Kiss Me First (7 page)

So it was all progressing as normal and I don’t know what happened exactly, or when, but I know that by fifteen I was a shadow of my former self. I know that’s a cliché but I can’t think of a better way of putting it. The first time I remember really feeling it was the evening of my friend Simone’s birthday – everyone was going to this pub that would serve us and there was this boy going who fancied me, he was one of the cool lot at school. But instead of being there I was in my bedroom, door locked, lying in bed. I told my parents I had flu, but really it was this profound sense of hopelessness. It’s hard to explain. It was like I was unaware I had been walking around all that time with a noose around my neck, and then suddenly a trapdoor had opened under me and I was hanging.

And then, a few days later, my mood suddenly lifted. Like I had been given an adrenalin injection straight into my heart. I didn’t just feel better, I felt absolutely brilliant. The world was mine for the taking. I thought of that boy – I can’t remember his name now – and decided to jump on my bike and go round to his house without phoning or anything. His mum answered the door and said they were having dinner, and I insisted she got him, and when she did and he came to the door, looking all bemused, I didn’t say anything but just snogged him, right there and then, in front of his mum. I was irresistible and brilliant and everyone responded to me, and wanted to be near me. And then I’d feel the trapdoor start to open under my feet and I would crawl home, lock the world out of the room and fall into the pit.

That was the pattern for a few years, on and off. I knew that teenagers were meant to be moody, so I presumed that’s what it was, and my parents presumed so too, I think. But my brother hadn’t gone through all of this. He slammed doors and grunted and was a little shit but he could always be pulled out of his moodiness by a bribe or watching The A-Team.

When I was about seventeen, I started to know that something was really wrong with me, that this wasn’t normal. I started to put myself into dodgy situations, staying out all night and shagging anyone who asked. Once I gave a blowjob to my friend Kelly’s father, when I was staying over at hers. I was brushing my teeth and he passed by the bathroom, and paused to look at me, and I took him by the hand and led him in. Another time my friends and I were at the pub in Edgware, and at eleven they had to go home – we were meant to be revising for our A-levels – and I phoned dad and made some excuse about staying with one of them, but instead I got a cab into Soho and asked someone on the street where the best place to go was, and ended up in this underground club, drinking whatever was given to me and talking to these crazy old guys wearing fedoras and cravats. One of them started stroking my tits and we went in the corner of the club, which was dark but not that dark, if you know what I mean, and we shagged there, standing up. I stayed out until the tubes started running again at 6am and then went straight to school and slept on a bench for two hours until the bell rang.

I didn’t give a fuck about schoolwork. I failed two of my A-levels but managed to get an A in art, and got a place at Camberwell to do a foundation course, which, as you can imagine, was the perfect – and worst – place for me. At art school being crazy wasn’t just tolerated, it was encouraged. On my first day there I shaved all my hair off in the middle of the cafe and everyone instantly knew my name. I put on this club night called Topless where, yes, you’ve guessed it, everyone had to go topless. God, I was such a twat. I sang in a crap band, and then managed an even crapper band, Godless Mary. Boys really liked me. I was the last to leave every party. During the manic periods – I knew when they were coming on because my cheeks would feel thick and tingly – I really threw myself into my work, was wildly productive, not leaving the studio for days, not sleeping, producing ten paintings in a night sometimes, listening to the whole of the Ring Cycle at full blast, chain-smoking so much that, by the morning, I could barely croak ‘hello’ when the cleaner came in.

Then, when things went dark, it was like my head had been filled with concrete. All I could do was sleep and when I wasn’t asleep, I’d lie in bed thinking the most terrible things, concocting violent fantasies of death for myself and people I knew who had slighted me in some way.

Sometimes, there’d be this crossover between the high and the low, I’d be manic and irritable at the same time. I’d phone people and yell at them, and, later, when the Internet started, write long emails to friends who I thought had let me down somehow, or to shops who had sold out of the teacups I’d seen in a magazine and desperately wanted.

