One of his boyfriends broke his heart while he was living with us and he disappeared into his bed for about a week, unable to face the world. As it was his birthday, Mum and I sorted him out a cake with a candle to cheer him up, taking it in to his bedroom. He emerged from under the sheets to blow the candle out.
‘So,’ Mum said. ‘Make a wish.’
‘I wish I was dead,’ he shrieked, whipping the sheets back over his head.
I remember going into his bedroom once and pulling his bedclothes off to wake him up, just as he let out a gigantic fart. Cool!
Mum continued to take me on tour with her from time to time. We went to Germany for six months with a band called Rausch when I was about six. They were a very dark bunch, surrounded by lots of drugs, which Mum didn’t like. She was always lecturing me about not doing drugs, especially cocaine, which she said made people sadistic and cold and evil. It wasn’t a particularly happy time for Mum but I enjoyed myself. I always enjoyed myself. We were in Berlin just before the Wall came down and the whole world changed in one night. Mum had been predicting it would happen, having seen it in a vision. I remember watching it coming down on the news and knowing it was important because everyone was talking about it and celebrating, but I didn’t really understand why. What was a Communist?
One of the band members in Germany really took to me and would laugh every time he saw me, calling me ‘Charlie’.
‘Why are you calling him Charlie?’ Mum wanted to know. ‘His name’s Pete.’
‘Because he is like Charlie Chaplin.’
He wasn’t the last person to say that and I liked the fact that I could make people laugh by clowning around. It always felt good to be the centre of attention, particularly if it was happy attention. All the world loves a clown.
I was always a bit of a daydreamer, drifting off into a world of my own whenever there wasn’t anything going on that was interesting enough to hold my attention. I didn’t see a problem with it, still don’t. I think it’s good to be able to keep yourself entertained inside your head, but sometimes it can get you into trouble – in school classrooms, for instance, or when you are meant to be doing something other people think is important.
I was supposed to get the bus home from school so Mum could meet me off it at the other end. One day I simply forgot to get on, because I was so distracted with my own thoughts and with watching whatever was going on in the street around me. When all the other kids poured out and trotted off to meet their waiting mothers, Mum realized with a sinking heart that I wasn’t among them and immediately freaked out, convincing herself I’d been abducted by a paedophile ring (a common fear among mothers of temporarily missing children, I guess). She ran to find a friend of hers, a disabled woman who was able to drive, and begged her to give her a lift up to the school to search for me. The poor flustered woman rushed out in her wheelchair and they piled into the car together.
Mum was trying to keep calm and allow her friend the time she needed to get going, but pictures of all the things that could have happened to me were crowding into her brain, making her a bit frantic. By the time they were on the road she had managed to panic her friend so much that she crashed the car, smashing the windscreen and dissolving into tears at her failure to complete the mission to rescue gallant Little Pete from the ‘evil paedos’. At that point Mum abandoned all pretence at being patient, leapt out and legged it the rest of the way on her own, leaving her friend shaking and crying in the car. When she found me happily wandering around the school playground humming to myself, staring up at the sky, she was not pleased. I think she might even have given me a bit of a swipe around the back of the legs to try to wake me up a bit.
Although I didn’t know anything about it at the time, the stress of touring and feeling guilty about leaving me, plus all the worry about money, was getting Mum down, and around this time she had a nervous breakdown. She became convinced she’d met the Devil and she had some sort of religious conversion back to the Catholic Church that she’d been brought up in. As far as I was concerned we had just made a whole new set of nice friends down at the local church.
A couple of religious Irish women then frightened her by accusing her of condemning me to hell by not getting me baptized. She was due to go on tour in Japan with an Indie rock band called the Woodentops the next day and she was terrified something would happen to me while she was away and I would go straight to hell and damnation before she had time to do anything about saving me. Unable to get a priest to come out in the middle of the night to perform the ceremony, she baptized me herself while I was asleep. I wasn’t aware of what she was doing but while she was splashing around my bedroom with some holy water she’d mixed up herself, I had a dream in which I saw a huge golden angel.
‘From now on you have to take my name,’ the angel told me. ‘My name is Michael.’
It was a really cool dream, and I told Mum about it before she set off for the plane the next morning, leaving me in the care of Poofy-Cousin-Marcus. On the way to the airport she stopped off at the church to find someone to tell her who the angel Michael was.
‘That would be the Archangel Michael,’ a man told her. ‘He’s the one who led the fight against the Devil in the beginning of time.’
Since she was still convinced she had been having some personal trouble with the Devil, this put her mind at rest a bit, although she was still feeling bad about leaving me so much. I can still remember that dream vividly, even today when so many other memories have vanished, and for ages afterwards I would draw pictures of the Angel Michael, although I started to add wings to make him conform a little more to stereotype. Although he didn’t have any wings in the dream, he was surrounded by a heavenly golden light, which was how I knew for sure that he was an angel. From then on I took Michael as my middle name. Later a priest insisted on baptizing me again himself, not willing to accept Mum’s DIY version as the real thing, but it wasn’t as good as when Mum did it, and I didn’t get to dream of any angels that time.
I’ve always been good at drawing. It’s just something I’m able to do. When I was about two I drew a picture called ‘The Shouting Man’, a bit like a primitive version of ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch. It was an oval shape with a vortex for where the mouth should be, quite scary and angry-looking, a bit like a baby having a wailing tantrum, which was something I never did myself. Maybe I was holding the anger in, even at that age, and the picture was the only way for it to escape. Now I am ‘the shouting man’ for real, letting everything out all the time, unable to bottle anything up inside for long, so maybe I was having premonitions even then of what was to come. Maybe there was already something taking root inside my head, a troublesome thought behind the façade of the cheerful, amiable little boy. If there was I have no memory of it.
When I had difficulty attracting Mum’s attention to what I was saying because she was so preoccupied with her worries, I used to draw the shouting man and wave the picture in front of her, the words ‘Mum! Mum!’ coming out of his mouth in a bubble, like in the comics I read.
Mum showed the picture to a friend once.
‘You should be ashamed,’ the friend told her. ‘What kind of a terrible mother are you? Imagine having a kid who has to draw a picture just to get your attention.’
I didn’t want to make her feel guilty; I just wanted to be noticed. I thought she was a great mum – she always called me her little ‘Peter Bumpkin’. I just wanted to talk to her and tell her about all the stuff that was going on in my head. But all kids do that, don’t they? They burble on in a constant stream of consciousness while the adults around them zone out and give the odd grunt