by Robert Irwin
‘You are not Maud’s slave, you know,’ she said. ‘Maud will have to pull her weight around here. Either that, or she will have to go. Where is she, anyway?’
I nodded towards the back door and together we went and looked out. Maud had finished her karate exercises (katas, I think they may be called) and we were just in time to see her formally bowing towards the trees.
‘Weird,’ breathed Sally.
Then Maud came in and changed out of her karate kit into a longish black dress decorated with a pattern of gold medallions. While Maud was in the lavatory, Sally was on the attack again.
‘That dress must have cost a hundred pounds. It blows my mind. Where does a Camden hairdresser get the bread for something like that?’
‘It is easy, I suppose, if you are straight,’ I replied. ‘Maud doesn’t spend money on clubs, records, mystical treatises, or dope. What is not cheap, on the other hand, is being any kind of hippy.’
Sally did not look convinced.
‘I think it’s rich parents,’ she said.
Maud had a huge breakfast. While she ate, she talked vaguely of looking for work in some hairdressing salon in town.
‘So you are staying in Farnham then?’ asked Sally.
‘Oh yes.’
The trip was scheduled for the afternoon. Maud spent much of the morning looking up at the sky, visibly willing rain-clouds to appear, but to no avail. We do not usually have a cooked lunch, but since we were going to be tripping that afternoon, Sally would not necessarily be up to anything very much that evening. She was singing ‘The sun has got its hat on’, as she cooked us an egg-curry. We ate on the mattress with the plates balanced precariously on our knees. The curry was frightful and the grit of the curry powder kept getting lodged between our teeth, so we all had lots of orange juice to wash it down.
For pudding, Sally produced just two acid-laden sugar cubes – one for her and one for me. Maud looked relieved.
‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I’d just decided that I could not go through with it. I know it is weedy of me. But I am utterly terrified of going mad and saying or doing the wrong things. Besides right now I am not on tip-top form. In fact I feel a bit peculiar.’
‘I am not surprised,’ said Sally. ‘That will be the trip coming on. I thought that you would try to back off, so I put your cube in your orange juice. It’s probably best that you go and lie down.’ Then she added gleefully, ‘You’ve got a date with Mr Mickey Finn.’
Maud moaned. Her hands went briefly to her throat, as if she would prevent the passage of the deadly substance into her body. Then she moved away to the edge of the mattress and sat with her arms hugging her knees. She did indeed look like she was waiting to go mad. I went over and knelt before her.
‘Don’t worry, Maud,’ I said. ‘The first trip is usually a good one.’
‘Yeah, it’s quite rare to get the horrors on the first trip,’ added Sally.
I have gone into the bedroom to fetch this notebook, so that, as scientist of the invisible, I can record whatever may transpire on this trip. Now I am going to persuade Maud to come out into the garden with me and look at the grass. That is bound to be a good scene.
Indeed it is a good scene. Maud suffered me to lead her out by the hand and, together with Sally, we are looking at the grass waving and curving like hair on the earth’s skull. Now I am aware of the first anticipatory rush of adrenalin. I pick a blade of grass and pass it to first Maud and then Sally for inspection. Words are unnecessary. The medallions on Maud’s dress have become spinning sun-wheels and this is a sign that we are properly off on the trip. The sun becomes a giant factory for the production of illusions. Looking round, I can see that I am in good company. There is Pan slipping into the shadows of the trees. Just short of the wood, a Persian peacock-prince holds court in an emerald pavilion. On the left hand there is Yama, the death-god, with a clockwork, rotating nose. On the right hand, there is Marcel Proust talking to the sharks assembled in the bay of his beloved Cabourg. A great man for sharks, Proust. Brigitte Bardot approaches in an undulating walk. Then she hitches up her skirt to reveal a stocking-top and I can see that there is another, miniature Bardot, tucked into the stocking-top, signalling madly to be let free.
