The Obsessive Diary

I’m going to tell you a fairy story. Once upon a time there was a little girl who saw something. She happened upon a woman in a bath who was drinking a glass of wine and the woman’s expression said she saw it too but she carried on drinking her wine. The little girl knew she was going to die so she took what was most precious inside her and gave it to the Gremlins who lived in the hollow of roots...

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At the heart of addiction lies trauma. It’s an answer to the question, How can I live with such pain? My love affair with needles was a problem-solver and like all dysfunctional relationships it began with the explosive belief that I’d found the one, and ended with my world reduced to a pinprick. For three years I travelled back and forth to Australia using crystal meth and cocaine to make life fe...

It’s now that the shaman overplays his hand. You’d think cutting the brakes on my car and locking me out of my house would have done it. Or throwing a party while I was away called Going Ape that he’d advertised with fliers all over the local town. Or his misogyny. Or megalomania but don’t forget context; I’d come out of India, Israel, commune, cult, and Centro Maya was just another chapter in an...

The same word, written over and over, all over the hotel bedroom wall. And he was gone. In another version of this story I apologised to the hotel staff, paid for the paintwork, got in my red car, drove to Jo’burg and flew home alone and none of the terrible happened and neither of the brilliant either. There was nothing to stop me. He’d likely be dead but what did I care. I’d tried. He and his to...

I’m not sure what happened except we’d been up for a week under an eclipse and instead of going to bed about a hundred of us decided to carry on. The island was a narrow strip of land in the Zambezi River, the only way to it by canoe. We left our vehicles on the banks, I don’t remember what gear we had, I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a tent but someone must have lent us one because you spent a lot...

That was the kind of party it was. A thousand people on a plot of land in Zambia, gathered for an eclipse. We’d flown to Jo’burg with hand luggage of toy guns because scaring the s**t out of people at parties was what you were into. We’d hired a car, ripped out the seats and turned the back into a bed and driven from South Africa through Botswana to Livingstone. God knows how we found the site; th...

There is a version of this story where you stayed in the jungle, and I came back to England and our relationship remained three addictive magical months in a house in Possum Creek and none of the terrible happened and none of the beautiful either. But that isn’t this version because when my visa ran out and I had to leave I returned to a boy from Kent who was still trying to take over my home – re...

We left the party and moved in together. It was that simple. There was a house which two beautiful Japanese boys had found; I had been staying there with the Israelis before I came to the party on the lake. I told you about it and we drove out, found a window open, climbed in. It was wooden floors in a jungle, brightly coloured rugs under eaves, dripping leaves in an Australian storm, tree frogs a...

Do you remember? A party out the back of Mullum, a lake, an Australian night. I was high and you were wild or was it the other way round. I’d dumped my willowy friend with the ankles she was ashamed of soon after arriving in Sydney and jumped in with a bunch of Israelis who had a camper van going north. She was furious, she said she’d offered me her friendship on a silver platter, a phrase I found...

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Here are three other memories I carried unbroken and unquestioned. Every night I would slide down the banister of the tall, cold house, curving polished wood beside stone, and when I reached the dark ground floor, I’d slide all the way up again. But one night I didn’t. I waited, my legs dangling, waiting as I had outside for him, and realising slowly that with him the magic had gone. I remember di...

When I was three a man turned up to live in the basement flat with the woman who’d escaped the Czech revolution. She, a refugee, had been given a job and a home by my mother, he was her husband, not Czech, probably Australian or from New Zealand. It’s likely she married him for Commonwealth residency, I’ve spoken to other Czech refugees who knew her and that is their best guess. Our home, the tall...

He went to Mexico for the summer to see his teacher leaving me in charge of the sweat lodge altar. I cleaned and lit and waved incense and genuflected but the candles turned black. He said it was an attack, he was always in battle with dark forces. I wrote my first novel over those six weeks, a story of a girl who goes to India and loses her mind. When he returned, I put it in a drawer. We went to...

There’s a blank wall of silence in my mind when I try and think back, to capture the essence of what it was like to live and work with a boy from Kent who called himself a shaman, who’s still out there, working. I’m exhausted by it. I don’t know where to start. Is it enough to say that we ran sweat lodges every three weeks, hordes of naked crying people crawling in and out of a pitch-dark dome in...

It’s going to be all right. This story that has been going from frying pan to fire has a happy outcome in the end. I feel the need to tell you that because from here on in it gets darker and the oh no what’s next can be exhausting. So remember as we dive and the air becomes stifled and the pressure builds that there is a lowest point, and when we get there, we’ll turn around and start coming up fo...

A black fly buzzes about the kitchen as I write, small and annoying. It circles me, persistent and I’m not surprised. That was him, single-minded and obvious. Of all of them he was the worst, not because his delusion was any greater but for his intent. The others – the people who had crossed my path and abused their power – were convinced, if they thought about it at all, that they were doing me g...

I had painted myself into a corner the day he arrived. Returned to the farm after a year away I no longer knew where I fitted into this thing we’d started, a commune in Surrey, everyone else getting on with it but I was lost. I’d set about my bedroom floor with white gloss, a fresh start, and forgotten to leave a way out. Barefoot, dripping paintbrush, my back against the wall, he appeared in the...

I woke this morning with that Richard Wilbur quote spinning round my head: “Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind, something will come to you.” I have to remind myself that these are not a fluke, these daily posts that I get up and write every day. These episodes have been churning for decades. But here’s the thing, it’s only now when I string them together that they tell a story that I d...

That motherfucker. He smashed my brain. I’d moved to a flat in Tottenham with other students, a place we could watch our thoughts, police each other and go limp together. I would wake at five and make my packed lunch and drive to the freezing outdoor pool in Hampstead where I’d dive in and swim thirty lengths. At school by six, within a term the third years had given me the keys to open up the bui...

It didn’t say cult in the brochure. It said, We will make you the best actor ever , or some such s**t because he was full of grand claims, the man who ran it. He’s dead now, of a cancer that had any student brought to the table, he would have ridiculed and shamed. He was like that. He believed in breaking you down. He’d been trained through Est, a psychotherapy system that was watered down into Th...

There was a song we used to play, the words had her name in them, Lordy don’t leave me, the Carpenter listened to it over and over. Her name was Lourdes, she’d arrived in our lives when the sun shone and everything was new, our first May Queen, she had black ringlet hair and the way she would say his name I can still hear now, the slant of a Portuguese accent, she seemed so knowledgeable. It was g...

And all this time we’d been building a stone circle. Inch by inch over slow grass from pile to track to hole in the ground, the rise and fall of the moon marked in rock. A year and a bit, from Beltane to Summer Solstice, the last weekend of every month. In sunny weather crowds came, through winter hardly anyone at all. One wet and miserable December with only twelve of us up there we’d put in thre...

We’d gutted a rabbit on the central stone the day Father Juniper came to exorcise the children. Blood and entrails smeared a rock. It didn’t look great. We saw him lumbering up the field towards us, an enormous wooden crucifix over his shoulder. The hem of his brown robe was dampened by grass, his sandals snagged dandelions, his string of beads swung with every step. A squat woman followed dressed...

Because every good story needs a sacrifice and something lost. Jesus – devilish handsome, funny and sweet, an electricity coming off him like fire – god we’d had fun that summer; the sparks of something forbidden, an escape from a commune that had taken over and a marriage I hadn’t meant to make. In the normality of the Director’s house I laughed and ate ham and felt like just a girl. Jesus was my...