The Obsessive Diary

The same word, written over and over, all over the hotel bedroom wall. And he was gone. In another version of this story I apologised to the hotel staff, paid for the paintwork, got in my red car, drove to Jo’burg and flew home alone and none of the terrible happened and neither of the brilliant either. There was nothing to stop me. He’d likely be dead but what did I care. I’d tried. He and his toy guns and broken foot and magic marker could meet their fate and I’d be safely on a plane out of there. But that isn’t what happened. We found him on the banks of the Zambezi trying to get a lift across to the island. He’d hitched there from the hotel. I don’t know how we got him in the car. All I remember is leaving my friend in Livingstone and setting off for the border with him beside me, torn black leggings, bare foot up on the dash, and being stopped by the police. Their shocked faces when this thin, crazed white girl didn’t behave with deference, screamed at them instead because that’s what I do when I’m cornered, because by then I’d had enough and I’d lost all sense of sensible. How they threw our passports at me from the window of their car and drove away. All I could think about was reaching the airport when I would never have to see him again. I could throw his passport at him, get on that plane, be gone. We stayed in a glass-fronted hotel the night before the flight, he in another room, a bottle of whisky. He turned up at boarding. I remember how the air hostess came to me in distress, how they threatened to land the plane if he didn’t stop raging and abusing and frightening the other passengers half to death. And that would have been it, the goal post moved again to reaching the UK; as soon as we were home, I was out of there, I was sending him away, this bird of paradise whose feathers had turned ragged, I was telling him for certain it was over. But I had forgotten the shaman who waited for us at the farm, his takeover ready, who’d had a month to shore up his plans, who’d cut the brakes on my car and locked the doors.

“When I hear the word culture I take out my chequebook.” Barbara Kruger

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I’m not sure what happened except we’d been up for a week under an eclipse and instead of going to bed about a hundred of us decided to carry on. The island was a narrow strip of land in the Zambezi River, the only way to it by canoe. We left our vehicles on the banks, I don’t remember what gear we had, I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a tent but someone must have lent us one because you spent a lot of time in it. There was a bar, and a dance floor picked out by lights and DJ, speakers marked the corners. There was a fire pit with chairs and stumps and a couple of long drops that a friend soon fell into while tripping and never really recovered. The other person who didn’t recover was you. There was a routine. Take acid around sunset and dance through the night and into the next day and just when it felt like we were straight enough to make decisions, take more acid, so we couldn’t. Day after day this ragged band growing more ragged, unable to leave the island. I had visions. It became desperate and impossible. And then something snapped in your head. The first thing I knew you’d written c**t in magic marker all over the bar and the men who ran the island wanted to kill you. You hid in your tent. Then word travelled that you’d be selling something you shouldn’t and other people, not just the men who ran the island, wanted to kill you. So my crack daddy friend and I dragged you out at dusk into a canoe and across the Zambezi with crocodiles snapping and hippos snorting and into our red car. The moon was coming up, we bundled you in the back, my friend pinned you down, I took the wheel. The tracks were sand, interweaving, criss-crossing, no idea which way to go, at speed, frightened of getting bogged or lost or chased, stranded in the Zambian bush, men out to kill you, you struggling to escape, screaming at us from the well of the back seat. I took a wrong turn, a fallen tree blocked our path, if I’d stopped that would have been it. I put my foot down, the car jumped. We landed on the other side and sand flew beneath the wheels, a song played on the stereo, when I hear it now it takes me back exactly. And when we found ourselves at a tarmac road, the full moon in the wide African sky I got out of the car onto my knees and cried. I took us to a hotel. But then you broke your foot and got out your magic marker again while we were having breakfast.

