Mayhem

by Sigrid Rausing

  But perhaps those narratives are never true. Especially in American suburbia.

  —

  In the end “Ben” comes home. He is given a heart stone as he leaves, symbolising the rite of passage from addiction. At home, two children stand by the window waiting for him. They run to greet him, to hug him. A blond and polished woman comes, too; they kiss, expensive luggage on the floor.

  But this is not in fact the end. In the final scene, Ben is at the head of a table, in an opulent office. He hands out papers; he speaks. The members of the board look impressed; they smile. An older man whispers to another, they nod in appreciation of who Ben has become.

  And for all the bland and sanitized commerciality of the video, I am moved. I am moved because knowing where Eva was the week before she died makes me feel closer to her, perhaps closer to her hopes.

  Did she have hopes there, with her Valium? “One Valium, and they threw her out,” said her mother. But who knows how many Valiums she had, or other drugs.

  *

  At least the Malibu rehab, for all its luxury, had a strict policy on drugs. When Eva died I heard a rumour that Hans had been a patient for some time at the Stapleford Centre, an addiction clinic in London that had a controversial history of prescribing narcotic drugs to patients who were known addicts, for maintenance, detox, or even pain control. Its founder, Dr. Brewer, was struck off the medical register in 2006 for professional misconduct after a patient died during a so-called home detox involving a cocktail of various drugs. Two other doctors at the clinic, Dr. Kindness and Dr. Tovey, were also found guilty of misconduct, but were not struck off—Dr. Kindness retired, and Dr. Tovey was allowed to continue to practice under supervision, conditions which were lifted in 2009. The other Stapleford doctors who were charged were cleared of misconduct.

  It turned into a very big case for the GMC, the General Medical Council. The Guardian reported on it in November 2006:

  The GMC was highly critical of the program, which put the patient in charge of the drug dose and offered medical support only by telephone. Many of its findings relate to the practice of giving patients long-term prescriptions with the result that they had large quantities of drugs, which they may have been tempted to sell.

  I think of Eva’s letters to her pen pal in prison, dating from 2009. “I do not use ‘drugs’ in the sense that I do not need to use illegal drugs,” she wrote. “I have well-respected legitimate medical doctors who provide all sorts of ‘medications.’ Medications, I emphasise, NOT drugs.”

  —

  I don’t think Dr. Brewer or his two colleagues intended to do harm to their patients. It’s clear from online forums that addicts who had experienced treatment at the National Health Service as authoritarian and judgemental were protective of the clinic. And no wonder: they were not judged, and if they needed drugs, by all accounts they got them. But it could only have been a matter of time before the clinic was hit by a scandal. It was private, and the treatment was somewhat experimental, or at least unorthodox. There were obvious pitfalls everywhere, including the probability that at least some of the Stapleford patients combined their prescriptions with other drugs.

  Perhaps the doctors trusted their patients too much. Patient stories are often complex and elusive, but addicts, whose mental world is shaped by extreme needs, habitually tell lies. I don’t want to be moralistic about this—we would all lie to survive. Addicts lie because they are, by definition, hostage to cravings they can’t control. They lie about their drug use, and they lie about their lives. The lies are often obvious and crude, childlike claims to innocence—everything is fine, it wasn’t my fault, I can’t remember what happened, they made me do it. We all have a profound aversion to being judged: a guilty judgement can lead to exile, real or metaphorical.

  —

  The Stapleford Centre is still open. They are said to have improved their practices, and judging by their website they now seem to favour detox with naltrexone, a substance blocking the effects of heroin. They still, however, offer methadone maintenance treatment, adding this slightly disturbing offer, in parentheses: “(but we can transfer patients to other opiates before withdrawal and we can usually offer maintenance on buprenorphine [Subutex] or morphine although they are must [sic] more expensive then [sic] methadone).”

  Patients seeking treatment need to document proof of ability to pay and to give a deposit, too. “Unlike most other private treatment centres, we will always give you a range of treatment options to suit your needs and finances, if finances are a problem you can always get payday loans uk.”

