Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (13 page)

In the afternoon we usually go to the beach, to the club, which is called Goldmuir. You have to be a member because it’s a special place, with guards, at the end of a long sandy beach. There are shark nets all the way around, except on the side where there are rocks. In the middle of the sea, there’s a concrete platform with a diving board that you reach by climbing up a tall rusty ladder. My brothers and I like to run as fast as we can along the board and throw ourselves into the sea. The one who makes the biggest splash wins.

Dad says the shark nets are tethered all the way down to the sand on the bottom of the sea, to stop the sharks coming in and eating us. There are big red plastic balls called floats to keep the nets up. We are not allowed to play on the floats or swim too close to the nets, otherwise the sharks might get us. A shark did once eat a woman’s leg but that’s because she was foolish enough to go in the sea outside the club, where there are no shark nets. She wasn’t even swimming, just standing in the water, but the shark got her anyway.

Dad is teaching me how to do front crawl even though I can swim like a fish underwater, but Dad says it’s good to do proper strokes, on the top of the water. He says I could swim before I could walk, he says I am a water baby.

When we’re tired we go and sit in the shade and drink Coca-Cola out of glass bottles. There is a bit of cork inside the cap. If you’re very lucky, you find a picture of Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse hiding under the cork. My brothers and I fight over them. We eat crisps too, which they fry for us in the kitchen and serve in twists of greaseproof paper. You have to be careful when you eat them because the seagulls swoop down and snatch them out of your hands.

I like Aden. It is the third country we have lived in after Brunei, where I was born, and Brazil, where I first went to school. And we went to England too, in between, but we didn’t really live there, we were on holiday from Dad’s work. I think I like Aden best although I don’t really remember the others very well.

I remember Brazil a bit and I quite liked my school there, the British School of Rio, except the time a boy grabbed my hand and hurt me. I had a boil on my finger; I always seemed to have boils everywhere, so I told him to be careful. We were standing in a circle, holding hands so we could sing the school song and when the teacher wasn’t looking, he squeezed my hand really tight. He wouldn’t let go, just kept squeezing and squeezing even when I started to cry because the boil hurt so much. I hit him with my other hand and then I ran away, into a classroom where all the desks and chairs were piled up. I got under them and crawled right into the far corner so nobody could find me.

The teachers kept calling and coming in and out of the room and then one got down on the floor and saw me, but I wouldn’t come out. She couldn’t fit under the desks because they’re made for children so I stayed there and wouldn’t move. Mum came and got me although she couldn’t fit under the desks either. She had to talk to me for ages and I only came out when she said that nobody would hurt me again and that I wouldn’t get told off for running away from assembly.

That was my second school in Rio, and was a grown-up school so the teacher spoke in English. At the first school, which was a nursery school, they didn’t speak any language I could understand although Mum says they were talking Portuguese, which is the language they speak in Brazil. The only other language they spoke was German. I was four, I think.

All we did at nursery was blow bubbles into huge canisters filled with water, and play musical chairs. I don’t know what the canisters were for because nobody could explain them to me in words that I could understand. I just know that we always seemed to be blowing bubbles.

One day, Mum didn’t come to get me. I had to sit on a bench in the boiling sun and wait. We couldn’t sit in the shade, because they had already locked the school with a big key. A teacher sat with me but she didn’t speak in my language and I didn’t speak in hers. I wanted to ask if Mum would come but she looked like she was really cross with me, so I didn’t say anything. I wanted to pee too, and I wanted to cry but the teacher was so cross I thought if I said anything she might shout at me. So I didn’t do anything. I just waited.

I thought, probably, that Mum wouldn’t come. I thought she had lost me and I would never get found because we were in another strange country where nobody knew my name or the language I spoke. I was so frightened I wanted to scream and cry and lie on the ground but I had to be good because I was too small to be anything else. When Mum arrived, she was crying. She said the car broke down so she got on a bus but it went the wrong way and she didn’t speak the language so she couldn’t ask where she was. It took her ages to realise that she was lost and then she had to find a taxi and explain to him where the school was. The teacher was nicer when Mum arrived.

Later, it wouldn’t have mattered because I learned to speak Portuguese. After a few months, Mum says, I was fluent enough to chatter away like a monkey but I have forgotten it all now.

Anyway, now we have to learn Arabic at school. I can count to twenty and say hello and Allah be with you and a few other things. I don’t know why we have to learn it; we never seem to speak it, even to the shopkeepers.

Sometimes we go ‘Home’ to England. Or, at least that’s what Mum and Dad call it. ‘We’re going Home,’ they say, sounding excited. I don’t understand why they call it that. Home is here; England is just a place we visit.