“There is only one proof of ability: doing it.” John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

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That was the kind of party it was. A thousand people on a plot of land in Zambia, gathered for an eclipse. We’d flown to Jo’burg with hand luggage of toy guns because scaring the s**t out of people at parties was what you were into. We’d hired a car, ripped out the seats and turned the back into a bed and driven from South Africa through Botswana to Livingstone. God knows how we found the site; these were the days before mobile phones and satnav, we probably had a piece of paper and a map. I don’t remember much about the journey except for sitting on the edge of a mattress, red sheets, white walls, in some motel we’d stopped in trying to find things to stick in our arm – wine, day nurse, crushed-up paracetamol, anything to stem the flow of craving that without our usual supplies of cocaine and crystal meth was driving us mad. But we found the party and parked up at an intersection of paths under a tree and found the drugs other people had bought out with them and I remember one night very high in the darkness of the back of that car having a vision of you at the gates of hell because that’s where I’d found you and that’s where I tried to bring you back from. And when I wasn’t in the back of that car I danced and danced, all of us entranced by the repetitive simplicity of beats, all night and all day, nothing stopping us but for the eclipse which happened suddenly to shouts and brought us all to a stop and me to my knees. A silence on a ridge, silhouettes lined up, three minutes of wonder as day became night became day. Crack daddy wanted – that was the sign around the neck of my friend who I met, who was beside me through the chaos that came after because the party didn’t end there. A week on that site, dancing without stop and then a hundred of us went on to the after-party, the Zambezi River, the island.

“Show me the stone that the builders rejected: that is the corner stone.” Jesus

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There is a version of this story where you stayed in the jungle, and I came back to England and our relationship remained three addictive magical months in a house in Possum Creek and none of the terrible happened and none of the beautiful either. But that isn’t this version because when my visa ran out and I had to leave I returned to a boy from Kent who was still trying to take over my home – remember? The shaman is still there, still cracking eggs, some other poor mug hauling sweat lodge blankets from the dome to strings in the barn. And I was mad about you. And I hadn’t had nearly enough. So when I returned to England I rang you and said, Come, and I sent you a ticket and you arrived like a bird of paradise into the grey, muted lines of Heathrow, emerging through arrivals with wings folded, hair piled, a being from another world you may as well have had arrows on your back for all the difference you were to the ordinariness of English luggage trolleys and coffee shop chairs and square, dusty air. I had a thirtieth birthday party. I introduced you to my friends. I had left them large and soft round the edges, brown hair, un-pierced and come back a peroxide stick, a wild man at my side, your shark’s hook earring, tattoos and rings and I think they looked at each other and thought, Okay, and said, privately, Jesus. I remember all the things unsaid at the table like Who is this guy and What’s happened and I remember not caring because we were in our bubble and we were staying there. We found cocaine to go in our needles instead of crystal meth which we had swapped to in Australia instead of speed because it made us invincible. It cannot be unknown; it cannot be undone. It sealed up, in those early days, all the fear and all the dread and cocaine did the same when we couldn’t get hold of it in England. We locked ourselves away and built altars to our art and the shaman skipped from room to room not knowing what to make of it, of you who held him in no regard whatsoever. You had come from a land of unbroken lineage to holy powerful people, you didn’t give the boy from Kent half a second of your time. You said, Let’s go to an eclipse party in Zambia, and we went.

“Optimists and pessimists differ only on the date of the end of the world.” Stamisław Jerzy Lec (1909 - 1966)

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We left the party and moved in together. It was that simple. There was a house which two beautiful Japanese boys had found; I had been staying there with the Israelis before I came to the party on the lake. I told you about it and we drove out, found a window open, climbed in. It was wooden floors in a jungle, brightly coloured rugs under eaves, dripping leaves in an Australian storm, tree frogs and kookaburras calling. It was clean and bright and beautiful and furnished and empty and we took it without asking, it appeared to be made all for us. Those three months we spent in that house in Possum Creek, they were the best of us, they were water unchartered without letting each other down and shouting. I peroxided my hair. You introduced me to your friends. We rolled through thunderstorms, picnicked on the floor, made a nest of art all our own. And early on you introduced me to something else, too. We were on a dirt road, a steep drop away to our left, the jungle rising to our right on our way to a party when you pulled over and told me to hold out my arm. Was it speed the first time? I think so.

