He pours me some more coffee.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’
‘I meant the landscape.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘Do you know what makes it beautiful?’
I look around and I see an empty green valley below us. Behind us I can see layer upon layer of soft rounded hills stretching for miles. I see rocks.
I see trees.
Grass.
Clouds.
I see Wales.
But before I can answer he speaks again.
‘It’s not what you can see, but what you can’t see.’
He pauses and time appears to stand still and it is as if I have been here for days with the bearded stranger. Finally he speaks.
‘The beauty is in the absence of people.’
‘Right.’
A pause.
‘Of course, beauty is subjective. What might be beautiful to me may be inherently ugly to you.’
‘No, I agree with you,’ I say. ‘It’s people that I’m trying to get away from too. Well, kind of, anyway. I think maybe I’m also trying to escape myself . . .’
He nods at this.
‘And how is that working out for you?’
‘Ah – I guess that’s the annoying part. I can’t escape myself.’
He laughs at this. A big hearty laugh from somewhere deep within his nicotine-stained Santa Claus beard.
He pokes at the ground with the toe of his boot. Then his smile slowly fades.
‘The thing is, we can never escape ourselves. We don’t have very long in which to try, either. Life is short. And that’s the other problem: that constant awareness of our own mortality. The realization that we have no control over our own demise, only how we choose to spend our time before then.’
A thought swims up to the surface from the darker depths of my memory. A quote.
‘ “Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.” ’
‘Sartre,’ he replies, quickfire.
I’m taken aback. Not by my own pretentiousness -though I should be – but by the old man’s response.
‘You know it?’
He shrugs in the affirmative.
‘Only how we choose to spend our time,’ he says again with resignation.
A moment passes and then, as if suddenly remembering something, his face lights up. ‘Sandwich?’
The band do their best to accommodate you, but you know they don’t understand how much you’re hurting right now. In an attempt to alleviate any professional pressure, they tell you you’re free to walk away from any obligations. Take a hiatus, they say. The band isn’t everything.
And then Nicky says something that haunts you for days.
— You’re like the Motorcycle Boy from Rumblefish, aren’t you? What’s that Dennis Hopper quote about him?
James interjects.
He says that the Motorcycle Boy is miscast in life. That he was born into the wrong era and on the wrong side of the river.
— Yeah, says Nick. That’s it.
— And the worst thing is, though he has the ability to do anything there is nothing he wants to do.
Days later, alone in your flat, your body just sort of gives out. It rebels against you. It takes a stand: fuck you, it says.
Food is an impossibility and you can’t sleep. You have a constant hacking cough and saliva dries around the edge of your mouth. All you can eat are your fingernails and the inside of your mouth.
A multitude of thoughts do battle in your head at any given moment, which makes it impossible to read a book or write lyrics. Conversation seems exhausting and any sexual desire you had has disappeared. You haven’t masturbated in about three weeks.
All you can do is pad about the place making cups of tea, smoking and watching videos. You watch your old favourites again and again: Apocalypse Now, Naked, Equus. And you listen to the same records over and again. It’s easier this way; this way you don’t have to make a decision.
You receive no visitors and you don’t answer the phone. You don’t answer the phone because you choose not to have one. It’s one less impingement on your world.
You don’t leave the flat for days. Your arms are a mess.
A bloody, scabby, weeping mess.
A disgraceful map of your own making.
Drained of nourishment, you are incapable of exerting yourself. You simply can’t be bothered with anything.
And for the first time, you’re actually scared. Scared of yourself.
Scared of what you’re capable of.
Scared of the feelings stirring within you.
Finally Martin comes knocking on your door and within the hour you are on a ward in the Whitchurch hospital, crying uncontrollably as pale old men in white smocks look on.
We chew on our sandwiches – thick brown bread and thick strong cheese – and we drink more coffee, then we smoke another cigarette each.
We do this in silence, high up on the ridge of a hill in a valley in South Wales, Great Britain in ad 1995, me and this man, whose conversation hints at wisdom and whose demeanour suggests a oneness with the elements and the landscape. An oak tree of a man.
Then this oak tree of a man stands and brushes the crumbs from his lap. I feel the question burning in my stomach like acid. I can feel it rising within me. I have no control over it. It is coming from the other half of me. The half I cannot control. I clear my throat again.
Then I look up
‘Are you God?’ I ask.
He is a silhouette now. A man in profile against the sky.
He squats down on his haunches, then looks away, squinting.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m not God. I’m a retired lecturer.’
‘I didn’t think so.’
I told you he wasn’t God.
