Births Deaths Marriages

by Georgia Blain

When Andrew stood to still him, Harry leapt in the air, nipping at his hand. ‘No,’ Andrew told him. Harry leapt again.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Maria instructed. Andrew did as he was told but he felt bad. Harry was only wanting to play. ‘Don’t give him any attention.’ Maria focused back on the lesson. ‘He will get these basic commands fairly quickly. Then, who knows? You may even be able to teach him some tricks: how to roll over, shake hands or beg.’

  Andrew had had enough. It was demeaning, he said. He didn’t want a circus performer. He could understand things like ‘stay’, but tricks for tricks’ sake were wrong.

  Maria was silent.

  I looked at Andrew, but he refused to turn in my direction.

  ‘I mean, it’s bad enough having to keep him hungry while we eat, but getting him to do dumb things?’ Andrew shrugged.

  Maria held up her hand. ‘I prefer to see it as a way of interacting with your pet. A positive and enjoyable experience for both of you.’ And she stood, her clipboard under her arm, as she motioned for us to follow her inside.

  ‘Can we just get on with the lesson,’ I whispered, ‘and discuss the ethics later?’

  Maria wanted us to show her where Harry was supposed to sleep. I pointed to a cushion, plump, clean and comfortable, in the corner of the sunroom. ‘There,’ I said. ‘But he never uses it.’

  When Odessa was a baby, I never let her sleep in our bed. That would be the end, I thought, the final loss of control. Not only would she be dictating my waking hours, she would also be right there with me, disrupting my sleep. The midwives backed me up. Don’t do it, they said. You’ll never get her out. For the first few weeks, Odessa had a bassinette in the corner of our room and I would get up to feed her, sitting in a chair while she breastfed for what felt like hours. Trying to stay awake, I read Jane Eyre, never getting past the first chapter. Andrew told me to bring her to bed. ‘What’s it going to hurt?’ he would say. I wish I’d listened to him and allowed myself to let go occasionally, but it seems that no matter how often I realise that the halfway point would have been the place at which to settle, I once again find myself failing to budge from the extreme.

  After eight weeks I insisted that she go to her own room. In the sleep school, they had told me it would be a good idea.

  ‘What happens if I can’t hear her?’ I had asked.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the midwives had reassured me. ‘If she needs you, she’ll make sure you know.’

  They were right, and from then on she became a child that slept well.

  ‘I like sleeping,’ she tells everyone. And she does.

  ‘God you’re lucky,’ people say. ‘How did you manage it?’

  I was always firm, I answer. I didn’t negotiate. I didn’t give in. But now I wonder whether this is the reason why I have a child who loves one bed only: her own.

  ‘Come and have a cuddle,’ we say, looking at her mussed hair, her soft eyes and her beautiful warm body when she wakes us in the morning.

  She just grins. ‘No way.’

  ‘Please,’ we beg.

  She sits on the floor, turning her back on us, and the bed, with some distaste.

  Harry, however, was all too keen on the idea of sleeping together.

  ‘We’ve managed to keep him on the floor,’ I told Maria. ‘But we can’t get him to use his bed, to stay out here.’

  She wanted us to follow her into the sunroom. She would show us how to start teaching him, but Harry lay at Andrew’s feet, blocking his path. As he began to step over him, Maria stopped him.

  ‘There’s something going on with you two,’ and she looked at Andrew, who stayed where he was, foot poised, midair, over an inert Harry who refused to move. ‘He doesn’t respect you.’

  Andrew, who never blushes, reddened slightly.

  ‘He acts like you are a young pup, a playmate, low down in the pack. He’s been nipping you, jumping all over you, and now,’ Maria pointed to where Harry still lay, ‘he blocks your path and expects you to step over him. A top dog never steps over one of the others in the pack. He always shoves him out of the way.’

  Andrew looked directly at Maria. ‘Really?’ he asked.

  ‘What’s your interaction with him like?’

  He told her. ‘I do tend to play with him. And I’m the one who takes him for a run in the morning. He gets me up, in fact. Early.’

