Could only I see Anna for what she was? Either this was true or others ignored her imperfection. In the final days I spent watching Anna I studied her completely. Such a comprehensive study couldn’t have turned up incorrect results could it? No, I don’t think so. I must believe others overlooked her insanity for their own selfish reasons. So they could ogle and fantasize without guilt. I might say that it was beauty that upturned the morals of Anna’s admirers, which has a comforting poetry, but it wasn’t beauty it was sex and sexual fantasy. Though unfortunately this corrupt passion is natural in all of us, so is repressed but not punished. People are notoriously indulgent of the beautiful and Anna was beautiful, gobsmackingly beautiful in fact. I didn’t mind much that she was allowed to exist as she did. She possessed, after all, a polite and gentle derangement. That which is often labelled as eccentricity because there’s not enough room in the loony bins for the nutters the public don’t fear will defecate on their front lawns or attack their children with meat hooks. Maybe Anna escaped diagnosis hidden behind these more observable lunatics… Still, I knew that she was more unlike in mentality to the general population than any number of shit slingers, kiddy feelers, and arse sniffers that huddle, rotting in maximum security facilities with three feet of steel, mortar and padded lino between them and fresh air. I admit it frustrated me that only I had the vision to truly see anna, but what frustrated me more was that she had effortlessly perfected lunacy while I spent everyday desperately trying to fabricate it. How can you not be frustrated when someone does something so well and so easily while you break your back everyday clawing around for just a taste of their natural talent? She’s dead now, but that’s of little consolation
I was unhappy the day I met Anna. I had no reason to be, but I was. I find it difficult to explain except that one man’s paradise is another’s purgatory and I seemed to be trapped, always, in limbo. It’s all relative. I’ve always thought of relativity as a disappointingly limp theory to govern human behaviour. Not Einstein relativity, but marmite relativity. It basically boils down to an equals sign. Marmite = good to Susan, marmite = bad to Mark. PVC and a paddle = happiness for Gary, PVC and a paddle = unhappiness for Gillian. That’s why people created God to be in charge, he’s more fittingly ostentatious than an equals sign. We don’t like it that every idea is simultaneously absolutely right and absolutely wrong as well as being every shade of indecisiveness in between. Infinity’s both constricting and a headache, that’s what makes God so useful, he’s painlessly black and white.
I had been hunched, reading in a gloomy corner of a bar when Anna glided in. She sat next to me uninvited and smiled. She really was stunning, even I, melancholically drunk, was compelled to stare at her saucer eyed. She sat unabashed by all the inebriated eyes that caressed her long white hair, her almost colourless skin. I really loved her then, before the love got sick with resentment and jealousy. It became a terrible, cuntish, catholic love, but for that first moment it was real. I’m sure of that.
That night I took her to my studio and showed her my paintings, jumbled and stacked among the debris of failed sculptures. Anna happily waltzed through the clutter smelling canvases and squealing in delight at the thick, rubbery acrylic as it oozed out of the paint tubes. She never really looked at the paintings. She looked so clean standing alone between the paint splattered and peeling walls of the studio. I wanted to undress her. I wanted to slide off her white dress and touch and lick every inch of her pale skin. She looked so white, so ethereal that I imagined my tongue might pass right through her. But I didn’t move, instead I narrated from the shadows, leering at her body as I catalogued the paintings she ignored. Suddenly she was bored, she turned to me and kissed me on the cheek and left. I think I knew that night that she was insane, but the idea was hidden like the noise of a ticking clock when you’re falling to sleep. It was muffled by my infatuation. But a clock that seemed silent can very easily become loud enough to send you mad with insomnia.
