The Dark Zone

My missing months

Giorgio de Chirico, Il cervello del bambino (The Child’s Brain), 1914

As long-time readers of this newsletter might have noticed, I pride myself on having rather a good memory.

Yet a specific time is missing from my mental record – namely the months from June to August 2003. What happened then?

Why, do you ask, do I care? Allowing the fact that we care about all the times of our lives, sure, but in addition these were the months following the failure of my student performance at Oxford, which I’ve written about at length here and here. It was the immediate aftermath, to use the langage de nos jours, of a significant trauma – so I’m naturally curious what was going on with me.

And yet only the merest glimpses of that time remain.

I remember my girlfriend of the time driving us from Oxford to Gloucester and eating soup in a gastropub on the way. I remember a poster of a production of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s ‘Pre-Paradise, Sorry Now’ hanging in my ex’s room visible for street, and one day a car pulled up and a man got out.

‘Is that a picture of Myra Hindley?’

‘It is.’

‘What’s it for?’

‘It’s a play about her.’

‘I hope it’s not glorifying her or putting her in a good light.’

‘It is not.’

‘It better not be, you know.’

‘I can assure you it isn’t.’

And the man got back into his car and drove off.

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It was during this period of collapse that I decided that I had to take a year off university. Indeed, I had already applied for a scholarship to Iceland to study at the university of Reykjavik. Not sure there are many other Icelandic universities.

In the way young people do, I had already quite elevated a speculative prospect to a settled appointment, in the same way I would tell people back then I was writing a book for the BFI because I’d sent the BFI an email. The person I’d said I was writing a book too by the way was the film director John Boorman, in August 2003, at the end of our Edinburgh Fringe run. I can see the scrumpled piece of paper I wrote my email address I gave him now.

But from the months of June and July I can only really recall one moment.

I am on a train, and it is the afternoon, and I am returning from Canterbury to London, where I am visiting a friend. I remember the carriage was in a parlous state, dirty and rattling, and somehow the outside world felt very close, as if the train were flying through the air. We were going over a viaduct if I recall.

I would have been just about to turn 21.

After the Icelandic refusal, my tutor said that I’d probably want to take the year out anyway – funny the idea of a year out, like Oxford academic life was the real world - and I did; it’s fair to say that year off saved my life. During that period, I began to learn German, and went to Berlin, and forget – apologies to all those whose ears I chewed off at the time – my ex. I’ve told that story elsewhere, and the story of before then too, the hubris and misfortune that led to me flaming out in my second university year. Trying to move on from that was the work of many years after and has only recently, really, been brought to a resolution.

Still the story of the in-between time haunts me as the purest grey space in my mind. All I can see is that carriage, and, though I would have been writing emails to friends at the time about what was happening, they’re now lost to the caprices of historical email servers. What was I thinking?

I would have been changing in London to get back from Canterbury; I’m not sure there was a direct train to Nottingham from there, though there might have been. I know my friend Ed, a reliable comrade in enabling depression, would have come to visit my family home. And my girlfriend must have been around – we didn’t break up until the end of the summer. I certainly remember all that.

I remember her telling me that real life wasn’t eating soup at a nice gastropub. That must have been a few days after we ate soup in the nice gastropub.

But of that period really only that one image remains, of that train on, I think, a Sunday afternoon. It is a very clear one, like my mind has situated me in a painting by Di Chirico or Magritte. The flat landscape. The outside feeling very close. The dilapidated state of the carriage. The rattling sound. No doubt I was on the way back to Nottingham, about to see friends, hardly able to work at all.

Later on would come the job of healing and learning and the long slog back to some kind of happiness. Yet that moment on a train on Kent seems to be all that remains of those toughest times; a flash of misty lightning across the Dark Zone.