La Folie à deux - Part One Chapter One Chapter 1. Waltzin’ Black He couldn’t sleep. He lay there wondering if there was a golden hour in which this simplest and hardest of acts could be accomplished with some ease. Either way he’d missed it. The tiredness had once again translated into an uneasy laziness, packaged up with guilt at another wasted evening. Remorse at all the little beginnings he could have made, all the opportunities to become something better than this, wasted. Escape velocity that was the name of the game. The dull, crushing pieces of his #life made that harder and harder to reach. As he lay thinking how he must have missed the boat again, he listened to the frantic scratching noises of the cat as she dashed about the room after enemies and prey both real and imagined. He knew in a moment she would sit by the side of the bed and watch him blankly and he’d fall deeper into the non-sleep, non-wakefulness fugue. The sheets smelt stale. He wondered if there was a reason why he was so bad at the basic acts of #life maintenance. If there was some deep, underlying flaw in his character that was the reason he was terrible at paying bills, even opening the letters containing the bills, doing the washing up at a respectable interval, making appointments with dentists, he tongued the little gulf where his temporary filling had fallen out months before as he thought this. Was it to do with some impractical filling system in his head that he had little to no control over? Some things, which he was sure other people regarded as of primary importance, just couldn’t be relied on to remain in his focus for any length of time. Often once they had fallen off the radar, so to speak, even ‘red’ letters failed to reignite his interest. What did his filling system regard as important then? Probably endless cycles of mundane introspection destined to repeat but not to prompt any action. The best of us lack all conviction. He vaguely remembered something he’d read about false enlightenment or some other existential concept. Something about the self endlessly analysing itself for all eternity upon reaching the barrier between Me and Not Me. A fractal of the mind, a thought exercise in futility. He wished he could remember more details and as he did so began to worry that the bulk of his thoughts went something like this, half remembered, semi-truths, giving him a false sense of wisdom that lacked any solid quality. He realised he was once again living through one of those chapters of his #life where most experience was internal. A broad malaise with no discernable centre, no core issue to be fought and overcome, had once again settled over him. He supposed it could be his job, the kind of profession he’d fallen into as a younger man as it had allowed him a certain flexibility. The ability to just get up and leave had always appealed, although to be fair he would often find excuses to stay in increasingly intolerable circumstances. He’d been raised a devout Socialist. Although raised suggested a certain lack of personal responsibility he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. He had been lucky enough to have parents that had given him the intellectual tools to make his own moral and personal judgements and so he supposed his personal beliefs, his framework of understanding the world, was as much his fault as theirs. What he knew in his heart of hearts was right and noble and true had begun to feel increasingly distant though. It wasn’t that he’d begun to question or turn his back on those things, not at all, it was more a growing sensation that he was drifting away from them, as though he was moving further and further from the light, sinking into some murky depth to what end and for what purpose he did not know. He’d always felt that the way he made his money was a betrayal. He never even made that much money which in a way made the betrayal deeper. He’d sold out for pennies. He’d worked as a salesman before even going to university. It was easy enough for him to fall into a cycle of such jobs, the decor might be different but they all boiled down to the same thing. Making imaginary wheels turn imaginary wheels. A prospect had said to him once “If something needs to be sold it can’t be any good. Anything good sells itself.” He was right. Was that why they sold the world to you so damn hard every damn day? The self made man. Consumer paradise. Just one more item, just one more purchase and you will be happy, just one more product and you’ll be content. The clockwork agony of bliss. But then, he thought, he wasn’t much better at the simple things when he was out of work. He’d spent a sizeable chunk of his earlier twenties on the dole. He’d tell women he’d meet he was an out of work actor, there was a dirty kind of glamour to that kind of poverty. The truth was he’d always felt he’d been raised to fight in battles already lost and so he’d struggled to find a point in it all. Idealism always leaves the door open for Nihilism. Drugs had helped for a while, he’d quite by chance fallen in with a clique of like minded, dilettantes he supposed, the drugs had been the common thread that held them together. When inevitably the group had scattered in the wind he’d gradually realised that the drugs weren’t really the same without his comrades and so he lost them also. He realised as the familiar train of thought went through his head that he was probably in the shallow end of sleep now. Melancholy reflection would inevitably be followed by flashes of petty little