Psycho

Intensity, Solitude, X

Hello, I’m Polly Clark, novelist and TS Eliot Prize–shortlisted poet. Monday Night Reads brings thoughtful writing direct to your inbox every Monday at 7pm. Recent highlights include my interview with Graham Linehan and my essay The World Does Not Negotiate about being frozen in on my boat.

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Dear Reader,

This week I was approaching my record for not seeing another person in the flesh. Not even myself: brushing my teeth, I didn’t wear my glasses, and my bathroom mirror is (of course) at a funny angle thanks to my lack of straight wall space, making it easy to avoid my own reflection. Below decks I am completely unobserved. A quirk of positioning, along with the cute curtains I inherited from the previous owner (the harbour master), patterned with little lighthouses and drawn to hide the temporary insulating bubble wrap from my view, make it virtually impossible to know whether I am aboard or not. This appears to be how I like it. When walking to the shower block and encountering people on the way, I have been known to hold my hand up and cry, ‘Invisible to the human eye!’ as I scuttle past.

Actually, this last thing is pontoon etiquette. Anyone emerging from the shower block in flip flops, towel in hand, hair dripping, does not want to chat. We all flirt with invisibility at such moments; no one wants to acknowledge having been seen by their neighbours semi-naked. If we could clamp our headphones to our heads without getting them soggy, we absolutely would. In this way we remain the child who hides behind their hand in a game of hide-and-seek, believing this makes them invisible. Boaties are well practised at this: they’ve taught me that a cohesive community is built on turning a strategic blind eye. The most popular person will always be the one who cheerfully forgets everything anyone said, never holds you to anything, and has mastered the imperceptible nod and a kind of functional blindness.

You get the picture. It’s a hibernation that is both essential and complicated to navigate. Being alone for long periods is a kind of extreme sport and it appears I may excel at it.

The first thing I notice when I sink into the soft bed in my cabin after a day of non-fleshly encounters is my nervous system has quietened. Anxiety feels as if each blood cell were an individual porcupine in a state of alarm, their spines raised and scraping through my veins and the ventricles of my heart. When they settle, so do I.

Another unexpected find is that time alone is so populated. Dantès, in The Count of Monte Cristo (referred to in last week’s post), has escaped and is out settling scores across the Mediterranean. Several interesting people followed me on X after that post; one of them, Darrel Bristow-Bovey, has written a book about Shackleton and his own relationship with his father. Intrigued, I downloaded the audiobook and listened to it on my walk, displacing my usual loop of favourite songs.

Then, in a break from writing, my feed pinged with Andrew Gold’s interview with ‘Posh Pete’, real name Pieter Tritton, a former drug lord and supposed psychopath, and I was pinned to my chair for an hour and a half. Tritton’s oddball charm, his gentle manner, his unassuming widget-guy vibe, held me transfixed. He is so familiar. As a type.

Suddenly I am spirited back to a hundred, a thousand conversations — arguments — with people like this. The porcupines in my veins flick their spines. I remember trying to access something behind just such a façade, dashing pretty life-years against that icy wall, eternally fighting a person’s weird calm and their unnerving tolerance for another’s distress.

You might say it’s lucky for me that I haven’t met him in person. But actually, it may be lucky for him that he hasn’t met me. It seems I am a person who drives psychopaths mad. They don’t have to be drug lords; people on this spectrum are everywhere. If you were to ask those I’ve known, I’m confident they would agree: I put them through their paces. I emoted and probed and empathised and bonded until their walls broke and their howling voids erupted, Exorcist-style. I didn’t mean to. But I did.

Like Posh Pete, gently recalling that cutting off a debtor’s finger and sending it to their family was really a last resort, once all other options had been exhausted, the nicer ones tried to warn me in their way. Stop pushing me. Stop trying to connect with me. Mostly I ignored those warnings, or failed to understand them, still hiding behind my hands like the kid playing hide and seek. When the consequences rained down, I wrote about them instead, because that is what I do to understand the incomprehensible.

Andrew Gold, like many of us, is fascinated by psychopaths. His soft-ball approach in this interview did get Posh Pete to reveal himself briefly in the hour-and-a-half conversation. For just one moment the ex drug lord grew animated, describing a girl he had met at a wild party in an Ecuadorian prison. His large, pale eyes widened behind his nondescript glasses; he almost bounced in his chair, his hands waving as he gasped, twice, “She was the image of Angelina Jolie. Angelina Jolie! So much sex!”He looked at Gold gleefully, with the assumption that his interviewer would be impressed.

A glimpse of emptiness. A crack in the veneer that showed not the vulnerability we keep hoping exists in such people, but something colder: that other people are objects to him. I recoiled, far away, behind my screen.

But I noted the pull too, from the same safe distance. Such emptiness has a gravity. It seems to issue a challenge: People are not real. Prove me wrong. It is probably wise to resist that gauntlet, because once engaged, the battle is existential. It teaches a false lesson — that love is attrition, a fight to be seen, to be heard.

The interview stayed with me, not because it was unusual, but because it clarified something I already knew. I am drawn to intensity, even when it is dangerous, because it is a hotline to a kind of truth without consolation. Solitude is one way of protecting myself from its costs, and it is also where my understanding is processed and refined. But some connection to the world is necessary, not to dilute solitude, but to keep it human: a conduit that allows intensity to remain a form of knowledge, rather than curdling into anxiety. A long time ago, letters fulfilled that function. Then emails. Now, the main option is social media.

As demonstrated by the Bristol-Bovey book and Posh Pete, what comes my way through my very limited participation in social media may be unexpected but is often valuable. Social media lacks the depth of the old methods, but can bring its own brand of comfort. In particular, X and I have history. The platform, and the anonymity it offered, saved me when the gender conflict swallowed my old life. It became a space where I could actually speak. X tolerates, even encourages, ugliness, disagreement, friction. It is noisy with the full range of disobedient humanity.

Learning this week about the UK government’s proposal to ban X, I felt a familiar disquiet. Rather than projecting too far ahead into what might be lost, I did what I do when the porcupines stir: I turned to something practical. I busied myself with housework. I changed a bulb. In doing so, I blew all my electricity and was plunged into freezing darkness, save for the 12V LED lights.

Fuses: complicated

This is the peculiar beauty of a boat. It runs on two systems, 12V and 24V. Usually your lights, loo, and sometimes the fridge are powered by the 12V battery, so that when you’re away from shore you can still function. It is a neat, reassuring piece of redundancy. Until it isn’t.

It was very cold. I checked the breakers; they all appeared to be on. This, it turned out, was the limit of my diagnostic ability. The porcupines lifted their spines, began to face off against one another.

I messaged Tom, a dock master, and tried not to sound too worried.

Soon after, Tom knocked on the side of the boat and I was so glad to see him that I forgot, briefly, the figure I presented. By a process of elimination we worked out that the extension cable was at fault. I hadn’t lost power so much as misread it; I’d blown a breaker and missed it. He reset it, told me to replace the cable, and wished me goodnight. The heating came back on and soon I was warm again.

Only afterwards did I feel the faint embarrassment of having been physically seen — my hair no doubt awry, in my cold cave, mid-failure. But it passed quickly. Tom had not noticed my lack of superficial curation; he had simply solved the problem and gone. Cosy once more, I poured myself a drink and opened The Count of Monte Cristo. The lamp stayed on. The story continued.

Thank you for reading,

Until next time,

Polly x

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