A Lie About My Father (28 page)

Still, it is possible – I think Margaret believed it was more than possible – that my father learned to forget some of this when he was alone in his house, waiting to die. He still went out, he still drank and smoked, he still waited, but it is possible that he loved something, for minutes or hours at a time. He stopped growing vegetables in his little plot of garden, and let the flowers my mother had planted grow a little wild. Once, when I paid him that final visit, towards the very end, he told me he’d let the garden go, to enjoy the wild flowers. When I saw what a wilderness the garden had become, I thought he was being ironic, but it’s possible that he meant what he said. I’m told that he was gentler towards the end, less angry, more capable of being quiet in himself. So, as foolish as this seems, I want to venture a hypothesis that, roughly expressed, goes like this: you cannot learn to love yourself until you find something in the world to love; no matter what it is. A dog, a garden, a tree, a flight of birds, a friend. I want to say that the old pop-psych cliché is almost true if you reverse it: you learn to love yourself by loving the world around you. Because what we love in ourselves is ourselves loving. I will never know – it would still have been too much a matter of shame for him to admit it – but I can
imagine
that my father learned to love the world a little before he died, and so, in turn, learned to love himself. I hope so, partly for his sake, and partly for my own – because there are times when I look back and suspect, times when I look back and
know
, that I was as much to blame as he was in our failure to be a father and a son. As a lifetime proposition, happiness is a discipline, no doubt; but for moments at a time, it’s a piece of luck. A piece of luck and a clue: a hint, not just of what might be, but of what already exists, in the heart of a man’s heart, in the private place where clichés no longer hold, in the smoky, golden, myrrh-scented chambers of his own imagery.

CHAPTER 7

Fulbourn.
Any resident of Cambridgeshire knows what that word means, and every other community in the country has its equivalent, some innocent-sounding place name signifying madness, an everyday word for life beyond the pale, a word for pleasant gardens with high fences and rooms filled with medicated phantoms muttering to themselves or to other, even less palpable ghosts in day rooms and isolation wards named for local beauty spots or historic figures. On my first visit, I arrived in the middle of summer and, after a few days, I began to take it all in: the cedar trees in the grounds; the flower borders; the long corridor that led from the day room to the cool night beyond; the piano in the recreation room; the crazed, beautiful girl spinning across the floor of the refectory on the day I emerged from the first wave of medication. I could do this, I knew, because I wasn’t mad. I knew it, the doctors knew it, the nurses knew it, the one visitor who drove out from the city with a bag full of fruit and books knew it. I had been mad, but that was over; now, I was just a body that was changing, moment by moment, into something new, something more rational than the logic that had put me in that institution could conceive.

Which meant, of course, that I really
was
mad, or if not mad, then at least disturbed, out of order, a suitable case for treatment. Because everybody – the nurses, the doctors, my visitor, even I – knew that the only way out of Fulbourn was to accept the logic, not of some unexpected, yet wholly necessary transformation, but of the rules that had put me there in the first place. In other words, you got out by appearing normal. How anybody could appear normal when he was taking a healthy dose of chlorpromazine every few hours is a puzzle to me now (though I did fall in love with that particular drug later on). Still, that’s another story. This story is a lie about madness: it’s bound to be a lie, because nothing I say about that first visit to Fulbourn could be true. A lie, or a story, which amounts to the same thing, if what I say differs in any way from my medical records: records I have seen and marvelled at, for their sheer –
what?
Stupidity?

At the point when they took me to Fulbourn, I was emerging from something I am tempted to call a fit of temporary insanity, emerging and, in an extraordinarily tender and vulnerable state,
becoming
something I couldn’t anticipate, something I couldn’t have described. It was as if someone had happened along, after the imago of an insect had emerged from its cocoon, wet and new and impossibly fragile, and decided there was something wrong with it, because it wasn’t a caterpillar any more. There were other people in that hospital who were undergoing worse treatments than mine – my greatest fear, at Fulbourn, was of the ECT room, into which someone like Cathy, the beautiful, wild dancer from my first day’s visions, could vanish one afternoon, only to emerge with all the beauty and wildness stripped away. I knew there was some technical sense in which they couldn’t treat me without my consent, but there were ways and means, or there seemed to be, to make me do anything. The proof of that was a moment that came every evening, when I walked to the end of the corridor and smelled the night air seeping through the double doors of the exit. If I was a voluntary patient, all I had to do was push open those doors and walk out. It was all so easy – and that was how I knew it was a trick. I wasn’t mad, I could walk out any time; but if I did, it would be taken as another confirmation of my madness, another sign that I still hadn’t discovered the secret trick of seeming normal.

