Potentially negative connotation. I feel a wave of bitter irony.
*
Joan Didion’s novel Play It as It Lays describes the breakdown of a Hollywood actress, Maria Wyeth, in the early 1960s. Maria takes to compulsively driving up and down the freeways: “She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura.”
She would stand on the hot pavement and drink the Coke from the bottle and put the bottle back in the rack (she tried always to let the attendant notice her putting the bottle in the rack, a show of thoughtful responsibility, no sardine cans in her sink) and then she would walk to the edge of the concrete and stand, letting the sun dry her damp back.
Maria Wyeth is enacting a story where she is not alone, where there are no empty sardine cans in the sink, where she hasn’t broken down. She sleeps outside on an old rattan chaise by the pool, using beach towels for blankets to mark the temporary nature of the chaise as bed; to break the slide towards those empty cans and bottles, the point of no return. She tells herself a story about sleeping outside only until the heat breaks; until the mountain fires stop; because she is bothered by the palm fronds scraping the screens of her windows.
We tell ourselves such stories every day. We tell the story of ourselves to others. If no one listens we tell the story of ourselves into the void, or the Internet. But addicts, more than most people (and we are all somewhere on the spectrum of addiction), create stories of blame and denial: they deny that drugs are a problem, and they tend to blame others for any problems that may be undeniable in their lives. But here is a paradox: the spoken narrative is based on denial, while the enactment—addict life—is visually, and obviously, horrific.
Addicts live in a drug bubble. They are numbed by drugs and, unlike Didion’s Maria Wyeth, they don’t notice much; neglect creeps in. But I still wonder about that contradiction: are addicts unconsciously trying to draw attention to an emotional state that they are unable to express in words? Is addiction associated with a certain inarticulacy, so that instead of narrating a disturbed emotional state—I feel so awful, I am so sad, I feel hopeless—they mutely enact it, even as they deny it?
Maria Wyeth tried to act normal. What if addicts unconsciously enact a profound emotional need or disturbance while simultaneously denying it; dark and truthful ids hijacked by bright and shallow superegos?
Eva in front of the mirror, dusting the skin over her pacemaker below her collarbone with powder, making light of it. That flat square, inserted under the living skin, keeping the heart beating.
Ids hijacked by superegos. I keep coming back to the idea of the kidnap, the hostage, the prisoner. Addiction is a family disease, they say. An endlessly revolving merry-go-round of guards and hostages, addicts and family members alternating roles.
*
Remember the painting at Tate Britain, The Worship of Bacchus, by George Cruikshank? “Sacrificed at the shrine of Bacchus, father, mother, sister, brother, wife, children, property, friends, body and mind.”
Have we lost sight of the fact that somewhere in that sacrifice there is volition, or at least akrasia, the deficiency of will described by Walter Mischel? Recovering addicts know that before you reach the point of no return there are many turns in the road. The strength of the 12-step programs is that they combine an emphasis on that moral journey with a principled lack of moralising, or judgemental blaming. The disease model bypasses the question of blame and guilt, ignoring the whole thorny issue of causation, which so often leads addicts to speculation and self-pity, to blame and denial. True recovery is a profoundly ethical journey, finding meaning and dignity through solidarity and restitution. Without that, there may be a cessation of drinking or substance use, but there is no real recovery.
—
I sound so moralistic, so prim—so proud of the neat fences, the geraniums on the windowsill.
The finger wags and wags.
But I don’t know how else to talk about it.
—
How do you write about addiction? How do you disentangle it from rebellion, or from social protest? The drug user is marking her body, she’s leaving home. It’s an adventure; then she steals and lies—she has to, to get by. Marks on the body, marks on the soul. She is not an addict yet; or maybe she is. How many people who use drugs turn into addicts?
We are snared in language and in traditions; the history of protest, the history of drugs. The 1970s runaways on the streets of San Francisco thought they were free, but then hard drugs hit them, and sexual abuse and HIV hit them. Some ended up with grey teeth and scarred arms in seedy rooms in the Ambassador Hotel: everything their parents, those imaginary hectoring and oppressive figures, grimly predicted.
They were not free, those runaways, were they?
Or maybe they were, for a while.
*
Eva’s grandmother lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I always used to imagine Eva there, too, in her Chanel suits and high heels, bedraggled but glamorous, a hint of chronic anorexia and too many prescription pills, shopping on Madison Avenue, white wine at lunch, gossip and occasional cheques for select good causes.
—
It could have been.
—
I lie on my window seat watching the trees, watching the Heathrow planes cross the sky punctuating time, one after the other, one after the other.
—
Why couldn’t it have been?
—
There was a song in my head that awful year: “The Carnival Is Over.” Not a song I really knew, but I found myself humming it, over and over. Such is the stuff our ids are made of—that is both thrilling and disappointing, in equal measure.
Two years later, I finally looked it up—the Seekers released it in 1965. They are mannered and slightly ironic in this 1967 recording; they are standing on a space age stage, before boarding a silver airplane. Their voices are steady and clear.
