The Scent of Dried Roses

  All these phenomena I write up in furious detail in notebooks. I have always been a patchy diarist at best; now I write page upon page, every day, for hours and hours, full of tortuous philosophy. Over the following eighteen months, I write thousands of pages, sometimes for eight hours a day.

  At this point, I suppose, I am building my final defence against breakdown. I am aware that I am trying to keep a hold of something, but I am not sure what. I know only that it is an enormous effort. My handwriting becomes very neat and precise and unlike the random scrawl of my previous self. My train of thought is systemic, laid out clean and pure, and has become me, what I am. My feelings have closed down entirely, so what is left is simply what is in my head, and it is imperative that that makes sense, because otherwise I think I will lose my continuity as a very person. If the stream of ordered thought in my head stops, then I will stop too.

  The diary writings are not mad, or even rambling. They are just relentless and rather dull. Reading them now is like dipping into the collected works of a slightly drunk, reasonably clever but frighteningly single-minded saloon-bar philosopher. I am as high as a kite and, I believe, intoxicatingly rational. My thoughts seem to be structured almost mathematically, reading out premises and conclusions like a ticker tape. But actual thoughts of suicide have stopped. As far as I am concerned, I have recovered, although I vaguely sense that I am still acting and thinking abnormally.

  In 1987, a year after leaving university, I achieve a remarkable career boost. I am offered the editorship of the (now defunct) London listings magazine, City Limits, in charge of some eighty staff. My inexperience does not seem to make much difference to the interviewing board: they are faced with someone in the grip of mania, crackling with nervous energy and apparently unassailable self-confidence. Articulacy has always been my strong point, and depression, at this level, is a quickening of the mind, an astonishing clarity. The panel are bewitched.

  Amazingly, I am still with Becka at this point. She believes that now I have this job everything between us will be fine. She continues to try hard, but instead of our relationship improving, I leave her again, fighting down a rising sense of panic. She is completely frustrated and bewildered. I am bewildered myself. I simply know that I cannot carry on any more. Having to act, to pretend an entire life on two fronts, is just too demanding.

  I realize very quickly that the job is not going to work out. City Limits is a bizarrely structured remnant of the 1970s, a socialist collective, containing many long-established competing factions. I do not have the emotional – or, in fact, the practical power – to hold eighty people together. I do not belong here, I am not a member of their tribe, although I have convinced them that I am. I do not have a tribe, or if I do, it is a shameful one: white, male, not ‘properly’ working class. Perhaps it is shameful, but it is mine. Why, then, can I not claim it?

  I am a strange combination of left-wing and libertarian. I see myself as a sort of Fabian P.J. O’Rourke, rather than the conventional, ideological socialist I feel is expected. This means that I find the censorious environment incomprehensible and intolerable. Even the idea of being a liberal seems to be tantamount to moral ignominy. But in the face of eighty more or less like minds, I am not confident enough to state my case.

  At an interview for a new designer, when I sit on a panel with a cleaner, a secretary and the news editor (we all have an equal vote), applicants are quizzed about their stance on the miners’ strike, which has long-since finished. I realize finally that the only solution to City Limits’s problems is to sack three-quarters of the staff and recapitalize the magazine, but I understand that I will be removed by the people I am trying to sack. That is the way the collective works. I know what I have to at least try to do, but I lack the requisite ruthlessness, management skills and rhinoceros skin. I have the fatal weakness of wanting to be liked, and this contradiction seems to set up a final, intolerable stress in me. It lobs a hand-grenade into the limbic system of my lower brain, which then short-circuits. I resign, four weeks after joining. The magazine will fold shortly afterwards. I sense that this will be the case and feel still more guilt that my habit of destructiveness towards people has extended to institutions.

  The day after resigning, I have a panic attack far more extreme than anything I have experienced before. I am sitting in Holland Park Open Air Theatre, where a comedy event is being held. The stand-ups are good, but I am unable to raise a smile of any kind. My lips begin to move to the sound of my own thoughts. Something is wrong, something is wrong. And what happens now? What is it that must happen? What is it that is going to happen? I start to sweat when the breakdown that has been gathering within me for so long finally begins. I am suddenly steeped, soaked through to the spirit, in sticky black pitch. My power of speech begins to disappear, as does the ability to reason.

  I take to lying in bed most of the time, consciousness hardly flickering. I know immediately how it will end. I don’t in the least want to die. What I ‘realize’ is that it is inevitable, a destiny that needs to be fulfilled. Thoughts of suicide are no longer the mental doodlings of a bored undergraduate. I compare myself to Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. Self-importance is one of the several profits of depression.

  Hamlet was prisoner of a tragic destiny. Compelled from within, it did not matter how much he vacillated and demurred: ‘There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.’ This is the speech of a man who has submitted to the demands of implacable fate.

  The sense of guilt and failure that has for years bowed me down now takes on a religious flavour. I am ashamed of everything – my country, my class, my very self. Up until now, I have been a militant atheist, but I begin to believe that my soul is lost to the devil, that I am evil and must die. In short, I am going crazy, and like a crazy person, I do not know it.

