darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had a call from a girl who said she was ringing from a mental hospital in Woking. She said she was a fellow patient of your friend Jack’s. What should I do?’
The next day, I drove the hundred miles to the hospital, where I found my new boyfriend hopping round a traffic cone. ‘Hi, Bunny!’ Still hopping, he jiggled my shoulders. I asked him what had happened.
‘The pigs got me!’
‘How did they get you, Jack?’
‘Ha ha! They said, “You can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and I said, “The hard way!” So they beat me up, but it took three of them! Look!’ He showed me a nasty crop of bruises.
Later I pieced together the events: after taking the usual cocktail of speed, acid, dope and ecstasy, he had gone to London and begun a mystical quest for his dad, whom he had never met. He decided his philosophy professor was the most likely candidate, and wrote him a series of impassioned letters, hanging some on trees and posting others, which were later returned in a sealed envelope. He walked around naked in High Barnet, reciting from Ecce Homo, which promptly got him arrested and banned from the borough.1 That was where his friend lived, so now he had nowhere to stay. He
decided to build a raft and escape down the Thames, so he dumped his belongings in the tube station and made his way to Camden Lock, where he started throwing planks and branches into the canal, which wasn’t a river but would do at a pinch. He needed to steer his vessel and spotted an ideal-looking mop on top of a narrow-boat. He ran on board to fetch it, but the owner got upset and called the police.
Jack resisted arrest with the mop and was taken to the cells, where the police psychiatrist decided he was mad, and ordered him put away somewhere else. As all the local NHS wards were full, he was sent to a private hospital on the outskirts of Woking – Willowdell Hall – which took a very relaxed stance towards recovery, as the owners got £300 per patient per day from BUPA or the NHS. In return, they hung crap oil paintings on the walls, and made fancy food. (‘Good evening, Mr Stumford, will you have banoffee pie or peach melba tomorrow night?’) This last luxury was a bit of a waste, as most of the patients were anorexic.
On my second visit to Willowdell Hall, I met Jack’s mother. She was surprised by my loyalty – as her son didn’t seem like good boyfriend material, even to her. She told me how she had raised Jack on her own after having been abandoned by a rich American who had got her pregnant. After the drama of the birth, she’d fallen unconscious and then woke up in a hospital in America quite alone. Where was her baby? Dragging her drip behind her, she’d found him spreadeagled beneath a knife, moments away from circumcision. ‘Get your hands off my beautiful boy!’ she’d snarled, and snatched him back, then limped off to bed; next, she’d taken him back to Wales, where they’d lived with her sister’s family while she retrained as a nurse, working nights, studying by day and forswearing sleep and sex. It was there that Jack grew to manhood with his foreskin intact, surrounded by women, hens and puddles. And it was there, as the damp months turned slowly to years, that he grew a pair of size thirteen feet.
Back in Woking, the doctors had no idea when – or even if – he’d recover. I visited him every day, hoping things would get better, but they didn’t. Private clinics don’t accept dangerous patients, so he was the only male resident. A three-strong harem formed round him, solemnly following him through the grounds, giving him shoulder massages. By flirting with one, he provoked me into having sex with him. His bed collapsed. He had to get a new one, and it was obvious why.
Willowdell Hall was not locked, and Jack went missing on a daily basis. He was often found standing on the road out front, directing traffic with volumes of nineteenth-century poetry.
After three weeks of this sort of thing, I had to return to Cambridge to face my final exams – three years of indolence distilled into six weeks of hell. When Jack and I argued on the phone one night, he tried to escape to Cambridge by hitch-hiking up the M1, and was quickly picked up by the police. I decided I needed to visit him again, but the day I arrived, he suffered a bad reaction to his medication, and things got really nasty. He started saying creepy things, and dribbling, and then his face froze, whereupon the nurses dragged him upstairs, pulled down his jeans and gave him a massive injection in the backside. At once he fell asleep, and I went home.
All too soon, my exams began. While I tackled Paper 7: Near-identical Portraits of Fat Old Men in Wigs, 1740–1860, my mum took my boyfriend out for afternoon tea, accidentally driving the wrong way up a motorway slip-road. ‘Christ, Lins, your mum’s insane!’ he yelled, into the phone.
‘Oh, darling,’ reported Mum, gaily, ‘Jack’s a riot! We were in this café run by Christians and he went up to the owner and said, “You know, I don’t believe in God,” and then had this philosophical conversation with him and, of course, the owner couldn’t keep up. Oh, it was marvellous!’ I was glad they were having fun.
While I struggled with Paper 8: Near-identical Classical-style Buildings in Varying States of Disrepair, 1000 bc–the Present, my parents took Jack out to the Woking shopping centre. ‘And, darling – he disappeared! We thought he’d escaped. He was gone for at least half an hour, and we were panicking. We were thinking we’d have to call the police – oh, it was terrible, I had such a fright, because we were legally responsible for him! And then he came out of the gents’, smiling as if nothing had happened.’
‘Mum, I should have warned you – Jack takes for ever in the loo.’2
Things took a turn for the worse. A bed had come up in an NHS place in Cambridge, and he was being transferred. He was happy that he’d be closer to me, and so was I, until I visited him. It was like one of those re-enactments of nineteenth-century Bedlam you see on BBC2, and the place stank of ladies’ pants. Not surprisingly, he got better pretty fast. That summer, his mum got him a job moving furniture, and watched over him while he got his head back in order. Altogether, it had been a humiliating episode. Jack had no more secrets. Those who cared for him had been hurt, and everyone else was laughing. He loved drugs, but it was official: he couldn’t handle them, and it was my responsibility to make sure he never took them again.
These were the inauspicious beginnings of our story. Not the ideal basis for a solid relationship, you might think, but the fact is, I’d never had a boyfriend before. My mother was beginning to despair, so even a boyfriend in a lunatic asylum seemed better than none. I felt the same way.
I was a teenage solipsist
My early childhood was spent almost exclusively with my mum, a devoted and endlessly interested companion. Her friends’ kids were older than I was, and Dad was busy with his crossword, so it was just the two of us. Perhaps as a result of this, I pursued close one-on-one friendships with a single-minded passion from the moment I was pushed into the social whirl of nursery school. When I made a friend, I didn’t want to share her, and I was never the first to let go. I spent most of my childhood lying in bed, reading – a delicious habit that has the preservative effects of heroin but doesn’t build one’s social skills.
Significant Best Friend No. 1 was Melanie. Aged eleven, we dressed up as pigs and became fast friends. We’d go to jumble sales, then totter home in the worst possible outfits, giggling helplessly. As I was copying her, I’d got Mum to buy me a coat just like hers, from C&A, and we used to hold hands within the matching sleeves. But one year later we were marched off to different schools: I was sent to the local comprehensive, five years of breeze-block hell. Melanie started seeing boys and forgot about me. Aged sixteen, I got a job on the till in the Safeway opposite her house and sat on the
