Mayhem

by Sigrid Rausing

  The coroner found that Eva had died as a result of cocaine intoxication. Her tricuspid valve disease and its prior replacement were contributory factors.

  Finally, she offered her condolences to the family for the loss of a forty-eight-year-old mother, wife, daughter, and sister.

  *

  One of the purposes of official reports is to make us feel safe again. Authority is restored. The coroner takes the evidence, sifts the facts, and writes conclusions based on medical and legal experience. The inquest represented reason and sanity, and when you have lived with dysfunction and addiction for so long, reason and sanity fill you with hope, like a tribunal or truth commission after political repression. The legal process imposes order on shifting sands—the facts may be shocking, but the steady legal narratives contain the facts and make them safe. Perhaps this was the account I was looking for, the text that could be filed in the family archive.

  But in the end the authority of the inquest was not enough. My thirst for knowledge was too intense, and the story was inevitably simplified. The riddle wasn’t solved. For instance, the coroner didn’t say so, but the silver foil and wire wool in Eva’s hands indicate crack cocaine, not powder cocaine.

  Crack is cocaine mixed with water and baking soda, forming pink or brown rocks that can be smoked. I learn from the Internet that you can place the rocks on the foil and set them on fire and inhale, or you can use a glass pipe, inserting wire wool as a filter. The hit is faster and more intense than the hit of powder cocaine. The high is accompanied by a greatly increased heart rate and a risk of death from heart attack or stroke. It is followed by depression and edginess. Paranoia, anger, hostility, and anxiety are common and lasting side effects, along with severe tooth decay; damage to blood vessels, liver, kidneys, and lungs; malnutrition; confusion and psychosis.

  *

  The inside of a body.

  A body turned inside out.

  A fingerprint.

  A pacemaker, still beating its regular rhythm.

  A life, gone.

  13

  In February 2016, Channel 4 News broadcast a special report from Mombasa. The city is overrun with heroin, the reporter said; it has become the centre of a smuggling route from Afghanistan and Pakistan. The report comes with a warning: there are graphic images of drug taking and the use of needles.

  These days there are always warnings on the news. We see painful images of war and terrorism, and even so, the reporters often say, they have images they can’t show us; images that convey human suffering on a scale that we couldn’t bear. This report is not about war, and yet it shows a world fragmented—a culture addicted. Tourists have abandoned Mombasa for fear of terrorism, and three out of four young people are unemployed. Addiction is the “new normal,” the reporter says. He talks about weak maritime border controls and corruption, about drugs destined for Europe transiting through Mombasa. Some of the heroin is left behind, causing “misery for a generation.” The city is said to be “littered with heroin addicts.”

  The film team go to a drug den: that word again. What is this place? A room, a shack? Addicts sit on a cement floor. There is a man they call the “doctor”; he is missing some teeth. His eyes are slow. The men inject their legs and hands. The camera focuses on the entry point of the needle; the images are deliberately blurred; a grey digital balloon hovers over the skin. A man slowly looks up; eyes dazed with heroin.

  The men sit together; injecting. If someone has trouble finding a vein, the “doctor” helps; the “doctor” feels a vein, he gently injects.

  We meet Mohammed. He has taken drugs for twenty years, since he was fifteen. The reporter asks about people dying. Four went down last year, Mohammed says. But he himself has a protected spirit: he can’t die.

  He complains about the authorities. They don’t go for the big fish; they hassle the addicts instead. They steal their drugs and sell them on the street.

  Mohammed takes us to meet his mother, Roshana; she sits on an old sofa in a room, another cracked cement floor. He can’t remember her name. “My mum, she is called Regina,” he says softly, sitting next to her. She corrects him. “Roshana,” he repeats, nodding.

  They take out a family album. Roshana has lost four children to drugs. Her son Ibrahim was an addict and died while taking drugs, “through the nose and injections,” she says. “All my children were taken away by drugs.” She is suddenly crying. Two arms shoot into the frame of the camera to touch her, one is the son, the other the reporter, or the care worker who has fixed the visit.