Go back, go back. The questions I am raising here are phantoms, just as so many of the people I met in Fulbourn – the doctors; the nurses; the visitors; some, but not all, of the patients – were phantoms. I was not mad; I was not suffering from ‘psychosis’. I had spent several days in what was, to outward appearances, a psychotic state – hallucinations, mad ramblings, a misguided attempt, not to fly, but to rise a few inches, no more, from the ground – but I was not mad. Medical records from that time describe me as having a history of ‘extreme heavy drug abuse’ which had caused ‘a psycho-stimulant psychosis of a paranoid nature’ – but to me, this language means absolutely nothing. I can read the reports with grim curiosity, but they don’t interest me in the least. What does interest me is the interior of that description, the process that was happening behind my eyes and under my skin during the weeks I spent at Fulbourn, and during the months I spent as a shadow after I emerged. No mention is made in the notes of the details of my hallucinations, the tiny elephants and circus acrobats parading across the floor of the hospital ward when I was first admitted, no mention of the Water Girl, a beautiful, sinister woman-child with fingers like hunting knives, who followed me about, changing shape as she went, becoming a nurse, another patient, a passing cleaner, only to emerge as soon as I relaxed my vigilance and advance upon me, fingers slicing the air. No mention of the fact that, at one point, I found myself in a shuttered room with a beautiful gunman, a smiling, gentle creature who held a glittering silver revolver to my forehead and very slowly pulled the trigger. No mention of the fact that this moment, when I was being shot, was one of extraordinary joy.

This all sounds like madness, I don’t doubt. And yet – I have to insist on this – I did not lose my marbles, get myself committed, take the meds, talk the talk, then emerge cured, normal, suitably treated and ready to take my place in the world. I will not deny that chlorpromazine eased my pain, and quietened the world down – no, not quietened, but held it at bay, held it at arm’s length – long enough for me to do the work that I had to do in that place. Chlorpromazine (trade name Largactil) was a friend to me, then and later, but it wasn’t just medication, it was an instrument. No more, no less. The real work happened inside the lit circle of my own mind. I say mind, but I mean
psyche
, in the old sense of the word:
psyche
, spirit, mind, soul. A theatre of possibilities that, most of the time, is out of bounds. Inside that space, there was something that, to others, looked like chaos, but for me it was a maze, a complex pattern of angles and turns and dead ends, but a maze nonetheless, and I knew that, for every dead end, for every skewed turn, a transformation was being offered to me, a chance at an aseity that was as beautiful as it was terrible. There were times when I was desperate to get out of Fulbourn, but there were also times when I felt privileged – and this is what the authorised story never says: that it’s
beautiful
, this madness; it’s beautiful, this amazement.

Most of the time, though, all I could think was that a mistake had been made. When I came to myself, after what remained of the deadly nightshade experiment had been pumped from my stomach and I’d spent hours in a hospital storeroom, barricaded in, terrified of the Water Girl and her strange company, after the blank days of the first stage of medication, I didn’t know why I was there. The experiment had gone awry, I accepted that, but everybody around me had got hold of the wrong story, a story of insanity, psychosis, depression, suicide attempts – who knew what else – and the sheer weight of all those people believing what they believed was too much for me to counter. They didn’t know – how could they know, and how could I have told them? – that what had happened to me was the outcome of an experiment in which my life was not that important, or rather, was something I was prepared to risk in the process of effecting an absolutely necessary sea change. I wanted to become something other than I had been, and I didn’t care what that transformation cost.

And still, while I was there, I tried to go on with the experiment. As soon as I was stable enough to avoid constant supervision, I would take myself off to the recreation room in the evenings and sit there, alone and silent, for all the world like a living vial of some distilled substance, empty of intent or meaning, reflecting nothing but the moonlight through the long windows and the shadows of the gardens. The recreation room was my sanctuary: a piano, a games table, several shelves of foxed, cloth-bound books, half a dozen jigsaws in boxes with labels on the side to say how many pieces were missing. Nobody bothered me there, and I liked being in the same room as the piano – I had an idea that I could play it, still, but I never tried. The keys looked so perfect, it seemed wrong even to touch them. Most of the time, I was elsewhere, and trying to come back – only I didn’t want to come back empty-handed, I didn’t want to be ‘back to normal’. I was like the monkey in the monkey puzzle story: I had hold of something and I didn’t want to let go of it, but I would never escape unless I did. On that occasion, I couldn’t figure the puzzle out: I was too weak, I hadn’t gone far enough, I thought the reason for my stay was something other than it was. I thought I was tired, or wounded, or unhappy. I was coming off a huge dose of poison, and that explained everything. It didn’t though, and I suspected that too. Poison has its own logic, its own purposes, and they vary from one person to the next. In every case, they might be a revelation. I was sorry, when I left, that I hadn’t been afforded that revelation. The experiment had failed: I had tried to engineer a meeting with the angel, but there had been no annunciation, just a series of hallucinations and delusional symptoms. Still, I knew I’d be back. There was a sense of unfinished business in the air, as I walked back into Cambridge from my temporary heaven, dazed by the sunlight, numbed by the movement and the noise, and I knew I still had work to do.

