Fanning - Mind on fire: a memoir of madness and recovery

Arnold Thomas Fanning was born in London and raised in Dublin. His stage plays include the acclaimed McKennas Fort. Mind on Fire is his first book.

Arnold Thomas Fanning

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MIND ON FIRE

A Memoir of Madness and Recovery

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India | New Zealand | South Africa

Penguin Ireland is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published 2018

Copyright Arnold Thomas Fanning, 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Part of this book was previously published in a different form in The Dublin Review, no. 65, Winter 2016/17. Grateful acknowledgement is given for the quote taken from Into Extra Time by Michael Paul Gallagher SJ, published and copyright 2016 by Darton Longman and Todd Ltd, London, and used by permission of the publishers.

Arnold Thomas Fanning received financial assistance from the Arts Council.

ISBN: 978-1-844-88430-8

for Tessa

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, No Worst There is None. Pitched Past Pitch of Grief

In writing about my decade of madness, I drew upon my own memories as deeply as I could. But while my recollections were often vivid and detailed, they could not tell me everything I needed to know about the period, so I undertook detailed research. I consulted medical records; police records; emails; and my own diaries and notebooks. I also interviewed several people who knew or encountered me while I was seriously ill: acquaintances, professionals, friends, and my sister. What follows does not purport to be definitive, but is as true and accurate an account as my memories and this research have allowed. Writing in the present tense, I have attempted to capture as precisely as possible the state of a mind that was often subject to the distortions of mania, depression and delusions.