I hate England. It is grey and cold and the houses are very small and stuck to one another with no space in between. We go on leave, which is the word for Dad’s holiday from work. It’s then that we can see our relatives who are my grandparents and my aunts and uncles and cousins.

I like to see my grandparents but I hate having to go to school in England. It’s dark and cold and the buildings are grey and damp and the other children hate me. Or that’s the way they act. They make a big space around my desk and pretend they can’t understand anything I say. And they say I’m a funny colour because I’m so brown. Mum says it’s not for very long, just for a few weeks, but I don’t see why we have to go at all. She says it’s so our education doesn’t suffer which is stupid because we don’t learn anything. They read all the wrong books.

It’s nice to have telly though. We don’t have that in Aden. Once I saw my grandfather being killed on telly. We were in the street, watching it in a shop window, our hands and noses pressed right against the glass because we’d never really seen telly before and it was always exciting when there was one turned on. And in the shop, there were hundreds of tellies lined up in a big row, not just the one. My grandfather was on all of them at once, being stabbed with a big knife. Dad says it wasn’t real, that he was only acting because that’s his job, but we set up such a caterwauling that he had to take us to my grandfather’s flat, to prove it.

We’ve only just met him, although Mum says we met him before but I was too little to remember. He is very handsome and has blue eyes that twinkle. After he said hello, he put me on his shiny brown leather shoes and danced around the room with me standing on his feet and he sang, ‘Tiptoe Through The Tulips’, which is his favourite song. He gave us sweets too, Smarties and Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles. The sweets in England are better than in Aden. In Aden the chocolate is hard and covered in white marks because it’s frozen and unfrozen then frozen and unfrozen again.

I don’t care if the chocolate is hard in Aden. I’d never eat chocolate again in my life if it meant I didn’t have to go to an English school. Nobody likes Tony and me. They say we’re weird because of the way we speak and the things we talk about. I told one girl about the shark nets and she told everyone that we lived in a zoo and that our parents must be monkeys. They call us names, too, like dirty Arab and push us hard in the playground, when the teacher isn’t looking, so we fall over and graze our legs. They say I’m a show-off because I know things and can do joined-up writing. So I’ve stopped. I write like them now, making a big mess in my book with lots of capital letters and blotches. Mrs Gould would be very cross.

They say I’m stupid too, which is very confusing. ‘Stupid, stupid,’ they chant in the playground. It’s not my fault I don’t know what they’re talking about. They go on about people I’ve never heard of, who are on the telly, which I’ve never seen, or they talk about books I’ve never read. The books are English books and they’re different from the ones we get at home. So how could I have read them? You’re only stupid if you don’t know something when you’re supposed to have learned it.

I don’t like being called names or being punched so at break I go and hide in the lavatories, which are all the way outside in a separate building. I don’t know why. They’re smelly and freezing cold. The walls are all slimy with damp and the floors are made of concrete, which gets slippery. But if I sit with my feet pulled up on the wooden seat, they can’t see me if they look under the gap in the door. And if they can’t see me, they won’t hit me. I feel sick sitting there but that’s because the teacher makes us drink warm, sour milk, which comes in little bottles with a straw. For our health, the teacher says.

We don’t have milk in Aden except the sort that comes in cardboard boxes marked
LONG LIFE
in big red letters. When I was little, I used to think that if we drank Long Life milk then we would live for ever, but Dad said it wasn’t the case. Which was a good thing because it tasted disgusting. Anyway, I think my health is perfectly all right. I hate milk.

I am always really happy when we go home.

In my mind, it was an idyllic childhood; at least until I was nine and we went to England where I was to half-live for the rest of my childhood. I say half-live because to me England
was
boarding school, a place we rarely left, so England as a country was quite unfamiliar to me. So unfamiliar, that I still get its geography confused. I never felt that those years at boarding school in England were in any sense a life. They were simply periods of time that had to be endured. Nor was there ever again during my childhood a place that I called home, at least in any profound sense of belonging; the place where my parents lived was just somewhere that we returned to from time to time. After Aden, I never quite felt that I belonged anywhere. I still miss it, although I know it is the memory that I miss, rather than the place.

I didn’t go to boarding school straight away. Dad had been posted to Oman, but there were no facilities for families in the desert so my mother stayed in England while Shell, the company my dad worked for, built some houses. It took two years so I stayed to keep her company while Tony went off to join Michael at his school. I was sent to the local primary.

