Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) Read Online Free PDF Page B

stairs and asking the babysitter if I could stay with her until my parents came back. I was crying.
    She was kind. She let me sit with her. I liked her a lot. She smelt of vanilla and wore baggy t-shirts. She was called Jenny. Jenny the Babysitter Who Lived Up the Street. A decade or so later she would have transformed into Jenny Saville, the Britart star famed for her large-scale painted depictions of naked women.

    ‘Do you think they’ll be home soon?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Jenny, patiently. ‘Of course they will. They’re only a mile away. That’s not very far, you know?’
    I knew.
    But I also knew they could have got mugged or killed or eaten by dogs. They weren’t, of course. Very few Newark-on-Trent residents ended their Saturday night being eaten by dogs. They came home. But all my childhood, over and over again, I carried on this way. Always inadvertently teaching myself how to be anxious. In a world where possibility is endless, the possibilities for pain and loss and permanent separation are also endless. So fear breeds imagination, and vice versa, on and on and on, until there is nothing left to do except go mad.
    Then something else. A bit less ordinary, but still in the ballpark. I was thirteen. Me and a friend went over to some girls in our year on the school field. Sat down. One of the girls – one I fancied more than anything – looked at me and then made a disgusted face to her friends. Then she spoke words that I would remember twenty-six years later when I came to write them down in a book. She said: ‘Ugh. I don’t want that sitting next to me. Withhis spider legs on his face.’ She went on to explain, as the ground kept refusing to swallow me up, what she meant. ‘The hair growing out of his moles. It looks like spiders.’
    At about five that afternoon I went into the bathroom at home and used my dad’s razor to shave the hairs off my moles. I looked at my face and hated it. I looked at the two most prominent moles on my face.
    I picked up my toothbrush and pressed it into my left cheek, right over my largest mole. I clenched my eyes shut and rubbed hard. I brushed and brushed, until there was blood dripping into the sink, until my face was throbbing with heat and pain from the friction.
    My mum came in that day and saw me bleeding.
    ‘Matthew, what on earth has happened to your face?’
    I held a tissue over the fresh, bleeding scar and mumbled the truth.
    That night I couldn’t sleep. My left cheek throbbed beneath a giant plaster, but that wasn’t the reason. I was thinking of school, of explaining away the plaster. I was thinking of that other universe where I was dead. And where the girl would hear I was dead and the guiltwould make her cry. A suicidal thought, I suppose. But a comforting one.
    My childhood went by. I remained anxious. I felt like an outsider, with my left-wing, middle-class parents in a right-wing, working-class town. At sixteen, I got arrested for shoplifting (hair gel, Crunchie bar) and spent an afternoon in a police cell, but that was a symptom of teen idiocy and wanting to fit in, not depression.
    I skateboarded badly, got eclectic grades, cultivated asymmetric hair, carried my virginity around like a medieval curse. Normal stuff.
    I didn’t totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated around people, and became what they wanted me to be. But paradoxically, I felt an intensity inside me all the time. I didn’t know what it was, but it kept building, like water behind a dam. Later, when I was properly depressed and anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity. A kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard enough to let your self be free, your self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown all those failed half-versions of you.

A visit
    PAUL, MY OLD shoplifting partner in crime, was in my parents’ living room. I hadn’t seen him in a few years, since school. To me, it might as well have been millennia. He was