Grey Area

by Will Self

  So I stayed calm, but told them in no uncertain terms that I’d rather be dead than go into one of those grotesque NHS bedlams, where the ‘patients’ wander around making Hogarth look understated. This raised a bit of a laugh from George – but the rest of them stayed grim, stony-jawed.

  George then said that he was prepared to put up the dosh for me to go to some private place that he knows about in Wiltshire. He claims that it’s OK there and they won’t necessarily put me on drugs. They won’t even make me talk about things if I don’t want to. They’ll also let me have as many visitors as and when I want.

  I said I was very grateful to George (even though I know he’s only doing it to protect his fucking asset, the mercenary cunt). And I said I would go – if that’s what they wanted. But that if I did George had to promise to come and see me every week, and if I wasn’t happy he had to get me discharged. He agreed to this. So, I’m off tomorrow. I suppose I have to admit that I’m a bit relieved, the suicide shit is beginning to get to me badly. I wouldn’t want the kids to find Daddy strung up from the light socket.

  There’s then a gap of about two months until the next entry.

  22nd January

  Dear Fuck-wit Diary

  Well, I managed to get myself out of that joint at long last. What a pile of wank! To think that people get paid for administering that so-called therapy, and other people are prepared to pay for it. The blind pissing on the blind – that’s what it is. The best thing I can say about my stay at the funny farm is that it cut the costs at home – thanks to George’s largesse. And I managed to miss out on Christmas, which has to be the most depressing time of the year.

  George was right about one thing, though, the cunts didn’t make me talk about myself, or take anything I didn’t want to. They did however insist on my sitting in on group therapy sessions. What an absurd idea! As if forcing a lot of unhappy people to sit in a circle, prating on about their private miseries, could possibly make any of us feel any better.

  30th January

  It’s not as if I ever really felt any better – so I suppose I can’t be feeling substantially worse. The house has been wreathed in thick fog for the past week or so. Every morning when I get up, I look out of the window and see it hanging like a cloud of gas at the end of the garden. I can almost imagine that soldiers are about to emerge from it wearing puttees and carrying Lee Enfields with bayonets fixed. They are advancing towards me, determined to capture the trench of my mind.

  I like to move very carefully now. To cross a room, or even pick up some small object, I affect an undulant motion, like someone with Parkinson’s disease who’s just taken some L-Dopa. I have to get the right rhythm into my actions in order for them to happen at all. Often I’ll be halfway towards doing something when I’ll realise that I don’t have the correct rhythm, and then I’ll just collapse back into despair.

  9th February

  I went to see Tony Bohm yesterday. Not because of my mental health, but because of a cyst in one of my nipples. I joked with him, saying perhaps he should inject a little collagen into the other nipple, to even things up.

  He gave me a peculiar look, and said in that nannyish way that doctors have, ‘You’re not at all well, Simon, are you?’ I confessed that I didn’t feel my stay with the other sads had done me a great deal of good, but so what? He suggested – in a roundabout sort of a way – that I try going on anti-depressants again. According to him, these drugs are far better designed than they used to be. They can now target exactly the receptors in the brain responsible for depression, like some smart misery-seeking bomb, dropped down the ventilation shaft of the mind.

  I started waving my hands about when he began this eulogy, saying All right, all right, I’ll take the bloody pills! I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m just exhausted, tired of fighting this thing day in and day out. I want some respite from my head, and I dread the suicidal urges coming back. I read last week in the Bulletin of Suicidology that the suicide rate for male painters in their early forties is 700 per cent higher than the national average. No wonder I want to do a Rothko.

  I left Bohm’s surgery with a prescription and went across to get it at MacLachlan’s. For some reason the pharmacist in there – a drowned rat of a man, who is normally sulky and silent – gave me a broad grin, together with my pot of head-governors.

  I came home and took a couple. I’m waiting for the mushy feeling that comes before I’ve adjusted to the dosage. Waiting for it with something that could be anticipation – but isn’t. Rather it’s something that stands in the same relation to anticipation as a whore does to a lover.

  11th February

  No mushy feeling yesterday, and none today either. Instead a peculiar lightening in my mood. It’s not that I exactly want to do anything, or that I don’t feel the depression still gnawing at me, it’s just that I can almost – almost, mind – imagine what it might be like to feel interested in something again, to want to include some of its essence within myself.

  Sat in my studio all day and listened to the sounds of the house around and below me. Jean’s shoes clacking across the wooden floors; the children’s crashing entries and slamming exits; the occasional waft of music; the chirrup and trill of the phone. I smiled, thinking about how I constantly complain that this rumpus upsets my work, when the truth is I haven’t done any work now for so long.

  12th February

  On some odd impulse I bought an antique victrola today. It was sitting in the window of the noncey little antique shop in Thame, together with the usual cataract of tat. I had noticed the thing a number of times before, but on this occasion I found myself intrigued by it. With primitive music machines like this, the analog of the sound they make is so visible, so tangible. I only had to touch the thing to imagine that Chaliapin was creaking and groaning the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’. It will make a great object to place at the centre of a canvas.

