CHAPTER 5
(les fleurs du mal: a field guide)
My Halloween party at Tom’s went on for several days. When Tom and Olivier departed, I continued the celebrations with other friends, then alone, till what I remember of that time fades out, like the moment in a film when the director draws a discreet veil over the proceedings. The next thing I remember is coming to on the floor of my room. Someone was talking to me, but I couldn’t make out who it was. I was there, I was present, but I was also somewhere else, unable to talk, unable to see. I felt like an astronaut suspended in a sea of radio waves. I’ve heard it said that all the messages we send to cosmonauts and moon-golfers will travel on for ever, barely dimming, as they merge and bleed through all the creaks and whispers of infinity. I felt just as remote from my everyday existence, and just as much a part of the unnameable.
Finally, I surfaced enough to see that my visitor was Valerie, Tom’s sister. I didn’t really know Valerie – she didn’t live in the house, and she only came by occasionally – but I knew about her. She was a nurse, which presumably explained the fact that, over the next week or so, she stuck around, travelling back and forth to work when she was on shift, but helping me put body and soul back together the rest of the time. I wondered, then, why she did this, as I was to wonder, later, why others like her – passing strangers, part-time saints, surrogate brothers and sisters – would catch me, part-way through my fall, and try to haul me back to solid ground. Sometimes, they fell a little of the way with me, and only just managed to save themselves. Sometimes they were falling too, only at a different velocity, or in a different space. Valerie wasn’t one of those people, though: like Tom, she was solid, dependable, rocklike. Maybe this was why those people did what they did: they knew how lucky they were; they wanted to reach out to others less fortunate than themselves. And maybe there was an element of curiosity in that reaching out; they wanted to see it close up, to get a taste, to know what it was like. Maybe they envied it, just a little. It’s hard, keeping things together all the time, being more or less acceptable, more or less normal. It’s much easier, falling.
il faut être voyant, se faire voyant . . . par un long, immense
et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens. Toutes les formes
d’amour, de souffrance, de folie; il cherche lui-même, il
epuise en lui tous les poisons, pour n’en garder que les quintessences.
Il est chargé de l’humanite, des animaux même;
il devra faire sentir, palper, écouter ses inventions . . .
Arthur Rimbaud
There was a time when everything surprised me. My mother would read me something from the newspaper, or one of the teachers at school would casually give out some item of information, and I would be stunned by the sheer beauty, or horror, or unexpectedness of the world. It might be cold and overcast for days, but I would still be taken aback, as I trudged the half-mile from my front door to the white steps of St Bride’s, when the snow came thick and fast, blanking out the woods and the wide, straw-covered pens of Kirk’s chicken farm. In summer, it would feel odd, waking up to sunshine on the walls and the birds calling to one another as they settled in our hedge, or darted through our garden, casting swift, furtive shadows on the rosewater-thin curtains my mother had put up while Margaret and I were at school.
Then, when I was falling, nothing surprised me. When I hitch-hiked back to Scotland one summer, and found that the Water Houses had been cleared to make way for a light industrial estate, I thought such things were only to be expected. It was only to be expected that the trees I had climbed as a child would be grubbed out and paved over, or that the places where I had grown up – the prefab, Mary Fulton’s overgrown garden – would have disappeared. Later still, it was no surprise when the little garden supplies store where I’d worked during summer vacations was refitted as a hair salon, the florist next door quietly replaced by a tinny little shop selling electronic goods. Even when it was cheap, or ugly, or just plain sad, change was what you expected. The only thing that seemed odd was when things stayed the same: a building at the far end of a street, or a public park suspended in time, picked out, still, in a light from twenty years ago, the same details, the same unremarkable colours transformed by an unnatural stillness. It was like seeing a fox or a snowshoe rabbit in a glass case at the natural history museum: the creatures were never lifelike; no matter how well the taxidermist had done his job, they were devoid of potential, devoid of latent energy – though that only made them more compelling, like emblems, or symbols, standing for the very things they were not.
