Jackdaw, page 10
After I’d been there a week, I asked one of the COs if I could fire a gun, and he said sure and yanked out his sidearm. I think I knew the difference between a revolver and an automatic. His was the latter. I tried to rack the slide like they do in the movies. It was harder than I expected, or maybe this motherfucker didn’t oil his gun. When I did manage to pull the slide back, it caught the web of flesh between my thumb and index finger, drawing blood. The soldiers laughed their heads off. I didn’t hold a grudge because they were fun. They drank hard and made me jog with them and I treated their gonorrhoea. They told me stories of undeclared wars and extrajudicial assassinations. The world seemed darker to me, and when the old guy recovered and took his job back I was relieved.
Back in the UK a sales rep who was trying to sell me on a new psychiatric drug took me to see sniper rifles being tested at her husband’s firm. I even fired one under heavily controlled conditions. I missed the target entirely.
This is all to say projectile weapons were never going to be part of my defence strategy, even if they were readily available in the UK, which they aren’t unless you are a criminal or maybe a farmer.
Kitchen knives are the way to go. Get stabby.
I was going to do that but the phone rang. It was Elise.
‘Your son wants to speak to you. Stand by,’ she said, like a receptionist or phone operator. Cold, and barely maintaining civility because of Trap.
‘Daddy?’
‘Hey, Trap. How is Grandma?’
‘She’s making me dust her statues,’ said Trap.
Elise’s mum had these figurines of seventeenth-century folk from Amsterdam or some shit. They looked weird and always freaked Trap out.
‘I’ll let you in on a secret. If you break one of them she won’t ask you to clean them anymore. Have you been drawing?’
‘Yes. I drew in the toilet, but Grandma doesn’t like it.’
‘You can’t draw on walls, Trap. We’ve told you that. When you get back we’ll finish that picture book, okay?’
‘When can I come home?’
‘What did Mummy say?’
‘That you weren’t feeling well.’
No shit. ‘She’s right. I’m not.’
‘Why can’t we come and look after you?’
‘Because I’m a doctor. I have superpowers that I’ll use on myself.’
‘Should I buy you some medicine?’
‘Maybe later, Trap.’
‘Daddy.’
‘Yes?’
‘Can you read me a story?’
I did.
Okay, no, I didn’t. I only wrote that to make myself seem like a good dad. I did start to read him the story but my call waiting flashed and it was Destroyer. I told Trap I’d call him back. I never did.
Now you are judging me. Look, if this was an AA or NA story and I was reciting it in a meeting you’d forgive me. Try to think of me as some kind of addict, though I’m not sure what I was addicted to.
Destroyer had a few guests and had me over to serve drinks and clean up afterwards. It was midnight when she dismissed me. I walked home and had an idea on the way.
You know where to go in your neighbourhood, or at least you know where not to go, the places from which to steer your teenagers away. The front door is usually unstable from being broken in one too many times by police serving a warrant. The windows are usually boarded up. In the daytime, young folks slouch about or just sit on the stoop, eye-fucking passers-by. The place serves as a reservoir for petty criminals going out to get cash for a hit. Depends on the neighbourhood, of course. In some places it’s a phone number. Rich folk don’t like to deal with street-level suppliers on the actual street. I had a doctor friend in the 90s who had a heroin habit. He used from Friday evening to Sunday night. On Monday morning he smoked crack, which countered any somnolence. Then he’d take risperidone, which he also got from his dealer in Shepherds Bush, for the paranoia. He seemed okay. In the 90s, at least. In 2006 he got caught stealing antipsychotics from the patients’ tray in the hospital and I haven’t heard from him since.
But here was me, at one am, at that house.
At some point a family must have loved this house enough to pay the mortgage. Right now it looked like a strong wind could blow it to Kansas. Moss on the ground crawling up the sides and some species of wild ivy climbing up its walls made it seem like nature was trying to reclaim it. There were some sounds from inside, and through a crack in the window I saw people playing dice with periodic cheers and groans. Music waxed and waned.
