A Life Discarded Read online

  The endpapers cracked when I eased them open.

  The writing in the thigh box is also different to that in the earlier books. It’s done in blue-black ink with a medium nib, never biro, and makes me think of escaping maggots. The early diaries from the 1960s are written in ebullient letters. Four words are sometimes all it takes to fill the width of a page. In these modern books ‘I’ crams fourteen words to a line. The height of the letters is the same as the thickness of the pen nib. The shapes of the letters have changed too: ‘h’s are often written with just a vertical line, or (in small, quick words such as ‘that’ and ‘the’) ignored entirely; ‘u’s and the round bit of ‘d’s are as flat as pennies. Everything is wriggly or sat on. But after the initial shock this hand is not too difficult to read.

  If I was “God”, I would

  strike the people all dead.

  Two lines of text can easily be slid into each gap between the printed rulings:

  Peter still risks having a knife stuck right through him;

  and the police coming up here and all that,

  just like with the widow lady.

  And, whereas in the early books the diarist wrote always on or parallel to the line, here he runs at precisely two degrees to the horizontal, suggesting that his arm is constrained, as if by a piece of rope:

  It was in the news that a man has been let out of prison –

  was wrongfully imprisoned since 1975, twenty three years;

  myself been shut up at Peter’s for one year more.

  Yet these diaries are unquestionably by the same person as the ones in the Ribena box. It’s not the handwriting that gives the author away, it’s the sense of urgency. In both cases, the text charges in from a previous book in the top-left-hand corner of the first possible page and, two hundred sheets later, in the last millimetres of the closing blank side, explodes off towards tomorrow. Removal men couldn’t squeeze in more. The luridcoloured modern volumes each contain 150,000 words and cover roughly two months of entries, or 2,500 words a day. The typical English human can write thirty words per minute. Assuming no pauses for thought or to relax hand muscles, this man is therefore spending an average of an hour and twenty-three minutes each day offloading his thoughts onto paper. It is never less than forty minutes. On rare occasions it is as much as three hours.

  There are no crossings-out or hesitations. Once or twice the ink fades abruptly in the middle of a word, in the space of a few letters. But the writer must have spare cartridges close by, because instantly it spurts away again, hauling the day on.

  Life is an emptiness in these late books. All talk about the Great Project is gone. There is no mention of ‘it’. He sees nobody and goes nowhere. ‘I’ describes himself as ‘ruined’, lost’, ‘sacrificed’. There has been a smash of all his hopes. It is not only the man called Peter who is responsible for this catastrophe; ‘I’ several times accuses ‘those who are stuffed with sleep’.

  The writer refers to this man called Peter as his ‘gaoler’ – a ‘cruel’ person.

  I just wish I could put my hands round his throat

  and strangle him – throttle him to death.

  We never see Peter. The writer never describes him physically. We smell him. ‘Pongy Peter’, ‘I’ labels him; ‘Stinky Peter’. Occasionally, particularly at night, we hear him. His footsteps creak along the corridor below; there is a rattle at the rear of the house and a rush of water: he has gone to the toilet.

  It is still a riddle to me, how all the stink of his wicklery [going to the toilet] comes up to the back landing when he has a crap – if it comes up through the drainpipes or the ventilators or what. Or if the smell seeps out of his bedroom from the pipe to his washbasin.

  Occasionally, Peter creeps into ‘I’s room. What happens next is hardly believable. He steals ‘I’s belongings! Books, valuable letters, volumes of the diaries themselves. He sets light to his haul in the garden.

  I think Peter must have burnt all E’s photos, and a lot of the music – took advantage when I was in hospital.

  What is going on? Why doesn’t the diarist stop this hateful behaviour?

  Peter is a detestable man.

  He seems indestructible, like Nelson Mandela.

  4 Flatface

  May just look back on a life of struggle, at the age of sixty or so – and feel deeply sad, because in spite of various talents, of great beauty, have come to nothing.