you charge through Heathrow two days after Christmas, it is imperative you get on a flight now, the tsunami has struck in Sumatra and you need to go and volunteer there, join a relief agency, only you can help all those people in need of succour, but first you require equipment, tools, an outfit, something that will indicate the seriousness of your intent, and on the wall you see the perfect thing, an emergency kit in a glass case, containing a defibrillator and a hazard jacket, so you pull open the door of the case, ignoring the alarm that goes off when you do so, and you put on the jacket, and put the defibrillator pack over your shoulder, and now you are ready for your mission, now you must go and find a flight that will take you to the disaster zone, there must be dozens of relief agencies flying out today, you can join one, they will be glad of another volunteer, so you go up a level to the departure lounge, eager and hopeful, but first there is the security guard to deal with, and now he angrily wrenches the emergency kit from you, too furious to understand your explanations, he takes your details, calls the police, you are arrested, charged with theft of a defibrillator, the police take you then, but after they have finished with you all they have said is forgotten and you go back to Heathrow, into the crowd of travellers thronging the airport, push, then run through the lines of people waiting to check in to flights all over the world, and another idea comes to you, as urgently as the last, an obvious idea, so obvious you wonder why it didnt occur to you before, you can join the British Army as a chaplain, so you go down the lift again two levels where you saw the squaddies hanging out earlier, join them, tell them your idea, and they are all enthusiasm, all chums, it is a lark, they are just young lads, and you run with them through the lower levels of the airport, they are your new friends, and you will travel with them to Cyprus and be their spiritual counsellor, but one by one they break away, drift off, disappear until you are left alone to wonder what to do next, and then of course another obvious idea strikes you as suddenly as the other ideas, another vital thing you can do, you can fly to Israel and convert to Judaism and join the Israeli Defence Forces, defend the Promised Land, it is your destiny, you have always had an affinity with the Jewish people after all, and now you will demonstrate this by being with them and fighting to secure their homeland for them, it all makes sense to you, you have some feeling of guilt and responsibility towards them, there are historical injustices only you can put right, and so you find the check-in counter for a flight to Tel Aviv, and join the queue of Orthodox Jews dressed all in black, with their bewigged wives and neat children, as well as secular passengers dressed casually, and you start to chatter about your plans to convert, to enlist, to fight, to defend, and they watch you as you edge closer to the check-in counter, you are positive they will let you fly when you tell them that you are a Jew, the conversion is a mere formality, it is the covenant of faith youve made between yourself and God that really matters, so they will believe you when you declare you are a Jew and then they will have to let you go to Israel to enlist, and they will pay for the flight themselves, it is well known, it is the Law of Return, but you have no identification whatsoever, it is all lost, and you have an Irish accent, and are pale, very pale and thin, and the people around you are finding it hard to keep up with all your ideas, to understand you at all, and you are not allowed to go any further in the queue by the ticketing agent, who has come down the line to check what the fuss is about, to do a check on your documents, which you do not have, and you begin to explain it all again to the ticketing agent, who does not understand, only blocks your progress towards the check-in counter, and so you start to argue, then object loudly, because you must be allowed on the flight, it is imperative, pressing, it is your destiny, and so you physically resist, until there is a struggle between you and the ticketing agent, and you lie down on the floor and wrap yourself around a bollard and grip tightly on to it, and refuse to leave unless you are given a ticket and access to the plane, and so the police are called now, and they come rapidly, black-clad, in body armour, bearing machine guns cocked and at the ready, and they loom over you, in their helmets and sunglasses, pointing their guns at you warily, unsure what exactly they are dealing with here, and dont reduce their hostility when you grin, and begin to laugh, and concede defeat in the face of overwhelming force, no, they just grab you by the arms and pull you off the ground and frogmarch you to the nearest exit on to the road outside the airport, and shove you roughly into the back of a police van, drive you several miles down the motorway, then open the van door, push you out, and tell you not to return to the airport anytime soon, and then they speed away, and you turn and walk the lay-by past light-industrial centres, Traveller encampments with horses that you momentarily think could bear you back to the city quicker, then continue walking towards London, no end to the highway, the night dark and cold, nowhere to shelter from the wind, but still you dont feel tired, your energy does not abate, so it is not hard to keep walking, but then finally you get a lift from a kind man who listens as you talk rapidly about what youve been doing, how youve been living, and he drops you in Camden Town, tells you there is a centre giving away free dinners to those in need like you, so you go, but it is too late, when you arrive at the community centre the food is gone, the tables deserted, the centre empty apart from the few tired volunteers who move from table to table clearing up, so you go on walking deeper into the night, and you arrive in Regents Park and lie on a bench exposed to the cold still and try and sleep, listening to the lions roaring in the nearby zoo, and this sound strangely arouses you so you slip your hand down the front of your trousers and rub yourself, and then take your cock out in your hand and jerk it off furiously, coming with the sound of the lions roar, and wipe the ejaculate on to your trousers, and now you no longer feel in any way tired, you feel energized once more, so you get up off the bench and go on walking, the streets are deserted, you are all alone in this city, momentarily standing lost in a colonnaded square wondering where to go now, because you have nowhere to go, save a doorway off the street, there is nothing to eat now but the pickings from a bin, and it is winter, harsh, it is night, cold, and you feel suddenly bereft, adrift, alone, but then you feel the energy surge through you once again so you continue walking, walking miles to another part of the city, until you can walk no further, it is impossible, you must rest, must stop, so you find some cardboard, and then a sheltering doorway, and you attempt to settle for the night at last, and manage some form of sleep despite the freezing cold and the hard steps you lie against, despite your seething mind, full of thoughts and fleeting ideas, and almost as soon as sleep descends you wake to another day, dull morning, to face a man in an overcoat and a suit standing over you carrying a briefcase who looks down at you as you are blocking the way to his office door, so you stumble to your feet as quickly as you can, afraid he will hit you, pleading with him that you didnt do anything wrong, but he assures you he is not angry, but rather he holds out a ten-pound note and urges you to go and get some food, and you walk away with the money he gives you and you go to a shop and buy a pack of cigarettes, and smoke some quickly, momentarily joyous at this good fortune, then go on walking, walking, through the city, thinking all the time of who you are and what you need and what you will do next, because you are actually a private detective following up on a complicated case, one that only you can understand and solve, but no one knows that about you, they dont understand why you suddenly fall to the ground and roll there, shouting, then run and hide yourself, and no one knows either that you are the star of a movie being made about your life, so they cannot comprehend why at one moment you laugh and the next you cry, and they dont understand that you are the survivor of a slaughter that has taken place, and the only witness to a genocide that is occurring outside the city, which is why you stand in train stations and weep as the trains pull out on their way to the concentration camps, taking the people in them to their deaths, and all these ideas are swirling around inside your head at once, hurling through your mind, it is on fire, so when you speak it all comes out muddled and confused and no one can understand you, so when you go into a pub and demand food and drink for nothing off the landlord expecting to be granted it because you are entitled to it, you are an important person after all, he just refuses and tells you to leave, and you have annoyed him so he follows you out, a big heavy man, follows you out on to the street, and though you smile at him before you turn to go, he lashes out and slaps you, hard, across the side of your head to send you on your way, removing that smile and driving you off with your ear ringing, and you stumble then, on through the city, sometimes hopping on buses, sometimes on trains, but now you need to shit, you are unsure where you are, where you can shit, and you cant hold it in much longer, and theres no way any premises will let you in to use their toilet, you are dirty and your clothes are torn, so you grab some newspaper out of the drain and go into a phone booth, so as to be relatively unseen as you squat and expel an enormous turd, and wipe yourself with the newspaper, and go, leaving your stinking mess behind, go with nowhere to go still, through this city, this endless city, into shops where you are followed around by security guards, and sometimes evade them, so you are able to pocket things unobserved, and sometimes observed, so you are caught, and so end up in a police van hurtling at speed through the streets of London to yet another police cell for the night before another appearance in court to be arraigned for a trial you will never turn up for, but these police who now ferry you in the back of their van have not searched your pockets, which was a mistake, because you have a box of matches, and so now you take them out and pull off your suede jacket that was given to you in a shelter, and you set fire to your jacket with the matches, until the back of the police van fills with thick smoke, and the police have to brake suddenly, stop in the middle of the street, get out of their van, and come and open the doors at the back to get you out, pull you out in a plume of smoke, wrench you out, see you laughing, dismiss you as a waste of time and effort and go and attend to the fire in their van, and so off you go, you continue to walk through the city, to a train station, and on to a train, you dont even know the destination, and get out and are lost, and yet you feel all is well, there is nothing wrong, and your mind is racing full of rushing thoughts, each more beautiful and fascinating than the last, and you have nowhere to go today or tomorrow, and still the energy surges through you, so you get back on a train that brings you back to the city, and you just decide you will keep on walking, endless walking, and even though you have nowhere to go and nothing to do you feel that there is something pressing that must be attended to, and it must be attended to now, immediately, which gives a sense of urgency to everything you do, so you dont stop, and the thoughts dont stop, and you are so alone, so far from home, and friends, and family, and you dont think of any of that, of them, you have too many other things to think about, you are full of energy, and plans, and things to do, to get done, and it all makes sense to you, you actually feel so happy, despite being hungry and alone and cold, yes, euphorically happy, as you walk on, walk on through the city, full of rushing thoughts, and your mind is burning, burning, burning