Before he died, my brother Philip believed he was a corpse. He complained of having lost everything and was convinced that various body parts had been taken from him in the middle of the night. He imagined himself limbless and was so immersed in his own delusion that he claimed to be able to smell his own rotting flesh and feel worms crawling through his skin. I was so disgusted by this ill-concealed madness that I refused to go near him for months and was secretly terrified, finding a variety of ways to keep myself permanently hidden from view.
Later, the doctors said he’d suffered from Cotard’s syndrome, but by then Philip was already dead. It wasn’t a sick joke anymore, like a screwy kid pantomiming death; it was the real thing. And before I had time to be truly afraid, he was gone.
***
When I started to miss him I was mildly surprised. During his last few years Philip and I had become more and more alienated from each other and I hadn’t prepared myself to grieve. Most of my nightmares had been filled with bloated images of him, shuffling down the landing to my door, his eyes hopelessly swelling with blood. He would whisper his psychosis in my ear and tell me about his hardened arteries, his deficient heart, the tumour on his brain, and I would scream myself awake with the monster’s name on my lips, desperate for my real brother to emerge.
The memory fills me with shame, but at the time that’s all Philip ever was: a monster. The creature who lived in my house. The thing I was determined to avoid, who had stolen my brother away.
***
My sister Amy was far more accepting. She treated Philip more humanely than any of us and yet she had more reason than most to be afraid.
Our Mother had encouraged her to tend a small garden at the back of the house, on a narrow, discreetly shadowed patch of land. I remember watching the two of them from the kitchen window, revelling in their time alone.
“Will anything grow there?” Amy asked. “It looks kinda dark.”
“Don’t worry about the darkness,” Mother said. “Some plants grow beautifully in the shade. Begonias, jasmine, heliotrope.” She smiled, a gesture that was becoming less common with each passing year.
At that moment, Philip trundled past, his eyes glazed over with some hidden trauma, mobilised only by his latest pathology.
“Hey, Philip! I’m gonna plant some jasmine and begoners,” Amy said, the simplicity of her pleasure illuminating her pale face.
Mother chose not to correct her; saw little point in it, I guess. What did it matter if a seven-year-old child mispronounced the odd word or two? Wasn’t that part of their charm?
Surprisingly, Philip drew to a halt and knelt down in the soft soil, spreading his hands in the dirt. His cheeks were raw with some imaginary irritation and his eyes appeared sunken and lost. A stranger might have suspected he was drunk, but dad had pretty much nailed that condition for himself, and, besides, we knew better. It wasn’t drink that addled Philip’s brain; it was the faulty wiring in his head. The misfiring synapses that sparked a lunacy we couldn’t control. He couldn’t help it. It was just the way he was, and we dealt with it by trying to forgive him whenever we could.
“This is where I want to be buried,” he said, sieving the dirt through his hands. “In a place where the soil is soft.”
Amy jumped up, shocked. “You can’t!” she cried. “This is my garden. Tell him, mum! He can’t be buried here, can he?”
Philip stood up and walked unsteadily back to the house, while Mother consoled a weeping Amy in her arms.
I tried to picture the garden in full bloom, having been nourished by Philip’s withering corpse. Flowers my sister had set her heart on but could barely name: jasmine, heliotrope, begoners.
***
Each morning Philip peeled away dead skin that he had feverishly worked loose in the night. It was a terrible ordeal to have to witness and Mother tried to encourage him to do it in private. If he had to do it at all, she insisted, then it must be done in the bathroom, like all the other bodily unpleasantness we endured.
It didn’t much matter; we may have avoided having to watch the actual shedding, but the skin that Philip spent hours worrying from his hands and arms and feet was always left in a repulsive mound on the floor, like dirty underwear that none of us were very keen to retrieve.
My Father, bearing the customary hangover, was never best pleased by these events.
“I swear, Cynth, if that boy fouls the bathroom with that shit one more time, he’s out on his arse. Do you understand?”
When Father was in this kind of mood, which was, of course, most days, the rest of us had learned, by instinct it seemed, not to say a word. We quietly went about our business, buttering toast, preparing for school, and waiting for Father to explode.
“How many times has he been told? A dozen? Two dozen? I don’t care how retarded the boy is, Cynth, he’s got to learn. He can’t treat this place like a bloody zoo. Are you listening to me, woman?”
“Of course, dear. A zoo.”
Father howled helplessly. “I said not a zoo! Not a zoo!”
Had this ludicrous conversation taken place ten hours later, with Father in his cups, this is the point at which Mother would have received a bloody mouth. But hangover-Father was never quite as savage as drunk-Father and the heat of the argument would eventually fizzle out. Dad would hold his head in his hands, listening to the waves pounding in his skull, and would disappear for the day to whatever watering hole he had yet to be banned from, though they were increasingly few and far between.
