Most of the time, though, all I could think was that a mistake had been made. When I came to myself, after what remained of the deadly nightshade experiment had been pumped from my stomach and I’d spent hours in a hospital storeroom, barricaded in, terrified of the Water Girl and her strange company, after the blank days of the first stage of medication, I didn’t know why I was there. The experiment had gone awry, I accepted that, but everybody around me had got hold of the wrong story, a story of insanity, psychosis, depression, suicide attempts – who knew what else – and the sheer weight of all those people believing what they believed was too much for me to counter. They didn’t know – how could they know, and how could I have told them? – that what had happened to me was the outcome of an experiment in which my life was not that important, or rather, was something I was prepared to risk in the process of effecting an absolutely necessary sea change. I wanted to become something other than I had been, and I didn’t care what that transformation cost.
And still, while I was there, I tried to go on with the experiment. As soon as I was stable enough to avoid constant supervision, I would take myself off to the recreation room in the evenings and sit there, alone and silent, for all the world like a living vial of some distilled substance, empty of intent or meaning, reflecting nothing but the moonlight through the long windows and the shadows of the gardens. The recreation room was my sanctuary: a piano, a games table, several shelves of foxed, cloth-bound books, half a dozen jigsaws in boxes with labels on the side to say how many pieces were missing. Nobody bothered me there, and I liked being in the same room as the piano – I had an idea that I could play it, still, but I never tried. The keys looked so perfect, it seemed wrong even to touch them. Most of the time, I was elsewhere, and trying to come back – only I didn’t want to come back empty-handed, I didn’t want to be ‘back to normal’. I was like the monkey in the monkey puzzle story: I had hold of something and I didn’t want to let go of it, but I would never escape unless I did. On that occasion, I couldn’t figure the puzzle out: I was too weak, I hadn’t gone far enough, I thought the reason for my stay was something other than it was. I thought I was tired, or wounded, or unhappy. I was coming off a huge dose of poison, and that explained everything. It didn’t though, and I suspected that too. Poison has its own logic, its own purposes, and they vary from one person to the next. In every case, they might be a revelation. I was sorry, when I left, that I hadn’t been afforded that revelation. The experiment had failed: I had tried to engineer a meeting with the angel, but there had been no annunciation, just a series of hallucinations and delusional symptoms. Still, I knew I’d be back. There was a sense of unfinished business in the air, as I walked back into Cambridge from my temporary heaven, dazed by the sunlight, numbed by the movement and the noise, and I knew I still had work to do.
CHAPTER 8
It took me a few weeks to get myself sorted out. I had no desire to stay in Cambridge, so I sold, handed on, or discarded the little I owned and walked away. I needed new surroundings, space and time to think, a place to be unseen by others. I could have gone anywhere but, as it happened, I ended up in Woodingdean, just outside Brighton. The room I rented was to the rear of a bungalow, otherwise inhabited by an elderly woman who was often away and didn’t seem pushy about rent; I had the use of the kitchen, and my bedroom overlooked a shady secluded garden that, after a time, I took charge of, as payment in kind for monies owed. I wanted to be in a place where I didn’t know anybody, and could make a fresh start. If I’m honest, I have to admit that I wanted to hide, to be alone with the theatre of my recovery, assuming the pose of a man who has come close to an experimental death, and might as well behave accordingly.
Which was probably what made me attractive to every crazy and visionary in Brighton. By the following Christmas – a Christmas I’d planned to pass in splendid isolation – I had gathered a circle of friends that I’d never intended to find: madmen, artists, slow suicides, masochists possessed by their own brand of dark, demanding joy. Brighton was just coming to the end of a heyday: an alternative world of gay pubs and arty cafés torn between decline and gentrification, a sad old seaside town of crazed ex-hippies, squaddies on two-day passes, NF skinheads, hopheads, acidheads, cokeheads, breadheads, Supremes impersonators, poets, jazzmen, maniacs, thieves, jokers, fools. At the centre of it all stood the Pavilion, the city’s bitter soul passing itself off as a psychedelic birthday cake; but what really mattered was the seafront: the promenades, the pebble beaches, the wreck oozing oil by the old pier, the pier itself, falling apart gracefully under the weight of a thousand starlings and the buffeting of the Channel winds. It was on the front, on the beach or the promenade, where we got high, made love, fought our pointless battles, and lay down in our street clothes when we had nowhere else to go. It was in a house on the front, a tall, narrow mock-Regency building that had been adapted to student accommodation, that my little band of friends came to grief, when the smartest and funniest of us all fell right out of the world when none of us was there to catch him.
