The Obsessive Diary

There’s a blank wall of silence in my mind when I try and think back, to capture the essence of what it was like to live and work with a boy from Kent who called himself a shaman, who’s still out there, working. I’m exhausted by it. I don’t know where to start. Is it enough to say that we ran sweat lodges every three weeks, hordes of naked crying people crawling in and out of a pitch-dark dome in the mud while he intoned and chanted and spat water, hot rocks hissing? How we stood about afterwards, flushed and confused eating baked potatoes. The hauling of those heavy blankets onto strings in the barn to dry in time for the next one, how everyone wanted to feel like they were his special helper. How he skipped about the kitchen, a firecracker of energy, taking up all the space. How he let me be seduced by him – and I’ve worded that sentence carefully because I knew, even at the time, that he had no interest in me as a lover. Yet that was my language of devotion and he needed me to stay at heel so that’s what he did; he let me in occasionally, just often enough for me to feel that between us there was something precious. If only women talked to each other. How much time we’d save if instead of staring up at some f****r we turned to each other and compared notes. Did I mention his long-suffering girlfriend? No, nor did he, not until he was properly ensconced, feet firmly under the table. And once we’d all got used to that reality he brought in his Spanish lover, she who he said was a shaman too, his equal, and no, I didn’t take offence at the inference, I just lay in bed listening to them having sex down the hall. My god he rode roughshod, it’s shocking to think of it now. And I believed in him. I believed every word he said. What he didn’t say but should have, if he’d had an ounce of conscience, was that he wanted the farm, its beauty and power, the sheer force of these hills and land, he wanted it all to himself. And he got it, almost. That’s the trouble with shamans, the white ones anyway, the ones not born of the lineage, they think we’re all idiots. They think the power is in them. If he hadn’t got high on his own supply and overplayed his hand, I’d have lost this place. But he did.

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It’s going to be all right. This story that has been going from frying pan to fire has a happy outcome in the end. I feel the need to tell you that because from here on in it gets darker and the oh no what’s next can be exhausting. So remember as we dive and the air becomes stifled and the pressure builds that there is a lowest point, and when we get there, we’ll turn around and start coming up for air. We will survive. On his website he says he ran a clinic at the address of my farm; just a line in his bio that gives the lie of something simple and complete. To fury, upset, anger and outrage I cleared the farm while he waited in the safety of his north London flat. When everyone was gone, their lives uprooted, the commune dismantled, my car smashed, the effigy of me hanging by the neck broken into pieces and thrown onto the forest floor he returned and set up home in the bedroom down the hall. I thought he was my saviour. He was charismatic, he exploded with energy, he was sort of handsome, he played the trumpet when he wasn’t cracking eggs and blowing smoke. He was certain. He had an answer for everything. Shamanism is flashy, impressive, a mystery to which he liked to hold the keys, a gatekeeper, master of the arts. It was exciting. It felt as if the old life was cleared away and something new begun; new people, new language, drumming replaced by jazz solos. No more pagan ceremonies, now the altars had South American iconography, Mayan symbols, the incense changed from sage to copal. Eggs were bought by the tray. Even as I write this, I can feel him listening. That’s the strength of it, truth doesn’t matter, if he really can hear me or not. He believed completely in his power and so did we, the support crew, the entourage, the floozies and flouncies, the set up that kept him in place and us looking only at him and not at each other. I have lived in these worlds between worlds and I know the rules and the no rules. Anything is possible. But I write this anyway because I know he cannot touch me. He is a fly buzzing in a jar. A boy from Kent who needed to feel better about himself. A magician who failed to read the small print. So we set up a clinic in the studio in the garden and the people came.

