*****
By the time I was sixteen the nihilism was firmly entrenched and really everything else was inevitable. I suppose the true beginning was four years earlier, in the events of the few months before I became a teenager.
I had been pretty happy in junior school. I liked having the same classroom, the same teacher, the same desk for a whole year. It suited my temperament and I found the lessons and the work relatively easy. I rode around the streets on my bike and did stupid kids things like you were supposed to (like you were allowed to back then, before the cotton wool brigade came along and reduced childhood to a virtual experience). I had a tiny black and white television in my bedroom and would spend my pocket money at jumble sales, picking up old records and books for a few pence. I enjoyed myself most of the time and didn't really think about life or my future. If asked at the time I would have described myself as 'happy'.
But high school was a shock for which I was woefully unprepared. I went from a school with fourteen teachers and a few hundred kids to a huge monolith of a building – several buildings in fact, more like a compound – with a hundred and twenty teachers and two thousand pupils. We were given a map on day one to help us find our way around. There were so many staircases they all had numbers and finding the right room was impossible. I got shouted at by a teacher on my very first day for hesitating on a staircase because I didn't know where I was going. He turned out to be the teacher for my first lesson. There were kids there who were taller than the teachers and had beards and cars and cigarettes. I was terrified and confused from the start and that never really changed. I never ceased to find that school oppressive and prison-like and the teachers sour and quick tempered. Showing any sign of imagination or individuality was a cardinal sin, you were supposed to sit down and keep quiet while they taught at you. The 'right answer' was the one that agreed with the teacher or the text book, not one where you had actually applied some original thought to the problem.
By the end of the first year my personality had changed drastically. I was definitely no longer happy and I was starting to think about 'Life' with a capital L. During the six weeks of that summer holiday I spent most of the time in bed. My best friend called round every day the first week. I knew it was him because he came around the back through the garden gate and knocked at the kitchen door. Nobody older than sixteen ever did that. My parents were at work so I was alone in the house. If I was still in bed I just stayed there. When I got up I closed all the curtains and watched TV with the sound down low until after he had left. Every summer holiday for the previous five years we had spent most of the time together but now I just couldn't face the company. I don't think I ever told him why I was avoiding him. Well, I couldn't, because I didn't know the reason myself. Eventually he stopped turning up but I kept the curtains closed all day anyway just in case.
I didn't see anybody that summer, I just slept and watched TV without ever really enjoying it. I began writing in exercise books, little essays I suppose they were. I was losing any sense of meaning or purpose and those books were my attempt to find some, to figure out what the hell life was all about and what I was supposed to be doing.
I began to be obsessed with the universe and would spend hours every day thinking about things like what it was made of and, if it was expanding, what was outside it. I wrote a lot about space and time and what a thought was made of and where they came from. I threw out all those books many years ago and I've never been sure whether they were a positive or negative factor in my life at the time. I suppose at least it was something that occupied me and 'got me out of myself' – if nothing else I had to at least get out of bed to find a pen. I began to listen to science programmes on the radio and record them – I still have some of the cassettes now, though I no longer have anything to play them on.
When we started back at school I was unrecognisable from the boy I had been a year before. I had shaved off all my hair, which back then was seen as very extreme and people would cross the street to avoid you. I had also lost quite a bit of weight because I had spent six weeks mostly in bed not exercising and hardly eating anything. Combined with a sudden growth spurt and the onset of puberty giving me a deeper voice and a bit of stubble, I looked sufficiently different for many teachers to not even recognise me. I slouched around avoiding eye contact unless absolutely necessary and did my best to shut out everything and everyone around me. I didn't speak unless I had to and then in as terse a manner as I could get away with. A few teachers tried engaging with me or making jokes about my new physical awkwardness but I didn't respond and eventually they stopped bothering to make any effort with me.
The first time I was aware of my best friend was about three weeks after term had begun. I was in the far corner of the playing field one lunchtime, the furthest point I could get from anybody, laying on my back and trying to sleep. I was just starting to nod off when a football rolled over and came to rest against my elbow. I tried to ignore it but several kids were shouting for it so I stood up and prepared to kick it back to them.
I looked at the boy who ran towards me to get the ball and then stopped as he recognised me. We hadn't spoken for two months and I only realised in that moment that I had been avoiding him as well as everyone else on the planet.
He looked at me for a few moments after I had kicked him the ball. I thought he was going to say something and I wondered what it would be and what I would say in return, if anything. But all he did was shake his head in a mixture of disgust and sadness and turn away back to his friends and their stupid game. We never again exchanged a single word.
Twenty years later I ran into somebody else who was in our year back then and she nervously told me that the story going around at the time was that I had got into drugs. I don't know where that story came from but it certainly explained why most people avoided me from then on and also why several low life's used to try to hang around with me - they were hoping I would share some of my drugs with them.
Then, things got much, much worse.
The first thing that happened was that my granddad died. He was the last of my grandparents and by far my favourite person in my family, the only one I ever really felt I had anything in common with. For the previous eighteen months it was only his weekly visits on a Sunday that had made life bearable. When he was gone I started to bunk off school and generally let things slide.
And then, a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday, one of my cousins died. I hadn't been allowed to go to my granddad's funeral so I insisted on going to my cousin's. It turned out to be the worst decision of my life.
My cousin was a year younger than me and died in an accident that could have happened to any kid. At the service I couldn't help comparing myself to him and he beat me in every single department, other than that of still being alive. All the nice things the vicar said about him were true and none of them applied to me – I was neither popular nor good at sport nor 'beloved' by anybody except my granddad, who was now also in a box. There were a dozen attractive girls in the front row and I knew that none of the girls at my school would even notice my absence let alone bother to come to my funeral and cry. My cousin was liked or loved by everyone who knew him and good at everything he ever turned his hand to. I was a pitiful failure by comparison.
I walked away from that funeral with an unshakeable impression that has never left me and had formed the guiding philosophy of my entire life: it should have been me who died, not him, he would have done so much more with his life than I have, therefore I don't deserve to live.
The other thing it left me with was an inability to see any kind of future. If his life could be snuffed out so quickly and easily, so casually, then surely mine was on an even slenderer thread. Ever since that day I have been totally incapable of imagining anything beyond the next few weeks. If ever I tried to think about what I would be doing in a year or five years, or even just six months, all I could envisage was a blank, a void. And if you can't see any kind of future then you have no
dreams, no ambitions, no plans. You live in a permanent state of suspended animation. Welcome to my world.
Brian: Mental Book 1 Page 2