I had been pretending to be mad for a few years by the time I met Anna. I needed to appear deranged to sell art. I needed to sell art because I was utterly terrified of dying. I’d decided this at the age of sixteen after a bus ran over my father on his way home from work. His funeral was pitiful, a handful of people standing, shivering in the cold, wondering whether there’s enough mince in the fridge at home to make shepherds pie, uncomfortably glancing at watches as my father was winched into the ground by the morbidly slow gravedigger. ‘Not me’ I thought then. Our awareness of our own unavoidable mortality is what separates humans from every other animal on this planet. It made religion, philosophy, art and all of us that our parents moulded with their ideas and beliefs from the day we fell, bloody, out of the womb. Every idea, book, painting, child and God is the legacy of some scared bastard trying to escape death. I accepted my paintings alone weren’t good enough to earn me this diluted immortality. They were badly composed and fairly uninspired by normal standards. But if I were mad? If I were mad they would be transformed into impressionistic masterpieces, documentaries of the world as seen through the eyes of a man differently sighted. I could be a Van Gogh, an Edgar Allen Poe, a John Nash, a mad genius. This is what I foolishly thought anyway. But two things became quickly obvious after I tried to implement my new plan. The first is that feigning lunacy is very tiring and time consuming. I tried to act in a way that would show beyond doubt that I was fantastically mental, but this is difficult when every gut reaction you have to the world is so tediously normal. When faking mental illness you must be constantly guarded against all the social tendencies you have had unfairly drummed into you since birth. The second thing I learnt was that everyday a man plays a part he loses some of himself to it, and since the age of sixteen I had become more and more engrossed in my act. Prophecies are often self-fulfilling and playing a lunatic compels irrationality in the actor who portrays him. I suppose this is why drama school lasts such an apparently superfluous length of time. To train those young men and women against the dangers of being commandeered by ones character. I had benefitted from no such inoculation and found myself drifting further and further into the realms of the cracked and the crazy. This was the beginning of my end. I know that now because I’m sitting writing this in the middle of my end. The end of my end is yet to come. I suppose that will be death although you can never be sure.
As my façade began to take shape I became increasingly jealous of Anna’s poetic and innocent naivety. She had the unblinkered perception possessed usually only by the extremely young and the extremely old, and at both these ages the lack or loss of corruption is lamented as you sit blankly, moaning in your own piss and shit. I had begun to follow her in the weeks after our brief encounter. Hidden or in disguise usually, but I’m sure she knew I was there and seemed happy enough that this lanky and dank man who reeked of meths had taken up stalking her. I admit it was a perversion of the relationship I had dreamt we would have, but it fitted with my adopted character and this somewhat alleviated my guilt about the depravity of my actions. I imagined grabbing her sometimes and screaming ‘I’m not really crazy, not like you! I’m just pretending to be to for my legacy!’ but this would make the whole exercise pointless. Instead I just followed as she drifted through London like a puff of silver smoke, she always wore white summer dresses regardless of the weather.
I sat on a concrete step one afternoon, watching Anna browse the bookstalls that line the South Bank, when I was distracted by the Thames. I started thinking about all those tiny hydrogen and oxygen molecules being buffeted around in the swirling grey water, through the obstacle course of rusting trolleys and dismembered corpses. They would be washed down to the Thames estuary and then out into the channel, eventually old currents would drag them across the ocean to exotic places where they would precipitate down into the rivers of new cities. I would never see these places, I thought, and the experience seemed wasted on atoms. I was angry that these undying particles would live until the earth was sucked into the sun and the universe blinked out of existence just as it had began, but backwards. With a !GNAB. Someone coughed next to me and I looked around. Anna was sharing my concrete step, rocking backwards and forwards on her heels, her hands held tightly behind her back.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ I said, taken aback by her sudden appearance, I hadn’t spoken to her since the day in my studio. She blushed softly.
‘It’s me, Anna,’ she said. I could only nod.
She sat down next to me and stared out at the river. I looked at the arch of her back. I noticed how perfectly curved her spine was. We sat there, still and silent, for a few minutes before she turned to me and began to talk. She never once asked why I’d been following her, she just chatted about everything and nothing, drifting from one subject onto another down a path of thought so wonderfully tangled it was difficult to follow. The wind off the river blew her smell off her skin and up my nose. She smelt like what I’d imagined those fresh, foreign rivers would have smelt like.
