Trinity Blues 2

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At home for a weekend, my parents were not best pleased.  What did I mean I was depressed?  What had I to be depressed about?  I showed my mother my list of forbidden foods. She dismissed it as nonsense. Bananas, yoghurt, cheese - sure most of these foods were good for you.

The next day my mother made a sausage and bean casserole for dinner. Dinner was a mid-day meal in our house.  I asked her if it had broad beans, one of my forbidden foods,  in it. “Of course it doesn't” she snapped.

A short while after dinner, I was sitting on the toilet, when I felt what I can only describe as a flash of heat flow from my body into my head,  This was followed by an intense pain shooting across the top of my skull, as if I had a bass string in my brain that was bring plucked.  I stumbled downstairs.  When my mother saw me her face went white.
“Are you sure there were no broad beans in it?” I asked her, through the pulsating pains.
“No.  There was …  There was cheese.  How could cheese be any harm?”  She looked frightened.
“You'd better get me to the doctor.” I gasped.

On the way to the hospital, I vomited through the open car window, earning a distressed tsk from my mother, but the evacuation brought no end to the pain..

The doctor was no help.  I told him I was having a reaction to medication.  I had the bottle of pills with me. “What are you taking these drugs for?” he asked.

He could offer no treatment other than I should lie down. So that is what I did. All afternoon, every beat of my heart sent a pain searing across my cranium.  Eventually, towards 7pm the intensity began to decrease.  Once it did, it fell away quite quickly.  By 8pm it was gone.  I got up and went into the kitchen.  My parents were sitting at the table. My father turned to me.
“What drugs are you taking?”
“What?” I asked, baffled.
“The doctor said you were taking drugs.” he shouted.  “What drugs are you taking?”
“He was talking about the pills” I said.
“HE SAID DRUGS!”
“Pills ARE drugs” I shouted back. “All pills are drugs! The ones you take for your blood pressure are drugs.  ASPIRIN are drugs!”
I stormed out of the room.

Back in Ranelagh, the weird occurrences continued.  One afternoon I was in the flat, when there was a loud thump, thump, thump on the ceiling.  This was repeated three times. Thinking the old man upstairs might be signalling for help, I went up and knocked on his door.  There was no response.  I kept knocking, all the while calling  “Are you ok?”
Eventually I heard him shout. “Go away!” 
“But why are you knocking?  I called out.
“I'm not knocking.” he said.  “You are!”

Academically, things continued to deteriorate.  I was missing most of my lectures.  I tried to study, but was completely incapable of doing so.

I made a half-hearted attempt to kill myself, swallowing what was left of my months supply of Valium, but it seemed no have no effect, other than to make me even more exhausted and depressed.

Exam time came around. I tried to dredge some knowledge from the recesses of my brain, but to little effect.  For one of them, I signed my name at the top of the answer sheet, was overcome with the futility of it all, and just left.

When the holidays came I went to work in a holiday camp in Morecambe.  The previous summer my one school friend and I had worked there, and I hoped to recreate the feelings I had then.  I had got on well with people. My accent seemed exotic to the mixture of students and seasonal workers who staffed the camp.  Girls liked me. The occasional loutish insult of  “Fick paddy” didn't bother me.

But this time, I was on my own.  Chris had a job now. He was a natural ice breaker, and without him, I found getting to know people more difficult.  My depression continued, and deepened.  When news came that I had failed all of my exams, and my tutor had wrote that I was unsuitable for college and should withdraw, I could not hold myself together.  I walked off the job, took the train to Liverpool, and the boat to Dublin.

When I arrived back home, after a 24-hour journey, my father did not kill the fatted calf.

A month of bitter arguments ensued.  I was always ungrateful. I always wanted more than everyone else in the family. I countered with my own grievances.  The time my mother had deceived me, promising to go half on an expensive toy if I saved up the other half, only to renege when I was close to the target.  The time she bought be a chess set for my birthday, and then decided it was too expensive and took it back, replacing it with a fountain pen.  The time my father had come to the school to talk to a teacher who I thought was picking on me, only to take his side right from the start.

The arguments eventually died away, and in their stead came silences.  If I entered a room, my father left it. My mother threw my meals at me and withdrew to the kitchen sink to smoke

One Sunday, my parents and siblings drove up the country to see some relatives.  I was not invited.  But I had the house to myself.  I was about to take my medication when a thought came to me.  Every time I take these, I am telling myself, “you are depressed”. It was a self fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if I stopped, I would not be depressed?  I went out into the garden with some old newspaper, and a box of matches, and I made a funeral pyre of the pills and the prescription for them.  And, do you know, dear reader?  It worked.  From that very day, I began to feel better.

Postscript.  
About a month after the burning of the pills, I got a job in London. The next year was to prove one of the most consequential of my life.  But that is another story.  Suffice it to say, I saved enough during that year to return to Trinity with money to pay my fees for the year and to keep myself for two terms.  But more importantly, I came back with a coping strategy.  Never be afraid to admit that that you don't know something.  And if someone says something to you that you don't understand, ask them to explain it.  This latter tactic proved particularly useful.  Often times I learned something I didn't know, and as a bonus, earned the gratitude of the man or woman passing on the knowledge.  And sometimes I learnt that my interlocutor was a bullshit artist. Among these bullshit artists was the occasional lecturer.  Four years later I graduated.  At the top of my class.