![\"George](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/sydenham-hill-george-berger-3am-300x200.png\")
<\/p>\nBy George Berger.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I came straight up from nowhere, I\u2019m not going straight back there.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve not written an introduction to any of the other chapters in this journey, but I fear that without one here, I might never get through it.<\/p>\n
Because this is the most emotionally difficult thing I\u2019ve ever had to write. I feel, in turns, self-indulgent \/ exposed \/ vulnerable \/ open to disdain, criticism, even ridicule \/ overly negative \/ as though I may tread on others\u2019 toes. Sometimes misguided. Sometimes just wrong.<\/p>\n
And yet, here I am. Writing it. Without obvious recompense of any sort. So, with what reason?<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been putting off writing this for months. I\u2019ve started it a hundred times, mostly in my head, but occasionally on the computer. I\u2019m frightened of the emotions it will churn up. I guess this is PTSD in action.<\/p>\n
Because what I\u2019m about to write about is certainly the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me. How are you expected to fit that into mere words?<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve changed some of the names here. Not because of you, dear reader, but because of Google. Because to this day, against all logic, I will occasionally Google her name in the hope that some proof she existed outside my memories has somehow turned up. She has a sufficiently unusual name that no-one else shares it. No-one.<\/p>\n
But\u2026 nothing. Every time.<\/p>\n
I worry that in my later years, I may Google her, find nothing, and start to wonder if she ever existed at all. That I might start to doubt my own sanity. A sanity that was pushed to its very limits over the ten-year period I\u2019m about to write about.<\/p>\n
So, if others were to Google her name in the same weird way I do, I don\u2019t want them to find this. Because they would. Her parents may still be alive for all I know. I presume Alan is.<\/p>\n
You\u2019d be forgiven for thinking this is a bit pathetic, misguided or even a footpath towards mental illness. But I haven\u2019t got much beyond memories, you see.<\/p>\n
Three photos. That\u2019s it. Three photos as a memory of all that happened over the best part of 10 years. It demeans the intense, lasting love and friendship we had. As does what happened next\u2026<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/em>\u201cEver fallen in love with someone you shouldn\u2019t have fallen in love with?\u201d Like a suggestive old black and white film, we left the train line entering the tunnel after leaving Penge East. The darkness has never seemed so perfect.<\/p>\n On the other side of the hill, we pull out of the tunnel and into Sydenham Hill station. And every time, I get the same flashback: getting off the train that rainy dark evening in the winter of ’82, and seeing her waiting at the end of the platform. \u201cI saw her standing there\u201d. Lit up like an angel in the yellow shade of the platform lamps, as if in a Hopper painting. That magical moment that only first love can deliver. Or so I thought for years. I always think of the film Brief Encounter<\/em>, despite a paucity of parallels.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n We\u2019d had a mutual friend \u2014 and local hero \u2014 called Zina who decided we should meet each other. She announced this to me one day in the canteen at Orpington College.<\/p>\n Zina had explained to me that she had this friend who was \u201cpretty fucked up\u201d and she though that I could help. Or maybe she just thought that would make us a good fit. Looking back on this moment, I can see that my knight in shining armour ambitions cross-fertilised tragically \/ beautifully with my low self-esteem.<\/p>\n Also, I wanted a girlfriend. Y\u2019know\u2026<\/p>\n CH had had an elder sister, Natalie, who had committed suicide the previous year, Zina explained. CH was quite straight but had hippie leanings, having inherited the sister\u2019s record collection.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve written previously that CH was \u2018reassuringly, a car crash\u2019.<\/p>\n Reassuringly<\/em>\u2026 that\u2019s telling. I didn\u2019t consider myself fit for \u2018normal\u2019 people, so this represented a slightly opened door for me. As tragic as it sounds.<\/p>\n And so it came to pass that on a cold wet night in November 1982, I found myself walking in the rain towards Zina\u2019s place in Beckenham. Bleached hair and huddled into a black mac decorated with epaulettes from Laurence Corner in Euston. CH was getting out of her car as I approached.<\/p>\n \u2018You must be George\u2019 she said, with a confidence that I neither expected nor shared.