Romany and Tom (33 page)

Having said that, it is hard to avoid the violent sadness that has gathered over the heads of various members of my family. There is a black-and-white photograph from the twenties of Sandy – one of the brothers of my grandma Jean, my dad’s mother; if I’d known him I suppose he’d be my great-uncle. He is sitting outside on a flight of steps. Everything is covered in thick snow; it covers most of his boots. He wears a dark-wool winter Mackinaw jacket with the collar turned up, and gloves and a flat cap. On his head is balanced a large snowball, and flecks are tumbling on to the peak of his cap. His is smiling shiny-cheeked into the lens of the camera. It is a picture of winter fun. On the back it says:
Jean’s brother, Sandy: drowned himself in river (love affair?)
.

My mum’s brother, Glyn, killed himself too. In 1977. My aunt Jean found him. They’d been married since the fifties when they first met working in different departments at the Coal Board. Glyn had striven against unhappiness for years. They moved to the countryside near Cambridge shortly before his death in an attempt, Jean said, to alleviate the perceived stresses of London life. She told me how she came home from work one evening. The first thing that struck her was the silence around the house. She went in and found their dogs locked in a room in which they wouldn’t normally be kept; if Glyn was napping, she’d thought, he would have taken the dogs with him, and they’d have been curled up on the bed beside him. She went upstairs and found him in their bedroom. He’d used a shotgun.

I was brought up to believe it might have been an accident, that he might have been cleaning the gun, but as Jean said, ‘Who locks the dogs in a strange room before they clean a gun in the bedroom? And anyway, it was always coming. If it hadn’t been the gun it would have been something else.’

Perhaps closest to home is the story of my half-sister Jennie who lived with neurosis and depression for pretty much all of her adult life. She was twenty-two when our mum let her come back home to live briefly in the flat downstairs after Nunu’s death. I was thirteen. I’d pop down in the evenings after I’d done my homework to see her and her new cat. She didn’t seem to have very many possessions. Although she was my half-sister she seemed unlike anyone I knew – quiet and far away yet gentle. I never understood why my mum was reluctant to have her stay. I didn’t really know any of the drug and psychiatric stories then. I knew she had had a breakdown at nineteen – not that I knew what a breakdown meant, except that it had left her sad and without a job or A levels. It was only later I learned that, by the time she moved in downstairs, while my half-brothers were getting university degrees and finding their first jobs, she’d already lived with an ex-junkie, been arrested for possession, had an abortion, survived an overdose and an attempted strangulation, and experienced two long spells at Long Grove Psychiatric Hospital living among schizophrenics and addicts, where she’d undergone electro-convulsive therapy and something called desensitising where they confront you with your phobias in an attempt to cure you of them.

She stayed in the flat only a few weeks. It was the long hot summer of 1976. She played me Lou Reed’s ‘Satellite Of Love’ and J. J. Cale’s ‘Magnolia’ with the windows open, and when we talked she made me feel grown-up.

Aged thirty – long after she’d moved out and tried holding down her first half-decent office jobs – she was still capable of being fearful of her own family and could still hear voices talking to her through the radio, voices that could drive her from a house in the middle of the night, and make her run down an unlit country lane with bare legs to be found curled up in a cold remote barn by Ken, her distraught father. She lived on and off with a handful of unreliable, sometimes violent men, or had dead-end affairs with ones who were married and bored, but when she finally got herself sorted out and got married herself to a lovely bloke in a windswept country church on the Somerset Levels at the grand age of fifty, she asked me to be the ‘father of the bride’. Her own father was no longer around – Ken died just after Christmas 1984 – and Tom was by then housebound in the care home near Bristol. I was forty-one. My daughters were bridesmaids. I was very proud.

Of course these stories make my own seem tame by comparison, but when things were then to take a turn for the worse for me with my own depression, Jennie was one of the few people I felt able to talk to.

I travelled heavily that summer of 2005. I flew out to Palm Springs and DJ’d at the Coachella Festival. The manicured grass of the polo fields and the vast picket-fenced business class of the VIP section made me nostalgic for the mud and unruly hedonism of festivals back home. I went on up to New York and Boston, joining the club circuit, and then headed south-west again taking in Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Part of me was travelling to escape myself. I was down and I couldn’t shake it off. We will always take our hang-ups with us wherever we go, but at least we can keep them moving. The itinerary helped stupefy and nurse me: comfy beds; room service; taxis; airline check-in staff; travel accessory shops; massage chairs; moving walkways and vast windows of light; airports as cathedrals to the pining journeying heart. And at the other end – for those of us lucky enough to make a living out of our self-expression – a kindly stranger who wants to promote our work is there to drive us into town, pay for our hotel room, buy us dinner, set us up in front of a supportive crowd, give us drinks, offer us drugs. What’s not to like? Not much of course. A life seemingly gilded. Except that I hadn’t addressed why I’d left in the first place, what it was I was running from, rather than towards.

