But of course there was something wrong.
My brother had recently announced he was HIV-positive. That is, any freedom he had had to announce this had been effectively stripped from him just as his flesh was plucked from his bone when he was returned to us, from a holiday in Thailand, almost a walking skeleton.
It was happening.
The slippage of my mother’s sanity took off. When she rang me one evening, shouting down the phone, that the house was about to slide down the hill—the walls were bulging—the pipe had exploded—I knew I could avoid the issue no longer.
My mother was seriously disturbed.
For me, this was one of the most extraordinary moments in my life. I had been suckled, it seemed, by my mother’s warm practicality. She was a woman who lived for the surface of the sun. If there could have been a cathedral made out of her love for my brother and me, it would have risen up towards the organ pipes of preserved fruits and jams which stood in the top cupboards in our kitchen—each one possessing a glorious intensity of colour, promising us in the winter of our lives a foretaste of the summer to come.
My mother for me was like a summer that had been kept perpetually alive inside the preservative of her skin: she ordained warmth, and the salty taste of her skin as I licked her, or the soft blows and pats we exchanged as we moved past each other, pretending to play like cats and kittens—all of these suggested a mother who was unquestionably sane.
She was like those black and white figures on the wooden walls of church, which indicated the number of the hymns: each card was individual, spatulate, slightly worn, even faintly grubby from repeated use, but everyone within the vessel of the church knew by glancing at these numbers what hymns to turn to and so we would shuffle to our feet and open our mouths and out of our throats would flood elements of song—praise for the Lord.
O Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world
have mercy upon us
O Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world
give us peace
Everything had fallen out of sequence as we’d got older.
I’d stopped going to church after my mother tried to drag me physically along the pew, to keep up the illusion that I still received communion. My brother had become more religious, more charismatic—almost to the same degree that he was more furtively homosexual.
Our father, not in heaven, but on earth, had just died. And now, just at this moment when it seemed we had at long last got rid of the one person in our family who despised homosexuality to such an extent that the three of us had to keep our lives a perpetual secret from him—now he had gone, and we could at long last relax—this had happened.
It did not happen, it erupted.
Just like, I guess, that pipe in the garden which my mother saw out her front windows as she stared through the glass, pacing endlessly as she turned and re-turned to an insoluble problem.
Her son was dying of AIDS.
She who had never admitted to her friends that her two sons were gay, could hardly call on them for help.
Of course she went mad.
It was probably impossible not to.
When I think of this period, I don’t see it as a sequence, I see it in the erratic movement, the stop-go, the sudden loss of control, the wild and frightening freefall, the stripping of the gears, the longterm damage to the engine which comprises slippage.
My brother’s state of mind, as could be expected, was fragile—instantly he was having to review his expectations. He was ambitious, successful, on his way to being rich. He had many beautiful possessions. He worked in the public service with the intensity of one who believed he could make a difference. Perhaps he was a priest in another calling? This makes him sound stiff and formal: rather he was impulsive, spontaneous in his acts of generosity and kindness—he wanted to understand, to make a difference. He believed life could improve—after all he, a runt at primary school, had had his life changed by an art teacher who gave him her art room to hide in, to paint in, to escape bullying. He changed himself as he got older into a desirable man, a man other men found handsome. He had only recently come back from Waitangi where he advised a hui which would effectively change the future of his country.
But now he was being written out.
Now, just at this point when he was about to come into his own—before he was even forty—he was having to make a rapid reassessment, the end point of which was frighteningly close.
The thing which frightened him most of all was dementia.
The trajectory of AIDS has moved so swiftly in the past decade that one has to go back to a time when there was no possible alleviation of the disease. And perhaps the worst aspect—worse than the loss of the beautiful body which gay men had made into such a virtue—was the loss of your mind. Everyone—everyone who knew someone gay, that is—had their own humiliating story of how a human being became a kind of Quasimodo of horror.
This now awaited my kind and humane brother.
He began a slippage of his own.
But before this could happen, we had to decide about what to do about my mother.
As I write this, looking back, I can hardly believe the series of decisions we made, just as I can hardly believe that the woman my mother became at this period—frantic, consumed with anxiety, always on the point of hysteria—is embedded in the same woman I know today, who has returned to her native skin, and is warm, sane, salty, wry in her perceptions, and shrewd.
My brother and I agreed to my mother undergoing a series of electric shock treatments.
How did we arrive at this decision? Both of us had been brought up on the horror of Janet Frame’s experience, on the Grand Guignol of the movies. How could we have agreed to subject a woman we both loved to such horror? Perhaps we were insane in turn. Or was it that we turned a rapt and supplicant ear to the smooth words of the doctor who urged us to accept this mode of treatment?
I remember several things.
The wattage of the light in his surgery seemed as low as in that disappointed supermarket. It had the quiet of an execution chamber, or rather, the silence of a room being prepared for an execution (or a church for a service, which isn’t so strange when you think a service is all about celebrating a man going to his execution). It was a low gabled bungalow ‘of a better sort’. The doctor had a calculating air—at least I think so, looking backwards.
