61. When Crazy Met Crazy

A Memoir in 65 Postcards & The Recovery Diaries

It’s now that the shaman overplays his hand. You’d think cutting the brakes on my car and locking me out of my house would have done it. Or throwing a party while I was away called Going Ape that he’d advertised with fliers all over the local town. Or his misogyny. Or megalomania but don’t forget context; I’d come out of India, Israel, commune, cult, and Centro Maya was just another chapter in an already overloaded book. And he’d got inside my head because even the most poundshop shaman knows enough tricks to make it look like they know a lot. The bulbs are flashing again in the kitchen as I write this, that little boy from Kent, annoying as the bluebottle circling my head; I’d better get on with it. After I’d climbed in through the bathroom window and left the car nose-first in a fence I met the shaman in the kitchen. He said, You have to take the stone circle down, and that was when I knew. The realisation that he’d hit my edge, the boundary across which I would not go was sudden and disappointing. I remember thinking, Oh. You’re an idiot. This is the moment when crazy met crazy. The bird of paradise appeared wearing a magician’s hat, tall and felt and covered in stars, the rest of him naked but for my dressing gown which flapped open. He broke into the shaman’s temple, stole a bow and arrow from the altar and snapped it over his knee. The shaman was incandescent. Rage made him drop all pretence. He took chase. They ran about the garden. The shaman called his henchmen. The bird locked himself in the car. The shaman sat exhausted and powerless on the stone steps and said my family and home would be cursed for a thousand years. The sink in the downstairs cloakroom spontaneously fell off the wall. The bird stayed in the car. I walked the shaman down the drive to the main road. I told him he was not welcome. I said he could never come back. The last I saw of him was on that road, standing alone, small and defeated. He wrote to me once, years later, a badly worded email with grammatical errors saying it was about time he thanked me for his time at the farm. Not actually thanking me, mind, just saying he probably should. He’s still out there, buzzing around. He can thank me now if the years since have brought him an ounce of the wisdom he lacked. Meanwhile the bird of paradise with the wings grown ragged got to stay in his stead, and with him the needles and parties.