There was a guy sitting at the door and he stretched out his hand for an entrance fee. Though blanketed in shadow, he was large. I wondered if he was the kind of large that never had to prove himself in a fight. I’d fought larger guys before. It could go either way, but the strategy is expect to get hit, try not to get hit in the head, try to hit back more times with greater accuracy, and be ruthless. Don’t hesitate. My instructor said to conduct each fight as if your life is in danger.
But I didn’t want to fight this guy.
‘I’m not here for that,’ I said.
‘Then scram, innit?’ he said.
‘I need you to do something. I’ll give you money.’
I handed him forty quid, which is all I had on me.
‘What do you need?’ he asked.
‘I want you to beat me up.’
Okay, this was more like it.
When you get hit by a person who knows how to punch, you have an out-of-body experience. A proper swing to the gut doesn’t just take your breath away. Done right, it makes your intestines go into spasm, and if you’ve had a recent meal, you’ll think of vomiting. A hit to the face blooms like fireworks behind the eyes, a pleasant brightness cut short when the pain arrives, even if nothing is broken. You can hear a pure tone, low-volume ringing in the ears. Temple, eye, nose, angle of the jaw, hit, hit, hit, hit. These places can so incapacitate you that your limbs become flesh noodles.
This was familiar. Everything else, my life experience, my medical practice, my wife, my son, my life, was all a farce. A good farce, but no less of a performance. My entire existence anticipated this, waiting for something to go wrong, waiting for the next beating from my mother or my stepfather or my father. In this pain, in this suffering, which could not have lasted longer than five minutes, I was home. I was where I belonged. I finally understood the purity of Bacon’s masochism.
And, fuck, I had to go to hospital because I pissed blood.
I told them I had been mugged. No, I didn’t want to press charges. Yes, it was appalling how the police had been defunded. We needed bobbies on the street, yes? No, there’s nobody to call, just patch me up.
Catheter through my penis to my bladder, draining the urine into a transparent bag, which I could stare at. Maybe my kidney was bruised, they couldn’t tell just yet. I would have to spend the night, get some scans, rest, take some high-potency painkillers.
I ate that abominable hospital jelly and watched The Bridge on the River Kwai before nodding off.
I woke up with a start at four am, thinking of Trap and the incomplete bedtime story.
Oops.
15
Elise wasn’t taking my calls.
Not that I blamed her, but on the bright side she hadn’t mentioned the D word and I was in the mood to count my blessings.
The day after a beating is the most painful. Your endorphins abandon you and, like I mentioned before, the cute little nervelets that are growing back rupture easily. Here I went on a long digression about the nature of pain, its neurophysiology and psychology. The editor made me cut it as irrelevant. Editors are hell beasts who suck the life out of art and spit out bland, inoffensive pap because they are convinced that’s what readers want.
Anyway.
I was in pain. I couldn’t climb up to the attic to check on the sculpture. I tried to phone my wife a number of times. Failure. I found a loose filling. My piss was suspiciously dark, but no more blood, so there was that.
Destroyer called. I stared at the ringing phone for some seconds and decided to ignore it. This was a breach of our contract. I had agreed to always pick up the phone, no matter what the circumstances. Well. Circumstances. I drank water to flush out my kidneys and bladder. The pain was such that I couldn’t even respond to Henrietta when I closed my eyes. Cured at last?
I had one black eye on the left. I lay down on the sofa and played the audiobook of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Not because of the content, which I loved with a burning hot passion. No, I listened to this particular audiobook obsessively because of the narrator. Ron McLarty’s voice is soothing to me. I almost had an accident driving to Birmingham from Thamesmead because I put one of the discs on and dozed off. Just for a second, but I swerved and I had a moment of this is how you die, Thompson, but I corrected and parked immediately.
I sank into Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo, stream-of-consciousness reportage. Here too was a guy on an assignment and nobody edited his irrelevant digressions. Barbra Streisand paintings, bats, apes being attracted to water and biting the faces off folks, lizard people, gigantic Samoans and Margaret fucking Mead.