‘But if you’re looking for him – and you wouldn’t be the first lost young man to wander the mountains in search of answers – you only have to look around you.’
He pauses to smile, then continues.
‘Because God isn’t a man. If he exists at all, then he is in the dirt and the rain, the rocks and the grass. And if that’s not enough for you, then you should give up looking because you won’t find anything closer to perfection than this.’
They come and visit you. All of them.
You see more people in three days than you have in the past three weeks.
Mum, Dad and Rachel. Martin and the boys.
Their faces are so stern that you try to crack jokes.
— Lighten up, you tell them. It might never happen. They bring you grapes and they bring you magazines. The kid-glove treatment.
They don’t mention it, but you know the boys are wondering what the hell to do, so you make it easy for them. Even though you’re blitzed on Librium you make an effort. You feel you owe it to them.
So you suck up the stammer and the drool and try to comfort them.
You try to comfort them.
— It’s OK, you tell them. It’s OK. I’m not going to fuck this up for us. For you. This album’s too good for us to blow it now. I’ve been thinking that maybe I’m just a hindrance live. Maybe I could, you know, retire from the public eye, but still do my bit. Maybe take a backseat role. ‘Creative director’ or something. I could do the lyrics and the art. Keep on doing what I’ve always done, but stay away from touring. Look after my body. Get my head straight. I still can’t play that plank anyway.
This is what you tell them and they nod and smile and are noncommittal. You don’t know what they’re thinking. What they want.
When you’re done talking you walk them out on wobbly legs to the hospital entrance to say your quiet goodbyes.
As they leave, you wonder how long their sympathy and patience will last. These are limited resources and you’re not stupid. You’re not oblivious to your surroundings either; quite the opposite, in fact. You’re hypersensitive. Sooner or later they’ll get sick of waiting for you.
This thought gnaws at you for the rest of the day. The idea that you are letting them down. That staying at home while they do all the hard work feels like a cop-out.
So that night you ring James from the phone in the hospital corridor.
With your voice quivering, you ring him and you tell him you’re sorry and that you’re really going to try and get better. That you want to be in the band. That you really want to do this properly.
You tell him you’re going to practise your guitar until your fingers bleed. And you’re going to get better. At everything.
At music.
At eating. At sobriety.
At life.
The bearded stranger who definitely is not God stands up and makes to depart, but before he does he rifles through his backpack.
‘I don’t know who you are and I don’t need to know,’ he says. ‘We all have a right to roam the mountains unmolested. But I do know that the weather can turn out here and you look far from equipped. So, here, just in case.’
He passes me the rest of his sandwiches, a bottle of water and a rescue blanket, which is actually an unused orange tarpaulin neatly folded into a flat A4-sized rectangle.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘That’s really kind of you. But I’ll be all right.’
‘If it’ll make you feel less guilty about it then maybe you could trade me another one of those cigarettes.’
‘Deal.’
I pass him the packet, which has six left in it. I have no more. He takes a couple out.
He looks at me again.
‘Really I’ll be fine.’
After six or eight or ten days – it’s hard to tell how long you’ve been here – Mum and Dad check you out and Martin drives you to London, to leafy Richmond and a clinic called the Priory, near a huge park where the wild deer run free and the summer sun is a thousand shades of orange exploding on your retina.
You weigh six stone.
It’s only when the man has long gone that I see that he has left his staff behind. I pick it up and look at the coiled serpent: two snakes intertwined to form a kind of wooden plait that follows the grain of the wood. The handle has been polished smooth by the palm of a cupped hand and the bottom tip is dyed dark with peat and mud and the primordial juices of the hills.
I grip the stick in my hand and continue my walk along the ridge of the hill. My breathing is still short and I am soon sweating again. My panting is loud and troubled and my legs are unsteady.
My energy resources are so severely depleted that I have to stop every few minutes to rest and hawk up phlegm and sip water. Once or twice I stumble and fall. The second time I turn my ankle but after a short rest I am OK to continue.
It is then that I realize that I have stopped thinking. About everything. There’s a new kind of stillness and silence about me and the babble of the internal voices -the people of the past, the demons of the present and the concerns of the future – are all finally quiet. There is only this moment, the here and now, and it takes all my efforts to remain conscious and moving within it.
It becomes entirely about the repetition of movement: put one leg in front of the other. Breathe deep. Keep sending that oxygen into the bloodstream. Stay upright. Watch where you put your feet. Aim for the horizon.
One step at a time.
