Grey Area (21 page)

I haven’t painted now for over four months. I feel as remote from my art as I do from Tierra del Fuego. You might as well ask a man to stretch his cock to the moon, as ask me to pick up a brush again, or even prime a canvas.

I can’t see things the way I used to. I used to see form spontaneously. Just looking at a miscellany of objects would intrude the idea of a composition. A quality of light, or a particular texture, would impinge on me with amazing force. Colour, chiaroscuro, the very sense of the volume of an object, a portion of the sky, or the geometry of a human face – all came to me unbidden. I never knew how fucking lucky I was, how blessed really, blessed with a gift. A gift that’s gone as if it was never there to begin with.

Of course, as my charming wife sees fit to remind me, I have had these ‘episodes’ before. That’s nice, isn’t it – ‘episode’, like an episode of some tawdry soap. ‘Here it is, folks,’ the announcer says cheerily, ‘this week’s episode of Simon Dykes’s chronic fucking depression. Sit back and enjoy.’

I can’t stand the anger I feel towards Jean – she really isn’t to blame for all this. But all right, I’ve always been a bit unstable, had my ups and downs. I don’t subscribe to the notion that the depressive and the creative mentality go hand in hand – only a fucking shrink would – but I can admit that about myself.

But I’ve never felt as bad as this, as futile, as purposeless. I experience the love I thought I had for Jean as an irritation, a niggling under my skin. And as for the kids, when I look at them, particularly Henry, a sharp pain comes into me. A pain that’s a sort of probing finger coming into my grey area of depression and titillating it with the possibility of feeling love once more. It’s disgusting, almost as if I don’t want it. It’s like Jean reaching for my flaccid cock – which she does nowadays as if she were a weary bell-ringer – and giving it an uncalled-for tug.

22nd October

I didn’t think things could get worse – but they have. Even Magnus and Henry are a burden to me now. I look at them from the studio window, playing on the lawn, wrapped up in autumnal scarves and mittens, and it occurs to me that they aren’t the right size for children of their age. Rather, that they’re like some fucking emotional decoys. Decoy ducks are made twice the size of ordinary ducks, so that the poor fuckers flying over will misjudge the distance to the ground and crash into it when they dive down to join what they imagine are their fellows.

That’s what’s happening to me with those kids. My love for them is a suicidal plunge. It isn’t until I get close to them that I see how chronically I have misjudged everything in my life, exaggerated my own precious obsession with my art, at the cost of everything else.

Jean says I should go and see Tony Bohm, and of course, like another member of the plainting chorus, Christabel says the same. But I won’t go. What would he do anyway, save for put me on some fucking drug, that would act like a governor on my brain? I hate that. I’ve been on those anti-depressants before, and they make me feel madder than I feel now. The sensation of those drugs coming on is just as I imagine the feel of a surgeon’s knife, probing into your grey matter, seeking out the right place to sever your fucking hemispheres.

30th October

The longer I’m sunk in this mire, the worse things get. Shrinks divide up depressions, don’t they? They say this one’s ‘chemical’, or somesuch; and that one’s down to all the crap you’ve got in your life. But with me the crap inside and the crap outside merge into one great ocean of shit, flowing into and of me.

No work means no money. No money means I can’t face the idea of work because I’ve got so far to go just to pay off the bills this lay-off has ranked up. George called today and I couldn’t even speak to him. I just told Jean to say to him, ‘You haven’t got a client any more, you’ve just got a piece of shit. And unless you want to put on an exhibition of turds, there’s little point in calling me.’

I wonder if she relayed this message? She hardly talks to me at all now. I guess she’s worried. No, actually she’s past being worried – or concerned, she’s just fed up. I only sit in the studio now – the rest of the house seems threatening to me. I don’t want to go there.

Even sitting up here for hours on end, I’m hardly comfortable in my depression. There’s nothing cosy in this unremitting greyness, this corporate gothic, with its grinding, emotional bureaucracy.

5th November

My mind is like a fly, it buzzes around in a fucking febrile fashion, and when it alights on some crumb, or fragment of an idea, it’s off again before I can apprehend it.

I’m getting paranoid. I look out over the garden and across the fence and across the farm track, and I’m convinced that I can see figures moving there. I joke about it to Jean, I suppose to stop her from becoming frightened. I say, I think our creditors have built a hide over there, in the shape of a giant dunning letter. They’ve elected one of their number to sit in it and observe the Brown House all day, in case I try and leave.

Jean doesn’t think it’s funny. I hear her praying a lot nowadays. She wanders around the house muttering under her breath. She knows I despise religion as a fucking opiate.

I wish I had some fucking opiate myself. Something that would take away this pain that is indifference to everything. I hate it when I’m reminded of the pain of others. If I see some item on the television, showing kids starving, or women raped in the war, I hate them. I hate them because the reality, the fucking substantial nature of their pain, seems to mock the nebulousness of my own. It says, you think you’re in pain, you’re not in pain, you’re faking it. And then I think of killing myself, believe me, I really do.

Oh Jesus! (Ha-fucking-ha!) the effort of staying interested in anything. It’s like trying to clench a paralysed fist. If I try and take a drink to numb the awful sensation out, I just feel sick and woozy. I can’t get drunk anymore, no matter how much I pour down my fucking neck.

13th November

Images of suicide all the time now. Every day. I’ve got them now as I write: Simon dead in a bath, blood flowing from his slashed wrists in gentle, billowing clouds; Simon dead from a shotgun blast in the mouth, the mess of grey, white and red on the wall behind his deflated head at last forming an interesting composition; Simon dead from a drug overdose, the blue tones of his skin reminiscent of a Renoir. The thoughts are scampering across my shoulders. I can feel their wing-beats around my ears.