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A black fly buzzes about the kitchen as I write, small and annoying. It circles me, persistent and I’m not surprised. That was him, single-minded and obvious. Of all of them he was the worst, not because his delusion was any greater but for his intent. The others – the people who had crossed my path and abused their power – were convinced, if they thought about it at all, that they were doing me good as well as themselves. But he knew he wasn’t. He was shooting fish in a barrel. That night by the fire, paint on my feet, I heard the word doormat and felt immediately frightened. I hadn’t realised. He was right. I had to act. This is the way of the shattered brain. All it needs is a picture. He laid out in that hour drinking tea exactly what he would do, precisely how I would lose control at his hands by drawing a story of it already happened, a picture I walked right into. Not everyone on the commune was lovely but not one of them had gone out to cause me harm, they were people getting on with their lives in all their funny, normal ways. They trusted me. The first one I told was the woodsman, an original member who had kids at school, who was married to a Wiccan woman. They’d built a complex home in the bluebell copse, there were daffodils and paths, terraces edged with stone. We sat in the field, I said he and his family had a month to leave. His wife took a broom to my car, smashing it on all sides. A tall, skinny druid with the skew leather hat who’d lived quiet and happy played out his hurt in relentless speechless moments in the kitchen. The road protester took his coffin and bag of oats. The old couple in the top wood left with shaking heads. I don’t remember the megalithic giant going, but one day the metal barn was empty. I do remember finding hanging from a tree an effigy of me, a figure dangling by the neck within a triangle of sticks, a branch I would see on the path behind my house. The egg man kept out of the way. He’d played his first hand and gone back to London while I cleared the farm. The f*****g coward. And when it was over, the commune dismantled, the people gone, the land empty of yurts and tipis and trucks and friends and drums and didgeridoos, he came back.

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I had painted myself into a corner the day he arrived. Returned to the farm after a year away I no longer knew where I fitted into this thing we’d started, a commune in Surrey, everyone else getting on with it but I was lost. I’d set about my bedroom floor with white gloss, a fresh start, and forgotten to leave a way out. Barefoot, dripping paintbrush, my back against the wall, he appeared in the doorway and introduced himself. He didn’t say, I am the egg man, but we came to know him as that. Many years ago when he was just a boy from Kent, he’d had a dream about a place in Mexico. Like it happens in the story books he’d taken a flight, walked into a cafe and a grizzled man had glanced from under a wide-brimmed hat and said, I’ve been waiting for you. He’d gone with this man, a shaman, into the jungle and emerged twelve years later a shaman also, whereupon he’d left his teacher and set up shop in India where a friend of mine met him and brought him back to the farm where he met me, dripping brush in hand, back against the wall, painted into a corner. His teacher had taught him the ways of divination by eggs; a process of wafting and breathing and cracking into water, the white tendrils and yolk a replication of your innards, not just your guts but your soul and heart and innermost feelings too. He didn’t do that to me yet. He didn’t need to. I skipped over white gloss leaving toe prints and smudges and made tea for him. We sat together before the huge open fire in the sitting room where he told me my home was not my own. I remember he used the word doormat. He said, These people walk all over you. These people who I lived with, who had set up home and had children and built a life. Who had taken care of the farm while I went off to be smashed by a cult masquerading as a drama school. Who were happy. He said I’d lost control. This sense of invasion was hardly breaking news but the power of that moment was in its voicing, your home is not your own. I’d grown up in a house like that, a place overrun with guests my mother used to make up for the guilt of being rich. The commune was a beautiful attempt at another way of life and a replica of this stab at feeling better about wealth. And in naming it, he provided an answer; hey presto, it was him. He would sort it out, he would save me, all I had to do was close the commune and tell all the people to get out.

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I woke this morning with that Richard Wilbur quote spinning round my head: “Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind, something will come to you.” I have to remind myself that these are not a fluke, these daily posts that I get up and write every day. These episodes have been churning for decades. But here’s the thing, it’s only now when I string them together that they tell a story that I didn’t know. They’re no longer isolated fragments, they give context to each other. I didn’t know quite how lost I was, how rudderless, how vulnerable to the intent of others nor how intent I was on finding answers. Although my father had his eye on me from afar and my mother in her own way cared, though they both loved me, they were absent. It was no wonder that I found myself in a cult, it’s understandable that I was wide open to charlatans. From the charlatan who pretended to teach acting and liked to humiliate, a friend got me out. She came to see me. I said, I’m so unhappy, sitting on the counter in her kitchen, kicking my legs against the cupboards. She said, You have to get out of there. I returned to face the Svengali who’d discovered that day it was me who’d been opening the school every morning to give the third years a lie-in – a transgression that made him wild. I said, I don’t care; I’m leaving. He said, No one leaves, you’ll be back, but I knew I wouldn’t. As I write this the lights in my kitchen keep flashing, an electrical short of the kind he would have ascribed to his powers, not the drama school man but the charlatan who came next, the boy from Kent who swam into the void left by drama school. Two years from the day I walked out of the cult this boy would vow a curse of a thousand years upon me, my family and the hill. He said that. Those were his actual words. He believed totally in his powers to frighten, as the cult leader had done. They were no different. One called himself the headmaster of a drama school. The other called himself Shaman. These people who think it their right to terrorise. I am coming for you.