Captive, bored and bombarded with quasi-spiritual jargon and hollow religious clap-trap, being in this place reminds of you being back in the Methodist chapel, only this time you’re paying £300 per day for the privilege.
It’s no coincidence that this place is called the Priory -‘a religious house governed by a prior or prioress’. All residents are automatically inducted into compulsory AA meetings so you find yourself gently coerced into entering the famed Twelve Step Programme.
You have issues with it right from the off. Step 1 is fine – ‘Admission of one’s own powerlessness’, that’s easy -but everything else is problematic. Step 2 is the ‘encouragement of a belief in a higher power, while attacking “intellectuality and self-sufficiency”’.
No, no, no, you scream inside. You can take my time and my money but you can’t have my fucking mind.
No way.
Not my mind.
You don’t say this though because you are willing yourself to get through it. You don’t say this because you know you need help. Instead you concentrate on the notions of a higher power. God is out, because he doesn’t exist. Something that doesn’t exist is not going to pull you through this. Ditto false prophets, icons or dead heroes.
The only worthwhile figure you can think of without bursting into tears of regret is Snoopy, but even he is old and on his last legs.
So you concentrate on the concept of ‘nature’ instead: nature with all its cruelty and violence, but its constant capacity for regrowth and healing.
Nature matters because it will out-live us all.
So you spend your days smoking cigarettes and daydreaming of creeping ivy and woodlands and streams and meadows and conducting ‘a searching and thorough moral inventory’ (Step 4).
You don’t know whether any of this is helping, but at least the urge to draw blood dissipates and you finally begin to get a few snatched hours of sleep here and there.
Meanwhile The Holy Bible, your greatest work both musically and lyrically, is released during your stay but you’re too deep in the programme and too lost in your own self-created green heaven to notice.
It is beginning to get dark when I stop for a while and sit and watch the sky. It’s breathtaking. Over from the east, working towards me, it is a range of blues, moving from white through pale blue to azure to the colour of a clotted bruise. Then over to the west it is shot through with all the shades of fire – darkening salmon, orange, carmine, cherry, crimson, copper, chestnut. It is a banquet of colours and I want to reach out and touch it, taste it, pierce it and rise beyond it. The sky is so vast and I am so insignificant that it is only this moment that matters. This is what I focus on. Only this moment.
The sky.
Me.
The moment.
Then I start laughing.
I start laughing because I think of all the years of worry and anxiety, of books read in lonely bedrooms, all those thoughts about self-disgust and self-obsession, about art and artists, money and music, of love and loyalty, blood and bandages, of murderers and the murdered, and I think: what a waste of time and energy. All I really had to do was to learn to stop worrying and live in the moment.
But can you ever actually do that without first relinquishing the one thing you ultimately have control over: your body?
I don’t want to think about this.
I don’t want to think about this because it was too much thinking that brought me here. It was too much thinking that destroyed it all.
And right now I feel too fucking free to go and spoil these sanctified moments by rationalizing or analysing them.
My mind is going and my body is going, but in the moment, beneath the sky of a thousand colours, I feel OK.
I laugh as I think all of this and when I stop I can still hear that laughter, braying and honking and cackling and giggling. It is the laughter of a man who has broken through. Or maybe just been broken.
It is the laughter of a madman but I am not scared. Of anything.
Six weeks pass. Six weeks of eating and sleeping and talking; all the things you have evaded and avoided for the past however many months.
Six weeks of self-analysis and God-talk. Six weeks of tedious routine that you actually begin to revel in.
Six weeks; your own alternative to the time-honoured school holiday. And now, just as you did as a child, you suddenly feel reluctant to return to what is beginning to feel like work.
In that time your band has released a new single and a new album and played a number of festivals without you. For the first time in five years they have appeared as a three-piece, nothing but shadows and silence filling stage left. They need to, in order to pay your medical bills. It’s a big talking point in the press: no one is quite sure where you are and if this is perhaps some sort of publicity stunt. The editorials and letters pages swell with such speculation and it’s enough to convince you that you need to be back at work.
So, in early September you gather your books and your clothes, the crisp new certificates that say you are a successful graduate of the Twelve Step Programme and a little medal inscribed with the words TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE and you get the hell out of that place. First you go to Mum and Dad’s for a day or two of decompression and recalibration.
Then: back to work.
Business as unusual.
I taste it first, the blood. It runs down my top lip and into my mouth.
It doesn’t taste good. It tastes stale.
Stale blood.
My blood is stale because my body is giving up.
It has received no input, no fuel, and now it is revolting against me. This is one more warning sign, another flashing red light: a smattering of salty rheum and blood dripping from my nose.
