Grey Area

by Will Self

  When we resumed play an hour after MacLachlan had ingested some Inclusion, he was a different man. Witty, engaged, eloquent, both on the game in hand and the whole history and practice of bridge; there was little Bohm and I could do to contain him. His countenance – which is mousey in the extreme, hidden behind a water-rat beard of terrible lankness – brightened and brightened. His impressions of Omar Sharif became hard to deal with, but overall I can say that MacLachlan’s Inclusion-based rehabilitation was one of the most humane things I have witnessed in almost thirty years as a medical practitioner.

  Bohm and I have restricted MacLachlan to a nugatory dosage of Inclusion. He himself admits that if he takes too much he becomes overly absorbed in the little pictures that adorn the labels of the shampoo he sells at the pharmacy, or some such irrelevance. However, on a mild dose he just feels that loose sense of positive engagement that we are looking for.

  9th February

  The trial has been underway for a week now and everything is going smoothly. There is actually remarkably little for me to do now, except wait for Bohm to begin relaying the data.

  I have been in the habit of commuting to Worminghall on a weekly basis. Really it is a tedious place. On a good day there is something affecting about the view from the Chiltern escarpment where the Facility is, down on to the rolling country of Oxfordshire. Walking along the Ridgeway path, where it dives under the M40, I am often reminded of early Renaissance paintings depicting enclosed landscapes like this; and can half imagine that the cooling towers of Didcot Power Station are some Tuscan fortification.

  On a good day, that is. On a bad day it’s dreary beyond belief. Often thick fogs roll in from the north, and the whole countryside is rendered both tatty and claustrophobic. On my walks I pass chicken-wired pheasant runs and abandoned piggeries. They give a disagreeable impression of urb in rus. The fog distorts my sense of scale, and I toy with the notion that I am wandering over a giant, derelict tennis court, or a still vaster cat’s litter tray that no one has bothered to empty for a while.

  It’s mordant fantasising such as this that has driven me to what might be termed ‘recreational’ use of Inclusion. I am very rigorous about this, though, I have no desire to experience an Inclusion dependency – if such a thing turns out to be possible. So I only take Inclusion when playing ping-pong with one or other of the auxiliary staff. I can’t say that the Inclusion makes my game any better, but it does make me considerably more interested. I now really appreciate ping-pong and am extremely glad that I’ve decided to make it a part of my life.

  4th March

  The trial has now been going for over a month and the results are very encouraging. Bohm’s reports clearly demonstrate that the depressive patients treated with Inclusion are responding far better than those on tricyclics or SSRIs, and far, far better than the control group. If things carry on this way for another month I shall have to recommend that Cryborg find a way of legitimating the discovery and the trial findings. To allow things to go much further, would, I feel, cast into doubt the ethics of what we have been doing. I shall relay this conviction of mine to Gainsford in my next report.

  11th March

  I had a worrying phone call from Bohm this afternoon. What he had to tell me has unsettled me and cast into doubt some of my faith in Inclusion. One of Bohm’s patients, a painter called Simon Dykes who lives on the Tiddington side of Thame, has been saying some very strange things to him.

  I am fairly certain that Dykes must be on Inclusion. There is no other explanation for his behaviour, if Bohm’s report of it is to be believed.

  Bohm has been prescribing ‘anti-depressants’ to Dykes for almost six weeks now. Dykes came to see him complaining of a sense of futility, emotional alienation, impotence etc., etc. He made light of his depression, but his wife – who attended with him – told Bohm, in confidence, that he had been a nightmare since last year and had to be hospitalised, briefly, over Christmas.

  Initially the Inclusion seemed to be having a beneficial effect on Dykes. He reported to Bohm just the sense of positive engagement that we look for from the drug. Dykes said that he was sorting out his problems with his wife, he was enjoying the company of his children and had begun to paint again after a block lasting some six months.

