The train brakes, pitching my back into the seat’s plush upright. Neither wholly asleep nor awake, I occupy my usual, preferred state: a purgatorial wonderland in which everything appears possible, for as long as nothing is realised. It takes dedication to maintain such poise. Spells of catatonia were okay; psychosis had its moments. There is something deathly about pursuing either to excess. Every time I end up incontinent – leaking, squirting, dribbling – there ensues a growing marginalisation. Each representing a checkpoint beyond which there is no guaranteed return.

An announcement is made – incomprehensible except for the name of the village: ’La Coquille’. Knees splayed I crouch before the open carriage doorway, pushing my case onto the station platform, where it explodes for a second time. Fuck! Too heavy to lift it has grown hateful – broken to begin with and held together with gaffer tape. An ambiguous gift, donated by a neighbour, whose only offer of assistance in two years had come to hasten my departure.

The suitcase contains all I have left. Nowhere remains to call home. That I have made it this far is a testament to defiance. The first time the case detonated, it spontaneously burst into halves, leaving me wedged between two barrier gates at a metro station in Paris – some subterranean stretch between the Gare du Nord and Austerlitz. No one had stopped to help me. All of this I’d foreseen. Taping the pieces together, I consoled myself by gloating. The rumours about the capital were true: people rude, streets blistering with dog poo. At least Londoners were marginally more considerate. They cleaned up after their pets before sportingly tossing the shit-filled bags onto bus stop roofs, fences, or into trees, where they hung like dubious talismans. The effect was almost joyful.

As for the case’s contents, I couldn’t figure out why I had brought so much stuff. This was supposed to be a journey of renunciation. The selection process had been both spontaneous and egalitarian. I had closed my eyes and stood in the centre of the room. Whatever lay within an arm’s length radius of my body had gone in. Since nothing held any meaning, everything had to come.

I am a hurt and angry young woman. In this sense, not alone. My attempts to manage my feelings have brought me intimately close to death. Physically starving, bones crumbling, I’m rotting from the inside out. I no longer have periods and am stippled with scars from injecting and self-mutilation. I can feel my organs failing – withdrawing their attention with the tired sighs of a disappointed fan-club.

Running parallel to my own efforts are those of the state. Over-medicated, I regard the world through a keyhole. Behind this locked door, my mind is a whistling wasteland. Barely able to formulate sentences of meaningful thought, I read the backs of pill boxes. Pills from the doctors for the downs and the ups. Pills from the project to keep me off the drugs. Drugs I’d used to stop feeling or caring at all, since, to care about what one is powerless to change is a terrible pain indeed. Still, I persist, like creeping mould or an unnoticed rash, a boil on the back of the taxpayer. And whilst the long-term effects remain unclear, my existence is proof of an unnatural right to survive.

The professionals believe there is something fundamentally wrong with me. That my antisocial exhibitions of distress are not symptomatic of the oppression I feel, but of a mysterious mental illness too complex to successfully treat. The government has declared me unfit for purpose, constitutionally incapable of work. Every month I receive two disability payments. Enough not to die, enough not to live – welfare as prophylactic. Over decades, my condition has progressed: poverty, marginalisation, loneliness. Precarious work, sex work, no work. Crappy housing, crushing rents. Benefits sanctions, homelessness. Stronger, more obliterating drugs. More dangerous means of administration.

The objectification of my body has led to the destruction of my mind. Not only by my own hand, but by the messages of society, which began, as they do for all of us, with an attack on my pubescent adequacy – rapidly advancing to declare me insane. All the while, the same dubious doctrines persist, slyly inducing conformity. Ever-seductive promises that the solution to dissatisfaction lies everywhere but within and without. Enough is never enough.

With every loss of means and faith, I have found myself compensated with a profitable new diagnosis. For every label I cling to, I come to know myself less. Every time I am required to use the words I have been taught to explain my behaviour, (to benefits officers, key-workers, therapists, police), I become less certain of the truth of my experience. In this way I lose my power. As for what I believe my sickness is, my answer is Disillusionment.

Following another thwarted suicide attempt, I arrived at a solution. Indifferent about living, I should donate myself to a cause. Having discounted every terrorist organisation I could think of, I remembered religion. Maybe I could join an order. Become a devotee. The idea percolated. Then I met The Abbot. Six weeks later, I found myself at King’s Cross, boarding a train to France, as though by divine direction.

I stand on the empty platform at La Coquille. A day-lit night scene, a deserted set. It’s only 6.12 p.m. but it may as well be dawn. Having read Balzac, I know what to expect from the locals: peasants with egg down their shirt fronts – born and raised not to care. Different from Parisians. Free of whatever bourgeois pretensions might stop someone from helping a person being publicly attacked by a turnstile. Yes, the proletariat know what’s important. And when their livelihoods are challenged, spring to action with a panache those cosmopolitan snobs can only dream of – burning livestock, ramming their tractors down the Champs-Élysées, spraying manure at the bourgeois. I sense the need to urinate. Having spent most of the last forty-eight hours awake, my mind is fragmenting.