  That’s a link. I go there. Instant cash loans when you need them. Apply for a loan today! the web page says. These are loans of up to two thousand pounds for any purpose, at a stated interest rate of 180.5 percent (variable). Late repayment can cause you serious money problems, the site warns, in small letters.

  A few weeks later the sentence on the Stapleford website has changed. It now reads simply, “Unlike most other private treatment centres, we will always give you a range of treatment options to suit your needs and finances.”

  —

  Hans and Eva lived as recluses in those rooms on the second floor where the housekeepers were not allowed access. Sometimes they left food for them on a tray outside the room. When I asked them what Hans and Eva would eat they looked at each other and shook their heads. One of them said they sometimes ate ice cream at night.

  If Hans and Eva were prescribed narcotic drugs by medical doctors—how was that supposed to help them?

  17

  I am remembering that summer of 2012 again.

  I was sitting in our house in Sweden, looking out over the sea. The children had just left. I looked for a book to read and randomly opened an old novel, Storm Over Jamaica by Richard Mason. Inside I found a postcard addressed to “the boy Hans-Christian [sic] Rausing, Kraftstorg 8, 223 50 Lund.” It was a 1960s flip effect postcard of two expressionless koala bears sitting in a tree, blue skies behind. Tilt the card, and the koalas look the other way.

  I saw that the card had been made by Axel Eliasson’s Konstförlag AB Stockholm. This was Sweden’s leading manufacturer of postcards until the mid-twentieth century. By the time of this card Axel Eliasson’s Konstförlag’s heyday was over, though this innovation—lenticular printing—must have been exciting in its time.

  My grandfather was in the printing business, too, before packaging, before his first company, Åkerlund and Rausing, and long before Tetra Pak. He probably knew Axel Eliasson, or knew of him, anyway.

  Something about that flip effect turns the card from a message to a gift. And the koalas—the person who sent this card must have known us well. My parents went to Australia and brought back two koalas, a soft furry life-size one, with a black plastic nose and claws, and a small carved wooden one. My brother and I exchanged those koalas back and forth for Christmas for years.

  I have the wooden koala still. It sits like a little Buddha on a chest of drawers in this room, looking placidly towards the window and the late-summer butterflies outside. For years it was a reminder of my lost brother; an embodiment of loss. When I was too sad to look at it, I put it away in a drawer. Then I’d bring it out again.

  Simrishamn 13th March

  Dear “Gurre,” how are you now. I hope you are well. Everything is fine here, but gosh how much I miss you. Now I have forty different children to look after, so it’s a lot of work, but really fun. I will call you later. Hugs, [something illegible] Britt

  “Gurre”—my brother’s nickname when he was very young. But who is something-Britt? Gun-Britt is the only name I can think of—she must be a forgotten nanny or au pair. Neat old-fashioned handwriting. My mother probably left the card in Storm Over Jamaica in Lund and brought the book to our summerhouse to read. She prepared this house for my brother, placing old books on shelves. Storm Over Jamaica (who reads it now?) slipped in, the card inside. A message from now to then, the land of the unknowable. I stand in the future, the card in my h
and.

  I read between the lines that my brother had been ill, as he often was: how are you now? My mother worried, I remember that. Dark anxieties fed her own depression after her parents died. But even in her most anxious fantasies about the future, the land of now would have been unimaginable.

  Storm Over Jamaica was made into a film, released in 1958, the year of my parents’ wedding. Maybe they saw it.

  I find it online. The website has given it a tagline which reads: AN ISLAND PARADISE…where all human emotions are exposed under a tropic sun.

  My parents would have been amused by that.

  I check, and the actual film poster has “tropical” not “tropic.”

  The finger wags and wags; I admonish and correct as I read.

