The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. It’s a lie, of course; but then, Blake was always a bit of a fraud: the prophet of free love who remained faithful to his wife, he lived a life that was, by all accounts, remarkably free of the Rimbaldian excesses that the church of latter-day visionaries to which I now belonged had come to believe were de rigueur. We were asphalt visionaries, of course: DIY amateurs poring over the sacred texts in the mercuric light of our own befuddled minds; spiritual orphans, lacking any kind of discipline or tradition; but we were visionaries, nevertheless. The road of excess leads to so many places: for Roland, a junkie I’d known back in Corby, it led to death by burning (as his best friend remarked at the funeral, it wasn’t necessarily Roland’s fault: the bed was probably on fire when he got into it); for Dan, to a side street in south London, where his right arm was very thoroughly broken by a pair of dedicated business people; for Mark, a mistaken attempted suicide diagnosis when one of his arm-slashing experiments got out of hand; for me – well, there were people who said I was mad (psychotic, according to medical records), but I wasn’t, not really. When they eventually carted me off, I wanted to point out that I wasn’t properly insane: not clinically, not in the full-blown way. Even in madness, I had binges: a few days, a week, of cask-strength lunacy, followed by a period of hyper-lucidity is not, by any account, the epic poetry of real madness. I can look back now and, for myself at least, I can lay out the perfectly logical steps that led, a few weeks after my midnight waltz with the naked girl, to my administering to myself a near-lethal dose of Atropa belladonna. I really didn’t intend to kill myself; I just wanted to conclude the most interesting experiment I’d managed to concoct, on my way to the place I could never quite reach. Dying didn’t come into it. Still, after they’d pumped the belladonna from my system, they decided I was a suicide risk, and transported me to a haven of new drugs and greenery, a place called Fulbourn where, not on my first visit, but eventually, I embarked upon the long discipline of happiness.
CHAPTER 6
Meanwhile, in his parallel world, my father had been falling at his own velocity. He had withdrawn more than ever, closed in on himself, after a second heart attack. I made no effort to contact him, but Margaret kept me informed of his progress, whether I liked it or not. I also understood enough to guess that his fall, like mine, was not continuous, not uninterrupted. There were mornings, I knew, when he got up and slipped into the routine of a good day without even noticing it. Nothing dramatic, just the quiet of his own house, sunlight on the sudden, unbelievable orange of a bowl of clementines Margaret had brought round, a fond memory coming to him like a surprise gift, the smell of summer when he opened a window and looked out at a lone girl playing hopscotch in the court below. Why not? I don’t know what his days were like, but I won’t deny him moments of insight, or satisfaction, or even joy, in the years before his death, when he would have known he was going to die, listening to the doctor warning him, again, that he had to stop smoking, had to cut down on the drinking, had to eat properly, listening to Margaret and the odd neighbour telling him the same things, and deciding that he was going to go in his own way, with dignity – which, for him, meant dying alone, in the privacy of his own house. It was the one aim he could still achieve, that solitary, dignified death; nothing else was an issue, not happiness, not pain, not what people thought.
I would like to imagine him happy – or contented, at least. I had never seen him happy, though this, I’m sure, was because he was only really happy when he was alone. I think he was content, at times, during those first six weeks in Corby, working at a new job, probably not drinking that much, but enjoying the odd night out, feeling his way, full of good resolutions. He was staying at the Church Army hostel, which must have been difficult, but I think he did things during those weeks that he hadn’t done for years. He went swimming. He took walks out to the little Northamptonshire villages around the works, to Weldon and Cottingham and Great Oakley. He read books. I remember how surprised I was, one afternoon, when Richard was round at our house, and they started discussing Hemingway.
It was odd, watching the two of them talk. In certain moods, my father could like anyone, even someone like Richard, with his shoulder-length straight black hair, like one of those rebel chiefs we used to see in old B-movies: Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull. I liked Richard for very specific reasons: he had a generous mind; he was funny, in an offhand way; he liked the same music as me; but there was something else, something that was harder to put my finger on, the sense of someone who lived, when he was alone, in a separate world, a world that was large and subtle and full of echoes, a world where he didn’t mind feeling small. My father usually regarded Richard with suspicion – he was an obvious dopehead, for a start – but there were times, like that afternoon, when he made a point of getting on with my friends, the more dubious the better. By that time, it was his way of showing me that he was fine with other people, that not everybody regarded him with contempt. He would never have talked to me about books, but here he was discussing the merits of the early stories with my hippie doper friend. I was surprised, but there was no doubting that he had read all, or most, of Hemingway’s stories. It was all aimed at me, I knew: he wanted me to know that there was this other side to him, even if he’d never been able to share it with me. The implication being that it was my fault. I had never respected him, I’d never seen him as he really was.
