Mayhem

by Sigrid Rausing

  I read that, and think about denial.

  I feel sick, like Hans.

  Why didn’t I see it?

  And why didn’t I see it before, when Hans was living in my Islington flat in the late 1980s? We were in our mid-twenties. Hans had left one of his many rehabs. My mother thought it would be a good idea if he stayed with me for a while. He relapsed straightaway, and none of the signs of drugs spoke to me: the plates of rotting food, his reclusion and passivity, the sweet and rancid smell of heroin smoke.

  And then he left.

  —

  Why didn’t I see it before that, when he came back from India in 1983? He was twenty. His hip bones jutted out, his upper arms were thinner than his wrists, he had cut his own hair. He was in hospital, eating bagfuls of wine gums, hooked up to a drip. He had a stomach parasite, he claimed.

  Perhaps he did.

  The doctors and nurses looked on and said nothing.

  —

  My sister Lisbet, who read this book in manuscript, wrote a comment in the margin at this point. “Why would we see it,” she wrote. “What did we know about mental illness, or tropical diseases, or drug addiction.”

  It occurs to me that this is true. When Hans came to stay with me in Islington, I had started work on my PhD. I had a life—the beginnings of an independent life, the beginnings of a career. How did we, as a family, conceive of addiction, I wonder now. How could it have been left to me to deal with a young person with a potentially fatal emotional illness; a condition so existentially threatening, and one which we knew so very little about? Did we think this was going to be a passing phase? Did we think he would sort himself out?

  He had no help. I had no help. We lived in my beautiful though somewhat dilapidated maisonette on Liverpool Road in Islington. After some months I asked him to leave.

  He didn’t leave. Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps he didn’t have the energy or the impetus. Perhaps he had nowhere to go.

  By the time I asked him to go, he had stopped washing. By the time I asked him to go, I still hadn’t understood that this was about drugs, even though I was fully aware that he had just come out of a rehab. Such was the power of my denial.

  He didn’t leave when I asked, but he remained in his room afterwards. It was a small room, that second bedroom, a child’s bedroom, I guess, at some point. He stayed in that room like a neglected child, dirty and dishevelled, with a distracted sister for a mother.

  The defining condition of being a sibling is this: you see through each other. You get it. You think you get it. You are more impatient than maternal. But how spectacularly wrong I got it.

  And maybe it was just a good place for him to stay, a convenience. Perhaps that’s what I never understood, with my excess of emotion, my sentimental empathy, my existential angst.

  I thought he was still my little brother, a kid with a sweet milk moustache, chocolate powder under dirty fingernails. I felt so guilty about his small room, about asking him to leave because he was not cleaning his room again, not doing the dishes, again. I didn’t see that he had grown up.

  And maybe he hadn’t. In some ways he was still that messy child. But the chocolate powder had turned into heroin, a dark and sticky substance under his fingernails.

  *

  When we were children, during term time, Hans would watch television for hours: Czechoslovakian cartoons, Astrid Lindgren adaptations, M*A*S*H, Starsky & Hutch, punctuated with scenes from Swedish TV studios with their bland presenters, potted plants on low brown tables, or sometimes just a clock, ticking, ticking, ticking.

  This was in our townhouse in Lund, on the top floor. On the wall was a climbing frame. We climbed and hung; we played don’t-touch-the-floor, stretching from sofa to table to climbing frame to chairs. We played horses on the stiff back cushions on our ’60s sofa, striped in brown and beige and cream.

  My brother and I dripped wax from burning candles onto cartoons in the attic to make wax prints, a red toy bucket of water next to us. Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse; how nice it was to drip the melting candle wax, flame oozing, wax stiffening and turning white, drawing up the image from the print on the page underneath.

  Our Dutch au pair, the daughter of a professor friend of the family, picked mushrooms with us in the woods; we sat at the rough stone table on the lawn of our weekend house cleaning them. My parents were away, but some friends came by and found us there, placidly brushing grass and earth from the poisonous mushrooms we were about to cook and eat for lunch.

