What he does is say, ‘Of course you’re not going mad.’
And he reaches for his prescription pad. And he writes me a prescription.
Next
‘As though everything I possessed had escaped me, and as though it would hardly satisfy me if it all returned.’
Franz Kafka, Diaries
I’m sitting in the Warwick Arts Centre waiting for the bar to open. One of the cleaners comes up to me and asks me if I’m all right, I don’t look well.
They’re still happening, these attacks, these whatever-the-fuck-they-ares. They are in me but not of me, which means that they get to decide when they come and visit me. They seem to like it when I’m outside, particularly on public transport. They also like cars, cars on motorways, dual carriageways. In cars they like that I’m both confined and exposed, closed in next to someone but surrounded by no one, and nothing, nothing ‘safe’ anyway. Like houses. I go to a Buñuel double bill in Birmingham, get a lift with a friend. I hyperventilate all the way back, squirming and sweating in my seat, trying not to go mad. I’m embarrassed and he is kind, says that he thinks it is claustrophobia. Or agoraphobia: some mixture of the two. I think he’s right, though I’m not sure what it means. Something to do with the Greek: ‘agora’ meaning ‘market’ or ‘place of assembly’. Except we’re not in a marketplace. It’s an outside-ness thing, a spatial vulnerability thing.
I sit in the Arts Centre and think about all the situations in which they might happen, and how utterly devastating it would be if they happen in those situations, and how there’s nothing I can do to stop them from happening.
And so the cleaner says, ‘You don’t look well.’ She’s right. I don’t look well. In movies, when the actor is messed up, looks bad, they always seem to look good-bad. They may be sweating and shaking, but they still look like movie actors sweating and shaking. They still look cool.
I don’t look cool. I’ve been throwing up into a toilet, thrown back up the cottage pie that they sell in the Arts Centre cafe that I didn’t want but thought might make me feel better because I’d not eaten for the last couple of days, but which didn’t. I cover my mouth with my hand because I’m ashamed of my breath and tell the woman that I’m fine and that I just need a moment.
I don’t just need a moment. I also need the pills that the doctor has given me to kick in. But I think I must have spewed out the pills that the doctor gave me when I threw up the cottage pie that I ate. I look at the white label on the bottle of pills. It says: Ativan: 30 tablets, 5 mg: May cause drowsiness: If affected do not operate machinery. Do not drive. Avoid alcoholic drink.
Which means that I need an alcoholic drink. I know that pills that tell you to avoid alcoholic drink only do so because they make the pills (and the drink) a little bit stronger. And what I need are stronger pills.
The bar staff are getting ready to open, lifting up the shutters. Earlier I had left a lecture halfway through, had felt the dread in my stomach and the sweating palms that I think of as my warning system. I can now add ‘lecture hall’ to the list of places to avoid, yet another place that can’t be trusted, or that I can’t trust myself to be in.
It’s getting long, this list. It already has on it: supermarkets, banks (if there’s a queue), buses during rush hour, public transport if tranquillizer has not had time to work, public transport to unknown destinations, the all-night garage, Leamington Spa and now lecture theatres. It doesn’t include bars, or places that have a bar like the Arts Centre. It doesn’t include those because they sell alcohol, and I know that the one thing, the only thing, guaranteed to tranquillize me if my tranquillizers don’t work, or if I’ve spewed them back up, is alcohol. Only I’ve taken to spewing that back up lately as well.
It’s getting complicated. The things I do to make myself feel better are making me feel worse.
I see my friend Heather. She saw me leave and wants to know if I’m OK, has noticed that I’ve not been around much this term. Heather’s a rare thing in 1984. She’s a mature student and a single parent, not to mention a white South African with a distrust for the more pious end of student politics. I love and trust Heather, can talk to her about anything. Anything except the dread in my bowels and the fear in my stomach. I can’t talk to her about those things because I know that talking about them will make them real, will bring them forth like some deranged self-fulfilling prophecy.
She has hold of my hand. I squeeze her hand back and say that I’m fine, really, that I’m just drinking a bit too much, hitting it a bit too hard, she knows how it is.
She does know how it is. She has a friend, Simon, who was an alcoholic, says that alcoholics are born and not made. He’s mentioned me to her. She buys me a drink – a bottle of strong lager, one that my uncle Jack used to ‘have’ to drink because he was diabetic. We talk for a long time, about our course and how studying literature wasn’t what we expected, whatever that was. She tells me about stuff that happened to her back in South Africa and I feel slightly ashamed at not knowing what to say, and about not knowing anything about anything really, despite the fact that I’m always mouthing off. I tell her some of the stuff but not the cock-tasering stuff about Lisa and how we’re trying to have a relationship that doesn’t follow all those shitty scripts about relationships, and Heather laughs and says fuck that, a left-wing orthodoxy is just as confining as a received orthodoxy if it’s not giving you what you want. She’s right. Fuck that.
I go to the toilets to swallow another Ativan to make up for the one that I threw up earlier and I wash it down with more strong lager. I tell Heather not to worry, that I’m fine, that I’ll see her soon.
