by Tara J Lal
I wasn’t aware of the burden of responsibility Jo felt after Mum died. She was in her final year of school, studying for her A-levels. She had wanted to take a year off to go travelling after her exams but she sacrificed it to be there for us. With no idea of the pressure she was under, I saw only my world and her absence, and I wanted her to fill the gap that Mum had left. Like Adam, I strived for her approval and her love.
I searched for a rock, anything stable to help me keep my head above water. It was as if the rocks were all covered in slippery moss, so that every time I placed my hand upon one, it found a way to rid itself of me, sending me back into the murky water, gasping for air. I kept looking desperately for a solid handhold or foothold, so that I could draw breath. I found Adam.
He was the loose rock upon which I tentatively placed my foot so that I could haul myself out of the water and begin to climb my mist-shrouded mountain. I clung to him, for when I looked below I saw the abyss. We didn’t talk about Mum, we simply loved and cared for each other.
* Many years later, with the support of a very good psychotherapist, I learned that I could redefine my relationship with my mum. That just because someone dies, it doesn’t mean the relationship ends. It’s never too late to work on the relationships we have with our family and those we love, whether they are living or dead.
CHAPTER 9
Adam and I shared a unique bond. Only my brother understood. It was as if, floating in our individual spheres of grief, we each held on to a small branch, which connected us and prevented us floating entirely alone. I have one artwork at home, a picture called The Art of Life by artist Karen Mason. It is a painting of two hot-air balloons, one side lit up by the sun, the other side dark. In each basket stands a person. Each is reaching out to the other. They do not touch, and the balloons are separate, but there is a cord that runs between the two. Adam and me.
One day, Adam came home limping. I asked him what had happened.
‘I hurt my foot,’ he said, without looking at me.
‘Yeah, I can see that, but how did you hurt it?’
I could tell he was embarrassed.
‘I sort of … kicked a door.’
I burst out laughing. ‘Always good to pick a fight with a door.’
He smiled.
I found out later what had happened. Dad had left his keys at the cinema. Adam had told him to go back and find them. Dad had said he didn’t want to walk back up the road, he’d get the locks changed instead. That was it. The point when Adam’s frustration boiled over and he’d kicked the door. It was only a small thing yet it signified so much more. It was a sign that all the turbulence and anger in my brother was metastasizing.*
I loved to be around Adam. Most of the time he let me join in, though sometimes I managed to wind him up.
One Saturday morning I came and sat on the couch beside him while he watched the sport.
‘Ad, I’m bored …’
‘Go read a book.’
‘Talk to me …’
‘I’m watching football.’
I nudged him for a reaction, only I missed, and hit him where it hurt.
‘Fuck, Tara!’ His face was screwed up in pain. ‘Why do you always spoil it?’ But even as he said it I knew he was joking. He loved me as much as I loved him.
His favourite party trick was to get me to arm-wrestle his friends. He took great pleasure in watching his little sister beat them all. He always had time for me, always made me feel special. Adam had an incredible ability to do that for people.
If I was bullied, he would step in. If one of his friends fancied me, he would warn him off. We were proud of each other, protective.
Adam was the golden boy of our neighbourhood. As well as being smart, he was agile and strong, and good at rugby and cricket. I loved to watch him run up our street, ducking and diving, throwing dummies to each tree.
Boys wanted to be like him. Girls wanted to be with him, and they would stand at the top of the hill every morning, waiting to see Adam cycle past, giggling and flirting with him, much to his embarrassment.
I started going to the pub with my brother. I became ‘someone’: an avenue for girls to get to him. Adam was engaging and funny, with a quirky sense of humour but, although everyone liked to hang out with him, he felt the falseness of the Hampstead social scene, as did I. While Adam was a part of it because of the school he went to and because he was beautiful, he never felt at ease with it. He had an earthy genuineness about him which sat uncomfortably with the air kisses and affectedness of those around him. Like me, he struggled to belong:
Okay, so let’s see. I like to buy the clothes that I have on tonight because I see myself in a particular image. Now, is it because I, myself, like these clothes or is it because other people will see me in a particular way, which is not necessarily what I am? Can I answer? I suppose it must be the second because that is the one I would least like to admit to.
It was no surprise when Adam was made head boy at his school, and even less of a surprise that he never told us. He was a straight-A student, gifted in everything he did, but his drive and perfectionism came at a cost. The letter my mother had written to him before she died added to my brother’s burden, something she couldn’t have foreseen when she wrote it.
My dear Adam,
I don’t know when you will read this, but you are fifteen as I write it. I am very proud of you and love you dearly and want you to know that. You will have most of your life still before you and it makes me very sad to realize I have shared so little of it with you. I presume you will miss me, but once all of you have recovered from your sadness I hope you will pick up the threads of your lives again, piece them together in a meaningful way and gradually, when the grieving is over, the happy memories will sustain you.