  However, last week when Dykes went to see Bohm for his check-up, he told him that he was having doubts about his sanity again. He now felt that he was ‘going the other way’. When Bohm asked Dykes to elaborate, the painter said that he was having difficulty in controlling his capacity for being involved with things. That when he turned his attention to something – whether it be a person, an object, a whole area of knowledge, or merely some abstract notion – he couldn’t prevent himself from being sucked deep into its contemplation. Furthermore, the painter claimed that he began to feel as if he knew more about whatever it was than he possibly could.

  Bohm asked him for an example and Dykes came up with the Boxer Rising. He said he was looking through an old edition of the Britannica when he came across the entry on the Boxer Rising. Accompanying it was a picture of the Chinese Boxers attacking the British Embassy. Dykes swears he didn’t read the entry at first. Instead he merely stared at the old engraving (apparently he leafs through such old books looking for graphic material for his work), and found himself being ‘sucked into it’. While in this reverie he became acquainted with a vast amount of information on the Boxer Rising, including the names of the ring-leaders, and even elements of their motivation.

  When he was sufficiently recovered, he read the accompanying entry. All of the facts that had come to him in the reverie turned out to be true! He even knew some things that weren’t in the entry, but when he did some further research at the Bodleian in Oxford, they panned out as well!

  If all of this wasn’t bad enough, the horrific clincher came this week. Dykes arrived for his appointment as usual, at about eleven. Bohm said that the painter was haggard and unkempt. His eyes darted this way and that around Bohm’s consulting room, lighting on object after object, as if he were seeing not the things themselves, but looking deep into their anatomy.

  Bohm asked him how he was feeling and Dykes said that he knew he wasn’t taking an anti-depressant, but some experimental drug. When Bohm challenged him and asked how could he be so sure, Dykes replied that he knew the man who was behind it. His name was Busner and he was operating out of a compound in the Chilterns near Worminghall.

  Dykes had seen me – he claimed – in the Three Pigeons Inn by Junction 7 of the M40. He hadn’t paid any particular attention to me when he went into the pub, but after he grew tired of contemplating the history and evolution of the towelling bar mat, he turned his attention to the ‘froggy-looking man in the corner wearing the mohair tie’. He said that I wasn’t as easy to read as the bar mat, or the engraving of the Boxer Rising, but that merely by looking at me he could include elements of my mental terrain into his own. So it was that he discovered that I was doing some sort of drug trial, and that it involved anti-depressant medication.

  The bugger is that I do have a drink in the Three Pigeons from time to time, and there’s every possibility that Dykes has seen me in there. Although I cannot recall noticing anyone paying undue attention to me. On the contrary, it’s often extremely difficult to get served in there, despite a bar staff to drinker ratio of about 1:1.

  After this encounter Dykes formed the conviction that his current predicament had something to do with me. He then challenged Bohm with this information. Bohm told me that he was as circumspect as possible. He advised Dykes to stop taking the Inclusion immediately and switch to a tranquilliser. Dykes refused, and as he already has a repeat prescription for Inclusion, Bohm realised that he would be unable to force the issue. Especially as Dykes then said he wanted Bohm to arrange a meeting with me, and that if he didn’t, or if I refused to see him, he would get in touch with the press.

  Bohm displayed as much sang-froid as he could under the circumstances. He told Dykes to go home
and try to relax, and that he would ‘see what he could do’. As soon as Dykes left the health centre he called me.

  I have been put into such a state by this news that I’ve been unable to come up with a definitive analysis of the situation. Can it be that this is some kind of Inclusion-induced psychosis? And if so, will it occur in all of the patients who have been prescribed the drug? I shudder to think. An alternative possibility is that Dykes is going into a psychotic or schizoid interlude despite, rather than because of, the Inclusion, and that the facts he has adduced about the Inclusion trial and myself are lurid supposition, hit upon by chance.

  Whatever the case, I cannot at this stage bear to inform Gainsford. I know that he would overreact and jeopardise what we have achieved so far. If we can contain the situation with Dykes then there is no reason to abort the trial. So, I told Bohm that he was to bring Dykes up to Worminghall as soon as possible. He called back an hour or so later and said that they would be coming up tomorrow night. Until then I will see if I can’t discover some more about the drug’s effects. Obviously, the best way to do this is for me to take an extra-large dose of Inclusion myself.

