Patient FJ

       Recovery Diary 3 (or 4)

      I feel calm now. I should be screaming. I think I was screaming before.

      They’re clever, making you start this diary before you find out, because they know that when you do you’re going to have to write about it just to stop yourself from going mad. Or killing yourself. But how do dead people kill themselves? Dead people like me. I’m dead. Oh Jesus, I can’t believe I’ve just written that. I’m dead. Or I’m mad. God help me.

      Mad or dead or both.

      I’m back. I had to stop for a while there. Okay, let me think. Is there another explanation? What about drugs? It’s a bit early for me but you go ahead. Funny. No, but could it be some kind of hallucination or delirium? It doesn’t feel like it. I’ve had hallucinations on acid trips and I’ve had very vivid opiate dreams but I knew they were dreams and hallucinations while I was having them. Maybe this is some kind of psychosis. Maybe I was right, and this is a nuthouse, and I had some kind of breakdown. I wish I could believe that. But I can’t. I don’t feel weird, or spaced out, I feel completely normal. Everything looks real and feels real. It is real. I’m not insane. I know mad people are convinced they’re sane and all that shit but this is real and I’m not mad. I’m dead.

      Fuck, I’m dead. I must be, given what just happened.

      After I finished the sandwich I went back to my room. I didn’t want to delay my departure much longer but I felt a bit shaky and I still couldn’t remember anything. So I had a nap. When I woke up I was hungry again and it was nearly dark outside. I’d obviously missed lunch. I’d probably missed dinner too. I left my room and cursed my way along the corridor. When I got to the Blue Room I couldn’t remember which doorway I’d gone through before to get to the dining area. No one was around. The French windows were closed and some table lamps were on. A smell of stale food was in the air. I decided to open the French windows. As I pushed the doors open I saw that someone was standing just outside them, facing me. He stepped into the room. I stepped back. Fuck, I said, and sat down in one of the armchairs. I was looking at a dead man.

      I knew he was dead because I delivered a very moving little speech at his memorial service two years ago. I spoke with wry humour but also great tenderness. I kept the tone light but let them see the struggle I was having to control myself. Very poignant. Not a dry eye in the house. I’d always hated him.

      It was my dear friend and deadly rival Patrick Warrendale, preposterously undeserving winner of the Booker prize, and prize dickhead I’d always detested, except when I was crying into my beer (red wine actually, and always very good) at his place in Notting Hill and swearing he was my best friend in the world, the whole fucking world, no really my best my truest friend the only one who’s standing by me as I go through this terrible divorce, awful bankruptcy, loss of girlfriend or contract or agent or whatever, and thanks so much for letting me stay in your spare room until I can just get myself sorted and oops sorry I’ve just done a vomit down the side of your sofa. Don’t worry, Paddy says, I’ll clear it up. But haven’t you got a girl, I say, a cleaner, a girl, some lovely young immigrant totty who does all that and probably shags you on the side for good measure as well you lucky bastard even though you’ve got a perfectly good wife who you stole from me I seem to remember, but haven’t you got one of them, a girl an au pair with a nice pair, one of them? Oh yes, he says, but I couldn’t let her do that, I couldn’t make Yolanda do something like that, and he means it the stupid guilt-ridden liberal bastard and he really does clean up my sick himself the bastard why is he always so good to me and why am I such a dreadful cunt.

      Yes, that’s how it was, I’m afraid.

      Not always, though. At the beginning he was only a bit more successful than me. We were part of the same generation of writers, the same non-existent movement invented by lazy journalists (is there any other kind?) which meant that writers like me and Paddy and our gang – and we were a bit of a gang – were lumped together with sub-Nabokovian panty-sniffers and militant lesbian magical-realists, just because we were all roughly the same age. Paddy had a head start because of who his mother was, so they were all waiting to see what he’d do. Which was to come up with a few glib neologisms and write about the kind of bad behaviour that always impressed him even though he didn’t have the balls to do it himself. Not seriously, anyway. He dabbled, and cultivated a hoodlum boy genius image. I always found his stuff fundamentally puerile. Even when he was 50 he was still writing like a precocious teenager trying to show off. I was the real tearaway, the one who did the overdosing and the adultery and the getting into fights and fucking everything up. He watched from the sidelines and then wrote very ­successful books and I know for sure that at least one of them was based on me. But he was too clever to make the mistakes for himself. Or so I thought.

      He had a heart attack at 53. Triple bypass. A week out of hospital and I was at his place, fetching him tea as he lay on the sofa. I asked him why he thought it happened. Bad genes? Bad diet? Bad luck? And out of the blue he told me he’d had a massive coke habit for years. I was stunned at first but it made sense when I began to think about it. The most important thing for Paddy was to be cool. He used to join in, he was one of the lads, even one of the bad lads, but not one of the really bad lads. He used to go home early. And now we know why. All the time he was sneaking off and hoovering up the coke. Unbelievable.