From our subscribers' submissions: Eleanor Anstruther's A Memoir in 65 Postcards

Read an extended extract below ^ Plus The Rock Bottom Revealed, Part 36 of The Demon Inside David Lynch

In today’s issue:

— ‘My boyfriend and I took off on the motorbike, a Royal Enfield Bullet heavy with luggage, and purring. We headed first to meet his brother – also estranged until now – for a few nights of giant beetles flying into my hair and then north up the Western Ghats. The monsoon chased us’: the opening pages of Eleanor Anstruther’s A Memoir in 65 Postcards & The Recovery Diaries. We’ll soon be publishing her piece on prose style.

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— ‘A bird shat on you and you did not notice. You are sleeping rough for some reason. There is always crusty stuff around your eyes. You are hanging about a bar which plays reggaetón mixes of Paris Hilton songs. You tried to sell your Multipla to the Prado. Your latest hairstyle, you say, alludes to a 1985 Swedish heavy-metal charity single’: Part 36 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com.

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Photo of Eleanor Anstruther by Rosalind Hobley

1

A JOURNEY TO INDIA

When I was eighteen, I met a boy who told me a story of being kidnapped from his mother when he was four years old. He was taken to England by his father, never to see her again. In my mind I saw a room in southern India, gossamer curtains, a broad messy bed of white sheets, a mother sleeping with a child in her arms. I saw a man creep in, he was a pilot so I put him in pilot’s uniform, no jacket. I saw him lift the boy from his mother’s arms, the curtains stirring gently in the breeze, the mother waking hours later, her horror shock of emptiness. The boy and I were in our second year at Manchester University. He’d come over to the house in Withington, I’d opened the door and about two seconds later was going out with him. I remember the night he told me; we were in bed and as his story unfolded I unfolded my limbs from around him. His parents had been on their way to Brazil from Australia when their flight touched down in Karnataka to refuel. They got out to stretch their legs, the loud jungle calling them, and came upon the abandoned house of a colonialist, pidgins making the frightening cacophony of escape as they pushed open the door, holding vines aside. The shock of a man hanging in the hall, his last breath there. This was enough to make them stay, abandon their plans; she was a nurse and one place was as good as another to set up a village hospital. They never reboarded their flight to Rio. The house of the dead colonialist became their home. That was the story he told me. I said, We have to go. It was too obvious. So we dropped out and bought flights to Mysuru, took buses and rickshaws, heading towards Srirangapatna, the village of his birth. We asked and asked and on the final day of searching a tuk-tuk driver said yes, he knew her. I remember feeling petulantly grumpy as we walked the last dusty mile, self-centred as the epic reunion took place – he, knocking on the door, she, opening it. I was hot and tired. It had been all about him. I went for a swim in the river and slipped on stones and got frightened by giant, scuttling crabs. I crossed the unkempt lawn and shook her hand, sat on the wide veranda, gossamer curtains lifting in the breeze. We stayed for months, bought a motorbike and converted it for the long road north. The story of that journey I wrote into my first novel. It sits in a drawer, a great title but not much else to recommend it.