I hated it. I hated the school, I hated England, I hated my dad being away and I hated being without my brother Tony to whom I had been very close. We had shared a bedroom and a life for nine years and, suddenly, he was gone. Michael was long gone, having left home when I was five. That was the last time the three of us ever lived together, except on holidays from school and I don’t, for some reason, count them. They were interludes, magic fragments of happiness in a bleak school year, rather than anything resembling a life.

Mum was not happy either. She was always tired and often miserable, trying to cope with buying a house and setting up home in England. In my father’s absence, she had to deal with all of the financial practicalities, something for which she had never really been prepared and which, even to my child’s eyes, she obviously found exhausting and difficult.

I suppose she must have been lonely too with her husband away and both her boys at school. Like me, she had few friends in England. Like me, she had left all her friends behind, in Aden. But she, at least, was used to England. I was not. The sudden shock of my life changing beyond comprehension made me feel that my happy childhood had suddenly and abruptly ended. The sun, in every sense, disappeared behind a bank of grey cloud.

The local primary was miserable, housed in a squat and sullen redbrick building and backed by a vast expanse of freezing, windswept fields. Or, at least, it seemed to me that they were freezing but to a colonial child, raised in the Far East, South America and Arabia, everything seems cold. Even an English summer is cold.

As usual, I spent the first few months hiding in the girls’ lavatories, a low-slung outhouse reeking of damp and Jeyes disinfectant. I seemed always to be shivering in those cubicles, knees pulled to my chest.

Children hate difference. And my difference was obvious as soon as I opened my mouth. I had none of the right cultural references. I had never lived in England and still thought of Aden as home. Whenever I mentioned home, I talked about Aden. At least, I did, until I learned to keep my mouth shut. I’d missed nine years of television, so I had almost nothing to say, no means of joining in a playground conversation. I could swim like a fish, count in fluent Arabic and read a book in two hours. Other than that I had almost no social skills. I was plainly weird.

Nor was I planning to hang around the area, so there wasn’t much future in being my friend. No other child was going to boarding school, let alone a school a hundred miles away. And my new home, as soon as I was allowed to make my escape, would be in Oman, Arabia.

Some of the kids were perfectly nice but they are not, of course, the ones who I remember. It is the gang of girls I recall, the ones who waited for me on the way home and dragged me off my bike, hitting and punching me or pulling my hair.

I said nothing to anyone until my mother was brushing my hair and it came out in handfuls. ‘What’s this?’ she said.

I said that it was just a little fight. I never told her about the rest, kept the worst of it from her in that curious, protective way that children do. And I felt, too, a deep sense of that shame that bullied children (or adults) always feel. I also knew that Mum was powerless to do anything about the situation other than tell the teacher, which, I knew, would make everything worse. The discipline at the school was almost non-existent; we were often left to our own devices.

It did not seem to occur to my mother that I might be having a difficult time. She offered me no advice or sympathy and, taking my tune from her, I expected none myself. It was just another thing to get through. I knew, too, that in the midst of such anarchy, it would have been lunacy to draw any attention to myself. I had quite enough of the wrong sort already.

The bullying stopped eventually but I made no friends. I have no idea what I did with myself, or how I occupied my time. It is all a blank. I don’t remember a face, let alone a name, from the two years I spent in that place. This, I think, was the beginning of a sense of disconnection that has remained with me for most of my life.

As a child I was absurdly jealous of other children who lived their whole lives in the same house, surrounded by the same friends and going to the same school. I say, absurdly, because they thought I was absurd to want such a thing. They thought that sort of life very dull. To me, it sounded like paradise. I could find nobody who understood how I felt, until I met Sarah, when I was sixteen. It is perhaps no surprise that my closest friend, who is the daughter of a diplomat, had a childhood similar to my own.

Sarah’s word for that sense of disconnection is ‘homesickness’. It is a good description, a vast broad-ranging word that loops endlessly across provenance and identity, settling nowhere. She suffers from it too. Sometimes, if she is low and I ask her what it is that’s bothering her, she will simply say, ‘Oh, just homesickness’ and I’ll know immediately how she feels, an unsettling unease and unrest and an inarticulate yearning for who knows what? Home, I suppose.

A part of my depression lies, I think, in my unanswered question: Where is home? I feel a sense, always, of trying to find my way back to a place that doesn’t exist. The cliché that is invariably offered up is always, ‘Home is where the heart is’. The simple answer is that my heart is where my daughter is. That is where it most profoundly lives. But my daughter must, as children must, go off into the world and find her own way. And if my heart goes off with my daughter, then where does that leave me?

Our childhood experiences and the sense of belonging that they root in us are important, but they are not everything. Sarah, despite having a childhood similar to my own, does not suffer from depression. We have quite different natures. Her family is very different too, as was her schooling. And while I see in her emotional patterns a legacy of a peripatetic childhood that is as familiar as my own, they are neither destructive nor overwhelming.

