Mother's Milk

by Edward St. Aubyn

In the hall, angular blocks of evening light slanted across the floor and stretched up the walls.

but it so happened that he did hate his brother, and he wished that he didn’t. Couldn’t his parents remember what it was like when it was just the three of them? They loved each other so much that it hurt when one of them left the room. What had been wrong with having just him on his own? Wasn’t he enough? Wasn’t he good enough? They used to sit on the lawn, where his brother was now, and throw each other the red ball (he had hidden it; Thomas wasn’t going to get that as well) and whether he caught it or dropped it, they had all laughed and everything was perfect. How could they want to spoil that?

Having a brother made Robert wonder what it had been like when he only had his own thoughts to guide him. Once you locked into language, all you could do was shuffle the greasy pack of a few thousand words that millions of people had used before.

His parents were trying not to make too much noise but they had hopeless giggles. As long as he was performing they hardly paid any attention to Thomas at all.

Her face was a cobweb of creases earned from trying so hard to be good, from worrying about really huge things like the planet, or the universe, or the millions of suffering people she had never met, or God’s opinion of what she should do next.

sweating bottle of white

‘Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up,’ said Julia, smiling at Robert sternly. ‘They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won’t drink too much, give up, get divorced, become mentally ill. The part of oneself that’s fighting against decay and depression is transferred to guarding them from decay and depression. In the meantime one decays and gets depressed.’

‘Since divorcing Richard,’ she said, ‘I get these horrible moments of vertigo. I suddenly feel as if I don’t exist.’

but Robert found himself caught between the punchbag and the punch

He could see without looking, hear without listening; he was aware that he was not thinking. His attention, which usually bounced from one thing to another, was still. He pushed to test its resistance but he didn’t push too hard, knowing that he could probably make himself pinball around again if he tried. His mind was glazed over, like a pond drowsily repeating the pattern of the sky.

Illness had blown her apart like a dandelion clock. He had wondered if he would end up like that, a few seeds sticking to a broken stem.

Her eyes made Robert feel as if she was scudding through an overcast sky, breaking briefly into clear space and then rushing back through thickening veils into the milky blindness of a cloud.

Robert didn’t know what to do. His father hated his own mother. He couldn’t join him and he couldn’t condemn him.

‘Hospitals are very shocking places,’ he said, ‘full of poor deluded fools who aren’t looking for groundless celebrity or obscene quantities of money, but think the point of life is to help other people. Where do they get these ideas from? We must send them on an empowerment weekend workshop with the Packers.’

‘What can drive a man mad is being forced to have the emotion which he is forbidden to have at the same time,’ said his father. ‘My mother’s treachery forced me to be angry, but then her illness forced me to feel pity instead. Now her recklessness makes me angry again but her bravery is supposed to smother my anger with admiration. Well, I’m a simple sort of a fellow, and the fact is that I remain fucking angry,’ he shouted, banging the steering wheel.

Why was his grandmother causing so much trouble? The scramble for a front-row seat in heaven seemed unbearably expensive.

As usual, he was too tired to read and too restless to sleep. The tower of books on his bedside table seemed to provide for every mood, except the mood of agitated despair he was invariably in.

Being surrounded by children only brought him closer to his own childishness. He felt like a man who dreads leaving harbour, knowing that under the deck of his impressive yacht there is only a dirty little twin-stroke engine: fearing and wanting, fearing and wanting.

Everything was as usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.

Even Johnny (but then, he was a child psychologist) reproached himself for making his children feel that he really understood them, that he knew what they were feeling before they knew themselves, that he could read their unconscious impulses. They lived in the panoptic prison of his sympathy and expertise. He had stolen their inner lives. Perhaps the kindest thing Patrick could do was to break up his family, to offer his children a crude and solid catastrophe. All children had to break free in the end. Why not give them a hard wall to kick against, a high board to jump from. Christ, he really must get some rest.

It was five in the morning now, too late for one half of life and too early for the other.

He knew that it was not really his mother he needed to escape but the poisonous combination of boredom and rage he felt whenever he thought about her.

