SUNNY AFTERNOON/BLACK DOG

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Nine in the evening and I am lying in bed watching TV on my laptop in my front room, Isabella sitting beside me in an armchair scoffing a vegan Magnum. The colour and noise of the screen begins to get bigger and harsher, as though someone is turning it up. I start to feel dizzy. My body is becoming hard. I can’t breathe. I yearn to be quiet and still, convinced my blood pressure has shot up.  Urgently, I want a bit of oblivion.

It does come, and I sleep until four. I wake up feeling alone. I listen to the city, there is nothing out there. I hate to do this, but I call again and again for Isabella, who sleeps upstairs in our bedroom. Eventually I hear her footsteps on the floor above.  She comes down to kiss and caress me. I fall back to sleep.

Aging doesn’t suit me and illness neither.

But since I’ve been out of hospital, my mood has been reasonably optimistic. People say I am myself again, almost. I have been working, touring the neighbourhood in my wheelchair, seeing friends most days, giving bollockings cheerfully, and drinking vodka.

But depression is like a switch with me: the world losing colour, all activity a blur without meaning.  

I had more than enough depression in my twenties and thirties. I did too much that was not in my best interest. The wrong people; wrong places. But psychoanalysis kept things moving, allowing me to be productive. Since then, I have been stable, someone capable of enjoying the world, even as it is. But recently the gloom returned.

I’ve reverted, at least a little, to how I felt in hospital, where I was afraid, even terrified at times, of being alone or abandoned. I was desperate for others to alter my mood and create distraction. 

Now, this morning, writing these words in my kitchen with Carlo, I already feel more engaged, jauntier. He and I had been working on another idea for a blog, but last night’s insomnia disturbed me. As I tell him about it, he opens up a new document and begins to write down what I say. The idea for the blog changes. I ask him if what we are doing is interesting, and we talk it through together; what we want to do, what the audience might like this week. He is encouraging and tells me to go further with the improvisation. He wants me to be freer. That’s his job.

When I work with Carlo, my internal editor is dimmed. Before, I wasted time hung up on trivialities; fretting over semi colons. The superego is a crushing machine, rendering you slow and feeling worthless. Freud famously said that the superego dissolves in alcohol. But we have found another way.

I don’t know of any other writers who have actually written word by word, line by line, idea by idea, with another person sitting with them. Since my accident, I’ve produced more writing than before, with no discernible drop-off in quality.  I wonder if this method could work with fiction, and whether two imaginations could collaborate to make anything substantial.

Maybe Mary Shelley and her husband Percy worked in this way on Frankenstein, but I don’t know the details of their partnership. Which one of them did the typing? Did Milton’s daughter interject editorially as her father was dictating, turning writing into conversation?

Carlo sits right in front of me at his computer as I speak, stopping only to feed me water, orange juice and football gossip. He eats continuously. Just this morning; a massive bunch of grapes, cashew nuts, two tangerines, and a Pastel de Nata custard cream, washing everything down with a large cafetiere of coffee. Meanwhile his dog eats my carpet and pisses on the floor.  

While I talk, Carlo glances at his phone every few minutes, and I’ve never understood why or what he’s hoping to see. From time to time, I ask him to put his nose between my legs to check whether I’ve shat myself, but he always refuses.

Nevertheless, the solid and loving presence of another person - of a child who comes to your house voluntarily everyday - is an achievement of my fathering. I have friends who only see their kids at Christmas. I wish I could have been to my dad what Carlo is to me.

Saturday was a hot day, and Kier laid down the ramp so I could go out into my garden. My favourite elder tree, which has been perched at an angle since I moved into this house at the end of the nineties, has, under the deluge of recent rain, snapped and collapsed, and is now splayed horizontal in the middle on the lawn.

I always liked having a garden; before my accident, I would tend to it. Now it is a shambles, the fence broken, the hedges unkempt, everything overrun. The only beautiful thing are the buttercups, which have sprouted through the overgrown grass.

The NHS have delivered a new standing machine to my house, one I used before in hospital. It is pretty cumbersome, and since I live on the downstairs floor – the rest of my home is inaccessible to me – I feel oppressed by the amount of rehab equipment that crowds me.  

Most days, I stand up for at least ten minutes with the help of one of my physios who come six days a week. Standing up, I am supported by a band around my arse and my knees are in a brace. My legs are getting stronger, or so I have been told. My left is “functional” - I can move it, extend it and lift it – the right one is much weaker. I can’t take a step, but I am getting closer. But all this improvement doesn’t mean so much if I can’t use my hands for anything useful, they are still stiff and unmoving.

I have to pay for the physio, the NHS cannot provide it every day, as I need. Without it I would physically deteriorate. One thing I have learned is that an injury to one person requires a whole team of other people to keep them going, in my case, physically and intellectually.

Recently, my novel The Buddha of Suburbia was brilliantly staged by Emma Rice for the Royal Shakespeare company. I enjoyed going to some of the rehearsals in Clapham, but was unable to travel to Stratford to see the actual show. But they did livestream it for me, and I was able to gain an impression of the whole thing. As you can imagine, I couldn’t watch it as any other punter would, but sat through it in a state of intense embarrassment – the story is fictional, but aspects are true – and so I saw my parents, my friends and indeed myself float before my eyes, the past coming to life in song and dance.

Was I humiliating my family by exposing us in this way? I have talked to other writers who have also experienced this, using autobiography as theatrical material. It is one thing to write a novel about your life, and another to see actual actors wearing your clothes, mimicking your expressions and cadence.

My parents are of course dead, and to see them resurrected was moving, disturbing and uncanny. I am thankful they never lived to see me like this, a broken tree.