Prologue: Beat Freak
I’m the sanest person I know, but the maddest person you’ll meet. Don’t you agree? Well, we’ll see.
Madness in great ones should not unnoticed go, eh? The devil that is my ego has deluded me into grandeur. The price to pay: insanity.
What do I do when everyone is mad but me? Does that mean everybody is right and I am wrong? Or am I the loan avenger, with X-ray vision, blessed/cursed with the gift of clarity that no one should have? No one was meant to have. A freak of nature, born with a wheelbarrow of machinery in my head that is no earthly good to anyone. Born to a world that doesn’t know me as it’s own. I’m a freak and I don’t belong here. I’m a freak and I should go. I’m a freak and everybody knows it. But me.
One of us is right and one of us is wrong, but the judge has disappeared leaving a note on the gates of hell saying “sort it out for yourselves, gone fishing”. What are we supposed to do now? You keep telling me I’m a loon, so in the end it’s easier just to believe you. And after a while I need your fix of chastisement to deaden the pain. ‘Cos the alternative is to leap into the abyss, without a parachute, maps, charts....oh, and my mind. I might as well accept the inevitable of the herd. That grass must be some poky shit you’re chewing, ‘cos you seem off your heads to me. I’ll just have a little nibble and before you know it, I’m just like you, except this grass tastes rancid and its rotting my insides. I keep retching. I need a doctor, but all the doctors give me are a free supply of McDonalds for a year and that keeps me on the toilet for days. So what now? I’m doomed to inertia, locked into my own tomb of apathy. But wait. I hear something from the darkness, as though coming from under the ground. Just a faint throb, a mild rumble, a slight explosion, but over and over and over again. Dvvvvvvv....dvvvvvvv.....dvvvvvvv. It’s a beat. Oh, yeah, it’s a beat, moving my feet closer to the edge, to the ledge - that looks a flipping long way down, but now I’m not in control anymore. My body is leading me. I can’t stop it, ‘cos the beats getting louder and I’m just a sucker for the groove, man. Gotta’ follow it, ‘cos when I stand still all the grass around just withers and dies, so that I can’t even eat it anymore. And the McDonalds makes me shit even worse than before. Yeah, it’s a long way down and I don’t have that parachute. You’d say no one in their right minds would leap into that. But I gotta’ follow the beat. After all, I’m just a freak. A freak to the beat. A beat freak.
So, there I was in the late spring of 2001, 31 years old and slowly but surely losing my mind in a psychosis of unreality. Unable to tell the difference anymore. But was it any wonder? I turned on the TV and I was presented with a smorgasbord of choices that offered me no choice at all. Soaps that reminded me just how shitty the world could be, programmes to help me live the perfect life: my garden could look like something from 6th century China, my living room could be covered in puce, and I could do wonderful things with poultry in my kitchen from Habitat. Gameshows offered me the means to instant material nirvana to compound the problem even more. And my whole psychosis could be messed with to the power of n by either ogling “real” people, doing unreal shit, whilst the TV cameras sucked out all the marrow and the programme makers sold it back to me as “the way it is”, or I could watch the news mould the truth into it’s own reflection. And if I turned over to the next channel, I could just watch another wedding in a soap, or have a carp pool instead of a pagoda, burnt-arse tiles in the bathroom and do marvellous things with Soya mince. And if I had chosen to have more choices, then I could use more time up trying to find out which remote control did what. I guess the point is made, but the repeating method creates the right effect.
If I read the newspapers I could find out which prejudice sold the most. If I went to the cinema I could watch Die Hard again, but with Keanu instead of Bruce. Or the Full Monty, but with rugby players. And there was always Tom and Julia or Mel and Meg, to help me keep dreaming the dream in the face of evermore overwhelming odds (ain’t that the truth). I could even switch on the radio and listen to “bands”. And I could consume all this and line the same handful of companies’ pockets with cash, so that they could buy each other up, thereby narrowing the definition of “choice” even more, yet giving me ever-increasing quantities of what I didn't want.
Somewhere in all that I would probably have come across politicians giving me more reasons not to believe them, whilst trying to make me help them to create a world that increasingly bore no resemblance to anything I ever wanted it to turn out as. You could substitute advertisers for politicians and get the same effect. And I undoubtedly would have stumbled across values, beliefs and a worldview which, if I was to follow, would have choked my spirit to death, suffocating me in a security blanket of debt and consumption, yet always leaving me with a desire for more of the same punishment. In short, if this was the way it really was, if this was the way things were supposed to be, if everything was as it should be: HOW COULD I NOT BE F***ED UP.