CHAPTER 8

It took me a few weeks to get myself sorted out. I had no desire to stay in Cambridge, so I sold, handed on, or discarded the little I owned and walked away. I needed new surroundings, space and time to think, a place to be unseen by others. I could have gone anywhere but, as it happened, I ended up in Woodingdean, just outside Brighton. The room I rented was to the rear of a bungalow, otherwise inhabited by an elderly woman who was often away and didn’t seem pushy about rent; I had the use of the kitchen, and my bedroom overlooked a shady secluded garden that, after a time, I took charge of, as payment in kind for monies owed. I wanted to be in a place where I didn’t know anybody, and could make a fresh start. If I’m honest, I have to admit that I wanted to hide, to be alone with the theatre of my recovery, assuming the pose of a man who has come close to an experimental death, and might as well behave accordingly.

Which was probably what made me attractive to every crazy and visionary in Brighton. By the following Christmas – a Christmas I’d planned to pass in splendid isolation – I had gathered a circle of friends that I’d never intended to find: madmen, artists, slow suicides, masochists possessed by their own brand of dark, demanding joy. Brighton was just coming to the end of a heyday: an alternative world of gay pubs and arty cafés torn between decline and gentrification, a sad old seaside town of crazed ex-hippies, squaddies on two-day passes, NF skinheads, hopheads, acidheads, cokeheads, breadheads, Supremes impersonators, poets, jazzmen, maniacs, thieves, jokers, fools. At the centre of it all stood the Pavilion, the city’s bitter soul passing itself off as a psychedelic birthday cake; but what really mattered was the seafront: the promenades, the pebble beaches, the wreck oozing oil by the old pier, the pier itself, falling apart gracefully under the weight of a thousand starlings and the buffeting of the Channel winds. It was on the front, on the beach or the promenade, where we got high, made love, fought our pointless battles, and lay down in our street clothes when we had nowhere else to go. It was in a house on the front, a tall, narrow mock-Regency building that had been adapted to student accommodation, that my little band of friends came to grief, when the smartest and funniest of us all fell right out of the world when none of us was there to catch him.

Rick was like a brother to me. I never knew what that cliché meant until I encountered him, and realised I had been waiting for him ever since my real brother – my ghost, my Andrew – had died back in the prefabs. He was a thin, nervy man-boy with thick, shiny glasses and horribly pale skin. On our first meeting, it seemed he would never stop talking, but I never got tired of listening; he was always funny, always a little wild. It was like watching Keith Moon play Mercutio from
Romeo and Juliet
: everything he said sounded like some bizarre, speedy variation on the Queen Mab speech, all fanciful nonsense and mania that, of a sudden, could stop us in our tracks and make us wonder if he was serious. I think, at times, he was, but he never let on. I didn’t know it then, but all this talk was a smokescreen, not for us, but for himself, a diversion to distract him from the knowledge that he was slowly going crazy with disappointment and outrage at the way people behaved. He loved the world; he was a romantic, even a sentimentalist; and he was doing all he could to hide it from us and from himself. On first acquaintance, it seemed that all he wanted was to go from one party to the next, worming his way into the affections of complete strangers by the sheer bravado of his conversation; but it wasn’t all parties and, once I got to know him, I saw that he wasn’t really the manic, stand-up cynic he pretended to be. Sometimes, at the end of a night, we would find ourselves alone in the small hours, dawn just beginning at the window like a black-and-white film, and we would be there, with coffee and hash, or the last of the wine, talking about whatever he’d just got into – it didn’t matter what: the techniques of sword-swallowing, the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa, it didn’t matter at all, he would just open a subject up in front of me like a backgammon board, and we would be playing, trying out ideas, serious, but not taking ourselves seriously. It was the world that mattered, all that real stuff out there that seemed to mystify and enchant him, and for which he felt a mysterious and genuine grief. Nothing could come up without him thinking of it as a puzzle, he was always bemused, always wondering. Sometimes, he seemed worried, as if he thought everything around him might disappear at any second. It wasn’t a side he revealed when he was out and about, but I saw it, and I was forced to admit – silently, in my own mind – that his bewilderment was something I not only shared, but prized.