  13th February

  Started work on the victrola painting today. I thought I’d do some charcoal sketches of it just to get my hand in, and then it struck me: I was working! I had the yen to work for the first time in months. I had the impulse to shout, hoot, do a little jig, rush down and tell Jean and Christabel . . . but I restrained myself. What if it was just an illusion, some function of the happy pills Bohm has given me?

  So, this afternoon I drove into Oxford and went to the Science Library. I had intended to look up all the anti-depressants commonly prescribed, and see if I could account for my creative rebirth. But when I got down among the stacks and was leafing through the pharmacological reference works, I lost interest in this mundane task. The juxtapositions of carpet tiling, strip lighting and blond wood in the library fired my imagination. The library – and the way it acts as an analog of the information contained in its rank upon rank of volumes – struck me as a counterpart to the victrola I bought yesterday in Thame.

  Why not amalgamate the two into one canvas? I could see exactly what it should look like: the victrola, hunched and black, with chunks of pharmacological gobbledygook radiating from its flaring horn. It will look Dadaist, and be a suitable memento of my voyage back across the psychic Styx.

  14th February

  I stayed up late last night and drew Jean a Valentine’s card. She seemed shocked when she saw it among the breakfast things – and then burst into tears and ran out of the room. I ran after her and caught her in the drawing room, where she hugged me and sobbed for a while. She said she had despaired of my ever improving and had made arrangements to take the children away, if I wouldn’t agree to go back into hospital.

  I was shaken by this. It’s peculiar how from the vantage point of even a partial recovery the idea of my former negativity, my rejection of the world and all its works, seems so remote.

  Worked on the victrola painting all morning. I’ve got hold of some second-hand pharmacological reference works back from Oxford, and I spent the morning cutting them up into the appropriately sized chunks. I’ve given up on doing the
charcoal sketches and have decided to work directly on to canvas. I feel that confident.

  16th February

  I went into the health centre this morning to see Bohm. I told him, with some humility, that he was right and the new anti-depressants did seem to be having a remarkable effect on me. I now find that more or less anything I direct my attention to appears interesting to me, and worthy of some place in my life. Bohm asked me if I would describe this as ‘positive engagement’. I replied that this was a bit technical, but that I did feel a general enthusiasm for life and all it offers.

  The truth is that the posters Bohm has put up in his consulting room, which show cuddly toys – teddies and suchlike – inhabiting their own parallel realm, had begun to intrigue me, and I wasn’t directing much of my attention to him. He’s obviously put them up for the children, but perhaps, in away, they represent an idea of a better world that adults also find seductive. It would be interesting to do a series of paintings, in a photoreal style and employing the same colour scheme, but showing the cuddly toys working in laboratories, or industrial plants.

  20th February

  Jean is a bit concerned about the way the house is filling up with laboratory equipment and cuddly toys. I’ve explained that they’re essential for the new painting World of Bears; and that I simply haven’t room for them all in the studio, where I am busily posing a scene that comprises four near life’ size stuffed bears in white coats, working at a chemical experiment.

  It isn’t that I’ve lost interest in the victrola painting, but right now this project grabs me more. Possibly it needs to be a triptych?

  22nd February

  I went for a walk with Jean and the boys today. What a joy it is to see one’s children growing up and taking an interest in the world they inhabit. I think Magnus will be the more scientifically minded of the two. Even at the age of six he looks at everything in structural and normative terms; while the older Henry is so plainly responding to the imagistic and the emotional in everything he does.

  We walked all the way to the golf course and back, the four of us chattering away. I felt nothing but interested in everything that they said; none of my former sense of irritation with the family seems to remain. On the way back Jean and I walked arm in arm, and last night she came to me.

  26th February

  Perhaps a falling out always comes after a reunification. I don’t know. But yesterday Jean and I had a bit of a spat. It started like this: she was telling me about some work she was doing for the local church, collecting for a famine relief charity, when I conceived an overpowering interest in everything she was saying. I wanted to know all about the charity: everything that it did; where its projects were sited, what they hoped to achieve; how they stood in relation to the rest of the charitable sector; the relationship between that sector and the foreign aid budget; the history of foreign aid.

  All of these questions came surging up in me, together with the realisation that Jean didn’t know enough to satisfy me. It was rude and peremptory of me, but I couldn’t help it. I threw up my hands and said, ‘There’s no point in your going any further with this, you haven’t got enough information,’ and turned away from her.

  I don’t blame her for being upset, but she must appreciate the overwhelming need I have to incorporate and assimilate things at the moment. I feel that this faculty has been in abeyance for so long now that I must give it as free a rein as I can.

  28th February

  I’ve started on a ‘found object’ sculpture, using pill boxes and plastic pachyderms. The pill boxes are glued to the elephants’ backs like miniature howdahs.

  29th February

  Sat in my studio all morning experiencing a surge of motiveless and directionless interest in everything. I found this quite disturbing. Any line of thought that I tried to pursue came up against some thing, idea, or individual, and all infinitely worthy of a lifetime’s devotion.

  For hours my thoughts were like aeroplanes, stacked over-head for landings on my consciousness that were always being aborted. Not that dissimilar to states of mind I remember from my depression days.