guilts and petty little shames, the memories themselves insignificant and not even that shocking except for their vividness. Lies he’d told, people he’d treated badly, things left unsaid. Thankfully these little sucker punches from his subconscious where getting fewer and further between as he got older. On reflection he wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad thing. Did this happen to everyone? Was part of getting comfortable in your own skin letting go, without even really thinking about it, of the nasty bits of baggage you’d accumulated. Or did he just care less and less as time went on? Was that why he never fell for anyone anymore? Not like he had as a younger man, but then even that always tended to accumulate yet more dross anyway. Maybe it was just a survival mechanism. Maybe you could only endure so much hurt before it stopped mattering. He realised this was the same theory he had about Pills. He’d decided that everyone had their own secret limit to the number you could take before they just stopped working like they had. You burned out on joy just as easy as you burned out on misery, maybe easier. What did that leave though? He opened his eyes. There she was. Staring at him as predicted. Soon she’d come and sit on top of the duvet on his feet unless she was sulking about something again in which case she would spend the night at the top of the stairs. Sometimes when unusual difficult to place noises woke him she’d be at the top of the stairs above his bed looking startled at things only she could see. He didn’t like that, the embarrassing fear of the unknown. He realised he’d better turn the lamp off and get serious about the sleep that may or may not come. If you don’t know honey, honey then you don’t. The words drifted through his head as he got comfortable. He was thinking about her now. Better not dwell, he thought, some wounds heal best in the dark. He tried to convince himself that he could stomach another day of drudgery, tried to tell himself that tomorrow would be better and brighter, that he would accomplish more in the scattered hours of freedom he had than he had in the evening just past. What did he do with all his time? Where did it go? If he parcelled up all the separate elements what would it look like? How would you even begin to express it in an abstract but understandable form. A pie chart of experiences? A graph of emotional states, how would you define the X and the Y? He realised as these vague and half formed ideas swam through his head that he was picturing the street he’d lived on four years ago in a half remembered town far away. Why had his thoughts taken him there? He was somewhere else now anyway, somewhere ethereal, a garden wall in the backstreet of a childhood so far away as to seem alien. You’d need more than an X and a Y axis anyway, sometimes when you were happy you were sad, sometimes there was a certain comfortableness in sadness. What would you do with the information anyway? It would probably just be another string to the bow of neurosis and self doubt. He’d decided about a decade ago that you could only really be truly and deeply, depressed if you actually truly and deeply loved yourself. You had no other frame of reference. It was only the disparity between the happiness you felt you were owed and what you had that caused any kind of ongoing bleakness. He’d decided once you ‘got over yourself’ you could get on with being basically ok. It was this kind of glib logic which had at one time given him a grim sort of comfort that if he thought about too closely he realised was running out of steam. He felt the solid and reliable weight of the cat as she hopped onto the bed and made her way to her usual place on his feet. Casual grace mixed with an earthy ungainliness. He was glad she hadn’t decided to bite his toes. Friends were often alarmed at the sudden and unpredictable switch between tenderness and violence she often demonstrated. He worried that maybe he hadn’t raised her properly. He hoped she was ok. Then he felt foolish for thinking like that at all. There was a dull far of drone outside, probably a plane. He always hoped that the familiar noise would resolve itself into something more exciting, something to violently rip him out of the mundane, a dramatic crash, a planet killing meteorite, the end of the world. It was the same excitement he felt at news of the sabre rattling of World Powers. A submarine sunk of the coast of South Korea, a mysterious rocket launch from the Pacific near California. He was always half hoping for World War Three. He’d once been in a tumultuous relationship with a girl who had frequent nightmares about the end. He never told her that he had similar dreams but regarded them as a rare treat, a blessed release from normalcy. Would it be worth it? If the Seas boiled and the sky fell in, just to be free of council tax, weary commutes and mind numbing soap opera. He thought it probably would. He never told her. Why the need to be similar to the ones we feel close to? Did that need mean all supposed closeness was to be distrusted? Was it always partly an act. He decided he probably didn’t care. He’d stopped trying to be anything but himself a long time ago anyway so the blame would always be elsewhere. He probably didn’t care. He wasn’t comfortable facing this way, he would have to turn onto his other side and risk upsetting the cat. He occasionally promised himself he would sleep on his back so that she could lie on his front. It was with some sadness that he realised