That motherfucker. He smashed my brain. I’d moved to a flat in Tottenham with other students, a place we could watch our thoughts, police each other and go limp together. I would wake at five and make my packed lunch and drive to the freezing outdoor pool in Hampstead where I’d dive in and swim thirty lengths. At school by six, within a term the third years had given me the keys to open up the building, realising quickly they could get away with a lie-in. School began at seven with meditation, yoga, face exercises, eye exercises followed by the horseshoe of chairs around him. So far so good, right? Sounds healthy, all this cold water and stretching, that’s the trouble with cults, there’s often a grain of sense. He, Mr Svengali, wasn’t wrong in thinking all those things helped a healthy mind, and nor that we are motivated by shame, that the psyche will do what it can to move away from pain and towards pleasure, that we’ve mostly been conditioned to hide. Breaking someone down is easy. Anyone can do that. It’s the holding and putting back together with care that’s the hard bit, the bit that matters. It’s what you do with the pieces when they’re all over the classroom floor. You don’t kick them and laugh unless you want to cause a shattering. In the horseshoe of shame confessions, he encouraged us to say what we thought of each other and ourselves, the more abusive the better. He told us to bring in baby photos so that he could rip into our earliest parts. He understood absolutely the power of language and used words to cut us open. He said, Show me your soft underbelly, and then took out a knife. I won’t use the words here. He doesn’t deserve it. And if we’d gone out for the weekend into normal life, seen people not of the school, he’d make us admit it like a souring, a transgression that had set us back. We were ridiculed and shamed and fined and made to feel that only he could save us. And the acting bit? Yes, that happened, sort of, not much, we put on Russian plays, he told us relentlessly that we were lying. Day after day for a year, a dismantling in north London while my old life on the farm, the commune, carried on without me. Yesterday, when I finished the piece and pressed publish and was completely wrong-footed by the torrent, I found beneath my chair an old rusty nail, small, sharp and flat-headed. It was as if it had fallen out of me, the small, sharp poison that was him.
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