I wipe my lip with the back of my hand and a gooey red smear covers it. It is so stunningly red that it is quite beautiful; I never fail to be amazed by the sight of blood. It is like a glimpse into another world – the internal world of the human body.
I start coughing and hawking and there is blood in that too.
Noreen the Irish landlady seems to spend all day in the kitchen roasting chickens, baking cakes and steaming great pots of vegetables. You do your best to eat her food to avoid causing offence but can never manage more than half a plateful.
You’re ensconced in a converted farmhouse deep in Pembrokeshire, rehearsing for the French tour. Rehearsing the songs you helped write but have never been able to play. Songs that require more than the E, A and D chords that you have got by on this far.
It’s nice here, though, and for the first time in ages it feels like you’re back to being a band again. It’s back to being the four musketeers, back to sharing the same common goal once again. To promote the album. And for you to not fuck up.
So it’s back to the piss-taking and the sarcasm. It’s back to the volume and ringing ears of the rehearsal rooms. Back to the nightly ritual of watching films together.
Back to ignoring the elephant in the room. The skinny, red-eyed elephant.
Back to band business.
The business of phone interviews and group photo sessions down on the windswept beach. Confessionals to the weekly inkies and assurances that you’re back, back, back, baby.
Only this time you do it all sober.
No whisky, no vodka, no gut-rot sweet white wine. No late-night books and bottles.
Nothing but tea and cigarettes and Noreen’s sponges; long days at the tail of a summer you feel you missed, and even longer sleepless nights of sobriety addled with extremely vivid dreams and dark, dark nightmares whose contents you dare not verbalize for fear they’ll send you straight back to the Whitchurch ward with the old men in the white smocks.
— I had that Take That here last month, Noreen tells you.
— What were they like?
— Just like you boys, lovely lads. Good manners. Same as you, though they eat more, especially that Gary. Loved my puddings, that one.
— Who was your favourite?
— I’d have to say Little Mark. Face like an angel, couldn’t sing for toffee.
— Have you ever met East 17?
— East who?
— East 17. They’re like Take That, but they come from London, wear silly hats and have better songs.
— No, I don’t believe I have now.
The staff helps me keep me balance as I continue my ascension.
My feet slip and slide as I clamber over the large damp rocks that lead to the peak of the mountain in this rapidly fading light. I’m breathing in gasps now, the lassitude sending me spiralling deep into a delirious state.
But something propels me forward. Something propels me upwards.
Towards the highest point, marked by a crown of rocks.
Where the mountain meets the sky.
I grip the smooth handle of the staff and use it to take some of the weight as I keep the rocks in sight.
I don’t know if it’s the light, my mental state, or my erratic, occasionally blurred vision but as I move closer to them and the sun accelerates in its setting, the rocks appear to be in a state of metamorphosis.
At first they look like the heads of a crowd in silhouette – the shadowy, cloying front row of a gig crowd. But then they look like a murder of crows silently sitting on a branch above the valley. Then as I advance still further the crows turn into vultures.
Then they look like the pointed spears of a bear-trap or upended knives stabbing at the sky.
Then they are the fingers of a hand.
Then they are the sharp features of a witch.
Then I have to stop again.
A sip of water. Sweat on my back.
The rise and fall of my ribcage.
The taste of blood in my throat and lungs.
The darkening sky.
Paris in September. Paris as the leaves turn brown.
They’ve never really understood you, the French. They should do, what with their history of existentialism and poetry and reputation for having no sense of humour whatsoever, but somehow the crowds remain small. Twelve hundred people turn out in the capital but the figure diminishes as you head south.
To Lille.
Rouen.
Nancy.
Still, you only have to play ten or so songs per night. It’s back to forty-minute sets as this is a joint tour with Therapy?, a hard-rock trio from Northern Ireland who do better business here than your band. Therapy? have songs called things like ‘Nowhere’, ‘Isolation’ and ‘Die Laughing’ , yet are surprisingly happy people. Black-clad piss-takers and party animals. You have known them for a while and though they are good people they are also heavy drinkers, so as James finds himself with some new mischief-making, whisky-drinking pals, you force yourself to pull back away from it all.
You stay in your hotel rooms – a series of them – as long as possible, where you wrestle with the boredom of sobriety. You part your hair and dye it a rich copper colour. You star wearing clothes that accentuate rather than hide your bone-cornered frame. You still can’t sleep and eating is no easier.
But the tour continues.
To Grenoble.
Montpellier.
Marseille.