Now, edging towards sixty, he was falling. He’d been tottering all his life, but he’d never had the good grace to fall, he’d always clung on with all the tenacity and self-deception he could muster. He could drink his wage packet away in a night, he could come home and smash the house up, he could force my mother to push me out of a window into the night for my own safety, but he was proud of the fact that he wasn’t falling – that, no matter what, he would never lose a day’s work through drink. He’d never been unfaithful to our mother, he’d told us, during his drunken rambles, though he’d had plenty of offers. He could have made a heap of money on the horses if our mother hadn’t made him give it up. He could have stayed in the air force, but he’d left for her sake. Because, no matter what any of us might think, he had loved her. As soon as he registered that she was gone, he began to fall. To begin with, he believed it wouldn’t take long, that it would all be over in a matter of months, a year at most. But this is the biggest surprise, this is the biggest shock to the system, worse than any of the damage we do to ourselves or others, worse than the lost joys of the early days, when the drug of choice was so gracious. This is the worst stage, when the end keeps promising to come, but never arrives, and we go on falling, for years, or decades. And after all that falling – so slow, so casual – when the end finally comes and the fall is over, there’s nobody there to appreciate the fact.
I rarely saw him during these years. I met him once at a family wedding, when we exchanged a few civil words, then avoided one another; later, at Margaret’s request, I visited him in the hospital when he had a serious heart attack. I could say that I didn’t want to know, that I was too busy with myself to be bothered. I could say that I had too many unhappy memories to see him as he was then. But this is all after the fact, all construction. It doesn’t explain the fact that, now, in some perverse corner of my heart, I would like to imagine him happy, or that I would gladly have imagined him happy, back then. A few minutes’ happiness – a good memory, a bright morning, an old song on the radio during a moment of self-forgetting – would have made so much difference to a life like his. A few hours would be a story in itself, the basis for a whole new construction: gentleness, veneration, history, love. After I landed, in the course of my own fall, in a country of tough love and psychological clichés, I heard the same phrase over and over again: you can’t love others until you learn to love yourself. I thought that idea was suspect from the start, but I didn’t know why. Thinking of my father, though, in his lonely house, where nobody could see him, I can imagine him shedding, ounce by ounce
, the armoured self he had been taught to carry, as a man, from the moment he learned to walk. When he was three or four, somebody would have set him on a table and told him to jump off, assuring him that he would be caught, that no harm would befall him. It’s an old story: the child jumps, and he falls; then, as he picks himself up, or lies dazed and betrayed on a cold stone floor, somebody leans in and murmurs, with dark satisfaction, ‘That’ll learn you: trust nae bastard.’ He did the same trick for me when my mother’s back was turned, and he picked away at any and every sign of softness that he saw in my character, just as somebody no doubt picked away at him. To my father, a man was not raised for gentleness, or veneration, or joy. Most of all, he was not raised to love. A man acted, a man used, a man destroyed, a man controlled. Love was a sign of weakness.
Still, it is possible – I think Margaret believed it was more than possible – that my father learned to forget some of this when he was alone in his house, waiting to die. He still went out, he still drank and smoked, he still waited, but it is possible that he loved something, for minutes or hours at a time. He stopped growing vegetables in his little plot of garden, and let the flowers my mother had planted grow a little wild. Once, when I paid him that final visit, towards the very end, he told me he’d let the garden go, to enjoy the wild flowers. When I saw what a wilderness the garden had become, I thought he was being ironic, but it’s possible that he meant what he said. I’m told that he was gentler towards the end, less angry, more capable of being quiet in himself. So, as foolish as this seems, I want to venture a hypothesis that, roughly expressed, goes like this: you cannot learn to love yourself until you find something in the world to love; no matter what it is. A dog, a garden, a tree, a flight of birds, a friend. I want to say that the old pop-psych cliché is almost true if you reverse it: you learn to love yourself by loving the world around you. Because what we love in ourselves is ourselves loving. I will never know – it would still have been too much a matter of shame for him to admit it – but I can imagine that my father learned to love the world a little before he died, and so, in turn, learned to love himself. I hope so, partly for his sake, and partly for my own – because there are times when I look back and suspect, times when I look back and know, that I was as much to blame as he was in our failure to be a father and a son. As a lifetime proposition, happiness is a discipline, no doubt; but for moments at a time, it’s a piece of luck. A piece of luck and a clue: a hint, not just of what might be, but of what already exists, in the heart of a man’s heart, in the private place where clichés no longer hold, in the smoky, golden, myrrh-scented chambers of his own imagery.
CHAPTER 7
Fulbourn. Any resident of Cambridgeshire knows what that word means, and every other community in the country has its equivalent, some innocent-sounding place name signifying madness, an everyday word for life beyond the pale, a word for pleasant gardens with high fences and rooms filled with medicated phantoms muttering to themselves or to other, even less palpable ghosts in day rooms and isolation wards named for local beauty spots or historic figures. On my first visit, I arrived in the middle of summer and, after a few days, I began to take it all in: the cedar trees in the grounds; the flower borders; the long corridor that led from the day room to the cool night beyond; the piano in the recreation room; the crazed, beautiful girl spinning across the floor of the refectory on the day I emerged from the first wave of medication. I could do this, I knew, because I wasn’t mad. I knew it, the doctors knew it, the nurses knew it, the one visitor who drove out from the city with a bag full of fruit and books knew it. I had been mad, but that was over; now, I was just a body that was changing, moment by moment, into something new, something more rational than the logic that had put me in that institution could conceive.
