by Paul Torday
‘Weren’t you terribly lonely?’ I asked.
‘No, not at all. I always found someone to talk to, or play with. I was out on those hills a lot. I could run like a stag in those days.’
‘And everyone called you Mikey,’ I said. ‘You sound as if you were like Mowgli in The Jungle Book.’
‘Yes, brought up by the creatures and the people of the wood,’ said Mikey warmly. ‘It makes a nice story, doesn’t it? But not everyone called me Mikey. Some of the children in Bridge of Gala called me “Mental Micky”.’
‘Oh, how horrible of them,’ I said. My heart started racing. Mikey - on purpose or not - had given me another opportunity to ask him about his mental illness, about Serendipozan, and all the mysteries that now surrounded him.
‘I told you I was rather an odd child,’ said Mikey. ‘And children are mostly horrible to each other in any case.’
He smiled at me, as if holding a deck of cards towards me like a conjuror: pick a card, any card, don’t tell me what it is, I’ll tell you. I drew a deep breath to ask him why he had really been prescribed Serendipozan, what darker truth might lie behind such bland terms as ‘odd’ and ‘behavioural problems’. But as I did so, I realised how fragile this new happiness was; happiness that I now held in the palm of my hand, like a drop of quicksilver. How quickly it could slip through my fingers and fragment into a thousand droplets.
Instead of asking what I wanted to ask, a different question came out.
‘Why did you decide to come to Rome so suddenly?’
‘Do you wish we hadn’t?’ he replied, staring out at the view without turning his head to look at me. I could see that he was still smiling.
‘Don’t be a fool: you know how much I’ve loved every minute of it. What I meant was, why has it taken us ten years to do something like this? We’ve really been together, Mikey. Don’t you think so?’
‘You’re asking me why we never did this before. Don’t ask me, darling, just accept things as they are.’
‘But how do I know they’ll stay this way?’
He said nothing in reply to this, but a line appeared between his eyes.
‘Mikey?’
‘I like you calling me Mikey,’ he said. But he still didn’t answer my question.
We got home on Monday afternoon, and I decided I would go and freshen up, and then go straight into the office and put in a few hours, just to appear willing. But when we unlocked the door, Norma the dog minder was waiting for us with a grey face. She wouldn’t look us in the eye.
‘Hello, Norma,’ I said, as we stepped into the hall and put our cases down.
‘Where’s Rupert?’ Mikey asked, because Rupert, like many dogs, had the psychic power of knowing exactly when we would return from our rare trips away without him, and was always standing beside Norma wagging his tail as hard as he could when we came back.
‘Oh, Mr Gascoigne . . .’ said Norma, and then burst into tears. We couldn’t get any sense out of her, so I shepherded her into the kitchen and put the kettle on while she buried her head in her hands, unable to speak through muffled sobs that shook her narrow shoulders. I heard Mikey going from room to room calling for Rupert, and then I heard the front door bang as he went out to look up and down the street for him. He came back into the kitchen a short while later and shrugged, a bleak look on his face.
‘What happened, Norma?’ I asked, as gently as I could. She was still shaken, but had managed to calm down enough to sip some tea. ‘Where’s Rupert?’
‘I don’t know. He was so restless. I couldn’t calm him down. Then, yesterday morning, when I opened the front door to pick up the newspaper, he shot out into the street and disappeared.’
After a while we managed to make sense of Norma’s story. From the minute we left Rupert had seemed very anxious. That was quite customary, and it always took a while for Norma to calm him down, but this time she couldn’t. Rupert kept going from room to room, looking for us. He slept the first night in his basket, which Norma moved into the spare bedroom so that he could be next to her. That was unusual: he was normally content to stay in the kitchen.
‘Then, on Sunday morning, very early, he started to growl. He didn’t leave his basket but he was growling with that awful low sound they make, you know, when they’re really angry or frightened. I switched on the light and saw that his hackles were up.’
She looked at us with scared eyes.
‘Of course, I started imagining that there was a burglar in the flat, and I didn’t know what to do. They say these drug addicts will put a knife in you as soon as look at you. But I couldn’t hear anything. It was very cold, too. The heating was on but it didn’t seem to be working properly. After a while I must have fallen asleep again. But I wasn’t very happy, and neither was Rupert. I kept thinking I could hear someone padding about. I was very frightened.’
Despite Rupert’s disappearance, I felt a little sympathy for Norma. She was in her sixties and not very robust. To have a dog growling beside you in the dark, while your fancy makes you interpret the small sounds of night as something more than they are, is not a comfortable thought.
‘In the morning I went around the flat. Of course, everything seemed to be in its place, and there was no sign of any disturbance or of anyone having been there except me. Then, when I got to your bedroom, I opened the door to take a quick look inside, just to make sure everything was all right.’
She looked at us, as if apologising for this invasion of privacy.
‘Quite right, Norma,’ I said. ‘That was the right thing to do.’
‘Rupert began whining,’ she continued. ‘Then he howled. It chilled me to hear it. Then there was a noise at the front door and I went to see what it was. I was frightened - I don’t know why. When I opened the door I saw the newspaper lying there, and I bent down to pick it up. Rupert burst past me and ran out into the street. I couldn’t stop him.’
