I decide that using films to talk to me is like using me to talk to strangers. It’s a way of avoiding having to talk directly, of taking responsibility for what you’re saying. I know this because I do it all the time.
I say something about not wanting to take a stroll down memory lane, and she says not to bite her bloody head off, and Jack says something about not talking to your mum like that. I say something sarcastic and Kath says there’s no need to be sarcastic. Jack says to leave it the both of you, and Kath tells him to leave it, because I’m his son too and it’s his religion and, whilst we’re on the subject, it wouldn’t have killed me to put in an appearance at mass on Christmas Eve. I ask them if their mate Ken Hargreaves was there and they say no he wasn’t, but what if he was and anyway, what’s that got to do with anything.
I say and they say and we all three of us say that we’d better not say anything we’d later regret.
I walk around Accrington and try to figure out how I would know if I was going to regret saying something until I’d actually said it. And if I could regret not saying something. And if I could regret saying some things only because I regretted not saying others, and how would I know the difference until I’d said them and saw what there was to regret.
I remember it was snowing and when the streetlamps came on I felt like I was inside one of those glass globes that you can shake.
I think, I’m enraged by the smallest things because they feed into big things. And because I know what the big thing is, I know that the small things aren’t small. I somehow think that other people must know this too, must be able to see it.
I was wearing my regulation Oxfam overcoat, a long scarf and a peaked blue cap that I think makes me look like a folk singer and Jack says makes me look like Captain Birdseye.
I think, I must have brain damage.
I arrive at Dave Hes’ house and his parents give me homebrew and ask me if I have had a good Christmas. I say what I always say, ‘Fine thanks, you?’ I feel guilty for thinking that Dave’s parents are nicer than my parents. I still haven’t got the hang of calling them by their first names, John and Maureen. I wish my parents had central heating. And a car.
Me and Dave walk over Dill Hall Lane to Clayton, past where my grandparents used to live, and I tell him about playing cards during the power cuts and how I feel bad for not seeing my grandma much after Grandad died. He tells me a story about his grandad that makes me want to put my arm around his shoulders, but I don’t. He knows a pub where we’ll get a lock-in.
I say something like, How do you stand it?
I’m half-expecting him to say something about families, or Oxford, or a book he’s been reading or (his favourite) the wide range of stories available to posh people and how we should be suspicious of the ‘got out and made good’ story that we seem to have been lumbered with.
He doesn’t say any of that. What he says, with a face as flat as a pancake, is this: ‘What I think is that love is like oxygen and if you get too much you get too high, not enough and you’re gonna die. Love gets you high . . .’
And on he goes, delivering Sweet’s ‘Love is Like Oxygen’ as though the words have just occurred to him and they carry the gravitas of all ten commandments. He’s stroking his chin, nodding at his own wisdom: ‘I can’t shake off my city blues, everywhere I turn I lose.’ He’s playing it straight, like Peter Sellers reciting ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. ‘Some things are better left unsaid. I’m gonna spend my days in bed.’
I can’t stop laughing, snorting. I pull myself together . . .
‘Really, David? Interesting that you should say that, because I often think that love is the drug, particularly when I troll downtown to the red-light place and lumber up and limbo dooooown.’
Dave stays in character, not missing a beat, nonchalant but officious: ‘A fine thought, Mr Caveney. But have you ever considered that people may have had enough of silly love songs?’
‘I have indeed, Mr Hesmondhalgh, but I look around me and see it isn’t so . . .’
We do this all the way to Clayton.
We sit in the pub, and drink, and talk. The landlady has put out a table groaning beneath plates of pork pies sliced into quarters, the insides glistening with gelatine. There are sausage rolls that don’t seem to have any sausage in them, and bowls of nuts and crisps that are suspiciously damp. There are sandwiches, thick white bread just starting to curl, basins with pickled onions and mince pies heavily dusted in icing sugar.