2

HE TOOK THE BIKE

My boyfriend and I took off on the motorbike, a Royal Enfield Bullet heavy with luggage, and purring. We headed first to meet his brother – also estranged until now – for a few nights of giant beetles flying into my hair and then north up the Western Ghats. The monsoon chased us. We’d mistimed our travels and no matter how fast we rode, the rains caught up. We stopped soaked and freezing in tea plantations, couldn’t undo the swollen ropes that tied our soaking gear to the bike, slept in roadside rooms fully clothed, never time to dry off. In Goa we looked for the parties that had already moved north. At the Taj Mahal we sat on marble away from each other. In Delhi we put on helmets and couldn’t see for moths. In Rajasthan we fell in love with green-eyed women and crashed the bike in sand. In Chandigarh we slept in a barn with twenty men, one of whom put his hand down my jeans again and again until I woke my boyfriend up and told him we had to leave. He agreed, but grudgingly; we weren’t friends, he and I. Already we were unhappy. From the night he unfolded the story of his kidnap to the last dusty road to his mother’s house had been a matter of months. We’d left England on an impulse, no plan except to find her. And we were children; we hardly knew ourselves let alone each other. At a chai stop in the foothills of the Himalayas we met an Israeli couple who invited us to stay. They had a Royal Enfield too. It had got us talking. We followed them, two Bullets chugging up the winding narrow roads of the valley towards Manali, the great drop to our right, the apple trees bending in the light, sudden rainbows bowing to drink from the river crashing below. They parked at a cow shed above which were some rooms. We followed them up the wooden steps. He cooked a meal on a camping stove, tomatoes, onions and green peppers. She unfolded their clothes and made the bed. We ate and then they gave us acid and suggested an orgy. I remember thinking, How revolting. My boyfriend also declined. We went to bed listening to them laughing. The next day a friend of theirs arrived, the most beautiful man I’d ever seen; tendrils of dark hair, a soft pink shirt, faded jeans, he sat cross-legged on the floor and passed me a chillum. My boyfriend went out to get food. When he came back, he found us together. I gave him only the most fleeting of goodbyes. He took the bike.

3

MUTE

The Israeli was handsome and unkind. I grew fat on German pastries, he poked my backside and said so. His cool Israeli friends came over and sat about smoking chillums; a complicated series of rituals which I got wrong. How to mix the charas and tobacco in your palm, how to pack it and wrap your special ragged cloth about the base, the boom shanker throw of a prayer and touch to the forehead, how to light it, get it burning without dying, breath in without throwing a whitey, and for god’s sake don’t pass it to the left. I pretended to know everything while wishing I spoke Hebrew. I think I thought I was happy. I’d cut ties from England, taken off on my own, taken up with a man who’d done military service, who’d stripped out of his uniform and grown his beautiful hair; I felt grown up. We took LSD and walked amongst the apple trees. He taught me how to cook shakshuka. When he went out, I sat in the window and wrote my diary, smoked spliffs and listened to Edie Brickell. The cows beneath our rooms rang their bells at night. We spent three months in the mountains of Manali and then the seasons changed and we took the bus to Goa. He rented a house in Arambol. A mosquito net over our bed caught scorpions which he killed with a stick. Pigs chased us through bamboo for a feed on our morning faeces. Water was pumped from the village well and carried in buckets, and his friends, more of them, gathered on our porch. Circles of handsome women and confident men, they moved effortlessly, sat carelessly, knew the rules; not tourists but travellers, they made that distinction in every sweeping statement about Indian life. I swept the floor and made the bed and fetched water from the well. We went to a full moon party on the beach. My handsome and unkind Israeli gave me a microdot. His friends played djembe and threw back their heads at the stars. I ran down to the water’s edge. Thousands of stone soldiers were marching from the sea. I said, Look! and he said, Why do you think I see what you see? You are on your own and he left me there. A night tripping without anchor, I set sail and didn’t come back. The sun rose, we returned to our house and life together. Like a mute maiden he’d picked up at the market, my body continued to sweep the floor and fetch water, cater to his beautiful friends on our porch but my mind was gone. I stopped speaking.

4

LOST GIRLS LIKE ME

I found my voice in the hands of a self-styled Colonel Kurtz on an island in the Gulf of Thailand. A White man running from something, he’d decided himself a temple father, fat under a palm tree handing out easy wisdoms to lost girls like me. My Israeli and I had gone to Bangkok to renew our Indian visas; with our passports stamped we travelled out to the islands for a bit more beach life, Colonel Kurtz was a friend of his. I remember almost nothing of the time we spent there except for sitting at the feet of that large, sweating man. My months of mute had made me invisible yet suddenly I felt seen. He told me I was special. That old chestnut. Classic. By the time we left I was speaking again and my Israeli had found God. We returned to our house in Goa where full moon parties were replaced by Friday night prayers. A cloth on my head, he no longer taught me how to load a chillum but how to move my hands in circles over candles, repeating Hebrew texts he knew by heart. His friends came over, but less often. The drugs stopped. I swept and cleaned and cooked and lay beneath him. I broke my collarbone carrying water from the well and accepted this new reality as I’d accepted every other; no longer a teenager on a motorbike or the girlfriend of tendril hair, now I was a good Jewish wife who wasn’t Jewish or his wife but I was adjustable, loyal, hoodwinked; I’d do anything for attention. It never occurred to me to leave. When the seasons changed, we travelled to Delhi and lay hot in our hotel bed, his arm around me. The mattress was thin, the city loud, he told me he was leaving. He was giving up this life of faded pink shirts, he was returning to Israel and his faith. I couldn’t believe it was over. The next morning we parted; I flew to London, to my mother’s house, he to Tel Aviv, to his. I walked barefoot through streets of my childhood, a lungi wrapped like a turban round my head. I spoke pidgin English to street people who looked at me like I was weird. I don’t know what my mother thought. All I could think about was him. Across the park were synagogues still and quiet in Regency rooms. I made an appointment. I found myself there. I said I wanted to convert to Judaism. A Rabbi sat me down.

