Mayhem Read online

  I, too, ran away sometimes, and understood his wish to be free.

  *

  Back to those summers. I would help my mother hang laundry on the clothesline. The sea wind saturated the sheets and towels; no sheets or towels ever smelled so clean. We took down the dry sheets from the clothesline; my mother held two corners, I held two. We stretched and shook and folded, stretched and shook and folded, again and again.

  My father did all the shopping and cooking in the summer; my mother did most of the cleaning and laundry, with our help. He took out the rubbish; we burnt what we could in a rusty barrel he’d shot holes in for ventilation. I remember the fires at night, glowing fragments of newspaper whirling up in the heat. We watched, mesmerised. At times some plastic slipped in, a chemical smell like the smell of plastic on the shop floor of the Tetra Pak factory.

  Sometimes I was afraid of the dark. My father, standing with me by the fire, told me that dark was simply the absence of light. Nothing to be afraid of. And such was his authority that I believed him.

  —

  Now we are in the summerhouse my brother gave me. The children are on the roof watching the sunset. Eric and I sit below, listening to the sound of their feet as they run, their wild games so similar to our games when I was young, in this same house, and in my parents’ house next door. There’s the same TV room, the same black tar-paper roof, the same pungent and heady smell of rotting seaweed from the beach below. We cooked and ate the crabs then; now we release them back into the sea. And the world of layered smells we lived in—the washing, the ironing, the smell in the greengrocer and the fishmonger—seems more muted now, just as the euphoria of arrival, of summer and freedom, has become tempered.

  Perhaps there can be no euphoria without a degree of suffering; no feeling of freedom without its absence.

  —

  It warps your sense of time, taking children back to the world you grew up in. It is bewildering. Everything is the same; nothing is the same.

  Occasionally I bump into friends from that lost world, the world I slipped away from thirty-five years ago. It’s like nothing has changed; no one seems to have aged or changed much. Hey, how are you? they say. And Lisbet? And HK? as my brother was then known. And Hans and Märit? they ask, remembering my parents, too.

  We have a ghost presence here.

  —

  I am writing this in the playroom, filled with our old toys and books. There are hundreds of names and telephone numbers written on the bare pine walls, most of them scribbled down by Sten, the architect who built this house and spent his summers here. This was his office. I find my own old number in London—he might have written it down to give to his son, I suppose.

  Sten and his wife would come for drinks with my parents—dry martinis with olives, or champagne. Cheese noodles and peanuts, his wife in pink lipstick and 1970s tan; my mother in her old Marimekko cotton dresses that lasted for decades. They would sit on the wooden steps looking out over the common and the sea, watching the sunset, watching for a green flash, watching for the black rabbit—there was always one.

  The black rabbits are gone now.

  Looking at the wall I can see all our children’s names, too; they have signed the wall each year we have been here.

  On a shelf is a little house my sister Lisbet built in school woodworking class, and a wooden car, also hers. Amongst the books—our childhood books—I find my Pony Club calendar from 1973. There’s my name in my eleven-year-old signature, and Jappo, the name of my pony, in 1970s bubble letters. I sit down to read it, remembering every article, every piece of horse advice and pony lore, every black-and-white photograph of girls with their ponies.

  I was eleven in 1973. Hans turned ten, Lisbet thirteen. There were three years and six days between them. I was born twenty months after Lisbet, and Hans was born sixteen months after me.

  My mother put all those mementos in this house for my brother.

  *

  One of the Granta editors gives me Anne Carson’s luminous and painful book Nox about her lost brother, who eventually died in Copenhagen. I read it with fascination. They had nothing in common, Carson writes. Her brother called her pinhead or professor; there was no common ground, and yet he left a void behind him.

  The three of us, by contrast, were so similar, as though mixing my mother with my father could make only this one combination, more or less, of height, of green eyes, of brown hair.

  And if we were all the same, is the implication that what my brother did, I might have done, too?

  Perhaps I should rephrase that: is the implication that what happened to my brother might have happened to me, too?

  I read Jane Austen; he read Charles Bukowski. I turned left; he turned right.

  —

  The summer ends and we return to England.

  Melancholy London, melancholy Knightsbridge.

  There is Mr. Chow. My parents used to take us there forty years ago to eat drunken fish.

  There is the discount carpet store, advertising its sale, 80 percent off, year after year, season after season.

  There is High and Mighty, closed now. My father used to buy shirts there.

  There is Please Mum, where I bought my son’s cream suit for my second wedding, to Eric. Daniel was five, and looked like a mini-mafioso in his suit, with my brother’s dark eyelashes, my brother’s serious watchfulness.

  —

  I notice that I am hesitant to begin the story. I write around it.

  —

  Hans and Eva met in rehab, in their mid-twenties.

  They got engaged.

  They got married in 1992.

  Her family happy, our family happy, after so many years of addiction, of anxiety, of unhappiness, of blame, of denial, of disappearances.

  This, finally, was recovery.

  The wedding was a celebration of that, as much as a celebration of love and the founding of a new family.

