Crazy

by Jane Feaver

Genres: Biographical; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

'Stunning . . . it almost feels transgressive' Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail

'One of the most startling novels I've read this year' Frances Wilson, TLS

'This book is brilliant - brave, truthful and intelligent' Wendy Cope

'I will break him; he will break me, and when we are broken, we will be even, and then we can be put back together again'

Jane has been accustomed to clever, undemonstrative men. So when, as a young woman, she meets Ardu, she is instantly bewitched by his intellect and detachment. What starts as a crush turns into something far darker, an all-consuming obsession, from which, years later, she is still reeling.

Crazy is a work of autofiction, a startling story of obsessive love, addiction, motherhood and work. It is a reckoning with fiction and with truth: how these things play out on the body; what it takes for a woman to write out her own life.

Release date: April 7, 2022

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

Devon, Autumn Term, 2017

It’s getting worse not better. There’s a mustiness to the room that I imagine is endemic to institutional buildings: books, rotting plants, fear. I’ve never been able to untangle the cords of the blinds, the slats hitched up to one side like a skirt tucked into knickers. Two years’ worth of unfiled papers, plastic bottles, books, the latest iteration of university finance procedures. Every morning I head straight for the window, brace myself against the stiff aluminium frame and prise it open, heave until the window is wide enough, should the need arise – who knows? – to throw myself out.

Later, I’m in a seminar room where, not for the first time, the audio equipment isn’t working. ‘One of you must be good at IT?’ I ask. Under the tables they’ve begun to consult their phones. I poke at the array of buttons, my heart in the roof of my mouth. I know the drill: the evaluation they will fill in is called MACE.

On a scale of one to five: how well was your tutor prepared?

How enthusiastic was your tutor?

This is how it goes.

After class I return like a piece of elastic to my office. Though the room is a mess, I spot at once that something’s amiss, a piece of paper tucked between the rows of computer keys and written in capital letters:

UR ROOM SMEELS OF SICCLEAN OUT UR MUG

(Say it, Deborah Gorman says because we have only just moved to London and have yet to be bought the correct school uniform. I’m wearing purple knee-length socks.

Iced Ink, I say.

Say it again, she says; say it faster:

Iced ink, Iced ink Iced ink, Iced ink. Iced ink. Iced ink. I stink. I stink.)

I spot the mugs on top of the filing cabinet: the lumpen pottery one is empty, but the other wobbles with a caramel-coloured blancmange. I dart out into the corridor with it, but in my haste do the thing I absolutely can’t afford to do. I trip, the contents fly. There’s nothing around to soak up the mess, a pancake crust, half-flipped. In a panic I rush down the corridor to the Ladies, yank a wad of loo roll from the dispenser and return, drop to my knees. Immediately the paper begins to disintegrate; my teeth on edge, I pick at the little worms of tissue where they’ve become stuck.

When I was six or seven (six and seven) I used to pick my nose and wipe it on the wall – there! – the shame of being exposed was so unbearable that the telling of that tale was held over me for years. My mattress was on the floor, flush to the wall, and all along the skirting in neat vertical lines were the three-dimensional forms arranged like trophies – fox, stag, moose. Pick-a-nose! Although I’d been caught and publicly shamed, although I’d been warned repeatedly, I couldn’t stop. It was compulsive, a wonder at something produced out of myself; the thrill of prospecting, gold or oil, as if my body were a mine.

But one morning I woke and there was something horribly wrong: an acrid stench like tarmac, so pervasive that I thought the smell must be coming from inside me, something rotten, some long overdue punishment. It was dark and I reached for the lamp-switch, the lamp that was new and mine, its two white halves slotting together over the bulb to form a moonlike whole. The switch wasn’t working. I fumbled out of bed towards the bunks where the babies slept. I wondered if the stench could be them, though it was far stronger than the smell of pee. Only when I pulled aside the curtains and turned around did I see that something terrible had happened. The lamp, which had been so perfect, had been grotesquely altered, a palsy down one side of melted plastic that exposed the ugly grey bulb in a kind of curse – a pox on your house.

