Rabbit vs Archimedes

This is a contribution to a book being compiled by the University of Brighton. The book is made up of short pieces of writing by people who have been in the mental health system, or carers thereof.

In the guidelines for the contributors to this book I noticed this subheading and description. The words ‘not quite human and dangerous’ kinda leapt out at me. It made me think of Sci-Fi. I like Sci-Fi. My brother likes Sci-Fi. Our dad liked Sci-Fi. And even our mum, who prefers Jane Austen, is widely read in Sci-Fi, simply because it was littering the shelves of the house. But Sci-Fi in the pages of a book or flashing past on a screen is a very different thing from it happening in your living room at 4 o’clock in the morning on a school night.

 

                When I was a kid I looked up to my older brother as a little brother should do, at least a little brother in a family to whom the word ‘sport’ was something that happened to other people. Stefan could draw better than me, he was better at computer games on our BBC Micro, he knew a hell of a lot more than me about everything, as far as I could tell. In fact, I don’t remember anything that I asked my brother about that he didn’t immediately lecture me on at length. And being the younger brother I had to listen, regardless of whether I’d just wanted a ‘no’ or a ‘yes’, otherwise Stef would proceed to tell me about how unimaginably ungrateful and stupid I was.

                His cuddly-toy was called Archimedes, mine was called Rabbit, need I say more?

Then at some point I can’t really put my finger on, my older brother started to become less a figure to look up to and idolise and more a person to avoid. Partially for fear of the complicated conversations that cropped up, and partially for a certain late-teen funk that hung in the air about his person.

“Digestive biscuits are a meal unto themselves.”

“What?”

“There are carbohydrates in the cereals; there are proteins in the fats; there is a source of fibre and there are minerals.”

“Um... really?”

He’d take the packet of biscuits upstairs with him, and close his bedroom door behind him. From what I recall, Stefan worked a lot in his bedroom apparently powered entirely by biscuits, and usually wearing one of the sleeping-bags-with-legs that our mum made for us and our friends to combat the bitter cold of our houses.

He worked on his computer producing technical animations for a pneumatics company; probably as interesting as it sounds. And he would stay in his room for days, as far as I was concerned. Perhaps he left occasionally, but I must have been at school and missed it. He sat in his bedroom, with the curtains closed to stop reflections on his monitor.

His friends, each one living high up on a pedestal of cool in my mind, would pop round, sidle up the stairs and into his room, closing the door after themselves. Even with my ear pressed to the chipped gloss paint I still couldn’t make out exactly what they were talking about. I just heard their laughter, smelt the slightly underarm scent of weed creeping out from under the door, and felt pangs of jealousy that I wasn’t allowed inside.

Sometimes his friends would leave loudly. Maybe there was a disagreement in his bedroom. Then his door was slammed, and Paul or Ollie or one of the Nicks would thump down the stairs and out the front door.

I may have wondered why one of Stefan’s friends was leaving so loudly and angrily, but if I did, I didn’t do it for long. Thinking about it now, maybe some truly weird accusations or implications were flying around up there in Stef’s bedroom. Things that you could pick to pieces until you were hoarse but my brother wouldn’t listen.

Stefan once told me that one of his oldest friends, someone who lived a hundred meters from our front door back then, and lives about two hundred meters from our front door now, had spiked him with LSD. This friend and his girlfriend had done this so that they could trick Stefan into having sex with a dwarf, a dwarf with red hair. They took photos and used them to implicate him as a paedophile.

“Why?” I said. “Why on Earth would they do that?”

“Because they want me gone. Dealt with. Out of the picture. They did it to my father and now they want to do it to me.”

“He was my dad too, Stef.” He looked through me with the big black eyes I was learning to hate. My stomach would knot-up when I saw them. They really didn’t seem like they were his eyes any more. It is a cliché, but they were openings into something else.

When he looks like that, you cannot communicate with my brother. He is another thing; an anti-Stefan. Painful and terrifying things will come out of his mouth. And no matter how much you talk to him you can’t convince him that he’s wrong. He's always been a bit arrogant. You can sit, talking to him until it’s tomorrow and the sun is coming up outside, trying to work with what you understand, what you know is true about the world. But at 15 years of age I was unsure enough about the world and my place in it to make persuading myself an insurmountable problem at times. Let alone my big brother who was the brainiest person I knew when I was growing up.