People are wearing paper hats with glitter on their faces. The next table over a man is blowing a party horn and singing the wrong words to Paul Young’s ‘Love of the Common People’. I say to Dave that it’s like that scene in Educating Rita, the one where Julie Walters is berating Michael Caine for raising her expectations of life, and how it cuts back to her sat with her family having a sing-along in the local, except that she can’t sing along because she knows there’s better songs than this.
Dave had been irritated by it, thought that it sentimentalized both sides of the equation. I didn’t know quite what I thought of it. I had sat watching it thinking, So it is possible to be schooled without being seduced, to be mentored without getting fucked. Yet there had been something sexual between them; no doubt about that. The bit where he comes back from holiday and has brought her some cigarettes and she says that she’s stopped smoking. It’s a mini-betrayal, the kind of incidental hurt that a lover might inflict.
But he hadn’t fucked her, or tried to. He’d held whatever it was between them within himself. He’d been reckless with his drinking and his career, but he hadn’t been reckless with Rita. It was intimate and flirtatious without being sexual. I’d been mesmerized by it.
I don’t say any of this to Dave, It would take another two years and my first nervous breakdown before I’d tell him what it was I needed to tell him. Meanwhile we drink bitter with a proper head on it and hit the optics towards the end of the night. And when the inevitable moment comes and someone plays Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas’ on the jukebox, we put our arms around each other’s shoulders and sing ‘everybody’s having fun’. And we were.
Next
‘Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.’
Franz Kafka, Diaries
The new year is still on its first legs the day I go back to Warwick. I’m going early. I’m going to look for a house in Coventry, get the hell off campus. Kath has packed me some sandwiches, corned beef and brown sauce, wrapped in tin foil; an apple to counteract Christmas, a KitKat to counteract the apple. It’s sunny, the kind of crisp winter sunshine that should make me want to take myself off up the Coppice, or Pendle Hill.
But I’m not going to either of these. I’m going back to Coventry. I’m going to find a house near Lisa, even though I’ve said that being near Lisa isn’t a factor in me finding a house. I’m taking the coach. It takes longer than the train, but it’s cheaper, and (Jack’s convinced) more reliable. No threat of the strikes that they keep having, even though they haven’t had one for about ten years.
I put my suitcase in the luggage compartment, down in the bowels of the coach which are built into its side. Like I say, it’s sunny, warmer than it should be for January.
The coach will stop for a break in Manchester, but before that it goes to pick up passengers all around the small towns round about: Colne, Bacup, Rishton, Rawtenstall. It’s a long journey, best part of a day Kath says; three, four hours maybe. We set off.
I sit next to the window and look out and think just how green it is around Accrington. I always forget this. I think of Accy and I think of pie shops and women in hairnets and pubs and factories and school playgrounds. But it’s a valley: it’s why it was so useful for the cotton trade, the factories powered by the water that ran down into its centre. So, yes, it’s green and rolling and beautiful; the kind of landscape that produces the kind of poet-y types that I see myse
lf as being.
It’s really hot now, I’m sweating.
Along with the food, I have a flask and a book, all packed in a little leather holdall. I take out the book: Elmore Leonard, my new discovery. He writes crime novels with titles that sound like they could be noirish movies from the 1950s, titles like Cat Chaser, Unknown Man No. 89 and 52 Pick-Up. They’re funny also, cracking dialogue. I start to read.
I’m reading but also looking out the window, which means that I’m not really reading. The words are bit fuzzy. The window is made of glass.
The coach is quite busy, but then again it’s a Friday, and not everyone will be going to Coventry.
The window’s made of glass, but it’s as though the world outside the window is made of, no, not made of glass, but has glass all around it, like a fishbowl.
First stop . . . Clayton-Le-Moors, is it? I’m not really paying attention; I’m thinking about the sweat trickling down my back. It doesn’t look like anywhere. It looks like everywhere. It looks like a new thing, a thing that’s nothing to do with me, a thing called outside. People are getting off.