The chemicals are mixing nicely now, ethanol and lorazepam. I’m buoyant, warmly belligerent. It’s a useful guide, the ‘avoid alcoholic drink’ guide. Without it I wouldn’t know which pills to drink on. It should be that an Ativan in the morning takes me through to lunchtime, and a couple of drinks at lunchtime should take me through to the athletics union opening its doors at teatime, and a couple of drinks at teatime should see me through to the evening, when I can take another Ativan. Thus inoculated against panic, I should be able to manage trips to the library, where I sit and write my essay on Milton, and why he seemed to think that Satan was more interesting than God.
Except it’s not working out that way. The medication is filling my head with mashed potato. I need alcohol to bring myself back into focus. I need coffee to keep me awake. I need cigarettes to give my fingers a reason to touch my face. I need to eat because I remember promising Kath that I would eat. I need Lisa to not touch my cock but still be my non-girlfriend girlfriend. I need to stop wearing this spacesuit. And I need to figure out if it really was better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.
I’m talking to Julie now about talking to Heather then about how I used to talk about my drinking. She says that back in the eighties it was easier to have a drink problem than it was to have an anxiety problem, and that because drink also causes anxiety problems, it soon becomes impossible to tell if the problem is the drink or the anxiety. She says drink was the remedy that was also the poison.
I go into Coventry city centre. I’m an agoraphobe who uses alcohol to control his agoraphobia.
Julie talks about dual diagnosis and says that she has worked with alcoholics and addicts for over twenty-five years and never fails to be astonished by the following fact: that she has never met an alcoholic yet who likes the taste of alcohol.
I live in fear of having a panic attack in an exposed place, or any place that exposes me. There are two places in Coventry where I go to feel safe.
She says, Addicts grow to love alcohol for taking away whatever it is that they want taking away, anxiety, depression, phobia, trauma.
The cinema and the cathedral.
They learn to trust alcohol. It will become the only thing they trust.
There’s nothing on I want to watch, nothing I fancy. I wander across to St Michael’s.
They mistake the absence of
pain for the presence of pleasure. Addiction is the love of any substance or activity that makes the pain go away. Pleasure is the absence of pain.
The new cathedral is built alongside the ruins of the old cathedral, the one destroyed during the Second World War. I remember the date from a book Jack got me from the library: November 14th 1940.
She says, Addiction has a life of its own, is an entity in itself. We can’t just take it away and treat the ‘thing’ that’s left beneath, because the thing and the addiction have become entwined, inseparable.
It is vast and yet I am not phased or threatened by its vastness. It is a space that can hold me, calm, non-invasive.
Drink was the cure for anxiety and anxiety was a cure for abuse.
There is a huge seventy-two-foot-high tapestry called Christ in Glory, before which I sit and stare, patiently waiting for it to move. It’s not a Christ I know from my childhood, not a pious or portentous Messiah. Here’s a Christ perplexed by his own divinity, affronted by it even. He’s a Christ who would be played by John Cazale in the biblical epic I direct inside my head.
There’s the damage done to us, and then there’s the damage we inflict on ourselves because of the damage that’s been done to us.
There are columns which don’t seem to touch the floor, but that just seem to float, suspended.
But the damage doesn’t have to be terminal, or permanent.
Some of the stained glass looks like boiled sweets, other bits the colours you find in illuminated manuscripts.
I remember from somewhere that the code name for the bombing of Coventry was Moonlight Sonata.
I look out through the window at the ruins of the old cathedral. Five hundred people were killed the night of the bombing.
There is a cross, a charred cross. Behind this cross is an altar.
Behind this altar is a wall on which are inscribed two words: Father Forgive.
I stand and look around me. My hands in my pockets feel numb with cold. I blow into my curled-up fist, raise the collar of my coat against the freezing night and try to figure out where to go next.
Afterword
‘Finally, the Church: speak with burning zeal about its self-righteousness, the narrow-mindedness of its bigots, indicate that all this can be murderous, hide none of the weaknesses of the faith. And then, in extremis, hint that the letter of the law, however unattractive, is a way to salvation for its very victims, and so justify moral austerity by the saintliness of those whom it crushes.’
Roland Barthes, ‘Operation Margarine’, Mythologies
Did they let you choose where to go, give you a say in where you could have your ‘treatment’? America would be my guess, though the priest I spoke to later would neither confirm nor deny.
It’s the States I imagine you in, when I imagine you in treatment. Boston or New York maybe, one of those cities with big turnouts on St Patrick’s Day and Pogues concerts. Do I imagine you there because I know how much the place annoyed you? I’m not imagining the therapy, though. The priest I spoke to was adamant that you were receiving therapy. There’s an irony there. Ironic because you thought therapy was a way of man trying to short-circuit God, of trying to make himself whole rather than accept that he was incomplete.
So, sorry about that, for being the cause of them sending you to wherever it was they sent you. It was probably better than the treatment I received (and had to pay for, not having the funds of the Catholic Church to fall back on). The Church didn’t offer to send me to America. Or anywhere. I told them about you and they said, Oh, and, You’ll be pleased to know he admitted it (strange how it never occurred to me that you wouldn’t). They said that the problem had been dealt with.