It went on back home. At the Homelands Festival I arrived after nightfall. I drove through swirling mist and silent woods west of Winchester, my headlamps shooting ahead into the darkness, the tents and rides appearing suddenly like an extra-terrestrial circus had landed in a hollow in the land. In Paris I was led into a club in the hull of a huge moored ship on the Seine. Then Edinburgh, Malmo, Ibiza. The Electric Picnic in Ireland. Berlin and Brighton. And then back for more: a return to New York in December with San Francisco, Seattle and Hollywood thrown in for good measure. And of course, in the midst of it, were the gigs themselves. Two or three hours of indulgence and escape; glass-rattling bass and air-punching exuberance, burnished with moments of pathos and blurred melancholy; and all the time the drum, the drum; a ritual where the room is bigger than any one individual within it; a fire that gets stoked then self-sustains; societal and infectious. Clubland is a world largely without language, in which fragments of song replace narrative, text messages and gesture replace conversation, feelings replace ideas. For someone who all his life had written songs that had often been performed in hushed auditoriums to crowds clinging to every syllable, it represented something that suddenly seemed to express the way I was
actually
feeling inside at the time: inarticulate; messed up; introspective; my mood rising and falling in waves; grateful for a room of people who seemed to need the same thing.

I stepped off a plane from Los Angeles at Heathrow after a week of dawn finishes and a final night-flight of broken sleep and intermittent sinusitis on the first day of November 2005. It was as if I was testing myself. How much sleep did I not need? How many decibels could I stand? How far could I run? It was the day after my dad’s eightieth birthday and I knew I needed to see him. At thirty-seven thousand feet just before I’d tried to close my eyes, I had leafed through a catalogue from
The Sharper Image
and dwelt on all the useless executive man-toys I could have bought him for a birthday present – an indoor golf-swing improver, fog-free travel mirrors, a bagel splitter, a shiatsu belt massager. What
do
you buy old people? Slippers? Chocolates? A rug? They seem so comforting and sensible, yet also somehow insulting.

The kids were thrilled to see me back, rushing at me, pawing at my suitcase for presents, jumping up at me with paddling hands like terrapins at the side of a tank. Wasn’t I meant to return home refreshed and invigorated, ready for the resumption of normal life with equanimity and renewed zest? In reality I felt the same as before I left, if not a little worse. Shrink-wrapped in my own world. Jangly. Apprehensive. Not helped in the least by being down on sleep.

Forty-eight hours later, jet-lagged and guilty, I got into the car to drive out to see my dad and my mum in the new care home near Bristol. By the time I reached the M4, my eyes felt sand-papered and my hands were trembling on the steering wheel. The tissue inside the back of my head seemed to be flexing involuntarily, pushing into the hard bone. The traffic slowed then stopped near the junction to the motorway from the Hayes bypass. I was staring at the concentric rings on a flyposter wired to a lamp-post by the crash barrier:
Back To 88 Old Skool House Rave All Dayer You Know It’s Gonna Be Fireworks
. A van honked behind me. A gap of three cars had opened up in front of me; I hadn’t noticed. I signalled an apology into my rear-view mirror.

I drove round the roundabout under the motorway and missed the exit. I drove round again, hugging the inside rail, and missed it again. This time deliberately. And then I did it again. This time indecisively. And then I just wanted to lie down and sleep. A metal signpost in the tall grass of the roundabout flashed by amid the trees and the underpass:
Welcome to the Field of Hope
. And then I was shouting at myself inside the car,‘Why, why, why?’ and had started to drive back the way I came. Another lamp-post:
Cash Paid 4 Cars
. And then another – dead flowers wilting in cellophane. The barriers were strewn with litter – split sandbags, styrofoam cups, Lucozade bottles, empty plastic bags wafting like little ghosts. I kept driving, retracing my steps. When I got home, having managed only fifteen of the one hundred and twenty-two miles to Bristol, I went upstairs and climbed on to my bed fully clothed and pulled my knees up and lay there for a long time. So this is what a wall feels like, I thought.

I told Tracey I still had to go to Bristol, so two days later I pulled myself together and took the train instead.