  Random memories; hidden dangers.

  School was a prison, we had to endure it, but then we were free. At weekends Hans and I played poker and five hundred with multiple decks of cards; I made up new rules when we got bored. We threw our cards down with a certain panache; we made bets with matches; we aimed, and failed, to learn the cool shuffle. But in town Hans was more quiet than me, more likely to watch television, while I taught Kol, our dog, to run by my bicycle—nose high sniffing the air, tail in a jaunty arc—and Lisbet read in the town library.

  Who was he meant to be, this quiet child?

  Lisbet and I became academics because my mother had been an academic. We gave it up, as she gave it up. We were not conscious of her as a role model, but of course she was: we map our lives with reference to our parents and to our culture.

  But who could my brother model himself on? He couldn’t become my father in a meritocratic society like Sweden.

  —

  Heroin is a very loving drug, someone tells me. I can believe that. “A precious substance whose unadvertised charm was love,” Victor Lodato wrote about crystal meth in his short story “Jack, July.” The love of the drug, the safety of the drug, replace, some therapists believe, parental love and safety. But what if that absence of love is linked to an inherent inability to receive and process love, an emotional lack, a born or acquired deficit? Born and acquired, perhaps.

  My brother stayed with me through the summer, that time in my Islington flat in the late 1980s. Then, one day in August or September, he was suddenly gone.

  I had no idea where he was, and heard nothing. His small room haunted me. I cleaned it, but it was still a rebuke, as though I had imprisoned him there. And like a neglected city after a revolution, I shut down, bit by bit. A button fell off my coat; I didn’t replace it. My underwear turned grey; my socks developed holes; my shoes were old. Newspapers blew across the road; the lorries thundered up towards Holloway and the north; I went for long and aimless walks.

  I was sad, but I was able to carry on with my work. I saw friends. I called my parents. Lisbet sent thick manila envelopes of newspaper cuttings about this or that, matters of interest, from America; she was at Harvard then.

  We waited.

  —

  In February the following year my mother drove down to the village in Sussex to see about a cheque that didn’t seem right. This sentence looks so normal on the page, but in fact my mother rarely, if ever, went to the village. The idea that she would personally go and see about a cheque that didn’t seem right is so out of character that her decision to do so seems almost psychic. Because there, in the bank, was my brother, waiting in line. He had come over from Amsterdam to get cash; he was living there. And my mother took him home.

  —

  My mother is from the north. Mysticism lingered there: some women were healers and could stem blood, even over primitive phone lines—the ability to stop bleeding was a useful knack in the deep forests of northern Sweden, where forestry workers sometimes had terrible accidents. My grandmother was of Finnish extraction, descended from the seventeenth-century Finns who were given poor marshland to settle the Swedish middle north. Their villages were accessible only in winter, when the marshes froze. The inhabitants were almost self-sufficient—early on they even made their own guns from marsh iron.

  But Sweden was changing. My grandmother wanted to study chemistry at Uppsala University, but then her father died, and with his death her chance of a university education died, to
o. For a while she taught in the remote Finnish villages in the marshy badlands. These were rough places. She bought a gun and made sure that the men noticed her daily target practice. Later she told stories of men stabbed for cheating at cards; of whole families dying of tuberculosis; of the hunger in the north during the First World War.

  My grandmother was formed by mysticism and modernism, one tugging at the other. And on the day long ago—it must have been in the 1930s or 1940s—when her brother swallowed all the sleeping pills the nurses had counted out for him night after night in hospital, she sensed his decision long before the hospital called.

