unleash hell

David Kerr’s Story

Sometimes in the midst of all our apparent normality, life and circumstance take a turn for which no human being could expect to be prepared.
The world hurtles happily through space and time, its surface popping insanely with boundless human travesties. In any given moment, thousands of instant catastrophes are happening all over the world, even one of which would be too much to contemplate. In the time it took to write those few lines, lives have been shattered, snatched and broken, trashed and in those few seconds, everything is gone. The second hand on the wall clock moves one inch and everything you believe in, all your education and experience, all your history of love and life, means nothing. As the California license plate says,
Shit Happens.

Before it happened, I was David Kerr. Now I’m writing at the request of Mike Parker, founder of the Basildon self-help depression group. I cannot attend the group at present, I'm in an “Intensive Care Mental Ward” I do not feel, as it happens, intensely cared for in here. The unit is new, opened last week by the Chairwoman of Basildon Council. You can smell the polish and the OBEs. It is pristine, with Malibu style wooden floors, a state of the art Nurses Station, seemingly modelled on the gas-chamber observation room in San Quentin, a triple door entry system. It looks the part, like a film set. The truck arrived last week and spewed out the crew. A sorry bunch of half-life casualties. They are the staff. The patients seem more used to the displacement ritual. Two million pounds worth of instant decay, National Health Monopoly money scattered in a festival of ill-guided be-seen self-indulgence. I’m writing a four pager for Mike’s new book on depression self-help. Mike knows me, he knows I can write a thousand pages, but he keeps saying only four. I offer him 18 pages , he laughs and walks away. Out through the triple entry door system. Jesus wept, there’s no picture of the Queen, what hope is there for us? Mike says he doesn’t want a ream of change-the world rantings. He wants to know David Kerr. So do I.

I had, in some respects, a brilliant childhood. The streets of Cumbernauld, Glasgow, Scotland, tough mean and fun, with real adventures coloured with daydreams, my father’s scrapyard and dogs, anti-picturesque and musical, the central feel of family laughter, togetherness and warmth of optimistic poverty and the pop of air-rifles among the sad and derelict cars, pellets and shouts defining territory. We made our lives work, with the sheer energy of being, and rough and clannish but unshakeable bonds. It was alright to be us, it was more than alright. We never really knew if there ever was a big pike in the fishpond, the fabled lone symbolic predator feared by perch and little boys alike, but we waited endlessly for that unmistakeable ferocity of bite and the imagined glamour of being the one that landed the thrashing monster. Boys were born to kill giants, to take on the monster in the search for recognition and even adulation. The real monster waited.

A town dubbed as number two in the publication “The fiftiest crappy towns in the UK” where badgers were either too ashamed or too afraid to show up at night, according to the homespun humour which is the built-in self help therapy of lifestyles that otherwise might me labelled as inadequate. Millionaire pop-singers echoing in the ice-rinks and pubs “All you need is love” and our mothers scour Woolworths for a few pennies off, and live under the spiky umbrella of debt-collectors and the tally man. Teenagers with vacant faces in “The Worst Town Centre in Britain” while myself and comrades climb forty feet up a tree in search of a kestrel egg surging with forbidden anticipation, the seduction and rape of nature. The obscure prize nestling innocent and virgin, and only a hero can claim such a prize. And the legend that a swan’s wing can break a man’s arm proved true by one mate. It always seems that these things happen to a certain type of friend and never us, but it is the whole gang of us that become stranded on a cliff-top suddenly reminded that we are dependent still on some aspects of the adult world, not as safe as we thought. Maybe after all, adults know some stuff and can protect us. When shit happens. So, on a day when maybe thoughts were wandering to the mysteries of what girls have and boys don’t, there’s a sudden switch of realities when a raid on a starling’s nest triggers an attack by ferocious wasps who sting my ears into ugly swollen flaps and somebody, naturally, says “serves you right.” The dawning realisation that despite the endless attractive qualities of Mother Nature, she sometimes bites back, and hard. At about the same time, the blackest of comedic moments when a wasp invades farmboy’s yokelly overalls as he makes clumsy progress with an early female prospect who already is realising that a farm-working huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ adolescent lump somehow lacks the finesse and romance she craves.
I flee the scene, a hysterically bad slapstick figure. She must have laughed herself sick.