I think it was after that we moved on to methamphetamine, once I had a taste for a taste which I had instantly. You gave me my first needle but you weren’t to know how much I’d love it, how it met with the longing I’d had since forever and made a dance with it. Or were you? I’ve thought about this for a long time, this question of responsibility because you said hold out your arm and I did and it cannot be undone. I cannot un-know and maybe you didn’t want to be alone in the knowing and after that dirt road you weren’t. You had a partner in the secret about finding god and discovering him absent. We could be faithless together. Needles are for those who’ve been abandoned and need to prove it. They are the evidence for loneliness and neglect. I flexed my arm against the sting, felt the speed in my veins, you put the car into gear, we drove on.

“Upon the highest throne in the world we are seated, still, upon our arses.” Michel de Montaigne (1533 - 1592)

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Do you remember? A party out the back of Mullum, a lake, an Australian night. I was high and you were wild or was it the other way round. I’d dumped my willowy friend with the ankles she was ashamed of soon after arriving in Sydney and jumped in with a bunch of Israelis who had a camper van going north. She was furious, she said she’d offered me her friendship on a silver platter, a phrase I found funny not sobering. It didn’t make me sorry. The Israelis called me hefty or some such word which is relevant to mention not because I was but because I soon wouldn’t be, and I hadn’t noticed that through a cult and a shaman I had grown fat. I felt innocent against their world view. I tried to talk politics and they laughed. Their motto was, Dance don’t speak. I had forgotten the Israeli from long ago who had made me mute. They took me to parties, that party, the one where I met you. By the time we reached it I was with one of them, he was small, he had curly hair. We were camped on the other side of the lake but I was bored of their talk already, their exclusive cool. I took mushrooms and went in search of something else. Perhaps I was looking for a cafe though there weren’t any, but I found that awning and that ground and I lay beside you for hours enraptured by your profile in the dark while you gabbled I don’t know what. Then music took us and we were gone, into the night, the dance floor, it was not until the next day that I saw you again, saw you properly for the first time, crouched barefoot on a speaker, your camera, dreadlocks, torn leggings, ragged vest, shark’s hook earrings, those rings on your fingers and bangles up your arms, a terrifying handsome man. I went to the lake and knowing you were watching took off all my clothes and dived in. I lost you again and then I found you, I’d danced all day and went in search amongst the tents and vans for a ruby red VW with the back open. You leaned out and looked at me, tipped your glasses, revealed blue eyes and I knew, it was inevitable, we would have children though I still didn’t know your name.

“Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.” Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker (1766-1817)

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Here are three other memories I carried unbroken and unquestioned. Every night I would slide down the banister of the tall, cold house, curving polished wood beside stone, and when I reached the dark ground floor, I’d slide all the way up again. But one night I didn’t. I waited, my legs dangling, waiting as I had outside for him, and realising slowly that with him the magic had gone. I remember dismounting, my pyjamas and bare feet, and having to walk the stairs instead, up and up in the pitch-quiet of a sleeping house knowing it was over, it would never happen again. Let’s roll back a bit. She who had married that shadow man arrived when I was one; this photograph, the only one with her in it has only her white sandal, we were in the square garden opposite. My mother’s socialist heart wouldn’t let a bit of out of your depth in the way of doing good, thousands had fled oppression and my mother had opened her door. Which is admirable except trauma is not a state to put in charge of your children. She had curly red hair; she wore fuzzy peach jumpers. She was bad before he left but after she was worse.

I remember this. Bedtime. Crouching behind my door. Hearing her searching for me. She pulls me out of hiding. I am in jeans, not ready for bed, she is angry. The window is open. She drags me across the carpet, lifts me up and pushes me out onto the wide sill streaked with London grime. I feel the wind that blows through the branches of the trees in the square garden opposite. She is holding me by the waist. She is screaming that she will drop me. We are five floors up. I look down and see the black iron spikes of the railings. Afterwards, perhaps it was days or weeks, I am sitting on the big chest freezer in the basement while my mother, in tights and shirt, is ironing her skirt. She is in a hurry. She is going out. I am banging my Kicker shoes against the white wall. I tell her what happened. She puts down the iron, circles the board and hits me across the face. She tells me I am never to speak of a person like that. She says, These poor people have nothing. These potted memories are important for the story they told to my little mind, and the one which they tell to me now. They’re going to make sense. There will be understanding. But look, wait, do you remember? We’re on a flight to Australia. Look out the window. You will see the lights of Sydney. We are coming in to land.

