I held on tight. Men’s lambswool sweater. Woman’s brushed nylon peignoir. Child’s school socks (wool and polyester mix).
All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles.
I held on very, very tight indeed.
Because in addition to that feeling, that disintegration, there was rage. I wanted to break something.
I could no longer move. I clung rigid to the edge of the counter. I could see my knuckles white. My finger was bleeding where my thumb nail had gouged it.
‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘No. Get me a doctor.’
I forget what happened, except that when a man came, I wept.
They brought a chair. This man put his arm round my shoulders. That’s why I cried. That small kindness.
By the time an ambulance man came, the blue pills must have been flushed through me by the vodka. I drank a glass of water, which must in turn have released the loitering alcohol. I remember nothing more until I awoke in a cubicle.
I was lying on a bed in my clothes beneath a cellular blanket. I felt relaxed, though nagged at, worried by something. I felt I’d given vent to things I should have kept locked up. I’d let the cat out of the bottle, the genie out of the bag . . . I slept again. Some man asked me questions, offered me rest and I accepted.
Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender. It was dark, and two or three people were with me, speaking softly, with consideration.
I was obviously somewhere else now, but I didn’t remember the journey. My disintegrating particles had become a wave. I had reappeared without apparently having travelled the intervening distance. Human beings, as atomic matter, must conform to the laws of quantum mechanics – even their thoughts, which are but electrical functions of brain. Perhaps I had thus solved the mysteries of human behaviour and motivation. God, how should I know?
I was offered hot milk and two white tablets. No injections, nothing sinister. Then a comfortable bed.
I awoke and it was day. I was in a dorm. There were five other beds in it, but no one in them. My clothes were folded over a chair at the foot of ‘my’ bed.
The first thing you do in such a situation is try to get normal. Do your teeth, have a cup of tea, find out where you are. I dressed and stuck my head into the corridor and saw a woman in ordinary clothes, not obviously a nurse.
‘Excuse me, could you tell me where I am?’
‘You’re Michael, aren’t you? We let you sleep in a bit. How do you feel?’
‘Fine.’ It was true. I’d slept deeply. I had no hangover. Good clean spirit, vodka, and I had an eighteen-year-old’s resilience. ‘But where am I?’
‘You’re in a hospital. You came in here last night. My name’s Alison by the way.’
‘Which hospital?’
‘It’s called Park Prewett. It’s a psychiatric hospital. You were transferred from—’
‘I want to get out of here.’
It appeared that I had finally followed Stalky Read’s much-offered advice, albeit unconsciously: I’d taken if not the first bus, then some kind of ambulance to ‘the Prewett’.
‘Why don’t you come and have some breakfast?’
I followed Alison reluctantly along a corridor, then down some stone stairs.
‘I ought just to warn you,’ she said, ‘that we’ve got some visitors at the moment. One of the long-stay wards is having its kitchen renovated and their patients come to us for meals. Don’t be alarmed. They’re all nice people, just that some of them have got their funny ways.’
She led me into a stench of hospital food. I found my throat close tight. It was like the opposite of appetite; it made me feel that far from eating I could never eat again.
Maybe it wasn’t just the smell, maybe it was the sight as well.
At two refectory tables were about fifty people, men and women of all ages but mostly much older than me. A man with a big shaved skull was banging a metal dish on the table and moaning. Women with funny, screwed-up faces were grabbing and gobbling.
Alison must have seen my expression. ‘Come and sit down here. I’ll find you a place. Come and sit next to Sandra here. Sandra, this is Michael.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
Bits of food were being thrown around. Some people ate with their hands. There was little speech – and no one actually conversed with anyone else – but there was a lot of noise. Shouting out; moaning, wailing. The whole thing seemed barely under control.
I pushed my food away and tried to raise the cup of tea in front of me, but my hand shook. I got some into my mouth but couldn’t swallow it. It felt as though some mechanism was preventing me from letting anything from this crazed world enter me, over the membranes of mouth and throat. My body alarm was on, the doors were jammed. I let the tea dribble back into the cup.