Then it’s straight into a UK tour. Another winter tour. Sixteen days covering England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
The album charts at Number 6, your highest placing yet, but sales are sluggish. With sales down it’s generally far easier to get into the charts these days. It’s how many records you sell that matters and so far, The Holy Bible is underperforming. You’re past caring, though; you couldn’t give a shit what the label think any more.
You’re just amazed that your last single – a song that the critics have called your most impenetrable lyrical work yet, a song with the chorus ‘Lebensraum, kulturkampf / Raus, raus! / Fila, fila’ – charted at all. ‘Raus’ means ‘Get outside!’, ‘fila’ means ‘form a line!’ and you have just become the first known songwriter in history to have written a pop song based upon the orders of Nazi death-camp guards.
And you keep moving.
Cambridge.
Leicester.
Portsmouth.
On and on and on.
Sheffield brings new tattoos. Three in one session: the eight concentric circles of Dante’s hellish inferno from the first canticle of The Divine Comedy along with the quote Traitors to their Lovers, Traitors to their Guests, Traitors to their Country, Traitors to their Kindred’.
More blood, more scars, more indelible skin maps of your own wandering mind.
Then, with bandaged arms, it’s on to Leeds.
Nottingham.
Cardiff.
Dublin.
Belfast.
The shows are sold out everywhere you go now but you really wish someone would just make it stop.
I have an overwhelming need to piss so take out my cock and let go, right there on the shale and the slate. I can tell by the colour and the burning in my bladder that I am dehydrated.
It sprays noisily on the rocks and on my shoes.
I look back down the valley that I have walked along and am surprised by how far I have come. Curving away out of sight, and now cast in the shadow of the opposite fells, I have walked further than I can see. I am nearly at the end of this valley, which peaks at the cluster of rocks just a couple of hundred yards ahead of me at the summit.
I am tired and I am dizzy and I am breathless.
I remember the sandwich, which I take from my pocket, unwrap, then take a bite from, to mask the taste of the blood.
I slowly chew on a mouthful, then put the rest in my pocket.
I don’t know how long I can continue for.
The simple fact is you shouldn’t be doing this.
There, you said it.
You shouldn’t be here. In fact, you barely are here. Your frail, ailing body has shown up, but your mind is elsewhere.
Your mind is in Cardiff, Stuttgart, the Priory, Toulouse, Blackwood, Tokyo, Hull, London, Bangkok, Pembrokeshire, New York, Lisbon and Middlesbrough.
Your mind is in 1972, 1983, 1986, 1990, 1993.
Your mind is in purgatory, the inferno, Hades, the underworld, the pit, Jahannam, Dis, Tartarus, in screaming bloody fucking hell.
But your body is on tour with Suede, in the winter, in Europe again.
You are a ghost.
You are a ghost in Switzerland.
Italy.
Spain.
Stop.
In France.
Holland.
Belgium.
Make it stop.
In Denmark.
Norway.
Sweden.
You can’t do this any more.
No more.
No.
You can’t do this.
Then just like that – just as I am staggering up the final stretch of rocks to the top of the mountain that crowns the valley’s end – thoughts and memories and faces come flooding back.
It is as if a door has opened. As if something has been unleashed a kaleidoscope of memories crowds my vision. Memories of places I have been, faces I have known. Songs I’ve sung and films I’ve seen.
It whirls by, a lurid carousel of colour and noise and emotion. Everything is experienced at a dizzying super-speed. Colours, smells, emotions. Clothes I’ve worn, girls I’ve kissed, exams I have sat.
Memories of holidays and haircuts, houses and weather. Books and arguments and aeroplanes and hospitals. Memories of music and motorways, bridges and buses, pills and thrills and tears and screams and smiles.
It all battles for space in my head here on the hillside, exhausted, defeated, half-mad and alone. The summit in sight. Day turning to night turning to day again. And silence.
After soundcheck – a perfunctory daily routine in which you are nothing but a spare part consigned to the wings, stage right – you find an upmarket household-goods shop in a quiet Milan side street where, in broken English, you enquire about buying the most expensive meat cleaver that they have. Stainless steel, it’s heavy in your hand and when you step into a doorway and remove it from its wrapping, it glistens in the late-afternoon Italian sun.
The chattering in your head is constant now.
The voice won’t leave you alone.