In other words, a disrupted childhood does not in itself precipitate severe depression. It may contribute to it by establishing deep insecurities and feelings of disconnection, but it is not the cause. Nor, usually, is any one event, or set of events. It seems more likely (and there are many, wildly differing, theories about this) that childhood, innate character, life events and a particular fragility of chemistry all conspire.

A journey through depression and the causes of depression is in some ways like the unravelling of a mystery story. It may, at first, not even be obvious to us that our present distress has a direct lineage to the past. We may respond to a particular sort of person or characteristic incredibly badly and have no idea why that person should affect us. Or a situation that is, on the surface, entirely benign, can inspire a response that is completely at odds with the matter in hand. These are what therapists and psychiatrists call triggers; they trigger some deep pain or long forgotten memory and provoke a reaction that often bewilders us.

If we can discover the triggers, we may be able to defuse them. We can never avoid them. They are always going to be present, if only because life will always be filled with incidents that cause us pain. To avoid them altogether would be to avoid life itself, which seems to me just another form of depression.

We can, instead, confront them and put them into context. For most of us, those triggers were put in place during childhood and the feelings they invoke in us are childlike, rather than childish. To our adult selves they appear hopelessly out of proportion to the actual situation. But they are, nonetheless, real.

I may remember few details of that English primary school but one incident remains vivid in my mind. My mother had arranged to pick me up from school and was late. By the time she arrived, I was completely incoherent with grief. At first, she tried to console me, but when I would not settle, she told me that I was being ridiculous, that she was only ten minutes late because she had been stuck in traffic. She grew very angry but I could not explain why I was so upset. It did seem such a small thing to be upset about. I could not even explain it to myself. It was only later that I understood the connection back to that time in Brazil, when I was four years old, and I thought that she had gone for ever.

Even as an adult, I still get absurdly, inappropriately, upset when people are late. I feel, in every sense of the word, abandoned; a feeling that expresses itself in blind panic and the threat of imminent tears—an absurd response in an adult. While, these days, I am better able to reason with myself when somebody isn’t on time and temper my response, I have not conquered it entirely. A vague distress will linger with me for days.

It is what neuroscientists call ‘emotional memory’. Researchers at Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience have found evidence for a self-reinforcing memory loop, in which the brain’s emotional centre triggers the memory centre, which in turn further enhances activity in the memory centre. In a scientific paper published about the findings, they explained that, ‘an emotional cue could trigger recall of the event, which would then loop back to a re-experiencing of the event. Or, remembering the event may trigger the emotional reaction associated with the event, which in turn could trigger more intense recall.’

It is the first study of its kind using neuroimaging in human brains and provides clear evidence that the brain’s emotional centre, called the amygdala, interacts with memory-related brain regions during the formation of emotional memories. They are hoping that their insights can contribute to an understanding of the role that the neural mechanisms underlying emotional memory formation play in post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

So, perhaps I have a faulty trigger in my memory system. One like this: Every time I go to an airport, I feel an overwhelming urge to cry and feel a terrible, black sense of despair. It makes no sense. I am an adult. I love adventures and exploring new places and different cultures. I love foreignness and strangeness, which make me feel immediately at home, perhaps for obvious reasons. I love the smell of camel dung and urine, the dusty heat and noise of African villages, the car horns and chaos of Indian cities.

I even love flying, enjoy the ritual of airports, the sharply acrid smell of aeroplane fuel, the shimmer of runway lights, the no-man’s land of transit lounges. In my earlier career, first as a fashion writer on
Vogue
and the
Observer
and then as the editor of
Elle
, I was forever jumping on and off planes to Milan, Paris and New York and other far-flung destinations. It was work that I loved; these were trips I loved to take. Yet, even when I am going to a place that I long to see, I always feel a dreadful sense of despair. My throat closes until I can hardly speak or breathe and I feel perpetually close to tears.

It was only when I tracked it back that I understood it has to do with an old, but, for me, terrible, reality. It means the end of the school holidays, leaving the light and warmth of Africa or Arabia and my parents’ house and flying back to England, and that cold, dark and unlovely boarding school I hated so much.

And while I still feel tearful at an airport, I have lost that awful sense of dread. I am able to reason with myself until the feeling goes. It’s harder than it sounds. I have to literally remind myself that I am no longer a child, perpetually being moved from country to country, school to school, house to house; a situation over which I had no power and in which I had no choice.

But when I feel that feeling again it is, I now know, a feeling pretty much like depression.