My mother was mad. I don’t mean mad in the way of wearing unexpected hats, wearing bright tights when everyone else wore dull, or talking too brightly and too long, or spending too much money at the shops, all of which can classify a woman as mad, that is to say disconcerting – Tamara? Oh, Tamara’s mad! Such fun, on a good day; really trying on a bad – but clinically, definably, schizophrenically mad. An inhabitor, on and off, of lunatic asylums, a plodder in wrinkled stockings down shiny pale green smelly corridors, a hearer of voices in the head which urged her to burn and murder, a perceiver of visions before the eyes which made her see devils in corners performing hideous obscenities, which she would, en crise, attempt to nullify by imitation.
Or thus a kind psychiatrist once tried to explain the voices and the visions to me, sorting out a little of my confusion and despair. I belong to the school of thought which sees mental derangement as a matter of chemical imbalance in the brain – if the balance is out of kilter, however minutely, the mind picks up information from itself and processes this alongside what comes in properly and in an orderly fashion from the senses. If you’re sane, a dog is a dog, yellow is yellow, bread smells like bread. If you’re mad the dog is more than a doG, possibly God in reverse, yellow is something sinister, bread smells like shit so perhaps is shit. Everything is more than it should be. The mad are not happy: they are overloaded. They hate.
Now there are many driven by circumstances to dwell in lunatic asylums or let their stockings wrinkle and their jackets stain in what is known as ‘community care’: their eyes may dull and glaze, their face muscles stiffen in imitation of the real thing, but they are merely refugees from life, the ones who can’t stand it a minute longer. These are mere pretenders, they are not the genuinely, tragically, frighteningly mad.
Do you know, if good people, and many such there be and I do not include myself amongst them, opened a hostel for the mentally unbalanced next door to me, I’d move out. I wouldn’t be one of those who joined a protest meeting – ‘We Don’t Want The Mad Here’ – that kind of primitive hysteria which always bubbles up in the general populace to prevent social improvement, prevent the arrival of Utopia – I wouldn’t have the face; I’d lose street credibility. ‘Starlady Sandra in Madhouse Feud’! I’d just keep my mouth shut and move out, saying the place was too damp.
At times in my life I’d tell myself that my mother was merely one of the pretenders, one of the ‘driven mad’ not ‘born mad’. Driven mad by my father. (There’s another story, and certainly one my grandmother liked to believe.) But I never quite convinced myself: the desire to murder was there in her brain, the devil’s glare in her eye, as she stared at me, her daughter. And the frequent approach of the madhouse staff, syringes and strait-jackets at the ready, made it difficult to maintain the illusion. No, here was no pretender to the mad state: this was the real thing. Mad Tamara was born, mad she remained. In my veins runs the blood of the past. My mother’s insanity, my father’s sanity. Now there was a man who was sane: whole committees of sensible men (not a woman amongst those jurors) and some of them most cultured, agreed that he was sane. That was in 1949, at the Nuremberg Trial. Then they took him out and shot him dead. Sane, sane. But all that’s another story. I notice I have said ‘they’ shot him, those cultured, censorious, shocked folk, but of course they didn’t do it themselves: they appointed a firing squad of rough soldiery to do it for them. Officers seldom actually kill. The judge doesn’t switch on the electric chair, let alone slam prison doors. Lesser men do that, who don’t have the same sensitivities. Well, we all know this. In the meantime, my father doesn’t have a grave, so we can’t lay flowers: we, his many, many children.
Of course I’m in flight from the past. Who isn’t? There is a good deal to escape from. None of us are born to ordinary parents, but to the one way or another insane, the one way or the other cruel. I am just an extreme example of the human race, scratching away with my pen, thinking this, writing that, working out a story about Jennifer, on a door on two boxes which makes a satisfactory table if I don’t lean on it too hard (if I do, it tilts) from time to time moving my chair, with its one almost-broken leg, out of the sun, as that splendid orb creeps up and round the courtyard rooftops; and as and when the white paper throws up too much reflected glare for comfort, conscious of the pleasure still lingering between my legs, and confident of its eventual renewal; with a couple of doves – perhaps the same two? but who could tell? (Doves? They all look alike to me! Seen one, seen ’em all) to peck and coo about for company. Even I can be happy: mothered as I am, fathered as I was.