I got up from the table and walked out of the bedlam, down the corridor. A nurse in uniform asked where I was going, not unkindly. I said I wanted to go outside and get some air.
‘The doors are closed for the time being, until after breakfast is cleared and the C-block patients have gone back. Then of course you can go for a little walk. Which doctor are you under?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t live here. I just want to go home.’ The smell.
I suddenly thought of the 1100 in the town centre car park. It was going to cost me a packet.
The nurse took me to an office, a glassed-in place, where a man assigned me an appointment for the following day.
‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘I want to go home. I want to discharge myself.’
The registrar, if that was what he was, found my admission note.
‘You were sent from the general hospital,’ he said. ‘A Dr Andrew Brown was on duty there. You’re now under the care of Dr Leftrook, but she’s not in today. You can see her tomorrow, and she can make an assessment.’
‘There must be other doctors. I need to get out today. I’ve got a job. I need to get back to it or I’ll lose it.’
After a lot of dim questions, he conceded that the Prewett had more than one shrink and I was given an appointment to see a Dr Greenhough that afternoon. The registrar wanted to know who my normal GP was, and fortunately I could give him the name of Dr Ray, on whose list I’d been at the grammar school. Since I hadn’t consulted him for at least three years he’d give me a clean slate. (I wouldn’t have wanted him to get the opinion of old Vaughan in King’s Parade.)
Later, I saw an open door and went out into the grounds. My block was clearly low risk, which was reassuring. I walked about, being careful to steer clear of any mutterers in overcoats. The main building was gabled brick with creeper; there was a bell tower and a colonnade whose cloister was held up on steel pins rather than on plastered columns. In other respects, it was the twin of Chatfield, down to the distant games pavilion and the gravy smell. Hello, Batley, hello, Francis. I knew we’d meet again.
As I walked about I could taste the fear in my mouth. I thought of the old men’s poorhouse that I used to see at twilight as a child. All these places were versions of the same thing. One could never finally escape, one was destined always to return.
Through a hole in the fabric of time, through a gate in the wall, through the moment in the arbour where the rain beat.
I sat on a bench in the garden and bit back tears.
I remember little of the day. I kept apart from the others, especially at lunchtime, until my appointment was due. Dr Greenhough was reasonable. He wanted to know my age and medical history, about my parents and if there was someone to take care of me.
I lied about my mother’s capabilities as a parent.
He talked to me about the ‘incident’ in the shop and asked me to describe what I’d felt. I gave an edited version.
He nodded.
‘Can I go now? I want to go home.’
He said the words I wanted to hear. ‘I’m not inclined to keep you here against your will. In f
act, I’m not allowed to. I would prefer it if you stayed. I think it would be better for you. But unless two psychiatrists decide that you are a danger to yourself or others, then—’
‘Of course not. I’ve never hurt a fly. Still less myself.’
‘But you should seek help when you get home. The panic attack that you experienced is a warning that something’s wrong. I shall write a letter to your GP and I suggest that he refers you to your local hospital for treatment as an outpatient.’
‘What would that involve?’
‘Just talking to someone about your thoughts and feelings. Some minor medication if he sees fit. Nothing very dramatic.’
‘All right.’
‘And you should do the same when you return to college. You’re registered with a doctor there, I presume?’
‘Yes.’ I could just picture Vaughan as a psychotherapist. The return of the cold shower and the straitwaistcoat.
‘I’m going to prescribe some pills. Only take them if you feel a repeat attack coming on,’ said Greenhough.
I nodded. I was quite happy with the term ‘panic attack’. Panic had indeed attacked me. I was also glad that it was not the whole truth: it made no reference to the rage – which I had quelled. Panic had overcome me and led me to the loony bin, but there was a reason: I’d been too overstretched to deal with it because I’d been capping off the rage and that had taken all my strength. No wonder I’d been vulnerable.
‘How are you going to get home?’
