Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

shifts. Maybe the huge madness calmed my own disturbances. I felt compassion. And I felt lucky. It is easy to go mad.
    The only thing I hated was the drugs trolley. Inmates were sedated and tranquillised – syringes and tablets look kinder than padded cells and straitjackets but I am not so sure. The wards smelled of Valium and Largactil – that’s the one that rots your teeth.
    Vicky and I went to and from our work there, trying not to notice that back home in Water Street the atmosphere was crazier than anything at work. The house was darkening and cracking – like something out of Poe. The Christmas decorations were up and the coloured lights were on but that just made it more frightening.
    For about a week Mrs Winterson had not spoken to us. Then one night we got home, and it was snowing, and there were carol singers in the street. I realised it was the church meeting at our house.
    Mrs Winterson was in gay mood. She had on a nice dress and when Vicky and I arrived she greeted us warmly. ‘I’ll bring round the dinner wagon – would you like a party pie?’
    ‘What’s a dinner wagon?’ said Vicky, thinking of stagecoaches and shoot-outs.
    ‘It’s a hostess trolley for northerners,’ I said, as Mrs Winterson careered into the parlour loaded with party pies on her heated element.
    At that moment a rival group of carol singers arrived at the front door – probably the Salvation Army, but Mrs W was having none of it. She opened the front door and shouted, ‘Jesus is here. Go away.’
    ‘That was a bit harsh, Mum.’
    ‘I have had a lot to put up with,’ she said, looking meaningfully at me. ‘I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day.’
    Vicky was struggling. Just before Christmas she went up to bed and found that her pillowcase had no pillow in it; it was stuffed with religious tracts about the Apocalypse. She was beginning to discover what it was like to live in End Time.
    ‘It’s hard for you where you come from,’ said Mrs Winterson.
    ‘I was born in Luton,’ said Vicky.
    But it was hard for her. It was hard for anyone. The paperchains hanging from the ceiling began to look like a madman’s manacles.
    My dad was spending most of his time in the shed in the backyard making an installation for the church. I suppose it was a kind of evangelical altarpiece. The pastor wanted something for the Sunday school that could decorate the church without looking like a Catholic graven image as forbidden in Exodus.
    Dad enjoyed making clay-cast figures and painting them. He was on figure number six.
    ‘What is it?’ asked Vicky.
    It was the Seven Saved Dwarves: Snow White wasn’t there, presumably because she was too near the Catholic heresy of the Virgin Mary. The dwarves had little nameplates: Hopeful, Faithful, Cheerful, Godly, Worthy, Ready and Willing.
    Dad was painting quietly. ‘Your mother is upset,’ he said.
    We both knew what that meant.
    In the kitchen Mrs Winterson was making custard. She was stirring the pan obsessively like someone mixing the dark waters of the deep. As we came past her from the backyard, she said, without looking up from the pan, ‘Sin. That’s what spoils everything.’
    Vicky was unused to a conversational style that included bouts of silence lasting for days, and sudden doomful announcements from a train of thought we were all supposed to share but never could. I could tell that Vicky was finding things a strain, and I felt that Dad was trying to warn me. I checked the duster drawer. The revolver was not there.
    ‘I think it’s time for us to leave,’ I said to Vicky.
    The next morning I told Mum we were leaving. She said, ‘You do it on purpose.’
    The house. The two-up two-down. The long dark lobby and the poky rooms. The yard with the outside loo and the coal-hole, the dustbins and the dog kennel.
    ‘Goodbye, Mum.’
    She didn’t answer. Not then. Not later. I never went back. I never saw her again.

Intermission

    I
N MY WORK I HAVE pushed against the weight of clock time, of calendar time, of linear unravellings. Time may be what stops everything happening at once, but time’s domain is the outer world. In our inner world, we can experience events that happened to us in time as happening simultaneously. Our nonlinear self is uninterested in ‘when’, much more interested in ‘wherefore’.
    I am more than halfway through my biological life and about halfway through my creative life. I measure