  My new ideas of religiosity and sin, beliefs that I thought I had cast off in my infant schooldays but now find were merely dormant, reach their fullest expression when I start wandering the streets, unshaved, sometimes with piss on the front of my trousers, merging in with the winos and beggars I have in the past awkwardly ignored, or, just as awkwardly, rewarded. My eyes are muddy. My mouth hangs open like a cretin. There is recognition in the faces of the winos, who offer me mouthfuls of warm cider. But I have tried drinking as an anaesthetic; it just makes me feel sick. Otherwise I am indistinguishable from the other human street-litter, except that my creased, dirty trousers are Paul Smith, the stained shirt is from Joseph. I am a designer scumbag.

  On one occasion, walking blank and aimless as usual, I come to a church, near Goodge Street station. I decide to go in, feeling hopeless and foolish. It is open and there is a door marked for the priest. I knock on the door, because I will speak to anyone who will listen. There is nobody there.

  I walk to the pews, fall on my knees and begin to pray, for the first time since school. I pray for my soul to be saved from the devil, to be forgiven for what now appear to me to be terrible sins. There is only silence and emptiness in the church. It is cold. I clench my eyes tight and try to make a sound in my head that will be heard by someone. Who is the Holy Ghost? I pray above all that my parents, most particularly my mother, will be saved from the impact of the pain of what is happening to me, of the destructive force that I have become. After ten minutes or so, I get up and leave. I do not feel any different.

  I begin practising suicide notes, often at great and tedious length. At this point, surprisingly, I have not lost my capacity to satirize my own situation. At the end of one particularly overblown effort, I observe in a postscript that the Labour Party 1983 Manifesto was no longer the longest suicide note in history. On another, I observe that my life is ‘like Mantovani rather than Otis [ Redding]; a sticky, ersatz version of life at 15 removes from the real thing’.

  It is not only me who seems to be falling apart but, eerily, the world outside. In Au
gust Michael Ryan goes insane and massacres fourteen people in Hungerford. In October, incredible storms seem to tear England apart. I lie in bed, rigid, listening to the howling wind shake at my window like some strange summons. A few days later, the stock market crashes on Black Monday. Then, within weeks, eleven people are blown up at Enniskillen and there is a tube fire at King’s Cross that burns thirty people to death. It all seems to knit together in a great cross-stitch of decay and chaos that merges with the darkness inside my mind.

  My prevarications come to an end in the early hours of one November morning. I put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I play ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ by Van Morrison softly, once. I leave a note for my family: So low. Not low: non-existent, rambling, utterly mad, totally sane. I loved you all so deeply when I had a heart to love with, when I possessed a soul. Now all I care about is cigarettes.

  My time is up. I am to die against my will, but fate cannot be denied. I make my way up the fire escape, trying desperately to find courage. A neighbour looks out as I approach the roof. I smile and wave. He goes back to bed. Romanticizing my fate to the last, my thoughts still court cheap melodrama. This is the last moon I will ever see. I am to die against my will. But fate cannot be denied. I weep, for my family, for my stupid life and, most of all, for myself. From the roof, I stare down to the gardens far below, waiting for the moment when I will find the nerve.

  Always casting about for certainty, I have at last found it. My belief about my need to commit suicide is the greatest certainty I have ever known. This is what I have always needed, and this is what my mind has duly come up with. I have done what the deepest part of my self has demanded, which is to build myself a system of belief, at any cost, a system of belief that will make sense to me. Suicide in this sense, like just about everything else in life, is a strange form of self-protection. I must die in order for my beliefs to survive, in order to prove to myself that I am free-willed, in control, in possession of a self, that I am good. It is clear and consistent and precise and, in its conclusion, quite mad.

  I feel transparent, as if the wind is blowing through me. My own self-pity disgusts me more than I can bear. My head is sharp and clear. It seems that some immutable force is working within me. Above all, I feel that to launch myself into the air is the right and appropriate thing to do; something, obscurely, I can be proud of. I am convinced that all the streams and tides of my personal history, all my choices and non-choices, have inevitably led to this moment of truth. I feel soaked in a mysterious sense of destiny, which bids me jump.

  I don’t think of anybody else; or rather, I don’t hurt for anybody else. It is a shame that my family will have to suffer through my death, but anyone who can feel so little for themselves that they want to die is hardly capable of feeling for others. Which, of course, is why life becomes absolutely without reward.

  Although I feel compelled to die, so great is my fear of the plummet that I feel, once again, helpless. I fear the devil, I fear pain, I fear oblivion. I balance on the edge of the roof, thinking Just let yourself slip. Now, no… now! I wobble and stay upright. The wind hits again. Now! I hold back again.

  What is pushing me forward? I cannot say. Try to remember some moment in your life, some decision you had to make which you felt involved only one choice because failing to take it would be a complete denial of yourself and your personal destiny. At those moments, there is some reverberation within you, some deep certainty which asks you to trust it. Such a certainty is upon me, as real as the bricks which stand solidly in the way of my will.