  —

  By 1999 Hans and Eva had three small children. Their youngest son was not yet born. They had a house in London, a house in Barbados, many cars and paintings, many things. Headed notepaper and invitations to this and that and philanthropy and house parties and lunches and dinners.

  Were they happy? I think so. Happy enough.

  But perhaps I didn’t pay enough attention.

  *

  I have lunch with my parents. My father sleeps; my mother and I walk through the house, looking at paintings, looking at photographs, looking at her collection of glass. “To tell you the truth I am bored with it all,” she says. We meander on through her memories, through her house. In a drawer she finds some photographs of the grandchildren when they were small; the school photographs I used to send to the family every year.

  We look at the pictures. I remember the uniforms. Breakfasts on dark mornings, a pile of kitbags gathered by the door. Five pairs of school shoes lined up by the coats; the cricket bats; the tennis rackets; the homework diaries; the crumpled bits of paper children bring home from school.

  It seems so long ago.

  I stand with my mother in front of a cabinet as she absentmindedly opens drawers. She finds a wedding photograph of Hans and Eva, bleached by the sun. Eva is looking down, smiling; Hans looks straight at the camera, holding his head high, a happy smile.

  And under it, in a silver frame, is a photograph of me and Eva, sitting on the steps outside my parents’ house, in front of the old orangery. Behind us is a blurry child, throwing her head up to look at the sky, but I can’t see who it is. What year is it? I search for clues. I am wearing jeans and a cotton jacket I still have. My ex-husband’s watch: that’s a clue. A bracelet; a gift from him.

  My hair is so dark. I look young, and happy. Eva looks happy, too. What is she wearing? A white cardigan, a skirt? I can’t quite see. Bare legs, tanned. The grass is green; I am guessing it’s early summer, June. Eva looks American, blond hair flying in the wind, confident and strong.

  There we sit, leaning slightly towards
each other as people do for photographs. My arms clasp my knees; I squint into the sun. Eva’s hands are under her legs, holding up her skirt, her bare knees touching, one foot slightly over the other.

  The silver frame acts as a mirror; it catches my glasses, my face, my greying hair.

  After Eva died, I stopped going to the hairdresser; I cut my hair myself for a year. I would take a strand of hair between my fingers, feel the split ends, and cut the strand off, a little pile of hair forming on the side of the basin. Eva would not have approved of that, had she been sober, and alive. She would have rightly diagnosed it as a sign of distress and made me stop, because the counsellors at the rehab were right: she did have the gift of persuasion.

  She might even have taken me to her own hairdresser. She might have sat with me, sipping cappuccino and discussing hair, in that parallel universe, normal life.

  The photograph may or may not have been before the millennium New Year. I remember the nervous questions: would the Internet collapse through jamming date functions, would everything grind to a halt—flights, banks, cities, governments? No one knew.

  Hans and Eva went to a party, and drank a glass of champagne, to celebrate. Or maybe several glasses, for the first time (or maybe not the first time) since recovery. The date functions didn’t jam and the airplanes didn’t fall from the sky, but our world was fractured that night, by those glasses of champagne.

  4

  Over the next few years the signs of addiction accumulated, though we were not as yet aware of the extent of Hans’s relapse. We worried about Eva in particular, and we worried about the children. In June 2004, I wrote to Eva to suggest that she go to rehab. She didn’t respond. Of course she knew that rehab doesn’t work so well if you have done it many times before. You know the vocabulary and the shortcuts, the pretty prayers, the glib sayings. If you have seen it all before, perhaps you see through it.

  I think of those many letters that I wrote, those useless sentences. I don’t know what she made of them, and I don’t know what they made of me.

  Looking back, I can see that I didn’t understand how hard it was for Eva. Her layers and layers of acting out and acting in tricked me; the pose and the authenticity, those refractions of addiction where the pain is sometimes the authentic thing and sometimes the pose; where hard laughter is sometimes the authentic thing and sometimes the pose. There seemed to be empty spaces in Eva’s body and mind itching for drugs and for freedom, cavities that might have been filled with contentment, or work, or family love, that subtle connection between parents and children, and their children in turn, that animal thing which is about feeling better, and safer, when the loved ones are in the room.

  The knowledge that you will be protected and that you belong: the primitive function of love.

  —

  I watch Asif Kapadia’s documentary film Amy, about Amy Winehouse. I recognise the contrast between the distress of her friends and the detachment of Amy’s own narrative, that facile pose which is part of addiction.

  I am moved by the grief of Amy’s friends. I know what they are doing, grasping at the dull straws of recovery-speak, those clichés that are all we have. But most of all I am haunted by the selfies taken in the weeks and days before Amy died: those dark observant eyes watching her own face, so thin, so bony. The camera as mirror. Her heart worn out by cocaine; by bulimia; by alcohol. Those eyes are so searching, almost scientific, coldly neutral as mirrored eyes always are. There is no message—she is observing herself.

  I wonder if she believed in the danger she was in.

  She played with death, obviously. Perhaps death was her faith, a belief in the what then, the thrilling unknown. I think of the romantic enactments of the European tradition—nihilism and Russian roulette; war and heroism; Goethe’s young Werther triggering an epidemic of suicide; the suffering in jazz; the rebellion in music.