“You know about DNA, right?”

“Well, yeah, it’s two spirals of information that code life and stuff.”

“Exactly, strings, strings of intelligent information. Polymers that control, interact, store knowledge. That’s what they’re like.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t work like...”

“They can consume someone. Copy them, until the polymer is winding up and down and around and imitating the original person’s entire body, mimicking their character and interactions perfectly; a two-dimensional being in three-dimensional form.”

All the while he would be pacing backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards across the living room. It felt like World War II interrogation methods sometimes, the too bright central light overhead, the door into the kitchen open, lights out, and the big black windows beyond, Stefan walking back and forth constantly.

It was like being beaten down with truths viewed through lumpy old glass. My brother’s paranoia about living in a world of bodysnatching life forms and omnipotent occult groups that toyed with ‘standard’ humans for sport was turning my life into Room 101. All you can do against that is cling to the sense you were born with.

The worst thing to contend with was the fear. Sometimes his black eyes were very, very scared. So many times he thought that they were coming for him that night. It was a horrible thing seeing my big brother quaking with fear as the appointed hour for his execution came closer.

      He was still my big brother though. He still looked out for me in his own way. He would get so protective of me. Telling me I had to stay, hide, keep away. It was almost like being the Chosen One in a Spielberg movie. The whole family couldn’t go anywhere together; otherwise They could get us all, and all would be lost. At least I had to stay behind, at least me...

Why would anyone be interested in us? Why would clandestine organisations possibly be interested in a family of four living in a terraced house in a seaside town one hundred years past its heyday?

The tiniest things grew to be of all-consuming significance: Dad had had two seizures when he was a kid, frozen moments rather than epileptic spasms. Apparently these developed into migraines and nose bleeds in later life. These were clear signs to my brother that something underhand had been done to our dad which had eventually led to his heart attack and death when we were kids. These same insidious tortures were now being inflicted upon Stefan. External forces playing with my brother’s mind, his memories and his thought processes.

 I have no memory of dad getting migraines. And the only time I saw him have a nose bleed was when I was about six and he was tickling me. I was wriggling and thrashing around and I accidently shoved my entire finger up his nose until the knuckle. It was very warm up there.

When I asked him, again, why anyone would want to do that to him; Stefan, son of Maggie and Dave from Hastings, he replied “Because they can. And because they think it’s fun.” What can you say to that? There is no reasoning with a Hollywood villain.

***

At 18 I moved to Wales, to study animation at university, and to start afresh away from home, and all the people who knew me and my family and my friends: Just me and the world. Selfish though it may sound, this eighteen year old boy didn’t want his bedraggled older brother to visit him at university. He didn’t need any one of his new peers to see his skeleton, out of its closet and pacing back and forth in the hallway.

My brother appeared at my place in Wales a few times while I was there at studying. One time he came and I don’t remember him being particularly ‘mad’. This time he wasn’t talking about the Bad Things. But I knew he could, and I knew he had, and I was carrying all I knew of my strange brother around with me. So, when my brother didn’t fit in as I felt a person should I found it acutely embarrassing. He was part of me, my brother, and I was part of him. I was terrified of becoming him, or appearing similar to him in any way. When would this happen to me? Could it happen to me? Was it happening already?

We went to a party. I really didn’t want Stefan to go, or to be seen by anyone there. He’d just miss jokes or not realise people were taking the piss. He’d be weird.

Stef made himself a nest and fell asleep resting on a table early in the evening. I hated that he hadn’t just gone home. He was like a cat and would find the place he wanted to sleep in and sleep there, regardless. It was a party in a fellow student’s house and my brother was asleep in the kitchen, so naturally he was used as a toast rack, a masking tape testing facility, a broken crisp repository and put to all manner of other undignified uses. My stomach churned.

Anyone else who saw an opportunity to have a laugh at their big brother’s expense at a university party would probably have found the largest marker pen known to mankind and drawn an oversized Prussian moustache on said sibling’s face. I just felt acute embarrassment and guilt and anger. My brother is a freak and they all must have known it and were taking the piss out of him and by association me.

It’s amazing how easily you can slip into knowing everyone around you has it in for you.

I just wanted him to disappear.

