At the age of 17 the blood donation vans rolled up into the car park of my school. The chairs and table in our common room were folded away, stacked against the walls, and the space was filled instead with felt board dividers, giving uncertain privacy to the temporary nurses’ stations. In the centre of the room a number of fold-out beds were arranged in a circle. This, we had ascertained, was one of the key rites of adulthood. Giving blood was good, selfless work.
We were caught in an in-between stage, as teenagers often are. Not children, but not quite fully-fledged adults. We could smoke but we could not drink; we could learn to drive. We were past the age of consent (though, 6 years earlier, that would not have been the case for men who have sex with men); and, we could give blood. Added to this, I had been keeping a secret, and had been on a one-man mission to secure my goodness. If I was gay, I had to make up for it by being good at school, by being polite, by being virginal, by cultivating a moral inviolability.
When I reached the head of the queue that day, and the seat in the nurse’s booth became empty, I was called forward and sat down in front of her. The nurse pricked my finger, and a bright droplet of blood emerged. The red droplet floated in the green vial she was holding, and she handed me a form to fill out. There was a row of tiny boxes on the form, and next to each box was a question. As usual, I went down the list, cavalierly ticking “no”. No, I do not have HIV. No, I have never been given money for sex. No, I have never injected drugs. And then a pause, a sudden flush of the cheeks. I felt my ears burn red and looked up, wondering if the nurse had noticed my hesitation. “In the last twelve months,” the form asked, “have you had oral or anal sex with a man, with or without a condom?”
My blood might betray me. It linked me to any man I might have had sex with, and from there on out to all of their men, all of their encounters, proliferating out through time, through space, intangible until now. My blood was full of ghosts.
I didn’t know what to do. Tell the truth, tick “yes” and have to leave, have to explain to her and to everyone why I couldn’t donate (sixteen, fumbling of zips in the back row of the cinema, something secret and forbidden); or lie. And so, for the safety of my one-man kingdom, I scratched a quick pencil line through the box that said “no”, and handed the clipboard back to the nurse.
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After she pricked my finger and the bright droplet of blood floated in the green vial she was holding, she prepared the soft skin of my inner arm, lay me down on to one of the beds and took out her needle. I felt a flutter in my vein, as though a butterfly were trapped inside. “Sorry — I caught the valve,” the nurse said, smiling apologetically as I winced. She slid the needle backwards slightly, then pushed it inside again. Assured that my heart would pump out a pint of blood in a short time, the nurse left me lying there and went back to her seat and to the next teenager in line.
When, finally, the small pint-bag of blood had filled up, the needle was pulled from my arm, and I stood up. My vision clouded over with white shapes and bright, expanding circles. I fell to the floor with a smack, and woke up in another world.
That day, I realised that my history was not quite my own. My blood might betray me. It linked me to any man I might have had sex with, and from there on out to all of their men, all of their encounters, proliferating out through time, through space, intangible until now. My blood was full of ghosts.
I have come to think of these people as a chosen family of ghosts. We are often told that queer people can choose their own family; a second family not bound by ties of blood, or power, or biological inheritance. But I think we have a family of ancestors too: those who went before us, who may have lived lives similar to, or different from, our own. We inherit many things from other people, the living and the dead. Language, trauma, love, prejudices and fears, joys, rules and lies.
If I was going to understand what I have been given, and how the world we live in shapes a self, I was going to have to dive back through time, go into the underworld, to confront ghosts, and to salvage things from the wreckage
In my book the ghosts are those of the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Swedish modernist Karin Boye, the ghosts of old lovers, some of whom I know, and some of whom I met once. What I realised, in the book, was that the final ghost was me. I was haunted by another self, a self I had kept hidden, had rejected, had willingly pushed aside. At the end of those deep tunnels of time, I found a little boy, waiting for me, answering me across the intervening years.
These ghosts are the guiding lights of All Down Darkness Wide, a gothic memoir that, although it is real, is haunted. The gothic mode does not seem so unreal to me: there have been times in my life when I have experienced reality as gothic, full of visions, nightmares, strange clues, entrapment, and imaginative overdrive. When I sat down to write it, I realised quite quickly that the traditional memoir — based in a tone of reality, charting the lived life — would not do. My life began way before I was born, was full of inheritances, and moved through time in ways not always tethered to a strict chronology. The book begins in a 19th-century cemetery in Liverpool — a place of forgetting and remembering — and moves across three centuries, and numerous countries. It is a love story. It asks what love can survive, and what it cannot.
If I was going to understand what I have been given, and how the world we live in shapes a self, I was going to have to dive back through time, go into the underworld, to confront ghosts, and to salvage things from the wreckage. I wanted to take the reader with me: to take them by the hand, and to lead them through time, so that they might see, alongside me, how identity can be made, unmade, and remade.
All Down Darkness Wide is a voyage through that other world. It unpicks the lies we tell ourselves, and the lies we tell to others, the fictions we are forced to construct, in the hope that the memoir — a particularly vulnerable act of truth-telling — might be a powerful antidote to shame. This is a journey born out of terror and out of love; but it recovers, I hope, one of the most precious treasures we can hope to find: ourselves, and our love for ourselves.
Seán Hewitt’s memoir, All Down Darkness Wide will be published by Jonathan Cape on the 14th July