This, a girl, and one or two other things all put me in a monastery for four days. It was my take on the whole Priory shtick. I had to get away from everything. “Run away, sir brave knight”, I cried as I sought solace in the sanctity of silence. Of course, the alternative view on all the above was that I had simply messed myself up. Maybe I was just sinking into deep paranoia. Maybe it was just cowardice; the two can sometimes be the same. Maybe I was just over-sensitive, unable to cope with the realities of the new millennia. I had the fear bad. Fear of myself, fear of everything around me. Just an innate sense of being very afraid. I was going under, I know that much. All very dramatic, perhaps, but then I have a penchant for the grand gesture, as you’ll see. Whatever it was, something had to be done. I needed to land. That much was clear. So I did the only thing I could do: I ran away some more. I went travelling. Or to be more precise: I went searching for my sanity. I literally became a walking cliché.
There you are, then. That's how I came to be on a boat heading for Le Havre on the 14th of June, with no clue at all as to what I was doing, where I was going, or what would happen when I got there. That's where things really started to get interesting………..
21/6
About last night. Bernard and me got absolutely plastered and we went right on one. It ended up with me accusing him of being gay and him threatening to kill me with a bow and arrow. Seriously. Quite a night, all in. The details are a bit hazy, although I distinctly remember staring at the bow and arrow and thinking "where the blazes did that come from......wow, real magic". I’d had a few, like I said. This morning, we had a laugh about it and agreed to forgive and forget. It suits at the moment - I don't have to do too much, it's cheap and I found a beach about five minutes walk away, so I can put up with mad nights. Hell, home from home. It could well have been just the booze, but if he really is after my backside, I'm off, providing I can avoid his weapon, so to speak. I suppose if you put yourself in certain situations, life can be very.....unpredictable, but then that's the whole point of the exercise. Just to leap....... no other way now. Whatever. Tomorrow's another day.
22/6/01
Interesting day last night and this morning. You know about the incident the previous night. The day started out alright. But then all hell broke out in the evening. B had obviously had something on his mind when we sat down to eat – no, actually it started before that. I began worrying about whether the E-mails I sent a couple of days ago had reached everybody. I wanted to ring Dad to check, so I asked B where the nearest payphone was; big argument; finally, he drove me to Redon. All the way there he was being a weasel; clearly depressed to the hills. We got to Redon - I went off and rang Dad; everything fine, messages received. Went back to the car - no B. Hitched back, thinking “something’s up”, got back and finally he comes out with it:
"You have drugs in the house"
"What?"
"I know you have marijuana here"
"Don't be stupid, Bernard"
“You are on the run from the police and they will come here and arrest you and me."
"Are you on the temmys again?"
"We will go to prison. And I don't want to go back there."
"You are on the temmys.....wait a minute. You've been inside before?"
"Three times"
Hello. More surprises. Hmm.
"What for?"
"Not important. But I know you have drugs. You have lied to me."
"Shut up, Bernard. You're talking shit. Go and have a sleep."
At this point, I can here the dogs outside making a right racket. They can smell food - me! So he goes outside and quiets them down whilst mumbling some more stuff about nonsense. He then falls arse over tit trying to get back into the house, as he forgets the dirty great big hole outside the back door, which nearly killed me the other day. Finally, he gets back into the kitchen and then collapses in a heap on the table. The next day, he wakes me up at about 7 in the morning to carry on where we left off.
"I'm telling you the truth. I haven't got any drugs. The police are not after me and we're not going to be arrested. I don't know what you're going on about. Something's spooked you or you're not telling me the truth about everything. What's your problem?"
"You're the one who is lying. Not me."
We argue some more, getting really mad at each other and in the end he goes outside and begins to untie the dogs. Ah, time for action. Judging when you've outstayed your welcome is a key skill in travelling, I suddenly realise.
"Alright, Bernard. Whatever. Have it your way. I'm going."
He actually begins to calm down at this point. "You don't have to leave. Where are you going to go?"
"I don't know, but this is too much. I'm off. You are a f***in' nutter." (which is a bit rich, maybe, but whatever. He was.)
I quickly pack all my things, whilst he paces up and down outside. I think to myself that getting past the dogs might be a challenge, particularly since they are barking like mad and I can see out the window that he's holding them on a tight leash. Shit. How the arse did I get into this? As it happens, though, he holds them back and I quickly scarper.