he never remembered to do this. How many other little acts of kindness did he forget to do? He realised that he was starting to worry about whether he was a good man or not. Long dark nights of the soul rarely resulted in anything but tiredness the next day. He longed for some kind of hard earned revelation but it never came, just the usual inane chatter and self doubt, he wondered if the world was set up deliberately to thwart people like him, then decided this wasn’t only paranoid but insanely vain. He thought about sex instead. He thought briefly about masturbating but then decided he was too tired and remembered he needed to turn onto his other side. The cat fidgeted and resettled once he was facing the opposite side of the bed, unexplored and cool areas of the pillow secured firmly under his cheek. “Goodnight Kidda” he half whispered as he reached up for the lamp above. He sensed, rather than heard her yawn in reply. The unidentifiable clicking noise started up in the next room. That meant it was close to midnight. Why did he only notice the noise when he was trying to sleep? The familiar dread crept over him. He knew it was probably just the boiler, fuck knows it was unreliable enough, but there was something out of place about it that made him uneasy all the same. The house could be creepy sometimes. Things had happened there that he preferred not to think about at times like this but on occasion unavoidable, traitorous thoughts crept in, the uncomfortable sensation that you were alone and not at the same time. He gladly admitted to himself that the presence of the cat was a comfort to him at times like this. In fact he’d reassure her knowing full well he was reassuring himself. When she would suddenly become startled at some invisible presence he would put one hand softly on her back and say “Don’t worry, nothing bad’s going to happen to you, cos I’m here.” Once he’d paused and added “Bad stuff’ll happen to me because your here, but there you go.” She could be a terror at times, numerous little scratches attested to this. It had got quieter now, winding down to almost a chirrup. At its loudest thoughts of something turning a key in a creaking lock in a dark corner flooded his head or a horrible, crooked thing turning a crank. Were these irrational thoughts the twin sibling to his excitement at the thought of apocalypse? Part and parcel of the same morbid wish for violent change, any change at any cost, just for something different. Freedom and fear at the same address. He thought they most likely were. It was little comfort and it still didn’t spare him sleepless nights or annoyance at his own foolishness in the cold, weary light of day. Crrrrrr-ik-ik-ik-ik-ik-ik-ik-ik-ik. A shudder went through him, distinct and primal. He tried to visualise a simple dial turning and not the all too easy to imagine finger, stripped to the bone methodically running down an exposed spine. He thought about reaching up and turning the lamp on. No, don’t give in to an overactive imagination, at least not just yet. Mundane thoughts, usually regarded as the enemy, now desperate allies. Shopping lists, laundry to be done, should he go back to having a skin-head, what should he have for lunch tomorrow? Silence. The kind that suddenly invades a room. He realised even his thoughts were quiet. He felt an unpleasant anticipation now, would he now drift off or would the alarming sounds begin again? The cat stirred, stretched and settled. It was a sweet distraction. The room began to feel oppressive now, too many corners out of sight, the little light bleeding through the below ground level windows spilling onto crumpled clothes and scattered papers and distorting them into unfamiliar shapes. A coat on the back of a chair became an elongated man on his knees, light glinting off a corkscrew became eyes in the dark, wires hanging from a bookshelf a mournful mouth. The darkness itself, more than just an absence of light, seemed to have taken on a character and spirit of its own. It clung about the room like some parasitic plant clinging to a ruin. His normal, plain everyday cell transformed into some faded, baroque monstrosity. That damned clicking sound. It lurched into #life again. It wasn’t just the timbre and resonance of it, unpleasant though they were, the rhythm was playing its part also. Spurring his quietly beating chest on into a spiralling ecstasy of anxious dread. Stop being an idiot. He thought desperately to himself. I can’t face another day of nervous exhaustion and then a wasted evening, his rational self pleaded. Stop being an idiot. Alone in the dark his rational voice was very quiet indeed. Silence. He wondered how long this cycle would go on. Fear of that horrible mechanism followed by the tense penetrating emptiness it left. More than likely long enough he would wake up miserable. He’d wake and take slow long drags on a cigarette rolled half asleep, try to work up the willpower to go upstairs, to shower, to feed the cat, put on his shirt and tie, arrange his hair, walking the same old route to the same old city to the same old office with the same old desk, make the same old pleasantries, feel the same old alienation, scream the same old scream all the day through at the indignity, the pointlessness and waste of a human #life of it all, silently, hollowly, inside the same old head where no one would ever hear it. He started to feel angry now. Not the hot instant anger that rose up uncontrollably when in danger or when deeply hurt or insulted, the slow warm