This, at least, served to drag my attention away from what was going on next door. I knew I had to do something fast. Having neither a phone nor a car and with the emergency room of the local hospital too far away to walk, I decided to go round and see my friend Sheila, who lived just round the corner and who was a pharmacist. There was a part of me that was wondering if I had gone completely mad, because I had never ever heard of somebody having an allergic reaction to music before. As I got ready to leave the house the band started playing ‘Anyway That You Want Me’, which had been the first single we had recorded. Am I loving you in vain? I heard the lyrics but I was no longer listening to the quality, or lack of it, in the bass playing.
I was too concerned with getting some medical help and a second opinion on what I thought was an attack of psychosomatic madness. I dragged my coat on, ran down the stairs and locked the door behind me on the way out. I was now standing in the yard of the plumber’s between the two flats, directly beneath the window where Spiritualized were playing. I stopped for a second, unable to resist the pull of the sound and heard the words, ‘Am I loving you in vain?’ Shaking my head and swelling by the minute, I turned my back on the weirdness of it all and ran for the small wooden door that led out of the plumber’s yard filled with the pipes and pans of potential piss houses. I ran the hundred metres to Sheila’s house, frantically rang the bell and knocked on the door while feverishly scratching at my body, which now felt like it was home to a nest of angry ants. Sheila answered the door and immediately looked concerned. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘You look awful.’
‘Sheila, can you give me a lift to casualty? I think I am having an allergic reaction. Quick.’ I stepped into the light of her hallway and after a quick look at my face, she ran back into the house, grabbed her car keys and we both ran to the car. When we arrived at St Cross, she parked in the place reserved for ambulances and we both ran into reception. She talked to the woman behind the desk, explained the urgency of the situation, and that she was a pharmacist. Within five minutes I was sitting in a chair in a curtained room with my shirt off while the doctor prepared two shots of adrenaline. I felt like my whole body was on fire and my face looked as though I had gone three rounds with a prizefighter.
As the first needle slid into the vein in my right arm and the doctor pressed the plunger I could feel the wave of relief spread through my body. The doctor checked my left arm and had a little more difficulty finding a vein. After the second shot was in I could feel the drug working instantly, cooling the angry heat in my blood as the furious itch began to subside.
Sheila stroked my arm and said, ‘Are you all right, hon?’
I nodded and smiled and thanked the doctor and Sheila.
They watched me for five minutes to see that I wasn’t blowing up like a zeppelin any more, and then they left me alone for five minutes. I could feel myself returning to normal. I was taking easy breaths again as the drugs did their work and the panic began to subside. I hadn’t thought about the band once between leaving the house and starting to feel better.
I still don’t know what happened.
Fame at Last
Eventually, things returned to something approaching normality. Spiritualized continued to practise next door now and again, but I had no further episodes with excess histamine and urgent trips to Accident and Emergency for shots of adrenaline. The agony was subsiding.
Despite the fact that Jason and Kate were my next-door neighbours, we no longer socialised, nor did we spend much time in each other’s houses. It was like a dead relationship somehow and, although I bore them no ill will, we became increasingly distant. I read the overwhelmingly positive reviews in the papers when Lazer Guided Melodies came out, and then Spiritualized went out on the road to promote it. Sometimes I’d see them waiting in the van outside or bump into the rest of the band, and although it was a bit awkward, for reasons nobody really understood, it really wasn’t as weird as it might have been.
I was still fairly heavily in debt to the bank, and I’d taken a few odd jobs to try to pay it off. My debt was still hovering around the three-grand mark and my sporadic window-cleaning job was not going to pay it off in a hurry. I was also signing on the dole and I had made an agreement to pay the debts off at a rate of ten pounds per fortnight with the bank. If I broke the agreement I was in big trouble. It would mean that I had defaulted and then they would have been within their rights to break my door down and take my stuff. When I had arranged the payment plan with the bank I had gone to see the nice bank manager who had looked through the music papers with me back in the hopeful days of Spacemen 3. I’d sat across the desk from him and explained the situation I was in. ‘I feel like the vultures are circling,’ I said to him.
‘We’re one of them, aren’t we?’ he replied, looking at me apologetically over his spectacles.
I think if it had been up to him, he would have let me off the debt there and then.
I was also starting to receive threatening letters from the bailiffs over a different unpaid bill. I had refused to pay my poll tax as a matter of principle and now the council was looking for me too. They couldn’t legally kick the door in, but they could gain entry through an open window, or if I was stupid enough to let them in. It was a bureaucratic matter and before they could get to the point of legally kicking my door in, they had to make sure that they had a point of contact with me, which I was understandably avoiding. Life was becoming a bit of a cat and mouse game, where I would check outside the flat before leaving the house and always think twice before I answered the phone or the door. Not having a doorbell was proving to be a useful diversionary tactic. The bailiffs could stand around all day outside, ringing a bell that wasn’t attached to anything for all I cared.
Rowley Ford visited me one day and offered me some good advice: ‘Will, you’ve got to get your head out of your arse. You can’t sit in this flat for ever.’