People are getting on. I put my hands on my forehead just to make sure that my head’s still in one piece (nervous laugh) and they come away damp, and I’m not sure if they’re damp because of the sweat on my forehead or the sweat on my hands. And there’s tingling in my fingers. And static in my head.
The woman in the aisle opposite me is looking at me and I don’t know what she’s thinking.
There’s tingling in the tips of my fingers, but when I rub them against each other they also feel numb. Tingling and numb. And my chest.
She’s probably thinking, What’s that bloke doing, what’s wrong with him? Does she think I’m a bloke, what’s a bloke? When did I become a bloke?
And my chest is like someone is pushing down, or kneeling on top, or stretching. No, it’s coming from the inside. My lungs. There’s dry ice in my lungs.
She’s staring now, and nudging her husband, and they’re talking about how weird I must look. Except I can’t hear what they’re saying because they’re so far away, even though they’re right next to me and they’re inside the fishbowl too, which is outside, outside of me.
Where are we again? Where am I?
There’s dry ice in my lungs. Which is why I can’t breathe and why I need to start breathing; breathing, breathing quickly, breathing hard.
Great Harwood? People getting off. Get off. I can’t get off. There’s nowhere to go to if I get off. My stuff’s way down in the innards of the coach. And why do you need to get off? There’s nothing the matter. Everything’s fine; stop being so stupid.
People get on.
I look out of the window, try again with my novel, put the novel away, look again out the window.
It’s happening again, except this time I know that it’s going to be worse. I know it’s going to be worse because my bowels are churning, turning to water.
Scramble inside the bag. There’s sandwiches, and an apple, and a KitKat biscuit.
My bowels are turning to water. Which means I’m going to mess myself. On a coach. In front of the people on a coach. There’ll be shit, there’ll be the stench. Of my shit, and the people on a coach, and the inside that’s neither inside nor outside.
Breathe. The problem is that you can’t breathe. I tell myself this with the one voice that I’ve still got left in my head that I still hear as my own, a voice that I’m trying to hang on to, a voice that’s fighting with the other voices. Who are saying . . .
You are going mad. You have gone mad. You are going to die. You are going to go mad and then die. You will shit your own death. You are disappearing.
Rishton? People get off, people get on. Getting off is not an option now because my legs won’t move. My legs won’t move because they’re tingling and numb. And if I try to move them, my intestines will explode.
Breathe, gulp and fight for breath. I’m not me any more: I’m you, and you are going to die unless you . . . you are lungs that need air, and a throat that can’t swallow, and mouth with no saliva. You are a stomach that’s trying to stay on the inside. You are shit trying to hold itself in. You are one thought, and it’s not even a thought, it’s more primal than that: it’s visceral, and desperate, and clamouring to be heard. It is:
I have to get out of here. I have to get out of here. I have to get out of here.
Next
‘. . . so much to answer for.’
The Smiths, ‘Suffer Little Children’
I’m in Manchester Coach Station. I’m still shaking, but I’m able to walk. I was right, people were looking at me strangely. They still are. They’re looking at me as I get off the coach, and as I ask the driver how long he’s stopping for, and is it all right if I get off and come back on.
It’s the early days of 1984 and I have just had my first panic attack.
There’s a bar in the station and I have to wait for forever until the barman serves me, and I get a pint of bitter and go and sit in the corner and wait for my hands to stop trembling so that I can put the glass to my mouth.
In 1984 people didn’t have ‘panic attacks’. They were mad, or crazy, or a bit doolalley. Not right upstairs.
I have no idea what has just happened to me. I feel like crying but am too overwhelmed to cry. I feel like I have had a premonition of something dreadful about to happen and, at the same time, that it has already happened.
They were destined for the funny farm, the nut house, the loony bin.
