It’s very hard for me to write when I don’t feel well, especially when I have jet-lag and feel brain-dead, but I’ve felt like this for weeks now. Like I’ve been hit round the head with a giant rubber club. I have tinnitus 24 hours a day, excruciating eye pain, my torso feels like it’s been trampled on, I feel sick, I can’t eat and I’m bleeding. In fact, when I’m not asleep I’m spilling blood all over Australia. The bleeding wound, a never-ending memory.
I just been to see the doctor, I have another ton of antibiotics and told I’m basically full of shit.
I’ve hardly eaten for four days, I can’t it hurts too much. It even hurts when I drink water.
Sometimes I think maybe I’m not really in pain, maybe I just think I’m in pain, so I try mentally to rise above it, climb out of my body and fly around
Giant rocks falling into the lake. A touch of citrus burns like sulphuric acid. I am a living, walking volcano about to erupt from all ends.
Yesterday I thought, I think I’m going to have to go to hospital, but I didn’t, instead I took some heavy-duty painkillers and got on with what I had to do.
I flew to Melbourne and gave a talk to a huge audience. I was in conversation with Patricia Karvelas.
The auditorium had the most beautiful ceiling, every now and then, I’d drift off staring at the ceiling and try to mentally blast the pain away.
Sometimes I think maybe I’m not really in pain, maybe I just think I’m in pain, so I try mentally rise above it, climb out of body and fly around.
This time I was flying above the audience having a wonderful close-up view of the art deco ceiling.
After the talk, we went to the NGV, the National Gallery of Victoria, to see a display of my work. All recent acquisitions.
I walked through the Yoko Ono room then onto mine. I stood in silence, then cried. My giant neon Love Poem for CF 1997 illuminated the room with a beautiful soft pink.
Everything shone and sparkled as light bounced and reflected back from the antique mirrors onto the Georgian furniture.
My miniature bronzes used entire swathes of space, feeling a million times bigger than they actually are but the star was my painting hung above the marble fireplace, I KNOW NO GAIN.
I always call this painting my Bruce Nauman painting because it reminds me of one of his neons NO PAIN NO GAIN but it didn’t start off like that. The painting is very cryptic, behind the words you can make out a very fucked-up crucifix and behind the crucifix — if you had X-ray eyes you would see a figure of a curled up young girl and behind that, bloody tears.
Every Saturday night we’d all creep out of bed and meet up in the shed. The shed was a chalet that stood in the back yard between our cottage and the derelict hotel.
We’d drink bottles of cider smoke Rothman cigarettes and listen to tapes of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.
Sometimes there would be lots of us, sometimes just a few.
This one night there was just the few, my friend who I will just refer to a G, her boyfriend — who was much older than her — and his friend.
For some bizarre reason G and her boyfriend decide that I should have sex.
Totally against my will they both held me down, while the fourth person in the shed lay on top of me.
I sat in a bath of lukewarm warm water for hours. I cried and felt totally contaminated, like I would never get clean.
At the time I didn’t realise how abused I’d been by the situation. Now I wonder how abused G must have been to get herself in that situation.
To hold her 13-year-old friend down and watch them be raped. The person who raped me was only about 16.
He knew it was wrong. They all knew it was wrong.
I wonder where they are now, if they ever think about what they did.
I live with it, I always have, but when I saw that painting in that museum above that fireplace it sent a searing pain through my heart.
I cried for little Tracey.
Tracey Emin is an artist