‘It’s not been good,’ said Roly, collecting me from the station. ‘Mum’s near silent. They’ve had to change the carpet. Tom can’t get to the bathroom quickly enough. He can’t see it coming. It was all over his slippers yesterday. The smell has been awful.’

I looked out at the fields. First I saw an image of my parents forgetting the small, often comic, insignificant things, such as where they put the car keys or the name of that face on the television. Then must come bigger, more significant things: what day it is; how to work the cooker. Until finally must come the dangerous and demeaning things they didn’t think it was possible to forget, such as what thirst feels like, what being cold feels like, what needing a crap feels like. Can you just forget to drink? Forget to keep warm?

At the care home I sat with my mum in the window of their room.

‘You needn’t stay long, dear,’ she said. ‘It’s all beyond comprehension.’

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘In there, I expect,’ she said, gesturing with her hand, her fingernails as grey as a winter sea.

I got up and walked towards the doorway to a little darkened room. In the shadows I could see the bed. A shape was rolled away from me. I took two or three steps. The shape stirred. As my eyes adjusted I could see him lying on his back.

‘I heard you arrive,’ his voice said. ‘Sit me up.’

I got him upright and swivelled him round. Wilting skin. Mismatched pyjamas. We sat on the edge of the bed side by side in the shadows, neither speaking for a moment. His breathing was laboured.

‘Happy birthday. Belatedly,’ I said, looking at the floor. ‘I didn’t know what to bring you. So I brought . . . myself . . . eventually.’ And as the words came out of my mouth so did an unexpected heavy breath, following the words out like a tremulous gust ushered by a closing door. And then there were lots of tears in my eyes, spilling over on to my cheeks and my shoulders were rising and falling, and I didn’t think I could stop easily. And I felt his arm come round my shoulders, and his other hand squeeze my forearm, and his head came close into me, as if he was about to tell me a secret, and he rested his cheek on my shoulder and his voice was saying quietly, ‘I know.’ And then again gently, ‘I know.’

Christmas came and went, and then I had my breakdown.

Chapter 33

On 18 May 2006 I was sitting in a large dark ground-floor room in Harley Street crying at the unknown bald man in front of me. I’d tried to tell him all I knew: how I’d driven Tracey to think about leaving me; how I’d trampled all over the few days she’d set aside for recording her first solo record in twenty-five years; how I was unable to pick up a pencil or plug in a guitar; how I considered myself a false, inhibited parent; how I lacked any authenticity in my work; how violence and pain on the TV made me cry, especially the newsreel footage of that man trapped under a collapsed roof in Poland, his torso rising and falling like a hand-puppet; how I was shouting at the children all the time; how I couldn’t even face seeing them, the way I felt yesterday, and slipped out of the house when I heard them come home from school, and drove the car aimlessly in slow-moving heavy traffic, before pulling over on the side of a busy road and watching a set of traffic lights change over and over and over again, and closing my eyes and falling asleep for forty-five minutes to shut it all out while the mollifying rain drummed on the roof; how I felt I was never catching up; how I could not cope with the detritus of home life, the endless tidying, the clutter, the dishwasher, the loose socks, the sweeping, the fingermarks, the chipped paint; how I hated my bald patch, and the little bits of knobbly skin appearing on the backs of my hands; how I couldn’t taste or smell anything; how I’d been to see a counsellor recommended by a friend a few times and not liked her very much but learned new things that troubled me even more like
somatising
and
resistance
and
adult child
and
narcissistic parents
; how my father was in hospital on a nebuliser and couldn’t really breathe any more, and how I’d just been to visit him on the train; how I thought both my parents suffered from depression; how I had been unable to effect any change in their lives when I thought I’d be able to; how my uncle had killed himself although I barely knew him; how I’d been through bad periods before – going right back to the eighties – but got over them, although I’d twice been prescribed Venlafaxine and it’d calmed me down but left me feeling vacant and packed in cotton wool; how I knew it was all just a chemical imbalance in the brain, but it didn’t feel like that; how my half-sister had been in Long Grove Psychiatric Hospital; how I’d survived a life-threatening illness that I wasn’t expected to survive; how I still had flashbacks; how some days my black mood invaded the house like a fog; how I was having bad dreams that were making me sit up in the night and shout; how I was brimful of tears and as soft as a peeled egg; how I often felt I was lying at the bottom of the deepest barrel looking up to a tiny patch of grey sky; how Tracey was overwhelmed and frightened, and the other night didn’t know who or where we were any more.