‘Gosh,’ a voice says, affably. Anthony is clean-cut, wears a mauve jumper. He stands by the swing door and sniffs the air. ‘It stinks of drains out here.’

I freeze. ‘Does it?’ I say.

‘It really does smell as if someone has vomited,’ he says, pronouncing the word with relish.

I am fifty-two, middle-aged by any definition, and these days sleep fitfully, in and out of recurring dreams: a huge public building, a museum or a concert house, with corridors and wide staircases. I need to pee. I’m directed far away from where eventually I’ll need to be, not sure if I’ll ever remember my way back; take a staircase that winds down and down until I reach a dank basement, L-shaped, the tinkling noise of water dripping from tiles. There’s a row of ceramic toilet bowls. I walk the length of the floor, which is slick with water, and around the corner to try and find a cubicle: there are none. In some bowls the foul liquid threatens to overspill, others are blocked with wads of loo roll. I select the emptiest-looking, though there is piss all around the seat. And now because, thank goodness, I find that I’m alone, and because there may not be another opportunity for a while, I decide, fatally, to shit. It takes no effort, everything I’ve hoovered up into my body, out it comes in an earthy homogeneous mass, which, at first, I admit, is a huge relief. It’s only when I get up and discover that the bowl isn’t connected in any way to the sewer that I realize my mistake. It’s a trap. Who else performs such degraded acts?

The next morning I’m on the campus by quarter to seven. I have yellow gloves and anti-bacterial spray. The smell is like dead rat, and because it hovers at my door, I am entirely implicated. On my knees I pump the spray, little bubbles fizzing into the carpet. With a green kitchen scourer I scrub, sneeze. At which point the door from the landing swings open: Anthony.

‘Hello?’ he says and performs a double-take. ‘What are you up to?’

My face distorts. Anthony sets his hand on his chest and throws back his head. For a moment I’m out of my mind to be discovered. But then I hear laughter, unbridled, friendly, and recognize, in my comedy gloves, how bad I’ve let things get.

A week later, the smell is no more than a haunting: it might be ascribed to the sea-weedy ozone of the photocopier, the fustiness of the unventilated corridor. But in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, I decide to hunt out the cleaner. He’s a small, wiry man of indeterminate age, and I find him in his grey overalls with a packet of crisps, sitting under the back stairs where he takes his breaks. I prostrate myself. ‘I am so sorry,’ I say. ‘I can’t believe how bad it was.’

‘It is bad,’ he says, refusing to acknowledge that it is over.

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘Very bad. It makes me sick,’ he says, taking another handful of crisps and turning them over elaborately in his mouth as if they are pieces of glass.

When Ardu rings on my mobile, his name comes up. I wonder sometimes whether he has a nose for my low ebbs.

‘I can’t get hold of Shirin,’ he says.

‘She’s gone back to college.’

‘What’s she doing this term?’

‘Tragedy.’

‘Tragedy?’ He glosses every word with irony. ‘Okay,’ he says, though I can tell by the pop of his fag that he isn’t finished.

‘You know your Shakespeare?’ he asks, which can only be a prelude to showing that I don’t.

‘Not especially,’ I say to head him off.

He huffs. ‘And they let you teach?’

‘I don’t teach literature.’

‘What do you teach, then?’

‘Not formally.’

‘What do they call it?’

If I say the words creative writing, he’ll choke. ‘I’m at work. Is it important?’

‘How’s the Professor?’

‘I told you, he moved, he got another job.’

‘Did you? Are you sad?’ he mocks. Rarely does a conversation go by but that he’ll tell me he’s heard the Professor on some late-night art review. He takes another puff. ‘Maieutic is a good word,’ he says. ‘You should look it up.’

‘I know what it means.’

‘What?’