It’s so kitschy. And yet I cry hearing it.
Say goodbye, my own true lover
As we sing a lover’s song
How it breaks my heart to leave you
Now the carnival is gone
High above, the dawn is waking
And my tears are falling rain
For the carnival is over
We may never meet again
But the carnival is not really over. The carnival can always start again—the caged animals, the helter-skelter, the spun sugar and the music, the screams and the lights and the dark, the innocence and the guilt, the genetic thread running through us, weaving in and out of generations.
—
I watch myself. I watch my son. I watch my nieces and nephews. I watch for signs. They know this.
And perhaps the process of observation skews that which is being observed. I am watching for signs of addiction, but I also know that most people in distress will enact their diagnosis. A few people with psychiatric diagnoses become catatonic, but most of us, distressed or not, are more malleable.
Would we be better off if we assumed that this will never happen again? Are we creating a family model of addiction; an expectation of dysfunction?
These endless questions. The fate of families of the distressed is to always wonder what you have done, and what you haven’t done.
12
In the autumn of 2012 I wrote to Hans in hospital, describing a dream I’d had. I hadn’t seen him yet—he wasn’t ready to see any of us. I dreamt that he was in a hotel, doing rehab. I saw him there. It was, as in real life, the first time I had seen him since 2008. His room was a suite, not big; the term “junior suite” was in my mind. At the back of the small living room was a black leather sofa, and sprawled on that sofa was a woman I knew to be his psychiatrist, a dream character lying with her back to me, bare stockinged feet up. Her high-heel shoes were on the carpet. Someone else—a lawyer or adviser—was in the room, too.
There was a certain di
sorder in the room, a frightening lack of boundaries. Hans welcomed me, but not warmly. Then he made chocolate milk with chocolate powder. It was messy.
The dream ended with a plane laboriously taking off. There were too many people on board, including a little girl who seemed to have no parents.
All the people we were meant to trust I didn’t trust—the psychiatrist with her high heels, on the sofa, the adviser in the room. The chocolate powder and the child; the heroin and the addict. I had lost faith in our advisers, and like children with attachment disorders I kept my own counsel.
*
Six months later, I take my youngest nephew, then twelve, for lunch with my parents.
He is reluctant to come but finally does, with the promise that he can drive up our drive and down my parents’ longer drive. “Anyone who can drive a go-cart can basically drive,” I say before we set off, to encourage him. He has never driven before, but he can do it, easily. He brought his slingshot, also, to show my father.
My nephew is interested in science, and at lunch we talk about the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang, Einstein, and Schrödinger’s cat. My father hears nothing my nephew says, and I repeat everything in my loudest, clearest voice. My father’s lips are bloody from a treatment of precancerous cells; he is frail.
After lunch we go out to watch my nephew shoot his slingshot. “Shoot the girl!” my father says whimsically, pointing to a naked bronze statue whose hand trails the water of a fountain. My nephew shoots, and misses. “He wants to protect the girl, unconsciously,” I say, filling a silence as I do. My father leans on my arm, so tall and not quite steady, nearly ninety. I feel such affection for him, such a sense of longing, even though he is right there, his large dry hand on my arm.
*
The months after Eva died I went over the sequence of events in my mind, over and over again. I wanted to know exactly what had happened. In the beginning we had few facts, but all our assumptions turned out to be true. It was such a simple story: Eva had died of heart failure, as she herself had predicted many times that she would.
The inquest, which took place in December 2012, told us more. We learnt that Eva had been identified by the fingerprint on her left thumb and the serial number of her pacemaker. This was set at 65 beats per minute. On December 1, 2011, it recorded 334 beats per minute over a five-second period. On January 4, 2012, it recorded four episodes of a heartbeat between 233 and 366 beats per minute. On May 7 there were nine episodes of between 180 and 384 beats per minute.
I take my own pulse. Sixty-six beats per minute. I divide 334, the heartbeat of the five-second December 2011 episode, with 60, and multiply it with 5, and get 27.83. I try to drum twenty-seven times on my arm over five seconds, but I can’t. I mumble a count, to see if I can count twenty-seven times over five seconds, but it’s not possible. I get to eighteen or nineteen at most, counting as fast as I can. How can a heart beat so fast?
Each episode, presumably, is an inhalation of crack or cocaine.
At 7:23 a.m. on May 7 the rhythm of Eva’s heart became chaotic. This was likely to have been the time of her death.
The pacemaker carried on, as pacemakers do.
*
She was found two months later, on Monday, July 9, 2012, after a policeman had stopped Hans for driving erratically across Wandsworth Bridge. There was a crack pipe in the car (a warm crack pipe, we heard) and a bag of letters addressed to Eva. There was heroin and cannabis in the car, too. When the police asked Hans if he knew where Eva was, he initially said, eyes welling up, that she was in California.
The officer, who was giving evidence at the inquest, said that Hans appeared “dishevelled” and “vacant.” He suspected that drugs were involved, but he was also concerned about the letters addressed to Eva in the car and, potentially, a missing person case. The police initiated a Section 18 search of the house.