Norma began to sob again.
That was all there was to it, really. By the time Norma had changed from her slippers and dressing gown into her clothes, Rupert was long gone. She walked and walked, she said, until she was fit to drop. Then she spent the afternoon phoning the police, the RSPCA, and every dog shelter in London. Nothing: no sign of Rupert anywhere. Not then, and not now.
After a while we managed to get Norma out of the flat, although she kept apologising every five seconds as she went. It wasn’t really her fault. I was devastated - I adored Rupert - but it was worse for Mikey. I could see that he was on the verge of tears. I had never seen him look so distressed.
‘Poor Rupert,’ he said. ‘What harm did he do to anyone?’
That seemed an odd way to look at it. I just said, ‘Perhaps he’ll come back. They do that sometimes. They go walkabout and then come back.’
With a great effort Mikey smiled, and said he supposed that was possible.
‘All the same, though, I’ll just go out and look for him again. I can’t bear the thought of him wandering about on his own. I’ll get the car and drive about a bit. Would you mind not going into the office and staying here? Just in case he comes back?’
In the end it was nearly midnight when Mikey returned. I had made a dozen phone calls to some of the telephone numbers Norma had scribbled down, but no one had any news of Rupert; not the police, not the lost-dog centres. Mikey looked exhausted.
‘Any news?’ he asked me, but he knew the answer from my face before I spoke.
I poured him a very large whisky and water and we sat in the sitting room together. With an effort, Mikey said, ‘Poor darling, what a rotten end to your holiday.’
I went across to him and kissed him.
‘It was the best holiday I have ever had,’ I said. ‘I’ve been really, really happy.’
Mikey sipped his whisky and was silent for a moment.
‘Have you noticed,’ he asked, ‘how happiness never seems to last?’
The autostrada, which had been travelling through Mediterranean landscapes of cypress tr
ees and vineyards, plunged back into the blackness of the tunnels.
11
I Smelled the Blood
When I was a child, I thought and spoke as a child.
My first memories are of waving goodbye to my parents as Mrs McLeish and I stood in the doorway of Caorrun Lodge, my parents’ Bentley, laden with suitcases, disappearing down the drive. I don’t have memories of them coming back from these endless trips: to Doncaster for the St Leger, to Newcastle for the Plate, to Newmarket for the 2000 Guineas, to Goodwood, to Ascot, to Deauville. I know that they must have been at home much more than memory suggests because it was talking to my mother that first got me into trouble.
When my parents were away I spent most of my free time wandering the hills behind the house, following the sheep and deer paths that led cunningly along their contours, finding other paths that ran through the tangled woods of the Forest of Gala. I walked up the sides of the burns that ran down from the distant slopes of Beinn Caorrun, and saw the silver salmon lying in the pools in the spring. Once I remember crossing a small burn and noticing, to my surprise, an old dog fox lying on the other bank, half in and half out of the water. I approached him carefully: he was still alive, but only just, his breath coming in shallow pants. I looked at his flanks and chest - there was no blood, no sign of a wound. His ribs showed and his muzzle and coat were flecked with grey. It seemed as if he had come down to the burn for one last drink, and then had fallen on his side, unable to move, waiting patiently for death. It was not far away now.
The old hunter had survived, I thought, survived dogs, snares and the bullets of keepers and shepherds chasing him away from the spring lambs. He had hidden, and he had travelled the hills by his secret ways. Now he lay dying in a stream, with hill and sky around him, dying at his appointed time in a place of his own choosing.
On those long-ago excursions in the hills I talked to people too: the shepherds, the old stalker, Fraser; the occasional woodman cutting birch for charcoal. Then there were the others who, it seemed to me, I met in the darker clearings; who communicated with me in a different way, in the old language of gestures and signs that came before speech, so that their voices did not carry through the air but appeared directly inside my head. I told my mother about them one evening, as we sat in the nursery talking, because I hadn’t seen her all day and didn’t want to be read a story.
‘Mummy,’ I said. ‘Who are the people who live in the wood?’
‘What people, darling?’ she asked. ‘It’s nearly time to put your light out. Get into bed.’
‘They don’t speak with their voices,’ I explained. ‘They speak with their hands. I see their voices in my head.’
My mother looked at me oddly. ‘Darling, there are no people in the woods. Don’t tell silly stories. Now get into bed.’
I hadn’t expected my mother to say anything different: grown-ups, I had already realised, didn’t know very much about what went on in the world. All the same, as time went by, I became more interested in the people I met and what their voices told me, and sometimes, despite a natural caution that urged me to keep quiet, I found myself speaking to my mother about them. I told Mrs McLeish all this and more, and she never minded what I said; she never told me I was imagining things. My mother was different, though.
She took me ‘to see somebody’.