  Aged twenty-one

  Six of the diaries in the thigh box are ‘Max-Val’ exercise books, stapled along the centre-fold, with paper made out of oat biscuits. The colour of these dreary little volumes is washed-out, Latin-class blue. Printed on the back of each is a set of Arithmetical Tables giving the lengths for cloth measure (2½ inches = 1 nail), the amount of grass needed to make up a ‘Truss’ (56lbs of Old Hay; 60lbs, New Hay; 36lbs of Straw), and, my favourite, ‘Apothecaries’ Weight for mixing medicines’: 20 grains = 1 Scruple.

  Inside the books is a rapidly hand-drawn cartoon strip in blue ink. There are between two and eight frames per page. Nowadays it would be called a graphic novel. The scenes are of different sizes and always boxed in. The figures in the story are dressed in cloaks and repeatedly caught in moments of persecution or shock. The faces are distorted. But what’s going on is anybody’s guess.

  The narrative does not progress obviously; it is like a set of flash photographs taken of a troupe of melodramatic puppets. The only constant figure is an androgynous and rhinoceros-nosed face:

  This face is always viewed from the left, angled down, just off the silhouette. It appears in each frame of the cartoon – a total of well over two thousand times – and always produced in the same way, with nine fundamental lines: one for the forehead, two for the big nose, another to make the priggish upper lip, the chin and jaw are produced by a single wiggle that looks vaguely Arabic, a down stroke for a dimple and three quick movements to make up the eye. Hair (sometimes slicked, sometimes dishevelled) is a rush of slashes or curls on top. Most of the time this wig-wearing flatfish of a face doesn’t reflect much. It appears to be a force of creamy benignity. At its most irritating it represents poetic suffering. Sometimes it has a body coming off it, sometimes not. It is repeated so often that you begin to feel ill at the sight of the thing.

  The flatface’s name is (usually) Clarence. It can also be called Rhubarb or Porbarb or John.

  Sometimes he’s in prison:

  with his two cellmates, the ‘Keeper’, who has a jaw like a casserole pot …

  … and a rubber-faced monstrosity called Worful:

  ‘Clarence’ Flatface lives in the past. Sometimes he’s out of clink and down the tavern, being asked difficult maths questions …

  “What’s two and two?”

  … that he struggles to answer:

  At other times, as ‘John’, Flatface is living at the time the cartoon is being drawn, in the early 1960s. In these contemporary frames ‘John’ might be lying in a fancy deckchair, with a Martini:

  “I will have zis deckchair, & none uzzer” raged Irwin.

  “Tomorrow, tomorrow!” was the carefree reply.

  How did he get into this chair? Why is Irwin (who turns out to be Flatface’s brother) speaking in a German accent? What are those two people up in the air doing – planting carrots? Since when did deckchairs have foot canopies?

  Once, as ‘Clarence’, Flatface becomes a king …

  … which makes him grumpy.

  Another time, Flatface’s days appear to be numbered:

  This story never settles down – except for Flatface’s eternal presence. Every fifteen or twenty pages the strip is abruptly cut off and a whole side is given over to this disturbing profile:

  Relieved, the writer then picks up the story again and presses on.

  This isn’t a cartoon strip, it’s a set of narrative false starts ‘tethered by a face. But whose face? Not ‘I’s own, surely. A person this self-obsessed would want to explore his features, not freeze them. This fac
e is a symbol for someone or something. Give it a few more years and it will evolve into a pictogram and join the Chinese alphabet.

  There is only one occasion on which ‘I’ does not limit himself to the nine essential lines and allows Clarence to look at the reader full on. To emphasise the horror of the revelation, it is also the only time ‘I’ uses colour:

  5 The Torso box

  Got two obsessions – that I’m going to be an author; and that I’m going to choke.

  Aged twenty-one

  In 2005, I left Cambridge and rented a shooting lodge in Suffolk, and the diaries became a makeshift boot stand. In 2006, my girlfriend Flora and I went to London to house-sit for a pianist. The torso-sized printer box became a cocktail table; the box the size of a thigh propped up a chair; the Ribena crate, too wonky to be of any use, got kicked under the Steinway.

