Tommy Catchup

Apologies for not having written for so long: it’s what comes from now having a full-time girlfriend and, weirdly enough, mostly preferring to talk and spend time with her rather than this computer. Though no doubt writing will prevail. In any case, I thought perhaps time for a brief recap on what I’ve been up to, just so I don’t worry all the fans in Haiti and Botswana any more than I already have.

So, first up, I went to Germany to see Mother Meera, and also for another instalment of iboga – double the dose – which I took my second night there. Weird thing was, nothing much happened, save the vomiting and the dizziness: all a bit of a letdown really. I did have this interesting dream, in which I met with my mother and had this massive realisation that, when I was born, and when she first laid eyes on me, she was afraid of me and that really heavily effected me – but that was just a dream. Plus a sort of weird dawning that all faces are ugly when you get right down to it, so I shouldn’t be so hung up on pretty women, but that was about it. And then I saw Mother Meera for four days, and ate a ton of German bread, and it was all mellow and chill and really rather wonderful.

Except, in the middle of all that, I ran into an old acquaintance of mine who was also there to see Mother. And when I say old acquaintance what I mean is: fling, lover, and maybe even love; that sort of thing. Very nice to see her; very easy and friendly and cool – she’s a jolly sort – but then she told me about this thing that had happened to her a while back and it sort of threw me through a loop. She’d been raped. She’d been raped not long after I’d last been with her. And I don’t know why but I found it almost impossibly hard to bear. I felt a million things. Guilt was one – this weird guilt that I could have maybe done something to prevent it (there were inklings around the time that I could have gone to visit her, she could have come to visit me, the timing would’ve been different, everything would’ve changed, if only we’d been brave enough to say more in our emails than we did…) – and a huge and crushing sense of helplessness, of impotence. And anger, of course, and fury. I couldn’t sleep. I cried in the night. I beseeched Mother and the gods and said, why? Why would You do it to someone so pure, so wonderful and good? You sonofabitch, why? And I dreamed of vengeance and hated men and, for two days, felt absolutely, utterly unable to contemplate the notion of ever having sex again, so disgusted was I by the act, by the thing that was even then between my legs. Men. Fuckers. Animals and monsters. I want to chop off their balls.

My friend, for her part, seemed okay about the whole thing. Time had passed, she’d done her healing, found a new guy to love and, sex-wise, everything was groovy. She said what had happened was so divorced from the act of making love she didn’t even relate the two things. She’d cried her tears and screamed her screams and the whole thing was fading from her system. And yet she wondered why too.

She and I share a common belief: we don’t believe in victims and villains and we believe that we create our own realities, that we attract circumstances and people into our lives for very specific purposes which are all, ultimately, for our own good. Something like this happens, though, and I find it hard to swallow – don’t want to believe it – or, at least, it begins a battle in my mind between the part of me that dwells in the bigger picture of the metaphysical and the eternal and then the here-and-now of the human boy-child that thinks this body is all there is and such a thing as “unfairness” exists. And yet I’ve been so long in that space of knowing and seeing, in the workings of my own life – some of which some might call “traumatic” – that it’s all ultimately good, that we do create the events of our lives, by our being, and that, good or bad, we get what we deserve. The good, though, is so much easier to see and accept – and the bad – and a bad like this – so, so difficult to reconcile with such a blasé sentence as “we get what we deserve”. And even though I’m able to accept and see it in my own life, I still find it heartbreakingly difficult when I try to apply it to the lives of others.

We talked. We walked and talked and we talked everything through. She could see that I was in pain and really struggling with the whole thing – I felt absolutely unable to see anything other than the black cloud I was under – and she wanted to help me through it. What a soul! What a strong, brave soul. She truly had done her work, and now she wanted to help me do mine, even though what I was feeling must have been a fraction of what she had gone through and I felt so stupid for feeling anything at all. I mean, what right did I have? Shouldn’t I have been the strong one, the compassionate, the supportive? But I couldn’t – and that’s all just TV-thinking anyway. I wrestled with it and I realised I just had to be what I was already being and to go with what was there. I have no idea why it affected me so – it’s not the first time that I’ve been in this situation, heard this story – but it is the first time I’ve been so overwhelmed by it, so utterly devastated and touched and lost to the feeling of injustice, to the feeling that I could or even should have done something, that it was somehow wrong. And much as I tried to put it out of my mind, to be light and happy and free – as, somehow, my friend seemed able – there was no way, my mind would clog with thoughts, and I’d become unable to speak, unable to see anything other than that. And then I’d wrestle with it, try to push it away, fail miserably, and start acting all weird, and my friend – my ex – my angel – would gently nudge me and ask me how I was feeling, what I was thinking about, and I knew that it would have to come out.