‘I can take a bus, can’t I? Then I’ll pick up my car and drive.’
He nodded sadly. ‘Don’t take any pills before driving. Ever.’
He was manifestly reluctant to see me go, whereas I felt my spirits rising by the moment.
I decided not to be mad any more; I was never going back to a place like that again.
And that was it. I got a bus, eventually, got my car out of the multi-storey which, to my relief, was a flat-fee-on-exit rather than a by-the-hour one, and drove home. I don’t think my mother ever knew I’d not been back on Wednesday night. Julie was out at a friend’s.
I rang the factory to apologise for missing a day and said my mother had been ill. They said they’d overlook it this time.
Tra-la. On we went. No more the madhouse.
Back to work, then back to university and the 19th century novel (I was still doing English at this time) the entirety of which we were required to study in one week. I calculated that even if I read for 24 hours for seven days I still wouldn’t have got through Trollope.
‘And where does that leave Dickens?’ I asked Dr Gerald Stanley, who told me I should have done the reading in the vacation. Yeah, but I had to work. I gave the money to my mother for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t just dope and booze money. It paid the electricity bill.
OK, back live in’85, as they say on the radio. I’m off to interview Ken Livingstone and so I’m reading up on him. He seems very distrustful of the press, so I’ll try to surprise him. I’ve worked out this thing with journalism, a way to do it. The pop papers talk about Red Ken, Loony Left, Newt-Fancier. One-Legged Lesbians, blah, blah. The ‘serious’ papers talk about ‘the way he is “perceived”’ (I presume they mean mis-perceived); they talk about the ‘image’ – but then go over the same ground as the tabloids in the same terms. The only difference between broadsheet and tabloid papers is that broadsheets put inverted commas round the received ideas.
Suppose, though, you neither regurgitated the cliché nor let the truth or otherwise of the cliché be the master of your trot round the block. Suppose you didn’t mention it all. Suppose you asked Ken about what books he’s read, what football team he likes, which politicians from history he admires, if he believes in God, whether he likes sex or cookery or going to the cinema, bath or shower, tea or coffee, where he takes his holidays, who his best friends are and how he spends his day. That could conceivably be almost interesting, couldn’t it? Why has no one thought of this before? Is Michael Watson a newspaperman of Genius? See next week’s paper.
I posted the diary to Jennifer’s mum a few weeks ago, when I was on a story in Birmingham. I didn’t think she’d try to track the sender in such a big city. I didn’t put a note in it with it, so I’ve no way of knowing if it reached her safely, but I assume it did.
I miss the book itself. I miss the eruptive blue ballpointed handwriting squeezed in so tight between the red feint rules. I kept one of the photobooth snaps of her and Anne, though. I couldn’t resist. I have no other photographs of her, except some blurred ones from the newspaper articles which I keep in a box file. She doesn’t look so good in those. It’s hard to look your best amid columns of type describing your sudden disappearance and presumed death. They cast a shadow. But in the one I kept, while Anne has crossed her eyes beneath her bobble hat, Jen has been caught between silly poses and is staring naturally, with that slight smile, suppressing laughter, and looks quite beautiful.
As for the content, it’s all safely memorised. I don’t recite it to myself that often, just occasionally – as a way of paying my respects.
On Sunday night I was feeling nostalgic, and I decided to pick a day at random. With closed eyes I swirled a pencil round over a calendar of 1974 and stabbed. The date I landed on turned out to be one of the very last entries.
I paused, collected my thoughts, and pressed the recall button.
Interesting post. Molly had a conciliatory letter from Gary. Anne and I told her she better off out of it. I had a letter from Tilly saying she thought D’s office affair had started again because she had found M crying for no reason. Bit of an assumption. Shall tell Tilly. Maybe M had just read sad book or something. Or seen Tilly’s school report!