<\/p>\n The three of us went to see the film Catpeople<\/em>. That\u2019s how I know the month and year \u2014 I\u2019m rubbish with all that usually. I don\u2019t usually hang love on dates, or anything else for that matter. I barely remember my own birthday and completely rely on a calendar for anyone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n She was beautiful. I genuinely hadn\u2019t expected that. I mean, really beautiful. I really<\/em> hadn\u2019t expected that. It was confusing. I didn\u2019t think beautiful people got fucked up. Or came near me.<\/p>\n I fell \u2014 hook, line and sinker \u2014 into her orbit. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her and save her from the cruelties of the world.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d like to get you \/ on a slow boat to China \/ all to myself \/ all alone.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n I wanted us to run away to a cottage in the middle of nowhere, become untouched by the dirtiness of the outside world. I sellotaped a small picture of the cottage of my dreams to my diary, and to my heart.<\/p>\n In this place, I figured, she would naturally lose the voices in her head that tormented her so dramatically. And we would live happily ever after. Away from capitalism. Away from the trauma of everyday life. Away, maybe, from other people in general. Away from all the bad stuff. All you need is love. That was the limit of my understanding, still so childlike.<\/p>\n She was beautiful, but the clues were there if you looked more closely. They were all over her arms \u2014 the subtle scars of self-harm, as it was never called then. Scores of little white lines, somehow whiter than her already pale skin. Tattoos that whispered more quietly, and screamed more loudly, than ink.<\/p>\n The first cut is the deepest. Our relationship blossomed in its own way. I\u2019d just left home and started living in the shared house I talked about in the Orpington Station piece. She\u2019d come over and we\u2019d lie under the duvet in ignorant innocence of what would inevitably happen next. Strange stirrings. Two virgins on the cusp of anointing adulthood. My first experience of any kind of intimacy with a woman, and hers with a man.<\/p>\n I always felt like she was Cassandra to my Rodney. Or Princess Diana even \u2014 still to my Rodney. She had that same demure enigmatic smile. She was from a vaguely different world, one that didn\u2019t exactly welcome pink hair, weird attire and political activism. Her parents never spoke to me beyond a cursory hello<\/em>. But I loved her, and she loved me. We built a bubble around us where that was all that mattered.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were so close, there was no room,<\/em><\/p>\n We bled inside each others\u2019 wounds\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n – <\/em>Melanie, Candles in the Rain<\/em><\/p>\n It would be fair to say we were an odd couple. Her music taste ranged from Opera to whale music, to bands like Supertramp and Runrig. We did meet in some kind of middle with Melanie and Fleetwood Mac.<\/p>\n I tried, unsuccessfully, to get her into Crass, with the idea that maybe all this turmoil she felt could be filtered into an anger more external and leave her more peaceful inside. She did like some Poison Girls stuff, but not in any kind of way that tempted her off the straight and narrow. Or the self-hatred.<\/p>\n Straight was the land she inhabited, despite her squareness never even vaguely fitting into the round world. She had a succession of well-paid, successful ultra-straight jobs in central London, inhabiting worlds that were alien to me. They inevitably finished when her mental state would sabotage everything with a suicide attempt or simply a bout of not turning up due to her illness. I desperately wanted to take her away from that world, but she wasn\u2019t having it.<\/p>\n She ended up working at the then nascent TVAM (British breakfast TV), sitting next to Ulrike Johnson in the office. I\u2019d meet her for a lunchtime pint in the (now legendary Goth) Devonshire Arms opposite, back when it was an Irish pub. Well, I\u2019d<\/em> have a pint.<\/p>\n She was impossibly beautiful and insanely intelligent. She knew something like 6 languages by the age of 17, including Swahili and sign language. I\u2019ve no idea how or why. She was wired different in so many ways.<\/p>\n In a vain(glorious?) attempt to understand, or at least shout about the situation, I interviewed her for my fanzine, about her state and how the state dealt with her in mental homes. Pretty much the whole of that issue was dedicated to exploring mental health \u2014 both hers and mine also by that point, I guess.<\/p>\n It was heavy, it was miserable and, as such, a mirror image of my life at that point. You could perhaps throw stupid in there as well, inasmuch as I was pretty keen, in an arrogant teenage posturing way, on RD Laing\u2019s anti-psychiatry stance. I was so sure, in the way teenagers often are.