Section 18 is the part of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 that covers police entry and search after arrest. An officer authorising (or being informed of) a search must make a written record of two things: the grounds for the search and the nature of the evidence that is sought. A suspicion of drugs, in this instance and no doubt in many others, gives the police an easy legal reason to search premises.
So the police turned up at Hans and Eva’s house on that July day. They were taken to the first floor by staff. They noted that the house was immaculate and asked where Mr. Rausing slept. The housekeeper made a phone call before replying; it was clear that the housekeepers were not allowed in the bedroom. The officers went up to the second floor in the lift.
They noticed a smell of decomposition.
They walked into the bedroom. The policeman described it as looking like a “squat,” “in a state of disarray.” The bed was covered by a blue tarpaulin and several television screens. They saw a second door with duct tape around it and became concerned that someone might be held prisoner. They removed furniture and pulled the tape off, but found nothing sinister in the room next door.
They cleared away the televisions and some drawers on the bed and removed the tarpaulin. Underneath were blankets, duvets, and clothing, all covered in a white powder, perhaps some sort of deodorising powder. After many layers had been removed, they saw blond hair.
*
Hans’s lawyers wrote a statement for the inquest. It seemed to have been written with the intention of minimising Hans and Eva’s drug addiction, as though that would make Eva’s death, and Hans’s act of hiding Eva’s body—the crime he was accused of—less serious. But of course Eva’s death, and the act of hiding her body, are only comprehensible in terms of the profound dysfunction of addiction. Hans could only have done what he did because of the very serious nature of his addiction.
The statement outlined Hans’s early addiction in one sentence. He was said to have attended rehab and “overcome” his illness. He and Eva married in 1992, had four children, and enjoyed a close relationship. On New Year’s Eve 1999 Eva drank champagne, and Hans also (subsequently) began to drink. They were drinking and smoking marijuana but “remained in control.” In 2007 there was a successful (and unexplained, in the statement) application for the children to be made wards of court.
From that time on, the lawyers wrote, Hans and Eva took increasing amounts of drugs, including morphine legitimately prescribed by doctors.
In August 2006 Eva Rausing had surgery to replace a valve in her heart, the statement continued. During surgery the heart was damaged, and a pacemaker had to be fitted.
In April 2012, she travelled to a rehabilitation clinic in Malibu. Then she returned home unexpectedly: it appeared that she had been asked to leave the clinic when she was found with Valium. Mr. Rausing was upset that the rehabilitation had not been successful.
The statement moved on to the events on May 7. Hans was shaving when he heard Eva slide off the bed. He saw her sitting on the floor beside the bed. She exhaled and went still. He tried to pull her up and shouted her name. She had stopped breathing, and he knew that she was dead.
He covered her up, the statement said, because he did not want to confront Eva’s death. He tried to carry on as though it had not happened; he couldn’t bear to tell her parents or the children.
—
At the time of the statement, he did not know the date of her death or how long she had been there.
*
Dr. Nathaniel Carey was the pathologist undertaking the postmortem examination of the body. At the inquest, he noted that the pacemaker was helpful in determining the time of death, though he expressed reservations about whether the time on the pacemaker was British Summer Time or GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). The coroner in charge said that it would be sufficient to establish a date of death. Dr. Carey confirmed that after the burst of nonsurvivable heartbeat, the rhythm of the pacemaker was consistent with the heart no longer functioning.
Dr. Carey, I discover, is one of the most respected senior pathologists in the U.K. He was involved in the case of
the two murdered schoolgirls in Soham, the Ipswich serial killings of prostitutes, and the death of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with polonium in London.
The coroner asked Dr. Carey about the postmortem examination. He reported that the body had been severely decomposed, limiting the scope for assessment, but that there were no obvious injuries or indications of natural disease. It was apparent that the deceased had had heart surgery. The tricuspid valve had been replaced and was functioning normally. He noted that disease of the right side of the heart commonly relates to intravenous drug abuse. A full assessment of the heart was not possible, he said, but the scarring of the heart muscles was consistent with long-term cocaine use. Dr. Carey also said that it is common for accident and emergency departments to see patients complaining of chest pains and abnormal rhythms as a result of drug abuse.
The toxicological examination of the calf muscle and liver showed that Eva had been intoxicated by cocaine at the time of death, and Dr. Carey felt it was safe to presume that it was cocaine intoxication which caused her heart disturbance. He confirmed that a pacemaker cannot prevent rhythm changes in the heart, unlike an implantable defibrillator.
On the balance of probabilities he concluded that the principal cause of death was cocaine intoxication, causing fatal arrhythmia in an already diseased and susceptible heart.
The coroner found that Dr. Carey had been able to rule out a violent death and establish that the death was not suspicious. Hans was therefore charged solely with preventing Eva’s lawful burial. She concluded, on the balance of probabilities, that Eva had died on May 7, 2012. In the body there was clear evidence of cocaine use, and silver foil and wire wool found in the hands of the deceased also indicated recent inhalation of cocaine.
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