5

A MOMENTARY FLICK OF THE SWITCH

I sat with the Rabbi in his plush, Regency room, red cushions, a view of the park. I told him I wanted to convert to Judaism. At school I had sided with the Jewish girls, opted for Jewish prayers instead of Christian, I felt that those beginnings at a private girls’ school on Harley Street had come full circle, it was meant to be. I told the Rabbi I was committed. My feet were bare, he was kind, he said love wasn’t enough of a reason. He sent me away to long for my Israeli in the stark uncomfortable spare bedroom of my mother’s tall, uncomfortable house. I sat at the desk facing the window and made necklaces from beads brought home from an Indian market. I didn’t talk to my family and they didn’t talk to me. Days passed. Weeks of silence. I was unthinkably absent from my surroundings. I was terribly sad. One day, unable to contain the loss, I picked up the phone and rang him. I remember the telephone in its alcove, the carpet beneath my feet, the sudden and unexpected jolt of his voice. I told him I missed him and incredibly I heard him say he missed me too. This was enough, the only invitation I needed, it was like pressing go on a racer who has leant against the starting rope, ears trained for the pistol. I was off. That afternoon I went to a travel agent near the station and bought a plane ticket to Israel. I came home and packed a bag. I imagined a life of headscarves and simplicity and picked up my sewing machine, too. Money allows for these things; a momentary flick of the switch, a plane ticket bought, no conversations had with anyone but him. I told no one. I took a taxi to the airport, a folded note on the kitchen table for my mother that I thought she’d find at breakfast. It said, Gone to live in Tel Aviv.

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The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire. But the descriptions of The Return’s content are not fiction, no matter how much you come to believe or wish otherwise.

The Rock Bottom Revealed

Mid-May, mid-afternoon in a hovel of a bar that kept fading in and out of my vision. It was striped with green light beaming down through the windows from The One’s title lettering in the sky, rays that gave the place an unearthly shimmer, a nearly sacred glow.

‘The mature sophistication of what?’

‘Of wrestling your woman till she calls out Submit!, Trinna. Almost a kind of meditation for you both.’

In my glass of ginger ale there were two green men and a green woman wearing boar masks. They were circling a green kneeling boy. The men and the woman wore green-hooped Buckie Thistle football tops but nothing below. They faced in towards the boy and spat at him through their snouts. Spittle mixed with his mascara to trickle down his cheeks. The three adults waded in circles through the ginger ale, inches from my eyes. I could swallow them if I wanted, send these little people down to my belly.

‘ “And notice the parallel between that submission,” Ella used to tell me,’ I said, ‘ “and the relationship between our world with its three dimensions and Dark Matter with its infinite numbers of dimensions. Although in each case the second one may seem the less noisy and controlling half of the relationship, in fact it is much more sophisticated and undoubtedly in charge.” ’

‘And this helps me stay sober and not wrestling how?’

‘I love the fact that you’re going off the rails as well. We can both go plecto together.’

‘You need help.’

‘I know, I know. We have so much in common, don’t we? When did yours pick up momentum, then?’

‘When did what pick up what?’

‘Your plummet, your mental collapse. When did it pick up speed?’

‘I know for a fact that I am not… plummeting. I have been sober and not wrestling for eleven weeks.’

