A Lie About My Father (27 page)

Jed and Mark came along at a magical moment in my life. I’d stopped doing acid, after a ‘psychotic’ episode when I’d met my doppelgänger under a street lamp. (Abuse the sacrament, pay the price. I’m not sure I was as disturbed by the bad trip itself as by the sheer banality of its imagery: pure Hammer Horror B-movie shiverfest stuff, on routine
Oliver Reed
is
the Wolf Man
lines.) Now I’d decided to continue the experiment with beer, mushrooms and the odd medicinal dose of meth. The first time I mixed barbs and wine, I just drifted off to sleep, after a dreamy half-hour or so, and woke up hours later with a crick in my neck. No big deal. No good reason, either, for doing it again, but I did, and it carried on from there, life folding into a haze, the occasional periods of lucidity needed to get through a day’s work punctuated by long, slow reveries in grimy bedsits with people I didn’t know and wouldn’t have liked if I had. I did it, of course, for the dreams, and for that feeling of remoteness so perfectly described by the expression ‘spaced out’. Imagined space, real stars. It was an idyll, the true
dérèglement
. It didn’t matter where I was, I could leave my body and go wandering wherever chance took me, a blissful child of the random. It’s not exaggerating to say that some people disappeared out there.

All things must pass
. I’m not sure when that particular idyll started to sour, but I do recall the summer night when I found myself in the summer house of a big house in Newnham, hallucinating wildly on deadly nightshade, which I had consumed a few hours before with Jed and Mark. We knew nightshade contained both fatal and psychotropic active ingredients, but we’d worked out that if we took just so much, and no more, we would be fine. I had discovered the deadly nightshade plant – a tall, dark, dangerous-looking bush of it – on a strip of wasteland by one of the gardens where I did jobbing work, and I’d harvested the purple berries a few days before, carrying them home in a jar like some kid coming in from the fields with a hoard of volunteer raspberries. Earlier that night – the details are hazy, since drink was also involved – I’d taken two or three berries, not enough, I knew, to poison me (I estimated it would take about thirty or so to do that) and waited for the effects to show. I’m not sure how much time passed, but the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor of this rich man’s summer house, fully clothed – though the girl beside me (I had no idea how she came to be there) was stark naked. Stark naked and giggling wildly as a torch played across the windows of the hut and a worried but determined voice sang out in the dark.

‘I know you’re in there. The police are on their way. If you have any sense, you’ll get your clothes on and – ’

He kept on talking, this rich man with the big house and gardens and, though I guessed from his voice that he hadn’t called the police, I was pretty sure he would, if we scared him any more than we already had. Meanwhile, my companion was sitting on the floor, still giggling, trying to get into her jeans. I wanted to say something, to ask her who she was, or how we’d come to be there, or whether she knew where Jed and Mark might be, but I couldn’t speak. I stood up. The rich man had backed away across his lawn and was heading for his house – maybe I’d startled him. The girl scampered to her feet and pulled on a blouse. I don’t know why, but I was waiting for her. Maybe it was gallantry, maybe it was confusion, but as soon as she stood up I saw that she was completely gone, not just high, but crazy, giggling softly to herself as she did up her buttons, and looking at me with eyes the size of saucers as if I was her oldest friend. Or was it something more? A moment later, she darted out into the garden, still barefoot – and I followed after.

These are the snapshots that do not exist on paper, snapshots I carry in my mind, all the moments sieved from lost weekends and four-day binges: moments of waking naked in a stranger’s bed, alone and wondering who undressed me; moments of waking in bad hotels, bruised, bloodstained, with no clue as to how I got there, or even of what town I am in; moments of waking on the floor of an abandoned warehouse, or some country bus shelter on a windy road running from nowhere to nowhere through acres of rainy wheat fields; moments of waking fully clothed but slightly damp on the floor of a girlfriend’s flat, while she sits at the kitchen counter nursing a cup of coffee and a hurt expression, waiting to see if I will get up of my own accord before she goes out into the regular world, not wanting, now, to leave me alone with her space and things, not wanting me around at all any more, and not wanting to have to find the words to tell me so. The night before, she’d said, with a small, hurt flaw in her voice, angry and compassionate and lonely in the small hours, with this wreck of a human crumbling into oblivion as she spoke:
Some day you’ll meet someone who’s crazier than you. I hope you’ll both be happy.

I’d wanted to tell her that I wasn’t crazy: that I never had been, wasn’t now and never would be. But I didn’t. To begin with, half the attraction had been her notion that I
was
crazy: crazy was what was missing in her life, and she liked the fact that I put a little of it there. What she hadn’t liked was my taking it too far. One of the characteristics of crazy, I would have thought, but I didn’t want to quibble. Meanwhile, I just kept getting up again and moving on. It was what I did: find something; test it to breaking point; wander for a while, happy, in my perverse way, to be lost; find the next thing; break it. When they warn you about all that bohemian stuff, they always talk about the seductive properties of alcohol, or drugs, or loose morals, but they never say how seductive falling is, what a great pleasure it is to be
lost
. Perhaps they don’t know. Perhaps only the lost know. Far from home, far from the known, the imagination starts to play beautiful, terrifying tricks on us. Maybe it
is
the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom – which is just another word for a certain kind of crazy. Being lost, being crazy: while I was falling, I knew I was on to something. I knew I wasn’t anywhere near
there
yet, but I also knew that I couldn’t get there from where I was.

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.