<\/p>\n The issue of the zine pushed some people away, as you might imagine, and also inspired a few of the most moving letters I ever received. If nothing else, it connected with some people very deeply, and those letters made any amount of ridicule or rejection bearable at least. Not much fun though. Some people actually got angry.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n We split up after about a year \u2014 she finished with me. I was devastated and my self-esteem in that department tumbled even further down the rabbit-hole. I wasn\u2019t even good enough for a car-crash lady. She didn\u2019t need me and it didn\u2019t matter how I felt about that.<\/p>\n But that was far from the end of it. For the next decade, through my loving relationships with a couple of other women and through her developing a long relationship with another man by the name of Alan, I remained devoted to her, and we shared a sometimes difficult and perhaps inappropriate mental intimacy. When we were both single (but only then) the intimacy was also physical. That closeness was responsible for at least one of my relationships failing \u2013 the mental intimacy, that is.<\/p>\n \u201cYou love CH more than you love me\u201d said Emma, crying and vulnerable. It wasn\u2019t true. At least, I don\u2019t think it was. I was madly in love with Emma, but nothing on earth could make me lose touch with CH. She still held that bomb over my head \u2014 an unspoken blackmail.<\/p>\n Throughout this time, CH made regular suicide attempts. Whilst some seemed possibly symbolic; others definitely weren\u2019t. She never left me in any doubt that it was her intended ending. <\/p>\n The constant threat of the woman you love killing herself does a couple of things. Firstly, it gives her a massive power over you. One wrong move and it could tip her over the edge. By which I mean, into killing herself. That\u2019s kind of nuclear. Being ill, it was a power she sometimes used (in retrospect, and albeit subconsciously). A seductive habit to develop I suspect \u2014 all power corrupts.<\/p>\n The other thing, of course, is the constant stress of it all, both existential and physiological. It coloured what should have been the best years of my life and cast a terrifying, disabling, hypercortisolemia shadow over every moment I couldn\u2019t forget about it.<\/p>\n I looked at others getting on with a more carefree existence like they were on a different planet. Yet I could never join them, I just didn\u2019t possess the spaceship.<\/p>\n She\u2019d ring up and announce she was about to end it all. That she\u2019d had a new idea about driving down to Beachy Head and throwing herself off. What was I supposed to say?<\/p>\n Sometimes she\u2019d ring and tell me that with last night\u2019s phone call, I saved her life. She sent me a thank you card once that said the same thing. I still have it.<\/p>\n Should I throw it away? Is it an insult to my (extremely happy, thank you) marriage? Should I even be writing this?<\/p>\n Heavy doesn\u2019t begin to describe it. Abuse might. She\u2019d ring up from a random hospital where she\u2019d just had her stomach pumped. I\u2019d drop everything and rush to see her, wherever she was in the country. It was no way to live.<\/p>\n I moved in with her temporarily, dysfunctionally, towards the end. She was in Crouch End by this point, working in the latest high-powered job. One night I\u2019d gone to sleep having hidden her door keys, following her threat to go out and throw herself off \u2018suicide bridge\u2019. She woke me up in the middle of the night screaming aggressively for her keys. Heavily self-medicated against the situation on Special Brew and stress, I gave them to her and went about waking up.<\/p>\n Once I\u2019d properly come to, I spent the next few hours wandering around Crouch End\u2019s dark empty night-quiet with a banging head and a lot of fear. Looking for this bridge (pre-internet, you see) and for her body. Special Brew hangover and corpse-searching. I eventually gave up, went home and called the police. I was 20 minutes into that call when the door opened, and she came back in. We made intense love. Every threat intensified everything and drew me closer like a Venus Fly Trap.<\/p>\n I moved out shortly after that. Back to the room in the shared house in Catford that I\u2019d kept on throughout \u2014 I guess deep down I wasn\u2019t kidding myself.<\/p>\n One day not long after, she rang me to say goodbye and thank me for everything I\u2019d done for her. Not for the first time. But for the last.<\/p>\n I lost my temper and asked her why she was doing this to me. For the first time, I shone the spotlight on myself as well as her. She\u2019d left me teetering on the edge of a breakdown for ten years and I just couldn\u2019t handle it anymore. Not that I ever could.<\/p>\n Then she died.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n I have, of course, often looked back and wondered what exactly was wrong with her \u2014 how she would be diagnosed if doctors knew then what they know now. Bipolar doesn\u2019t seem to cut it, but what do I know? But what did they know?