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That motherfucker. He smashed my brain. I’d moved to a flat in Tottenham with other students, a place we could watch our thoughts, police each other and go limp together. I would wake at five and make my packed lunch and drive to the freezing outdoor pool in Hampstead where I’d dive in and swim thirty lengths. At school by six, within a term the third years had given me the keys to open up the building, realising quickly they could get away with a lie-in. School began at seven with meditation, yoga, face exercises, eye exercises followed by the horseshoe of chairs around him. So far so good, right? Sounds healthy, all this cold water and stretching, that’s the trouble with cults, there’s often a grain of sense. He, Mr Svengali, wasn’t wrong in thinking all those things helped a healthy mind, and nor that we are motivated by shame, that the psyche will do what it can to move away from pain and towards pleasure, that we’ve mostly been conditioned to hide. Breaking someone down is easy. Anyone can do that. It’s the holding and putting back together with care that’s the hard bit, the bit that matters. It’s what you do with the pieces when they’re all over the classroom floor. You don’t kick them and laugh unless you want to cause a shattering. In the horseshoe of shame confessions, he encouraged us to say what we thought of each other and ourselves, the more abusive the better. He told us to bring in baby photos so that he could rip into our earliest parts. He understood absolutely the power of language and used words to cut us open. He said, Show me your soft underbelly, and then took out a knife. I won’t use the words here. He doesn’t deserve it. And if we’d gone out for the weekend into normal life, seen people not of the school, he’d make us admit it like a souring, a transgression that had set us back. We were ridiculed and shamed and fined and made to feel that only he could save us. And the acting bit? Yes, that happened, sort of, not much, we put on Russian plays, he told us relentlessly that we were lying. Day after day for a year, a dismantling in north London while my old life on the farm, the commune, carried on without me. Yesterday, when I finished the piece and pressed publish and was completely wrong-footed by the torrent, I found beneath my chair an old rusty nail, small, sharp and flat-headed. It was as if it had fallen out of me, the small, sharp poison that was him.

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It didn’t say cult in the brochure. It said, We will make you the best actor ever, or some such s**t because he was full of grand claims, the man who ran it. He’s dead now, of a cancer that had any student brought to the table, he would have ridiculed and shamed. He was like that. He believed in breaking you down. He’d been trained through Est, a psychotherapy system that was watered down into The Landmark Forum but he knew it in its purest form. He had not an inch of kindness to him. Let me zero in on this word, cult. A Svengali leader. A place to belong that requires you cut off from the outside world. A doctrine that dictates they are fucked and you are saved. A requirement of absolute, unquestioning devotion. A list that grows of do’s and don’ts, built by the leader’s capricious whim. Mandatory daily rituals and punishments for failing. Cold baths every morning. Our hair a certain length, how we dressed dictated by him. If anyone ran away, they were fined £10,000 to come back which, crazy as it sounds, actually happened. If you walked down the corridor in a way he didn’t like, or creased a piece of paper by the way you held it, he punished you with public ridicule and demands for money. He said to be someone else you had to think their thoughts and this was his excuse for the morning confession, the acting, drama school part of his tyranny, our chairs in a horseshoe around him, spilling in turn our darkest secrets about ourselves and others. He said our shame described us and that’s the trouble with these things, the method of cults, because he did have truths which at first lit me up into thinking I’d found something brilliant. Wait. I have to stop here. I feel sick. I thought I could write this quickly because nothing in me wants to give this man and that place more than a page or minute more of my time, but I can’t. I had forgotten how vulnerable I was to him. Like so much else I had buried it, filed it under another funny story. But now I’m looking, I find I cannot pull it out in one shot. I am too angry.