  This may appear foolhardy, but the whole thing intrigues me so much that I am determined to get to the bottom of it. I am passionately interested in Inclusion, and wish it at all costs to remain a large part of my life.

  And that’s it. That’s the last entry in Busner’s journal. Or at any rate the last that you’re able to read. There are a few pages after this entry that have obviously been torn out by someone – just a ragged fringe of paper remains, close to the binding; the rest of the notebook is empty.

  That doesn’t immediately concern you. What’s far more intriguing is the other notebook, the one you know already is Simon Dykes’s own diary. How did it come to be at the Worminghall Facility? Did Dykes take it up there himself on the climactic night of the 12th of March? And is the fact that it’s exactly the same kind of notebook as Busner’s purely coincidental? Or is it yet another ramification of the Inclusion trial?

  You don’t hesitate. You pick it up and give it a heft. Well, that won’t tell you anything. Open it up and have a read:

  12th October

  Why fucking bother? Why fucking bother at all? Why fuck and why bother? I would be angry – if I had the energy. I would hate myself more, if I didn’t feel dead already. I hate doing this. I hate writing these things. Write down your feelings. It’s the sort of shit that that dickhead psychotherapist at the Warneford told me to do, when I made the profound mistake of going to see him on Tony Bohm’s recommendation.

  If I find myself writing this stuff down, it’s only because I have to make something external, something that’s tangible, just to keep alive in me the idea that I’m alive at all.

  I haven’t painted now for over four months. I feel as remote from my art as I do from Tierra del Fuego. You might as well ask a man to stretch his cock to the moon, as ask me to pick up a brush again, or even prime a canvas.

  I can’t see things the way I used to. I used to see form spontaneously. Just looking at a miscellany of objects would intrude the idea of a composition. A quality of light, or a particular texture, would impinge on me with amazing force. Colour, chiaroscuro, the very sense of the volume of an object, a portion of the sky, or the geometry of a human face – all came to me unbidden. I never knew how fucking lucky I was, how blessed really, blessed with a gift. A gift that’s gone as if it was never there to begin with.

  Of course, as my charming wife sees fit to remind me, I have had these ‘episodes’ before. That’s nice, isn’t it – ‘episode’, like an episode of some tawdry soap. ‘Here it is, folks,’ the announcer says cheerily, ‘this week’s episode of Simon Dykes’s chronic fucking depression. Sit back and enjoy.’

  I can’t stand the anger I feel towards Jean – she really isn’t to blame for all this. But all right, I’ve always been a bit unstable, had my ups and downs. I don’t subscribe to the notion that the depressive and the creative mentality go hand in hand – only a fucking shrink would – but I can admit that about myself.

  But I’ve never felt as bad as this, as futile, as purposeless. I experience the love I thought I had for Jean as an irritation, a niggling under my skin. And as for the kids, when I look at them, particularly Henry, a sharp pain comes into me. A pain that’s a sort of probing finger coming into my grey area of depression and titillating it with the possibility of feeling love once more. It’s disgusting, almost as if I don’t want it. It’s like Jean reaching for my flaccid cock – which she does nowadays as if she were a weary bell-ringer – and giving it an uncalled-for tug.

  22nd October

  I didn’t think things could get worse – but they have. Even Magnus and Henry are a burden to me now. I look at them from the studio window, playing on the lawn, wrapped up in autumnal scarves and mittens, and it occurs to me that they aren’t the right size for children of their age. Rather, that they’re like some fucking emotional decoys. Decoy ducks are made twice the size of ordinary ducks, so that the poor fuckers flying over will misjudge the distance to the ground and crash into it when they dive down to join what they imagine are their fellows.

  That’s what’s happening to me with those kids. My love for them is a suicidal plunge. It isn’t until I get close to them that I see how chronically I have misjudged everything in my life, exaggerated my own precious obsession with my art, at the cost of everything else.

