And Other Textbook Symptoms

It’s funny. I thought things were looking up for Chris. We all did. I’d known him since I was 17. We met in the smoking room in St Thomas’s Hospital, where our mothers were enjoying a two week stay in the psychiatric wing. I fancied him, he fancied the scary crazy girl with the cuts in her arms that spelled DADDY. He wore velvet jackets, drainpipe jeans, Chelsea boots and flowery nylon granny shirts that he bought in Bernardo’s and said chafed his nipples. He had wild hair and pouting lips. He tried every drug available and fell in love with wild women who were into black magic rituals and crazy, bitey sex. He was a great song writer. I’m not exaggerating. He wrote songs like Beck before Beck existed. The only trouble was he suffered with stage fright and didn’t play as well in public as he did in the privacy of his own bedroom.
+++We kept in touch and became close friends. It was all through me. I effectively stalked him and he politely allowed me to. We often used to talk about how afraid we were that we’d end up like our mothers, but mine fully recovered then set up her own interior design business, whereas Chris’s wrapped her taps in tin foil and screamed in shopping centres.
+++On the way to becoming a Rock God, Chris got a job in IT and did so well he was promoted ceaselessly until he managed his own department and had a company car. He still dressed like Jim Morrison, but with a sensible haircut. He built a recording studio in his bedroom, was often seen on the Kingston Bypass with a sound boom, or in the British library collecting rare and unusual samples. He mislaid the shiny new company car and bought a rusty Lada. He made a demo, sent it to a few people.
+++After years of my unreciprocated adoration, I got engaged to someone called Simon. At which point Chris decided that he was madly in love with me. I told him that he was like a brother to me, which was true. He found this insulting and punished me by constantly trying to ruin my relationship with Simon. It nearly worked a couple of times, but that’s another story.
+++Then a miracle happened. Beck wrote to Chris and said he was coming to London to record an album. Could they meet? Chris signed a manager – his mother’s ex boyfriend – and practiced night and day until his fingers were raw. But as the day of Beck’s visit grew nearer, Chris became jumpy and strange. He discovered he was allergic to steel guitar strings and developed a rash that covered his face and arms. He stopped answering the phone. We were all worried. Beck came and went and nothing more was said. Chris turned up at his mother’s Buddhist retreat in Scotland, unfortunately in time to witness one of her most extreme psychotic episodes, (the details of which he told me later when we were both insanely drunk. I can’t remember a thing except that it was so shocking my brain erased it instantly). He returned buzzing with ideas, gripped by an urgent need to get them all down before someone else stole them, as though they were faithless, flighty things. For this reason he took Pro Plus and amphetamines to stay up all night writing and recording. We should have seen it coming maybe, but this stuck me simply as the correct behaviour of a passionate artiste.
+++One of the main reasons I had not made it as a passionate artiste myself was that I liked to sleep and watch a lot of TV. I was lazy and not even remotely ambitious. But just as I was about to hit the age of 27 (that dangerous age, when Janis and Hendrix died, and other people I knew where either having an early mid-life crisis or becoming wildly successful) I wrote a Sitcom. It came to me while watching another sitcom that wasn’t that good. Instead of turning over I wrote my own show in my head.
+++My idea was this. A man discovered he was Jesus and didn’t really want to be Jesus. He didn’t even believe in God. In fact he was vehemently anti-religious, and in the throes of splitting up with his girlfriend, a hippie spiritualist type into feng shui and star signs and homeopathy; a real flake. Anyway, he had visions and created miracles and decided he was insane. But then his psychiatrist turned out to be his first disciple. He went for a second opinion and got another disciple. His best friend – a girl with whom he should probably have been instead of his irritating girlfriend – struggled with the concept of whether to believe him or not, but was determined to help him find the truth: hopefully that he was neither Christ nor insane, but that the whole world was mad instead.
+++I wrote down the synopsis for the first episode and treatments for the next eight. I showed Simon. He thought I should go for it, so I bought How To Write A Sitcom and wrote my first script. The first agent I showed liked it and we went for a meeting with Cloud 9 Films who wanted to showcase the pilot episode on Channel 4.
+++I hadn’t told anyone because a) I knew TV people could suddenly pull out at any moment and b) people hate their successful friends. I know I do. I had already sent my script to C4 when Chris called me out of the blue and said he was in the Lanesborough Hotel meeting Beck.
+++‘No way,’ I said. ‘That’s great, good luck.’
+++Afterwards he called me again and said he wanted to buy me some champagne somewhere flashy and glam. He was celebrating.
+++We met in The White Horse in Camden (neither of those things, but quite nice) and drank Champagne and ate a meat platter – or rather I ate, Chris ingested nothing but air – and then halfway through a second bottle after a rather raucous story about a lapdancer (it always amused him to shock me with his exploits, thinking I was extremely prudish and boring), he asked me the most bizarre thing.
