Please enjoy the first chapter from Start.
LIFE AT THE LINKS CAFE
I blame my medication for my weight.
When I am giving lectures, I say that before I went on to OlanzapineI weighed 10 stone and that now I weigh 16 stone.
I make jokes and say the NHS should give us a clothing allowance when it makes us take drugs that pile on the weight and then I get a weebit more serious and talk of diabetes.
Sometimes I get even more serious and say that people with my diagnosis die twenty years earlier than the rest of the population and then I do that wry laugh and say my age and that I must be living on borrowed time by now.
When I get home, I think of the promises I have made to walk thebeach and the forest in the evening and the early morning. I think of mysister-in-law making me commit to climbing a Munro on my fiftieth birthday. I somehow doubt I will.
Usually I sit down heavily on the couch, I pour a whisky and keep on pouring so that if I am asked, I can say that I only drank two whiskies last night, or I save the whisky for later so that it doesn’t look like I have drunk two bottles this week and I pour a huge tumbler of martini and gin, trying to convince myself that it is more healthy than you would think because of the vermouth.
And slowly, as I slip into a haze, I think to myself that I know that these drugs put on weight, I know what chips and mayonnaise do. I know what walking from the car to the office and the office to the car does, andwhat drinking does and having two sugars in my coffee and not sleeping.
I know what I should be doing but, in the haze, as I watch How I Met Your Mother, I think to myself that it’s been a busy day. That tomorrow I will walk, then the next day I will swim, that tonight I will take a drink to bed with me but not the next night.
When I think how many people with a severe mental illness have not even touched another person in the last year, I feel like weeping. I think of the overpowering loneliness, that gripping pain of the clenched throat of misery that says, ‘Someone, someone, speak to me, listen tome. Someone smile at me as if you wanted to smile at me without me wondering how much you are paid an hour to do that.
When I think of this, I pause and think to myself that I am very, very, lucky indeed. I think of the people that I meet in the café. The Links Café which has almost become an institution in our lives. I think of when I am sitting uncomfortably on the seats in mid-summer, the seats on the bench table just out of the wind, in the corner the café makes with the open air swimming pool.
It glares an awesome blueness and is surrounded by iron railings. The dogs are tied up there while we drink coffee. They sit almost patiently. Sometimes Benson will climb over another dog and get tangled up in his lead, or the collie dogs will suddenly bare their sharp teeth at another dog. Maybe Benson will lie down on his back and Taffy will grip his throat between her teeth but both will have wagging tails. On occasion, when they are tied near the sandpit that they have dug in the corner over the years, they will lie down, their heads poking over the rim.
Then, while they lie there, while we talk, Cara will totter up to them with the water bottle that seems bigger than her, to fill up their drinking bowls and they will drink and then knock the bowls over, and Cara will refill them over and over until, on hot days, she empties the bottle over their heads and bursts out laughing at their expressions.
All the adults will be talking: about dogs, children, husbands, school, work and the week ahead; whether Jean will come by before we all go away and I will be sitting a wee bit to the side.
When I am at the table, I always struggle with the empty sugar packets; you screw them up but there is nowhere to put them, so I twist them very small and by and by they will flick away in the wind to become the litter I pretend to have nothing to do with.
I say very little at the café. I tend to smile and give Cara packets of sauce to play with. I sometimes think of buying toast but I am trying to budget so I don’t.
I sit there basking; feeling uncomfortably happy, my bag and coat on the ground. That is often commented on because it is so untidy.
After a time, Sally will go off to the park or the beach to play with Gavin. Or if she doesn’t do that, she will ask to go to the other park and Cara will ask if she can go to the park too and Sarah will say ‘Not just yet,’ because everyone is busy. Then I will offer to take her with me.
Delighted at the gratitude Sarah gives me, even more delighted at the feel of Cara’s tiny hand in mine as she balances along the swimming pool wall, pausing to hold out both hands for me to hold while she jumps off.
We will spend the next half hour or so in the park. I will trail after her, swing her on the baby swing, till suddenly she says, ‘Stop!’
We will pause by the grate at the entrance to the pool and push pebbles and grass she has collected through the gaps. She will climb the stairs to the slide, grumbling that she has to hold my hand. Then she will insist that I sit at the bottom so that when she reaches the end of the slide, she can be caught.
On a couple of occasions she has toppled off. She just leans sideway #s in slow motion and falls to the rubberised floor; then I will rush and hold her to me until she stops crying. After that we may go to the pirate ship to peek out of the plastic windows or for her to leap into my arms from the deck.
At other times when no one else is on the roundabout, she will make me lie on my back and stare at the sky while she wheels it round and round. Sometimes the circling of the roundabout overtakes her and she falls over but at other times she climbs on, lies down beside me and we both stare into the blue and the clouds as the roundabout goes round and round, more and more slowly.
After that we go back to the adults at the café. And Gladys and Hamish will go away to the cinema or to the shops, and Kay and me and Sarah will walk on the beach with the dogs and the children. The two dogs go wild, rushing through the shallows, biting each other, running shoulder to shoulder chasing sticks. I tend to wheel Cara in her buggy while Sarah and Kay talk and Sally will be away doing small girl beach things.
Sometimes Cara will remember I am pushing the buggy and cry out for her mummy to push it. At other times Cara will walk along the beach, collecting stones to put in the water or to carry up the beach to place in the buggy. And these are the very best times.