  I am suddenly crying, too; the futile gentleness of those gestures. And yet it’s all we have—kindness, grace, dignity.

  “Now I am left with him alone.” Roshana rubs her hands, and raises them in a gesture of despair. “And he is a heavy drug user.” The son murmurs; the voice is not transcribed. The screen blacks out.

  —

  Four children have died; one remaining son survives, and he, too, is a drug addict. Who were those children before they got hooked on heroin? Were they unhappy, traumatised, distressed; did Roshana fail them in some fundamental way? Did they fail her? Or were they in the wrong place at the wrong time, falling into something so sweet, so delicious; so soft and loving that they didn’t even see their mother’s pain?

  They were inside the bubble; she was outside.

  Heroin, they say, is such an intensely pleasurable experience that you cease to see yourself from the outside: the foolish smile, the sleepy eyes, the dirt and disorder. There is innocence in that, but it also represents a voluntary exile from the world.

  “Hashish belongs to the class of solitary joys; it is made for wretched idlers,” Baudelaire once wrote.

  That is even more true for heroin.

  *

  Addiction is partly a learnt behaviour, I say to the children. You learn to become an addict. Marijuana is how it starts; you learn to do deals; you learn the music, the mood, the sequence of events, the aftermath.

  They don’t know how old the drug culture is. Allen Ginsberg was born the same year as my father, in 1926. The opening lines of Howl still resonate:

  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

  dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,…

  They threw up into bloody toilets; they accused the radio of hypnotism. Their madness and their drugs were entangled like a double helix; a code for an urban culture of rebellion and creativity and destruction.

  I think of Rimbaud and Verlaine. A Season in Hell. Illuminations. Absinthe and hashish, bitter drunken fights, Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in the wrist. I think of Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol, and all the hangers-on taking drugs and having sex and being filmed.

  Whole cultures can become addicted, like Russia’s dying villages where drinking became endemic, taking years off the national life expectancy statistics, or the current opiate epidemic in the United States, reaching across the class divide.

  Social conservatives are terrified. They exercise control because they think transgression is dangerous. I am not one of them. But, you know: they are right. Transgression is dangerous.

  The sociologist Erving Goffman has written about how institutions generate their own cultures. But even outside institutions microcultures spring up everywhere—each family, each set of friends, has its own microculture. These cultures may be harmful or beneficial or both. We normalise sets of practices and create habits and traditions. And some of those practices—like taking drugs—can become so normalised that people lose sight of the dangers.

  Family members anxiously police the habits of the addict, as far as they can. What happens to them, during the course of the illness? Who do you become if every step out of line—your own and those of others—is recorded and thought about; if every glass of wine brings a hint of anguish; if every sleeping pill brings regret; and the only relief you can find is in long, long walks, and the only excitement you allow yourself is skirting too
close to the steep places? Who do you become, policing teenagers; the mess; the beer bottles; the different beds, slept in?

  Who do you become when the logical conclusion of every transgression is the drug den and the dead body? Who do you become if you lose faith in the idea of recovery and return?

  —

  I am reading Chris Kraus’s 1997 autobiographical novel I Love Dick with fascination. Do you have any drugs, Dick asks, when Chris comes to seduce him, finally, after pages and pages of unsent letters; after the construction of an academic stalking project which left Dick angry, but intrigued, too. She did have drugs on her, as it happens, quite a choice: a vial of liquid opium, two tabs of acid, thirty Percocet, and some pot.

  Those drugs. It occurs to me that I have minimised experimentation in my own life because I so fear where those roads can take you. I have become stricter and stricter, observing Eric having another glass of wine; observing all the steps the kids, now teenagers or older, take away from the straight and narrow, the tidy rooms, the wholesome interests.