‘It’s to do with being a midwife,’ I say. ‘A way of teaching. From Socrates.’

He hums a surprise, forgetting that it was he who introduced me to the word in the first place. I don’t discourage him. He’s five hundred miles away and yet he is right here, in my ear – deeper – in a corner of my head, sitting like a guard who, after a little nap, has woken up.

‘It baffles me that anyone would employ you as a teacher,’ he says.

‘You’ve said that already.’

‘You don’t know anything; you’ve read nothing.’

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘What business is it of yours? Anyway,’ he says, ‘where were we? Shakespeare: people are stupid: they say that if Shakespeare were around today, he’d be writing for Netflix. But I say,’ he draws on his fag again, ‘I say, he’d be writing computer games. What do you think?’

He reminds me of the Professor is what I think, and, so unusual is it for Ardu to express admiration for anyone I might have a connection with, I am sensible enough not to have told him the whole story.

‘Quiz the wallpaper,’ the Professor used to exhort us, when, late in the day, I’d returned as a student to the university. ‘Never write in the first person, never write in the present tense.’ How right he was, is what, immediately, I thought. He’d sit in the Senior Common Room, Bunter-ish, with a bag of sweets. ‘I never want to read again about girls getting their periods!’

Only a rare type of man could pull off such an act, a man of discernment, expert in literature, in music and in art, is what I thought. And my fortune was that I knew how to please such men, had been hard-wired for it, the Professor’s chuckle reminding me of the pleasure of being on my toes, a testing in allegiance and taste that, at one time or other, had seemed the only way to be alive.

ii

I haven’t got all their names yet and the animal exercise gives me a second go at trying to work them out. I ask them to think what sort of animal they’d choose to be, and, if it’s different (it may well be different, I say), what sort of animal they think others might see them as.

‘I’ll start,’ I say, and of course it’s a cheat, something I’ve prepared earlier. I give the impression that I’m thinking hard. ‘Ant-eater,’ I say. They look askance. ‘This is how you’ll see me,’ I say, ‘thinking how pernickety I am. But,’ I gaze at the big aluminium windows, ‘what I see myself as: a hare.’ I give them a second, open to laughter, aware of how I must appear to them, in the same bracket as their mothers. But no one bats an eye.

‘I can clear a field at a hundred miles an hour,’ I say. ‘I box, I sing to the moon, I tremble.’ This last I slip in slyly as a concession to truth: if I make myself vulnerable, I reason, so might they.

As we go around the room, I write the animals down next to their names on the register: a girl who sees herself as a puppy, whom her friends, too, see as a puppy: she is enthusiastic and she is bubbly; there’s a cat/rabbit, a lion/puppy, a golden retriever/kitten. Next time I resolve to rule out puppies and kittens. It’s easy to lose heart. When I reach the girl in the white sweatshirt, we stall. I am gentle with her because I think she may be one of the particularly anxious ones I’m obliged to look out for. ‘We can come back to you,’ I say.

‘It’s childish,’ she says, and her gaze is direct.

‘What’s wrong with being childish?’ I ask. She fixes me and in that moment I am gone, a trigger of heat that sweeps up from my thighs to my scalp, fiery and slippery as a salamander.

The boy next to her has dyed black hair which falls over his pale face. He has been doodling intently but stops, raises his chin.

‘Adam?’ I ask, steeling myself.

‘A raven,’ he mumbles. ‘I like black.’

‘Great,’ I squawk. The girl in the sweatshirt makes a face at someone across the table, shifts perceptibly in her seat.

‘And what creature would you like to be?’ I ask.

He doesn’t have to think. ‘A kingfisher,’ he says. He uses the biro as a crutch. ‘I saw one at my nan’s.’ He shrugs, turns pink. ‘That’s all.’

‘Brilliant,’ I say, and look around, the heat dissipating.