anger, like metal twisted too far. The kind that never really went away, the kind you built up over a #life time. He tried not to analyse it too closely in case he lost the sensation, he found it preferable to the shameful fear of the dark. He understood anger better than that invasive and unwelcome condition that he’d allowed to overcome him. It was a familiar, desperate friend. They’d been thrown together often enough. The sound of drunken people making their way home outside suddenly brought the real world back into the room. It was almost as effective as turning the light on. He couldn’t make out the words. The conversation, such as it was, was somewhere between revelry and an argument. Suddenly he thought of her again, the latest ‘one that got away’. The way she would sometimes turn on him unexpectedly after a night out. He never could understand where that came from. The betrayal of the unexpected animosity had always angered him in a way that filled him with shame in the days after. The sounds of the couple outside drifted away into the background hum of the city. He suddenly noticed a texture to the silence that he desperately hoped would not, but knew undoubtedly would, mean the return of his invisible tormentor. Kh kk kkk kki ki ki ki ki ki The air felt cloying on the part of his arm, between two pillows, exposed to it. He wanted to kick his right leg free of the duvet and let it rest outside, hoping the cooler air would let him relax. He didn’t dare. His thoughts found themselves uncomfortably contemplating the times he would wake up paralysed and unable to move in the middle of the night. The excruciating paranoia of being trapped in a body turned against you, much like his mind had now, the pure giddy terror. He would struggle in silent agony until through sheer will some spastic motion would break the spell. Please don’t let that happen tonight. He wondered what the time was and then kicked himself for thinking the thought so clearly. That would never do any good. By knowing the time he would know the borders and boundaries of his failure to sleep. He hoped it wasn’t approaching three. Three was a bad time. The city would be quieter then, it’s reassuring presence distant somehow. Three was a bad time. He wasn’t sure when he’d first identified 3.00 AM as an unpleasant hour, even in a house full of occupied rooms you could still feel terribly alone at that hour, isolated in the dark. For someone so continually frustrated at other people he thought it a cruel twist of design that solitude could at times be so unbearable. Just another unpleasant paradox he supposed. He hadn’t been at all surprised to learn that Three was the so called witching hour, it seemed palpably obvious to him. Where did this flirtation with mysticism come from he wondered? He was a rational materialist, he knew it was ingrained in him, he would gleefully attack, verbally, anyone with any kind of Religious conviction that he met. He got a stubborn trill of pride at the reactions of superficial Christians when he explained to them the cruelty and horror of their Holy book, which they invariably hadn’t read. “Your God is a cunt.” He would say with a shocking certainty. That would be the bombshell he would drop only after making absolutely sure that the victim knew he wasn’t just saying it for effect, that this was a position born of reasoning and logic, solid and real and deeper than some childish belief in an imaginary friend. And yet. Why this fear of dark corners and unnerving sounds in the night? Was this all the product of an unhealthy mind? Was he sick in some way? Or was this all some throwback to an ancestral past where fear of an unknown and fundamentally unknowable world was a sensible survival strategy. When huddling together against a night full of fangs and claws and poison and death was the only answer? He wondered if this was how everyone else felt at times like this but just got on with things when the dawn came. He realised he could never know. The mind is private, all you have is your own thoughts rattling round and interpreting the signals received from the outside. The fangs, the claws, the poison, the shame, the hurt, the betrayal it was all you. The dark you were alone in was the dark of your mind. That indefinable thing that was you, that dialogue with and against itself, clinging to and railing against, in the cave of the soul. Anything but solitude an illusion, always and forever alone in the night. Fucking great he thought. He realised the sound had stopped. A light rain began to pitter-pat against his window. He sighed. He was probably taking everything too seriously. Things would work out. He had a knack for landing on his feet. He must have hit rock bottom now so he could begin his dreamy ascent back up, the inevitable fall that would follow far off and unreal. Yes everything would be ok. There was solace in rain, so much easier to drift off to the sound of its gentle beating, tiny little liquid hammers knocking out the ugly, sharp angles of his #life and weathering his thoughts down to a pleasing gentle landscape. There would be no shallow dreams tonight as his mind wandered into sleep, just a slow calm unwinding of his thoughts, processes slowing down, tense muscles relaxing, like a waterlogged sand castle losing its shape and slumping down into the beach, a barely perceptible waltz into blessed, rejuvenating oblivion. When he was in a deep slumber the cat lifted her head, stretched out her feet and quietly hopped off the bed, she carefully plodded into