Standing on My Brother's Shoulders

by Tara J Lal

  Jo often chose to have dinner with her boyfriend’s family. At the time I couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to be with me and Adam. I wanted us all to be together, all of the time.

  Eventually Dad started coming out of hospital for the weekends, but remnants of his mania remained. When he was home he wanted to eat out every night, which felt strange and uncomfortable to us after a lifetime of being rationed to one treat a week by Mum: an éclair at Lindy’s tearooms on a Saturday morning.

  One morning he turned to Jo at the breakfast table. ‘I know what we’ll do. We’ll have a dinner party!’ He was talking fast, his eyes sparkling. ‘Joanna, I’ll need you to host it for me.’

  ‘But Dad, I’ve got an exam on Monday.’ Jo was doing her A-levels.

  ‘We’ll invite everyone we know and get a caterer in. Adam and Tara can serve drinks.’

  ‘But Dad, do you think it’s a good idea?’

  ‘I’ll wear my black velvet jacket. Which shirt and tie, I wonder? How about the lilac shirt with the pink tie?’

  Dad had his dinner party during one of his interludes from the hospital, and he did wear his black velvet suit with the lilac shirt and fluorescent pink tie. Everyone smiled politely, drank wine and was merry. Dad went back into hospital the next day.

  Was I frightened of his madness? Was I relieved that he seemed happy? Was I angry that he should be like this when Mum had just died? I don’t know.

  In the end, he remained in hospital for nearly a year. I remember visiting him there, walking over the manicured lawns to the reception desk, everything being so quiet. Then down the corridor to my father’s room. Peering through the glass panel in the door, seeing him sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me, hunched over.

  I remember feeling scared as I approached the bed, suddenly unsure of exactly who was sitting there. The last time I had seen him he had been ecstatic, thrilled with the library of new books he had bought.

  ‘Dad? It’s me.’

  No response.

  ‘Dad. It’s me.’

  He looked up at me with hollow eyes, without a hint of recognition or love in them. I leant over to kiss him on the cheek, tried to hug him, willing him to respond. There was a pause, then Dad slowly lifted his arm. It was as if it had been weighed down by a landslide of mud. He patted me gently on the back.

  ‘How are you, Dad?’ I tried to smile, but his eyes were looking down at his feet. Then he closed them, retreating into himself again.

  ‘I’ve been at school, Dad. I won the long jump at the London Schools Athletics Championship. They put a piece in the paper, but they spelt my name wrong … Tara Hall.’

  His voice when he spoke was so quiet I could hardly hear it. ‘Well done, lovey.’

  I went home and pulled out the white envelope my mother had left me before she died. She had written letters to each of us, wanting us to have something to keep, to hold on to after her death. I held the sacred letter in my hand, staring at my name scrawled in my mother’s handwriting. A stray tear escaped my eye, tumbling down my cheek. Ever so carefully, I opened the envelope, unfolding the letter. Now the tears fell freely, threatening to smudge the very words in which I searched so desperately for answers. I read my letter over and over, grasping for my mother’s love, searching the words on the page for the safety of her arms around me.

  Tara, my love,

  I hope it will be a long, long time before you read this letter, but I wanted to write each of you a letter to keep for yourselves to remember your old mum. Darling, I do feel I have let you down so badly and have been able to share so little of your life with you. You will miss me – or I suppose you will – but when you have recovered from the initial shock and sadness I am sure you will all be able to help each other because I know how much you care for one another. Dad will, I know, need lots of help, but I know you will give him that help and give him lots of cuddles.

  I wanted so much to see you grow up, get married and have children – the things that any mother wants – but alas it has not been so. But whatever you do in life, darling, I want you first of all to be happy, secondly to lead a useful and caring life and thirdly to marry and have children eventually, because I know they will give you much pleasure in the way that you have all done for me.

  I sat curled up on my bed, craving more, more wisdom, more love, more affection, more help. Where are you, Mum? I need you. Please come back …

  The words swilled around my head in an endless unanswered quest for comfort. It was a lot to expect: the wisdom and lessons of a lifetime in one letter. I often think how each of us was affected by the words she wrote in those letters.