I hand out a poem by Ted Hughes, ‘Wodwo’. ‘What am I?’ the poem asks. I get them each to read a line of the poem, which they do, haltingly, stumbling on the unusual syntax and repetitions, and in the breather I’ve allowed myself a thought comes to my rescue:

‘By the way,’ I say when they’ve finished reading. ‘Ted Hughes wrote wonderful letters. There’s one to his son, Nicholas. About the importance, the necessity even, of being childish.’ I have their attention, a washing line of faces. ‘He talks about the creature that’s in all of us that peers through the slits of armour we create as adults. It’s the only real thing about us, he says.’ Should they be writing this down? I see them thinking. ‘Part of what I hope this class is about,’ I say, ‘is unlearning everything you’ve been taught, dis-arming yourselves.’

They shift like shale, the threat of un-learning, too much at this stage to take on.

The office doors along my corridor contain panels of frosted glass. I shut mine behind me, lean against the bordello-like curtain of flowers I’ve put up so that no one can see if I’m there or not. In the top drawer of my desk there are paracetamol, and I take the last two from the packet, swallow them down with what’s left of a glass of water. I’ve learned to identify the pain, which approaches and amplifies very gradually, from a long way off, a small orb with a built-in homing device. I can’t work out if it’s triggered by anything in particular, but over the last twelve months the episodes have become more frequent. Sometimes, sifting through the stories that pile my desk, I imagine that what these students need is an injection of pain, an electric shock, anything to break the circuit. I have to correct myself: there is pain, there must be; there is, of course, experience of sorts – if we’ve lived a childhood, Flannery O’Connor says, we’ve enough experience to last a lifetime – but how to recognize it, how to gain access?

The best drawings are by four-year-olds who haven’t yet learned to be afraid of getting paint over their nice clean clothes. Somewhere in this so-called education, the fear enters in, as if from henceforth we must learn to disguise the unpalatable truth about ourselves. Everything must be mediated, a kind of police state where words, too, are neutered and deprived of agency. So that the stories can’t be real, they’re not allowed to be alive.

At our last department meeting we were asked what could be done about student anxiety, of which, apparently, there’s an epidemic: what we might do about it. I’d raised my hand rashly at the back of the lecture theatre: ‘But what if we have it, too?’

The monitor in front of me has gone to sleep, but safe to assume that the camera eye in the forehead of the computer is never inactive. I give nothing away. Behind a layer of microscopic dust lies the murky sludge of an ocean floor, where it’s difficult but not impossible to make out a figure bound and gagged in her revolving chair. (Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger.)

iii

Black was my favourite colour, too. When we lived in Newcastle, I was going to be a nun. I’d seen nuns out in pairs gliding along the street by the railway line where we lived, utterly self-contained, as if wherever they were going, they’d already arrived. In assembly Miss Trotter, who had a thick helmet of honey-coloured hair, got us to sing from The Sound of Music. Raindrops on roses, a kind of spell. Bright copper kettles: rewards for enduring, for being good. It was the same good that was in stories, in Cinderella, Cap O’Rushes, The Little Princess, the good that might drive you to run away, because, by definition, it wasn’t a kind that could be valued at home. God recognized it, and that was a comfort, God who I came to see as the secret speaking voice of books. But I was so good, I began to worry that he’d end up choosing me for the next virgin birth. How would I get out of that?

‘Bourgie’ was our father’s word, and all things bourgie we were primed to despise: Abba, new furniture, cleanliness, lounge, settee, perms, hot pants, dancing, God, sport of any kind, Renoir (the painter), The Sound of Music (all musicals), public schools, ITV, the Southern counties. We were trained to covet battered things, like Persian rugs, horsehair sofas, dry-stone walls; had a Geiger counter for aesthetics, sensitive to within a hair’s breadth for what he liked and what he didn’t.

Anne and Wendy lived next door to us. Our father called them ‘the bourgie kids’. But it didn’t stop us taking turns to ride their bikes or going back to their house to stuff plastic skittles up our jumpers like the nurses in Carry On. When she caught us, their mother brought us home, standing on the path beside the dusty hydrangeas to explain what we’d done wrong, cradling her beautiful bourgie hands. (‘I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden,’ is what we heard from next door, the song their dad sang (so ours said) when he hit their mother with a frying pan.)