the little room adjacent and lapped at the cool water of her bowl. She looked back once at John, as she jumped upstairs one step at a time, his crooked sleeping limbs limp with unconsciousness. ** He was awake. It wasn’t the sudden wakefulness in the response to some stimulus, but it wasn’t the slow walk back to the world either. He had simply blossomed into near full awareness. He had turned back over again in his sleep. He knew he wasn’t fully awake but he was far from asleep, his focus wasn’t entirely on his thoughts as it would be if that were the case. What had woken him? He opened one eye, his other obscured by pillow remained shut. He realised his head was at a strange angle, not turned in towards the mattress as was usually the case but leaning back slightly, the unfamiliar geometry of this confused him, it was quite dark but he could make out the corner of the ceiling, the top of the bookshelf. He was calm as he almost dispassionately reviewed his perceptions. What had woken him? There was no sound in the room. He slowly looked to his left to bring in more of the room, the wardrobe at a steep angle from his position. Movement. His thoughts stopped instantly. His thought process entirely derailed by what he saw. A void in cognition. A tiny sliver of abyss. Unclear but there all the same, a figure, ridiculously, cartoonishly thin, no discernable head to speak of, side on at the foot of his bed. Short, maybe four and half feet, for all the world a ghostly oblong, the only distinction between head and torso the barest suggestion of shoulders, facing his mirror. An arm so thin as to be almost transparent, like ones own hand at the start of a Ketamine trip, was reaching out and touching what may have been a bottle of his aftershave. The whole spectre almost an after image, the room too dark to discern colour or detail. Except, Was it now wearing a bowler hat? He tried to shake off the grogginess and turn to see it more clearly, the awkward angle of his body meant he had to lean in the opposite direction away from the form back into his mattress. When he turned back it was gone, the barest suggestion that it had turned towards him as he turned to it. He fell back into his bed, reaching for the lamp almost out of reflex. Staring at the suddenly illuminated spot where, whatever the fuck it was, had been. There wasn’t any fear, no not fear, just shock at the absurdity of it. He had seen it, he wasn’t asleep, he couldn’t have been. But then, he must have been, he briefly thought of rolling a cigarette and then exhaustion landed on him like a heavy wet quilt. His last thoughts as he quickly fell back down into sleep were that it must just be because he was tired and his head was a mess. ** The alarm brought him round slowly, hit and run by love, the first words he heard that day. Morning cigarette, realisation that he was only at the beginning of another long unwelcome day, thoughts of whether he could get away with ringing in sick, numb headed, dry throat, sticky crusted mouth and leathery tongue, he could stay in bed for another half an hour and skip breakfast, check phone for messages and emails, enjoying the warmth of the bed, the cruelty of having to leave it. He didn’t finish the cigarette; unexpected reserves of willpower got him into the shower. Once he was in the shower it was ok, he could pretend to be a normal productive human being then, feed the cat, fresh water in her bowl, give her a fuss at the top of the stairs outside the bathroom, cold kitchen floor, look for keys. By the time he was suited and booted and out the door, he was almost awake. It was cold but not unpleasantly so, almost refreshing, he’d only gone a few steps when he realised his socks had begun to slip into the end of his shoe. He should buy better socks. Happy people probably bought better socks. In fact it was probably a collection of little things like decent sock elastic that made people happy in the first place. No grand complete units of happiness just little mundane things that made #life easier, less of a struggle. Actually he thought happy people probably didn’t give a fuck if their socks slip down into their shoes. He hadn’t thought about the night before. He wasn’t avoiding it, it just hadn’t come to his mind, when he realised this he thought that probably meant it was a dream. If it could be forgotten as easily as one then it must have been. It wasn’t fair that you forgot some dreams. There was one he had desperately tried to cling to as a very young boy. All he could remember of it now was the sorrow of its loss. He took a long pull on his cigarette as he passed the first window of many he would examine himself in casually as he walked to work. He was looking pretty good today. There was always comfort in that. He’d decided a long, long time ago that however shit you felt on the inside you had to make sure you looked as good as you could on the outside. He flicked through his iPod as his cigarette hung from his mouth. Ian Curtis solemnly intoned “Don’t walk away, in silence.” Music was best used as a mood enhancer he thought. If you had to feel something you should feel it as keenly as possible. Live it as deeply as you could with no fear or shame. He marched down the hill as the sun rose weakly above the tree tops. Post-Industrial-Soul-Death here I come. something you should feel it as keenly as possible. Live it as deeply as you could with no fear or shame. He marched down the hill as the sun rose weakly above the tree tops. Post-Industrial-Soul-Death here I come.