So happy I was, in fact, that I put down my pen and skipped around the courtyard a little – the sun was not yet so high and hot as to make such an act unthinkable – and saw my new life stretch ahead of me, my life with Jack as Sandra Stubbs, no longer Sandra Harris, Sorensen or Starlady. When Jack understood I was now Sandra Born Again, that he was my saviour, that I had been reborn the night I met him, the hour his body entered mine, why then he would be easy in his mind, as would the Citronella Jumpers. All would be well. True, the body of past that pursued me was powerful and heavy, more than most had to put up with, but I’d do it, yes I would! Who wanted a proper writing desk when a door on two boxes would do? Who needed gold taps and a navy bath and the dinner-time conversation of astronomers and barristers; water came as well from a rusty tap: a truer, more honest converse from musicians. For I could see, even in my elation, that if I lived with Jack I would also live with the Band. Musicians today live as they always have; as actors have: nothing changes. The troupe is all, the Band is one; like footballers, back-biting and sniping off the field, divided by temperament, but on the field united by common experience, exhilarated by a common joy, totally loyal, each one nothing without the group, everything within it. And women have always up and followed, off with the raggle-taggle gypsies oh, as Pedro would have it, away from the warmth and safety of their familiar lives: in flight from boredom.
It isn’t wise to be too happy: to dance around empty courtyards in a state of elation. Something will happen to bring you back to a sober state, a proper mode of anxiety. Something happened.
Something happened in the shade of the fig tree which leaned its branches over the courtyard wall. I’ve never liked fig trees. The branches are too bare, the leaves too oddly shaped, their green too muted: the flesh of the fruit too delicately, corruptly scented. A man was standing there: or not standing there. Perhaps not a man – hardly more than a boy. I saw the thin wrists and the red and yellow knitted cap he liked to wear, and knew it was my half-brother Robin. I couldn’t see his face clearly and I was glad of that.
‘Is that you, Robin?’ I asked.
‘That’s me,’ he said, or didn’t say.
‘What is it now?’
‘It’s all very well,’ he said, ‘but what about my grave?’
‘Oh my God,’ I said, ‘I knew there was something!’ Every August it was my habit to go to the cemetery and clear my brother’s grave, picking up the litter the year’s winds had swept in: his grave was in a walled corner – rather like the corner where he now stood, I realised – where rubbish was apt to accumulate. This annual clearing of Robin’s grave was the only gesture of sentiment I allowed myself – and see how it confounded me!
‘I just thought I’d remind you,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t really matter!’
Was he in my head, a memory taken flesh? I scarcely knew. What difference did it make?
And he smiled, my dead brother Robin smiled, and shrugged, and left it to me, in death as he had in life. Up to you, sister Sandra, do what you want!
‘I won’t,’ I said to this non-existent lad. ‘I’ll work something out. I will not go back. I’m with Jack.’ What woman doesn’t do it – use her duty to a man to get out of an obligation. Can’t see Mum today because she has to cook her husband’s dinner: can’t bake the PTA cake because she has to meet him at work. Can’t lay your ghost, Robin. Sorry. Jack needs me!
‘Tell you what,’ I say. ‘We’ll compromise, Robin. I’ll get your grave seen to, somehow. I may not do it, but it will be done.’
And he goes, though whether or not he’s satisfied by this, I can’t tell. Or I dismissed him. At any rate he wasn’t there any more, though for a time there lingered on the wall a slight Hiroshima-type shadow, and it did seem a little chilly. A lizard on the wall even scuttled back home. I wasn’t frightened. The ghosts of the past are always there – I just hadn’t reckoned on their tenacity, their capacity to travel.
I went into the village in search of a telephone box. I would have to ring my friend Alison. I had sworn not to, of course, but to make a clean break: give in but once to the longing for continuation, for familiar voices, places, and you’d be doing it all the time. Alison today was fine, but what about Central TV tomorrow, and Matthew the day after next, and the Sun peering through windows trying to get my boobs in the bath next week – and oh Jack, dear Jack, goodbye Jack, common sense triumphs over love, or lust.
Since Robin’s death I have become both tough and frivolous. It was not my will: it has just happened.