They didn’t tell me about the retirement bash they were going to throw you. I learnt about that through Kath sending me a cutting from the Lancashire Evening Telegraph with a note saying, I thought this might interest you: You were always one of his favourites.
They told me about you getting Alzheimer’s, and that you were living somewhere down in Sidcup, Kent, being looked after by the Marist Brothers. They said it as though that was going to be some kind of end to the story, as though I didn’t have questions that I knew then were never going to be answered, that your wretchedly fading memory was taking away my story as well as your own.
I knew then that I’d never get to ask you my two key questions: What was it about me? And: Was I the first, the only?
It’s a trickier question than you might imagine, this wondering if I was the only boy you’d fucked. I know that the stats would suggest not, that this stuff is compulsive, and that if I was the first I certainly wouldn’t be the last. I’m not sure I believe it. Or if I want to believe it. You see, there’s a bit of me that still believes I’m unique, that I really was your prime number, indivisible only by myself. I don’t want to think of myself as part of a pattern, just another victim. It cheapens my own self-image which, as I’m sure you know after all that therapy, is pretty cheap anyway. Because of the being-fucked thing.
And so: what was it about me? You’ve left me with a pretty unappealing set of options. I’ve had plenty of time to think about them, all that time spent in psych wards, rehabs, therapists’ offices. It’s something like: a combination of narcissism and self-loathing, the belief that I must be the centre of the world and a disgust with being so ill equipped to be so. I fight against my own bitter self-regard, the voice that says, I must have been so very damned attractive, must have been some hot little number, to make you risk your vocation (both of them), your vows, your authority. How alluring I must have been; such un homme fatale.
And with a humourless smile I think, Yet what a disappointment I was. All those nights out, those don’t-come-cheap seats at the theatre, dinner and drinks: all for what? Some acne-scarred little ingrate who doesn’t have the decency to come after you spend ten, fifteen, twenty minutes thrashing away at his cock. Such a let down. I wasn’t money well spent.
I don’t remember the exact date when I reported you. I’d just had another suicide attempt and was sedated, so forgive me if the details are a little fuzzy. It’s one of the problems of being abused, one of the occupational hazards. The abuse leads you to fuck up your life, and a fucked-up life means that you’re a less credible witness to the abuse that fucked you up in the first place. It’s an ironic trick of memory and survival: abuse makes you want to forget the abuse.
So it was late ’91 or early ’92 and I’d just slashed up my arms and I eventually told a priest called Father Phillip who told his bishop who told a friend of his in the Marists who told his superior, and the superior confronted you and you said, It’s true, and, But it takes two to tango. We OK thus far?
And so they sent you away to get therapy and you came back, presumably cured of your desire to fuck adolescent boys, and then you got ill and you got looked after and then, according to the printout in front of me from the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, you ‘died peacefully in the early hours of Sunday 20th of March 2011’.
The college governor, one Father Noel Wynn, is quoted as saying: ‘Kevin was the life and soul of any party and found a great deal of enjoyment in life. He was a keen traveller and accompanied many parties of students abroad to Italy and Greece, a country he continued to visit on his own or with congenial confreres.’
A solitary sentence about your time at the college says simply: ‘He left in 1993.’
No mention of why you left, or time in therapy, or the admission of child-fucking.
What there is a mention of is the following: ‘In 2008 a new £2.5 million performing arts centre – O’Neill Academy for Performing Arts – was named after the former principal.’
Ever since I read this cutting I’ve been tormenting myself thinking of the various performances I’d like to perform in your performing arts centre. There’s one in which I sit on a dimly lit stage masturbating to a 3D CGI avatar of Gloria Grahame whilst a voice off stage, say that of Father Noel Wynn, reads out the psychiatric sections of
my medical history. It could be called ‘Congenial Confreres’. Or maybe a more Buñuel-inspired one in which a group of bishops (a bench of), in full clerical gear, spend a day binge-drinking. It could be called ‘Two to Tango’ and would culminate in them playing truth or dare with a select band of altar boys (collective noun, a temptation of?).
Not amused, Kevin? Sorry: it’s just that there are certain levels of injustice that defeat my usual strategies of irony, and you having a Performing Arts Centre named after you is one of them.
How am I? Thanks for asking. The protection officer did say that you said you were worried about me, though presumably not worried enough to organize an apology or even a public admission of guilt.
But I’m doing better, these last six years. I’ve definitively quit the booze, and the drugs. Even the fags. I have therapy regularly, here in Nottingham, where I live. I pretty much fucked up my career. The opportunities were pretty limited for agoraphobes who medicated their condition with vodka and painkillers, even in academia and journalism.
And my parents are both dead: Jack in 1998, Kath four years later. Bowel cancer, both of them, cruel and undignified. Don’t worry, I kept your secret. They loved you to the end, I made sure of it. They were both so proud of me having gone to your school, and so utterly entranced by the idea of me being taken up by you, that I couldn’t tell them any other story. So I would sit and make monosyllabic noises in response to their enquiries about whether I’d heard from you or not, or did I ever think back to that time when you used to come and visit us, or wasn’t it a wonderful experience to have gone to Greece with you? I made monosyllabic noises and I swallowed my resentment.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 24