So it was that, in those months when I was falling, everything that reminded me of lost time was painfully and obviously not the past, but a deliberate and misleading reconstruction of things I couldn’t quite remember. As I went on falling, I did all I could to have no past at all. The past was a story, an invention: camomile, eyebright, books on a kitchen window sill bleaching in the sun, their contents – all the recipes and Greek myths and pirate stories – leaching away, till the very house itself was a fabric of words and shadowy woodcuts. The seasons of the year, the feast days, the turning points, the report cards, the photograph albums: all I ever knew of time beyond the clock was melting away in condensation and frost lines, bleeding into the paintwork, coming off in my hands. It was an illusion, a series of hallucinations. I didn’t know if it had really happened, or if I had just invented it. Or if it was invented for me. Something to keep me occupied, something for me to consume. As I was falling, I couldn’t help thinking that this was the problem of my generation: we couldn’t separate what was really ours from everything that had been set down in our paths for us to find. Something had to be torn before the real could glimmer through. What was needed was Rimbaud’s ‘long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens’. As I was falling, I believed this – and I really did think I could accomplish something new. I wanted to make something of myself, as my father would have said. Not that what I was making was what he had in mind. I was an experiment.
I wasn’t expecting anything. This wasn’t a road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom trip. For me, excess was a desperate attempt to preserve something inhuman, to hang on to wildness. I knew that being a man had something to do with that wildness: wildness, not savagery, but the wildness of birds and animals, the wildness of a hard wind in the grass, the wildness of the sea, the wildness of things that remain untamed. I knew this had nothing to do with drugs, or alcohol; at the same time, however, I felt that this private, wild self was somehow preserved, somehow ringed about by the mystique those things gave off. The further my actions placed me beyond the social niceties, the more I believed that some part of me, some essential element, was able to remain uncontaminated. There are other ways to protect this private wildness, but I didn’t know that: all I knew was that, sometimes, when I was ‘out of my mind’, I connected with something that was missing in my life-with-others. When I was alone, beyond the pale, I would experience an odd surge of tenderness for the world, and I would think that I had known, sometime, somewhere, what it felt like to belong – to the earth, to water, to the wind, to rain. That was the purpose of the experiment: to resume that belonging, by any means possible, and at any cost. It never once occurred to me to think of this exercise as my own modest variation on the eternal and bitter music of paranoia.
The fact that the great days are the ones that almost kill you is really neither here nor there. Falling ill, going crazy – dying in some way – these are not concerns, merely events in the greater scheme of falling. To me, it would have been much worse – sinful, in fact – to refuse the invitation implicit in every morning of that time, an invitation to be, at one or another end of the spectrum of being, and not merely to exist. Eventually, I came to see that Halloween party at Tom’s house as a pleasant divertissement, a mere first step on the road; eventually, the parties were going on for a week, or ten days (the best, the most fatal of them lasted for fourteen days precisel
y) and there were no limits, no boundaries. I was still doing kitchen work, mostly. There were various ways to supplement that income, but money wasn’t that much of an issue anyhow. It was a democratic era, the era of punk with its inverted meritocracy: the crazier you were, the more hellbent, the more welcome you would be at almost any gathering. Nobody was more welcome (and more despised) than a man who was obviously falling – and nothing made for better entertainment. What was better than watching a determined fall when the one falling was someone you knew but didn’t much care about, a grotesque Icarus tumbling slowly through the air, half-heartedly clutching at the scenery as he goes? People love a falling man, even when they hate him, and nobody loves or hates him more than the safe ones, the boys and girls who, in spite of their desperate veneer, are only playing the game, while they wait to move on to their appointed roles: son and heir, vice-president, Rt. Hon. Gentleman. Ladies in waiting. Boys most likely to. People with people to catch them.
