Centaur

by Declan Murphy

  That’s why I’ve never spoken about this. Because I know how close I got; how narrowly I escaped.

  I still don’t understand how she manages to get it out of me. But no sooner am I out of the driveway, following our meeting, than I call her from the car to tell her I am not prepared to put this in the book.

  ‘Pretend it didn’t happen,’ I say.

  ‘Which part? What you put yourself through or our conversation?’ she asks.

  ‘Both,’ I say.

  ‘OK,’ she says, ‘it’s your book.’

  An hour later, I call her back. Talking about it has opened up old wounds. I feel the pain – dull and heavy and as overpowering as the pain that my body went through at the time. The pain is mental, but I feel it in my body like it is physical, like I am reliving the whole thing. I can hardly bear it.

  When she answers the phone, she’s cautious. She knows by now when I am fragile.

  ‘Go on, put it in,’ I say. ‘What the hell, you’re writing my book, what’s to hide.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ I say.

  ‘It’s the right call,’ she says, ‘and a brave one.’

  ‘But there’s one thing,’ I say. ‘You know all those times I said I cried? That bit never happened.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘Big boys don’t cry.’

  Entrapment

  I am a spectator in a theatre of terror.

  My mind is a concert hall, vast and venerable, a fitting venue with its air of grandeur, its perfect proportions. There is a stage in the very centre, the bold platform where the drama will be enacted. The cast of characters is varied, they come and they go, but I know them all intimately from different periods of my life.

  And I am my only audience.

  But when the performance begins, I realize it frightens me. I don’t like it. I want to leave but I am shackled to my chair by invisible chains. I can’t get up. This happens many times. Many, many times. Sometimes I break free, run to the sides of the room and frantically push against the walls to find a way out. But there is none. On the stage, the ghoulish scenes continue to unfold as if oblivious to the terror of its audience. Sometimes the cast jumps off the stage, runs up the aisle and stands beside me. I am terrified they will touch me, but they never do. I run away from them, but they run with me. Following me, like my shadow.

  Slowly, like a python, the panic uncoils and begins its slow rise inside my throat. Until it swallows me, whole. And I am trapped.

  Inside the belly of the beast.

  Inside my own terror.

  The terror of a nightmare when you are asleep does not compare to the terror of a nightmare when you are awake.

  It was a little over seven months after my surgery. I could walk, I could run. To the outside world, I had recovered. I was normal. Inside my mind, the streets were burning.

  One day, Barney Curley and his son Charlie paid me a visit, unannounced. I was alone in the kitchen in Oaktree House when they arrived. Barney looked dishevelled, dressed in trousers with braces, a crumpled shirt, no hat. He took a long puff on his slender cigarette and exhaled – slowly, deliberately, blowing circles through his lips.

  Then, he opened his mouth and began to speak, but the words were muffled by the fumes and I couldn’t understand them. His soft voice boomed loud, ricocheting off the walls, echoing spookily around the small room. I put my hands to my ears to shut out the noise.

  But then the images started flashing before my eyes.

  FLASH … Barney Curley, ten years younger.

  FLASH … Barney Curley, in a suit and shoes.

  FLASH … Barney Curley, in the hat he always wore.

  FLASH … Barney Curley, on The Late Late Show.

  FLASH … Barney Curley, a ghost of himself.

  Even as I was looking at him, I wasn’t seeing him as he was standing before me; I was seeing him as he was inside my head. He was on TV, sitting on a chair, legs crossed, shoes polished, speaking to Gay Byrne. I was seventeen years old and I was watching him with my mother.

  But he wasn’t on TV, he was in my kitchen. He wasn’t sitting, he was standing. He wasn’t wearing the hat he always wore. He wasn’t speaking to Gay Byrne. He was speaking to me, but I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. I was twenty-eight years old. My mother wasn’t with me.

  I shut my eyes in confusion. When I opened them, the plume of his cigarette smoke was wafting upwards in a long, slow spiral. Inside me, the panic took life, uncoiling, rising. An angry serpent. Then, through the curtain of smoke that hung between us, I saw Barney’s lips curl, in slow motion, into his characteristic half-smile.

  In my head I heard him snarl.

  My blood curdled.

  And I ran.

  I ran away.

  Like a frightened child, I bolted past the bewildered father and son and, shaking with fear, I ran out of my own house and down the road. I ran as fast as I could, hysterical with emotion. Behind me, Barney and Charlie jumped into their car and followed.

  Frenzied and afraid, I ran down Duchess Drive, trying to break free of myself. I ran and I ran, as far as my weakened legs would carry me. Then, when I could run no more, I ducked into a shed, behind some bushes at the side of the road.

  Losing sight of me, Barney drove past where I was hiding, then parked the car and got out with Charlie. They called my name, frantic with worry, desperately trying to find me. But I lay crouched behind the bushes, silently watching them, failing to make sense of the chaos in my mind.

  I stayed there for a long time, long after Barney and Charlie had given up, sat back in their car and driven away.

  There were riots inside my head.

  I had tried to run away from them.

  Run and hide.