  In the afternoon I rallied a bit. All the surfaces of the studio appeared unnecessarily bare to me, so I began to decorate them with a pattern loosely based on The Marriage of the Arnolfini.

  3rd March

  It has to be those pills. I don’t think it can reasonably be anything else. What little objectivity I still retain tells me that it isn’t normal to feel this way, so tirelessly interested. I can’t sleep because I have to count all the little black and red diamonds that constitute my retinal after-image. I can sense that the barrier between my consciousness and the world is becoming fuzzy and indeterminate – so much of it have I become prepared to include within myself.

  If I sit in the studio I can no longer differentiate between the many Post-It Notes I have stuck up on the walls to remind me of errands, ideas, images and facts, and the thoughts that gave rise to them in the first place. Perhaps the studio is an extension of my own mind? And if I start to combine and recombine these original thoughts, I will witness the telekinesis of their representation?

  I must remember to phone Ivor Saluki, the engraver. About ten years ago he borrowed a biography of Cézanne from me, and I really do need it back.

  Jean is furious about the boxes of fruit that have been turning up at the house. I need that fruit! I need it for my work. I have in mind a great mound of rotting fruit studded with electronic components. Such an installation will present a fantastic satirical vision of mind, as the fruit rots and the components rust! Despite my anxieties over the medication, I know that I’m still coming up with creative solutions of the first order.

  5th March

  Walking up to the Three Pigeons at lunchtime today I found myself absorbing the very topography of the land surrounding the Brown House. The fields were as much in me as I was in them. The landscape seethed as I allowed myself to think through it and annex it to the territory of my own psyche.

  Then in the pub I became transfixed by the towelling bar mat. It was the same as with the print of the Boxer Revolt I looked at the other day. Through the individual bar mat, I felt myself being sucked into a durable history of other bar mats. I romped down the evolutionary pathways of this mundane object, turned into temporal byways, and then returned to the present.

  There was a man sitting in the corner. An ageing hippy dressed in a crumpled poplin jacket and a yanked-tight snake of woollen tie. I knew he had a connection with the pills Bohm has been prescribing me the minute I saw him. I can’t explain this in a commonsensical way; such things are not like a species of prescience, or any kind of ESP, they’re rather like remembering that you already knew something that you’d forgotten for a while. It’s a reacquaintance with the facts of the matter.

  I knew this man was called Busner. I knew that he was involved in secretly (and illegally) testing a new psychoactive drug in the Thame area. I knew that he knew Anthony Bohm. I knew that he thought Glen Gould a vulgar pianist. I knew that he once caught his foreskin in the fly of his trousers, whilst holidaying in Positano in Italy, and had to be hospitalised for a day. I knew that he was interested in curling.

  I was intrigued and frightened in equal measure by the revelation of Busner and his impact on my life. I didn’t announce myself to him, because I couldn’t think of any way of doing it that wouldn’t be melodramatic.

  7th March

  Busner is the Hierophant. He oversees the auguries, decocts potions, presides over rituals that piddle the everyday into a tea-strainer reality. I can sense him moving around there up in Worminghall, his shit-kicker shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor as he struggles to return that loop shot from one of his technicians. The way he has surreptitiously tinkered with the architecture of my mind is an obscenity. I must confront him with it, but at the moment I am too taken with the idea of some art work that expresses his attributes to be seriously bothered.

  I’ve ordered some curling equip
ment through a sports mail-order catalogue. It’s only a tentative idea so far (although I feel strong enthusiasm for it), but some melding together of both curling equipment and ancient votive statuary into a purely figurative sculpture of Busner would do the man justice.

  8th March

  More stuffed animals and exercise equipment arrived at the Brown House today. Jean is beside herself. She says there isn’t enough room for all this in the house. I shouted at her. After all, if I can include it in my mind, why can’t she have it in the house? People are so lazy nowadays. They confine themselves to some one role or other, and with it comes a narrowing and specialisation of what their minds allow.

  Take sporting trophies, for example. I think they’ve been unjustifiably ignored. Sure, there are a few pocket guides to them, but no truly informative and exhaustive history. I intend to remedy this situation as soon as I can find the time off from cataloguing my antiquarian library; electroplating my model trains; completing the construction of my combination sousaphone-and-samovar: and launching my collection of designer clothing made entirely from carpet off-cuts.

  9th March

  I will see Bohm tomorrow and arrange to meet with the Magus of Worminghall. I have no idea what will transpire, but it may prove illuminating. I can sense a growing concentricity in my manner of thinking, a desire to circle back on my own thoughts, to tergiversate, to animadvert, to extemporise. When I am too distracted even to formulate this in language, I am driven to express it in an odd kind of dance or jig.

  I choreograph these spontaneously, hopping from one leg to another in a symmetrical pattern, which seems to have a semiotics of its own. The dances are saying, ‘Here are interesting ideas, over there are more things worthy of inclusion in your life.’

  What to do with the car batteries and Eskis that were delivered today? A sculpture is out of the question. I may just leave them as they are, boxed up and so splendidly replete.