A tattered poster behind Trinna showed a boy with his tongue stuck out, to lick an ice-cream. ‘Or maybe we’re going to pull back from the brink together,’ I said. ‘Maybe that’s it.’

‘What is this brink?’

‘The brink everybody’s at the edge of. If we fall off we’ll be smashed to bits like Humpty Dumpty.’

Trinna picked up her phone. On the edge of my seat she plonked a sandal. ‘What are you talking of like Humpty Dumpty?’

I peered across the green-tinted table as if over spectacles. ‘Trinna. Aren’t you forgetting the appalling state of your hormones?’

‘Somebody needs to tell you this,’ she said, pressing the Send arrow on a Whatsapp message. ‘You have shit of a bird on your neck.’

‘Possibly. I slept rough last…’ The rest I garbled till it was pure vowel and let it drift into the bar’s reggaetón. ‘I went to the Policía Nacional about The One and asked them to investigate what had happened to David Lynch. They laughed me out of the building.’

‘Now there is a shock.’

‘Laughed me out of the building but then watched it like I asked and rang me to apologise.’ I sneaked a hand up to my neck. The crust split open and released the stink of birdshit. ‘Ever think The One’s puppeteering everything, this chat included? Have you seen its lettering in the sky?’

‘I believe I have been washing my hair,’ Trinna said wafting the stink away. ‘You need to speak to Les.’

‘Why would I do that? I haven’t thought about drinking or wrestling once. Never once been on my radar.’

‘What are we doing in this dump?’

‘It just feels right somehow. For our state of mind.’

‘When was your last GA meeting?’

‘I’m a male witch, by the way. Let’s start a coven. Let’s buy peat to chew so we can blacken these.’ I tapped my teeth. ‘Hey, what do you think hell’s like?’

‘This?’

‘I’m starting to think all that burnt-by-flames talk’s a load of rubbish. No, I think in hell you are the flames. What do you think? Am I warm? That was a little pun, Trinna.’

‘This forever?’

‘You still burn, though. You burn yourself. Are you with me?’ I smiled. ‘Hey, you know when you’re at an especially low ebb? I’ve a good comparison for those shooting pains you keep getting across the surface of your brain.’

Trinna faded from the bar. When she faded back in she was following a green fly round the rim of my green glass. But not, apparently, the foursome in my ginger ale. Peering in the bar’s window to watch proceedings was a gigantic green craggy Gordon Cole waggling fingers the size of zeppelins.

I said, ‘Jet fighters flying very low from RAF Lossiemouth.’

Trinna’s foot dropped to the floor. She finished off her Coke and said, ‘A bird shat on you and you did not notice. You are sleeping rough for some reason. There is always crusty stuff around your eyes. You are hanging about a bar which plays reggaetón mixes of Paris Hilton songs. You tried to sell your Multipla to the Prado. Your latest hairstyle, you say, alludes to a 1985 Swedish heavy-metal charity single. You have pages from a book by Morrissey all over your flat as wallpaper. You have a diorama taking up most of your front room of the town of Twin Peaks blending into some town in Scotland, featuring a tiny Green Glove and BOB’s punchup in the office of the sheriff and a tiny you getting covered with Tippex by a postman. And you have if you can’t beat them join them Tippexed several times on a mirror. But still you feel qualified to look down on my religion and my politics. Do you see anything not right with this picture, Andy?’

Laura Palmer walked in and waved at Trinna. A meek Ella-Laura Ospíndola on crutches. On both legs she had a cast. I wiped the birdshit from my neck, and the crusts from beneath my eyes. The One’s rays shimmered through my brain.

Behind Ella came Les, Stanley, César and Mateo Rodríguez, all but Stanley on crutches, and with their legs in casts. Beneath their tee shirts César and Mateo had a bump protruding from their torsos. Not a bun, waxed moustache, or forked beard in sight.

Ella stood beside me, then looked down into my eyes. She buried her forehead among my poodle-rocker’s hair. Mascara trickled down my cheek.

‘Sorry, Andy,’ Mateo said. ‘We are so, so sorry.’ There was something the matter with his teeth.

‘Sincere apologies for doubting you, amigo,’ César said.