  *

  On the tenth of March 2012 Eva wrote to me for the last time. She was legally no longer allowed to contact me, but I was glad that she did: there was hope in that email. A faint sense of a future. She wrote that she was moving to America, to live with her sister. She was taking back her maiden name, Kemeny. “From your sister in law,” she signed off. “Eva Rausing but not for much longer!”

  And for the first time in such a long time, she said something kind:

  I can tell you one thing that I know for sure Sigrid and that is that you were genuinely and truly loved by your brother. I’m sure many other people love you very much as well, but I absolutely know for a fact that your brother loved you very much.

  That in itself felt like the beginning of recovery.

  —

  Within two months she was dead.

  But it was in that spirit, I think, that she went to Malibu.

  I like to think that she hoped for a new life. But when it came to it she couldn’t do it, and instead stayed in her room the whole time she was at the rehab, before being asked to leave for bringing in drugs.

  That one Valium.

  If that is what it was.

  —

  Where was my brother all this time?

  I don’t know.

  He was like a hibernating bear, deep in his addiction.

  *

  Each summer is different, and each summer is the same.

  My notes merge; I struggle to keep the years separate.

  I am alone. The sea is still today; the wind has died. For the first time ever I heard the church bells, miles away.

  I walk on the common, through the herd of heifers. If I don’t look at them I am invisible; they stare at me, but they don’t see me. I walk head down.

  —

  Last night it thundered on and off, a low rumbling that came to nothing in the end. The weather didn’t break: the heat continues. I walk by the sea, on unmarked paths from childhood. Sometimes I stop to swim. I take off my clothes and make a bundle, I put my watch in a shoe. I stare at the cold dark water, cliffs and stones, seaweed, crabs, and huge orange jellyfish like balls of fire.

  Geese fly above. I lower myself onto the natural step, the rock. I hold handfuls of slippery seaweed and propel myself into the water. At times I am afraid. A tern hovers nearby—she attacked me the other day, but now she ignores me, hunting in the shallows. I swim across the bay, feeling only intermittently safe in the velvety dark water.

  Perhaps that is the point. I reify my anxiety; I exhaust myself to feel in my body what I feel in my mind.

  —

  It’s a hot day. We swim off the jetty. There was a grey rock in the water, a slightly odd grey rock. “Uh-oh,” said Eric, before I realised what it was. This was not good: a dead seal, upside down, nearly washed ashore. We rang the council. They might come later, they said, stressing the “might.”

  After lunch I looked at the seal again, through the binoculars. The body had flipped and drifted to the other side of the jetty. People were swimming, oblivious. A curious red rose had blossomed on its stomach. I wondered if the rose was the genitals of the seal, looked again, and saw: red guts spilling out of the swollen body into a tight spiral.

  *

  On Wednesday, February 5, 2014, I saw Hans for the first time since June 15, 2008.

  I look at the dates. The years feel so dense, like thick grey snow, melting, refreezing. I can’t penetrate them.

  Was this all my life?

  I hadn’t seen him for nearly six years. We had had some limited communication in all that time, but not much. He had walked away from me, and perhaps the truth is that I was beginning to let go of him, too.

  Now I was to see him: Hans had invited me and my mother for lunch. She came up from Sussex; I came from our house in London; we had arranged to meet outside his rented flat. I had thought I would be late, because there was a tube strike that day, and so had Hans.

  “Park Lane is solid,” he texted, or words to that effect. “I am stuck in traffic, may be late.”

  “Me too!” I wrote back. That friendly exclamation mark. So happy to finally be in the same boat.

  In the end none of us was late. My mother was waiting in her car as I pulled up. Her driver opened the door, and I helped her out. I thought of all the cathartic family meetings at the rehab in 1989. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to see the difference, we had chanted in unison, Sunday after Sunday, a faint sense of bitter bewilderment in the room.