  *

  In Amsterdam, my brother had put himself on methadone to try to wean himself off heroin. The methadone was giving him blackouts: he was calm, but absent. My mother got him into another rehab, a rural one this time. She went to see him there every Sunday, as did I. We took part in the weekly family meeting, when family members visited their addicts and alcoholics, their anorexic girls and compulsive eaters, their sex addicts and compulsive gamblers, and shared their anxiety and grief and anger. The addicts had to take it: family members had taken it for years, walking on eggshells, cautiously setting new boundaries that were broken again and again, and now they were dishing it out. We were purged at the meetings, before walking back into our own lives.

  —

  My brother got better there, and as he got better, I got worse. This time my depression was no longer like a bleak postrevolutionary dilapidation. Now it was a palpable presence, possessing me. A cold claw held me by the throat. This malevolent being plotted to kill me, to throw me off the roof, to stab me. It held me captive where I was.

  My academic work ground to a halt, and my professor called me. I stalled on the telephone; couldn’t place that so very familiar voice, a kind voice. Someone who was obviously trying to help me, but who? My deeply preoccupied mind failed to recognise him for several minutes, or perhaps seconds.

  My cousin, whom I liked, came for dinner with his wife; I had forgotten and panicked when they rang the doorbell. I took them to the Indian restaurant around the corner; a great effort. I got through it, but only just.

  Everything was a cover-up. Why was it so important to cover up my distress? I don’t know—but there it is. It’s easy to express vulnerability when you are strong, and almost impossible when you are not.

  —

  My power of association withered—those constant echoes of the healthy mind. You see a tree that reminds you of a childhood garden; and that game, that wild game of running from garden to garden through the town; the freedom and excitement that reminds you of America; a warm sun, a Camel cigarette; a random crab bake in New Orleans; a dark sky in Colorado; that film, that film…What was that?

  The depressed mind doesn’t echo. It is mute.

  I correct myself: my depressed mind didn’t echo.

  What do I know about the minds of others.

  —

  Lisbet kept sending those thick manila envelopes with cuttings; my mother and I kept meeting, every Sunday, for those cathartic family meetings. “And how are you, Sigrid?” the counsellors would say, looking at me thoughtfully. “This must be tough for you.” I cried and cried. That was a relief.

  In between, I could barely leave the house.

  —

  Eventually the counsellors became sufficiently concerned about my depression to suggest that I come in as a family member for residential treatment. Sometimes family members become so entangled in the addiction that they need help. This rehab occasionally took in such people and treated them much as they treated the addicts, in the same groups. My brother had to leave first, of course, for a halfway house in Weston-super-Mare. He left, and there was no bed, but one would come up in the summer, they said, or maybe later. I was on the waiting list.

  And then one quiet evening in early summer, I got a knife and cut long and shallow stripes in my arm. Drops of blood sprung up, strings of red pearls. I stood in the kitchen and cut patterns and stripes, my cat weaving in and out between my legs, miaowing, weaving, pressing herself against me. I remember considering the question of whether her reaction was an expression of concern or whether she was excited by the smell of blood.

  And then I broke. I cried until I couldn’t breathe. I rang the rehab, and a bed was found for me the next day.

  —

  I was the first patient, they said, that they had ever put on antidepressants; but the pills—this was still, at least in Britain, the pre-Prozac era—made me faint, so I stopped taking them. My brother was in Weston and wrote me a supportive letter of breezy recovery-speak. But I was not an addict, and I was by temperament and training a sceptic. There was a limit to what the place could do for me. Being around other people in a therapeutic environment helped, of course, though I felt the craving pull of knives—perhaps I was an addict after all? I knew that I was safer in the rehab than I would have been at home. And when the psychologist evaluated the psychometric tests new patients took and found that my profile matched that of an average addict—I enjoy watching fires, was one of the questions, yes or no?—he concluded that I was an addict in denial. Probably an alcoholic, since I didn’t take drugs.

  I didn’t really care. I was happy to be called anything as long as I could stay. But the false diagnosis undermined the logic of the treatment, which didn’t make sense anymore. When I read out my Life Story it was rejected by the group on the grounds of denial—not enough, if any, alcohol-related “damages” were in it: instances of neglect and harm to myself and others. In fact I didn’t drink much, and I never had drunk much. I was pliable in the beginning, then I started to withdraw my admission of alcoholism. That was a sign of sanity, but of course the counsellors and the group didn’t see it like that.

