by Matt Wilven
Legend Press Ltd, 175-185 Gray’s Inn Road, London, WC1X 8UE
[email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk
Contents © Matt Wilven 2016
The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
Print ISBN 978-1-7850796-8-9
Ebook ISBN 978-1-7850796-9-6
Set in Times. Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays Ltd.
Cover design by Simon Levy www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk
All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Matt Wilven was born in Blackpool in 1982. After receiving an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing, he spent the next ten years moving around, working jobs and honing his craft. The Blackbird Singularity is his debut novel. He lives and writes in London.
Visit Matt at
mattwilven.com
or on Twitter
@mattwilven
For Saskia
FOREWORD
FROM DR ELEANOR LONGDEN
“Madness,” says Shakespeare, “must not unwatch’d go.” And certainly, for those of us who experience a serious breakdown, there is a level of spectating and scrutiny. Society stares at us, science dissects us, our lives fall apart, and we are forced to watch it happen. When I was eighteen, I went mad. It occurred in a sputtering cauldron of trauma, loss, injustice and despair, and for many years I simply gave up hope and surrendered to the loss of myself and the life I’d been supposed to have. Gone mad people sometimes say, as if madness is a discrete destination or place, and this is also true. Such extremes of suffering are a journey which we often need to make, and are forced to travel alone. Maddened, then, yes — driven mad. But not ill. To me, the term “illness” privileges biology. It’s suggestive of random aberrance, an arbitrary, catastrophic misfiring of neurons. I believe very strongly that what happened to me was not a piece of biological bad luck. Rather, it was a sane and understandable response to deeply insane and abnormal circumstances. A narrative not based in disease and disability but in meaningful distress and a struggle for survival. In the years since, this has been the emphasis of my professional career: that what gets labelled mental illness is in fact an intelligible, ordinary reaction to incomprehensible and extraordinary pain, and that the therapeutic response demands we bear witness to the person’s story. Not “what’s wrong with you?” but rather “what’s happened to you?”
The Blackbird Singularity charts the journey of someone driven slowly, exquisitely, excruciatingly mad by the weight of his own anguish and unresolved grief. In discontinuing his medication, Vince is forced to confront the unspoken and unspeakable. It is a voyage that is both catastrophic and liberating: beautiful and tortured in turns. As readers, we witness the visceral complexities of a man being undone and remade as he attempts to engage with a past he believed to be buried; yet which is ultimately proved to be buried alive and desperately demanding acknowledgement. There are considerable risks in abruptly withdrawing from psychiatric drugs, and The Blackbird Singularity deals honestly and unflinchingly with these. Vince’s struggles are not romanticised or sanitised: we are never in any doubt of his desolation; never unaware that this is a man clawing together every possible resource – mind, body, soul – to fight for his life. The novel explores some profound issues: what does it mean to be mad? To be sane? Who makes that judgement, and how permeable are the boundaries of reason and rationality anyway? How can creativity, imagination and invention complement positivism and logic? As such the book can be enjoyed on several levels – a puzzle box of questions with no easy answers – and all handled by Matt Wilven with considerable deftness, wit, wisdom and compassion.
Any novel, and particularly a first novel, that can engage with mental health issues in such an engaging and intelligent way is to be warmly recommended. But one does not need personal experience of emotional distress to appreciate the nuances and pleasures of a good story, well-told. If you have known what it is to love, to lose, to persevere, to laugh with friends and sigh with family, then you will find something that resounds with you within The Blackbird Singularity. My own personal resonance I would like to share here. It was several years ago, and I was sat on a bench overlooking London’s Parliament Hill with my then-partner as I told him more details than I ever had before about my life. It was a story in several acts: trauma, degradation, madness, redemption. Of suffering, sadness and senseless loss; but also of hope, healing and transformation. I disclosed the years of abuse that had driven me mad in the first place, the pessimism and pathology that came after, the schizophrenia diagnosis, and – finally – the freedom that came from reinterpreting my distress as something meaningful to be understood, explored and acknowledged. It took a long time, and when I looked over I could see tears in his eyes.
“Someone died in that place,” I said quietly, although I didn’t really know what “place” I was referring to. Somewhere ineffable, I suppose; that dark, wretched wasteland called The Past.
“I suppose someone did,” he replied, and there was pause. “But you know, someone else was saved.”
On the way to the Tube station, we stopped for a drink. The pub was playing a Beatles medley, and I remember “Blackbird” beginning as we took our seats. One of the lyrics had a curious relevance: the reminder that even if one’s wings have been broken, it’s always possible to learn to fly again.
Eleanor Longden, PhD’s TED talk, Learning From the Voices in My Head, was featured on the front page of the Huffington Post and has been named by the Guardian newspaper as one of “the 20 online talks that could change your life”. It has been viewed over 3 million times and translated into 36 languages.