My brother Robin was mad. Either he inherited insanity from my mother, or acquired it from her, or else his brain, from close proximity to hers, learnt the same painful but no doubt interesting tricks, of wandering in and out of those areas of consciousness barred to decent folk, for their own protection. My mother, though mad, was beautiful, and married when I was five, a pleasant Englishman called Simon, a breeder of horses, frequently bankrupt, in one of her more apparently sane periods, when she didn’t stare at me, or him, with her mad glare, her devil’s brow, plotting how best and horribly to murder us, but softly and sweetly, though always sadly, knowing, only too well I fear, the temporary nature of her kindness. Robin was born when I was six and I loved him greatly and not enviously at all: he was witness not just to my mother’s ordinariness, but to my kind stepfather’s promise of permanence. And a bright, handsome, beaming child Robin was. Only sometimes, even when he was very small, would his face fall into a kind of stillness, a remoteness: and sometimes if I disturbed him in this state, offered him a sweet or a ride on my bicycle to stir him out of it, he would look at me with a hostility which I could not bear to see, and which reminded me of my mother. I did what I could to please him, to protect him from her fate.
‘Mum’s got a headache,’ I’d say, ‘that’s all,’ when he seemed upset at one of Tamara’s bursts of violence, or when she washed the same knife ten times over, complaining of germs, dashing with every jerky movement our hopes of ordinariness. Simon resisted to the end the notion of his wife’s, my mother’s, insanity. But I knew it even before they were married: when I was four, five. I was a wary child, given to smiling and turning away wrath, in case it was murderous. Robin, a fraction more obtuse than I, just a little more self-defending, wilful in his insistence on being happy, became merely confused. Tamara showed him once how to pull the wings off flies. ‘You’re a boy, so you’re bound to do it,’ she said, demonstrating. ‘There! Now you know how.’ It was as if, doing her best, she’d learned the maternal role by heart, but got it wrong. She taught me how to do it too –
‘It isn’t right for a girl to know less than a boy, in order to get to the same place.’ So I pulled the wings off flies when she was looking, and didn’t when she was not, and instructed Robin to do the same. I daresay I merely added to his confusion. He had her Knight’s move in thought to come to terms with, and I, zooming my pieces Bishop-like here and there, must have made his poor head dizzy. My stepfather was the King, a slow mover from square to square, always under financial attack, always moving out of trouble just in time. The Queen, the all-powerful, she who should be obeyed because she could be trusted, had long since left the board. We were on our own, Simon, Robin and I, playing a dismal end game we were bound to lose while wingless flies lay in heaps around. I knew my value, though: knew my way out: survival at home, steeling my heart against the pain of fearing my own mother, and progress at school. I would educate myself out of home, into freedom. When I was nine, and Robin was three, I taught him to read. I saw the same solution for him.
By the time he was twelve I could no longer hide from myself his resemblance to my mother: by the time he was fifteen he was expelled from his school; he took odd jobs and was fired from them: he was abusive and hostile at home and stared day after day at the television, trying to work out some connection between the images on the screen and the real world, and then, when he felt he had succeeded, had learned the patterns of behaviour and response which other people seemed somehow just to know, would go out and do likewise. Batter, bash and snarl. Better, I daresay, if only just, than copying the behaviour of invisible masturbating demons, as my mother did, and for which when Robin was nine, and myself fifteen, she was first put away. If anyone looked at Robin wrongly, in a bus, or on the street, and it was difficult so not to do, for his eyes looked so bright and odd and he wore a battered straw hat with the crown punched out, and a wing collar and tie, he would follow John Wayne’s example and knock them down with a cry of ‘A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do’, which would have been funny – and I think he meant it to be funny; there was always an underlying quality of double-take in his peculiar behaviour, which from time to time gave me false hope: he was just a pretender, then, after all, taking refuge from trauma, not just flesh of her flesh, brain of her brain, mad of her madness – but which in the event meant prison sentences, probation officers, social workers, and definitions of insanity, but no treatment, no hope, no cure.
Enough of all this. Robin is dead: he jumped under a train, a brave kind final act of kindness to me (if not the train driver) and his father and his grandmother, with whom we presently all lived, who could then put his existence behind us, consoling ourselves with the thought that he, our brother, our son, our grandson, had been merely one of evolution’s mistakes, and had to go: the sooner snuffed out the better. This was certainly Robin’s own view of his life. And better he went before the genes had a chance to carry on into the next generation, and prove themselves viable: for the mad, albeit distressing to themselves and others, can survive and propagate very well thank you. He was punch drunk in the end, of course, confused, whether by the drugs or electric shock therapy they gave him before throwing him out and saying ‘there’s nothing we can do’ – or else, more likely, by the sheer battering of the thoughts within his head, panicking like the birds in a chimney, soot flying, black everywhere, apparently exitless. Our existence, if you pay it any attention, is unbearably distressing.