An effeminate-looking man in a peaked cap stands beneath a clock. His cap, his uniform, the clock, make me nervous. He may be a gendarme. Checking the time disinterestedly, as only a station attendant might, he lights a cigarette. How very Nouvelle Vague. I feel reignited with love for the French. The way they smoke. The way they fuck. The way they deconstruct. Even their aristos had had some good points – chocolate bread for breakfast, one hundred and twenty days of Sodom. Marie Antoinette, applying make-up before having her head cut-off. Such profound superficiality made one think.

Another man appears. Halting, he considers the case, eviscerated on the platform. Proceeding, he strides forward, one hand extended. His grip rigid and tightly cuffed, head closely shaved. ‘Jérôme Alain,’ he says, by way of introduction.

Steeple-tall and dressed in black, he gives the impression of an undertaker. Once had, this thought is impossible to retract. It has children, similarly stupid but exhibiting variation: his large nose seems ill-fitting, suggesting prosthesis. It may be attached to his spectacles, comprising part of a crude disguise. His accent, which sounds German, is unmistakably that of a war criminal.

To a drugged and sleep deprived brain, this seems plausible. Starved of reality, my mind has begun to consume itself, simplifying the world to caricature. Many people with dubious backgrounds choose to dis-appear into closed institutions. Prior to learning of the monastery, I’d considered the French Foreign Legion. Especially since, under a pro-vision known as Français par le sang versé, or ‘French by spilled blood’, any soldier wounded during a battle for France can immediately apply for citizenship. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d seek to benefit by shooting myself in the foot.

The undertaker drags my baggage toward a car parked in front of the station. Climbing in, I am surprised to find myself behind the steering wheel. Jérôme Alain’s face looms through the side window. He taps the glass with a forefinger and watches as, rather than getting out and using the passenger door, I raise myself sideways over the gear stick. It’s an automatic manoeuvre that, once begun, is impossible to abort.

Within a minute, we’ve crossed what appears to be the vill-age’s main thoroughfare. Oh, merciful death. Not a nail bar or betting shop in sight. No one passed out on the pavement, no blow-dried dogs in coats. Recognising nothing, I feel happy. Goodbye London, with your cramp and contradictions. My eyes float upwards, drawn by the benevolent pulse of a green, neon-lit cross. Thank God, a pharmacy. I immediately think of codeine and wonder how easy it is to obtain without a prescription.

We slip gradually out of La Coquille. Bungalows thin, shutters close. Hedges thicken until we’re rolling alongside fields containing giant, jug-faced cows. I can’t remember the last time I saw an animal, not off a leash – urban foxes occasionally, grazing on plastic bags filled with kebab meat and disposable nappies. Without the familiar buffer of concrete and brick, the horizon feels claustrophobic. Sky sucking at the earth like one long, toothless gum.

I had become used to the city. “Adapted” is not the right word, implying as it does a healthy adjustment. I’d never been adjusted anywhere. Born in the countryside, I’d left as soon as I could. Lacking transport posed no problem. Pubescent pussy proved a powerful bargaining tool.

Whatever affection I felt for the city was that of a hostage. It was a place in which to lose yourself: rife with the kind of hype that could convince you to fall in love with a dream. Somebody else’s at that. Over the course of a decade, I’d grown isolated. My habits less and less savoury. More secretive for this reason. Months passed in which I barely left an area of a couple of square miles. Seasons passed largely unnoticed.

Jérôme Alain talks a lot for a monk. My eyes feel ragged, so I keep them shut. My sunglasses must still be on the train, bound for Bordeaux.

I’d marked my departure from London with a party. It’s timing had been myopic. Some chaotic part of me had wanted to miss the train and screw everything up. We’d started off at the Portuguese social on Westbourne Park – drinking sangria and rum on the benches outside, wobbling back to the flat in cliques. This was the first and last time I would host such a get-together, which had felt somewhere between a wedding and a wake. Generally, I avoided such gatherings. My drug use was too antisocial to seem anything other than a celebration of itself. That is, of destruction. There’d been a lot of coke flying about that night. Not a drug I’d actually buy, but since it had been my party, I’d taken the liberty of doing a sweep around, leaving the sniffling dilettantes who lay draped about half-conscious undisturbed.

Barricaded in my room, I’d located a syringe. Stirring the preparation with its needle, I contemplated the drug’s journey – the suffering it had accumulated as it coursed from source to tip. The offspring of my neighbours, stabbing and shooting each other outside chicken shops. How many violent deaths were attached to the production and distribution of every eight ball of cocaine? The weaker the purity, the higher the count. The war on drugs had failed. Its casualties: poor and addicted, a numberless acceptable loss.