‘All the water in that river today won’t be there tomorrow. Tomorrow that’ll be a totally new river.’ She pondered frowning, then turned to me looking for an answer to a question I hadn’t realised she’d asked. I just shrugged dumbly. She smiled and stood up her thin dress hanging down as she was bent over revealing a glimpse of a fleshy round nipple, the colour of eggshell. I clenched my teeth and stared down at my shoes. Then she walked away. Back down the concrete steps and along the South Bank, leaving only her smell lingering somewhere above my tonsils.
I painted for a week after that. I didn’t leave my damp studio once. Just threw all my anger and frustration onto canvas, when I ran out of canvas I painted the walls and the floors and the ceilings. I must have looked hilarious. Running hysterically around that grotty room, flinging pots of Dulux indiscriminately over the walls. By the third day I was that horrible brown you only get when you mix every single good colour together. ‘This is it!’ I thought, ‘This is how art should be made’. I slept hardly at all that week. When I finally passed out I had vivid dreams where I enveloped Anna like one of those giant, sci-fi, green blobs. And every part of her was touching every part of me. Her hair stretched out in a halo inside of me. And each strand of hair was a bright white filament that tickled my liver and kidneys and sent little shocks up my backbone. I woke up on the floor of my studio, only a dirty and ragged blanket pulled over me. I lay there for a while and thought about my dream. I think I knew what it meant, what it meant about me and Anna. I was a sad, childish, whingeing fancier. I was a lip-craver, a leg pursuer, an arse coveter, an arm desirer. I wanted to own her. I didn’t know much about love, but I knew that that wasn’t it. This idea made me stop painting. I left my studio feeling strangely liberated by my own patheticness. I had joined the international army of unrequited fanciers, there’s nothing poetic about that.
I walked to the pub across the road and sat grinning in the corner with a pint of watery lager. The walls were that deep, dingy shade of colour, found apparently only in pubs, that make it impossible to remember if they had been a dark red or a dark green. With my brown skin I was perfectly camouflaged. I could sit in here for weeks, I thought, unnoticed until someone sits on my lap accidently and jumps up with a startled shout when they realise there’s someone there already. I laughed out loud at this idea, provoking some puzzled glances. The TV bolted to the wall fuzzily tannoyed the news headlines across the pub, which was filled with an awkward mix of students and drunks and I giggled at the way they cautiously orbited each other, each party eyeing the other with a mutual distrust. Then I heard the name and turned up to the TV to see the jolty helicopter footage of the body being dragged out of the river. A totally different river to the one we had sat watching a week ago.
- - - - - - - - - -
In many ways I succeeded. It is what I wanted after all. I was sectioned a month after Anna’s body was dredged up from the Thames. I’m now a certified fruitcake, I have the paper work to prove it. I have explained that it was an act, a way to cheat death, but no one listens to a fucking thing you say in here.
It’s very similar to a school really. We’re taught how to be sane by doctors who use the same patronising tone as those bastard teachers. And the slouched medicated patients do a good impression of lazy teenagers, sitting glassy eyed and drooling. There’s mostly no screaming or burly orderlies grasping desperate maniacs like I expected. Just long hallways filled with the shuffling living dead. Erect carcasses waiting to be judged. Those who have been judged already have lost the will to even shuffle. The most frustrating thing about being committed is how the staff at this place treat even the most normal request as if it were a nonsensical rant. I asked yesterday for the heat in my room to be turned down because it was making me sweat buckets during the night. The nurse just looked at me and smiled pityingly as if I had spit on her smock and then screamed out that the Virgin Mary had stolen my testacles. What a joke! As for entertaining yourself there’s not much too do, that’s a problem I suppose. For recreation there are stuffy rooms in which you choose between board games or listening to the slowly congealing thoughts of broken men. Do you know what that sounds like? It sounds like paint drying. We’re ill they tell us, most of us anyway. I guess this means we have a sort of influenza of the mind. Others are not so fortunate; these are the men with disfigured souls. Men so abhorrent to society that they must be locked away out of sight, they have more need for an exorcist than a shrink. A doctor said to me yesterday that my problem was that I suffered from delusions of sanity. I’d laughed. We’re all of us guilty of that.
Welcome to YWS. I have three points to share with you.