“Love is the only wealth that multiplies when given away.”

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When I was three a man turned up to live in the basement flat with the woman who’d escaped the Czech revolution. She, a refugee, had been given a job and a home by my mother, he was her husband, not Czech, probably Australian or from New Zealand. It’s likely she married him for Commonwealth residency, I’ve spoken to other Czech refugees who knew her and that is their best guess. Our home, the tall, cold house in London, was a place of many rooms and many lives; bohemian, socialist, crowded, wealthy, artistic, noisy and lonely and trying to track the details of one particular person is like chasing a ghost. My mother recalls him as handsome and freckled, blond hair. Someone else has compared him to Donny Osmond. Another is adamant she doesn’t remember him. One person called him a memory implant, someone else said shadowy, there’s a report of him cooking eggs in the kitchen, no one remembers speaking to him. I can find no details of who he was or where he came from and this haze speaks volumes of a person who was there for nearly three years and, like Keyser Söze, was gone. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d remained for me a memory unbroken, his name and the truth of him would have sunk entirely. But I never forgot him. In my mind, unquestioned, he’d had the title first love, a mystery figure who’d paid me attention in a house where it was scarce. I had nothing to base this conviction on, it just sat there like a sticker on a box I carried around as I travelled through my life searching for what was wrong, no memories for illustration except this one, the day of his leaving. We were in the hall by the big black front door, I was nearly six. He crouched down before me and told “me he had to go but he would take me with him. I was to pack a bag and wait for him in the garden. I ran upstairs, fetched my rainbow rucksack, goodness knows what I put in it but I put it on my back and went outside and sat on the wooden bridge that linked the playroom glass doors to the patch of grass and I waited. And I waited and when I couldn’t wait any longer, I walked to the end of the street and then I walked home, in through the big black front door and this person who I’d been willing to leave with was gone and his existence never mentioned and it was as if he had never existed at all.

“Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday.”

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He went to Mexico for the summer to see his teacher leaving me in charge of the sweat lodge altar. I cleaned and lit and waved incense and genuflected but the candles turned black. He said it was an attack, he was always in battle with dark forces. I wrote my first novel over those six weeks, a story of a girl who goes to India and loses her mind. When he returned, I put it in a drawer. We went to Italy to run a sweat lodge on the shores of a lake near Rome. We went to Wales to collect more basalt for the lodge at home. I went to Valencia for a month in an effort to keep up with his Spanish lover. His Spanish lover came to stay and he ran her about the garden in a wheelbarrow, she, screaming with delight. He made coffee and forgot to fill the base with water and the espresso pot exploded hurling burning Lavazza all over the ceiling and he laughed and thought it was funny and I grabbed cloths thinking, This is my kitchen. He said there was a black panther resting on a branch near the sweat lodge fire. He didn’t identify the trouble in my bones. He had a tall, angular, male devoted helper on hand to do his bidding. He had legions of beautiful female patients; one had ankles causing her suffering, he assured her he could make them slim. These are the signs, not a candle turning black but devotees and lack of care and stupid promises, the keen use of the title, Shaman. Because anyone who calls themselves that probably isn’t. Because power without awareness is force, and force runs out. I was lying in the bath when he came in to talk to me. I don’t remember what he said that made the first penny drop, but I remember thinking, He’s never going to love me, and it was a revelatory bomb going off in my head. I knew I had to leave. Not him leave, mind. Me. I was still up to my neck in belief of him. The beautiful patient with the imperfect ankles invited me to Australia, she said there were parties, it would be fun. I bought a ticket, packed a bag, left the boy from Kent with his eggs and copal and lovers at the farm and boarded a flight to Sydney with the fat ankle girl who looked down at me from a willowy six-foot height. And while I’m on that flight, because it’s long and there’s time and the choices I made when I landed need context, I’m going to take you to the place all of this has been driving at. Buckle up. Put your seats in the upright position. We’re going back in time, to 1974 and a tall, cold house in London.

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