Mead is well-known for Coming of Age in Samoa which purports to describe… I don’t know, sexual behaviour and shit among young Samoans. I lived in Samoa for two years and that book is a crock of utter bollocks. There is one basic thing you need to know about Samoa and Samoans: friendliness, harmony and pleasing people, particularly visitors, is more important than truth, whatever truth is. It’s more important to keep the person you’re talking to happy than it is to be factual. You learn that in a week. Also, you learn to carry rocks or a cane around with you if you’re not driving because of the roving gangs of feral dogs. Sticks and stones, baby. You throw rocks, they leave you alone.
I don’t know if HST intended the juxtaposition of Mead and his Samoan attorney Dr Gonzo, but it might be one of those ‘accidents’ that Bacon talked about in the creation of his paintings. Oscar Zeta Acosta, the guy HST based Dr Gonzo on, was definitely not Samoan, and disappeared in Mexico in 1974, presumed dead. He was a Chicano activist but also not averse to drug use, so who knows if he was murdered?
Demon editor removed a long digression on the Chicano Movement, blaming your attention span and the fact that I was showing off. I’m not bitter.
McLarty lured me into a deep sleep not unaided by opiates. I woke up four hours later, refreshed, still in agony, and with a dead phone. I plugged it in and boiled water for spaghetti. Outside the kitchen window a cat lingered. I called him Bob and he had a collar, so he belonged to someone, but does anybody really own cats? I got one of Trap’s old plastic bowls and tipped in tuna from a can. I went outside, groaned like an old man, and gave the offering to Bob. I had no idea if Bob was a male or female and I don’t know if you can sex cats from a distance. I do know that they’re supposed to like fish. Bob ate the tuna which the container announced had been sourced humanely, another way of saying no dolphins were harmed in the fishing process, which is apparently a thing. Elise is the tuna person. I can’t stand it myself. The flesh seems water-logged, and the texture is off.
We did have a cat once when I was a kid. A kitten. Again, I didn’t know the sex. The kitten got itself entangled in some twine and strangulated. It wasn’t the first dead animal I ever saw, but it was the first that I had an emotional connection with. There was a blackout the night we found it.
The phone beeped a number of times, messages coming in.
I pieced together this from the Destroyer over several texts:
‘Hi. How are you feeling? I’m really sorry, Tade. I don’t think I’ve been fair to you or treated you with kindness. I like you and I think you’re a decent person, but I would be lying to you if I said you were all right. You have problems. We all have problems, but yours are new and raw. I don’t believe you anymore. I don’t believe you are researching a novel. I don’t believe your time with me is “Participant Observation” like you put it. This is a spiral and it won’t end well. Seek treatment. I am fond of you, you know? And when you’re better, after your treatment, you have my number. But I can’t enable what seems to be self-harm. You’re a shrink, you should know this. Please message me back and tell me if you’re okay.’
Where did art end and self-harm begin? When my sex worker asked me to get help? The Destroyer was turning into a cliché, a Heart of Gold moment. Whoever writes real life needs new ideas. I was touched, though. My instinct was to pick up the phone and ask her if she loved me. You have to understand that those of us brought up without maternal love sometimes have difficulties with affection signals. Any nurturing goes into that black hole where Mother’s love was meant to be. It is never enough. The yearning for some kind of appreciation means what is normal human compassion takes on romantic proportions. Rejection is monumental. Our defence mechanism kung fu is transcendent and I am a master. I would reject anybody before they inevitably rejected me. Smooth.
I didn’t message Destroyer back. I edited her name to DON’T PICK UP and discontinued the standing order that paid her. It felt like a break-up. Why did it feel like a break-up?
I wanted to write. I had notebooks downstairs and I emailed an old accountability buddy of mine in Wisconsin. I asked if he wanted to word bank with me, like the old days when we were both beginners. He had remained a dabbler, but he was diligent, which is what I needed. I also needed eyes that were not mine glancing over what I was writing to ensure it was new stuff, not a Xerox of an earlier novel.