  Jean says I should go and see Tony Bohm, and of course, like another member of the plainting chorus, Christabel says the same. But I won’t go. What would he do anyway, save for put me on some fucking drug, that would act like a governor on my brain? I hate that. I’ve been on those anti-depressants before, and they make me feel madder than I feel now. The sensation of those drugs coming on is just as I imagine the feel of a surgeon’s knife, probing into your grey matter, seeking out the right place to sever your fucking hemispheres.

  30th October

  The longer I’m sunk in this mire, the worse things get. Shrinks divide up depressions, don’t they? They say this one’s ‘chemical’, or somesuch; and that one’s down to all the crap you’ve got in your life. But with me the crap inside and the crap outside merge into one great ocean of shit, flowing into and of me.

  No work means no money. No money means I can’t face the idea of work because I’ve got so far to go just to pay off the bills this lay-off has ranked up. George called today and I couldn’t even speak to him. I just told Jean to say to him, ‘You haven’t got a client any more, you’ve just got a piece of shit. And unless you want to put on an exhibition of turds, there’s little point in calling me.’

  I wonder if she relayed this message? She hardly talks to me at all now. I guess she’s worried. No, actually she’s past being worried – or concerned, she’s just fed up. I only sit in the studio now – the rest of the house seems threatening to me. I don’t want to go there.

  Even sitting up here for hours on end, I’m hardly comfortable in my depression. There’s nothing cosy in this unremitting greyness, this corporate gothic, with its grinding, emotional bureaucracy.

  5th November

  My mind is like a fly, it buzzes around in a fucking febrile fashion, and when it alights on some crumb, or fragment of an idea, it’s off again before I can apprehend it.

  I’m getting paranoid. I look out over the garden and across the fence and across the farm track, and I’m convinced that I can see figures moving there. I joke about it to Jean, I suppose to stop her from becoming frightened. I say, I think our creditors have built a hide over there, in the shape of a giant dunning letter. They’ve elected one of their number to sit in it and observe the Brown House all day, in case I try and leave.

  Jean doesn’t think it’s funny. I hear her praying a lot nowadays. She wanders around the house muttering under her breath. She knows I despise religion as a fucking opiate.

  I wish I had some fucking opiate myself. Something that would take away this pai
n that is indifference to everything. I hate it when I’m reminded of the pain of others. If I see some item on the television, showing kids starving, or women raped in the war, I hate them. I hate them because the reality, the fucking substantial nature of their pain, seems to mock the nebulousness of my own. It says, you think you’re in pain, you’re not in pain, you’re faking it. And then I think of killing myself, believe me, I really do.

  Oh Jesus! (Ha-fucking-ha!) the effort of staying interested in anything. It’s like trying to clench a paralysed fist. If I try and take a drink to numb the awful sensation out, I just feel sick and woozy. I can’t get drunk anymore, no matter how much I pour down my fucking neck.

  13th November

  Images of suicide all the time now. Every day. I’ve got them now as I write: Simon dead in a bath, blood flowing from his slashed wrists in gentle, billowing clouds; Simon dead from a shotgun blast in the mouth, the mess of grey, white and red on the wall behind his deflated head at last forming an interesting composition; Simon dead from a drug overdose, the blue tones of his skin reminiscent of a Renoir. The thoughts are scampering across my shoulders. I can feel their wing-beats around my ears.

  24th November

  I’ve had what I believe is called ‘an intervention’. This afternoon I was sitting in my studio, as usual, mulling over the Hiroshima of my life, the razed buildings of my hopes, the charred corpses of my former loves, when they all fucking came down on me, the whole bunch of the wankers. There was Jean, of course, and Christabel. George had driven up from the gallery. They’d even dug my brother up from somewhere. They all stood around me and told me how my being so unhappy was upsetting the children (Jean was in tears by this point), and that it would be better for everyone if I considered going into hospital for a while.

  I tried to remain calm – although I felt like screaming – because I knew that if I let on just how bad things were they’d send for the men in the white coats, and then they’d take me away and put a hot wire through my brain; and then I’d be gone, there’d just be this shell left behind, with Simon’s head painted on it.