“You shouldn’t let him speak to you like that,” I said when he was out of earshot, but Mother was busy making our packed lunch. Three sandwiches, an apple and a carton of Sunny Delight.
***
I liked to watch Amy tend her garden from my bedroom window and I was as thrilled as she was when the first of the flowers began to bloom. Philip watched too from the garden bench as Amy tenderly turned the soil, no doubt imagining what it might feel like to have all that muck running through his hair.
When she cut her first flower, she gave the bloom to Philip and patiently helped him attach it to his coat. It was a beautiful wild violet that Mother had given to her as a gift, and which Philip, rather surprisingly, adored. He wore it with pride around the house even after it had wilted into a hideous parody of itself. When I asked him to remove it, he refused and I had repeated nightmares of Philip stalking me through the house, brandishing the battered corpse of the wild violet like a gun. Eventually, Father came to the rescue when he caught Philip staunching the blood of a self-inflicted wound with the dead petals. He was trying to offer them a little life, he said. Father told him that if he did it again, Philip wouldn’t have much life left to give, and he promptly threw the flower in the bin.
The image of Philip and the wild violet, though, has remained, and I sometimes wake up to this day with the sweet smell of it feathering my nose.
***
“Jack?” Amy said, while we were washing up one evening. “Why is Philip like he is? Have we done something to make him upset?”
“No, sweetheart,” I said. “Philip’s just a little different, remember? Just like mum explained.”
She pondered this for a moment and then sighed. “If he wants to be dead so much, why doesn’t he just die?”
I had no answer to this and carried on rinsing the pots.
“I don’t want to die,” Amy said. “But I don’t want to get like Philip neither. Do you think I will?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Philip’s very special. He’s just sick in the head, that’s all.”
“But what if one of us gets sick in the head too? What if our skin starts peeling in the night?”
I shuddered as Amy articulated another of my recurring nightmares and playfully rubbed her on the head.
“Trust me, it’ll never happen,” I said, folding the tea towel and ushering her along.
But there was a part of me that wasn’t so sure.
***
Our parents were fighting again. It usually took the form of Mother knitting in the armchair while Father screamed blue murder at her from across the room, so it was kind of one-sided, but the bile I felt in my stomach when it occurred had begun to fill me with dread.
It was also when Philip was at his worst. He would lie on his bed in complete silence, defined only by his homemade shroud, which had been stitched together from pilfered fabrics, and now covered him from head to toe. You could see the dull shape of his body lying motionless beneath the faded material, a small pocket of air where the mouth was occasionally disturbing the cloth.
I touched him once, even tried to yank him awake, but to all intents and purposes he was dead. When the shroud fell away his eyes were wide open. What he saw was anybody’s guess.
***
One morning, Philip announced to us over breakfast that his body was turning to stone. He said he could no longer raise his arms above his head and he would soon be unable to walk.
Mother continued pouring milk on her cereal and Amy and I immersed ourselves in the TV.
“What’s this?” Father said, appearing clean-shaven and refreshed at the door.
“Nothing,” Mother said quickly. “Philip was just telling us he feels a little unwell today, that’s all.”
Father grunted. “What’s new?” he said, taking a seat.
“I’m turning to stone,” Philip said calmly. “I can feel it. My digestive system, my insides. Everything.”
Mother sighed, anticipating Father’s response and I rolled my eyes, feeling a rush of nausea and hate.
“Philip, you are so full of shit!” I said. “Why can’t you just keep your fucking mouth shut for a change!”
“Jack!” Mother said, turning on me with an anger I didn’t expect. “Don’t you ever use language like that in this house.”
“Father does!” I blurted, “All the fucking time. We hear him when you think we’re asleep.”
Mother looked shocked and turned to Father for support. When his hand caught me on the side of the head I felt a momentary pain and then a swell of relief that Philip’s lunacy had been temporarily forgot.
“Go to your room!” Father shouted. “All of you!”
Mother nodded her head and we disappeared up the stairs, Philip dragging his petrified feet.
***
The best time to catch Father in a good mood was Saturday afternoon. He lay on the sofa drinking Stella and betting on the horses by phone, but for a few hours, before the beer and the losses took their toll, he could almost be fun to be around. He was a proper Father then, just for a brief spell, and if he was drowning his sorrows and racking up debt at the same time, what did it matter? It would only affect us kids later on, when the horror of what he’d become kicked in.
It was a Saturday afternoon when I saw him with Amy, kneeling before her wonderful garden with his arm around her shoulders, seemingly in the middle of a prayer. He was pointing to some of the flowers and Amy was delighting in telling him everything she’d learned about each one. They looked happy, purely happy, and I wondered how long their display of affection might last. The garden had facilitated moments of tenderness that we simply weren’t accustomed to, and I was waiting for the bubble to burst.