  I don’t think Eva quite believed in her own mortality, even though she often referred to it in her long emails. But those references always struck a slightly false note, as though they were part of some longer game between us; a game we knew was not quite real. Her rebel days were over, in any case. She was no longer young, no longer the party girl she had been. Now there was so much order all around her; so many things; such delicate or suffocating networks of obligations. She wanted out, I think.

  The line between addiction and recovery is so fine, and so vast: a tiny step, a movement in a dance; a huge commitment.

  In Hans and Eva’s house the bedroom was the private sphere, the locked room, the drug space. The drawing room on the floor below was a model of bourgeois order. The bedroom contained the addiction; the rest of the house felt like a front for the recovery they, or we, had hoped for, the family life they, or we, had wanted—a Potemkin façade of affluence and stability.

  —

  After the children came to live with us in May 2007, the life went out of the house. The staff waited; the house waited. That clean and empty kitchen, those subzero fridges, that big garage: so easy to inhabit a house like that again, if you know how. So easy to step back into that old order.

  And so easy to relapse, too, if you know how. Addiction is a culture; addiction takes knowledge, like any other way of life. You have to know how to operate in that culture, how to trade, what things cost, what doctors will help, how to keep safe.

  —

  Before they relapsed, Hans and Eva had stopped going to 12-step meetings. They let go of solidarity with other addicts; they became funders of addiction causes instead, flattered and praised, like all philanthropists. Perhaps in fact that was the beginning of the relapse, that lapse of solidarity, that seduction of philanthropy.

  I also don’t think that Eva believed in rehab any longer, at least for herself. I did, because there was nothing else, really. What else can you urge on a drug addict, if not rehab? And what else can you do, if you are not urging, planning, pleading, asking?

  —

  Chaos theory teaches us that the effects of small events—the beat of a butterfly’s wings—are not just unknown, they are actually unknowable, because the elements involved are too numerous and too varied. The specific course of addiction, too, is difficult to predict. People who are no more than mildly addicted sometimes succumb; people who seem lost do sometimes recover. There is always hope. And that hope is both wonderful and terrifying, because you search so desperately for what might help. Hope sucks you in. If you never give up hope, you are locked into the addiction.

  That is why Families Anonymous, the 12-step fellowship for family members of drug addicts, asks its members to recognise the limits of what they can do. The first step reads:

  We admitted we were powerless over drugs and other people’s lives—that our lives had become unmanageable.

  You can walk away from the addicts—other people’s lives. But you can’t walk away from their children.

  —

  I read my letter from June 2004 again. Those useless sentences.

  “I am writing this because I have been so worried about you for the last few months. I know it may not help, but I do feel I have to do something.”

  “Eva, you are very ill. I don’t know what it is you are taking, but I suspect it’s a cocktail of all kinds of different things. You desperately need help, and I would very much like to help you.”

  “I wonder if you are aware of how everyone in the family, and all your friends, are extremely concerned about you.”

  “I think you are in a frightening state where anything could happen—the illness, as we call it, has come back.”

  “The problem is that the descent into rock bottom is so long if you live the kind of life we do. Propped up by nannies and staff one could go on in a twilight existence of alcohol and pills for years. There are enough posh and sordid doctors in London to prescribe you with whatever you want.”

  “Please know that I am on your side—I know it’s not easy for you.”

  “You were so strong in your recovery, Eva�
�I remember that. So articulate about the process, so active in helping others gain access to the kinds of treatments you had, so centered and so compassionate.”

  “When I said to you you should be an addiction counsellor I wasn’t joking, or flattering you—you would be wonderful at it.”

  “So please please don’t think I see this as a moral failing on your part. And know, finally, that I am there for you, on your side. Whatever you need, whatever I can do, I will help you with.”

  “I don’t want to invade your privacy, but neither do I want to see you slide downhill while everybody looks on, saying nothing. It—life, I suppose—doesn’t have to be like this.”

  “With very much love.”

  —

  Grasping at the dull straws of recovery-speak.

  —

  Who did I become over the course of those hundreds of letters, texts, emails, conference calls, and conversations? A guardian; a team with my sister, with our husbands. A guardian and a guard, perhaps. Individual letters and random conversations became a process; the process gathered momentum.

  —

  I ponder that first step.

  —

  We admitted we were powerless over drugs and other people’s lives—that our lives had become unmanageable.

  —

  I became a prisoner of hope, and a prisoner of addiction.

  But if I hadn’t engaged, who would I then have become?

  —

  Judging by this particular letter, by the summer of 2004 we didn’t realise that Hans had relapsed, too. But sickness was in the air: a kind of hovering malaise.

  In September of that year, Hans came to visit us in Sussex with the children. It was very hot. In the evening the children devised and put on five or six short plays for us, morbid and enticing little horror stories. Eric, Hans, and I sat at the kitchen table, clapping and laughing. The next day, my diary records, was hot and hazy. Hans was nebulously ill.

  I feel sick, like Hans, I’d written.