FIRST
TRIMESTER
ONE
An event horizon is a mathematically defined boundary around a black hole. It is the point from which light can no longer escape the pull of the centre and all possible paths lead further into the hole. Beyond it, gravity is thought to be so powerful that it stretches and tears matter into subatomic strings. Outside, observers see it as a black surface upon which things darken and disappear. They can use the boundary to calculate a few simple facts – such as mass, spin and charge – but they can only theorise about what happens in the space beyond it.
Lyd leaves the house for work around 7:30am. I’d been listening for the sound of her shower to stop but drifted off. I sit up and rub my face, annoyed about missing her. Lithium doesn’t discriminate between the important and unimportant moments in life. My mornings are always fuzzy.
After using the toilet I look at myself in the bathroom mirror. The tired man behind the glass has aged a lot in the last two years. His black hair is mottled grey at the temples. The skin around his eyes is dark, bruised almost, but not on the surface; the beating has come from the inside. There is a discrepancy between the perceived morbidity of his character (someone in his late fifties) and the age of his physical body (somewhere in its mid-thirties) but his end is definitely closer than his beginning.
Downstairs, I make myself a coffee and a couple of slices of toast and listen to a John Lee Hooker
compilation. The phone starts ringing after my first bite. I leave the music on and continue eating, letting it ring out. Lyd’s left half an old packet of sultanas on the kitchen counter with a yellow Post-It note stuck to the front. It reads: For the birds. It’s impossible to fault her pragmatism, thinking about feeding the neighbourhood birds minutes after seeing me sleeping through one of the definitive moments in our relationship.
I open the pack and smell them. They look sticky and are beginning to ferment so I open the sliding door and dump them on the frosty lawn. The majority fall out in one big clump and break into three pieces when they hit the hard earth. It’s too cold to bother scattering them properly.
I slide the patio door shut, pull a chair away from the kitchen table, wrap my hands around my cup of coffee and watch the white lawn. Within seconds a blackbird arrives, and then another. Soon there are nearly a dozen of them fluttering about, raising tiny clouds of hoar frost and trying to win a few moments on top of one of the sultana clumps. I’m not sure how long I sit watching them but, for the first time in a long time, I experience the creative glimmer of a new idea.
After a couple of minutes the idea is outshining my interest in the birds so I venture upstairs to my writing desk. Words flow out of me all morning. There’s no double-checking my email, no scrolling through news sites or vacantly gazing at lists of jobs. I don’t even turn my computer on. I just sit down and write in my notebook for four hours.
Around lunchtime the broken images of the story stop appearing in my head and the words clog up. I realise that I’ve forgotten to take my lithium. I consider taking it now but what I just wrote felt like a breakthrough. I want to keep hold of this clarity of mind. I bite the inside of my right cheek and decide not to take it. I go out for a twenty-minute jog instead.
After a shower and some lunch I head back to my writing room. I stop at Charlie’s bedroom door. It’s been over six months since I’ve faced it, and Lyd doesn’t like it when I go in, but I feel like I have to. My hand trembles as I reach for the knob. I wonder if I’m already withdrawing from my medication or if I’m genuinely afraid.
The room is exactly the same – off-white wallpaper with pleasant childhood objects dispersed like polka dots, planetary-themed carpet, Toy Story bedcovers, wardrobe cluttered with cartoon stickers and scribbled crayon drawings, plastic whiteboard with a picture of our family drawn in stick man form, a cheap wooden trunk too small for all the toys – typical stuff for a four-year-old raised in a London suburb. The only unique thing is the low-hanging moon I made for him in one of our make-believe sessions. I push it with the tip of my toe and watch it sway back and forth.
His favourite soft toy lies by the pillow on the bed. He was probably the last person to touch it so I don’t want to disturb its position. It always looked like a limp, dead ferret, even when it was new, and we could never get it away from him. Where did it even come from? I look around and find myself sighing. The sound that comes out contains an unintended groan.
I pick up a retro 1960s robot from the windowsill; a toy we bought as an ornament. It’s red, quite heavy and shaped like a squat cone. Its mouth is a chrome grill and the eyes are blue sirens. There is nostalgia in its naïvety, cuteness based on the fact that the original creator had been unable to form a clearer vision of the technological future. My jittery hands fumble and drop it.
The robot is motionless on the floor, part of the wrong future. I scowl at it, hate it, and find myself stamping on it three times. It doesn’t break. It’s surprisingly sturdy. The pounding hurts my foot through my shoe. Grimly amused by my failure to destroy it, I pick it up and put it back in the same position on the windowsill. My hands are steady again.
I begin to feel like I’m loitering so I leave the room and go back to my writing. I find myself working on another new story. It’s set in a completely different time and place but it belongs in the same universe as the one I was writing this morning. I don’t know how or why I know this. I just know that I feel alive in a way that seems forgotten. I’m focused and productive. Time is moving so fast that I almost can’t believe it when I hear Lyd’s key in the front door.