  Now! I lurch forward again. Music blares from the flat beneath me. I am getting cold and begin to realize the true depth of my failure. I am too weak, too indecisive, even to kill myself successfully. After twenty minutes on the roof of the building, staring at the indifferent moon, I flunk the one choice in my life which I feel would have been brave and worthwhile. I climb down the fire escape and go back to bed.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It is several weeks before Jean receives a phone call from me to say that I have been standing on the roof with the intention of throwing myself off. In the interim, I have tried to rally myself, but repeatedly fallen back to a place where I wish, truly, to die.

  Jean’s first reaction is what her first reaction to family crises always is. What can I do? There has to be a way to help. My mother’s greatest definition of herself is as a doer. To not be able to do is to feel helpless and weak, and out of control. It is one of the worst feelings imaginable for someone like her. So, the first thing Jean and Jack do when I arrive from Notting Hill after a shaky drive down the A40 is to sit down and talk to me about what action is to be taken. By now, I am over the worst of the panic attack and begin to imagine, as I sometimes do, that the crisis in my mind is exhausted now. However, I remain bleak and fatalistic and clearly unhappy.

  My parents, up until now, have been about the only people close to me who have not known of the severity of the problems I have been experiencing. I have protected them thus far, hoping to find a solution through my friends. They – my friends – are for the most part kind and understanding, although one or two of them assiduously avoid me, as if fearful of despair or, more plausibly, boredom. None of them, however, has suggested that I am ill in any way, or might need to see a doctor. The idea of tablets and treatments remains beyond the pale; they too have seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. One of my wisest and closest friends, Bev, has recently suffered the suicide of her mother and tells me that before she killed herself, she underwent drug treatments and ECT that she felt to be worse even than the depression and quite useless.

  Likewise, my parents are extremely reluctant to accept that I am suffering from an illness that might be ameliorated by drugs. Drugs – although, oddly, I am happy to take them recreationally – are against our whole experience and philosophy; our experience of Alan, our belief in self-reliance within the family. We think that talking and kindness and tolerance are the answer for just about everything, and so Jean and Jack talk and are kind and tolerant towards me, offering to take me in and look after me until I ‘feel better’.

  I turn down their offer and return home. Over the next few weeks it becomes clear, however, that the solutions our family have always relied on in crises are useless in my case. Although I have a brief time of feeling better, I soon relapse. I begin to hang around on the platforms of tube stations, trying to let myself slip in front of trains but losing my courage as ever. I return to the roof of the flats, again staring beneath, praying for the strength to do what I most desire. In an attempt to combat my cowardice, I drive out to the country with a length of rubber hosing and a pair of handcuffs. The idea is that I will run the pipe from the exhaust to the window, switch on the motor, then handcuff myself to the wheel. Then, I reason, all I have to do to die is let go of the key. The scheme does not work, because I am too afraid to set it in motion. Whatever else it may be, suicide is not the coward’s way out. Death is a tremendously frightening prospect, however much you may desire it.

  Most of the time I conceal these attempts from Jack and Jean, but on one or two occasions I tell my mother what is happening. Her voice goes small. She sounds flat rather than terrified. My apartment is beginning to disgust even me and she begins to come round to clean it up. At least it is doing something. Her helplessness begins to weigh on her like an always heavier yoke.

  My parents ask me to come home again, as much in order to keep an eye on me as anything. I do so, indifferent. My power of speech has more or less dried up by now and I lie in my childhood bunk bed, curled up in a foetal position. My mother comes in to bring me food, which I listlessly eat. I am putting on weight, becoming bloated. I am unshaven, and utterly listless. My sense that I have returned to a sort of awful inverted childhood is overpowering.

  In the few hours of the day when I can be bothered to get up, I wander around the streets of Southall. I spend much time in Jubilee Gardens, where once I stood in the middle of the field shouting, Buggerfuckcu
nt, and muttering, with all the spirit that was in me then. Some day.

  Now I am back where I started, fifteen years later. I wander to the library which adjoins the park and feebly pick at the books. A quotation seems to slide around my head from somewhere: He who increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow.

  Without feeling any interest, I nevertheless find a copy of the Bible and look for the exact quote. Eventually, I find it. It reads: And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit, For in much wisdom is much grief and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. I stare at the page. The words stare back at me. I cannot make sense of them. I can barely even read a newspaper now, so parched and throttled are my thought processes.

  Jack and Jean have reluctantly come to the conclusion that I may be ill and need to be in hospital. They begin ringing around private clinics, which charge thousands of pounds a month for treatment. Their only source of income is Jean’s salary from the dinner lady’s job and a small wage from Jack’s new job with Age Concern. They decide that they will remortgage the house in order to pay for treatment and worry about it later. After twenty-five years of hard work, the house is fully paid off now and worth about £60,000. It will be a shame to have the worry of a mortgage again, but still –