We were desperate. My brother had his own causes of disquiet, and I was placed, or experiencing the novelty of existing, in an entirely unknown situation.
You see, within our family—and every family has its apportioned roles—in our family I was the weakest one, the most unstable member, the boy who must be protected. This protection had continued long into my adult life. When I went to university in England and my scholarship ran out, my mother paid my fees. When I came home, my brother, who was older than me by two years, found a house for me to live in. Somehow I was both erratic, vulnerable and at the same time promising. But above all, I needed protection.
Now, in this novel situation, I found myself the sole person left standing. When my father was dying it was me who went with him to the hospital and when they tried to push his old chicken carcass under the machine for another radiation treatment—he had taken on an elemental blankness by this time, seeming to abstract himself from the predicament of his own body—it was I who had taken the doctor aside and said, Can’t you let him die in peace? Can’t you see he’s dying? My father and I, in the nick of time, had made our peace.
My brother had avoided my father’s death. He lived in a different city anyway. At the time I couldn’t understand it, couldn’t comprehend the basis of his avoidance. He seemed full of self-importance. He told my mother our father’s funeral would have to be delayed as he had a ministerial meeting in Wellington on the designated day.
Later I could understand a little more—just as I came to understand his desperation when he wanted to go to Thailand for a break immediately after the funeral
. He cried out to my mother, ‘I need to go now, I have to!’ ‘Why do you have to?’ my mother argued. ‘Why? I need you here. I need your help.’
I can remember his whitened face in the dark of her bedroom, his unsayable truth.
He knew—he felt himself to be—running out of time.
He had had a delirious illness the previous year. He had come down to talk to me. I knew he had something to say. But by that time we had perfected our art of enamelled silences. We who had so much to say to each other, but who had turned on each other as our parents wished, could not now speak when it was so utterly important.
Yet such was the empathy of our almost twin-like sensibility that I knew—at least with hindsight—that this is what he wanted to tell me.
I am sick.
I am living on borrowed time.
I am facing the fact that I will die sometime soon.
These unspoken words existed in a space which now became filled with a kind of expanding cottonwool of hope: mantras against the impossible, rainbow-hued diets, bone ornaments, hugging pillows, attacking pillows, letting anger out, allowing love and forgiveness in, all of which he tried at least once, and with the same cleaving hope of the most hopeful—or hopeless—pilgrim.
Plague, pilgrim, madness, salvation; the terms last for ever, it is only the forms which change.
I had rung an old friend who was a doctor, to advise me about ECT. The contemporary take was that it was useful in shifting people out of psychotic states. It was no longer dangerous if administered in the correct dosage. Patients were tranquillised. And in the situation—which everyone accepted was a crisis, as my mother’s insanity was slowly sending my brother over the edge—in the situation the risks were deemed acceptable.
Thus began the series of hopeful reverses of my mother’s insanity. And it was true, after each ECT treatment, the woman who emerged was at least marginally more recognisable as the woman we had once known.
The startling trajectory of her insanity—that she had stolen money from her old boarding school, the house was collapsing, the front lawn was covered in raw sewage—all these delusions were abruptly terminated. We were pathetically grateful to be returned to the slightly frantic woman who met us now with ebullient spirits. She would sell the house immediately, buy another car, downsize so she would be ready to help if—or rather when, since the time allotted to my brother was also moving forward, disappearing in front of our eyes—my brother got sick.
But there was another side.
Like an overturned rubbish tin, her mind spewed out the garbage of the past. I, who had always loved the stories she had told—self-glamorising, always making herself into a heroine—I, an insecure boy, pathetically lacking a persona of my own, gratefully inducting myself into her religion—now I faced the heretic inside my own mother.
Listening to her apostasies, I came to comprehend that hardly any story she had told me was based on truth. Or rather, there was always an element of truth, like a grain of sand, as a basis, but the monstrous false pearl of her narrative had built up around it and obscured it. And what it covered over was so pathetically ordinary. We weren’t the gentry which the upwardly aspiring bourgeoisie always aim to be. Anyway, casting such aspersions on the hardworking, honourable and shrewd people who were my forebears was hardly creditable.
Worse perhaps was the way she tore away the shreds of decency surrounding her marriage. At that moment my brother and I didn’t need to know how little love there had been between my parents. Worst of all, that my father’s first response on hearing my mother was pregnant was that she should abort. This was especially hard for my brother to bear.
There is a very real sense of traducing her in writing this now. My mother would probably deny she ever said it. At any rate, she was not sane. She was simply shocked out of one psychotic state into another one, as the treatment returned to us a woman who was only roughly recognisable.
This envoy from hell had many tricks up her sleeve. We listened as she happily demolished our understanding of the past. Then the poor woman returned with almost a homing instinct, back into madness. The ECT would only last a certain amount of time and then her erratic responses would return. One day she sold her house to someone off the street. She had bought a townhouse in the suburb she always wanted to live in. But behind these gestures—these lunges at getting well—lay the larger, unresolved business of my brother’s impending death.