He was right.
It was getting close to Christmas when I heard the first stones against the window.
I was pretty sure that the bailiffs hadn’t worked out which window to throw stones at yet. Anyway, it was nearly Christmas and even those wankers knocked off for Jesus’s birthday. I looked out past the net curtains and saw a friend of mine looking up to my window from the street below.
What followed over the next few days was nobody’s idea of festive fun. If the shit is going to hit the fan, it always seems to hit the fan at Christmas. It is a supposedly light and joyful time of year in the depths of midwinter when everyone is so intent on having a good time that you can’t find serious help for love nor money. I guess it is no accident that the whole Jesus, Mary and Joseph story took place at this time of year.
That basic story, in case you are unfamiliar with it, is that a hugely pregnant woman and her husband visit a small town so that they can attend to some council census thing. Because it is Christmas, all of the hotels are full and they are unable to find a room for the night. The luckless woman is reduced to giving birth in a stable surrounded by barnyard animals. Let’s just think about the realities of that for a second.
Anyway, it was Christmas and what neither I nor the young woman who I had let into my house knew was that she was about to go into a fully fledged psychotic episode, and I was about to unwittingly bear the brunt of it. I had once told her if she was in trouble she could come to mine. Maybe something in her remembered that. She stayed for two nights and during that time her behaviour became progressively weirder and more unnerving. She didn’t eat, she didn’t sleep, and she wouldn’t let me sleep either.
At first she had seemed a little scared and ill at ease and I thought she just needed some rest and a place to hide out away from the party scene. After a while, it became evident that she had become fixated on me and had decided that I was either Brian Wilson, the devil, Jesus, or a combination of all three, which is a bit weird because I was only a bass player, after all. I had never been close to that kind of illness before and the f
erocity and strength of her increasingly warped reality damn near threw me off my own axis. This hadn’t become totally apparent until day two of her unscheduled stay, by which point she was screaming at me every time I went to sleep and alternating between sweetness and demonic rage every five minutes. In my innocence, I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t know what was happening, so I placated her, I humoured her, I brushed the strange behaviour off, and I explained it away to myself as I became increasingly unable to distinguish my reality from her delusions. It was only partly to do with the two nights of sleep deprivation and the overall creeping strangeness of the situation. By the end of the final night, I was a broken man. She would subject me to a torrent of abuse and I would just nod. If she had asked me to throw myself out of a window I would have done it without complaint. My initial concern for her and my subsequent unwillingness to throw her out, or draw the line, had proved to be a terrible mistake. She pointed at a large Silver Surfer poster I had on my living room wall and said, ‘Is that who you think you are? The Silver Surfer?’
By this point if she had told me I thought I was a three-horned unicorn I would have meekly agreed.
‘Hmmm,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Do you mind if I cut some of your comics up?’
I didn’t mind that either.
So she set to work, cutting up my comics, stopping only to shout at me every time I began to drift off to sleep.
By the morning, I didn’t know if it was Christmas Day or Wednesday, and she was in possession of a brand new homemade badge. ‘What do you think of it?’ she said. ‘Do you like it? Come and have a look at it.’
So I got a little closer. She had cut out a picture of the Silver Surfer in which he was being subjected to an unspecific torment on some cosmic electric rack. The Silver Surfer was uttering the words, ‘She is draining me of all of my power.’ It was certainly a striking badge.
‘Do you like it?’ she asked again. ‘That’s you, that is. We are going for a walk up town. Come on, Brian.’
I walked into town beside her, feeling like I was in a bad dream that I couldn’t wake up from.
As we made our unholy promenade through town, we bumped into a couple of my friends who were buying the last of their Christmas shopping. It was Christmas Eve. ‘All right, Will?’ they said, seeming jolly and full of Christmas cheer. ‘Merry Christmas.’ They looked a bit concerned by my hollow eyes and lack of response.
‘Do you like my badge?’ my friend said, butting in front of me and holding her lapel out. ‘Here, have a look. I made it myself. Does it remind you of anybody?’
And then she made them look at the damn badge.
My friends looked confused and they glanced between the two of us searching for some explanation.
I just looked away.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go shopping.’ And we continued our little walk through town, stopping occasionally if we met someone we knew, so that she could show them the badge.
Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? It was. She was in the grip of a fairly serious episode of mental illness and I hadn’t worked it out. If you have become used to eccentric behaviour and occasional bouts of mania brought on by personal peculiarity, or temporary intoxication, it can be surprisingly difficult to tell the difference between unusual behaviour and outright psychosis. There is, however, a difference ‒ an important one.
If you learn to recognise the difference, you might save someone’s life, or your own some day. It might also stop you needlessly phoning the cops every time someone does something slightly outside of your narrow frame of normality. It’s a delicate judgement call, and it is not one that I was in any way prepared to make at that time.
We parted in the town centre, and as she got further away it was as though a fog lifted from me. I began to go over the events of the previous night and none of it fitted together in ways that made any rational sense. I began to suspect that she had some very real and serious problems and that I hadn’t even noticed until I had managed to put some distance between myself and her formidable manic energy.