  My letter wasn’t signed. Our family therapist pointed that out. Adam’s was, Jo’s was, mine wasn’t. Up until that point, the letter had given me some comfort. But in that instant, the comfort morphed into angst: I was an afterthought. Had she finished the letter? Was it a sign that she didn’t love me as much as she loved Adam or Jo? What more had she wanted to say? What vital piece of love or guidance had I missed?

  In the ensuing years I would often unfold my sacred letter, looking for answers and love at those times when the world seemed to offer me none.

  CHAPTER 7

  A year after Mum died, Dad came home from hospital. Physically he was present, but mentally he remained absent, hanging by a tenuous emotional thread. It was as if he were in a darkly tinted bubble that rendered him inaccessible to intimacy, the thing I most craved.

  It was a struggle for him to survive each day, let alone support a family or run a household. Living with him was hard. We didn’t know how to care for him any more than he knew how to care for us.

  Six months after Dad came home, Jo went to study at Norwich University, leaving the three of us to fumble on blindly, learning how to live again. I ironed Dad’s shirts because that was what Mum did. I cooked, because that was what Mum did. I did the washing because that was what Mum did.

  A year after Mum died, I started menstruating. I was fourteen. No one had ever explained how to use a tampon. I bought a pack of ten and spent an hour in the bathroom trying to figure out how to insert one. I started getting frantic, wondering why everyone else seemed to manage while I couldn’t. Maybe there was something wrong with me? On the tenth tampon, I finally figured it out.

  I started smoking, just to try to fit in, despite having regularly chastised Adam and Jo for doing so, reminding them that Mum had died of cancer. Dad, of course failed to notice, even when I lit up in front of him. A year or two later he saw me with a cigarette in my hand and exclaimed in surprise, ‘Oh, Tara, I didn’t know you smoked.’

  I started raiding the drinks cabinet with my friends because I knew Dad wouldn’t notice. One night, after downing everything we could find, the scene in our bathroom resembled a hospital ward: one friend hanging over the toilet bowl, one over the sink, and one in the bath. I was the only one still standing. Even after a bottle of vodka, I never let go entirely, always maintaining a sense of responsibility, no matter how inebriated.

  After all, who else was going to look after Dad? I had to teach him how to do the simplest of things. Everyday activities such as washing, cleaning, housework and cooking presented him with a confusing challenge. The washing machine, which my mother had finally succumbed to having as her health had failed her, was especially baffling for my father. I wrote out, point by point, how to work it, starting:

  Step 1: Separate coloured clothes from white clothes.

  Step 2: Place clothes in machine.

  Step 3: Close door firmly.

  Step 4: Open tray and put one scoop of powder in left side.

  And so on. Except my father analysed every step, studying it for its intricacies, stopping to give his opinion on how the manufacturer might be able to improve the appliance. Three hours later, he still hadn’t reached the eighth step, where the wash actually started. I’m beginning to understand how you felt, Mum …

  Sometimes, if I was really stuck, I would make the error
of asking Dad to help me with my homework. He would reply with an hour-long monologue which went into every conceivable theory behind the concept in question. By the end I was so confused that I had no idea what the question meant. I had thought it was merely a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer – how silly of me.

  Dad was always so engrossed in all the information that passed through his brain that you could walk right past him in the street and he wouldn’t notice. On one occasion, when a friend rang and asked to speak with me, Dad told her that I had gone away for a few weeks. When I walked in the next morning, after a weekend away, he looked only mildly baffled to see me. Similarly our neighbours laughingly reported watching Dad walking down our street in London carrying a bag of wood for the fire. A stray log had fallen through a hole in the bottom of the bag. Upon realizing this, my father had diligently turned on his heel to pick it up, placing it carefully in the top of the bag. He had then continued on his way until another log fell through the same hole. Once more, upon noticing he had mislaid another piece of wood, my father had turned, stooped to pick it up and placed it patiently in the top of the bag. He continued in this manner all the way along the road, dropping log after log, much to our neighbours’ amusement. It never occurred to him to actually fix the hole in the bottom of the bag.