Walking, pushing the pram, talking; the dog always getting into trouble; strangers stopping us and assuming we are a couple, which makes me glow because I would like to be a dad again and a couple again with someone, one day.
At the gate to her house Sarah will pause before getting lunch and going out to the supermarket for food and nappies; getting ready for the rest of the weekend with her boyfriend, and I will say goodbye and setoff for home.
I will pass the old man with the crossed kukris carved into his wall. He will be smoking his cigarette; the one-eyed dog will be sniffing through the mesh of the fence and for a time we will talk. Never about much. I always wonder how he knows my name. I always feel embarrassed that I don’t know his. I often think to myself. ‘Wow, he is even lonelier than me!’
And it is always me who leaves; me, who pretends to be busy as Igo back to my flat and the mattress on the floor and the pile of whisky bottles in the wee cupboard under the stairs where the cooker is and the tiny sink.
I could paint that picture, the one of me being lonely and it would be true and yet it isn’t. There are a hundred million versions of me and none of them are true and none of them are false. It is just that at sometimes some of the pictures are more true to me, and maybe to you, than at other times.
When everyone is busy on a Saturday and I am in town, wandering in and out of the charity shops, I am occasionally very, very happy. I feel that delighted recognition when I find a book of Scottish literature maybe James Roberston or Andrew Greig or Alan Bisset, once Kevin McNeil.
For a time it became a regular occurrence to find just the books I would have liked to buy but couldn’t afford. I wondered who it was in Nairn who read the same books as me and put them by for the charity shops. At other times, because I was alone, I would find that awkward thrill of picking up romances by Jodi Picoult and Freya North, delighting myself with evenings curled up on the couch reading stories where there are always good endings and those tender kisses I miss so much. Those exciting times when emotion runs high and mini adventures scatter themselves all over the page.
Much as I would like to, I cannot persuade myself that fifty-two hours a year peering at second hand books in charity shops is an adventure. For me, my big adventure when I moved here was when I started buying clothes in the charity shops. Initially I had relied on people like Jean or my sister-in-law to help me with clothes. I just don’t have the sense of what is a good cloth and what isn’t.
I don’t know what my measurements are. I don’t know how clothes are meant to hang or fit or look or feel. But lately, I no longer feel that anxiety that stops me riffling through the hangers. I grab at the clothes and plonk myself in the changing room, almost always regretting wearing shoes with too many lace holes.
I now have a growing collection of beige trousers and shirts that almost fills the cloth-framed wardrobe I bought in Aldi last year.
And then I go home. Often I pop into the organic vegan deli where the owners know me vaguely and sometimes I pop into the fruit and veg shop which smells so rich; that has piles of glistening tomatoes and stacks of glowing oranges and bundles of herbs. They are far too expensive.
It makes me think what my wife would think if she saw me buying value tomatoes and mushrooms past their sell-by date when not so long ago our weekly shop was always Fairtrade, always organic.
And I buy the Guardian. Every week I buy the Guardian on Saturday. I sit at home in my flat, in my untidy flat, and there I read about recipe for meals with pomegranate syrup and sumac, for marsh samphire and sea bass and I read the indignant articles about everything we all have to get indignant about.
I get a wee bit tired of being so predictably angry about everything, sometimes I catch sight of the heresy people feel about me when I say, the Israelis need somewhere to live too, the ineptitude with which I wonder if nuclear power is better than oil. Generally, though, I eat up the little injustices; store up my passion for this and that, the issues I am meant to be passionate about.
Mainly I read about that man in a band in the magazine who makes fun of his wife and children and dog every week; who makes fun of them so much that you know he loves them more than he knows how to hold his love.
I like him. I could never talk to him but I would like to nod at him in the park when I walk the dog I don’t have. I like the photographs. I like the blind date page and imagine doing it myself. I love it when they have a great time together.
I look at the varied aged models with approval but still look to see which is the prettiest. The one I would like to walk along the beach holding hands with.
And then it is time to cook tea, take out the whisky and watch telly, to get that wee bit muzzy, a wee bit glaikit, a wee bit sad before going to bed and falling asleep with the light and the radio on. To wake and fumble for the light switch, to turn off the radio again and find my thoughts catching me up in the darkness; bundles of anxiety slipping round the corners of my mind, setting off alarms and; ‘What ifs’ and; ‘Why did she say that?’ and; ‘How will I do that?’
And at times I deliberately make my jaw soft, make my forehead smooth and say, ‘Let those thoughts drift away, drift away like dandelion clocks. Let your anxiety fade from your mind and the quiet oasis of sleep take you away.’
For a few seconds I find myself in limbo until, with a roar, the anxiety and the thinking rushes back in. Those dandelions have been flung into a rainstorm of cumulonimbus. They are flying all over the place, getting drenched by the heavy raindrops, and I am thinking, thinking, thinking and I don’t know what I am thinking but it is battering me. I hate the screech of my thoughts.
I turn the radio back on and it fades to a murmur that I do not notice, the world is an absence and I am not there anymore. I am gone. I am at peace.
In the morning I will wake to the tangled sheets. I will feel joy that I can lie still and do nothing, feel nothing, conscious just of the sensation of my toes at the end of the bedclothes and the downie still wrapped round my head. Conscious that at some point it will be time to sit on the couch drinking coffee and, because it is a Sunday, having toast and an egg at the bare table in the corner of the living room.