  Perhaps I’ve forgotten the dark side of that straight and narrow; the dull repression, the familial police state. I tidy rooms, I set everything straight, as my mother did before me. She started tidying and turning out lights before we’d even left the room when we were teenagers. I don’t quite do that. But I do make a fuss about bottles and wrappers and sticky remote controls, even though the bottles are water bottles and the wrappers are for chocolate.

  I wouldn’t call myself repressed, though. I wouldn’t call my mother repressed, either. She was too witty and too ironic for that; her mouth was not set in a thin and disapproving line.

  —

  Sometimes I feel my own mouth set in a thin and disapproving line.

  —

  I am haunted by my fear that those small signs—the bottles and wrappers and sticky remotes—are a one-way street to addiction. Perhaps I am so haunted because I missed so many signs before, when we were young, and I was deep in denial. But the distance between that almost mythical space in my mind, Hans and Eva’s bedroom, names and contacts of dealers scrawled on the wall, clothes everywhere, trash and dirt—the distance between that space and the ordinary mess of teenage rooms seems so fine to me.

  —

  I like to think of myself as broadly nonjudgemental, but of course that’s not true. On the contrary, I am constantly judging—as an editor, my days are spent critically reading and editing texts. As a philanthropist I judge grant applications with my fellow trustees on a monthly basis. I send thoughtful and moralising emails—annoying or helpful, who can tell?—to the children about this subject or that. My whole life—all of our lives—are about relying on our judgement, our taste, our instinctive or thought-out preference for x over y.

  I am shaped by moral ideals, by Jane Austen’s characters who do, or do not, feel and act as they ought; by Agatha Christie’s disapproval of murder and murderers, some greedy, some insane, some both (she didn’t think much of the distinction); by C. S. Lewis and Laura Ingalls Wilder; by Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson. I refill water bottles and store them in the fridge; I rebuild fires with one firelighter instead of three: my thrift is a form of moral control.

  In the darkest nights—my sleepless nights—of Hans and Eva’s relapse I rotated between Jane Austen, Agatha Christie and C. S. Lewis, and sometimes Rex Stout and Wodehouse, too. Those books are my familiar homes, each their own comforting world, passing through the generations from my grandfather to my father to my sister and me.

  At times, too anxious to sleep, I rotated between sleeping pills and Valium, too.

  *

  Eric always regarded Eva as slightly dangerous and out of control. He thought her and Hans’s neglect of the children was immoral, and that their drug taking was irresponsible and selfish. He doesn’t really believe that addiction is an illness, and often points out how utterly different Hans and I are. Almost not of the same family. Not obviously siblings. He thinks, also, that I suffer from excessive guilt—guilt about money, guilt about privilege, guilt about Hans, guilt about the children—and encourages me to move on.

  How do you move on, I sometimes ask.

  It takes time, he says.

  But time does almost nothing on its own. You need to think it all out.

  I have concluded that Hans was imprisoned by his addiction, and that I was imprisoned by it, too. My kidnap fantasy about Hans had become true, but the person in captivity was me. I was in that prison with my allotted food and drink and sleep and walks, observing myself and my family, writing my notes.

  —

  I suspect that drug addicts don’t think of themselves as hugely different from other people—it’s the only way I can make sense of this. We see them as so vulnerable, so weak; they have crossed over into another world. They see, perhaps, a bit of mess and disorder that will probably stop at some point. Drugs are fun, someone said to me once. Of course you don’t want to give them up.

  How much anguish was there in this whole thing, for Hans and Eva? I genuinely don’t know. In the twelve years of their relapse I kept coming back to an imagined drawing of two stick figures—Hans and Eva—inside a bubble. There was colour inside the drug bubble; music and sunshine and flowers. Outside the bubble—“real life”—was a black storm. We were caught up in that storm, in a bleak world of no colour. The children, catastrophically, lost their parents and their home. We all lost our peace of mind. Those thousands of emails, addiction experts, evaluations, reports, conference calls, lawyers, social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists. Those court hearings.