  You see, my father is unique, one of life’s curious mysteries. He lives in another world, where seemingly superfluous information, such as where your daughter is or how a washing machine works, is discarded so as not to take up valuable brain space that could otherwise be used for more vital information, such as how neural pain pathways in the brain might react to opiates, or how India might solve its socio-economic problems. It was as if Dad’s brain was locked on to an intellectual setting, where every task must be learned and analysed, as if he were studying for a university exam.

  Meanwhile, all I wanted was to be ‘normal’. I didn’t feel as if I belonged. I tried my best to wear the ‘right’ clothes, which in London in the mid-eighties was ripped, faded, red-tab Levi 501 jeans, preferably at least two sizes too big, secured by a thick leather belt. It was especially cool if the legs were just a tad too long so that the ends would fray as they dragged along the ground.

  One evening I decided I was going to go out with the trendy group from my school. I put on my very finest, most ripped pair of Levi 501s and doused myself in Anaïs Anaïs. I even put on make-up, agonizing for hours in front of the mirror as to how one was supposed to do it, using one of my mum’s old bright red lipsticks. A rookie error, given the polarity of our skin tones, hair and eye colour.

  I felt pathologically awkward. I stood on the platform at Camden Town underground station, trying desperately to think of something cool to say or at least to adopt a trendy stance, whatever that was. Clearly acting wasn’t my strong point. I heard a female voice emanate from fifty yards down the platform, the voice of the super-cool beautiful ‘It girl’.

  ‘Look at Tara … she’s the odd one out,’ she sang out loudly, repeating it just in case someone had missed it.

  I froze, paralysed by the accuracy of her bullet. Whatever semblance of self-confidence or self-esteem I had, disintegrated in an instant. I didn’t feel I belonged and now everyone knew it and thought it too.

  Only my brother understood how it was.

  When I was with Adam I felt I belonged. He made me feel safe. I didn’t feel awkward. We didn’t talk a lot about our feelings, about our grief, but in the years after Mum’s death we built a shared understanding.

  CHAPTER 8

  Adam was beautiful, with chocolate-brown skin, straight shiny hair and a chiselled jaw. He was tall and could almost be classed as skinny, were it not that his frame was clad in sinewy muscle. There was not an ounce of fat on his lithe body. He was blessed with a brilliant intellectual mind but he was also highly sensitive, a deep thinker with an ever-questioning mind. He was only nineteen when he wrote in his diary:

  Why should I be thinking so introspectively? I seek only honesty with myself, and in this mood I feel almost as though I know of the things I might want from life, but cannot grasp hold of the definite. Just let the words pour from inside without entering the analysis of my brain. Maybe in the confusion I shed a greater light on myself. I am writing, yet I feel as if I am seeing what I produce from someone else’s point of view which in turn changes what I write and how I think.

  Although he was bright and talented, he was disarmingly unassuming. When he was picked, out of hundreds, to take part in an episode of a TV series called Shades of Darkness, he never mentioned it to us, not until it was about to start filming, and then only to explain why he’d be missing a few days of school. He was embarrassed about his talents, as if he felt he wasn’t worthy of them. He was compassionate well beyond his years, always thoughtful and caring of others.

  The last couple of days have been so very thoughtful. I have thought of passion and compassion and why we have curbed them in our words when we feel so strongly in our hearts. I think, if I were to speak as these words are written, how much truer they would be to my romantic feelings, and yet, as usual I shall not, as sense will dictate to me how incongruous they would be with an everyday existence.

  As an eighteen-year-old, he spent his Christmas working for the homeless. He relentlessly questioned life and the essence of happiness, particularly during his travels in India.