‘Brace yourselves,’ Les said. ‘You’ll both get through this.’

I will always be grateful for the delicacy with which Ella told us about the worst thing in the history of art, a decision by David Lynch that they were calling the rock bottom. Before she filled us in the others handed out muscle relaxant for us to rub on ourselves in the toilets, to make sure we wouldn’t need colostomy bags like César’s and Mateo’s, Bottom Bags as the Twin Peaks fan community would soon be calling them. Next they gave us fish-oil and collagen capsules for our joints to help prevent what they’d named Rock Bottom Lock, which had sent the four of them to A&E, and some paramedics too. Once our capsules were swallowed and digested they gave us Orbit to chew to stop our molars grinding away to dust like César and Mateo’s had done.

Then using information from six years of my Whatsapps she’d never answered, Ella prepared us to hear the most shameful artistic choice there’s ever been, but in stages, with pauses for deep breaths and stretches of our legs and feet.

Yes, our toes and ankles curled and our bottoms clamped and our molars bit through the gum—whose wouldn’t during such an ordeal? But César and Mateo suffered more than we did, with each stage of Ella’s build-up provoking in them winces, blushes, shaking casts, shaking buttocks, and ground phantom molars, because of course when it came to the show’s rankness these two were still virgins, relatively speaking, compared to the four brutalised pornstars present.

Ella eased us in gently with a reminder of some parts of The One—she used our old name for it—that while pretty hideous were still nowhere near the worst things in it, such as the treatment of older women. She asked the two rock-bottom newbies how we were coping so far. Nodding at each other we agreed that we were fine, no bother.

Then she began to prime us with a reminder that The One makes David Lynch look the most risible human being who’s ever lived. When she’d listed some of the series’ lows in this regard, blushing Mateo cried out as his toes tried to curl inside his casts. Ella’s hand went to reassure him but when she caught my eye she stopped and instead told us of the membership, membership rules and basic ethos of what she’d decided to call Club Gevurah.

My lip trembled and I had to go and calm myself in the toilet cubicle, where she joined me for some kissing and playful grappling and a hair suggestion/ultimatum.

When we returned to the table hand in hand Les, Trinna and César applauded. With a defeated look Mateo muttered, ‘So be it, brother.’

Now Ella really primed us for the rock bottom.

Despite all its extreme formal zaniness and insincere game-playing, she said, the series is one of the most theme-heavy ever made. And a central theme is anti-retro, anti-nostalgia. Ella summarised everything The One sacrifices at the altar of this theme, then everything it desecrates at that same altar, which took her quite a while.

‘Are we clear on this?’ she asked. ‘It is very important to understand the number and the seriousness of the things which are desecrated by The One’s war on retro and that it is with no doubts the most anti-nostalgic work of art anyone has ever made. More than anything it was this which led to us needing ambulances when we understood the rock bottom.’ Mateo, César and Les nodded. ‘It means the contempt for the audience revealed by the rock bottom is like nothing seen before on this world.’

She was right about this. Nothing else on our world’s come close, not in art, not in any field. We’re in the realm of the cosmically minging. This is a Big Big Bad.

Trinna offered Ella and me her massive hands. César and Mateo joined hands with Les and Stanley. We closed our eyes and breathed in deep. I prayed for strength from my higher power, which was still my hatred of the abomination.

Then Ella let us have it. The most shattering element of the abomination’s megalomania, the Ragnarök, the most sadistic thing ever inflicted on Mr Lynch by his Demonic Twin. The impossible thing that had brought the finest woman I’ve known back to me at last, the shock of which had ECT’d my old friend back to his senses, and had even brought the director and minstrel of the Institución Nacional Lynch, and Ella’s boyfriend, now the former director and minstrel, and due to this rock bottom her former boyfriend once again, into this green hovel with his tail between his wrecked legs, with a Bottom Bag hanging off him.

Skulls were clutched. Wails were wailed. Stanley howled. Trinna had to be talked out of drinking. But such a good job had been done on preparing us, so considerate, so well thought-out, that neither of us newbies suffered Rock Bottom Lock, thankfully, or clamps so grave we had to call an ambulance. Please be as considerate when you tell people about the rock bottom.

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