it all go on without me. Stark and silent and strange and so so stupid. There was exile, and then there was this. 

There was life, and then there was the Devon I feared, the one that flattened itself into an all-encompassing nothing. There was death, and then there was the Devon I killed, the one I left no matter what leaving had cost. Two dark holes in the ground, a  HOLE IN THE HEAD, fingers on lips, not-supposed-to-know this dim expanse of nothing will be a damn good story someday, no matter how I chose to go about it. That was the crack of light I held on to as I left, the lifeline I cling to even today, playing hopscotch between open graves. Hoping to find the single blinding thing that made the ruins pale in comparison, the thing Masud's book poked me in the ribs about and pointed toward, like a gossipy friend in a crowded café. It got it. A Flat Place understood that people could drown on dry land, knew how to decrypt the desperate scratches they left on the shore.

I bought another copy to face outward in my bookshelf. Because the one I threw out of the window that night, the Sellotaped, bent-flapped, dog-eared one with a stubborn streak of Devon-dirt I couldn't get out, that one was mine. I kept it in a bedside drawer, like a talisman I didn't talk about. A mark of unplaceable success, though not one that would win me any prizes. Because the weekend, as much as I framed it as a research trip for something approaching a book review, had been nothing but a great big game of hide-and-seek. A game I ended up losing when the final Devon - the one I was looking for - slipped away and buried itself in some unmarked grave under some unremarkable tree. Somewhere between the Devon I feared and the Devon I killed, A Flat Place quietly told me to come back home, and look inside my HOLE IN THE HEAD. 

And there it lay. The creature that had crawled into my mind and died years ago: the stinking corpse of the only Devon that had ever mattered.

My Devon, whom I loved so fiercely I set fire after fire to prove it. Exeter's grey allure, Buller's hollow plinth, the Quay's half-lidded eyes, the glimmer of glass on glass facade. My Northernhay Gardens, my stubbed out cigarette, my exposed tree root, my table in Queen's Cafe, my rickety iron bridge. My secret duck pond, my flowered benches, my unlit path. My decomposing hills. My skeletal buildings. The rat within my walls. Its reeking remains. My reeking remains.

My Devon, whom I will never see again, and waste a life waiting for.