  In 2007, Dido was told she had neuroendocrine cancer of the pancreas. In 2009, that it had spread.

  I had known Dido for twenty-five years. When I first met her my father was dying – she saw me through that; I was twenty-one and idiotic. She was twelve years older. She grew me up, taught me how to think, how to write, how to be.

  Pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer is the same disease that killed Steve Jobs, and is why he was able to develop the iPad and the iPhone. If he’d had ordinary pancreatic cancer (as almost all newspapers insisted on giving him at the time) he’d have been dead before the MacBook. Neuroendocrine tumours can be very slow-growing. Some people live the rest of their natural life with them, as long as they do not spread.

  Dido’s tumour had seeded over her liver. Its spores had crowded into her blood.

  The consultant at Dido’s local hospital was contemptible: bullying and scary. I arranged for Dido’s case to be moved to the Royal Free in London, a European Centre of Excellence for neuroendocrine cancer. There was a scan due in six weeks’ time; I had to be on the phone every morning to reduce that to ten days. The NHS is a wonderful organisation as long as you learn how to kick it. There were anti-cancer diets to be researched, exercise programmes to be uncovered, high-absorption liposomal curcumin to be ordered in from California at $95 a 100ml bottle (produced by a man who, I subsequently discovered, was being pursued on a manslaughter charge), electrically-operated pomegranate squeezers to be shipped from Istanbul, a remarkable peer-reviewed but forgotten therapeutic from Sweden to be investigated. In fact, why are we still talking? I had to get on …

  During the five years Flora and I stayed in the London house, I’d occasionally catch sight of the boxes and remember their contents with dislike: that terrible face; those tiny scuttling letters; ‘I’s sense of destiny and devotion to an unknown, perhaps unknowable project of vital human importance followed by the catastrophic failure of all his plans. Despite the glistening orange and shocking pea-green covers of some of the books, I thought of them as pallid objects. I had the same feeling towards the diaries in these boxes as I do towards the ghosts in an M.R. James story: thrilling, but forces of absence; not so much evil as empty of good. They marked a time when Dido was well. They emphasised that she might be dying. They were hateful.

  Occasionally, I’d creep under the Steinway and peer inside the Ribena crate. But I didn’t study the books. I reversed back out between the legs of the piano with the slightly appalled sensation that I was escaping quicksand.

  Flora and I moved again in 2011, to Great Snoring in Norfolk, by which time I had forgotten about the diaries. They were just three more boxes among the thousand or so that I drag about like Marley’s chain every time I change landlords. I shoved them into the back of the van with the rest, yanked them out among the chickens and runner ducks at the other end and dropped them into a storeroom.

  At which point the Ribena box burst open and twenty-seven diaries spilled out.

  One of them featured a bloodbath.

  The Collins ‘Three Day Royal Diary’ is greeny-blue, not much bigger than a jacket potato and caved in halfway up the spine, as if it has been crushed by a spasmodic grip. I tested it, waving it around the chicken yard in Great Snoring with various holds of my own. Only a left hand could make this type of depression. It was a gesture I imagined an outdoor preacher would use as he clutched the Gospels and harangued cowboys.

  An inside page printed with useful information calls New Year’s Day ‘the Circumcision’.

  Once again, the diarist’s handwriting races into the book many sides before the official diary section starts:

  November 19th, Saturday

  Spent most of today painting. Perhaps it is the best I’ve

  ever done, more like Van Gogh than anything else.

  and 126 pages and four weeks later shoots out from the bottom of the last possible page, with the words ‘watched her go with foreboding …’

  In between, ‘I’ describes a stabbing.

  Then,

  to my horror, – a sudden burst

  of blood rushed from my body

  Ran about, & outside the house

  calling for Nizzy desperately.

  never lost so much [blood] so suddenly before in my life,

  felt terribly afraid.

  Who has stabbed him? Why? Who is Nizzy? ‘I’ doesn’t say. Where is he outside? Bleeding on the road? In the garden? I picture him leaping about a rockery as he clutches at his wound. What time is it? It might be first thing in the morning, because ‘I’ reports that he’s in his pyjamas. But then he’s a painter, so it could be any time of day.

