1977

We went to Milton Keynes with our mother and somehow came back without her.

Oscar Wilde would probably have asked how we could have been so careless.

Before Milton Keynes, life had not been perfect, but it had shape.

We lived in Lewes. There were streets I knew, a school I knew, teachers whose faces I knew. Mrs Pleasance. Mr Platt. Sharon Michin. Nicholas Rawson. Lee Christmas. Simon Mander. Neil Harris.

There were other people’s houses.

Carol and Richard Rawson had a house and a Red Setter called Gort. You went in and somehow knew what to do. There were kitchens, sitting rooms, food at particular times, adults who occupied recognisable roles. Other families had their own difficulties, presumably, but from the outside they appeared to work.

I became good at other people’s houses.

I learnt to observe.

I learnt to adapt quickly.

I learnt when to speak and when not to speak, how much noise was acceptable, what version of myself was wanted.

I could be charming.

Polite.

Funny.

A good boy.

I could read a room.

Then I would go home.

Things became more difficult there.

Perhaps that was one of my first educations in division: the self that functioned beautifully elsewhere and the self that became angry, frightened, demanding or impossible at home.

I did not have words for any of this. I just knew that other people’s houses often felt easier.

Then we left Lewes.

I think it was May. I know it was 1977. I remember the FA Cup Final.

We arrived near the end of a week and started a new school on the Monday. There were only a few weeks left until the summer holidays.

It felt like years.

The school was enormous to me.

And noisy.

I remember almost nothing of the ordinary business of school. I do not remember lunch. I do not remember what we studied. I do not remember forming friendships that mattered.

I remember fear.

One day I cried in class.

The teacher went to find my brother.

He came and looked after me. Maybe even a little hug, which was not his style at all.

Our mother was somewhere else.

That is the part I remember.

Nick came.

That mattered more than I knew.

He was my brother, but much of the time he was also my parent.

I do not mean that sentimentally. I mean it quite literally.

He was the one who came.

The one who knew where I was.

The one who knew what state I was in.

The one who, again and again, somehow became responsible for what happened next.

He was a child too.

That is the part that catches me now.

I do not know what it cost him to be made responsible for me.

I suspect a great deal.

I resented him for it then.

I resented being watched.

I resented being looked after.

I resented his authority because he was not supposed to have authority over me.

I resented needing him.

Perhaps most of all, I resented that he knew I needed him.

Becoming independent meant getting away not only from the things that frightened me, but also from the person who had helped me survive them.

That is a hard thing to admit.

I have always needed him.

I have always valued him.

I love my brother more than I can say.

I resent writing that sentence because it feels almost indecently exposed.

But it is true.

We survived together.

And for that I will always be grateful.

I do not know if I would have survived some of those years without him.

I hope he does not blush if he reads this.

He probably will.

We lived in a small anonymous house near the M1.

There was paint everywhere.

Fresh paint.

The smell is still capable of stopping me nearly fifty years later.

Paralysing me.

A particular paint smell and the years disappear.

And then the waiting.

Above everything, the waiting.

Waiting for our mother to come home.

Waiting for evening.

She often came home tired.

Grief. Anger. Fear. Desire. Guilt perhaps. Exhaustion. I cannot know.

I was nine.

There were no names for these things that helped.

There was only the sensation that something enormous was happening and that the adults who were supposed to know what happened next did not know either.

The difficulty was not simply that our mother was absent. It was that she was present and absent at the same time.

She loved us.

She could be warm.

She could draw us close.

And then she was unavailable.

After my father had left two years earlier, she had allowed us into her bed. For a child that meant something uncomplicated: warmth, continuity, safety.

Whatever else had broken, this remained.

Except it did not remain.

Even the warmth was unstable.

The person who was supposed to absorb our fear sometimes seemed to need us to absorb hers.

Milton Keynes intensified all of it.

There were no Rawsons or Gort to outsource the burden to.

There was only terror.

Then the school term ended and we returned to Lewes.

We had left with goodbyes.

Good luck.

Then, a few weeks later, we were back.

People seemed confused.

What are you doing here? Friends demanded the sweets they had given me as departing gifts be handed back.

Soon afterwards our mother told us she was going to remarry and move to London.

I remember Spences Lane. Crying again.

Then she went away again.

There were telephone calls, postcards, adult tears and adult explanations. I cannot reconstruct every sequence accurately now and I do not want to pretend that I can.

That is partly what this is about.

The period survives not as a reliable transcript but as a state.

Waiting.

Not knowing.