Rick was like a brother to me. I never knew what that cliché meant until I encountered him, and realised I had been waiting for him ever since my real brother – my ghost, my Andrew – had died back in the prefabs. He was a thin, nervy man-boy with thick, shiny glasses and horribly pale skin. On our first meeting, it seemed he would never stop talking, but I never got tired of listening; he was always funny, always a little wild. It was like watching Keith Moon play Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet: everything he said sounded like some bizarre, speedy variation on the Queen Mab speech, all fanciful nonsense and mania that, of a sudden, could stop us in our tracks and make us wonder if he was serious. I think, at times, he was, but he never let on. I didn’t know it then, but all this talk was a smokescreen, not for us, but for himself, a diversion to distract him from the knowledge that he was slowly going crazy with disappointment and outrage at the way people behaved. He loved the world; he was a romantic, even a sentimentalist; and he was doing all he could to hide it from us and from himself. On first acquaintance, it seemed that all he wanted was to go from one party to the next, worming his way into the affections of complete strangers by the sheer bravado of his conversation; but it wasn’t all parties and, once I got to know him, I saw that he wasn’t really the manic, stand-up cynic he pretended to be. Sometimes, at the end of a night, we would find ourselves alone in the small hours, dawn just beginning at the window like a black-and-white film, and we would be there, with coffee and hash, or the last of the wine, talking about whatever he’d just got into – it didn’t matter what: the techniques of sword-swallowing, the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa, it didn’t matter at all, he would just open a subject up in front of me like a backgammon board, and we would be playing, trying out ideas, serious, but not taking ourselves seriously. It was the world that mattered, all that real stuff out there that seemed to mystify and enchant him, and for which he felt a mysterious and genuine grief. Nothing could come up without him thinking of it as a puzzle, he was always bemused, always wondering. Sometimes, he seemed worried, as if he thought everything around him might disappear at any second. It wasn’t a side he revealed when he was out and about, but I saw it, and I was forced to admit – silently, in my own mind – that his bewilderment was something I not only shared, but prized.
In spite of this, Rick was the star at the centre of the little group to which I had accidentally come to belong. The inner circle – Carl, me, my girlfriends Katie and Lara – moved around him the way planets move around the sun. There were others who came and went – Karen, the beautiful bisexual whose meter we’d raid when there was no money left; Brice, a mad French guitarist who could sound like anybody from Duane Allman to Mark Knopfler, but had no sound of his own; Jackson, a Chinese gambler whose bad luck was legendary in every bar with a slot machine all along the south coast – but we five were always there: the wrecking crew, the ones who would do anything. At the time, I was drinking vodka, mostly, though I li
ked to carry a quarter-bottle of black rum in my jacket for emergencies. My drug of choice was speed, though I rarely turned down a night at Carl’s mixing barbiturates and Babycham. Carl was the best Elvis impersonator I ever met, partly because he made no real attempt to look like Elvis. He had long, dirty-blond hair that he kept straight by throwing it across an ironing board and pressing it before he went out of an evening; usually he wore blue or black drainpipe jeans and a woman’s fake leopard-skin coat that he’d found in a junk shop in Hove and had altered to fit him. He was tall and thin, not bad-looking, with delicate well-made features, but when he danced, you would have sworn Elvis had taken possession of his angular, anorexic’s body. He liked to drink well enough but, for him, the real fun came at the end of the evening, when he’d go back to his surprisingly attractive flat with whoever else wanted to tag along, and take night-long trips into oblivion. It was reputed that, at one time, he had earned a good living as a graphic designer, and there were always sketches and doodles scattered about the flat, but nobody knew what he did by the time I met him. Now and again, he would show me a sketch for something he said he’d been commissioned to do, but I never heard of any money coming from that source. Carl didn’t like Rick that much, but he couldn’t help loving him. In truth, Carl didn’t like anybody that much, but he was riven with love for everyone. That’s what barbiturates do: they drive the devotee insane with an unspeakable love for everything. For rain, for the pattern in a shell, for a stranger passing on the street. At the end, Carl was insane. He lost everything. The last time I saw him, he was standing on a street corner, singing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. He didn’t even sound like Elvis.