  ‘You can change that,’ she said. ‘If you behave like a top dog, he’ll treat you like one. You go for a run when you choose, not when he chooses.’

  Andrew turned back to where Harry lay. ‘Move,’ he told him, nudging him with his foot. Harry got up, shook himself slowly and stood, right where Andrew wanted to walk. ‘Out of my way.’ Andrew kneed him, gently, in the ribs. Harry just nipped him playfully on the hand. ‘No,’ Andrew said. ‘No.’ And they looked at each other, sizing each other up, until, finally, Harry stretched in one long lazy dog-pose before taking a couple of steps to the side.

  When it comes to the daily mechanics of living, Andrew and I have different approaches, and we each jockey to be the one who determines just how things should be done. This is how it is with many people; the small becomes the battleground. The salad should be made this way, the sheets should be washed weekly not monthly, the floor needs sweeping often not occasionally – these are the arguments that beset so many lives. In the case of my parents, we simply lived by my father’s rules. Andrew and I argue, each difference usually coming back to the same accusations. He tells me I am too controlling.

  ‘You say you go with the flow, but it is your flow that we are talking about,’ I respond.

  Although I know he understands, he pretends he doesn’t. ‘No one, and I mean no one, could be as controlling as you,’ he says, and he shakes his head in wonder.

  There are other terms that we throw about; passive aggressive is a favourite of mine. ‘And believe me, people who are passive aggressive are supremely controlling,’ Isay.

  He responds by telling me that passive aggressive is simply a name given to people who have to live with control freaks.

  But, like most people who live together, we have developed ways and means, tricks for circumnavigating each other so that we continue, despite the frequent derailments. He tells me he will do as I ask but he never does. I pretend to go along with his desire to let it be, but the minute he turns his back, I am organising things just as I want them.

  Yet, when it comes to parenting, we work surprisingly well together. In the early days, when I fell apart, he let me do it my way, sensing that I simply had to get order into place. Now I’m glad Andrew is there to temper my need for control. Because although there is a place for it, the extreme end of this need of mine is too close to the memories I have of my father. I remember him obsessively picking invisible pieces of fluff off the carpet, spending hours on his hands and knees making it immaculate, only to have to start again each time a child or pet walked into the room. I am determined not to be like that, and it helps when I watch Andrew and Odessa together, glad that he takes her out swimming past the break, riding down to Botany Bay without sunscreen or hats, or just lets her do a painting inside rather than in the backyard.

  Maria had told us that we had to work together in training Harry and although Andrew had agreed, I hadn’t really believed him. He was happy to let Harry be. He didn’t need order in the way I did. But as we followed her out to the sunroom for the bed lesson, Andrew led the way.

  It was not a success, the ‘On your bed’ command a total failure. Even Maria was slightly perturbed. ‘I don’t think we should push it just now,’ she said, after attempting to drag him across the room to sit on his mat. ‘Obviously something has happened with bed for him – who knows what? – but we don’t seem to be getting very far.’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do?’ I asked.

  She reassured us. It would just take time. Work on the power dynamics first, the rest would eventually follow. She glanced at her watch. The ninety minutes was up, and we followed her outsi
de, while she summarised what we had been through. You can call me, she promised. She reached for her card, and as she put the clipboard back down on the table, Harry leapt up, stealing her pen.

  ‘Harry!’ we all shouted. He lay out in the garden, chewing it, keeping his eyes fixed on us the whole time.

  ‘I’ll get the newspaper,’ I said, but Andrew stopped me. He wanted to do it.

  ‘Harry.’ And he bent to retrieve the pen, brandishing the rolled-up paper as he did so. Harry jumped up, barking loudly and began to dig up the dirt. Maria was already heading for the door. ‘Sin bin him,’ she instructed as she left.

  Neither of us knew what she meant.

  ‘Tie him up. And don’t let him off until he stops barking. Even if it takes half an hour.’

  I had never punished a dog by chaining him up before, and the idea didn’t appeal to me. I had visions of us creating a vicious yard animal. I imagined the neighbours calling the RSPCA on us.