My mind…curse this mind! Very soon after telling me what had happened she’d said, you can ask me anything you want about it and, I don’t know, it seems to me it was like opening a door, that every foul and stinking question and idea a head can come up with presented itself to me. Usually people don’t want to talk about these things, don’t invite such openness, and my mind finds that easy enough to accept. But to open the gates to curiosity! To say, whatever you’re thinking, tell me – it was too much. Just imagine, for a moment, if you were given that kind of freedom, if you lacked any sort of inhibition whatsoever, what sort of thoughts would come into your head. And come they did. My mind wanted to know and say anything – but me, the Rory that I am, or was, and probably will be – that me was plenty inhibited indeed, and didn’t like the thoughts it was being presented with…

I don’t even know when or how it started – it’s all talked through now, all – thank God – fading into the past. But I guess there were two main strains: one, wonderings on how such a thing could take place, what it would actually look like – you can’t imagine how much I hate myself for even typing that sentence: how much more, then, when I was thinking it in the presence of one who had been through such an ordeal? – and, two, those questions of why? – and the answers that so inevitably followed.

It’s a horrible thing. I would take hours to confess that there was something wrong. And just as long to finally blurt it out. I would say, I know I’m a horrible person and you’re going to hate me for this and I won’t blame you at all – but I also knew if I didn’t say it then we’d probably never say anything again, all sense of connection between us would be lost. These things happen rarely and only with people one has a special connection with – but if you’ve felt that you’ll probably understand what I’m saying. Either that or maybe I am just horrible and mad and screwed-up. And all those things I said as well, as preamble, as procrastination – as a desperate attempt to fend off what was going on in my head. Abject misery. The nature of the thoughts. The contemplation of saying them. The knowledge of what I was inside. A wretch. A despicable man. Absolutely nothing like anyone I knew, anyone I had ever come across, anyone I aspired to be. And yet, where does all that come from anyway? For, in a situation like this, where are we to take our cues? TV shows and books and movies, where strong men suck it up, heroically say ne’er a word about their own feelings and cure all emotional and mental ills with one or two well-placed sentences before all concerned wipe their tears and happily move on to the next scene as though nothing ever happened? Or if not there then perhaps our visions of what wise and saintly persons would do, old calm-faced grandmas smilingly holding the woes of the whole world in their ancient breasts only to flabbergast everybody when the magnitude of all they’ve so patiently carried and dealt with over the decades and years is finally deathbed-revealed? Oh God, I tried so hard to be what I thought I should be – I twisted myself into holes I knew I couldn’t fit and, Lord knows, I self-castigated endlessly for how far short I fell of this vision. Would Joey and Chandler and Ross have been so evil? Why couldn’t I be like them? This mind, this mind, this mind…this mind doesn’t live in a movie, doesn’t live on the pages of some made-up Rita-Sue novel, doesn’t resemble the mind of the arsehole Buddhist monk who skips through parable after proverb astounding and amusing all with his smart-aleck sayings and perfection but who never actually existed. My mind lives here. There is, it appears, no guidebook save the one I’m writing as I go along, and all that trying to follow what I imagine it says in the grand guidebook in the sky only serves to make myself and everyone around me sad.

And so I asked, and I talked, and I beat myself and beat the words out of me and waited for her hate and anger and goodbye and all I got were calm answers and it was discussion much like any other in which someone tells you about an experience they once had (except with less laughter). I sighed and felt good and free afterwards and everything was groovy with her and we returned to our light-hearted and happy ways – and then new thoughts would arise – thoughts to replace those that had revolved and revolved in my head for hours like little demons riding a record-player turntable – and the whole thing would begin again. And these thoughts were worse, I told myself, and these thoughts couldn’t possibly be shared, and I’d push them away and hold them in and slowly, slowly they’d begin to grow and cloud my vision and while my friend laughed or told a story they were all I could hear and once I’d descended deep enough down, and got to the stage of acting all weird and dark, and going beyond even that – to anger, to coldness, to distance – it became apparent that I needed to let them out. On and on, layer upon layer – and always that amazement, that ease, that acceptance and lightness from her when I finally got around to saying it, to sharing, to clearing my thoughts and re-establishing that connection. I write this and I’m so grateful for her, and for her guidance and patience and calm wisdom through the whole process – and yet I’m embarrassed too, for even having been effected so, when still I think I should have been the one that was there for her, that I shouldn’t have let it get to me so…and yet, it did. And that was the reality. And wrong or stupid or self-centred or pig-headed or what I guess I had to accept that. She didn’t mind. She didn’t mind at all. It seems to have brought us closer together, and taught us many things, and I know with absolute certainty that had I been in her position I would have acted in exactly the same way and so why shouldn’t I believe that she would be capable of doing the same?