The only thing that would ease things slightly would be a hot bath, so I’d have these baths that would last half a day, using up all the hot water for the house I was sharing and then getting out when the water cooled to boil more in kettles and saucepans.

My housemates got tired of me pretty quickly and there were arguments and finally they asked me to leave. So I moved in with the boyfriend I was with at the time, Jonny, and within about a week we had a huge row about god knows what, and I threw all his stuff out the window and wrote CUNT across his car in nail varnish. Yes, I am a fucking cliché. I didn’t remember it the next day – Jonny had to remind me.

Sometimes I would crave peace so strongly I would jump on a train and go to some shitty depressing seaside place and book into a B and B, the kind with porcelain cats and frilly loo seat covers, just to be myself, and then spend all night awake under the clammy nylon sheets and have to run out in the early hours of the morning because I didn’t have any money to pay for it.

Fuck, I want to kill myself just writing all this down. That’s a joke, ha ha. Well, not really.

I thought about suicide all the time. I thought it was the answer – literally. I used to sit in my room and imagine I had this calculator and I would type in all these details of my life and then I would press the ‘equals’ button and the word SUICIDE would appear in the panel, in those red LED letters. I tried once at college, storing up all the pills I could get my hands on and then went into a hospital and locked myself in the staff toilet and took them, my thinking being that no one would be shocked by dead bodies there, and it would be easy to dispose of me. But of course, I didn’t think that if they found me, they’d have all the equipment they needed to pump my stomach, and that’s what happened. Logic has never been my strong suit.

After that my parents came and took me home and they were totally confused and upset by this creature they had created. Well, dad was confused but as dopey and nice as ever, but mum freaked out. Like she was disgusted. She could barely touch me, all she could talk about was how I needed a haircut, or some new fucking lapis lazuli supplier she had found in Thailand, or anything that wasn’t about what I had just done. It wasn’t that she was upset about it, couldn’t bear it – she was angry. That’s when I realized she was toxic. It was this sudden realization, and all my past came into focus. It was like, if I behaved myself and was pretty and nice and agreed with her, then everything was OK, it fitted into her image. But now I was ill it was like I was damaged goods, and she kept saying that it wasn’t her fault, I didn’t get it from her side of the family, her perfect Chilean aristocratic family. I remember once she told me I was wasting my youth on being fucked up, that when she was my age she had been married twice and had two children. I told her that it wasn’t my life’s ambition to get married and knocked up at seventeen, leave the poor guy when he turned out to be less successful than I’d hoped, travel to London and find a nice, dopey rich guy to take me and my toddler son on, and spend the rest of my life dominating him and spending his money and flouncing around like some cut price Frieda Kahlo. With the moustache but without the talent. As you can imagine that didn’t go down very well.

I had counselling, which was fucking useless – no offence – and various combinations of drugs. The pills zombied me out, made me into this numb person who didn’t really feel anything, sadness or happiness or anything. On pills, I’m not a person, I’m, like, a log. There was a sort of novelty at first in having this ‘normal’ life, going to the pub, watching TV, being able to sleep for eight hours like the rest of the world. But I missed the mania. It was fun, you know? And it was a big part of me. Without it, it was like I was an impoverished aristo living in a huge pile where most of the rooms were shut up and covered in dustsheets, whilst I was confined to a chilly parlour. I was just existing, not living.

Then the medication stopped being as effective, and I started to slide back, and then they tried other combinations and it went on for months, for years, trying these drugs, getting bad side effects or just missing the high and going off them, getting into trouble, having these amazing nights, these crushing lows. I’d get jobs, lose them, have boyfriends, fuck them up, move into places, have to move on. It was all so fucking repetitive.