+++‘What would you do if Beck told you he believed you were the 10^th incarnation of Christ?’ he said, drumming nervously on his pipe cleaner thin legs.
+++‘I’d say, what happened to the other nine incarnations?’ I said.
+++‘Apparently, they came and went, but it’s the 10^th incarnation who will bring about the book of revelations and judgement day,’ he said. ‘You know what, I think Beck’s a little bit weird, don’t you?’
+++‘He’s supposed to be a scientologist, which is a real shame because it almost puts me off his music.’
+++He looked thoughtfully into the distance. He wasn’t listening to me.
+++‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘You don’t believe all that. You’re an atheist.’
+++‘Agnostic.’
+++‘Really? When did you cop out?’
+++‘I just realised I didn’t know as much as I thought I did,’ he said. ‘You can’t really make that kind of judgement without all the facts. It’s too important.’
+++‘Or not,’ I said.
+++I didn’t tell him about my sitcom, but I suspected he knew all about it and was just trying to wind me up. He never mentioned this again. The following weekend he was arrested trying to board a plane at Heathrow. His friend Daniel called and told me he had to move Chris to Epsom Psychiatric Hospital. Chris claimed that Beck had told him to go to America and save Britney Spears, who was the 10^th incarnation of Mary Magdalene and in deep trouble. But at the last minute Chris feared the British army were aiming a missile at the plane and had to warn airport security not to let the flight take off, as it may endanger the lives of many innocent civilians.
+++When I later described this to his psychiatrist – a thin blonde woman in her early 30s called Ruth Heppenstal – she looked bored and said: ‘They’re all classic symptoms of acute psychotic mania.’
+++‘Really?’ I said. ‘Even the bit about Beck and Britney?’
+++Strangely and to my eternal shame, only now was I beginning to suspect that maybe Chris had never actually met Beck in person, that there had been no recording contract in the first place.
+++‘Believe me. It’s textbook mania,’ said Dr Heppenstall.
+++I didn’t believe her. I went to the library and looked up manic behaviour in some dog-eared old psychiatric textbook. And there it was. Someone suffering acute mania may think they are a prophet or in some cases the Messiah, may believe they are being contacted by a higher force, or simply a celebrity, and may try to purchase a plane ticket even if they have no intention of leaving the country.
+++What upset me in particular was that I had already witnessed someone I loved having a nervous breakdown: my mother, who even helpfully did things like put all our furniture on the lawn and run naked down the street – all nice, clear signifiers of her general mental state, what her shrink called ‘cries for help’. I felt particularly stupid and as though I had failed an extremely important test. I could not be trusted to help anyone, it seemed.
+++When Daniel called and told me where Chris was, I admit I was afraid. Breathing-into-a-paper-bag kind of scared, hoping-I-have-a-heart-attack-or-get-hit-by-a-lorry-before-I get-to-Epsom sort of terrified. Psychiatric hospitals fill me with dread. When I was visiting my mother, a strange girl attached herself to Chris and I in the smoking room. It didn’t take us long to diagnose her as totally unhinged, even though she pretended to be visiting a friend. She was intense and sarcastic and scared me to death. I thought she might stab me if I said the wrong thing, so was hyper careful not to offend her in any way. It turned out she fancied Chris and thought I was his girlfriend, but after he slept with and dumped her and she was released from the ward, she kept calling me. I felt so afraid and guilty I kept meeting her for drinks, where all she’d do was ask about Chris. She was fixated with him, but then she calmed down, got married to a nice fireman called Nick and had three kids.
+++Yet when I finally turned up at the hospital, my heart pounding, Chris seemed fine.
+++‘I’m fine,’ he said sitting on his bed above which some former patient had punched a hole through the ceiling tile. ‘I had a bit of a wobbler, brought on by stress. It’s so embarrassing.’ He asked me to bring him a tooth brush, deodorant, a change of pants and his guitar, (not in that order, and written on the back of a Council Tax demand in his tiny spidery handwriting) which I did.
+++On the second visit, he had befriended a very beautiful and charismatic black intellectual called Anthony. I was impressed because Anthony was reading Don Quixote, which he pronounced in Spanish, and showed me his dog eared copy with tiny, obsessive annotations in every margin, which proved he had – as he claimed – read it consistently for five years now. He could also quote lengths of Dante’s Inferno (although he could also have been making it up for all I knew. It sounded wonderful) and recommended I read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which I did. We never spoke about why he was incarcerated. It wasn’t even the Elephant in the room, we just chatted as though we’d met in a rather fashionable and eccentric drama group. He leant me a book by Anthony de St Germaine called The Immortals. I could tell by the cover (a large blue hooded angel-devil astride a stallion rearing out of a fiery pentagon) it was self-published fantasy fiction of the lowest order, and couldn’t read past the first page without having a mild anxiety attack. There’s nothing more uncomfortable than reading the ravings of a madman you happen to have met and liked. Also, Chris told me that Anthony’s book contained uncanny evidence about the 10^th Incarnation prophecy. He didn’t elaborate, other than to say it all made sense and if it was true, then he was afraid.