Oh well. Considering these facts, it felt only right to waste nothing. By this point, it was all self-justification anyway. Hanging on the edge of a hit, I was like a lion clamped around a jugular. Someone could have stoved my head in with a brick, and I wouldn’t have released my grip. I knew what was to follow would make me want to simultaneously shit, come, and inspire the universe with the sort of euphoric violence that could end all wars. The effect would be momentary, almost immediately supplanted by terror. In face of such anticipated reward, reason could never win.

I blink to find I am still in the car, frozen hostage to Jérôme Alain’s ice-breaking efforts. ‘This will be the most important holiday of your life,’ he says enthusiastically. My face falls into a grim rictus, fingers curling into fists. What presumption! A holiday from what? My ticket was one way. I have nothing to return to. Nothing to lose, to quiet Karl Marx, but my chains.

Having inched into a parking bay, checking mirrors back and forth precisely, as though aligning an implant, Jérôme Alain rushes ahead of me along a tree-lined, tarmacked road toward a beige stone château; bouncing my broken case up the front steps with gusto. We pass through an entrance hall containing an altar and gilded statues, arriving in a vinegar-scented room with a glassy parquet floor and flaking rococo cornices. All I had to do, he’d said, was sit and wait. Someone would arrive shortly to issue further instructions.

I’d been lying lengthways on a low banquette when a second man swooped in, like a special forces bat. He looks like an action figure – die-hard macho, but dressed in these stealthy, far-out robes. His name, he tells me, is Genko. Overlaying the scent of the room, I notice the piquant stink of unwashed body. I nod as Genko speaks, pinning my arms to my sides and clamping my legs together.

‘You will spend some time in solitude.’^[1]

‘Good.’

‘You don’t need to do anything. Just be.’

I am used to spending time alone. The prospect of enforced solitude is, however, an ambiguous introduction. Even in prison, such punishment is reserved for the most disruptive – hostage-takers, rioters, violence-makers. I gaze at Genko’s periscopic ears, their infusion of tiny red veins glowing with through-pouring light.

He withdraws something from his robes, which cross at the chest: a pamphlet. Made of folded A4 photocopies, braced with staples. Somewhat ceremonially, he hands it to me with both hands. I receive it in the same fashion, read the title, and feel disgusted: Rules of Life. What rules? The idea that I might not be able to do exactly what I want, all the time, registers like a blow.

I was deluded. Thirteen years had passed since I first realised I was dependent on a drug – that, to all intents and purposes, I was possessed. Addiction functions at the level of desire. Progressive, its objects recede and mutate, quickly becoming obsolete. The moment the drug-thing is attained, the sense of emptiness opens back up – fear of pain, ageing and death, separation, or loss – and with this, the need for MORE. Regardless, the addict persists. What works one day is unsatisfactory the next. The one who uses and takes is transformed into a blind hunter-automaton: physically and ideologically impelled by forces of acquisition and consumption. Attempting, at this stage, to convince myself I was free, that taking drugs was what in an ideal world I’d be doing, was tantamount to upholstering my own coffin.

I thought Zen was about spontaneity. This is the impression Alan Watts had given me. Admittedly, my knowledge was limited. Some beat literature and dharma talks I’d found online and listened to in bed, too stoned and depressed to even masturbate. I’d read a few Zen stories: tales of bearded, rolling-eyed sages who wore their shoes on their heads. Cats being cut in half. The Zen master who fired an arrow into the sea, to the exclamation of ‘Bullseye!’ Those who were constantly drunk cautioning moderation in moderation. Zen was a practice that celebrated itself as good for nothing. Aesthetically, it was the most rock and roll of all spiritual traditions (black robes and skinheads, being hit with sticks). Nihilistic and averse to work, it seemed surely the path for me.

‘This is for you to study during your tangaryo’, interrupts Genko.

‘Try not to distract yourself with anything during this time. It’s not necessary to read anything else. Or to write or make phone calls. Someone will let you know when it’s time to join the others.’

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^[1] Tangaryo is a traditional Zen Buddhist monastic practice in which a newcomer spends forty-eight to seventy-two hours in silent solitude upon arrival at a monastery. Typically requested of those intending a long-term stay, tangaryo serves as a transitional period – allowing the individual to adjust inwardly and leave behind the agitation of the social world, thereby aligning themselves with the atmosphere of the monastery.

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Charlotte Northall is a London-based writer whose work moves between the raw and the transcendent. Her debut, Practicing Dying, blends autobiography and cultural criticism to explore addiction, capitalism, and spirituality. She works with rough sleepers, supporting those living with addiction and dual diagnoses.

Copies available via the press’s website at www.pilotpress.co.uk/catalogue or for wholesale distribution through Public Knowledge Books.