Sally is topping up her acid with a joint. She needs a light, but she just holds the joint up and elephant-headed Ganesha who is sitting in the lotus posture upside-down on the surface of the sky reaches down with a cigarette-lighter. Then Sally farts and the fart comes out all rainbow-coloured and decorated with little silver stars. It is really lovely. But Maud cannot see this. She is moaning and hissing. She is clinging to me so tightly that I am going to have to stop writing.
What happened next is that Sally and I realised that Maud was having a bad trip. We were trying as best we could to straighten up. I could not move because Maud was clinging on to me so tightly. So Sally went indoors to fetch our LSD survival handbook, which is called The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and is by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert.
‘You are experiencing the Wrathful Visions,’ announced Sally. ‘This is a sign of bad karma, but it is a good phase to pass through, on your way to losing your ego. Not that you have any choice.’
Sally danced about in front of us with the book in her hands and read from it in a sing-song voice, ‘ “Thus in the Tibetan Thödol, after the seven peaceful deities, there come seven visions of wrathful deities, fifty-eight in number, male and female, flame-enhaloed, wrathful, blood-drinking. These Herukas as they are called, will not be described in detail, especially since Westerners are liable to experience the wrathful deities in different forms. Instead of many-headed fierce mythological demons, they are more likely to be engulfed and ground up by impersonal machinery, manipulated by scientific, torturing control-devices and other space-fiction horrors … ” ’
Sally was miming the Herukas and the torturing machinery as she read on. Maud closed her eyes to it all. She kept whimpering, ‘Help me, please. Please help me.’ Although her eyes were closed, I could see her eyeballs flicking backwards and forwards under the translucent lids. The exposed parts of her body were white as the skin of a leper. Then, as I gazed on, the brightness of her pallor intensified, until it was like the white heat of a nuclear explosion. I dared not look at Maud any more.
My eyes dropped to the open pages of my diary. This was a horrid mistake, for once they had fallen there, I could not extricate them. Now I had already reached the deepest part of my trip and I was experiencing a total overload, in which I found myself locked forever in the pages of my diary. I was condemned to live in the past and only the past and the only past I had was what I had recorded in the pages of my diary. I visited and revisited everything I had taken note of. It was a tremendous gas at first, particularly the early choices – balling Sally, smoking dope with Cosmic, listening to ‘Sgt Pepper’ – but, in the longer run, the pleasure just drained away. It was like when I hear a record. After a while, the music loses all its emotional charge and I can no longer bear to listen to it. This deep part of my trip was like that, except that it was every single incident which I had recorded in my diary that was turning grey and becoming first meaningless, then actually repellent to me. It was like repeating the word ‘dog’ hundreds of times. I lunched with Maud at the Gay Hussar a thousand times and then another thousand, until I had analysed every fold of my napkin, memorised every item on the menu and counted every strand of Maud’s hair.
Taking my seat in the Gay Hussar for the millionth time, I suddenly remembered how the guy in Abdullah’s Paradise Garden, who sold me the drug I was now on, had been dressed like a Tibetan (indeed I re-encountered this character thousands of times and struck the same deal with him thousands of times) and it now came to me that I was in some special kind of accursed Tibetan afterlife, in which the wrathful visions drew their lives from mine. Although, at first, I beheld this afterlife as a vast house with many corridors, I soon gained the sense tha
t, though there were indeed many, many corridors, their number was still finite and every single one of these corridors went nowhere. Those corners I had failed to turn in real life, I would never be able to see round in my new and wearisome form of existence. Those corners which were not there in my diary were forever lost to me and I often had occasion to curse my literary idleness. If only I had written more! If only I had provided just a few more details about what I had seen and done! Just a few extra incidents would have made all the difference, I told myself.
What was especially weird was that I could visit and indeed was obliged to visit and revisit every scene recorded in my diary and this even included things which had never happened, but which I had made up for Felton’s benefit. So it was that I often found myself sitting on the wall of the playground of the wholly imaginary St Joseph’s primary school and there I conversed with its phantom children. I was in a sealed maze of my own construction and this maze, though vast, was all the time diminishing in my imagination, losing not only scale, but also colour and sense. I perceived that Maud, who continued to sit patiently at our table in the Gay Hussar, occupied the centre of the maze of my twilit afterlife. The woman I am condemned to love for all Eternity ….