<\/p>\n Contemporarily, I\u2019ve developed interests in the cutting edge of neurological science and quantum mechanics. One thing that came up was cellular memory: the idea that we can inherit memories from previous generations.<\/p>\n Sometimes I figure that\u2019s an offensive rabbit hole to go down. But that\u2019s what happens when you can\u2019t explain horror \u2014 you become more open to clutching at straws. Just look at conspiracy theorists right now.<\/p>\n So, I\u2019ll never have explanations and I\u2019ve never had closure. The closure that going to the funeral may have afforded me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n I was still living in the shared house in Catford when the phone call finally came. It was Alan, telling me that she\u2019d gone back to Friern Barnet hospital (a horrendous Poe-like Victorian asylum deserving of the word) where she\u2019d previously been sectioned, and where I\u2019d visited, with horror. There, she\u2019d hung herself.<\/p>\n That night, back in Catford, there was a party at a neighbour\u2019s house. Talk about timing.<\/p>\n People showered me with genuine love, much appreciated concern and a lot of strong spliffs. I ended up very drunk, very stoned and dancing. I was free. She couldn\u2019t threaten me anymore.<\/p>\n I was surprised and shocked by my reaction, no doubt heavily buffeted by the dope, but there it was. Alongside a shock so deep I hadn\u2019t begun to process it yet of course. It was quite a lot to take in in one day.<\/p>\n Because Alan had told me something else in that phone call. \u2018Her parents don\u2019t want you to come to the funeral. They said Natalie\u2019s funeral turned into a circus and they don\u2019t want that happening again.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018Are you going?\u2019 I instinctively asked.<\/p>\n \u2018Yes\u2019.<\/p>\n I nodded silently. I knew he was going to say that.<\/p>\n So, there you had it. My presence at the funeral would have turned it into a circus. That short segment of a phone call damaged me almost as much as her death. Maybe more. The idea that I wasn\u2019t important enough in her life to be there. Ten years of giving everything, ten years of dropping everything every time she tried to die.<\/p>\n And I wasn\u2019t even considered important enough to go to the funeral. Because my dyed hair, or my height, or both, would have turned it into a circus. A clown too many.<\/p>\n When something that incomprehensible happens to you, you have a hundred options of how to interpret it and react to it. How to then fold it into your life experience, and subsequent outlook. There are healthy options and there are \u2018let it fester\u2019 options. But I was only ten years on from being the fucked-up person who fell in love with her in the first place. I let it fester.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Lack of closure does strange things to you. It sometimes crosses my mind that it could all have been a big conspiracy where she just wanted to get away from me and the whole thing was a theatre production to engineer that outcome. That she went off to start a new life abroad, utilising her languages. Desperate times, desperate measures. She got cured and happy, but the condition was that I could never know. Everyone is in on it except me.<\/p>\n Of course, rationally, I know that\u2019s not true \u2014 at least I\u2019m 99% sure \u2014 but that door in my mind should have been slammed shut by the funeral, and wasn\u2019t. There\u2019s a cruelty therein that I\u2019ve never been properly able to fathom or process. I forgive her parents in my head but my heart struggles to do the same. Sometimes forgiveness can feel a bit like self-harm.<\/p>\n Her parents were grieving, of course. The second suicide of a second daughter must deliver unthinkable pain. But none of that has ever helped me heal.<\/p>\n In some ways, being banned from the funeral has been more difficult to get over than her death itself. Of course, I could have just turned up in defiance of their request. But I was too much of a coward to do that. Plus, I hate funerals and had never thought they were a properly legitimate way of saying goodbye.<\/p>\n I was wrong about that, of course.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Then, on what would have been her next birthday, I get a phone call out of the blue from her dad. It\u2019s the first time he\u2019s ever said anything more than hello to me. Suddenly, I\u2019m his confidant and it feels awfully selfish.<\/p>\n I\u2019m lost for words; I really don\u2019t know how to respond at all. I ask him how he is and he\u2019s clearly not good. As he details his self-pity, all I want to do is ask him about the funeral ban. I want him to know what he did to me. A part of this feels really out of order.