Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

they? And a baby is a baby. The baby begins again. No biography, no biology.
    Then a string of lines starts replaying in my head – lines from my own books – ‘I keep writing this so that one day she will read it.’ ‘Looking for you, looking for me, I guess I’ve been looking for us both all my life . . .’
    I have written love narratives and loss narratives – stories of longing and belonging. It all seems so obvious now – the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother. It is my mother. It is my mother.
    But mother is our first love affair. Her arms. Her eyes. Her breast. Her body.
    And if we hate her later, we take that rage with us into other lovers. And if we lose her, where do we find her again?
    I tend to work obsessively with texts, and I embed them in my work. The Grail legend is there – one glimpse and the most precious thing in the world is gone forever, and then the quest is to find it again.
    The Winter’s Tale . My favourite Shakespeare play: an abandoned baby. A sick world which shall not be righted again if ‘that which is lost be not found’.
    Read that line. Not ‘that which was lost’ or ‘has been lost’. Instead, ‘is lost’. The grammar shows us how serious is the loss. Something that happened a long time ago, yes – but not the past. This is the old present, the old loss still wounding each day.
    Soon after that time I began to go mad. There is no other way to put it.
    Deborah left me. We had a final fearful row, triggered by my insecurities and Deborah’s detachment, and the next day we were over. The End.
    Deborah was right to go. What had begun with great hope had become slow torture. I do not blame her for anything. Much about us together was marvellous. But as I was to discover, I have big problems around home, making homes, making homes with someone. Deborah loves being away from home and thrives on it. She is a cuckoo.
    I love coming home – and my idea of happiness is to come home to someone I love. We were not able to resolve that difference and what I didn’t know was how something as straightforward as a difference could lead to something as complex as a breakdown. The sudden unexpected abandonment, constellated as it was around the idea of/impossibility of home, lit a fuse that spat and burned its way towards a walled-up opening a long way back inside me. Inside that walled-up opening, smothered in time like an anchorite, was my mother.
    Deborah did not intend to detonate the ‘lost loss’, and I didn’t even know it was there – not in any matter of fact way of knowing – though my behaviour patterns were a clue.
    My agony over calling Deborah and finding that she would never return my calls, my bewilderment and rage, these emotional states were taking me nearer to the sealed door where I had never wanted to go.
    That makes it sound like a conscious choice. The psyche is much smarter than consciousness allows. We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don’t.
    I started waking up at night and finding myself on all fours shouting ‘Mummy, Mummy’. I was wet with sweat.
    Trains arrived. Train doors opened. I could not board. Humiliated, I cancelled events, arrangements, never able to say why. Sometimes I didn’t go out for days, get dressed for days, sometimes I wandered around the big garden in my pyjamas, sometimes I ate, sometimes not at all, or you could see me on the grass with a tin of cold baked beans. The familiar sights of misery.
    If I had lived in London, or any city, I would have killed myself by being careless in traffic – my car, someone else’s car. I was thinking about suicide because it had to be an option. I had to be able to think about it and on good days I did so because it gave me back a sense of control – for one last time I would be in control.
    On bad days I just held onto the thinning rope.
    The rope was poetry. All that poetry I learned when I had to keep my library inside me now offered a rescue rope.
    There is a field in front of my house, high up, sheltered by a drystone wall and opened by a long view of hills. When I could not cope I went and sat in that field against that wall and fixed on that view.
    The countryside, the natural world, my cats, and English Literature A–Z were what I could lean on and hold onto.
    My friends never failed me and when I could talk I did talk to them.
    But often I could