Carl was insane, but he drove himself to insanity with barbs. Rick was the real thing, a Parsifal, the holiest of holy fools. Back then, I thought of him as my soul-friend and, for almost a year, he was my inseparable companion, partly because he was the funniest man I had ever met, but mostly because we were falling at exactly the same speed. He had that sense of humour that comes of having given up, of seeing everything as an event to witness from the vantage point of profound bewilderment. He wasn’t funny ha-ha or even funny peculiar so much as funny absurd: he had a Jesuitical sense of the beauty of argument for its own sake, asking the questions that the rest of us never put into words, examining every detail of every object or event that came within his purview and taking the reductio ad absurdum to new and unforeseen heights. He was also, unmistakably, doomed: though not for any reason other than his own will to be so. I think we both knew that all along. What made him different from all, or most, of the others, was that he could have survived, and he didn’t lift a finger to save himself. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. This was Rick’s favourite saying. One night, when we were both completely wasted, we decided that, if the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons then, to escape our fathers we must kill their gods. It was an oddly satisfying moment, as if we really had reached some meaningful conclusion that could have been translated into action – but it didn’t last. A moment later, he picked up his beer, snorted into it and muttered, ‘If we could only be bothered.’
I met Rick on a Saturday lunchtime in the Shakespeare’s Head, on Spring Street. I had just lost another three days of my life. I could remember moments, scraps of conversation, faces floating in a bluish haze, and I had one very vivid recollection of sitting in a bar in hell, some dive I had obviously drifted into late on the first day, when I was too messed up and incoherent to get by elsewhere. By then, though, I was sober: anxious, horribly ashamed, my arms covered with odd scabs and scratches that I couldn’t explain, and I was already half hoping that this particular binge would be the last. In the meantime, I had stopped into the Shakespeare’s Head to see Katie. I’d stood her up two days before, somewhere near the beginning of this particular fall, and I needed to apologise. Instead, I went on another binge with Rick, who was a student at the art school, and knew where all the best parties were happening that night. From that first day onwards, we were inseparable.
Falling takes so long. There are parts of the process that seem to happen overnight, but it’s only later, looking back after years, that you see how slow and convoluted it was. How manifold. How mysterious, how seductive at times, like the seduction of casinos where the promise of the big win is overshadowed only by the beauty of losing, the beauty of having everything stripped away, till nothing remains but the soul, bereft and miraculous. I remember, on the way down, how beguiled I was by the story of the man who turned grey overnight, the story of the man who came home after days spent God knows where, his eyes bright, his body whittled away, the story of the man who had touched bottom and then returned – but that idea to which everybody clings, that notion of touching the bottom and coming up again, is a lie. Yes, you touch bottom, at some point or another, in that long fall, but that doesn’t mean you rise, or not necessarily. A man can bounce along for quite a while, lifting and falling, lifting and falling. In the end, the only way he can return to the surface is to stay in the murk, to take it into himself. Maybe he emerges into the light, but it’s as well for him to remember the darkness. Maybe, at some decisive point, he aligns himself with the angels, but it behoves him to know where the Devil lives, especially when that perverse imp so often resides in his own heart. Which is to say: in the secrets he keeps, for any number of reasons, from his conscious self.
But this is theory. All of it after the fact. No use to man or dog, as Jackson used to say. I have no idea what he meant by that.
It was still the time of vinyl. The soundtrack of our lives was Neil Young, Zuma and On the Beach mostly, with some Doors and Bowie thrown in. Days were spent in one or other of the pubs off Western Road, and they always ended back at Rick’s place, with ‘Revolution Blues’, or ‘Cortez the Killer’, or ‘On the Beach’ trailing off into the city dawn, while we folded into the blue of our own dreams, drunk, stoned, fluttering down into the beautiful grainy silence of barbiturates, it didn’t matter, all that mattered was that we were somewhere else. Mostly, it was just the two of us, though now and then one or other of my girlfriends was there, crashed out on the bed while Rick and I sat up, still smoking or drinking or lifting the stylus back again and again to repeat the tracks we loved and somehow couldn’t make out. That music was a mystery to us: it opened up distances in our minds and evoked memories of times we had never known; it made us, for hours at a time, into the people we’d always wanted, and could never hope, to be.