I wrote for an hour, transcribed and emailed it without revision to Wisconsin Guy.
I felt depleted. Lightfoot hadn’t come back and Henrietta had become ineffective. In agony I climbed up to the attic, sure that I would lose my footing, fall and break my fucking neck any minute. The sculpture was rising and falling, like it was breathing. I should have brought a broom to prod it with. Was it still feeding on my flesh?
I screamed at it. Briefly at first, then in a prolonged shriek. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it didn’t respond. I took a deep breath then screamed again and again until I started seeing purple spots. I sat down, surrounded by this musky miasma coming from it. The good news was it had no teeth or any means of harming me that I could see. I had to get rid of the sculpture, but no way was I going to touch it. The slime that covered it, the sweat that dripped from it, the wavelike motion, all triggered my gag reflex. I thought of hiring someone, but they might call the RSPCA or the police. Not good. The police were blunt instruments at the best of times. If they saw something they didn’t understand they would arrest first, make sense of it later. I’ve been to the cells before and it was unpleasant even as a visitor.
I couldn’t do anything while I was in pain, so I descended again, physically from the attic and metaphorically into pharmaceuticals.
All the screaming tired me out so I took a nap. I woke up with more pain so I took some codeine and sloshed rum in my mouth and went back to sleep. Kids, don’t mix opiates with alcohol. Don’t try this at home. I am a professional degenerate, so I can get away with this.
I either slept for four hours or lost time. I did not dream, but I woke up with a burning idea. I pushed all the furniture out of the way in the sitting room. I went to the back yard. There were two bicycles, Elise’s and Trap’s. I haven’t ridden since a 2003 race across the Thames where I disgraced myself.
Also in the yard, a punching bag on a chain attached to a stand.
I leapt into the garage, found a saw, came back out and cut both bicycle frames until I had ten poles. I dismantled the punching bag stand and laid out the frame. A little wobbly, but it might work.
I’ve had duct tape handy since I saw that they used it to seal the hole in the International Space Station in 2018. I took all the bits of metal and piled them on the carpet. Next I swept through the house looking for boxes of all kinds.
I’m slightly arty. I draw with ink and brush. Pastels, sometimes. I paint with acrylics and oils. Apart from the abomination upstairs, I haven’t done any sculpture, except, you know, craft with the child.
It was more difficult than I had thought and I used up all the duct tape in the house, but I finally had it.
It doddered, and a sneeze would probably bring it down, but I had a large cage in the living room. I laid thin strips of cardboard, some hanging down from the top like a curtain, others all around the floor radiating outwards. I dragged a chair from the dining table and situated it in the middle of the cage, then sat on it. Not right. I closed all the windows and shut the door. Dimness, a gloom bordering on darkness since it was so late.
Still not right. I zipped upstairs, hurting and creaking as I went, and I rifled through the wardrobe. I couldn’t find anything purple, so I took whatever was closest to that on the visual spectrum. Draped in one of Elise’s dresses, I sat on the chair in the middle of the cage. The opiates started to catch up with me after the frenzy of activity and I yawned so hard, my mouth so wide, I feared dislocating my jaw.
I yelled at the top of my voice with my lungs as full as I could get them.
Like before, again and again and again.
When I was tired, and my lids were so heavy, I found myself pregnant with words and I had to get them down before—
Doorbell.
Before you get to the next part, I maintain this was not my fault. I urgently wanted to write down the words in my forebrain.
It was the police at the door.
‘Do you live here, sir?’ asked the guy, a constable, fresh-faced, white, earnest.
I looked beyond him. A cop car at the kerb, older guy inside. Him I knew from my community work, although I couldn’t tell if he recognised me or not. Nobody else on the street, although I imagined my neighbours listening with directional mics and other espionage-grade equipment. Credit where it’s due, no curtains seemed to flutter or roll back.