The move from Primary School to Secondary School turns a shy awkard achiever quickly into a Punk, I go quickly to the nearest and easiest peer group bandwagon, learning the best ways to flout the worst words in the language, the little swot overnight becomes a monosyllabic oaf-urchin, safer from the bullies now, the sensitivity less obvious, the doubts hidden in copied bravado, and under pressure, learning to live the lie. The dangerous conflict of high ego and low self-esteem begins to grow. Am little big man, or a big little man. I operate from defence, not aggression, years must pass before that simple safe philosophy is dashed forever.
It is Wilma who makes some attempt to make a man of me. We do the Thing. There is no lapel badge to flout to say “I did the Thing” We go further than the Thing and embrace Love, and clutch at it gladly, it means we are normal, and even a punk rebel has emotions of a sort. Her father offers me a job as a flat roofer, and I learn quickly to identify with the Sex Pistols happy benevolent outlook that “I was made a Moron, and have “No Future.” Their success endorses my gravitation to failure. The cult of Money must be financed by a cult of poverty and fed my acceptance of mediocrity. We suck on ciggies and feel comfortably wordly and American when we pull the tab on a can of cola.
It is Wilma too that opens the door to depression. It seems like a small door but there’s many rooms in that mansion, I am to discover. Wilma decides to share herself around. The head-spinning feel of first love and romance becomes a dirt-cheap parody as the tale-tellers feed me with skin-crawling details. The first raindrops of sad disillusion herald the arrival of the black cloud. The wasps move from my ears and sting deep inside me. They breed on the fluids of a sickening stomach. I am a blob of raped innocence, the colour of life turns to foggy mush, I buy wholesale into the pain and I have no defences as my Wilma, irreplaceable, satiates herself, gorging on garbage , feeding at the trough of cheap sensation. She takes more, she settles for less, and I have nothing.
The life-force and inspiration drain from my consciousness, and I taste the bitterness of deception, the hollowness if the Big Con, at a time when mindless promiscuity was in its infancy, at a time when some of us still clutched at the endless confetti of love songs and lived our emotions second-hand through the heroic hymn tunes of Phil Collins. High and brilliant feelings reduced to the appalling squalor of a Coronation Street bang behind the Rover’s Return. I taste the huge capacity of the Human to hurt others, I vomit the nauseating blood of betrayal, not realising, that just around the corner, the Beast waits. Shit is going to happen, and it is going to be bigtime.

Like a lamb to another slaughter, I begin the rounds of Doctors and Psychiatrists, again buying wholesale into yet another illusory world, actually still a believer. Here come the anti-depressants, they look promising and somehow I feel like a Graduate of the School of Life. I look at the pills, my new and trusted friends, they are pretty those little foetuses of process, and somehow compliment the neatness of the lady in Boots. Was she betrayed too? Does she know? Like an alcoholic tasting that first brimming beer, I am off and running, albeit backwards, albeit chaotic, albeit innocent, I am a consumer in the burgeoning billion-dollar industry of hope measured in milligrams and have not a whisper of an idea that one day I’ll begetting stronger doses of the Happy Elixir, through a needle, in the arse, held down by a gang of moronic mental health workers. No mention of this on the list of side effects. In some distant leather-clad office, the managing-director of some silky sweet pharmacological
Corporation can confidently order another Aston Martin. A new punter has entered the game, and sadly, it seems to be me. The quack says six months, they seem to have some weird affinity to that time frame, since they forget you in six minutes. All that pain and heartbreak, and instead of the kindness of angels I have only a little green prescription slip as a memento of the lost battle with love.
Six months. Too long to think about when the Suicide virus is already well installed in the system. I have a whole packet, a real-live gun.

