Jackdaw, page 13
When my mum realised she had a genius demon-child, her attitude changed. All of a sudden I had value to her. Bragging rights. The lesson I learned was that I had to earn love which, fuck that. And fuck boarding school.
The words kept pouring from my keyboard into the novella. They were still meaningless, but this time I was sure they were new and meaningless, unlike before. Every thousand words, I would pause and email to Wisconsin. Nothing would stop me.
There’s a song by Tom Tom Club called ‘Wordy Rappinghood’ that seemed to capture what I was thinking and going through. I wasn’t thinking anything and words were going through me. The words didn’t mean what I thought they meant, and I couldn’t bend them to my will anymore.
Whatever the fuck I was writing, I was almost there when I heard the door downstairs open. I looked around me. The nest was there, but the sculpture, the pig, was in pieces in the kitchen.
Footfalls. People were coming in.
‘God! What’s that stench?’ someone said.
‘That’s what it’s been like.’ Elise. ‘Although this smells more ripe.’
I stole one more look at the screen. So close to the end. So close.
I rushed down the stairs.
‘What are you doing here? I don’t like people in my space when I’m creating. It contaminates my inspiration.’
They stared at me like I was Pennywise, like they were ready to bolt if I made any move to obstruct their exit.
Elise. At least, I thought it was Elise. This was brunette with blue-grey eyes and a wedding ring. She seemed familiar, so, let’s call her Elise.
With her, a woman I recognised as a social worker. And two strangers, but I could tell they were doctors. We can smell our own kind.
‘I know what this is,’ I said. ‘But you’re mistaken, so leave.’
‘Why don’t we sit down,’ said the social worker.
‘Where?’ asked Elise.
She had a point. The furniture was out in the yard, water-soaked. I had expanded the original cage and built a throne on a dais in the middle of it. I had sewn together some cloth and dyed it in an acrylic mixture approximating purple. I sat in there and screamed for hours on end when my fingers ached too much from typing. I always left with ideas crawling out of my ears. They were like wisps of smoke because I couldn’t capture them in words when I sat down to write.
I… that’s what I did in lieu of rest. I wrote, screamed, wrote, screamed, wrote. I hadn’t slept in days and the rotting pork wasn’t the only source of rottenness.
‘This is a Mental Health Act assessment,’ said the social worker.
‘I know. Didn’t I just say I knew what this was?’ I said.
‘Your wife has concerns.’
‘My wife doesn’t live here anymore,’ I said. ‘If she’s really my wife.’
Shouldn’t have said that.
Didn’t I say shut the fuck up, Thompson?
Yeah, there wasn’t a lot I could do.
Elises’s account, the house, my physical state, my refusal to accept help, it was all enough for them to detain me under section two of the Mental Health Act. Unsurprisingly, the police were outside to facilitate a smooth transition from home to a mental health unit. Because of who I was, they did not take me to the nearest facility, which was where I worked.
The first thing that happens to you when you get detained, or sectioned as the common parlance has it, is you speak to a nurse who may read you your rights, called Section 132, and so on. Then you get a doctor, usually a junior one, who clerks you, by which I mean he asks you a whole bunch of questions, examines you, and pokes you with a needle to get blood and stuff. You don’t have to answer any of the questions, but then you run the risk of someone using an educated guess to diagnose and treat you, which means you want to gamble your life on twenty-first-century medical wisdom in the United Kingdom. Good luck.
They had given me some hospital pyjamas to wear because my clothes were falling apart when they got me. I still stank, but I looked better. I needed a shower and a shave. I just wanted to finish my book.
‘I just want to finish my book,’ I said to the young man.
‘Of course. And we want you to be able to finish your book. Any medical conditions?’
‘Asthma, hay fever, non-specific skin allergies.’
While he wrote, he said, ‘Would I have read anything you’ve written?’
‘With the Royal College membership exams coming up? I’m pretty sure you haven’t.’
He examined me.
‘Squeeze my hand,’ he said, checking the power of my grip; standard neurological examination. Then he showed mild concern. ‘Hmm.’
‘What?’
‘There’s a huge difference between the power on the right and left.’
Clickety-click, lickety-split, I was in a clicking CT scan machine for his next trick.
‘Dr Thompson,’ said the radiographer.
‘Yes.’
‘You are going to need surgery.’
19
It’s amazing how quickly people forgive you when they think you’re going to die or be changed fundamentally, not for the better, by a surgical procedure. It wasn’t brain surgery, not exactly, but it was going to be performed by a neurosurgeon. Ah, fuck it. It was brain surgery.
Basically, I had a haematoma, a mass made of blood, and it had compressed the front of my brain, specifically the left frontal lobe. It was about the size of a California orange. They thought it had been there for months. Remember when I fell down the step ladder from the attic? Hit my head? You can get this problem from seemingly trivial trauma. I must have had a slow bleed and this orange was the result.
Your humanity is in your frontal lobe. You know when people make speeches and say shit about what separates us from animals, etc., blah blah? Well, I always whisper ‘frontal lobe’ when I hear or read that.