Each new hotel room that you enter you hope to find silence, but it’s impossible. The noise follows you everywhere. In the shower, sobbing as you cut yourself with a razor; on the bed, naked, trying to muster up the energy to dress and go to the venue; stone cold sober in the backstage corridors of Austria, Sweden, Denmark; onstage as you go through the motions, a ghost with a guitar like a millstone around his neck. Not even the volume of your band can drown it out now. You see and hear the voice in the crowd too, mouthing words at you, pointing, punching the air, sweating, screaming, crying all your words right back at you.
And then afterwards, as your ears buzz and hum with feedback and static, the chattering gets louder. It’s an ongoing argument with yourself. The voice is telling you that enough is enough – it’s time to ease the burden, time to do something. It’s time to get decisive. It is time to chop off your hands. Bite off your fingers. Cut your veins. Gouge your eyes. Scissor your tongue. Smash everything you can get your hands on. Take all your pills. Set fire to yourself. Locate a bridge and jump off it. Buy a gun and use it. Take a bottle of bleach and drink it. Find an oven but don’t light it. Anything. Anything to stop the chattering. Anything to feel better.
Anything to ease the burden.
Anything for some peace.
I haul myself up and over the final boulders to the peak of the mountain.
It is nearly dark now. In fact, it is completely dark in the east and west is following suit. The sky is a dimmer switch, a dying flame – and so am I.
At the summit there is giant flattened rock whose surface has been worn smooth by centuries of feet. And in the centre is a small cairn to mark the peak.
Gasping for air, I slump down beside it, my back against the crude angles of the rocks.
Isn’t it traditional for every walker or climber to add a rock to a cairn, to help perpetuate its growth? I think so.
But I have no energy for that. I can’t even lift my body into a more comfortable sitting position.
Because I am a shadow now, a silhouette for all down in the valley to see against the sky, though I expect the valley to be empty now, and for every sane person to be returning to their home, every animal to their burrow or bolt-hole.
Everyone but me.
But they don’t listen.
They don’t listen because they keep giving you work. They still keep giving you tasks to keep you busy. Tasks or tests – it’s hard to tell. They still seem happy for you to be out there (but not too ‘out there’), spreading the good word of the Manics to the tape recorders and the cameras and the nodding lapdogs of the world’s music media.
You surprise even yourself with your ability to hold it together under questioning. There are no tears or breakdowns here, boy. Just pure Valleys resolve. Graft. Stoicism. Pragmatism – again. And an unerring dedication to never letting people down.
So when a TV crew arrives at the venue in Sweden in search of an interview, the work is delegated to you. The others have had enough of trying to explain your actions, ailments and illnesses. They’re tired of second-guessing your sick mind. It – or rather you – has taken its toll on them in different ways for each of them, Manic Street Preachers has become a job whose daily grind is only barely tolerable right now, though for you it is an incurable disease. You are Richey Manic at all times. He is in your blood. Your bad blood. He is destroying your cells. He is eating you alive. He keeps you awake and he prevents you from eating. He compels you towards pain. He slices your thoughts into tiny worthless strips. He dismantles your jigsaw mind.
He puts words into your mouth and breathes down your neck. He makes sure you are there, in front of the crowd, in front of the camera.
— Every day of my life I feel that I’m not as good a writer as I could be, that I’m not as intelligent as I could be.
This is what you tell them. The telly people. The interviewer from some foreign channel.
— I try and constantly read and improve my mind to get a better perspective on world history.
You say.
— Nobody is going to get good enough to know everything.
And also:
— . . . But I try, which is more than most people do. You decide it will be your last television appearance.
Exposure.
It will be exposure that will take me.
It strikes me as extremely ironic that I might die from such a cause. ‘Over-exposure’ might be a better way of putting it.
Over-exposure to the world and all its cruel tricks and false promises.
I smile and then I laugh out loud and think: actually, I’m finally fine with that.
The only thing is, I wish my dog was here with me now. I wish he could be here to curl upside me so that we might share body heat, so that this dilemma might somehow be shared. Snoopy would make it all right because he’s the one thing I couldn’t leave behind.
But Snoopy isn’t here. Snoopy left last month. Now he’s in the ground; this same ground from which the mountain has been sculpted.
Later that day you slip into a complete void. Your ears ring and you become totally numb.
You cannot grasp on to a single coherent thought and you feel nothing.
Even when you’re banging your head against the outside wall of the hotel in Hamburg.
Even when blood is streaming down your face.
Even when small flecks of gravel are imprinted in your flesh.
Even when Nick is trying to contain his sobs as he leads you away by the arm.
Even when the staff gasp in horror.
Even when the blood swirls down the plug hole. Even then you feel nothing.
So. Where do we go from here?
What do you mean, ‘we’?