Instead, the Geographic cure. London calling, and the prosperous South-East, depression neatly packed into a hold-all wrapped in some new hope. First stop is Ealing YMCA. Somewhere along the line I had shifted my suicide plans to somewhere in my forties, so now I considered my life half-done. I meet and fall in love with a head of staff at the Y, and we talk marriage. Her name is Jill Saward. The Beast is ready, the second hand on the clock sweeps slowly towards his Coming. He comes as suddenly as an axe wielded from behind, but with less mercy, he comes as totally as a horrendous nuclear blast, but with less reason. On March 6th, 1986, what happened is described by the Daily Telegraph as “One of the most notorious sex crimes in history” At the time of writing it is 21 years and seven days ago. It might as well be seven minutes.
In an Ealing Vicarage Jill Saward meets the Beast full-on. It comes in the form of three men, two high on drink and drugs who drag Jill, her father, and I into the study and after crushing the skulls of the men with cricket bats and pouring salts into the wounds rape my fiancée, my Jill, my love, over and over in the most vicious and appalling style. We are made to watch, and listen to the stream of abusive drunken filth. Heaven caves in and crashes through the earth taking all life with it. The senses, physical and mental, cannot take it in, it’s too bloody
big. A personal reverberating Armageddon knifed into the consciousness and twisted with hideous maniac glee, all the puss and filth of human garbage flooding every cell of the body, all the sins of sick and soulless men stamped behind our eyes for ever, and our mentality, the skin of life, so bloody thin, ripped from our skeletons and leaving only vacant staring terrified eyes and a mashed and jelloid brain which cries “No More!” There is a deafening silence of numbed consciousness, but no, it does not take refuge in legendary style in the subconscious, it is raw and naked and it rages. It sobs and shrieks and vomits, and if and its here forever. For some of us, the idea that time heals is an appalling sick joke. And brace yourself, victims, THEY are coming. The forgivers and forgetters, the Judge, the Jury. Unable to even imagine the horror of the victims, they take the next best course and sympathise with the perpetrators. See my book, currently under construction. See Jill’s book too, she somehow through some unseen grace, managed better than I.
The crime finished out relationship, the vicar forgave the three “men” a week later on TV. Jill forgave too, and later later married and had children. Somehow the second hand of the clock comes out of freezing and begins to trick me into depression, rage, paranoia, a healthy young man except for a dread of anything sexual and every conceivable form of mental illness writhing under the usual polysyllabic conglomerate Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
I will take nothing from Jill’s courage and strength by saying I was a victim too. Help offered to me……none. I become a celebrity of sorts at work, the cheap innuendos and sexual remarks come from every directions, people love to cash in on an easy target in order to boost up their vision of their own safe and ordered lives. Nobody wants a victim around, it makes them aware of their own vulnerability when the Beast is to close to home. Thank heaven it wasn’t me, say the rubberneckers. That bloke’s been through hell, let’s finish the job. He must have asked for it.
My first brush with Society, the System, the hypocrisy and neglect, the indifference and a ridiculous posturing legal system that gowns and wigs itself away from the real nature of crime. It tells us we are less than It. Queen’s council? Go council the Queen.
The punk graduates. Guns now, car and lorry theft, credit card fraud. The baby is rattling and good. #
Some compensation comes, but is swallowed up by the property crash. A flood of fractured relationships. Seeking emotional compensation with addictive voracious and empty encounters. Inside the child screams for love. A business venture with video rentals leads to meeting my partner Trish, who gives me two sons Jake and Jamie, now 10 and 11. Relationships for me the minefield of them all, the apparent normality infected by old messages in the mind, the slightest emotional difficulties turning quickly into hideous explosive unbalance. Alienation and resentment on hair- triggers. I leave the business and return to the work market.

At a local factory the prize comment, and maybe they drew straws for the honour, was “I’ve heard the rapists buggered you as well.” The milk of human vileness so freely available once again to an easy target. Two accidents, one a blow to the same side of the head fractured by the rapists, and now, inevitably, the whole network of emotion, rage, bitterness, blinding inner loneliness, unravelling me in every direction as every untreated mental wound festers afresh and PDST flashbacks, the hallmark of the Vietnam Veteran, create a ghastly nightmarish mental time-bomb leading be back to the face-flannel superficiality and irrational authority of the mental health system, where diagnosis and ham-fisted treatment are served up fast-food style. Next year’s street-corner drugs ladled out in bucketfuls and Have a Nice Day. An after care treatment with an astonishing resemblance to total abandonment finds me taking on the whole sick fairground of suicide attempts, from the mock-religious overdose to the more glamorous jumping in front of trucks and trains. The journey from hurt to madness is well known, and frighteningly easy. An exorcist-like fight for possession of my soul between mental illness and medication illness. More diagnosis, less care. In the end they go no further than the first page of the file. They don’t like to pry. Drug pushers professionally avoid involvement with their clients. After all, if it comes packed so prettily, it must be harmless in a dreadful sort of way. They have me now. I’m multilabelled, I’m on the computer, I’m Googleable. Just open open up a mental health unit anywhere, sooner or later David Kerr will show up. You only need a dozen David Kerrs and you are in business, the natural flow of money is assured, and through people like me you can claim your right to respect and a good pension. You can drive home happy and fulfilled. Hooray. Here comes the London train. Quick look to the left and right and its hey-ho, a horrendous screech from brakes and commuters alike and leap like a mad frog onto the littered rails. Failed again, hello forced injection.

What saved me? Mike Parker’s self-help depression group. They use a long forgotten medication there, its ancient as dinosaur droppings, and the health service fears and scorns it. Friendship. The real stuff, the 18 carat bond of actual care. There is wellness there. Two quid a meeting and you can stuff yourself on chocolate digestives. Suddenly the world shifts. Maybe, no matter what, despite the flashbacks, the smash-ups of the mental ward and factory premises, the latest admission to these very new and very thick walls, despite it all maybe its ok to be me. Mike thinks we can make it. Maybe even in the process we can shatter the plastic vacant smile of the corporate institution, maybe we can kick over a few money-changing tables in the temple. Maybe out there in the blind and cynical and increasingly self-driven world somebody will finally hear the Scream.