It is 1984, and I’ve just re-read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I wanted to compare what he thought it would be like with what it was like. I think, This is my room 101. I think, It’s like that bit with the rats. When they find out that Winston Smith’s biggest fear is a fear of rats, and they put that cage over his face. He’s screaming, begging, saying that he’ll do anything they say; just tell him what they want him to do and he’ll do it. And they say, ‘You’ll know what it is we want you to do: when the fear is great enough, you will know.’ And he says, ‘Do it to Julia! Do it to her!’ Because he knows then that his fear is bigger than his love, that fear is absolute. And the man – O’Brien – who has known this all along says something chillingly simple. He says, ‘It is the worst thing in the world.’
This then was mine. Whatever happened on that coach must never happen again. Do it to Julia, but don’t let me experience anything like that ever again.
The diagnosis was to tap the finger to the temple, or roll the eyes, or make a whistling sound which was similar to the one that was reserved for an unmarried male relative. Kinder voices might insist that you were mental, or that it wasn’t your fault, and you would be listened to with an indulgent sympathy usually reserved for the recently bereaved.
But in twenty minutes I have to get back on the coach. And sit there all the way to Coventry. Sit there knowing that those feelings are still bubbling away, that they could descend at any minute, that they are inside me as well as outside me, and that they don’t seem to notice the difference.
That – whatever that was – cannot happen again. I will not, cannot, survive it. It is the worst thing in the world.
I say to the man behind the bar, ‘Can I get some cans to take out, please?’
Next
‘. . . and the poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man.’
Franz Kafka, Diaries
They’re happening regularly now. And when they’re not happening, I worry about them happening. Which can make them happen. I still don’t call them panic or anxiety attacks; those words are not yet available to me, not part of any common vocabulary.
Mental health had not been discovered, or invented, in 1984, let alone become an industry. If anything, ‘mental health’ was an oxymoron. If you were ‘healthy’ you were ‘normal’, and if you were normal you certainly weren’t ‘mental’. Despite evidence to the contrary, people didn’t seem to have ‘issues’ or ‘conditions’, didn’t openly sha
re about their neuroses. All I knew about psychoanalysis was that Woody Allen had had it. And it hadn’t worked. (And, as he said, if you killed yourself, they made you pay for the sessions that you missed.)
Or maybe there was such a thing as mental health, and this was yet another of those things that my class background (or was it ‘upbringing’?) had made me deaf to? I remember my family talking about so-and-so having had a ‘bad do with her nerves’. Aunt Mary, we knew, ‘suffered terribly with her nerves’. Nerves weren’t good, you wouldn’t wish them on anyone. They got on your nerves.
Yet there was never any acknowledgement that nerves were connected to the nervous system, and that the nervous system might be a response to emotional history. Instead there was a sense that there was something deeply shameful about them, and that their treatment should remain furtive, unseemly, like contraception, or haemorrhoids.
A ‘bad do with your nerves’ could also be shorthand for being ‘work shy’, slacking off, nothing that a hard day’s graft wouldn’t cure. Nerves were soft and namby-pamby, the result of too much molly-coddling. The best thing for nerves was a bath, or a good night’s sleep, or a bowl of hot soup.
You didn’t want to start with your nerves. Once you’d started with your nerves, you’d not know when to stop.
So when, in Coventry, I eventually go to my doctor, I don’t go armed with acronyms, or with a self-diagnosis gleaned from conversations with friends. I go and I say, I think I’m going mad.
And this being 1984 he doesn’t refer me to a wellness clinic, or CBT, or recommend that I practise mindfulness. He doesn’t tell me about breathing into a paper bag to short-circuit hyperventilation. He doesn’t explain about the hippocampus and the amygdala, and how the primal part of our brains responds to perceived threats by sending warning signals to the more evolved parts of our brain to set in motion the sympathetic nervous system, and that that produces a flight-or-fight response which is trying to protect us from threats even though there may not actually be a threat present, and so that even though these panic attacks may feel like they’re sent to destroy us, they are really just the body’s misguided way of keeping us alive. He doesn’t talk about exposure or de-sensitization, relaxation techniques or counselling.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 23