Us. You and me. All of us.
There is no you and me. There is no ‘all of us’. There’s only me.
Fine. Where do you go from here, then, smartarse?
Nowhere.
So – what? – you’re just going to stay here?
I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more. I don’t even remembering getting here. Do you think someone will come and help me?
Is that what you want?
No. I don’t know. I’m just so tired. Tired of myself.
You decide that ‘Stay Another Day’ by East 17 is the best single of the 90s.
Granted, it is only 1994, but it is hard to see how it can ever be improved upon.
Back home as you sit around attempting to ‘get better’ it’s all over the radio and the Christmas bells and winter-themed video are sure to send it to number one. You pick up a pile of their CDs when you’re in Sony to give away as Christmas presents. You play your copy to death. When you tell people that East 17 are a more credible band than Blur or Oasis, and that Tony Mortimer is the best lyricist around, they think you’re taking the piss. But you’re not. You’re really not. Pop gives you more of a thrill these days. It’s cheap and disposable and is not pretending to be anything other than what it is: titillation for young girls. Rock is all about fakery.
And after three weeks off, you are back doing what you have to do. What you do best.
They’ve booked you in back at the Astoria on Tottenham Court Road. It’s two thousand capacity, three nights, all sold out and just down the road from where you played your first-ever London shows in Great Portland Street and Covent Garden over five years ago.
Five years.
Five years is nothing. It’s only half a decade. Why then does it seem to so long ago? Why, when you think back, do you barely recognize yourself? And why does regret flood these memories?
It’s so loud onstage the first night that you and James both suffer nosebleeds after the show. Of course, you get off on this. James less so.
And you play a full-on twenty-song set each night.
Monday.
Tuesday.
Wednesday.
You pull out all the stops: the hits, the obscurities and even the odd surprise from James, with his version of the Watership Down music and ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! (which brings to mind images of George and Andrew and Pepsi and Shirley frolicking in the fake snow in their big wool-knit sweaters).
The band let you choose a set list, which you do, writing it out by hand as you have always done and decorating it with a salient quotations plucked from your notebooks. You spend a long time deliberating over which quotes to choose. It’s important, even if it’s only matters to you.
Eventually you condense an essay that Ballard wrote entitled ‘What I Believe’ down to its bare bones: ‘ I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion. I believe in the genital organs of great men and women. I believe in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom. I believe all memories, lies, fantasies, evasions.’
And you know what?
You enjoy these shows more than any you can remember in a long, long time. With Christmas around the corner they feel like a celebration.
On these three nights, with the crowds singing every single word back at you, you believe in the Manic Street Preachers again. You believe in noise and music and movement and freedom. You believe in the ritualistic and communal elements of music. And you almost believe in yourself.
In a brilliant and unplanned act of auto-destruction you smash your hired gear at the end. You all do. Ten thousand pounds’ worth. Beneath the combat-green military-netting canopy you swing and you smack and you bang and you crash until splinters litter the stage and the feedback from the PA howls like a pack of Carpathian wolves smelling fresh blood.
These three nights feel special.
They feel like catharsis. They feel like emancipation.
They feel like closure.
I have dreams like none I have ever had before. They are dreams that take place in that space between waking and sleeping and I find myself drifting between the two as everything becomes blurred.
They are dreams that feature no people, just the elements. Dreams of rock and fire, of lava and mayhem, of the earth torn asunder by lightning and storms and thunder. Biblical dreams. Prophetic dreams. Dreams of a scorched earth. Dreams beyond my understanding.
Dreams of end times.
It falls to the floor in clumps, your hair. Henna-red and unwashed.
You draw the clippers from your brow right down to the back of your skull and it feels good seeing it all fall away, fall to the floor around your feet. With it falls away the recent past. The grim Christmas, the autumn in and out of clinics and cold dressing rooms in France.
The sceptre of Germany. The nutty ward in Cardiff. The death of Snoopy.
All of it.
You’re aware that something is happening here, something significant, but it is taking place so deep within your subconscious that there is no need for rationality. You’re just acting upon impulse.
As the hair falls so too does the last thing you have clung to that makes you ‘Richey Manic’-the ever-changing hairstyle.
— Often emulated, but never bettered, you used to joke.
The clippers buzz and scratch at your scalp and you make sure to do it as evenly as possible, though without a guard on the clippers it takes it right down to the bone anyway. Right down to the skull.
When you are finished, standing in a circle of your hair, that is exactly what you see staring back from the mirror: a skull with big black blank eyes.
Now you can sleep.