  But I found that they were running with me.

  Following me, like my shadow.

  There was nowhere to hide.

  It was complete entrapment.

  Heartbeat

  They say you can run, but you can’t hide.

  I didn’t listen. I ran and I hid.

  But what do you do, when there’s no place left to hide?

  When you realize that there’s no one left to save you from yourself?

  When that noise inside your head becomes unbearable?

  Where do you go, then?

  I started going regularly to Mark Tompkins’s Newmarket stables. I found it therapeutic to be around horses. The first several times I went, I didn’t ride. I didn’t even move.

  I sat on a horse. Just sat on it.

  I mounted it, my seat in the middle of the saddle, my knees not gripping, my legs simply lying against the body of the animal, feeling the tightness of skin over hard muscle, velvet over steel.

  I sat on a horse and I felt it: the warmth of its body against mine, each muscle independently alive, twitching, responding, to my own tentative touch.

  I sat on a horse and I watched it: its breath blowing from flared nostrils, clouds of mist in the cold, early morning air.

  I sat on a horse and I smelled it: the dusty, earthy, grainy richness of it.

  I sat on a horse and I heard it: exhaling, nickering softly, that low, reverberating rumble from deep inside its throat.

  I sat on a horse and I touched it: my hands caressing the convex contour of its crest, the rising arch of its back.

  I sat on a horse and I sensed it: the physical consciousness of the sheer size of the beast, of the power underneath me.

  I sat on a horse. Just sat on it.

  Nobody could understand why I did this, why I went every day just to sit on a horse. But when I did it, just for those few minutes, I borrowed my freedom. And I wanted to hold on to that feeling, for ever.

  For over a year after my accident, I was afraid of being alive. I had managed to repair my physical self. I had fought to do this, to claw myself back. But my mind remained in tumult.

  It is impossible to explain the complete, utter state of confusion when you
are sometimes a child with adult thoughts and sometimes an adult with child thoughts. When a chunk of your life has gone. When what’s come back is disordered and in-congruent, like pieces from the wrong jigsaw puzzle that, no matter how hard you try, will never slot in. When everybody around you believes you have recovered because that’s what you’ve tried so hard to make them believe. And yet you know you haven’t. And perhaps you never will.

  Still waters run deep. Belief ebbs away and you capsize under your own weight. Everything is an illusion. You learn not to trust your own eyes. Or your own mind. Often they contradict each other and you are never quite sure which is right and which is wrong, what’s real and what’s a cruel, cruel trick.

  The incident with Barney Curley was not an isolated one. I had been having hallucinations ever since I had woken up from my coma, mostly when I was asleep, but many times when I was awake, when I was fully conscious. I had been warned about these ‘dreams’ early on by the doctors. I had been told that they would vary in their intensity and their severity, and then gradually disappear with time. But I hadn’t realized how slowly time would crawl. Or how frightening it would all be.

  I had long stopped my medication, so I knew it wasn’t the drugs that were causing the confusion. I had nothing to blame. To lash out at.

  It was me.

  And I don’t think anybody will ever understand how far I wanted to get away from being me – the me that I was in the year after my accident. Because being me was chaotic. I had no idea what was going on inside my head. I had no control over it – the disorder, the commotion. When my mind warped, it terrified me, because it swung me around like a pendulum, between my childhood at one end and my adulthood at the other. And often I found myself stuck in the scary spectrum of my own past, a grown man reduced to a helpless, whimpering child. And like a child I had tried to run, but like an adult I had learnt that it was a race I would never win. You cannot outrun what is running inside you. You cannot escape yourself.

  I found it so difficult to be around people. They didn’t understand me. I didn’t understand me. That’s why I went to Mark Tompkins’s stables. There was no judgement with a horse.

  It is amazing what a horse can do for your soul.

  I had always felt this, even as a little boy with my ponies, but I had never needed to rely on it in the way I did now. Horses empower humans and there is a reason for it. Because the horse is a prey animal, because survival instinct defines its existence, its response mechanism is immediate. So even at the quietest moments, it is intensely aware of its surroundings, acutely able to understand human behaviour, and reflect it. This endows the horse with an incredible gift; it enables the animal to be a perfect mirror for our feelings. I found that horses accepted me for who I was, not who I was supposed to be. In doing so, it granted me the validation I was so desperately seeking. It allowed me to get in touch with my own feelings, to accept myself for who I was, and not who I was supposed to be.

  I have always believed that horses are wonderful with people who have physical or mental disabilities because they are able to bring out the human element that often lies dormant within us. Horses are intelligent and honest, and their innate ability to read human emotion is perhaps what lies at the core of the man– horse relationship. Patient and gentle, they offer their insight and empathy, responding naturally to emotional issues, offering their companionship, their silent support. And in doing so, they enable you to win back trust in yourself.

  I always believed this, but I never imagined I would put it to the test. In my conceit, I never imagined I would need to. But I did. A disability can come in many forms. I may have been physically able, but my mind was badly – so badly – disabled.