  ‘We have to do it,’ Andrew said, and he dragged Harry out to the pole, leaving him to bark.

  Sliding to the floor, I sat with my back against the fridge, not daring to look outside. Averting my eyes from the clock, I waited. And for the next half-hour, Harry just pulled on his lead and yelped. Until, finally, there was silence. A hush.

  Opening the back door an inch I saw him. He was lying next to the pole, head resting on his front paws, exhausted.

  ‘Look,’ I said to Andrew, who came out to where I was. We crouched next to him and patted him gently, stroking the softness of the hair behind his ears. ‘Shall we let him go?’ I asked.

  As we stood up to untie him, Harry also got up, sharp white teeth visible, pink tongue hanging out; he yelped in delight and jumped up to greet us, nipping Andrew on the hand. It was a transgression that should have received punishment. We both knew that. But neither Andrew nor I said a word.

  WRITING ABOUT US

  WHEN JONATHAN DIED, I THOUGHT THE ABSENCE OF HIS physical presence would bring an end to the considerable pain we had felt for so long. His life was over, and with this ending I expected the space he had once occupied to cease to exist. It was, I know now, a strange and foolish expectation, one that was born out of years of struggling with sadness and anger. He had gone, and I wanted to be finally able to live life without him.

  But shortly after Jonathan’s death, my mother told us she was going to write a book about him.

  ‘It is about schizophrenia, really,’ she said at first, and then soon this changed. It was to be more than just a text about the illness. It was to be a book about his life, and as such, it would, in part, be a book about us.

  I was living in Adelaide when Jonathan took the overdose that killed him. He was in Sydney, and so was my mother. She would keep me updated as to his whereabouts whenever she rang. He was usually in the Cross, sometimes out on the streets, other times reappearing at the Matthew Talbot Hostel for men. She would be anxious when she had lost track of him, relieved when he was found again, and I would listen, staring at the pale yellow hallway of the house I was renting, wishing we could have another type of conversation, one that didn’t involve my brother. I couldn’t ride the ups and downs of his life any more. I was glad to be in another city, at some remove from him. To allow myself truly to imagine the way in which he was living would be to immerse myself in a despair so enveloping, I had to keep away.

  ‘He always turns up,’ I would say, and I would glance into the kitchen where my boyfriend of the time was waiting, uncertain whether to dish up the pasta he had made.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ I’d mouth to him, before telling my mother I had to go, I would call her soon.

  Cutting off from my brother was a gradual process, although it was precipitated at the end by two events, times when I was alone with him and forced to face the reality of who he was and what our relationship had become.

  The first made me realise that it wasn’t possible just to step in and save him. We were living by the beach in Adelaide, in a tall bluestone terrace with carpets that lifted from the floor each time the southerlies blew sand and salt into the house, and great clots of black weed onto the shore. I was in my second-last year of school, and had a bedroom on the middle floor of the house. I kept it immaculate; my bed made, my books on shelves and my desk carefully arranged for study. Jonathan was living in a squat. He wrote on the walls, warnings to himself, reminders that he mustn’t hurt either my mother or us. I never went there but my mother visited him regularly and he sometimes came home, returning to sleep in a room at the bottom of the house.

  I’m sad to say I dreaded his presence. I would smell him before I saw him, the cigarette smoke, the sweat, the layers of dirt pressed into clothes that had been worn for weeks. Often he had friends with him, young men in varying states of madness, all with matted hair, nicotine-stained fingers and eyes that failed to focus. They would emerge from the basement, laughing to themselves, or perhaps talking about Jesus or the end of the world. One, I remember, had a book of graph paper, and he spent hours colouring the squares in intricate patterns that he believed held solutions to all the problems of life. He was the most lucid of Jonathan’s friends and I would look at those colours, trying to understand their meaning, wanting to believe that there was one.