He was undeniably sick now—skeletal—it was not something you could hide.
She had just buried her husband and now she must face burying her son.
About this time my brother went insane.
*
By some division of labour my brother’s lover and friends agreed to look after him. His madness didn’t take quite the form of my mother’s—perhaps everyone has their unique form of mania. His was a folie de grandeur combined with rash acts of generosity and meanness. He was angry, resentful, bitter. He believed, perhaps quite rightfully, that he had had an unhappy childhood. His pride was also hurt. Everything was being taken from him. His looks, his body—possibly even his mind. He walked round his beautiful house, aware that the loveliness of his possessions betrayed him.
Then something extraordinary happened. My mother and brother—separately and unbeknown to each other—chose the same night to try and kill themselves.
This event—this remarkably clairvoyant act within a family which revealed how closely connected we were, even when we seemed most dramatically wrenched apart—meant that the family crisis exploded into a public dimension.
No longer for us the discreet bungalow, a private doctor, a tree-ringed hospital in a ‘good part’ of Auckland. No longer for my brother the core group of friends which allowed him to stay at home, tended in private, shielded from the public gaze. Now my mother and brother were subsumed into the public health system.
Whatever privilege we had fought for all our lives was now summarily stripped from us.
And in this stripping, our lives were saved.
It was always strange going to visit my mother on one floor of Auckland hospital then catching the lift down to visit my brother. Secretly perhaps I was getting used to the fact that, by some miracle, I had survived. Time changed for me. Priorities. I slipped out of the harness of my professional life, of being a film-maker. I stopped just about everything. Secretly, perhaps, this was a relief. The strain of completing the documentary I was working on, as well as coping with the decisions about my mother, had become all but unendurable. Yet now, looking back at this time in my life, I see it as somehow graced with a peculiar kind of magic. It may seem a strange thing to say; it was the low point, really, of my family’s existence. Yet was it? There was an almost literally grounding sense during this time. We had lived for so long with unsayable things it was a relief, in the end, that they had to be spoken aloud. And prosaically at that.
I found it very difficult, almost to the point of making me want to break out into incredulous laughter, when my mother and I were being counselled by the psychologist of Ward 15. This was nothing personal, though perhaps the fact she was at least twenty years younger than me made it all seem slightly unreal. No, what it was—as I glanced quickly into her unlined, reasonable face, the face of someone trying to understand, to help us untangle the clotted mess of family—what made me feel as if I too was briefly undergoing a form of insanity was that she expected my mother, or more to the point me, to say in a few easy sentences what had remained unsaid for almost forty years.
My mother was sitting beside me, worrying the plastic on the armchair with her fingers. Every so often she would glance at me, almost as if she was no longer certain who I was—in the way a nervous child glances at its mother, or father, uncertain about what I was going to say. Traduce. But what could I say?
How could I begin?
It was perhaps at this moment I became a writer. Or at least I began to feel the power of being a writer. At long last I had something to say. Perhaps too I w
as being forced into a form of sanity myself—a sharpening of focus. I began to see that we four, my father, mother, brother and myself, had all been on a long ride into madness. Just an ordinary, rather quiet form of madness—the madness which breathes in the suburbs at night, I guess.
But how could I tell that young woman about our stories, the mythology we built up round each other, our family, the past: the fact was that there was no one on earth more important to each of us than one another. We had a religion of family, became its servers, priests and then, ultimately—because there was no one else—its sacrifices. Well, that was over—thankfully—now.
My brother’s silver-knobbed walking stick stands as symbol of it all. When my brother got thin he began to walk with the help of a walking stick. (He also carried a more humiliating item, a bum-bag, as he called it—a rubber ring shaped like a toilet seat. All the flesh had disappeared from his buttocks. He was like a little old man, by this time—a bag of bones, I guess, is the crueller description.) But my brother was used to ordering his universe. He had what is called ‘an eye’. He could see things which other people could not. He had ended up with an exquisitely beautiful house, parsed all over, like an elegant poem on a densely white page, with plain furniture, good paintings, intriguing objets. Ever since he was a child, he had found treasure where other people had seen rubbish. Perhaps this was the revenge of a boy who was hounded by a pack. To make himself a singular world of balance and reason, order and beauty.
Now he had this disease—a disorder, an assault on rationality, a blitz on beauty—something dark, unreasoning, unpredictable even in how it might attack you. He chose to walk around leaning on a silver-knobbed black malacca walking stick. It was no accident that it was the sort of dandling stick a Victorian dandy might have had, resting lightly on his shoulder as he inspected antiquarian books. There was always an element of the showman, the shaman, in my brother. He liked to wave the stick, his magic wand. He came to terms with being an object of pity by refuting it with grandiloquence. The grand gesture became his defence. With a slim and elegant walking stick, he would fence with the Furies. But he also knew things: he knew malacca was stronger than the ugliest old- age-pensioner piece of wood, ending on a rubber shoe.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 122