I told myself I probably just needed to eat something, like Mum said. By now, just the thought of food was enough to make my stomach churn, make me run to the toilet and have to empty my bowels, but I decided enough was enough: it was time to eat. Something healthy, I said. Not fattening. Just a little bit.
I entered a cafe, found a seat in a quiet corner and looked at the menu. But when the waitress came to take my order, I couldn’t decide what I wanted. Everything sounded too complicated, too expensive. But I spotted a jar of yoghurt-covered muesli biscuits on the counter—surely they were healthy? I would only eat half, I promised myself, and no more.
On my plate, I cut the biscuit in half with a knife and started to eat. Before I knew it my hand was reaching for the second half—the half that I had promised myself I would not eat. This is the moment that something inside me seemed to snap. Suddenly the voice, the bad feeling that had been with me for as long as I could remember, said something more vicious than it ever had before, and not just as a sticky thought, but an instruction, a threat, a demand. It said, If you can’t even stick to a diet, you might as well kill yourself.
Any other day, a thought like that would have registered as a dark joke, a dumb thing to say. On that day, however, that awful day, it registered as an ultimatum. In my tired, fragile mind, the words ‘Kill yourself’ felt loud and real, and utterly terrifying. Oh my God. Is that where all this is leading. Am I about to kill myself?
From this moment onwards, my illness began to escalate. I had tipped now from anxiety into danger. I didn’t want to hurt myself; I didn’t want to do that to me or my family, and yet image after image flashed before my eyes: ropes and knives and cars and trucks and trains and guns. Blood and more blood. Horror and more horror. All I could do was sit there and weep, as quietly as I could, covering my face so no one could see me.
I had no name for what was wrong with me. I had no language. Just feeling. Instinct. Terror. Shaking.
I must have paid for my biscuit, but I don’t remember it.
I remember being in a church next, on my knees, praying to an icon of the Madonna, asking that something please stop me from killing myself.
And then I remember being outside the church, starting to walk back to the hostel, feeling too tired to continue, sitting on a bench.
I saw Matt from the Catweazle Club walking towards me, or was I imagining it? No, it was Matt and, when he saw me, he stopped. He told me I looked terrible. He kept asking what was wrong.
I tried to talk, but I didn’t know what to say. All I could do was cry, and mumble about being scared, about having a virus. I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t want anyone to know what else the doctor had said. I just wanted to be home, with my parents, and never leave the house again.
He took me to the tearooms for a cup of Earl Grey. I remember the red-and-white-check tablecloth, the smell of the tea, how his voice was so kind and steady, and slowly, slowly, I stopped crying. For a second, I pulled myself together to say, ‘Thank you’, and then had to look down because I’d started crying again.
He said that whatever was worrying me would pass. He said we all suffered sometimes, it was just the human condition, and besides, I was a songwriter: I’d probably use all of this and write an awesome song one day.
I thanked him again, told him he was making me feel more normal, that I felt so grateful—each sentence broken by sobs that I just could not, for the life of me, stop from coming. And he said, ‘You are normal, you’re just really far away from everything you know. What you need is a good home-cooked meal.’ He invited me to dinner on his barge, drawing a map on a napkin, with directions on how to get there. Then he paid for our tea, walked me back in the direction of my hostel, and told me he’d see me at six. Said he’d have the pot-belly stove cranking, and I could borrow his guitar. I said, ‘I can’t really play.’ ‘Yes, you can,’ he replied. ‘I heard you. Remember?’
That evening as I walked along the canal I was scared I might lose control, and jump in and drown myself. But when I reached Matt’s boat, it was like a scene from a movie: dusk, a long blue boat, smoke coming from its little chimney and, inside, a jam jar of red wine, and lovely music playing, and a warm dinner waiting, kilims and cushions, a guitar, and even though I could not eat, what I felt that night was enough to remind me that I was still here. I was not dead yet. And I dared to hope maybe that night I would sleep. Maybe I would go to sleep, and wake up in the morning, and feel like my old self again.
That night, lying in my bed in the dormitory once more (the private room Ian had allowed me to rest in was now back being used by paying guests), I tried to imagine my father’s deep voice saying, ‘All will be well, all will be fine,’ and for a few hours I drifted off, only to be woken again and then again by the churning of my stomach, by the half-felt feelings of my childhood rattling around inside me.
It was about Rowena, mostly. I saw it clearly that night, the horror of how long