Maud was shaking me awake. I opened my eyes. After aeons in my diary-scripted past, I was astonished to find myself back in the garden of the cottage on the edge of Farnham.
‘Peter, wake up! Wake up!’ Maud was urgent, ‘Peter, your mother is here!’
‘That is impossible,’ I said, suddenly feeling very straight. ‘She is dead.’
But Maud replied,
‘Yes, I can see that,’ and she pointed.
I looked to where she was pointing, but I could see only trees and little wispy, grey tendrils, which I knew were an effect of the LSD and which trembled on the edge of becoming proper hallucinations, but which, since my trip was beginning to wear off, did not actually do so.
‘I can’t see anything,’ I said.
‘Me neither,’ said Sally. She was now sitting on my other side and also looking to where Maud was pointing.
‘Yes, she is standing just in front of you, Peter.’ Maud insisted. ‘You must see her. She wants to be seen by you. She is dressed in her grave-cloths. Say hello to her, Peter. She wants you to acknowledge her presence.’
I said,
‘Hello Mum,’ and I waited to see if she would become manifest.
But Sally said,
‘Maud, you’re tripping. Peter’s mother is not here. She’s just a hallucination in your head.’
Maud was obstinate,
‘I know that I am tripping. But she really is here. She is stretching her withered arms out to you, Peter. And she is not alone. There is a fat man wearing a bow tie, standing beside her. Who is he? And there is another younger man with curly hair. And behind those two there are lots of people in brown robes. Your mother is their prisoner. There are lots of dogs, blind dogs – I mean that the dogs have had needles put in their eyes.’
The sun was hot on my face. I stared hard at the grass rippling and branches swaying in a gentle breeze. It terrified me that I could not see what Maud was seeing. Sally was, if anything, in an even worse state. She had scrunched herself up in a ball and was shaking all over.
‘The plump man in the bow tie also wants to talk to you,’ continued Maud. ‘He thinks that you owe him something. Your mother tells me that she is very cold, for there is almost no skin on her bones. She wants our help. What shall I do?’
‘Send her away. Send them all away, Maud’, I croaked. ‘Please. I don’t want to see any of them.’
‘Very well then,’ and Maud rose to her feet. She pointed to the invisible throng and spoke in a peremptory voice,
‘Go away. We have no need of you. This is private property.’
She watched them go – at least I presume that was what she was doing. Then she turned back to me and saw that my face was wet with tears. She lowered herself to sit once more beside me and put her arms around me.
‘They’ve gone,’ she said. ‘Though I think they will be back.’
‘Save me from them Maud,’ and I buried my face between her breasts. She started to stroke my hair. After a while, I began to unbutton her dress. She made no attempt to stop me, but shifted about so as to make it easier for me to get her clothes off. Over Maud’s shoulder, I noticed that Sally was now pressed face-down on the grass with her arms extended, like a penitent monk meditating on the crucifixion. Once Maud was undressed, I undressed and applied myself to browsing over her body, as if it were an illustrated encyclopedia. I was going to study to become an expert on her legs and breasts. Blessed with dilated vision, I was able to take in every pore of her skin and I saw that her pores were set out in an amazing, quincuncial pattern of lozenges. Her skin had become the Net of Indira and I willingly allowed myself to be entangled in this, the World’s Illusion.
‘I love you, Maud,’ I mumbled.
‘That’s good,’ she replied.
She was wallowing in my affection, rolling around in such a way as to allow all parts of her body to be successively inspected and embraced. But then, when I got on top of her and tried to part her legs, she resisted.
‘Not now, Peter. Not now. The time is not right. The appointed hour has not yet come. I solemnly promise that I will deliver my virginity to you, but it cannot be today.’
‘I will die if I can’t have you.’
‘You will die anyway,’ and she actually laughed at my disappointment. ‘I want you too. I’m desperate for you. Feel how wet I am.’