Lectures a bit uninspiring this morning, though Dr Bivani quite lively on Hapsburgs. Saw Rob for ‘serious talk’ in the Mill at lunch (had received note in pigeonhole by univ mail yesterday requesting ‘summit’). He unhappy about course of ‘our relationship’. I presumed this had something to do with sex, lack of, but unfortunately didn’t get to bottom of it, as first Irish Mike (!) came in and sat rather close, then Malini Coomaraswamy with two girlfriends. V bad luck. Mal doesn’t even drink and this probably her first pub lunch in three years!
R. exasperated by presence of Malini Coomaretcetera as he calls her. But we agreed to ‘reconvene’ at the Free Press tomorrow. Don’t know why all top-level negs have to take place in what Dad would call ‘licensed premises’. Rather dreading it.
Called in on Charlie in Emma on way back. Surprise! He seemed v pleased to see me but rather out of it. He has discovered Benylin. ‘You go to the college nurse, Jen, and say you have a cough. She gives you this mixture. You drink the whole bottle straight off and you’re zonked for hours. It’s really amazing.’ We listened to Focus III and drank tea by the gas fire. He told me some funny stories, then asked in a roundabout way whether he could sleep with me.
So I guess despite mascara he not gay after all! Just nervous maybe. Don’t know what else in addn to bottle of Benylin he had consumed to force self to this point. I explained that things complicated at moment etc. He very understanding: just a long shot, no hassle, if things change, always here . . .
Actually, would rather like to. He has beautiful skin and torso, all waxy and sculpted and firm – saw him shirtless in gardens once. Thin studenty tummy and long hair but large shoulders as though rower, tho’ he swears not. And gentle soul, too. Troubled, anxious, can be overpowering and a bit annoying and too self-deprecating, but you sense a true gentleness beneath. Trouble is, might be too nervous . . . Wouldn’t matter, would be long-term thing, wd get better. But do I want long-term thing at this stage? Deep waters . . .
When I went out on to St Andrew’s Street, I found someone had nicked my bloody bike! Asked porter if he’d seen anything. No chance. It’s not insured. How am I meant to get to lectures in the morning? Miles away. Will have to ring home and ask for money to get new one. Hate to do. Will have to call it loan from Dad and work it off
in vac. I’m so bloody annoyed abt this.
Normally when I’ve had a diary session, I feel immensely tranquil. I go and have a bath, lie back with the light off and feel myself re-inhabit those days a dozen years ago. It’s as close to time travel as you can get. I’m in the cold rooms of those tiny backstreet terraces; I can picture Catty tumbling off the roof, I can taste the Abbot ale.
This time when I’d finished, however, I felt as though I’d unwittingly jammed my finger into an electric socket.
I was in the armchair in my sitting room and I stood up, staring at the blank wall. I had had a memory.
Was it false or true?
I didn’t know.
All I wanted to do was force it out of my thoughts. I couldn’t rest, I could never sleep again, I couldn’t think until I’d got rid of this vile picture.
I paced up and down the room, I poured a huge drink of Johnnie Walker and swilled it down. Then another. But I couldn’t shift it.
This is what the ‘memory’, true or false, consisted of.
After lunch in the pub, I walked up Mill Lane, then up Pembroke Street. Outside Emmanuel, I happened to see Jennifer leave her bicycle in the rack and enter the college. I hung around for a couple of minutes, studying the menu in the window of the Varsity, the little Greek restaurant. Then I crossed the road, pulled her unlocked bike from the rack and rode off on it.
Eight
I bumped into Stellings the other day in Chancery Lane. I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and he looked sleek and optimistic. His clothes were obviously expensive.
I have this odd feeling that, not far from where I work, there are people suddenly making huge sums of money – I mean, preposterous, dizzying, comical amounts. They are doing it legally, every day, and getting home late. No wonder they look . . . Glazed. Honey-glazed. Money-glazed.
I don’t know how this happened. When I grew up in Reading, there were rich people, I suppose. The man who owned the paper mill, for instance. He had a new Jaguar and a house with remote-control gates. There were toffs who lived in the countryside nearby who’d inherited money. Then there were prosperous people who worked in industry or business and maybe at the top of the professions.