  I don’t suppose life inside the bubble was really sunny. Drugs create a state of intense contentment, euphoria, excitement, but the bubble is fragile, it drifts in the wind, children pointing, parents smiling, music playing…then it silently pops and you come back to a dirty room, sick and frightened and despairing.

  14

  Freud’s famous essay about supernatural fears, “The Uncanny,” was published in 1919. The first part of the text includes page after page of definitions of the term unheimlich, as though the uncanny itself has possessed the text. He then reminds us of the philosopher Friedrich Schelling’s definition of the uncanny: “Uncanny is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open.”

  “Uncanny” is a good translation of what unheimlich came to stand for, but it misses the twin elements of safe familiarity and dangerous secrets which cling to the root of the German word, which is Heim, or “home.” The word “homely,” with its twin meanings of “cosy” and “ugly,” is in some ways the Anglo-Saxon version of the heimlich/unheimlich riddle, but of course it doesn’t carry the same sinister undertones.

  Freud draws attention to other references to unheimlich, too. According to the German dictionary of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (masters of the uncanny), heimlich meant “free from fear,” a description of a place that is “free of ghostly influences,” “familiar; friendly, confiding.”

  “Starting from the homely and the domestic, there is a further development towards the notion of something removed from the eyes of strangers, hidden, secret,” Freud writes. Thus the heimlich and the unheimlich intertwine so that heimlich came to mean something secret, locked away, inscrutable, or even dangerous. Freud explains this slurring between heimlich and unheimlich with the idea that the thought or fact which has been repressed is by definition familiar, of the home: the quality of the heimlich shimmers around the unheimlich. The uncanny is eerily familiar; it is a known entity, repressed and transformed into an unknown one.

  The Swedish adjective (and adverb) hemlig (secret) and the noun hemlighet (a secret) share the linguistic roots of heimlich: the Swedish hem, the German Heim, and the English home are the same word. My old German-Swedish dictionary translates unheimlich as hemsk, “horrible,” a word itself derived from hem. The other given translations for unheimlich are kuslig and spöklig, “uncanny” and “ghostly.” Freud made sense of that strange connec
tion between the home and the secret; the home and the horrible.

  *

  I think of the premonitions in this book: my mother finding my brother at the village bank that winter morning in the late 1980s; her breakdown and hospitalisation in May 2012; and my own uncanny premonition at that rural airport in Sweden, that ominous sense that something was about to happen.

  My mother was repressing her anxiety about an unaccustomed silence, a cessation of communication, and perhaps we all were. Angry and paranoid texts and emails had become the norm; silence was unfamiliar. Our unconscious minds were signalling danger, and for whatever reason our conscious minds mulishly repressed the danger signal.

  I write “mulishly” without quite knowing why, but then I remember Tove Jansson’s books about the Moomins. She invented a character she named Hemulen. The Hemul was a middle-aged male stamp collector (sometimes botanist), fussy and repressed, who charmingly wore a dress, inherited from his aunt. All Hemuls, male and female, wore dresses, and they all liked order, rules, and fences. Jansson, who belonged to Finland’s Swedish minority, would, I’m sure, have been familiar with the German words heimlich and unheimlich; and I imagine Freud’s theories of repression must have been discussed in her bohemian and intellectual Helsinki childhood.

  There are unsettling moments in all of Tove Jansson’s books, big and small, around which she builds protective walls of kindness, humour, and understanding. The Hemul stands for a quality of repression, but Jansson has tamed him and turned him inside out; he is a fussy collector, a man in a dress. I associate his name with the home—the hem—and with the mule, or mula, in Swedish. He seems to me to inhabit the mule’s stubbornness, as well as some of the Germanic qualities of the Heim: order, fences, discipline, repression. The whimsical dress is a flag of inversion, a hint of the reason for repression. Jansson, a lesbian, may have amused herself with that conceit.