Around then I realized something – that whatever anyone said to me, whatever pills I took, whatever therapy I had, the best it could do was mask the problem. Whatever this thing was in my head, it would be there for ever. Therapy’s bullshit, labels are bullshit. The other day you were saying something about ‘beating’ manic depression, like it’s a dragon to be slain or something, but I don’t feel like that. It’s this thing that is part of me, ingrained into my character, and I will have to live with it until I die. There’s no way out. This is it. I read this quote once from this woman which was ‘No hope of a cure, ever, for being me’, and that’s exactly how I feel.

Every day, when I wake up, I have to make the decision whether or not I can bear to live with that. The thing is, now I know the script. I know what happens to me. When I’m drugged I might feel on an even keel but I’m only half alive. I’m just existing. All my fire and creativity goes. And then when I’m in a manic phase I’m too alive. But as I get older the manic phases are decreasing and the depressive ones are becoming more frequent.

I haven’t got a career to speak of – nice middle-class girl, all that money on education, all those possibilities. I’ve squandered it entirely, as my mum would say.

If I’m not on pills, then I’m crazy and I hurt people and I want to die. And if I am on pills, then I lack my fire, and I don’t feel things deeply, I’m just shuffling through life like everyone else, using up resources, eating food and shitting it out. They make me not think properly about things – I have the same opinions as the newspapers, take the line of least resistance. The other day in the pub my friends were having an argument about whether you should tip in restaurants even if the service is crap, and I couldn’t be bothered to take a position. I used to be a waitress, it’s a subject I should feel strongly about, but I just don’t have the will and energy to engage any more. I’m living a mundane life, just for the sake of it. And what’s the point of that?

And when I look at the future, I can only see more of this same old shit, but with me older. When I look at my face in the mirror now, I can see the beginnings of major lines – you know, the ones old women have, like mum would have if she hadn’t had so much surgery – and the future is just there, laid out in front of me. I’ve probably got a few years left in me before my face starts to fall, and I become middle-aged. Men’s eyes have already started to slide over me. I imagine my face as the subject of a time-lapse film, those lines rapidly getting deeper, mouth turning down into a frown, gums receding, white hairs sprouting. And then finally crumbling into dust. No, how could I forget – before that, senility. All that life and experience and memories turned to mush, and ending up pulling down my trousers in the newsagent, like dad. I’m going to be buried alive by my body and I don’t want it.

You asked me the other day about children. I’m not going to have them, I wouldn’t trust myself with them. I can’t look after myself, how could I have children?

And you know what, I’ve had my fun. For all the shittiness, for all the people I’ve hurt and time I’ve wasted, all the nights in stinking Soho clubs, the mistakes I’ve made, at least I’ve lived, which is more than you can say for lots of people. But now, I know what it’s like and I don’t want to do it any more. I don’t see it as a sad thing, particularly. I just don’t see the point in repeating the same things over and over again, becoming more and more invisible, going to sleep and waking up, always doubting my own instincts, feeling either half alive or out of control. I just don’t want to do it any more.

It finished there. After a moment, I opened a new document on my computer. I had noticed an inconsistency in her account. In the CV she had called the band she managed Grievous Mary, whilst in the biography it was Godless Mary. I made a note to ascertain from her which name was correct. Then I emailed back to acknowledge receipt of the documents, and tell her we could proceed.

Friday, 19th August 2011

Two things happened this afternoon. A couple who seem relatively sane said they might remember Tess, and I got online.

My day got off to a better start. To avoid repetition of the unpleasant awakening the morning before, I had gone to sleep with the tent flaps open, lying on my back with my head positioned half outside and my eye mask around my neck. When the brightness of the sun woke me I slithered out of the tent and repositioned my mattress under the shade of the tree whereupon I put on my eye mask and immediately went back to sleep. It was a minimal disruption, and I awoke again at 2 p.m. feeling quite rested.

After three biscuits and a quick wash with my Wet Wipes I took Tess’s photo and did a round of the site. Some new arrivals were setting up camp near the main clearing. It wasn’t immediately clear which of the couple was the male and which the female; both had long, limp dark hair and were skinny, the girl with not much in the bust department. The man had big black plugs in his earlobes, the size of a one-euro coin.