  Nothing about the methodical, evenly-spaced way ‘I’ forms his letters changes during this dramatic episode. If anything, a calm comes over the text. ‘I’ calculates that he will need a ‘blood transfusion’ and thoughtfully returns to the house to call his doctor so the hospital will be prepared for his arrival and have the machinery set up. But the sheet of telephone numbers beside the phone is missing – an absence that’s as good as finding the telephone wires have been cut. Weeping ‘with the added frustration’, ‘I’ scrabbles around for the phone list.

  Then, abruptly, the squall ends.

  The bleeding stops. Nizzy comes home and turns out to be his mother. ‘Crying in that uncontrollable way I sometimes have’, he tells her about the blood. Nizzy says he ‘is fussing unnecessarily’.

  Our mystery diarist hasn’t been stabbed, slashed his wrists or fallen out of a window into a greenhouse. He’s suffering ‘because of my sex’.

  The poor man’s got the curse.

  He’s a woman.

  6 A Chapter of curses

  I was born to love and be a woman as well as an artist Really have a very feminine nature, though not all lipsticky and screams.

  Aged twenty-one

  What man hasn’t wanted to gawp around a woman’s thoughts?

  It wasn’t just gloom and convenience that led me back to these books. It was eroticism. I was desperate to look at them again.

  ‘You want to know what I, a woman, think when I’m pacing around on my own?’ the author of the diaries seemed to be saying. ‘Settle back. Listen close. The answer takes 148 books.’

  If I read these pages I would be like Tiresias, the Greek seer who spent seven years as a woman after being bitten by a snake. Asked by Zeus whether women or men enjoyed sex more, Tiresias replied that women got nine times more pleasure, and was promptly blinded by Hera.

  Study these diaries, and I would learn secrets for which it was worth being blinded.

  I pulled the curtains in my study in Great Snoring, shut the door and locked myself in. Where would ‘I’ take me first? The bedroom?

  To my shock she took me to the toilet.

  ‘I’s curse began when she was fourteen, took over her life when she was twenty, at its worst ruined three weeks out of every four (one lost to fear, one to pain, one to exhaustion), and was not considered bad enough to need medical attention.

  Soon the tummy ache came on. It was not as bad as when

  it gets me extremely, but did feel awful; it certainly the


  worst pain to endure that I have experienced. Took pills,

  & knelt on the floor, just living for the pain to go.

  I knew I should take all three boxes back to Cambridge police station and, if they remained unclaimed, after a suitable time have them incinerated. I was a pervert to do anything else. I was not a decent human being. The world has no business to gawp at a woman at a moment like this. The writer was already describing things in a way that makes it clear she never expects or wants anyone else to hear about them, let alone put them in a biography.

  Thrilled, I lit a fire, backed myself onto an armchair and kept reading. I could hardly believe my luck.

  In the early books, ‘I’ talks about her period in the same way that addicts at the homeless hostel where I once worked talked about a hit of heroin. It makes her feel blissful, as you do on a Sunday morning when you open your eyes, see the day has started long ago and slip back into dreams knowing there’s not the slightest need to get up.

  Felt very warm & sleepy – a sort of healthy sleepiness of

  period. In morning, felt everything very beautiful, & that

  I’m beautiful myself. Men seem swerb [delightful].

  She likes to see men weeping in the week before her curse. She pictures them sinking to their knees with griefs that are difficult to soothe. Once, on the bus to her sixth-form college during this pre-curse week, she was distracted by a juicy reverie. She imagined an opera in which a young girl ‘is kept under the domination of her possessive jealous guardian, who has arranged for her to marry a man who is young & handsome but whom she does not love’.

  All the while she was on the bus, the hormonal diarist hungered over this promising situation. She imagined that perhaps the young girl’s guardian employs a painter to do her portrait, and forbids the painter to touch or talk to her. ‘But the enthusiastic painter cannot work in silence for long …’