  Here we were, twenty-five years later. My mother had mobilised all her strength, her solid generational determination in the face of this monumental meeting, after years of absence. By now he was not only her son and my brother. He had also become a symbol: the dense centre of all the years of sleepless nights, of chaos, of anguish and of grief. Like the medieval concept of the king’s two bodies—the body politic, the enduring and abstract power of the king, and the body natural, the king’s physical body, subject to human laws of decay—Hans had become dual in my imagination. He was a knowable person, and he was the embodiment of history, of fifteen years of dysfunction.

  We rang the doorbell and were admitted by a young man, a minder, I supposed, versatile and discreet. I was glad of his presence, though he disappeared as soon as coats had been disposed of; my mother’s walking stick lost and found.

  I saw Hans.

  I hugged him lightly. I had forgotten his height, his bulk. His hair was greyer, and thinning. He wore a green tweed jacket. He was very pale, with a little stubble. His hands shook.

  We walked up a steep staircase; Hans had to help my mother up step by step, pushing and pulling. She had difficulties walking at the best of times; this staircase was almost too much for her. There was loud music on, too, an LP playing. “I found all my old records,” Hans said, happily. “They were in perfect condition.”

  At the end of a long corridor was a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and maybe an Andy Warhol, too.

  Hans turned the music down. We sat and talked for a while.

  I wondered about his comment about the records. Did he mean that he had found his way back to his old life, that his life was still there, intact, waiting for him?

  Speculation, I know. But there was much to speculate about. I watched for signs. And those signs—Andy Warhol and Marilyn Monroe, loud music—are not neutral in terms of drugs, in terms of celebrity and notoriety, in terms of life and death. It would be difficult to argue that they meant nothing, in this context.

  But my own watchfulness is a sign too. I know that. It’s his addiction but it’s my addiction too.

  We talked about this and that. We talked about nothing in particular. The emotional black hole, that dense physical centre, turned out to be a surprisingly bland space, occupied with fish and sorbet, with water, fizzy or still, and with a small paper cup of pills for my brother. Briefly, the symbolic centre transferred to that small waxed-paper cup, folded at the sides, containing, I suppose, enough morphine to put me or my mother to sleep until the following morning. Morphine detoxes are very slow—they have to be, to avoid nerve damage.

  We drank coffee, served by the same housekeepers, still
there, after all those years.

  Hans had to leave by 2:30 p.m.

  My mother and I left together. We stood in silence outside her car. There had been too much to say, and we hadn’t said any of it. We had reverted to type; politely passing the water, commenting on the fish, sipping the coffee.

  “He was nervous,” my mother suddenly said. “We must remember that.”

  *

  In the autumn of 2012 I received an email from someone I didn’t know. He had something to tell me, he said. It was about Eva. I remembered who he was, and after some hesitation agreed to meet him at his place of work near Piccadilly.

  It was 6:00 p.m., and the place was empty, apart from my correspondent, a tired-looking man in his fifties. We talked. Eva was “paranoid,” he said, “but I liked her. She was a bright girl. I felt a bit sorry for her. We’ve all done drugs, haven’t we?”

  I nodded, silently. He carried on. Eva had to give urine samples, he said. So his wife did it for her. She had to take some other drug that Eva was on and wait for it to metabolise before peeing into a cup.

  The drug testing must have been part of those “rehabilitative or reparative conditions,” issued by Judge Timothy Workman in 2008. That “very sensible decision,” which had come to nothing. Or not nothing: a couple, waiting in a grand house, unknown medicines metabolising in the wrong body. It meant something to them, I presume. Some misplaced loyalty, or kindness, or both, or more.

  “She left me this package and to tell you the truth I just want to get rid of it and walk away. I really like your family, and I don’t want any trouble, and it’s on my mind, bothering me. Here it is.”

  The envelope was open. I looked at him, at his tired eyes, his salt-and-pepper hair.

  “Yeah, I did read it. You know.”

  The envelope was in my hand. I looked at the contents. I thanked him. Then I climbed down the stairs to the street and walked for some time in the early autumn twilight, until Eric picked me up.

  I showed him the papers in the car.