Adults appearing and disappearing.

Promises and arrangements that remained provisional until suddenly they were facts.

We spent the summer with our father.

Later we were taken to a lawyer near Liverpool Street and asked which parent we wanted to live with.

We chose our father.

We chose Lewes.

It was described as a choice.

It wasn’t.

Afterwards we saw our mother every two weeks.

Every other Sunday became something I dreaded. Victoria Station, tears and the same wound again torn open.

The crisis had supposedly finished.

But it had not finished at all.

She had gone and not gone. The attachment remained alive. The loss remained incomplete.

There was never a clean event around which grief could organise itself.

No death.

No funeral.

No final goodbye.

Just another Sunday.

Another telephone call.

Another departure.

Another return.

For years afterwards I had versions of the same nightmare.

A dark room.

No visible exit.

I would move around the walls trying to find the door.

Sometimes I sleepwalked.

The terror was not merely that I was inside, it was that I knew there ought to be a way out.

I simply could not find it.

I hesitate over writing this because my mother is still alive and I love her.

I do not want this to become an indictment of her.

I do not want strangers deciding whether she was a good or bad mother.

She was a person trying to survive a life of her own, with desires, fear, grief and contradictions I could not possibly have understood.

This is not a prosecution.

It is an attempt at description.

For almost a year now I have been trying to crawl out of depression.

I initially treated it as an accumulation of circumstances.

Divorce.

Money.

Work.

House.

Age.

Loneliness.

Children.

England.

Poland.

A relationship that existed mostly in the space between presence and absence.

The life I had left and the life I had not yet built.

All of those things were real.

But somewhere during the past year depression began to look less like a thing that had happened to me and more like something I was continually reproducing.

The same room.

The same wall.

The same search.

If I could get one more message.

One more explanation.

One more conversation.

One more piece of reassurance.

One more correct interpretation.

Then perhaps the room would open.

Instead I kept walking around it.

And I kept feeding the thing that kept me there.

That is the difficult bit.

Depression is not simply something I did to myself.  But my depression had acquired habits.

Alcohol was one of them.

Certain relationships were another.

Waiting was another.

Interpretation itself could become another.

The monster was fed partly by the person who wanted most desperately to escape it.

Me.

That is where Lacan became useful. He offered a way of thinking about why I kept demanding certainty from things and people that could never provide it.

Why recognition so easily becomes misrecognition.

Why another person can be turned into the answer to a question they never agreed to answer.

Why absence can intensify desire rather than diminish it.

Why knowledge can coexist perfectly well with repetition.

I know and I still do it.

That sentence became central to an article I am now writing for a psychoanalytic journal.

It emerged from something peculiar that happened over the last two years.

I wrote two books at the same time.

One was about a political border: Poland, Belarus, migration, walls, exclusion, the fantasy that a line can finally separate inside from outside.

The other was autobiographical: divorce, desire, depression, bodily collapse, attachment, repetition, all the things that kept leaking through the edges of the first book.

For a long time I treated them as different books.

Now they have started speaking to one another.

The political book has borders.

The autobiographical book has rooms.

The political book has fences, forests, exclusion zones, bodies moved from one side to another.

The autobiographical book has beds, doors, houses, lovers, departures, the child searching for somewhere secure.

Both contain the fantasy that if the boundary could only be drawn clearly enough, everything would finally make sense.

It does not.

That is perhaps the synthesis, if there is one.

Not that the divided self has finally become whole.

But the parts are at least in the same room now.

The political writer.

The autobiographical writer.

The frightened child.

The competent adult.

The observer who learnt in other people’s houses how to behave.

The boy who came home and could not.

They no longer need separate books to speak.

I have also found myself going into churches again.

Church provides something different.

Silence and a place to sit.

I can sit there without demanding an answer.

That feels new.

So does sobriety.

Alcohol was one of the most reliable certainties I had.

I prefer grief sober.

It hurts more accurately.

My own books have spent years telling me things I ignored.

That is where I think the past twelve months have brought me.

Not to mastery.

Certainly not to closure.

I have tried both.

I have analysed relationships until the analysis itself became another relationship.

Understanding does not undo any of it.

But something has changed.

I no longer need the past to be undone and that may be what crawling out of depression has meant for me.

Not finding the door, but stopping the frantic search for a door.

And, more painfully, stopping the behaviours that recreate the room because the room is familiar.

Stop feeding it.

Stop waiting in it.

The monster does not die because I have finally understood the monster.

It weakens because I stop feeding it.