Summer of 1978: in a little room in the quad of a time-honoured English university, a shy, somewhat paranoid student of Spanish and Portuguese – let’s call him Dan – discovers an astonishingly simple wheeze involving high-quality cocaine direct from Brazil, the international post and the assumption that books move from one academic institution to another for purely intellectual reasons. Dan’s girlfriend, a well-heeled graduate student in Rio, is so besotted with him, and with the idea of being an international cocaine smuggler, that she spends her entire life cutting wedge-shaped holes in the pages of textbooks, packing them with blanca and sending little packages off to her beloved (c/o his Alma Mater, naturally). Now and again, she sends him a huge, outsize, brightly coloured Brazilian beach shirt in a box, declaring on the customs form that the contents are to be considered a gift. As it happens, I am in the fortunate position of being a friend of Dan’s during these days of plenty, an association in which I am not alone. The gifts arrive, unexamined and intact, with astonishing frequency, so much so that Dan has to recruit perfectly new friends to help him enjoy his good fortune. Eventually, he decides, since he cannot pay his everyday bills with cocaine, that he should go into business, selling off the excess of this new-found largesse in a south London hostelry that he had, on occasion, frequented in leaner years.
Les fleurs du mal. They are so many. Coca, meth, alcools, Afghan black, magic mushrooms, bennies, dexies, sulphate. Choose your poison; dope right for your type. I loved them all and yet, for me, the really big discovery was barbiturates. I’d combined alcohol and speed, alcohol and grass, even alcohol and acid, but I didn’t get into the serious business of mixing large quantities of booze and downers till I met a thin, nervy, rabbit-faced boy called Jed on a three-day binge in Cambridge. I’d got talking to him because someone had said he had a plentiful supply of magic mushrooms, and things had moved on from there. Jed was no choice of companion for the confused soul I was at twenty-two, but I was hardly in a position to know, or decide such things and, besides, there were less reliable friends in the world. Jed’s sidekick, Mark, for example. Mark liked hallucinogens, sure enough, but mixing barbs and vodka was his catastrophe of choice. He was as thin as Jed and just as rabbit-faced, but he had taken the nerviness to a new level. He wore gold-rimmed glasses with an orange tint, which made him look like one of those laid-back stoned-out hippie types that Cambridge drew in from the surrounding fenland like a magnet, but his appearance was deceptive. He wasn’t laid-back, and he wasn’t a hippie, he was just common or garden crazy. Nobody had a vocabulary for it in those days, but his big thing, besides the drugs, was what we now call ‘self-harm’. A favourite trick was to stub cigarettes out on the palms of his hands. He thought the palms were better because they were more sensitive. He was always trying to get other people to try it. That, however, was only the acceptable, public side of his hobby: at home, on his lonesome, he majored in cut-throat razors and hunting knives. The last I heard, he was in hospital, though he’s probably out now, in the fen somewhere, maybe living with some sad-eyed, downtrodden woman, or maybe buried in one of those rustic graves where the unquiet dead lie side by side, like characters from a Fairport Convention song.
Jed and Mark came along at a magical moment in my life. I’d stopped doing acid, after a ‘psychotic’ episode when I’d met my doppelgänger under a street lamp. (Abuse the sacrament, pay the price. I’m not sure I was as disturbed by the bad trip itself as by the sheer banality of its imagery: pure Hammer Horror B-movie shiverfest stuff, on routine Oliver Reed is the Wolf Man lines.) Now I’d decided to continue the experiment with beer, mushrooms and the odd medicinal dose of meth. The first time I mixed barbs and wine, I just drifted off to sleep, after a dreamy half-hour or so, and woke up hours later with a crick in my neck. No big deal. No good reason, either, for doing it again, but I did, and it carried on from there, life folding into a haze, the occasional periods of lucidity needed to get through a day’s work punctuated by long, slow reveries in grimy bedsits with people I didn’t know and wouldn’t have liked if I had. I did it, of course, for the dreams, and for that feeling of remoteness so perfectly described by the expression ‘spaced out’. Imagined space, real stars. It was an idyll, the true dérèglement. It didn’t matter where I was, I could leave my body and go wandering wherever chance took me, a blissful child of the random. It’s not exaggerating to say that some people disappeared out there.