We know this because of a dude called Phineas Gage, railroad worker, and practically immortal in psychiatry and neurology. I knew his story intimately. Gage was a foreman working on clearing rocky outcroppings from the path of a rail track in Vermont, USA. He determined the placement of explosives. The process was you drilled a hole, you gently packed it with explosives, you covered this with sand, then you tamped it down with a threefoot tamping iron. Gage would have done this many times. On 13 September 1848 he tamped down without the sand for some reason. The rod generated a spark that ignited the dynamite, which turned the rod into a missile that went into Gage’s face at the left cheekbone and exited from the crown of his head.
Not only did he survive, he was conscious when taken to a doctor and said, ‘Doctor, here is business enough for you.’
His life afterwards is subject to some speculation that hasn’t come from primary sources, but it is certain that he was not the same man. Words used to describe him included fitful, profane, irreverent, impatient, obstinate, capricious, where he was not these things before. He died in 1860 or 1861 after developing seizures. You can bet I was worried about the fate that awaited me, but neurosurgery has moved on considerably since the 1860s.
Doctor, here is business enough for you.
A woman called Norton operated on me. She and her team drilled a small hole in my skull and drained the haematoma, relieving the pressure, decompression they call it, and repaired the blood vessels. She played Beethoven, Symphony No.7 in A major, looping through the movements over and over. Oh, yeah, I was awake for this. I didn’t want to be, but them’s the breaks.
Ms Norton wasn’t the chatty kind of surgeon but she had a social media profile that included photographs of weddings. Not hers, not people she knew, but an accumulation of random wedding photos from the internet. I didn’t see any ring on her finger, but that didn’t mean anything. I would probably never know the reason for this obsession.
‘Dr Thompson, your symptoms might not go away after the surgery, or they might fade over the next few weeks. The haematoma might come back and you might need another burr hole. Be vigilant.’
Elise and Trap came to visit me in hospital. Trap was happy to see me and wanted to inspect my wound. Elise was reserved, but understanding.
‘GUM clinic for an STI screen next,’ she said. ‘As soon as you can walk.’
‘Yes, I suppose I should.’
At least she was considering the possibility that she might have sex with me again in this lifetime.
Neurosurgery is weird. I was out of there in less than a week. You’d think poking around the old belfry would mean weeks of recuperation, but no. I was prodded by medical students and neuro trainees. I didn’t mind. They need to learn.
Destroyer came to see me in hospital the day before I was discharged.
She had timed it so my family had left. I had a conditioned reflex to slouch when I saw her and an intense urge to present my rump. But my forebrain was working again and I knew it was verboten. So did she.
The nurses and support workers glared, and it was obvious they thought this was my trashy side piece.
‘I’m sorry, Tade. My work is for consenting adults and I don’t think you had the ability to consent.’
‘But you’re keeping the money, though, right?’ I asked.
Her face crumpled.
‘That was unfair. You’ve been very decent to me,’ I said. ‘I’m just ashamed of myself, of what I’ve done.’
‘You were not yourself,’ she said.
In spite of everything, I still felt a stirring. I supposed it would take a while for all symptoms to go. Or perhaps this was just a man responding to a sexy woman type deal. I realised it was going to take me a while to separate out illness from plain lechery.
‘But the desires must have been there. The haematoma just removed my self-control. I must have wanted those things.’
‘We all want things that self-control says we can’t have,’ said Destroyer. ‘We aren’t what we think; we’re what we do. And even if you had thought these things in some fleeting way before, you didn’t act on them. Don’t be hard on yourself, but look me up if you feel like a little self-exploration.’
She brought me posh biscuits and left a miasma of perfume behind. I knew I’d never see her again.
I suppose the first feelings that returned, and I mean emotion now, were variants of mortification. Unlike in the films, I remembered pretty much everything I did while I was… haematomaed, but not in the right order and the details were off, inconsistent, ephemeral.
By my calculations I owed six thousand quid. That just popped back into my head. What happened was I took up gambling. It wasn’t hard. The poker app I installed early on in my Francis Bacon journey worked its magic. I won a bit and lost a bit, but never stopped. The phone made it easy and I found the app visually pleasing. The people I played with seemed okay, if they were indeed people and not bots. I played that for two days, didn’t think I was getting that Bacon vibe, so the next time I got a beating and a fucking I asked if there was any place for underground gambling nearby.
Long story short, I lost thousands at roulette and baccarat. And dice. I played a little of that too. Unfortunately I didn’t have Francis Bacon’s deep pockets or a gallery that was willing to float me cash whenever I was short.
I went to my crack house to pay back what I owed there. I had it in cash in a brown envelope. I took it to my guy who looked in and laughed.
‘The fuck is this? You owe twenty thousand pounds, bruv,’ he said.
Ordinarily, this would not have been a problem for me, but when I checked my account… well. It wasn’t exactly clean. My consultant’s salary was still going in, but the last payment from my employer was all I had left. I checked the breakdowns and there was all sorts of stuff that was going to take me months to disentangle in there.