***

My brother always managed to maintain contact with me even when not ‘absconding’ from ‘care facilities’ where he was ‘residing’. Telephones are a wonderful thing. If Stef knew my number he would call up to seven or eight times a day. These were not happy chatty words of advice from older to younger sibling; they were coded texts weighted with alternative meaning; pregnant with subtext and dire plots.

It became a rather cruel sport at times, seeing whether I could ever goad my brother into answering a direct question about any of the things he’d been hinting at bullishly for years. I could picture exactly the look in his eyes as each implication was offered up for me to take on board. But any attempt would end the same with an irate tirade and the sound of a slammed receiver. He would call back without fail, maybe in five minutes, maybe an hour, if I was lucky tomorrow, but he’d definitely call back.

It’s difficult to throw oneself into studying the history of Italian Neo-Realist Cinema when that sort of thing is going on. Let alone extracurricular language lessons. There was so much guilt at not being back home helping mum out, supporting her while she watched her oldest child twitching, cracked and shattered. I felt that I should be allowed to do whatever the hell I wanted after speaking to my brother, the universe owed me that. So I did what any self-respecting ‘tortured’ young person would do: I smoked weed, got drunk, and took pills, HURRAH!

***

Stef can’t just appear at my door anymore for two reasons: Firstly he has spent the last six years locked up in places he hasn’t managed to escape from, and second, I live abroad. We stay in touch by phone, and now that the place he is in allows it, over the internet too.

I only actually meet up with my brother on very rare occasions these days when I am back in the UK. I still feel guilty about not being in the country, not helping enough. But I also feel that I had to get that far away to be able to live for myself, selfish though it sounds. Now, maybe I’d be able to deal with life long-term back in the UK. I’ve grown up a lot and Stefan’s in a lot better way than he has been for a long time.

In spite of all the time that has passed and the things that have been learnt and the resignation acquired, I can still find it difficult sometimes when in my brother’s company. I shouldn’t, but I still do. I know that you shouldn’t judge a person by their appearance. But there’s morality then there’s reality.

I hate the odd looks he gets walking around; at least these days it’s more for him that I hate them than for me. I hate that people look at him and think ‘crazy person’.

His long, uncombed and unwashed hair and his hectically eclectic assortment of clothing isn’t important in the grand scheme of things. But the thing is, I know why; I know that washing or cutting or coming his hair could leave parts of himself scattered around for Anyone to find, to use against him in some way or to control him.

 I also know the sense of social awkwardness that causes him to buy something impetuously, without thinking, and then sense of moral righteousness that causes him to use the item in spite of everything. This is why I’ve seen him wearing a hat made for a teenage girl or a jacket four sizes too small. It’s the same reason he always carries a bag with him, a bag full to bursting with things. I have no idea what things exactly because he has not once packed or unpacked it in front of me. But I know he thinks if he lets it out of his sight then Someone will change the bag or its contents in some way.

The reason is that he still isn’t well. He can function better than he could. He can leave the ward these days and go in to town, buy a coffee and browse for comics. And the doctors are starting to talk about sheltered housing and moving him on. But he’s still ill. He has headphones in his ears all day, always playing music. He’s never said so, but I’m sure it’s to drown out the voices.

My brother’s lucidity is, in my opinion, twenty-four hours away from collapse at any one time. All he has to do is miss a few of the pills, pills that he hates taking, and everything that’s been built over the last six years of my brother’s incarceration will come crashing down. And it’ll all start all over again.

Having lived in Barcelona for six years I am now moving to Berlin. I know I should be here to help and support. But I also know that as time moves on, and my mum and my brother get older, it’ll be me who has to look after both of them, me on my own. And I have known this for years, almost since he got ill. I have seen how much help other people can and do give. They’ve all got their own lives and families to cope with. So for now, I am having time for me, just me, till then.

Author's Note

what do you rekkon? any good? or a pile of overly sentimental shite?

Reviews

[R. H. Watson]

Good? Yes. Overly sentimental? I think you have scrupulously avoided sentimentality. Emotional, yes. How could it not be? Seeing the already complicated older brother--younger brother relationship overlain with schizophrenia drives home the enhanced complications and the necessary emotional ambiguity you need to cope.

If anything, you have over sentimentalized a 'normal' sibling relation. This isn't a criticism of the essay, just pointing out a ramification that is apparent to me, but perhaps not to you.

Speaking to technique, I wonder if the Sci-Fi comparison in the first paragraph should continue to echo more explicitly throughout the piece?