All things must pass. I’m not sure when that particular idyll started to sour, but I do recall the summer night when I found myself in the summer house of a big house in Newnham, hallucinating wildly on deadly nightshade, which I had consumed a few hours before with Jed and Mark. We knew nightshade contained both fatal and psychotropic active ingredients, but we’d worked out that if we took just so much, and no more, we would be fine. I had discovered the deadly nightshade plant – a tall, dark, dangerous-looking bush of it – on a strip of wasteland by one of the gardens where I did jobbing work, and I’d harvested the purple berries a few days before, carrying them home in a jar like some kid coming in from the fields with a hoard of volunteer raspberries. Earlier that night – the details are hazy, since drink was also involved – I’d taken two or three berries, not enough, I knew, to poison me (I estimated it would take about thirty or so to do that) and waited for the effects to show. I’m not sure how much time passed, but the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor of this rich man’s summer house, fully clothed – though the girl beside me (I had no idea how she came to be there) was stark naked. Stark naked and giggling wildly as a torch played across the windows of the hut and a worried but determined voice sang out in the dark.
‘I know you’re in there. The police are on their way. If you have any sense, you’ll get your clothes on and – ’
He kept on talking, this rich man with the big house and gardens and, though I guessed from his voice that he hadn’t called the police, I was pretty sure he would, if we scared him any more than we already had. Meanwhile, my companion was sitting on the floor, still giggling, trying to get into her jeans. I wanted to say something, to ask her who she was, or how we’d come to be there, or whether she knew where Jed and Mark might be, but I couldn’t speak. I stood up. The rich man had backed away across his lawn and was heading for his house – maybe I’d startled him. The girl scampered to her feet and pulled on a blouse. I don’t know why, but I was waiting for her. Maybe it was gallantry, maybe it was confusion, but as soon as she stood up I saw that she was completely gone, not just high, but crazy, giggling softly to herself as she did up her buttons, and looking at me with eyes the size of saucers as if I was her oldest friend. Or was it something more? A moment later, she darted out into the garden, still barefoot – and I followed after.
These are the snapshots that do not exist on paper, snapshots I carry in my mind, all the moments sieved from lost weekends and four-day binges: moments of waking naked in a stranger’s bed, alone and wondering who undressed me; moments of waking in bad hotels, bruised, bloodstained, with no clue as to how I got
there, or even of what town I am in; moments of waking on the floor of an abandoned warehouse, or some country bus shelter on a windy road running from nowhere to nowhere through acres of rainy wheat fields; moments of waking fully clothed but slightly damp on the floor of a girlfriend’s flat, while she sits at the kitchen counter nursing a cup of coffee and a hurt expression, waiting to see if I will get up of my own accord before she goes out into the regular world, not wanting, now, to leave me alone with her space and things, not wanting me around at all any more, and not wanting to have to find the words to tell me so. The night before, she’d said, with a small, hurt flaw in her voice, angry and compassionate and lonely in the small hours, with this wreck of a human crumbling into oblivion as she spoke: Some day you’ll meet someone who’s crazier than you. I hope you’ll both be happy.
I’d wanted to tell her that I wasn’t crazy: that I never had been, wasn’t now and never would be. But I didn’t. To begin with, half the attraction had been her notion that I was crazy: crazy was what was missing in her life, and she liked the fact that I put a little of it there. What she hadn’t liked was my taking it too far. One of the characteristics of crazy, I would have thought, but I didn’t want to quibble. Meanwhile, I just kept getting up again and moving on. It was what I did: find something; test it to breaking point; wander for a while, happy, in my perverse way, to be lost; find the next thing; break it. When they warn you about all that bohemian stuff, they always talk about the seductive properties of alcohol, or drugs, or loose morals, but they never say how seductive falling is, what a great pleasure it is to be lost. Perhaps they don’t know. Perhaps only the lost know. Far from home, far from the known, the imagination starts to play beautiful, terrifying tricks on us. Maybe it is the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom – which is just another word for a certain kind of crazy. Being lost, being crazy: while I was falling, I knew I was on to something. I knew I wasn’t anywhere near there yet, but I also knew that I couldn’t get there from where I was.
A Lie About My Father Page 21