But, God knows, the number of times when I wished she hadn’t told me. Which is probably very unfair and small-minded of me – the child that wishes only to dwell in innocence and rainbows of puppy-dog light – but that is there too.

Except, right now, it all seems okay. Which I’m guessing, of course, is quite a controversial thing to say.

And: hey! What a woman. I might even be half-tempted to say I missed out there were I not so one-hundred-percent convinced of the utter impracticality of our working together as any sort of long-term romantic unit. But still: a marvel.

So that’s been in my thoughts a lot these last few weeks and I guess it’s taken me this long to figuring out how and if I should say anything about it here. But writing is what I does – writing and living, in the main – and I do seem somehow doomed and blessed to have to write down every single thing that ever happens to me, in one form or another. Which is probably what I’ll spend the rest of my life doing: just living and writing down what happens and leaving it there for the future generations. It’s not a bad lot to have, if it is my lot. It’s not as bad as Jonah’s.

In other news, I won a 100% fees paid bursary to do an MA in Writing at the University of Leeds, which is about the best news I’ve had in a long time. Four thousand, two hundred pounds it’s worth. A 12-month course which just started yesterday. And perhaps it’s my big break and, certainly, it’s the fulfilment of something or other: my formal education, perhaps. My undergraduate tutor pointed me in that direction when I finished my BA in 2006 but I put it off for worry of the cost – ie, tightness – and various other things. Well, the moment I committed to blowing off my tightness and saying, to hell with the money! was the moment the powers that be decided they were going to give it to me for free anyways. Lucky me: I am a lucky chap. And so instead of girlfriend and I jetting off to Mexico for a year of canyon-living loveliness, we’re back instead in the world’s finest large city and I’m once more a student. Went over yesterday, Freshers’ Fair – whatever that is: just an opportunity to collect some free pens (the Lebara one was the best; Virgin the worst) – and there I am, back in the world of incredibly young and excited recently-children, girls who all look the same and boys who…well, I don’t look at the boys. Or I try not to: the whole thing makes me shiver. But, thing is, it don’t touch me, we’re MA, we’re older and more select and we got our own little areas that say “Postgrad” on the door, kettles and sofas and it’s the sixth-form common room all over again, those upper echelons, oh boy…

Nice. Happy. Me. Good.

And now the work begins.

So I guess I’m all caught up. I’ve left London – so long London! I won’t be missing you! – and I’m currently up north in Huddersfield staying with girlfriend’s parents and building them a rather challenging twenty-five metre fence in exchange for bed and board. The fence is a thing of beauty: it’s straight and true and I’ve done a good thing there. And now all we have to do is find our own place to live. Obviously LS4 is the neighbourhood of choice – we’ve been scuppered in one perfect house we found over there – but I do keep getting this strange draw over to South Elmsall; and if Ali finds out today whether she’s landed a job in the practicality-neighbouring – and awesomely-named – Grimethorpe then, weird beyond weird, I reckon we’ll be moving there. Friend’s got a house spare she wants to rent out cheap; I’ve got mad ideas of running for council or for mayor (whichever has the most power) and I do keep banging on about doing something good there, about maybe making it into a book (“One Year in Hell” – the companion piece to my Mexico canyon-dwelling book “One Year in Paradise”) and it really wouldn’t surprise me somehow, Mother Meera’s curious ways and her strange and silent gaze beaming down on us all like a Ray Harryhausen Zeus. Phew! Now that would be weird, and daunting, and mad. Would I really do it? Run for mayor? Try and do something good? That’d be the challenge. But if I didn’t I’d know once and for all that I really am all talk and no trousers: the man who loves the idea but hates the doing, content only to grumble and to dream and then lay himself in bed, as he is now, rather than to put himself out there and get his hands dirty and risk. But we’ve got to do something with this life! I mean, haven’t we got to try?