<\/p>\n But a greater (as in bigger, rather than better) part of me thinks this would be just being cruel to an old man. So, I don\u2019t. Instead, I try to console him and in turn consign myself to thirty years of pain. At the end of the phone call, the space between us is almost solid. At no point have I been considered.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Just in case you\u2019re wondering, (because I know I would be, if I were you), I\u2019ve decided to finally get some counselling for the PTSD I\u2019ve been dragging around with me for the last 30+ years.<\/p>\n Because I still think about her \u2014 still feel the emotions. Whenever Leonard Cohen sings \u2018Suzanne\u2019, there she is in my line of vision; it\u2019s about her. Or James Taylor singing \u2018Fire and Rain\u2019. Or whenever Melanie sings anything. Or ‘Songbird’ \u2014 our song.<\/p>\n Zina, who introduced us all those years back, passed away from lung cancer at 54, too early. Suzanne makes me think of her too, and the jumble sales we would visit for rags and feathers. It\u2019s all a world away from my life now, partially rid of these demons and false gods.<\/p>\n The list is long, and I deliberately visit it sometimes, when fortified by a few sherries. Still trying to make sense of it all. Perhaps trying to confront those dark emotional memories in the hope that I build the muscle-memory to overcome them.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve had a few sherries tonight. I\u2019m playing Suzanne on the headphones, and I remember CH and I remember Zina. And I remember the younger me too, who I love. I love all three of us, in fact.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n You know those old films where writers sit at typewriters, white, open-collared shirt and dark braces, drenched in sweat and frustration? A hundred bits of screwed up paper on the floor around them. Then, the latest attempt joins it in a flash of angry frustration\u2026 well, that is this moment for me.<\/p>\n Only here, the latest screwed up piece of paper is retrieved in a fit of existential nihilism and a need to get this finished. Somehow, anyhow.<\/p>\n There are missing celebrities. Many missing incidents. The pain isn\u2019t painful enough. Some serious weirdness left out. The lows aren\u2019t low enough and the highs aren\u2019t high enough. Some of the most extreme, jaw-dropping drama is redacted. The level of overwhelm is reduced \u2014 and therefore betrayed \u2014 in an attempt to make some kind of readable form out of the actual dark swirling razor blade chaos.<\/p>\n So, that\u2019s one version of the 100 remixes I\u2019ve concocted in trying to tell this story. But it was always going to be like that \u2014 I\u2019ve resigned myself to that inevitability now. The whole story would take a book, and I\u2019m not sure I have the strength for that.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Where were we? Oh yes, Sydenham Hill station. The thing I\u2019m hanging all this on.<\/p>\n Shall we go back there? To a beautifully looked-after platform on a relatively genteel part of the train line. Eventually, no matter how glued to the platform your backbone is, you have to haul yourself onto the train and get to the next station. As with British Rail, as with life.<\/p>\n Dominated by the above thoughts, feelings, and memories. I\u2019ve only ever got off at Sydenham Hill one other time. When I was writing a book about the previously mentioned anarchist punk band Crass, I interviewed band members Phil Free and Joy De Vivre in their house near the station on the other side of the tracks.<\/p>\n It was a pleasant evening with two lovely people and three lovely bottles of wine. Standing on the platform waiting for the train back to Petts Wood, and buoyed by the wine, I momentarily felt like it was a past I\u2019d left behind. Ironic really, as Phil & Joy must have been going through similar emotions about Crass that night \u2014 another story without a happy ending.<\/p>\n Many years later, I meet up with my oldest friend from primary school. He commuted to school on this line and tells me that in the Penge East-Sydenham Hill tunnel was a war zone.<\/p>\n There would be light bulb wars with pupils from a rival school on the train, passing by in the opposite direction in the darkness. Private \/ public education wars. Class wars, if you will. Light bulbs would be removed from the train carriage ceiling and thrown at the enemy through the open windows of both trains as they passed. South London, la-la-la.<\/p>\n The scope for metaphor is so wide as to be overwhelming, so I won\u2019t even try.<\/p>\n West Dulwich next, and the sun is finally coming out.<\/p>\n An archive of all the articles in this series can be found here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n– Pete Shelley, Buzzcocks<\/em><\/p>\n* * *<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\n![\"george](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/george-berger-mindfulness-300x300.jpg\")
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