24th November

I’ve had what I believe is called ‘an intervention’. This afternoon I was sitting in my studio, as usual, mulling over the Hiroshima of my life, the razed buildings of my hopes, the charred corpses of my former loves, when they all fucking came down on me, the whole bunch of the wankers. There was Jean, of course, and Christabel. George had driven up from the gallery. They’d even dug my brother up from somewhere. They all stood around me and told me how my being so unhappy was upsetting the children (Jean was in tears by this point), and that it would be better for everyone if I considered going into hospital for a while.

I tried to remain calm – although I felt like screaming – because I knew that if I let on just how bad things were they’d send for the men in the white coats, and then they’d take me away and put a hot wire through my brain; and then I’d be gone, there’d just be this shell left behind, with Simon’s head painted on it.

So I stayed calm, but told them in no uncertain terms that I’d rather be dead than go into one of those grotesque NHS bedlams, where the ‘patients’ wander around making Hogarth look understated. This raised a bit of a laugh from George – but the rest of them stayed grim, stony-jawed.

George then said that he was prepared to put up the dosh for me to go to some private place that he knows about in Wiltshire. He claims that it’s OK there and they won’t necessarily put me on drugs. They won’t even make me talk about things if I don’t want to. They’ll also let me have as many visitors as and when I want.

I said I was very grateful to George (even though I know he’s only doing it to protect his fucking asset, the mercenary cunt). And I said I would go – if that’s what they wanted. But that if I did George had to promise to come and see me every week, and if I wasn’t happy he had to get me discharged. He agreed to this. So, I’m off tomorrow. I suppose I have to admit that I’m a bit relieved, the suicide shit is beginning to get to me badly. I wouldn’t want the kids to find Daddy strung up from the light socket.

There’s then a gap of about two months until the next entry.

22nd January

Dear Fuck-wit Diary

Well, I managed to get myself out of that joint at long last. What a pile of wank! To think that people get paid for administering that so-called therapy, and other people are prepared to pay for it. The blind pissing on the blind – that’s what it is. The best thing I can say about my stay at the funny farm is that it cut the costs at home – thanks to George’s largesse. And I managed to miss out on Christmas, which has to be the most depressing time of the year.

George was right about one thing, though, the cunts didn’t make me talk about myself, or take anything I didn’t want to. They did however insist on my sitting in on group therapy sessions. What an absurd idea! As if forcing a lot of unhappy people to sit in a circle, prating on about their private miseries, could possibly make any of us feel any better.

30th January

It’s not as if I ever really felt any better – so I suppose I can’t be feeling substantially worse. The house has been wreathed in thick fog for the past week or so. Every morning when I get up, I look out of the window and see it hanging like a cloud of gas at the end of the garden. I can almost imagine that soldiers are about to emerge from it wearing puttees and carrying Lee Enfields with bayonets fixed. They are advancing towards me, determined to capture the trench of my mind.

I like to move very carefully now. To cross a room, or even pick up some small object, I affect an undulant motion, like someone with Parkinson’s disease who’s just taken some L-Dopa. I have to get the right rhythm into my actions in order for them to happen at all. Often I’ll be halfway towards doing something when I’ll realise that I don’t have the correct rhythm, and then I’ll just collapse back into despair.

9th February

I went to see Tony Bohm yesterday. Not because of my mental health, but because of a cyst in one of my nipples. I joked with him, saying perhaps he should inject a little collagen into the other nipple, to even things up.

He gave me a peculiar look, and said in that nannyish way that doctors have, ‘You’re not at all well, Simon, are you?’ I confessed that I didn’t feel my stay with the other sads had done me a great deal of good, but so what? He suggested – in a roundabout sort of a way – that I try going on anti-depressants again. According to him, these drugs are far better designed than they used to be. They can now target exactly the receptors in the brain responsible for depression, like some smart misery-seeking bomb, dropped down the ventilation shaft of the mind.

I started waving my hands about when he began this eulogy, saying All right, all right, I’ll take the bloody pills! I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m just exhausted, tired of fighting this thing day in and day out. I want some respite from my head, and I dread the suicidal urges coming back. I read last week in the
Bulletin of Suicidology
that the suicide rate for male painters in their early forties is 700 per cent higher than the national average. No wonder I want to do a Rothko.

I left Bohm’s surgery with a prescription and went across to get it at MacLachlan’s. For some reason the pharmacist in there – a drowned rat of a man, who is normally sulky and silent – gave me a broad grin, together with my pot of head-governors.

I came home and took a couple. I’m waiting for the mushy feeling that comes before I’ve adjusted to the dosage. Waiting for it with something that could be anticipation – but isn’t. Rather it’s something that stands in the same relation to anticipation as a whore does to a lover.

11th February

No mushy feeling yesterday, and none today either. Instead a peculiar lightening in my mood. It’s not that I exactly want to do anything, or that I don’t feel the depression still gnawing at me, it’s just that I can almost – almost, mind – imagine what it might be like to feel interested in something again, to want to include some of its essence within myself.

Sat in my studio all day and listened to the sounds of the house around and below me. Jean’s shoes clacking across the wooden floors; the children’s crashing entries and slamming exits; the occasional waft of music; the chirrup and trill of the phone. I smiled, thinking about how I constantly complain that this rumpus upsets my work, when the truth is I haven’t done any work now for so long.

12th February

On some odd impulse I bought an antique victrola today. It was sitting in the window of the noncey little antique shop in Thame, together with the usual cataract of tat. I had noticed the thing a number of times before, but on this occasion I found myself intrigued by it. With primitive music machines like this, the analog of the sound they make is so visible, so tangible. I only had to touch the thing to imagine that Chaliapin was creaking and groaning the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’. It will make a great object to place at the centre of a canvas.