You have a special place in my life, Adam. A mother’s only son inevitably makes her proud and full of expectation and hope. We have tried as you know to give you the sort of education that we thought you could benefit from, but it has been difficult for me as you know I have a socialist philosophy and do not believe in an elitist society. On the other hand, I do believe that a chap’s potential should be encouraged and developed to the full and you have plenty of that. Diligence and single-mindedness and a sense of direction will, I am sure, achieve for you a university place. I’m sure that is your aim as well as Dad’s and mine and of course whatever you do afterwards is up to you. I have always nursed a dream that my son should go to Oxbridge, specifically, I think, because it is something in the family that nobody has yet achieved. Maybe you will be the first to do so! But wherever you go, enjoy your university days – alas Dad will find it hard financially but you will get a grant and you will simply have to live on it, but then lots of chaps do.
Always in life, the more you put into it the more you will get out of it, and always remember that whatever you do, you are part of the community, the wider world, and every citizen has a responsibility toward that community, to care, to give and to take a share in responsibility for it.
You will, I am sure, be able to help Dad a lot – he will need it. Jo will be able to cope herself, but Tara will need all of you. Do help each other all you can and try to see each other’s needs. I have trusted Jo through her adolescence and I trust you too. Above all, Adam, be happy and fulfilled.
Goodbye my son and good luck.
All my love
Mum
Adam read these words often, and he held them close to him, just as I did mine. The message was clear: he must fulfil his mother’s expectations; he must go to Oxford; he must be responsible and give to the community; he must help Dad and look after his sister. Mum had unwittingly passed a poisoned chalice to her son, full of her own hopes and dreams. She had written the letter in good faith, pouring out the love of a mother for her son, striving to give a lifetime of guidance in those few lines. But she had also planted a seed of unimaginable pressure, which Adam carried: a constant, heavy load upon his young shoulders. The words were expresse
d in one instant of one day in my mother’s life, yet for my brother they coloured his whole life. Adam took those words and chose them to guide him through the confusion of adolescence, his search for identity and his place in the world.
* There is now evidence, particularly in boys and men, that kicking or punching a solid inanimate object, such as a door, wall or tree, is a form of non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). NSSI is a mal-adaptive coping strategy and indicates the person is struggling to cope with difficult emotions. It is important to address it and seek guidance from a mental health professional.
CHAPTER 10
I walked into Adam’s room at home. I took in the array of papers, books and empty coffee cups strewn across the desk. He had just taken the Oxford entrance exam.
‘How was it, Ad?’
He shrugged. ‘Bloody hard. I think I stuffed it.’
‘You didn’t want to go there anyway. You’ll have much more fun if you go to Edinburgh.’
He looked angry with himself.
I should have known better. Adam was granted a place at Balliol College, Oxford, to study chemistry, just as Mum and Dad had hoped. He remained indifferent, humble in his achievements, unsure of his direction.
He took a gap year before starting university, travelling first to France to learn French, and later to India. I missed my big bro terribly. I was still at school, studying for my A-levels. It was just Dad and me in the house now. Mother’s Day was always tough but this year particularly so. I felt empty and alone, wishing Ad was there. He was in Grenoble, in France. He had just finished reading Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence. In his diary he scribbled a quote from the book.
Mother’s Day, 1988
For me …
‘They could not establish between themselves and an outsider just the ordinary human feeling and unexaggerated friendship; they were always restless for something deeper. Ordinary folk seemed shallow to them, trivial and inconsiderable. And so they were unaccustomed, painfully uncouth in the simplest social intercourse, suffering and yet insolent in their superiority. Then beneath was the yearning for soul-intimacy to which they could not attain because they were too dumb, and every approach to close connection was blocked by their clumsy contempt of other people. They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.’
Just as I did, on Mother’s Day Adam yearned more than ever for intimacy, for connection, for something deeper. He read voraciously, seeking in books an expression of those things he found difficult to describe himself:
Oh God, how I wish that my reality was in the stories I read. Again, understandably so, as Dostoyevsky says. Is not their reality a truer one? Are we not merely their diluted forms? Unable to speak the feelings they pronunciate.
In books Adam found a tenuous link to his own reality, a reality that he could not express to the world. I didn’t feel I belonged. Neither did my brother. He scorned himself for his inability to connect with those around him. For me, I found that connection in him.*
He came home from France and for a few happy months I had my bro back as he saved money to travel to India, took his little sister out to the pub and explained electrode potentials to her on an almost daily basis. In July he travelled to India with his best friend Dan and his journal.
I missed him terribly. The house felt empty without him, but he sent postcards and letters full of his quirky humour, addressing mine to ‘the big little one’.