+++‘But on the other hand,’ he shrugged. ‘It could all be bollocks. What do I know? I’m mad.’
+++Whenever I went to visit, the pair of them remained sane and charming, if a little too happy and optimistic for a pair of fine young men perched on Formica tables in a mental institution.
+++At this point, my sitcom, now called Christ On A Bike (the main character, Colin, was a cycle courier), was commissioned by C4. I still couldn’t bring myself to tell Chris. I told Daniel, who was impressed by my success. To be truthful, I had a crush on Daniel which was now smudging my judgement. I was trying to be blasé about a serious situation just because Daniel seemed so freaked out by it all, and I didn’t want him to be. I didn’t want him to associate me with the stain of mental illness. I wanted us to have fun when we met to discuss what was happening with our friend, but Daniel was always morose and worried.
+++Simon was boring me and I was thinking of leaving him, so I had pinned all my hopes on Daniel, as he had lovely slate coloured eyes and was interesting/creative, plus knew people who knew Jarvis Cocker and other interesting/creative types. But as I got to know him I discovered we had very little in common. For one, he believed in UFOs, and two, he was completely anally fixated.
+++Meanwhile, Chris was about to be released (Anthony still had a way to go) and my sitcom pilot was about to be made. I thought I’d better brace myself and tell Chris about Christ on a Bike. I had no idea what he’d say, but my biggest fear was that he’d ask me not to go through with it. I lay awake at night worrying what I’d do if he said that. To be honest, my decision was not one I was proud of. It was one of those moments when you realise what kind of person you really are, that all the judgements you made about others were quite unfair, when you know you would not make a very likeable character in a daytime soap. But fuck it. I wanted fame and money so shoot me.
+++My other lesser worry about telling Chris that he was accidentally the subject of my soon to be made sitcom, was that while I believed it was a coincidence, Chris might take it as some kind of sign, a further twist of fate that merely proved his destiny. Maybe he’d think I was one of the prophets, Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, but in the modern context. Maybe I was. If I was the sitcom prophet, perhaps there was a theatre, a film and a book prophet too, all of us writing the same story of Chris.
+++I finally confessed. After a moment or two he said quietly: ‘You fucking bitch, you stole my life.’
+++I was mortified, and braced myself for further insults.
+++‘Joking,’ he said, laughing at my expression.
+++‘Bastard,’ I said, relieved, waiting to see if he’d ask me for a cut.
+++‘You know, it’s weird,’ he said, studying me intently. ‘But I never had you down as the artistic type. And yet you must actually be quite sensitive deep down to have picked up something in me that everyone else missed.’
+++I nearly choked on my wine.
+++Instead of explaining myself honestly, bearing my soul, (not wanting to spend too long on a difficult topic) I said: ‘A) I don’t think it’s possible to be sensitive deep down. I think – although I was always terrible at grammar – that’s what they call a misnomer. And B) Are you still taking your meds? I have to ask as your official next of kin.’
+++I invited him to the recording of Christ on a Bike. He thought the title was terrible.
+++‘What would you call it then?’
+++‘I wouldn’t write a sitcom,’ he said. ‘It’s artistically beneath me.’
+++Before he was released from Epsom, Daniel and I had to sign some forms, and Dr Heppenstal told us: ‘You need to keep an eye out for warning signs.’
+++‘What signs?’ I said.
+++‘Like obsessive cleanliness.’
+++Was she being cryptic?
+++A month later, Chris ordered a pizza and ate three quarters of it. He phoned and said: ‘I just want you to know I love you. Everything begins and ends with you.’ Another mutual friend called me five minutes later and said: ‘Chris just called. He wanted phone sex.’ The next morning he was dead. He’d parked his car in a backstreet by a gas works and attached the long hose of a portable vacuum cleaner to the end of his exhaust pipe.
+++‘I had no idea he knew where the vacuum was,’ said his flatmate, Rob, which I thought was a little bitchy given the circumstance. Apparently the Lada had stalled at some point, but sadly not before the job was done.
+++I keep seeing him, keep leaping onto trains and buses and ending up in strange places. The other day I went to Chorleywood. I suppose he is resurrected, sort of, temporarily, every Monday night at 7.30 on C4, repeated Thursdays at 9. The box set is due to come out in time for Christmas.
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Lucy Pizey is a newspaper and magazine journalist from London. She has written many culture and lifestyle articles for The Evening Standard, The Guardian, Red, Elle and The Telegraph among others under her maiden name Lucy Etherington. A piece of her non-fiction was published in The Bedside Guardian 2007. The article, which originally appeared in the Family section of The Guardian, was about what it was like to be a character in a sit-com written by your parents. In 2010 she moved from Peckham to rural Suffolk where she has completed her first novel. The last short story she had published was in Goldsmiths University’s student magazine many, many years ago.