Which meant, of course, that I really was mad, or if not mad, then at least disturbed, out of order, a suitable case for treatment. Because everybody – the nurses, the doctors, my visitor, even I – knew that the only way out of Fulbourn was to accept the logic, not of some unexpected, yet wholly necessary transformation, but of the rules that had put me there in the first place. In other words, you got out by appearing normal. How anybody could appear normal when he was taking a healthy dose of chlorpromazine every few hours is a puzzle to me now (though I did fall in love with that particular drug later on). Still, that’s another story. This story is a lie about madness: it’s bound to be a lie, because nothing I say about that first visit to Fulbourn could be true. A lie, or a story, which amounts to the same thing, if what I say differs in any way from my medical records: records I have seen and marvelled at, for their sheer – what? Stupidity?
At the point when they took me to Fulbourn, I was emerging from something I am tempted to call a fit of temporary insanity, emerging and, in an extraordinarily tender and vulnerable state, becoming something I couldn’t anticipate, something I couldn’t have described. It was as if someone had happened along, after the imago of an insect had emerged from its cocoon, wet and new and impossibly fragile, and decided there was something wrong with it, because it wasn’t a caterpillar any more. There were other people in that hospital who were undergoing worse treatments than mine – my greatest fear, at Fulbourn, was of the ECT room, into which someone like Cathy, the beautiful, wild dancer from my first day’s visions, could vanish one afternoon, only to emerge with all the beauty and wildness stripped away. I knew there was some technical sense in which they couldn’t treat me without my consent, but there were ways and means, or there seemed to be, to make me do anything. The proof of that was a moment that came every evening, when I walked to the end of the corridor and smelled the night air seeping through the double doors of the exit. If I was a voluntary patient, all I had to do was push open those doors and walk out. It was all so easy – and that was how I knew it was a trick. I wasn’t mad, I could walk out any time; but if I did, it would be taken as another confirmation of my madness, another sign that I still hadn’t discovered the secret trick of seeming normal.
Go back, go back. The questions I am raising here are phantoms, just as so many of the people I met in Fulbourn – the doctors; the nurses; the visitors; some, but not all, of the patients – were phantoms. I was not mad; I was not suffering from ‘psychosis’. I had spent several days in what was, to outward appearances, a psychotic state – hallucinations, mad ramblings, a misguided attempt, not to fly, but to rise a few inches, no more, from the ground – but I was not mad. Medical records from that time describe me as having a history of ‘extreme heavy drug abuse’ which had caused ‘a psycho-stimulant psychosis of a paranoid nature’ – but to me, this language means absolutely nothing. I can read the reports with grim curiosity, but they don’t interest me in the least. What does interest me is the interior of that description, the process that was happening behind my eyes and under my skin during the weeks I spent at Fulbourn, and during the months I spent as a shadow after I emerged. No mention is made in the notes of the details of my hallucinations, the tiny elephants and circus acrobats parading across the floor of the hospital ward when I was first admitted, no mention of the Water Girl, a beautiful, sinister woman-child with fingers like hunting knives, who followed me about, changing shape as she went, becoming a nurse, another patient, a passing cleaner, only to emerge as soon as I relaxed my vigilance and advance upon me, fingers slicing the air. No mention of the fact that, at one point, I found myself in a shuttered room with a beautiful gunman, a smiling, gentle creature who held a glittering silver revolver to my forehead and very slowly pulled the trigger. No mention of the fact that this moment, when I was being shot, was one of extraordinary joy.
This all sounds like madness, I don’t doubt. And yet – I have to insist on this – I did not lose my marbles, get myself committed, take the meds, talk the talk, then emerge cured, normal, suitably treated and ready to take my place in the world. I will not deny that chlorpromazine eased my pain, and quietened the world down – no, not quietened, but held it at bay, held it at arm’s
length – long enough for me to do the work that I had to do in that place. Chlorpromazine (trade name Largactil) was a friend to me, then and later, but it wasn’t just medication, it was an instrument. No more, no less. The real work happened inside the lit circle of my own mind. I say mind, but I mean psyche, in the old sense of the word: psyche, spirit, mind, soul. A theatre of possibilities that, most of the time, is out of bounds. Inside that space, there was something that, to others, looked like chaos, but for me it was a maze, a complex pattern of angles and turns and dead ends, but a maze nonetheless, and I knew that, for every dead end, for every skewed turn, a transformation was being offered to me, a chance at an aseity that was as beautiful as it was terrible. There were times when I was desperate to get out of Fulbourn, but there were also times when I felt privileged – and this is what the authorised story never says: that it’s beautiful, this madness; it’s beautiful, this amazement.
A Lie About My Father Page 22