My dear, dear little sister,
I don’t actually see why I should be writing to you as I believe I have never received any correspondence from you in the whole of my life, have I, Snoobie? Wait … Actually somewhere from the depths of my memory I do remember a ‘Hi, having a great time. Love Ta.’ Hmmm … Yes, well, I hope this letter can be equally … precise! Anyway, Plopper, I hope that Greece was not too outrageous and that nothing of any improper nature occurred, ie the partaking of alcohol, drugs and men, and that the cultural experience was fully appreciated, this of course being the purpose of the visit. That leaves me with just one last thing to say Teej. Err … you know the 16th of September, very ordinary sort of a day, sort of a nice day … Err, my birthday (I didn’t think you’d forget). Well, seeing as I’ll be on a bloody Indian train to Delhi, I thought it might be nice if on the 18th when I get back, I might have a nice meal waiting for me or something like that – wouldn’t that be nice, eh Ta? Yeh, I thought you’d like the idea. Shit, no space. Anyway, see you then.
Love Big Bro
I laughed. I didn’t see that he was reaching out to me. There had been one occasion, when Mum was ill, when we had all forgotten Adam’s birthday. About halfway through the day he’d quietly reminded us. ‘I’m getting to be a big boy now,’ he’d said. My mother was guilt-stricken and horrified. Since then it had always been a family joke. I scribbled an equally light-hearted note back:
I might possibly manage to have dinner waiting for you when you get back if you’re very nice …
I smiled, teasingly. He didn’t sound unhappy. He scrawled in his diary:
Soon I will be twenty. My teenage years will have merged into the past, but in essence I will be the same. As always a birthday indicates no change in the individual, but merely what is expected of him or her by others. To me, twenty is old. It sounds like an age of maturity, but, God, how young I feel to fill its shoes. Well, time passes and, as Nehru says, the present is a culmination of the past and future and all three states we must experience as flowing into the other in order to appreciate life to its full. So, really, age is a nonsensical concept for it only describes the one tense of present.
Adam had been to India the previous summer on a school trip trekking in the Himalayas. I knew how much India fascinated him, how free he was of the pressure he felt in London. Yet this year was different. Gone was the carefree fascination, replaced with an intense dark shroud:
I am still feeling that great vacant misery that I left with, and what it is due to, I don’t fully understand. All life everywhere in the world suddenly seems small and insignificant, a place where everything is strange and somehow pathetically sad. One could die here and nobody would notice. God, I want some company. I want to see Jo and Ta, and Dad, sweet little Daddy.
While I cried, Adam wrote, and read, and kicked the occasional door. India triggered his analytical mind. At nineteen years old he questioned life relentlessly, haunted by his mother’s dying wishes.
I see that your life is as you yourself mould it, but in a way it makes me fearful. I question: can I really be that individual? Can I really do what I am capable of? Am I worthy of the opportunities I have? Here in India, all around me I see enthusiasts. People following what they want, not questioning and so confusing their own minds with doubts as to whether they might achieve or be considered to have achieved what they intended. Theirs is a love of life for life’s sake itself.
Anyway, I know myself what I should do. I must throw off this doubt and find the courage to make attempts at things, no matter the results. I am not a courageous man, but so long as I am aware of this, then hopefully I shall make myself one. Not a natural courage, but through practice maybe it shall become so. Step forth into the world. I owe so many people, I cannot fail them.
Adam thought he should be perfect. That was what the world expected and what his mother expected. Anything less was not good enough. Although he was travelling with Dan, he didn’t divulge his anguish to him. Only in his writing did he do that as he struggled to make sense of the world.
Whenever words strike me at the heart, I myself am struck by a weeping sadness. I see through a crystal window how vapid my efforts at describing living and wearing life have been. Any fated moments of elucidation have been bent by the concourse of time, twisted and lost in the numbing canals of memory.
To have painted truth in words that are the very shadows of my soul, to write, to imagine and to be …
No one knew of his inner turmoil. He kept it hidden. People on the outside saw only the vibrant, caring, compassionate Adam, the boy who halted his own ascent of a mountain on a school trip in the Himalayas to go back and render assistance to his teacher, helping him to conquer the summit that had defeated him in previous years; the boy who steadfastly cared for his sister and his friends. This was the Adam that those close to him saw.
Only his writing betrayed the dichotomy between the face he showed to the world and the conflicted, questioning, internal Adam. He searched relentlessly … for understanding, for purity, for clarity.
I feel at the moment – the draining in the stomach as if my natural humanness is filtering away. Please pray that I do not, once more, become the sterile alien. God, I want to be furious, but this half-baked, half-there, half-worried, half-relaxed mind and heart of mine will not let pure feeling through.
He arrived home from India just a few days after his twentieth birthday. I had missed him dreadfully and was counting the days until his return.
When he walked in, I was shocked. It wasn’t only the traditional Indian clothes he was wearing that made him look a stranger: his face looked hollow-eyed and ashen. My bubble of excitement burst instantly, giving way to a frightening sense of impending doom.
‘How come you’re so late?’
‘I got searched at the airport. They found a pipe in my bag so they strip-searched me. They read my diaries.’
‘Ad, you’re shaking,’ I said, confused and worried.
His face was vacant, as if he wasn’t there. The person in front of me didn’t feel like my brother.