Granny’s was the epitome of bourgie, though we went there often in the school holidays; Granny Georgie with her beds of perfect pink and yellow roses, her hostess trolley, her tubs of raspberry ripple ice cream. At Granny’s we had clean clothes and bath-time every night; we had trips to the boating lake and expeditions in the Dormobile to the seaside. It mattered to her that we loved her. She gave us individual packs of Coco Pops and Frosties for breakfast. ‘Which Granny do you like the best?’ she’d ask, an easy enough question to answer.

Sometimes we were left so long that when they arrived to fetch us home, it was as if we had been brainwashed: we didn’t want to go, we said, clinging to the bannisters, crying, all that careful anti-bourgeois training undone.

We moved to London when I was nine. In my non-uniform purple socks I was introduced to the whole class. I warmed to Mr Richards because he had a beard, and because he said I reminded him of the girl in Carrie’s War, which is exactly how I saw myself. He sat me next to Deborah Gorman, whose job, he said, was to look after me, Deborah, who smiled and kicked my shins under the table, daring me to tell and die: Jane Feaver, a Newcastle Geezer, caught her nose in a lemon squeezer.

iv

This student comes in to see me: she’s skinny, with lank dark hair, hooded eyes and a bad cold. She sniffs. She is buried in an oversized black coat made from curly woollen fur – an ape suit almost – and she doesn’t take it off. She sits in the farther away of the two chairs, and I suggest she moves nearer. She produces a piece of paper from her bag and at the same time, from within, her phone rings. I take the paper from her as she deals with the phone. There are two or three typed paragraphs.

‘It’s the child’s-eye exercise, is it?’ I ask, buying myself time. My bedroom has always been my safe place, I read. Two goldfish are introduced. They reside in a luxurious black bucket. ‘Reside? Luxurious?’ I ask. ‘How old is the child?’ The girl shrugs as if, surely, it’s up to me to tell her. ‘Think about it,’ I say.

We read on. In my youthful ignorance I named them Target and Zero.

‘I like the names,’ I say, trying to sound encouraging, ‘but do you need to tell us she is ignorant or youthful?’ My heart is sinking because we haven’t got very far, and I can feel her turning to stone in front of me.

They are the saddest goldfish in the world, the story goes. Then Target dies.

‘Why are they sad?’ I ask. ‘And how does she know which fish is which? How does she tell them apart?’

A mother appears in the next paragraph, making dinner. In another room, a younger sister is playing on her computer.

I want to ask what the point of the story is because What is the point? is a question I ask of myself again and again.

(‘You should write about it,’ Ardu has said, because what else do I have to write about?

‘Why would I want to do that?’, the ground shifting under my feet, sensing the pulse of his satisfaction: my resistance, enough of a reaction for him to know he has me still, can feel the tug, his end of the line.)

The girl is waiting, her chin set.

‘I wonder whether there is something missing?’ I venture. I’m not sure how far I can push her. ‘Or someone missing maybe?’

The girl is flint. ‘My father died two years ago,’ she says matter-of-fact. She is quite still, Estella-like, with her paper-pale skin, the pink end of her nose.

For a moment in that room we have fallen through the ice and our limbs are incoherent and flailing. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, drawing back into my chair. ‘Maybe,’ I say, tentatively, ‘that’s what’s at the back of the story. It might be too difficult to write,’ I say, putting it as a question. ‘You’d only need a hint, but it would put a different slant on everything.’

She takes another sniff and folds her story into her bag. She gives a tight smile. I feel a surge of validation. This is what writing is about, I want to tell her, it is difficult and hard, and you just have to keep going until that moment when you prod and feel yourself come up against something real, something live.

We had it from our father: vanity was th. . .