Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

happiness.
    This misshapen murderous creature with its supernatural strength needs to be invited home – but on the right terms.
    Remember the princess who kisses the frog – and yippee, there’s a prince? Well, it is necessary to embrace the slimy loathsome thing usually found in the well or in the pond, eating slugs. But making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us.
    This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. That’s the problem – the awful thing is you. It may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food. Mess this up, and you will go down with the creature.
    And – just to say – the creature loves a suicide. Death is part of the remit.
    I am talking like this because what became clear to me in my madness was that I had to start talking – to the creature.
    I was lying in bed reading Dog Years , and a voice outside of my head – not in it – said, ‘Get up and start work.’
    I got dressed immediately. I went over to my studio. I lit the wood-burning stove, sat down with my coat on because the place was freezing, and wrote – It began as all important things begin – by chance .
    From then on, every day, I wrote a book for children called The Battle of the Sun .
    Every day I went to work, without a plan, without a plot, to see what I had to say.
    And that is why I am sure that creativity is on the side of health. I was going to get better, and getting better began with the chance of the book.
    It is not a surprise that it was a children’s book. The demented creature in me was a lost child. She was willing to be told a story. The grown-up me had to tell it to her.
    And one of the first things that invented itself in the new book was something called the Creature Sawn in Two.

The Creature who came into the room was cleaved in half straight down the middle, so that one half of him had one eye and one eyebrow, one nostril, one ear, one arm, one leg, one foot, and the other half had just the same.
    Well, nearly just the same, because as if the Creature did not astonish enough, one half of him was male and the other half of him was female. The female half had a bosom, or certainly half a bosom.
    The Creature appeared to be made of flesh, like a human being, but what human being born is cleaved in half?
    The Creature’s clothes were as odd as the Creature itself. The male half wore a shirt with one sleeve, and a pair of breeches with one leg, and where the other sleeve and other leg should have been was a cut-off and sewn-up side. The Creature had a sleeveless leather jerkin over his shirt, and his jerkin had not been altered in any way, so it looked as though half of it was unfilled with body, which was true.
    Beneath the breeches, or perhaps the breech, as the garment must be called, having one leg and not two, was a stocking fastened at the knee, and a stout leather shoe on the bottom of the stocking.
    The Creature had no beard, but wore in his single ear a single gold earring.
    His other half was just as bizarre. This lady wore half a skirt, half a chemise and half a hat on her half of their head.
    At her waist, or that portion of herself which would have been a waist, dangled a great bunch of keys. She wore no earrings but her hand, more slender than the other, had a ring on each finger.
    The expression on either half of the face was disagreeable.

    My own vicious disagreeable creature liked me writing The Battle of the Sun . She and I started talking. She said, ‘No wonder Deb left you – why would she want to be with you? Even your own mother gave you away. You are worthless. I am the only one who knows it but you are worthless.’
    I wrote this in my notebook. I decided that I was only prepared to talk to this savage lunatic for an hour a day – and while we were walking. She never wanted to go for a walk, but I made her.

    Her conversational style was recriminatory (blame, fault, accusation, demands, guilt). She was part Mrs Winterson, part Caliban. Her preferred responses were non sequiturs. If I said, ‘I want to talk about the coalhole,’ she said, ‘You’d sleep with anybody, wouldn’t you?’ If I said, ‘Why were we so hopeless at school?’ she said, ‘I blame nylon knickers.’
    Our conversations were like two people using phrasebooks to say things neither understands; you think you asked the way to the