When people ask Lyd what she does for a living she usually answers with something self-deprecating like, “Sums.” Sometimes, when pushed, she says, “I’m a physicist.” Until four years ago she was an unsung hero in the world of particle physics and a some-time lecturer at Imperial College London. Then her book Mini-Novas: The End of Science or the End of the World? became a crossover hit (her publishers forced the subtitle – it upset Lyd for weeks but also ensured that she sold a lot of books). It’s about the role of particle accelerators in the future of science and, specifically, the potentiality of mini black holes. Now she occasionally does interviews on the news when they need someone to balance out a regressive or scaremongering perspective. She used to work much longer hours but a mixture of success and grief has put her in a position to choose her own working pattern.
I rush downstairs to meet her at the door. She looks tired but her mood lifts slightly when she sees that I’m smiling. I pick her up off the ground with a hug. Outside’s chill covers her.
“Wait,” she protests. “Let me get my coat off.”
I put her down.
“Hello, lovely.”
“Hello?” she says, curious. “What’s up? You seem pretty buzzed.”
“It’s just good to see you.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry I fell back to sleep this morning.”
“It’s fine,” she says, hanging up her coat and grabbing her leather satchel back up off the floor. “What’ve you been up to?”
She walks through to the kitchen, dumping her things on the counter.
“Writing. A new thing. A couple of new things actually. They might be part of the same thing. I don’t know yet.”
“Oh? That’s good.”
“The first taste is always the sweetest.”
“Great. Angela’s going to be happy.”
(Angela’s my agent.)
She kisses me, a peck.
“How was your day?” I ask.
“Dull. Busy. Mostly dull. I think the problem I’m working on might be impossible. And pointless. Impossibly pointless.”
“In the simplest terms?”
“Diffeomorphism covariance.”
“Should I pretend to—”
“No. It’s fine.”
“Prawn stir-fry sound good?”
“Later.” She pulls an opened bottle of white wine from the fridge. “I’ve got a headache.”
I accidentally lower the right side of my mouth as she pours out a glass.
“What?” she asks. “One won’t hurt.”
“No. One’s fine.”
I can tell from her slightly aggressive manner that she doesn’t want to talk so I go back up to my writing room for an hour. After a quiet dinner we watch a couple of episodes of a political drama that we’ve been hooked on for the last few weeks. I can’t follow the story because our silence feels like the most prominent thing in the room. I rest my hand on her thigh. I kiss the side of her face. She doesn’t turn to me once.
Around 10pm we go up to read in bed but I can’t focus on my book either. I pretend to leaf through the pages for a few minutes and then put my bookmark back where it was when I started. Once she’s finished her chapter she turns her bedside light off and lies with her back to me. I turn my light off and nestle up behind her. When I put my arm over her she rests her hand in mine but doesn’t say a word.
It’s 10:56am. I’ve slept in. I can feel the lithium depleting in me. It took me hours to get to sleep last night. I feel sluggish and depressed. I must have turned my alarm off and gone back to sleep but I have no recollection of doing it. Lyd’s long gone.
I put some coffee on, pour myself a bowl of cereal and stand looking out into the back garden. One of the blackbirds is back. He keeps searching the grass and then jumping up onto our birdbath, turning his head sideways and, seem
ingly, staring at me in the house. He is more slight and agile than the typical adult male and moves quicker, with more poise and grace. I like the look of him.
After a couple of renditions of this lawn-and-birdbath routine I realise that he isn’t searching the grass for bugs or food, he’s pretending to. It’s a show. He’s begging, but not in a desperate fashion. He’s like a busker or an entertainer. He doesn’t want to work for a living, he wants to sing for his supper.
Intrigued as to whether I’m truly being manipulated by a blackbird (and amused enough to participate), I open a new pack of sultanas and throw out a handful for him. After cautiously flying up onto the garden fence when I slide the patio door open he quickly flies back down onto the lawn and hops from one sultana to the next, pecking and swallowing them. When he’s done, before he flies away, he makes an oddly distinctive chirping sound:
– chink-chink, chook-chook, chink-chink, chook-chook –
The experience of watching him and being tweeted at cleanses my mind in some unfathomable way. The phased-out feeling I woke with dissipates. I close the sliding door, put my bowl in the sink, pour myself a black coffee and take it upstairs, ready to start writing.
It’s already later than when I usually take my lithium and what I wrote yesterday felt so clear and concise. Right now, I need that clarity. The light fuzz of lithium can be a gift, it keeps me level, but when I’m trying to use my mind as a quick, sharpened tool it slows me down.
I spend all afternoon typing up and editing my work from the previous day. I cut all the abstract language and useless similes then eke out the right grammar and piece it into something more structured and interesting. Once it’s in a readable state I go out for a jog.
I’m still in the shower when Lyd gets home from work. I can hear her on the telephone whilst I’m getting dressed. From her tone of voice and the cadence of her laughter (scathingly ironic but innocent of malice) I immediately narrow the person on the other end of the line down to her sister, Jayne, or her friend Gloria. I head downstairs.