*
The world after surgery looked like things do just after a rainstorm. Clean, fresh and forgiving. Still fluffy around the edges, and I didn’t trust my senses as much as before.
I knew Elise was Elise now, and that Trap was Trap.
Even now, when I try to recall those febrile days before my diagnosis, it’s unclear. Locations are indistinct and bleed into each other, people are misidentified, dates are optional extras in what I can only describe as a prolonged psychedelic interlude. I’ve never tried to retrace my steps because I’m the one who walked them and I have no way of recalling where the haematoma took me. I’m pretty sure I have left some things out of this account.
I was back now.
I knew what the world was.
It was a trick of the light, a thing covered with a veil that is so easily removed by trivial injury to this fragile flesh. With a tap to my head all my decency, my training, my honour, everything that I thought I was peeled away and the animal within emerged. Who then is the true me? The civilised doctor, father, husband, writer? Or what lies beneath?
20
Trap and I went back to our Jot and Tittle superhero work. We drew their adventures on watercolour paper in the exact spot where I had my throne before. It felt good to finish the father-son thing we had started. I felt less shitty and Trap seemed ecstatic.
‘Do you know anything about picture books?’ Elise asked.
‘No, we’re just faking it.’
‘Till you make it?’
‘No, just faking. Faking all the way, no making.’
Elise redecorated everything and sealed off the attic for now. The house smelled of fresh-cut flowers and love.
When I got the phone call, I was sceptical.
‘Hi, Tade, it’s Marge.’
I couldn’t answer at first. Marge was an old girlfriend whom I hadn’t talked to for like ten years.
‘Tade?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you remember who I am?’
‘This isn’t a good time, Marge.’
‘I’ll be quick, then. I’m having a ceremony to say farewell to the little spirit. The vicar said it would be prudent to ask if you wanted to be part of it. It’s okay if you don’t.’
Little spirit. Marge had been twenty-nine weeks pregnant with what would have been our child. She suddenly went into labour and the child could not be saved. The baby lived for forty-three minutes. I remembered it like it only just happened. I was on the verge of tears, but emotional incontinence can be the effect of frontal lobe problems.
‘Say something,’ I said. I put the phone to Trap’s ear.
‘Did you hear anything?’ I asked.
‘A woman,’ said Trap.
‘Jot and Tittle will have to wait a bit.’ I put the phone back to my ear and said, ‘I’m listening.’
Elise was surprisingly accommodating and encouraged me to go.
The miscarriage broke us up, Marge and I. She told me she had sunk into bouts of depression and a mild eating disorder. It had taken a long time, but she had climbed out of that snake pit, although she kept falling back in. She said the lost baby was at the centre of it.
‘I named her, you know? I call her Renee.’ Her voice was heavy, like she had either been crying or was about to start.
‘Renee.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘I love it. I used to call her Daisy in my head.’
Renee Thompson. Forty-three minutes old, but still affecting my life.
Small, weekday ceremony. Marge’s mother was there. I got along with her and we hugged for a long time. I hadn’t realised how much I missed her.
A decade after the fact, we said goodbye to Renee Daisy Thompson. She has a plaque somewhere in South London and I cried over it. I don’t know if it was residual frontal lobe dysfunction or my grief at the death of my first child.
As I said goodbye to Marge for the last time, some kind of weight lifted from her shoulders and mine.
I visit the plaque every year, but not on her birthday. I do it on the anniversary of my brain surgery. I talk to her sometimes. I tell her I’m sorry she couldn’t stay, that the world is not great, but that there are great people here. I tell her about her mother’s hairy upper lip that she tucks in or hides behind a book because she’s ashamed of it. I tell her it suited Marge and that the skin got bumpy when she shaved it. I tell her about Trap and Elise, that she would have loved them. I tell her I’ve been sick, but that I’m better now, and that I can see life for what it is.
I knew my recovery had progressed well when I browsed a second-hand bookshop on Fulham Road. I found a paperback, Henrietta, by Henrietta Moraes. The cover was a Lucian Freud painting. I had no sexual response whatsoever when I saw it, flipped through it, bought it, and read it all through that night. Eventful life. I wondered what she would have made of my experiences.
There’s an app you can get that works synergistically with the online poker app. Basically, it patterns your betting and punts for you. I had apparently installed it and gave it no credit limit. That’s why I had no money left. I had no recollection of doing this, but I must have.
I took out my SIM card and killed my phone. To this day I no longer use smartphones.
‘Double-Tee!’ said Tarquin. ‘How’re we doing with the novella?’
‘We’re not.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not doing the book. It’s cursed, Tarquin.’
‘Dude.’
‘What?’
‘It’s a great opportunity to—’
‘You write it, then. Or get someone else. You have quite a few writers on your slate.’
‘You’re the one they asked for.’
‘Tell them thanks, but no thanks.’
‘Tade, don’t—’
‘Goodbye, Tarquin.’
He got over it.
Especially when Jot and Tittle became a surprise illustrated book hit and Trap Thompson’s first literary credit. I never took it seriously, but Tarquin came up to the house to beg and while grovelling he came across the concept art.