A secret half of Eleanor grew more bitter and suspicious, so that the visible half could remain credulous and eager.

Patrick tried to imagine the world from Thomas’s point of view, but it was a hopeless task. Most of the time, he couldn’t even imagine the world from his own point of view. He relied on nightfall to give him a crash course in the real despair that underlay the stale, remote, patchily pleasurable days.

He clambered to his feet. Knees going. Old age and death. Cancer. Out of his private space into the confusion of other people, or out of the confusion of his private space into the effortless authority of his engagement with others. He never knew which way it would go.

It was bewildering to feel alive, almost painful.

She had handed him, without any sense of irony, the task of disinheriting himself, and he had carried it out carefully.

He was definitely going to get drunk and insult Seamus, or maybe he wasn’t. In the end, it was even harder to behave badly than to behave well. That was the trouble with not being a psychopath. Every avenue was blocked.

He had now achieved the pseudo-detachment of drunkenness, the little hillock before the swamps of self-pity and memory loss.

He saw that he really must get well, he couldn’t go on this way. One day he was going to drop the whole thing, but he couldn’t do that until he was ready, and he couldn’t control when he would be ready. He could, however, get ready to be ready. He sank back in his chair and agreed at least to that: his business for the rest of the month was to get ready to be ready to be well.

There’s no wood left for the fire that keeps the wild animals at bay, that sort of thing. But also something even more confusing – the wild animals are a part of me that’s winning. I can’t stop them from destroying me without destroying them, but I can’t destroy them without destroying myself. Even that makes it sound too organized. It’s really more like a cartoon of cats fighting: a spinning blackness with exclamation marks flying off it.’

As you know, my mother only paves the road to hell with the best intentions, so we can assume that my father was the advocate of the character-building advantages of a willbreaking upbringing.

We are always “the veils that veil us from ourselves”, but looking into infancy, with no memories and no established sense of self, it’s all veils.

The past has all the time in the world. It’s only the future which is running out.’

‘We’ve all been wondering what you’re up to,’ said Julia. ‘Are you baying at the moon, or working out the meaning of life?’ ‘Neither,’ said Patrick, ‘there’s too much baying in this valley already, and we worked out the meaning of life years ago: “Walk tall and spit on the graves of your enemies”. Wasn’t that it?’ ‘No, no,’ said Johnny. ‘It was “love thy neighbour as thyself”.’ ‘Oh, well, given how much I love myself, it amounts to pretty much the same thing.’

If he had one thing to say to the world, it was this: never, never have a child without first getting a reliable mistress.

The initial impact of the coffee and brandy was dying out, leaving him only with a doomed nervous energy,

He needed to rejoin his own species, the rows and rows of belching animals on the beach

He envied the male spider who was eaten straight after fertilizing the female, rather than consumed bit by bit like his human counterpart.

They were happy because they had the undivided attention of their mother, and he was unhappy because he had her undivided inattention.

How could she say she was sad when she was happy the next minute? How could she say she was happy when a minute later she wanted to scream?

She sometimes felt she was about to forget her own existence completely. She had to cry to reclaim herself. People who didn’t understand thought that her tears were the product of a long-suppressed and mundane catastrophe, her terminal exhaustion, her huge overdraft or her unfaithful husband, but they were in fact a crash course in the necessary egotism of someone who needed to get a self back in order to sacrifice it again.

all the child remembered was the violence, replacing the parent’s justified distress with his own.

Mary was not a boy. Girls who weren’t boys were such a let-down.

Mary was utterly lost in loss,

lost in the madness of knowing that only he could have understood her feelings about his death.

Even then he had been more introspective than Thomas, more burdened.

Until then, he had referred to himself as ‘you’ on the perfectly logical grounds that everyone else did. He also referred to others as ‘I’, on the perfectly logical grounds that that was how they referred to themselves.

He was either too close for her to see the whole of him,

She had spent the last seven years watching Patrick’s childhood like a rope inching through his clenched hands.