My Kingfisher

I have prepared a statement. Listen to me. Absorb my words and understand me when I say I remain a danger beyond pharmaceutical or surgical cure. I know it and your conscience needs to know it, too.

I am sick of people describing depression as black dogs, worms, wolves at the door, or some sort of atmospheric dampness. That sounds like self-contained sadness to me. Kick that dog, feed that wolf, buy a bloody brolly! In short, if your depression is so mundane and predictable, get it sorted.

My depression is not a dip, neither puddle not pothole, but a tack, a sharp and devastating nail protruding from life’s main carriageway. To give it body, my depression is a kingfisher; brilliant, rare, devastating, foul-tasting, unmistakeable, obvious to all around but elusive, judged by appearance, fragile, territorial.

And me. I am my own kingfisher’s lowly stickleback, swimming warily in life’s pool, waiting to be singled out, stabbed, beaten to death and devoured by this fantastic jewel. I recognise its glittering approach, but I can’t react in time.

You probably think that is a ridiculous analogy, but it’s the best I can do to describe an acute mental condition. Don’t be sceptical. My kingfisher has rumbled you.

Listen. For nine days out of ten, I am fine. For nine hours out of ten, I am fine. But for a few minutes in that one stained hour, my sparkling bird descends, takes control and batters my brain on a rock.

It is this kingfisher time that explains my fame. You know my name, and you think you know me, but my neighbours knew the other man. Not Halcyon’s puppet, but the laidback, thoughtful chap, always happy to share a cigarette over the garden fence. I was the good neighbour, the one who kept his lawn tidy enough, but not so neat as to show them up.

But their perceptions warp in the light of publicity. You know what it’s like. The local TV news turns up and says, “Mark Bolt’s neighbour, Jamie Lawrence, knew the man. How much did you suspect him?” “Not at all! He just seemed like a normal bloke.” And then they start to question their own judgement.

We like our exploding stars to be immediate, and born of normality, shot from the kingfisher’s burrow, not from incipient, untreated madness or inbred privilege.

That’s the trouble with description. Words are discrete, finite chunks of mumbled meaning, sprinkled pepper dusting a kitchen worktop. You could grind more than a thousand peppercorns and still not change from white to black, from suggestion to meaning and from there to the shared dimension of mutual understanding, of truth. I have done my best to describe what it feels like: intense, public and fleeting, but oh, so destructive.

Perhaps you will never comprehend my kingfisher any more than I can when I am squirming in its grip. But that, my dear Board, is why despite my apparent sanity and lucidity, I shall not be applying for parole.