The more I thought about the situation, the stranger it became and the more convinced I was that she actually needed help. Despite my misgivings I was so tired that I didn’t trust myself. I walked back to my house and immediately fell asleep.
Within an hour the phone started ringing. The first and second time I picked it up, I was greeted by a torrent of screaming weirdness. After the third time, I unplugged the phone and left the house. I decided to get a second opinion. I knew some members of her family so I made some phone calls to them, and made some general enquiries about her wellbeing and asked for their opinions on her mental state.
It was Christmas Eve. Nobody wants to hear that stuff just before Santa arrives.
Eventually, I managed to persuade her family that she might need some help. She was still at a point where she was able to keep a lid on her distress and to feign normality in some ways, so that when the priest came out to see her, or when the doctor finally arrived to pay a five-minute visit after endless phone calls, she smiled and acted surprised and when they had left, and only in front of me would she manifest that obsessive supernatural weirdness again. It was as hard as hell to get any help on Christmas Day. Her family said that perhaps she was in love with me, and that people sometimes act strangely when they are in love. Despite the fact that I had doubted my own sanity previously, I became convinced that this was a little bit more serious than that. I talked to another one of my friends about it.
‘She’s only a woman, man. What do you think she’s gonna do? Just tell her to fuck off,’ he said. Over the next couple of days she made a point of hanging around outside my house, ringing me up, or appearing wherever I was. Whenever she did, things got weird. Telling her to fuck off was not going to work.
Between Christmas and New Year I was at my wits’ end. She was everywhere I went, and her problems were becoming so obvious that other people were beginning to pay attention. A friend of mine gave me a lift down to my flat and I explained the situation to her on the way. We pulled up outside the flat to find angry mad writing scrawled all across the front of the plumber’s windows and the door that led to my flat. Written in red, and in the desperate handwriting of the crazy, it said: ‘William Carruthers is a worthless adopted bastard.’
My friend looked at me with sympathy and said, ‘I’d get out of town for a bit if I were you, Will.’
The next day I was on a very long train ride away from Rugby. The further away I got, the better I felt.
People say you can’t run away from your problems, but maybe they just haven’t had the right kind of problems yet.
By the time I returned from my journey, I had missed a signing-on date and my dole had been stopped. I had also missed a couple of payments to the bank and had therefore defaulted on my agreement with them, meaning they were going to send in the debt collectors and the bailiffs. Because my dole was stopped, I was also receiving no rent money, and that meant I was behind on that too. I moved out of the flat as quickly as possible and made arrangements to pay back the debt to my landlord.
I moved back to my mum’s place and took a four-week job with a shot-blast gang up a canal tunnel. It was January and it was a dirty and difficult job. At the end of it, I paid the remaining rent I owed to my landlord, bought a British army sleeping bag and a good rucksack with my remaining cash, and then spent the last of my money on a bus ticket north to help a friend move house. From there I drifted wherever there was a spare room or a couch, moving up and down the country, hitchhiking, taking odd jobs, staying with family and friends, and working hand to mouth. I would return to Rugby occasionally, stay for a while then drift away again. I didn’t feel safe staying in one place too long.
I had walked away from my debts. It was a move that meant I was no longer eligible for any housing benefit. It meant I couldn’t see a dentist or a doctor. It meant I couldn’t be on the electoral roll. It meant I couldn’t rent a flat. It meant I couldn’t p
ay utilities. It meant I couldn’t get a bank account. It meant that I would have to scrape by in a world of cash-in-hand payments, with no visible social support network. It meant that I was on my own. I had become one of Margaret Thatcher’s ideal citizens, with no recourse to state support, existing in a purely private world where everything had a price, and if you couldn’t pay for it then you had to go without.
Of course, I didn’t know any of that when I went. I just hit the fucking road. During the golden age of Britpop and ‘Cool Britannia’ I had somehow slipped through the cracks. I didn’t play in another band for four years but I still carried a guitar with me everywhere I went.
There was a notable quote from one of the members of Tony Blair’s government when they were first elected, after years of Conservative rule. An interviewer asked about the million men who were missing from the official census records. A million men, in my age group, had simply vanished from official government records around this time, and I had been one of them.
The interviewer asked the government official where he thought we had all gone. ‘We think they’ve all gone to Ibiza,’ he said, with half a smirk.
The social machine is a strange beast. In many ways you do not notice the way that it operates, or the scope of its operations, until you are in a position outside of it. As an outsider, I was made very much aware of the limitations of existence beyond the mechanisms of society. I found myself in so many catch-22 situations that there seemed to be no way back, and that only increased the sense of exclusion and, in a way, my determination to survive. It was a smooth slide out and a steep and slippery climb back in. Like a funhouse slide, with neither fun nor laughter.
If it had not been for the kindnesses of my family and friends and my own ability to adapt and make a living where I could, things could have gone very wrong indeed. I suppose sometimes they did.
Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands Page 24