But moments later she pushed me off and stood up. She walked over to the edge of the woods and called out,
‘Peterkin! Here, Peterkin! Peterkin! Peterkin, come to me. Here I am. Come to Maud who loves you dearly.’
I crawled behind her. I was crazy with desire for her heavy flanks.
‘Maud, what are you doing?’
She looked back down at me. Her drug-dilated eyes were like saucers.
‘I am summoning your fucking double.’
‘My double?’
‘Yes, Peter, your fucking double. Don’t say anything more. I need to concentrate. If I concentrate, he will emerge from the trees.’
This was all so very weird. It is true that when one is on a trip then everything seems weird. But what particularly struck me as supernaturally weird was Maud’s utterance of the word ‘fucking’. I had not thought that that verb was in her vocabulary.
Maud paid no more attention to me. She was panting heavily. She raised her arms as in a gesture of surrender and declared in ringing tones of absolute conviction,
‘My lover comes! My true lover!’
She dropped to her knees and then with an awful cry she performed a contortionist’s flip onto her back and swiftly spread her legs. I knelt a little distance away from her and looked on appalled. Of course, I could see not so much as a wisp of my simulacrum. All I was aware of was the way Maud responded to ‘Peterkin’. Her back was arched, her tongue protruded and her eyes rolled. Momentarily (though only momentarily) she looked quite ugly. It was while Maud was moaning, bucking and thrashing under the invisible man that Sally gave out a deep sigh and picked herself off the ground, but she walked back into the cottage without appearing to notice either of us. A few minutes later Maud gave out a long shuddering moan, before rolling onto her side and falling into a kind of post-coital doze. I sat watching over her and, for all I know, my Doppelganger was beside me, doing the same.
When I saw that Maud was coming round again, I told her that I was going in for a few minutes to make us both some tea, but she said that she was not safe alone. So, brushing leaves and stuff off her body, she followed me into the cottage, and while I, with the slow deliberation of the drugged, set about the reassuringly familiar rituals of tea-making, Maud stood close beside me. Sally was not in sight. Maud had found a hairbrush and worked hard on the tangles of her hair. It was as if the hairbrush was some kind of exorcism-tool with which she was br
ushing away the horrors. She admitted that this was the case when, over tea in the lying-room, we started talking and swapping our trippy horror stories.
I told her about my experiencing an eternity of repetitious, diary-scripted boredom in a few moments of time. In retrospect, I am amazed I ever came out of that part of my trip. I am lucky that my mind was not trapped there forever. It is not a risk I would ever take again and I told Maud that I was finished with acid. Maud looked pleased. Her own visions of my mother’s walking corpse and the congregation of spectral Satanists had also been nightmarish, though in a different way.
‘I do think that the drug itself was warning us that we should not take it,’ she said. ‘I am sure that those magicians you were mixed up with can sense you when you take drugs and it makes you vulnerable to their attack.’
This struck me as a rather Sally-like way of thinking and I spent ages trying to argue Maud out of this notion. Maud was indeed seriously confused in her attitude to what she had seen. I think that she was still suffering from some residual drug-generated paranoia. She thought that the drug was warning us that the Satanists were on our track. I told her that I no more expected members of the Black Book Lodge to turn up here than I expected to meet Yama, the Death-God with the clockwork, rotating nose, walking down Farnham High Street. Such hallucinations were just miscellaneous scrapings from the mind’s detritus.
At length I asked about Peterkin and, as I did so, she blushed. (It was lovely to see how the blush spread over her body.) At first she was rather vague, but as I pressed her relentlessly, she admitted that, ever since we first met, Peterkin had been her night-time fantasy and that she never went to sleep without thinking about him, mentally undressing him and whispering endearments to the darkness. Peterkin was just like me in every detail, except that, whereas I was obviously cool and uncomfortable with her, Peterkin actually loved her and adored her to distraction. Yet, though he was madly in love with her, she loved him even more. She worshipped him. Literally. Before getting into bed in that bleak little flat of hers, she used to kneel beside the bed and with eyes closed she used to pray to him, asking in her prayers that he make her worthy of him.