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There was a song we used to play, the words had her name in them, Lordy don’t leave me, the Carpenter listened to it over and over. Her name was Lourdes, she’d arrived in our lives when the sun shone and everything was new, our first May Queen, she had black ringlet hair and the way she would say his name I can still hear now, the slant of a Portuguese accent, she seemed so knowledgeable. It was gradual, this eating less and less, small additions of things cut out, a concoction every morning that we called gretch; garlic, ginger, vinegar and oil, it was for cleansing the liver. We were all of us scrubbing at something. The farm was a revolving door of answers to the question of how to be happy, bloating was her devil, she brought the candida diet. When my husband left, she and the Carpenter left too, they moved into a house in Brighton. A friend saw her at a gig and it was the first time I heard someone say she was too thin. Not long after that, in the hall of her home, she collapsed and was carried by the man she loved to hospital where she died. Her organs had shut down. News reached the commune on a wave of anger, there was blame and talk of curses, her Wiccan circle decided she had higher intentions. Deaths explained with, This was their path are easy to say once they’ve happened. When is it right to step in? What is the moment when your business becomes mine? She had starved herself to death right under our noses and what made me angry at the time and still does now is not that she chose to do this but that her trauma, acted out with food, was couched in an all-knowing wisdom. She was Wiccan and she was wise but she was also an addict and it killed her. We held meetings, her Wiccan friends came, the commune gathered, there was talk of burying her up at the stones, I made promises I couldn’t keep, in the end we planted a tree which her man wrapped in barbed wire, no one could get near, a shrine to pain and her loss beside the newly finished stone circle. It was many years before he took the barbed wire away and we could breathe again. In hindsight it must have been this which made me go to London for a year. I can’t have been in my right mind. I got it into my head that I wanted to be an actor and found my way to the only drama school in England, or perhaps the world, that turned out to be a cult.

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And all this time we’d been building a stone circle. Inch by inch over slow grass from pile to track to hole in the ground, the rise and fall of the moon marked in rock. A year and a bit, from Beltane to Summer Solstice, the last weekend of every month. In sunny weather crowds came, through winter hardly anyone at all. One wet and miserable December with only twelve of us up there we’d put in three stones because we’d got that good at it, because we’d learnt it was less about strength than coordination. And fewer people meant less chat. Over the building of the circle my marriage was born and broken. Jesus, who I saw one last disastrous time, had served his purpose, there was no relationship there either. My husband had said go, and I had gone to London to meet him and find out what all this electricity was about, but without the robes and forbidden touch there was nothing. I came home and the commune gathered and we orchestrated the end like the beginning. Beneath every stone were prayers and artefacts that meant something to us, and beneath the last stone we put our rings. I remember that day, standing at the brink together, the stone ready to tip, the Megalithic Giant beside us, others gathered about, Angel man and me, we took off our rings and earth covered them and the rock was heaved and fell and stood upright. That night we had a party, a full regalia dress-up, hundreds gathered to mark the completion of a stone circle built by hand, and the next day, or soon after, he left. He took the mixing desk and went to stay at my mother’s. He sent an enormous television, delivered to the foot of my bed which felt like a recrimination. I remember the sudden void of him, how quickly I cried and just as quickly stopped, how the day felt simple. The stone circle was finished, the commune was three years settled with families, children were going to school, there was no reason to think it wouldn’t carry on except now I was alone, no one to share it with. Did we fall apart after he left? Sort of. He was the only member of the commune who everyone loved. He unified us. It took a little time and someone coming down the line who would shatter all of it, but without him the fractious projective dogma grew stronger. And in the midst of it was a Wiccan woman in love with a carpenter who told us she knew what she was doing, and every day grew thinner.

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We’d gutted a rabbit on the central stone the day Father Juniper came to exorcise the children. Blood and entrails smeared a rock. It didn’t look great. We saw him lumbering up the field towards us, an enormous wooden crucifix over his shoulder. The hem of his brown robe was dampened by grass, his sandals snagged dandelions, his string of beads swung with every step. A squat woman followed dressed for weekend hiking; determined boots, no-nonsense shorts, furious hair. I want to give her a whistle and a map around her neck, though I’m not sure my memory isn’t embellishing. But you get the picture. A low centre of gravity. Eyes looking for a fight. He wiped his brow and lent his cross against a stone. She took up a wide leg stance. “We’ve come to cast out the devil.” The sun shone, it was a beautiful day, the stones were nearly finished, one lay on its side, a hole already dug. On such a day the view from the hill stretches to Chanctonbury Ring, The Weald a sea of green, it can look as if the last thousand years of people hasn’t happened. Buzzards wheeled the sky, smoke drifted from the campfire, the hot tub like a rocket bubbled with children. There was a crowd of us gathered that weekend for the final stone, the yurts enormous and flapping, dogs grinning, pagans, engineers, hippies, Wiccans and druids many naked from the waist up smoked roll-ups, put the kettle on, washed cups. I’m sure we offered them tea before they got to work, and I’m sure they refused. I heard later that they’d gone to every house in the surrounding area, offering to bless and protect from the evil worship on the hill. In my neighbour’s house a glass table had shattered when he’d walked in the door, and when we went to the wedding site, my soon-to-be ex-husband and I to say our goodbyes, we found that the altar had been smashed. My soon-to-be ex-husband. The end was coming. Tomorrow we’d put in the last stone.

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