  At some point in our lives, we come to the inevitable conclusion that so much of what we do and how we live is influenced by factors outside our control. For most people, the only thing we can control with certainty is our own mind. Our thoughts are based on our own decisions to have them. This wasn’t the case with me. I had no control over my thoughts, the voices in my head – I was hostage to myself. After each episode of the kind that I had with Barney Curley, I had to fight not to feel defeated, to get back up again and keep going.

  To this day, Barney has never made mention of what transpired at Oaktree House that morning, and for that I will be grateful to him for ever, because nobody understands the courage that’s required to face the day after. You find yourself alone. And no matter how strong you are, how brave, how fearless – it debilitates you, the isolation. The definitive, unmistakeable realization that you are well and truly alone. You try to drive it away – this sense of exile – in whatever way you can. For many months, I had tried to fight it myself, on my own. But in the end, I had failed. The only match for a wayward mind is a restful soul. And so I turned to horses to help repair my soul.

  It was cathartic.

  For close to six months after I started going to Mark Tompkins’s stables, I didn’t actually ride horses. I sat on them, I walked with them, I watched them. Sometimes I just stood on the dirt road on the outside of the long, white, continuous fence that demarcates the border of Newmarket Heath, and took it all in from a distance.

  Watching … as the massive strings of horses walked past me in all their glory and grace. Listening … to the beat of Newmarket Heath, thrumming with the sound of twelve thousand hooves pounding against the earth.

  Other times, I would get up close to a horse, my gaze searching the eyes of the animal, searching for a connection.

  I was anxious.

  I was trapped.

  I was losing my mind.

  Horses became my meditation.

  Horses became my escape.

  Horses became my sanity.

  A year after my accident, almost to the day, I knew it was time.

  It was springtime in England, the daffodils bloomed like countless shining suns, the wind felt almost warm. Newmarket Heath was resplendent with the magnificence of galloping horses across its vast and boundless sweep.

  And I knew I was ready. I felt it from the inside, that familiar urge, that longing.

  It was a deeply poignant moment in my life – the moment that I accepted that I was ready to ride again.

  For many weeks, I didn’t go any faster than a trot. It gave me comfort, that steady two-beat rhythm, my body following the tempo, rising up and down with every other beat.

  Two beats.

  Two bodies.

  Two souls.

  I felt as if we were trotting through time, through this deeply personal, deeply heart-breaking passage in my life. And in doing so, we formed a strong connection, a bond based on this unique form of communication, on this sense of solidarity where I felt, even without words, the horse speaking to me, ‘You are not alone. Whatever is happening to you, I am with you. We are in it together.’

  I found the experience intensely moving. It returned something to me, something I had naively allowed to be taken away – it gave me back my perspective. Ever since I had woken up from my coma, my mind had been full of clutter. Focusing on my missing past, on my uncertain future. The thing about a horse is that it always knows when you are present with it. It knows if your mind is focused, if it is actively engaged, or if it is somewhere else, a million miles away. The horse made me focus on my present. On my now. And I realized something immeasurably profound. I realized how fortunate I was to have a now.

  This life, this precious life, was mine to lose.

  A few weeks after I first started riding, I quickened my pace.

  Two beats to three.

  From the trot to the canter, that beautiful, flowing gait.

  Hind leg, hind leg, fore leg; the most expressive gait of them all.

  It is the sequence of footfalls, not the speed, which establishes the canter. So I focused my mind on sound – the beating of his hooves, the whistle of the wind through his ears – as we rode together, our bodies in rhythm. The beat of the canter, calming my mind, quieting the chatter.r />
  For someone who never wanted to be a jockey, it was ironic that being around horses helped me to heal. I took immeasurable comfort in our togetherness.

  It drove away the isolation.

  It absorbed my mind.

  It took me away from the pains of my past.

  It gave me balance at a time when I desperately needed it.

  It brought me back from the brink, and carried me home.

  Fifteen months after my accident, I was ready to gallop.

  Two beats to three.

  Three beats to four.

  My first gallop since Haydock Park.

  The horse Mark Tompkins brought out to me was Staunch Friend. He did this deliberately and although I didn’t remember it, this horse and I had made history together, winning the Bula Hurdle in December 1993. He was a beautiful-looking horse, a big bay gelding with a tremendously long stride and a striking head carriage, confident and in control.

  I saddled him myself, then I mounted him. We walked a bit up the dirt road, then he broke into canter as we approached the heath. But I knew he wanted wings. And I felt ready to fly.

  When you are all alone, you cannot abandon yourself. But it helps to have a friend.

  That day, when Staunch Friend and I galloped together over the sweeping plains of Newmarket Heath, I felt my mind relax. I listened to the beat of his stride, the four-beat rhythm – hind leg, hind leg, fore leg, fore leg – the gait of the classic racehorse. And as he kicked up the dust with the beating of his hooves, everything felt perfect, in total harmony and complete peace. I felt the familiar addictive thrill of riding a thoroughbred at speed; it filled me with a contentment I hadn’t felt for as long as I could remember.

  At your finest hour as a rider, it is trust that joins you and your horse. You put your life in that horse; you give it your complete trust.