  I finally left when one of the members of the group was asked to stand on her head in the middle of the circle. She was said not to follow the group’s advice and had been threatened with expulsion. The “advice” was unfathomable—abstract and contradictory. I don’t think any of us could have summed it up. When she said she would do anything to be allowed to stay, one of the patients drawled that he wanted her to stand on her head. The counsellors did nothing; the woman, who was not young, stood on her head, briefly.

  The next day she was asked to leave anyway. That act of humiliation had been all for nothing.

  —

  I called a taxi, which took me to the station. I took the train back to London, after more than two months in that country house rehab, outings limited to one walk a week, sometimes not even that, and Sunday visits to a small stone church in the middle of a wood.

  It was late summer. London was relatively empty, yet it felt shockingly busy and aggressive. None of the strangers I saw on the street knew where I had been. I dodged the crowds awkwardly; chatted to the taxi-driver so he wouldn’t sense my disorientation. We pulled up in front of the house in Islington; I walked up the steep bare staircase to the first floor. There was my cat, narrowing her eyes, quietly noting my arrival. There were my friends who had been house-sitting. They greeted me cheerfully; we went to the kitchen. And there, on a cutting board, next to some innocent carrots and leeks, was the knife I had used to cut myself. One of my friends, still talking, picked it up.

  Time stood still for a split second. Then I bent down to my cat. Life, my life, resumed.

  *

  Rehabs are closed worlds and strange things happen there. I found it difficult to talk about it to people who hadn’t experienced it. They were often embarrassed, as though I had found religion or joined a cult. When I think about it now, I am struck by how “recovery” was really linked with getting to know people, with moving so quickly from the status of stranger to the intimacy of the group. People came in unknown and messed up: addicts with a swagger and empty eyes; bulimics humble and self-effacing; anorexics calmly controlling, surveying the room; alcoholics with their loud and raspy voices, their narrative knack; troubled family members smiling nervously. We were all imp
rinted on the group like newborn ducklings. We had a schedule of meetings of various kinds; we walked around and around the garden; we sat and talked by the vegetable plot; people smoked, endlessly.

  Sundays were unsettling. Now I could see how hard the family meetings were from the other side, and how the counsellors framed the meeting to protect us. Sunday evenings were subdued and serious, with a weekly open 12-step meeting—anyone could come but mostly the participants were former patients and those amongst the counsellors who themselves were in recovery.

  And knowing the fallibility of the group method and the limitations of the treatment, I still believed in rehab for Hans and Eva. It’s like believing in school for children: there are few alternatives.

  —

  I gradually got better, and resumed my PhD. But I was still fractured, still given to overidentifying with the fates and lives of others. It hadn’t just been my brother. Earlier on, that flat in Islington had harboured a friend with severe anorexia, followed by another one who had become an alcoholic. I was trying to help. I was well intentioned, but my boundaries were so fragile.

  After the rehab I tried to get by. I moved to another flat; I covered up how distressed I was and hid my panic attacks—time and time again I thought I was dying, my mouth numb, my mind faint with anxiety.

  —

  A few years later, in 1993, I went to Estonia, to a tired modernist village in a former border protection zone. I lived there for a year, conducting fieldwork for my PhD on the process of de-collectivisation. The state of the country mirrored my own internal state: there was little or no welfare and no viable security forces. People grappled with the effect of censorship and Stalinist repression—Estonia was marked by history and by loss of history.

  It was, however, a profoundly peaceful place. I slowly cured myself by taking long walks, by reading, and, most of all, by my research and writing. I was gripped by curiosity about that strange place and that national condition. I wrote myself out of the aftermath of depression.

  But look behind the door and it’s there.