Catriona Ward: ‘Listening to psychopaths is a very soothing experience for me’

Where is my mother? 30% 
She died two years ago, in the arms of our family. We held her, my sister, my father and I, and kissed her and stroked her, cried and told her how she was loved, until it was over and her body was just a body, growing cool. But where is she? Is she watching? Is she free? Is she at all? I look for her everywhere. I look for her in clear skies and in myself and in the touch of sun-warmed dust and in flowers and new rain. She was the first person I ever knew, but I can’t find her now, and I don’t know what to do.

Tearing your heart from your chest with a bloodied fist, or, writing: 25% 
Most of my mind and being is circling this subject over and over, at all times. As Iris Murdoch says, it’s always taking place below, deeply, beneath the level of my attention. I hate it. It’s all that I am. Don’t know what to do with this one either, really, it’s all despair – but then there comes that rare moment – maybe 10 minutes a year – when I feel it all in me, complete and knife-bright and the words are mine, and everything is in its proper place. I am more at home on the page than anywhere else in the world. Unless I’m writing, I’m just doing a clumsy impression of myself.

Am I a piece of shit? % varies
I think about this every day, with varying degrees of intensity. I called the Samaritans recently to see what they thought – did they know whether I was just a useless piece of shit or not? But the line was busy (this is true).

The love of friends and family can sustain me: 15% 
I have been lucky enough in my life to have had romantic love, and platonic love, and family love. The first has never yet steered me true. My deepest loves, my most profound experiences, have been with family and friends. Maybe I’m not a grown-up yet. But the ties that truly bind, it seems to me at this point in my life, are those of kinship and friendship. I think about my friends, my father and my sister all the time. I imagine what they’re doing, throughout the day. I store up things to tell them, each one, that I hope will make them laugh. I tell them that I love them, even when I am hot with anger and I feel deserted or they are deceitful. Maybe especially then.

The soothing tones of violent psychopathy: 8%
This takes up a disproportionate amount of my time, mostly while I’m fading into the liminal places that border sleep. Listening to psychopaths is a very soothing experience, for me. There’s no friction there, none of the conflict and vibrancy that makes up most people’s internal lives. I find the lack of affect which goes with personality disorders a great relief. I can’t hurt them, and if they hurt me, it’s not personal. Ed Kemper, who killed many women including his mother, narrated an audiobook of Flowers in the Attic as part of an inmate rehabilitation programme. It is unearthly, wholly surreal, a terrible narration, and to me, infinitely calming as he talks on and on, in his slow dead voice. I believe the prison discontinued the inmate audiobook initiative shortly after this recording.

Galloping on strange hooves, chased by a lion: 5% to 100% depending on the day
I started riding when I was four. Horses were constant companionship in a fairly lonely childhood, moving from Kenya to Madagascar to Morocco to Yemen, and the USA. I had a quarter horse called St Elmo’s Fire while we lived in the US. She was beautiful, a roan appaloosa. She was so kind. I dream about horses all the time. They inspire longing in me. When my mother became very ill, I got into the habit of climbing into unattended paddocks and fields and scrambling bareback on to strangers’ horses. I stopped this after I was thrown – I remember hitting the ground, all my breath knocked out as a hoof whistled past my head, half an inch away. My sister and I are going to ride horses in the Okavango Delta in Botswana this summer, and I am looking forward to it so much that it’s like it’s already happening to me, physically – I can smell the clean hide, feel the smooth alert muscles moving beneath.

The whistling man: 1%
I have lived in the same flat in London for some time. Late at night, on occasion, an eerie, melodic whistling makes its way down the street. It’s been happening for 20 years. I always run to the window when I hear him, but I have never caught a glimpse of the whistler.

Sunlight, turrets and a skunk: 12%
I recently bought the corner of a turreted castle in Los Angeles, just beneath the Hollywood sign, by the canyons and Lake Hollywood. It was built by Warner Brothers to house their actors in 1937. Marilyn Monroe lived in the building, as did Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. Madonna lived in my apartment. My house is not a house for an adult. It’s a fable, a fantasy. It has turrets and vast windows, and sunlight and climbing white roses and a skunk which lives at the bottom of the garden. Skunks are so beautiful – no one tells you this – they are velvet black and silken white and plumed. I don’t want to live with anyone and I don’t want children, so I may die alone – but hopefully I’ll die in a turret with the warm sun streaming in from all directions. I think I could be content with that ending.