  But most of the time, I stayed in my room. I studied or wrote. My diary was filled with schoolgirl longings for a boyfriend, tales of jealousy and insecurity, classroom dramas; all interspersed with feeble attempts at recounting how difficult I found my brother. I didn’t have a language for what was happening to him. I didn’t know how to understand his madness, nor how to incorporate his existence into my own life. It was too large for me to deal with, and when I read those entries now, it is painful to witness the gaps between all that I recorded and my recollections of the reality.

  One night I wrote a poem. I described what he had become and how much I missed the person he used to be. I wrote it because I thought there was some way of fixing everything. There was no physical evidence of a sickness that I could see. He had just travelled too far off the rails. Surely he could come back if we let him know how much he meant to us? Filled with hope, I showed my poem to him when we were next alone in the house. It didn’t occur to me that he would find my depiction of the state he was in distressing. It was the way he was, and he must have had some realisation of what his life had become. All that mattered was the urgent importance of telling him how we felt.

  He sat out the back in the courtyard. It was a cold Adelaide night and he crouched against the wall, shivering as he smoked and read. I waited just inside the door, expecting an epiphany, I suppose.

  He dropped his cigarette to the ground, leaving it smouldering on the winter-damp bricks.

  ‘You think I’m filthy,’ he said.

  I backed into the kitchen.

  ‘And mad.’ He wiped his nose with his hand, and shook his head, his lank hair falling across his eyes. ‘Fuck you.’

  Stunned, I wanted to explain that he’d misread what I was trying to say. It was about love, I wanted to tell him, but he just spat on the ground and left, walking straight out to the street without looking back at me. I stood there, alone in the brightness of the house, as the gate slammed shut behind him.

  The second, and harsher, realisation that I needed to distance myself from my brother came shortly after I finished school.

  We’d moved to a house in the city. The house on the seafront was sold and this new house was rented; the first step in slowly inching our way out of Adelaide and back to Sydney. It was a rundown, dark place, opposite deserted parklands that died back each summer, leaving a brown wasteland, desolate under the intensity of the South Australian sun.

  Jonathan had already left for Sydney, where he soon ended up in jail awaiting trial for conspiracy to armed robbery. He’d been psychotic in the back of a taxi, and when the driver had taken him to the nearest police station, he’d produced a plastic penknife. He told the police he had a heroin habit and needed money.


  Because my mother was still in South Australia, she was unable to bail him out. A psychiatrist friend reassured her. It was important she taught him to face up to his responsibilities. Unable to do anything other than leave him where he was, she clung on to this attempt at comfort.

  After several months in prison, the charges were dropped and Jonathan was released.

  She said he wanted to come and live with us.

  I fought against the decision. I hated the thought of leaving him out there on his own, but I’d felt what respite was like during his time in Sydney and in jail. I didn’t feel strong enough to deal with having him back. He came home, and when he did, he was withdrawn and depressed. Crumpled packets of Kent cigarettes soon filled the bin. When he wasn’t smoking out the back of the house, he wandered the parklands alone, muttering to himself. He saw no one. He barely spoke. I watched him nervously, waiting for the next disaster to descend, and it wasn’t long before it happened.

  My mother had gone out for dinner and I woke to hear Jonathan shouting garbled, incoherent sentences at the other end of the house. He was in the kitchen, taking all the plates out of the cupboard.

  ‘Stop,’ I cried, as he carried them out to the street and threw them into the middle of the road, a great shattering of china smashing against the bitumen.

  He simply returned to the house for more.

  When he finished with the crockery and began dragging the furniture out, I realised he was completely unaware of my presence. I shouted, unheard. I stood in front of him, but was unseen. And behind us the parklands stretched, black and deserted, only the shadows of the trees marking any shape in the darkness, as he threw all that we owned towards that emptiness.

  Down the lane at the side of our house, alarmed neighbours opened their door and told me to call the police.

  ‘They’ll lock him up,’ I cried, terrified for him.

  He’d said he had been raped in jail. He’d also told us the police had bashed him, and that he hated the hospitals. But as he knelt down under the spill of the only streetlight, I went to the neighbours’ house and I dialled the number.