‘Cygnet Committee’. ‘The Bewlay Brothers’. Half the time I didn’t understand the words. Maybe they didn’t mean anything, they just created an atmosphere, they reflected something that was in our minds. These were the songs we had listened to and, like ‘Little Brown Jug’ or ‘Maybelline’ in other decades, it wasn’t the words or even the quality of the music that mattered, it was just that those were our songs. It took me years to realise that I loved Rick. He had a quality about him, a wildness, that couldn’t be ignored. Years before, on Blackburn Drive, I had waited for some such creature to come into the Fultons’ deserted garden – not just the usual foxes and cats, but something half-animal, half-child, so light-footed it would barely mark the panes of ice on the puddles, but strong enough to tip the bin, to get at the scraps and leftovers. I thought I would cross the lawn some evening and find it there, ripping apart a chicken carcass, or lapping at the crusts of fat on a half-eaten salmon. I didn’t invent this creature: there were stories from way back of feral children scouting the borders of graveyards and farms, searching for food and shelter and those were the children I believed in, those were my kin. All my life, I’d been afraid of waking up one day and realising I was safe, at home in the wrong place, marooned. Rick used to say the unknowable had gone out of fashion, but I didn’t think so. For a long time after he fell, when I was still mad, I would go out at daybreak and find a trail of pawprints crossing the park, and I would think he’d been there, in some other guise, or I would wake in the dark and imagine I had just heard a cry
, savage, insistent, yet at the same time almost human.
By the time he fell, Rick had become my ghost brother made flesh. I shared everything with him – money, drink, his room, his music, friends. We were inseparable. When I was with Katie, or Lara, and it was too late to get home, we would sleep in Rick’s bed, drunk, stoned, laughing at his stupid jokes, making love while he sat in a chair and listened to music, or opened another bottle of vodka. We invited him in, sometimes, but he wasn’t interested. He liked both women, but all he wanted was a brother, and that brother was me – by chance, ill fortune, or default, I couldn’t have said. I was the one who stepped in when he got into trouble, which was fairly often. He knew exactly the effect drink would have on him, and he knew what he was doing when he waded into an argument with some NF type or loud-mouthed darts player, he just couldn’t stop himself. It was a matter of honour, and no indignity, no mysterious injury, no hideous embarrassment could prevent him doing it. I was bigger than him, colder, more detached; I knew when to offer a cynical apology and when to show ready for a fight. Rick wanted to argue with everybody, but he couldn’t have fought his way out of a paper bag, and it showed. Faced with physical aggression, he was, quite simply, bewildered. His logic was always irrefutable, and he couldn’t understand why somebody who wasn’t as bright as him wanted to win the argument by other means. I was the one who talked him down when he flew too high, I was the one who shadowed him when he went too far into Queen Mab’s world. I was his brother and his keeper, his twin, his echo. And I was the one who let him fall.
We had been to three parties in a row, crashing at his room, or sitting around in the bar of the Shakespeare’s in between. We were all tired. Carl had disappeared back to his place and was probably floating in the isolation tank of some bizarre mix of sweet wine and downers, Katie had crashed out at hers. People came and went, disappeared, promised to return, didn’t return, did, went again, came back with new drugs, new rumours. Something hovered in the air around us, that special tension that comes when the end of something has been reached, but nobody is ready to give up. At some point in the evening, Rick decided he was a cat person, like Simone Simon in the old Jacques Tourneur film. He said people could change into animals by sheer force of will, and he was going to become a cat. It was just the usual nonsense he’d talk, trying to get something started – and at the same time, it wasn’t. As Rick waited for feline grace and miraculous eyesight to arrive, I was burdened with real foreboding. I almost knew something was going to happen. I could see in his face that he was serious about this cat thing: even if he never reached that stage where the cat emerged, and the old skin slipped from the bone, I think a point came, some time after I left him, when he believed he’d achieved a new awareness, a near-feral poise that made him invulnerable. I’m sure this was metaphorical, at some level in his consciousness: he was always dreaming about a fall, and he’d tell me those dreams, sometimes, as we sat over a vodka breakfast in his room. But maybe a moment came when it became real-world, when he really thought he could make it work. Maybe that was what happened with the window. I’ll never know, because I wasn’t there – and even if I had stayed at the party, there’s no guarantee that I would have been able to save him.
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