Nick Johnstone - A Head Full Of Blue

NICK JOHNSTONE

For Anna

When I was fourteen, I got drunk for the first time. Champagne drunk. My mouth was stretched in a smile so wide that my jaw hurt. The sky had the colours of a bruise. It was October 1984. Freezing cold and depressing. I was at my cousins eighteenth birthday party. Her stepfather pointed a champagne bottle towards me like a loaded gun. I watched the bubbles pirouette in the glass. The champagne picked through my brain like an electrician. Faulty circuits were re-wired. Loose cables were soldered. When the repairs were complete, my eyes sang as beautifully as Billie Holiday.

People always ask, Why did you stop drinking? They never ask, Why did you start drinking? Just like people always want to know why you broke up with someone before they want to know how you fell in love with them in the first place. I suppose theres some comfort to be had in other peoples suffering. I never have any black-and-white answers. All I can tell them is that there was no champagne when I stopped drinking, only pain.

No one I have ever met outside Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that is remembers the first time they got drunk quite as romantically as I do. For me, that night was an epiphany. Nothing would ever be the same again. I found a cure for the humming in my head. That nameless, shapeless humming. And once I knew it didnt have to be there, my response was only natural: I wanted to stay cured.

When I was eleven the humming got louder. It was no longer a single wasp, trapped inside my skull. There were many wasps, bees too, all humming until there was an itch inside my brain, an exhausting itch I had no hope of scratching. The humming wanted to take centre-stage so it threw a tantrum one morning when my mother was driving me to school. Id recently given up smiling. I was in training for all the other things Id later give up. My mother pulled up to the kerb outside the gates. Whats the matter? she asked. You seem so fed up at the moment. Hum. Buzz. I dont know, I said. This was to be my mantra for the next fifteen years: I dont know. We talked a little about why I hated school and why I seemed so sad all the time. There were no tidy summaries though, no precise sentences prefaced by I feel. When I opened the door, the humming was so loud I couldnt hear her say goodbye, I could only read her lips.

My childhood up to this point was fairly typical. We lived in Surrey until I was ten and life there was much the same as life for any other middle-class family growing up close to London in the 1970s. My mother stopped working when she became pregnant with me and stayed home to raise first me and then my sister, who was born when I was four. My father worked hard, always leaving before my sister and I woke up and coming home long after we were in bed. We spent week nights doing homework and weekends staying with or visiting grandparents and other family.

The rest of the time we had TV and Rolling Stones records and a paddling pool in the back garden in summer and prayers at bed-time and scary masks for Halloween and fireworks for Guy Fawkes Night and swimming lessons during school holidays and sand-castles on the beach and homework and ice cream and Sunday afternoons in winter wrapped in blankets on the living room floor watching Pink Panther films.

My parents tell me I was a quiet and withdrawn child, at my happiest hidden away in the corner of a room, writing a story or drawing a picture. I never really had any friends I wasnt interested and lived mostly inside my head. Without the distractions of others, I did well at school, often coming top of my classes. In December 1980, we left Surrey and moved to a new house in Buckinghamshire, some twenty-five miles from Central London. A year later, I passed the eleven-plus exam and got into a local grammar school. And then, when I was eleven, this humming, humid and close.

Had you noticed it before? a therapist would later ask. Not with such clarity, I told her. But I had known from an early age that there was something different about me, that something sinister lingered in the shadows of my everyday, that a dolorous shimmer glowed about me, that the company I kept was a reflection of the way I felt. This something else was there when I came home crying because a classmate at school told me his mother had died by choking on a piece of bacon rind; it was there when I befriended a girl at primary school who had five fingers missing; it was there in the hours I spent obsessing about the young sad-faced neighbour whose husband had died in a plane crash; it was there when I was eight and became close friends with a boy from a school whom no one would talk to because he had to wear callipers on his legs; it was there when I wouldnt ride my bicycle beyond a certain speed because I thought it would give me a heart attack; it was there when I broke down on the stairs one Saturday morning because I thought the world was going to be destroyed by nuclear war. The therapist nodded. So it was there from the beginning, she said. Yes, I said. I suppose it was.

When I was seven, I started to talk in my sleep, grind my teeth and sleepwalk. My parents would find me muttering nonsense to a wardrobe or trying to open a window that didnt exist. Once, I hid behind my bedroom door and jumped out on my father when he came looking for the source of the banging and crashing sounds that had woken both him and my mother up. Another time, on a family summer holiday in Tenerife, I was shaken out of a sleepwalking trance by strangers. Somehow, almost naked, I had got out of bed and walked to the other side of the hotel.

When I got a bad report card for Maths, my mother made me a giant times table chart which she hung on my bedroom wall. We practised sums at bed-time. My favourite was eight times eight equals sixty-four. Later, I would tell people that drinking was like multiplying the slopes and curves of eight times eight, getting drunk the glorious answer: sixty-four.

It was a hot, sunny day in May or June 1984. School was lazy, quiet. The exams were over and I, like everyone else, was looking forward to the end of the summer term. It was mid-morning. Break was on. I was talking with a friend out on the playing fields. He said he was thirsty. I said I craved a freezing-cold glass of Coca-Cola. He gave me an odd look. I drank two or three glasses every night. My mother bought big plastic bottles from the supermarket. Id come in from school, get my homework done, take a bath and then head to the refrigerator. It was my favourite part of each day. I loved to watch the door swing open and there it would be: a two-litre bottle of Coke shivering in the bottle rack. When I poured some into a glass, the bubbles fizzed, and if it was a hot day, the icy liquid would let out a hiss when it collided with room temperature. Id grab a packet of crisps and settle down in front of the TV. When the first sip hit the back of my throat, the craving stopped. So there I was, standing out on the school fields in the middle of a summer morning, my throat aching because I wanted that first sip of chilled Coca-Cola. I was about to turn fourteen, the sun was too bright.

After getting that drunk at my cousins eighteenth party, my parents rarely allowed me to drink any alcohol. They let me have a small glass of wine with Sunday lunch when we saw grandparents and they also let me have a small glass on special occasions such as a birthday or Easter or Christmas. It was never enough though and I remember how my throat always drooled, how one glass was never anything but a tease. How the tiny flash of not feeling like myself was so incredible, so miraculous, that Id stare at the empty glass and dream of a day when I could feel like that all the time.