The ‘somebody’ was a middle-aged, disapproving-looking lady in a set of consulting rooms in Edinburgh. We talked for a long time about the voices I saw in my head. It was a concept she had difficulty in grasping. I cannot remember that these first encounters with the world of psychiatry and medicine had any particular effect on my life. In those days the pharmacological treatment of mental illness was less all embracing than it is now. The rise of the giant drug companies was only just beginning, and the pharmacopoeia of antidepressants, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety pills, the whole chemical toolkit for dealing with modern life, was only just starting to roll off the production lines. There was still a lingering belief that if I confessed that all these stories about voices were just made up to get my parents’ attention, then the whole problem would go away. Unfortunately, it did not.
The next such meeting was four years later, when I was twelve, after Fraser had found me in a gully far up the slopes of the mountain, gralloching a stag I had killed without his permission or even knowledge; above all, without a rifle. I had killed the stag with a knife stuck into the back of its neck. Before he took me to see my father, Fraser questioned me at length to try to find out how I had done it. I couldn’t tell him, but I told my father. I told him how I had been taught to move without being seen, how a knife or a sharpened stick had worked well enough for hunters in the old days.
This time my father and mother both took me to see Alex Grant, and that was when they started to try to poison me. The first medicines they gave me - Alex and a specialist in Edinburgh, a different one this time - changed my life for ever. I could not believe that I was being made to ingest these pills that made me feel so awful. Yet such was my respect for my parents, my automatic obedience, my sense that if I did not take the pills then Alex Grant, with his, all-seeing eyes, would know, that it never occurred to me I had any choice but to keep taking the medicine. I have since read about these antipsychotic medicines. In one of the articles it said that symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease might be a possible side effect; in another, it even mentioned death. What was so terribly wrong with me that Parkinson’s or death might be considered acceptable side effects? I didn’t feel mad. My reality was not theirs, that was all. Years later, Stephen Gunnerton told me something. He was fond of the sound of his own voice, and as I was on such mega-doses of medication for much of the time, I was barely capable of interrupting him.
He said, ‘You know, it’s your bad luck that you are probably an evolutionary misstep, or sidestep. Your brain chemistry has reverted to that of the very earliest hunter-gatherers, before a social brain became the evolutionary path forward, as the climate forced early humans to huddle together for warmth and safety in caves, and learn to live together. You’re the ghost in the machine, Michael.’
I stared at him without comprehension.
‘There was a writer called Arthur Koestler. He advanced the theory, although he was not the first man to do so, that beneath the modern social brain there is an atavistic brain. He believed that this primitive brain still dictates our core behaviours, and if allowed to, urges us on to the destruction of ourselves and others. You might be rather a good example of his argument. In any case, I can’t let you out into the community as you are. We need to reorganise your brain chemistry with a nice, powerful programme of neuroleptics.’
In my teenage years they changed the medication again, and sometimes relaxed it altogether until some incautious word or gesture would result in another trip to Dr Grant, and another prescription. Some of the pills gave me a feeling of crawling restlessness, as if insects were burrowing under my skin, and made me twitch constantly. They called that ‘akathisia’ and seemed rather proud of me when I exhibited the symptoms, as if it were proof that everything was going to plan. I didn’t know what the plan was then. I know now: it was to replace my real identity with a new one.
At the age of sixteen I discovered the courage, or perhaps it was my instinct for survival, to throw the pills away. I stopped taking them and, after a while, it was as if I had crawled between the bars of some dark oubliette and somehow found my way back into the sunlight. I learned to dissimulate, to deceive. I didn’t bother to pretend with Mrs McLeish, but when my parents were at home, I remembered to shuffle around the house with a dazed expression and to keep the pills on display in my bathroom, washing two a day down the loo in case they were counting.
Another effect of not taking the pills was that the vividness of my encounters with the people in the woods increased. It really was fascinating. Their voices, their fluttering hands, made images in my head, and I began to understand what I might have to do in order to survive.<
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Then my mother died in her accident. That was bad enough, but five years later my father died in equally tragic circumstances. I became really ill. For a while I was beyond the help of any pills.
It was Mrs McLeish who called in Dr Grant, when she found me sitting in the kitchen a few weeks after my father’s disappearance. I was naked. I couldn’t speak and my mouth kept filling with saliva so that when I opened it to say, ‘It’s all right, Ellie, everything’s all right, don’t worry about me,’ all that came out was spittle. She looked at me and shook her head, as if I were letting her down somehow, then called Dr Grant. I don’t remember much about the months that followed. I ended up in a hospital with barred windows, somewhere in South London, and that’s where I met Stephen Gunnerton.
Stephen put me on a drug called Serendipozan. I have been thinking about this drug, and the scientists who designed it, for a long time, and I keep wondering: what type of human being can conceive that a drug which obliterates the patient’s identity so entirely is a cure for anything? This new drug stopped the voices, but it stopped a lot of other things as well. The worst side effect was not the loss of libido, though in due course that was bad enough - it was something Stephen called ‘dysphoria’. What wonderful words they come up with: dysphoria meant a long descent into a bleak half-world, a constant inability to concentrate for more than a few minutes, a feeling of malaise as if one was about to go down with a bad bout of flu. From the first days of the new medication, I became separated from the world by an intangible curtain that filtered out light and meaning; that filtered out life itself.