  Delhi itself is forever hustling and bustling, millions of people occupying themselves in one fashion or another. It’s so strange to think of them. What on earth do they do? Where do they find enjoyment and happiness? Or is survival the most prominent of desires in their hearts? Why I should question these things I do not really know, for if I think of London one may easily reason with similar terms: millions of people working all day to gain money which they can then spend and supposedly, hence, enjoy themselves.

  Humans are adapted to their circumstances by nature, thus there is an up and down – whether that range is at all relative to one’s environment I don’t know. It is easy to say yes, for hunger is no joy. Yet perhaps the enjoyment for such an individual at having a full belly is a greater satisfaction than the enjoyment I have at one evening at the pub.

  Adam had a huge concern for social justice, which sat awkwardly with his privileged upbringing and private education. The three of us all went to different schools: I to a single-sex state school with a good reputation; Jo to the tough local mixed comprehensive; Adam to a well-respected private school. His godmother had offered to contribute to the fees, but still the question hung in the air: ‘Why did Adam go to a private school when both my parents held socialist ideals?’ I don’t think that either my mother or father realized the implications of their decision, the effect it would have on Adam and Jo.

  Jo got the raw end of the deal. She knew it and so did Adam. The result of Jo’s resentment at this inequality in our education was that Adam felt guilty. He also felt an immense pressure to succeed.

  Aunt Margaret often came down to London to check on us, and to resolve any conflict.

  ‘Adam’s stolen my tennis racket!’

  ‘I didn’t steal it, I just borrowed it.’

  ‘He always gets everything. How come he goes to a private school?’

  ‘I can’t help that, Jo. That was Mum and Dad’s decision,’ Adam said quietly.

  I hated to hear them argue.

  I had hoped that our loss would bring our family together, that we would somehow unite in our shared pain so that I would have a family once more. Instead we fragmented in our own grief. Four individual entities of pain floating randomly about the atmosphere, sometimes out of control and at other times settling for a while, sometimes shrinking, sometimes growing, but never touching.

  Adam adored Jo. We both did, idolizing her, craving closeness. He scribbled in his diary:

  Dear, dear Joby. What can I say, but that I love her. I desperately want to write to her, but even now I know I would want so much to say the ‘right’ words that I would undoubtedly say the
wrong ones. I love and respect her so much that to be honest I want to say, speak and think on the same ‘relating’ terms. I know this is wrong for I can only be myself but it is something that has built up in me over the years and is not easy to remove.

  Adam once wrote us notes entitled ‘the big little sister’ and ‘the little big sister’. I was the big little sister because I am tall, broad-shouldered and strong, as well as being the youngest. Jo is smaller, but big in every other respect: capable, efficient and strong-minded. Just like Mum. After Mum’s death, it often felt as if a no-entry sign was plastered across Jo’s chest. Adam strove for her acceptance:

  It’s horrible in a way because I have this reverence, almost fear of Jobes. Perhaps fear is the wrong word, more like intimidation. I wonder how I might convince her that although I may not be as socially ‘adequate’ as her I still am myself and capable of dealing with things in my own way. At times it is almost as if she is guarding against me embarrassing myself. It’s almost sometimes that I feel Jo just doesn’t like me, which is fair enough as I’m pretty sure I’ve got a good idea of what she sees. Oh fuck, I don’t know, but I respect her and above all I love her, she’s my big sis.

  I too felt that Jo was out of reach, emotionally distant. It is only now that I realize that she had to be that way in order to survive.

  All Adam and I knew was that we craved what we no longer had: unconditional love and comfort. And, as our father was unavailable, we looked to Jo. Neither of us had any idea of the pressure we were unwittingly passing up the line: me to Adam, Adam to Jo. We only knew there was pain and there was emptiness, and neither of us wanted it.

  Jo and Adam were opposites. Grief and loss served only to accentuate the differences in their personalities. We had all lost the same person, yet our perceptions of that loss and the way we experienced the emptiness differed greatly. I was envious of Jo for the relationship she had had with Mum. They had often shouted and argued but they were friends. I knew they had had a special bond. I wished I could have had that. I wished that I had known Mum as a person, not just as ‘Mum’.*