Now you are anonymous.
So it has come to this?
Yes. It has come to this.
A day passes. Then another. Three, four, then you get a phone call from London to remind you that you are doing an interview later on in the day.
You don’t have to do it, they say. Not if you’re not feeling up to it.
— No, no, you say. It’s fine. I’m fine.
The writer is from a Japanese magazine and she has flown all the way to London, then driven to Cardiff to do it. You’ve worked with her before.
She’ll be here in an hour.
So you take off your dressing gown and open a new packet of pyjamas. You’ve been wearing pyjamas for about a week now, a new set each day. They feel comfortable against your skin.
Then, on unsteady legs, you vacuum the flat, put some books and CDs back on the shelves and light a couple of scented candles.
You want to pour yourself a drink. You want to pour yourself two drinks. You want to feel that warm surge in your head and in your stomach, then feel it flush through your cheeks. You want to feel your head loll and your eyes get sparkly and glassy.
But you can’t do it. To drink now would be a big mistake. Seven months, you’ve been dry.
You can’t blow it now so instead you take a marker pen and write LOVE across your knuckles. Every time you want to drink, you do this. You do this every day.
Sometimes you do it five times a day. Sometimes even more.
Then you make coffee and you smoke a cigarette out the window while Pantera plays on the stereo. After about two minutes it is completely doing your head in, so you turn it off, but the sound of nothing – or the distant sounds of Cardiff – do your head in too, so you turn on the TV and listen to Henry Kelly ask easy riddles on Going For Gold.
After the interview is over Mum and Dad arrive and you feel extremely emotional but hide it by making them tea.
You want to throw your arms around them and tell them that you love them and that you are sorry for everything, and that it won’t always be like this, and things will change very soon, but you worry that this might freak them out, or worry them even more, so instead you busy yourself taking photos of them on the disposable camera that you bought before Christmas.
You tell them you need to finish the film off, so they pose awkwardly on your Laura Ashley sofa, smiling, their arms around each other.
There’s more to it all than this, you think. It’s about more than just finishing the film off.
And you realize, maybe only truly for the first time, just how much you look like both of them.
They must see themselves in you.
They must look at you and wonder what they did wrong.
And that just fucking kills you.
It’s time to go.
My skeleton hurts.
It is like cold steel beneath my withered muscles and thin skin. My skeleton hurts and my marrow trembles. My heartbeat is slower than it has ever been.
I am in limbo.
This is what you remember: your suitcase sits there in the corner of the room.
You don’t want to go.
On the table are your travel documents and your itinerary for the next two weeks. It tells you where you will be at every hour for the next fourteen days. There are even scheduled ‘bathroom breaks’.
Beside it, in the ashtray, a cigarette burns. You’re sitting on the edge of the bed looking at your reflection in the TV, which is screwed down and not turned on. Below it, the minibar is locked. Outside, London is dark blue and dormant. There is frost on the window and you don’t want to go.
You’re scared and tired and full of angst and you’re reluctant to go to America. Even just leaving your flat was difficult. Travelling to London nearly tore you apart.
You’re in The Embassy again. The fifth floor, Room 516. Right now you don’t want to see anyone, you don’t want to do anything. Ever again.
James calls.
He is only three rooms away yet still he phones.
— Edwards.
— Bradders.
— What are you doing?
— Not much.
— I’m bored as fuck. Do you fancy going down Queensway to watch a film?
— Maybe. What’s on?
— I’ve got it down to two: Braveheart or Batman. Mel the marauding Scotsman or Kilmer in a cape.
— Yeah. OK, then.
— Which one?
— I’m not bothered.
Half an hour later you pick up the phone and call James back.
— I think I’ll skip the film tonight.
— OK. Is everything all right?
— Yeah, fine. I just don’t feel like concentrating on anything tonight.
— OK. I’ll see you in the morning, then?
— Yes.
— Bright and early.
— Bright and early.
— OK.
— James.
— Yes?
— Thanks. You hang up.
I can see Wales before me. Undulating, hazy Wales. I see valleys and fields and peaks and sedimentary landslides. I see blackened peaks and misty troughs. I see layer upon layer of Wales, great bands of earth and rock like torn streaks of paper on top of each other. In all directions.
Wales.
I take it in then I lie back against the stones and hear my breathing as my ribcage rises and falls. It is heavy, rasping, rattled. My head is hot. My head is swimming. My ears ringing.
I take a deep breath, hold it, then exhale. My breath makes a sound. It sounds like music. The music sings. It says my name.
It says, ‘Richard.’