***
It was inevitable, of course, that eventually Philip would try to kill himself. His consultant, Dr Bradshaw, had warned us as much. Mother had been very conscientious in stripping the house of any and all materials that might be deemed dangerous, including knitting needles, lead pencils, kitchen knives and so on. But how can you really provide a safe domestic environment for someone like Philip? Short of locking him in a padded cell, it’s impossible. Naturally, my Mother blamed herself, and being the kind of family that we are, we let her. We did nothing to try and ease the guilt that was progressively eating her away.
Amy found him, of course; another tragedy for which my Mother was never able to fully forgive herself, though if she were here now I’m sure she’d disagree. I believe she tried, but you could see the pain in her eyes. It was as though some private trauma was unfolding in the distance, and she was unable to make up the ground. She stayed like that for a long time, as long as I can remember, in fact, irreversibly damaged by her own flesh and blood, the weight of our dysfunction too much for any one person to bear.
It was Amy, though, who suffered the most. No seven-year-old girl should have to walk into the bathroom and see the blood of her brother spilled across the floor. By this stage, Philip had abused his body to such a degree that it was barely recognisable as human. There were scars, abrasions, and sundry other deformities that had degraded him beyond repair. It was, Dr Bradshaw informed Mother, all part of a process of ‘derealisation’ that Philip seemed to be experiencing, and, in retrospect, it was little wonder he had tried to reduce himself to an actual corpse. He had been telling us he was dead for so long now that we had become inured to it. The only way to convince us was with this desperately insane display.
The incident is still fresh in my mind, of course, and I suspect it will remain lodged there for quite some time. I heard Amy scream and ran upstairs, expecting to see her in some kind of physical distress. Mother had got there first and was busy securing the bathroom door, while Amy, ashen-faced, continued to scream down the house.
“What is it?” I yelled, wrapping my arms around my sister and burying her head in my chest.
“It’s Philip,” Mother said, looking visibly shaken. “I think he’s dead.”
The statement, after hearing it from Philip himself for so long, sounded powerless and mildly amusing, as though Mother was doing her best to cheer us up.
She nodded her head. “I need you to take Amy downstairs,” she said, “and call Dr Bradshaw. Okay? Then sit with your sister and do your best to calm her down. Give her tea with lots of honey. It’ll soothe her and help her to sleep. Blankets are in the cupboard under the stairs.”
Then she turned her back on us, slid open the bathroom door, and squeezed herself in. I had a sickening glimpse of something red scribbled across the floor before my Mother’s body impeded the view. When she finally shut the door, it closed with a terrible snick, trapping my Mother inside.
When she came out, much later, with Dr Bradshaw and the paramedics, I could tell she had been changed. She took my hand and smiled reassuringly, but there was blood on her face and in her hair. She looked monstrous and I tried to pull away, but she clung on, breathing heavily, in need of someone innocent to love.
***
We moved house; we had to. None of us dared venture into the bathroom, except Father, of course, who was usually too full of piss and beer to care. Mother never set foot in the room again. She bathed as best she could in the kitchen sink, used the old outhouse when she needed the loo and twice a week drew a bath in old Mrs Pratchard’s house two doors down. When we moved, it was Mother who was most relieved.
Philip spent two weeks in hospital after he tried to kill himself and another six being treated by Dr Bradshaw at The Collingwood Foundation. When he emerged, he was slower, weaker and paler, like fodder circling the pen, waiting to be zapped in the brain. Father told me Philip had received a special treatment called electroconvulsive therapy to try and make him normal again and it had worked better than any of them had hoped.
But he didn’t look normal; he looked sick. There was no denying the crazy part had been removed, but that was all Philip had left and now he shuffled around like a caricature of the walking dead.
I went to the library and looked up electroconvulsive therapy on the computer. The
screen flashed like a light bulb had gone on above its head and then showed me this:
Electroshock (ECT) involves the production of a grand mal convulsion, similar to an epileptic seizure, by passing from 70 to 600 volts of electric current through the brain for 0.5 to 4 seconds. Before application, ECT subjects are typically given anaesthetic, tranquillizing and muscle-paralysing drugs to reduce fear, pain, and the risk (from violent muscle spasms) of fractured bones (particularly of the spine, a common occurrence in the earlier history of ECT before the introduction of muscle paralysers). The ECT convulsion usually lasts from thirty to sixty seconds and may produce life-threatening complications, such as apnea and cardiac arrest. The convulsion is followed by a period of unconsciousness of several minutes' duration. Electroshock is usually administered in hospitals because they are equipped to handle emergency situations which often develop during or after an ECT session. Brain damage, memory loss and mental disability are routine distinguishing results.
I looked at the screen and felt physically sick. How could my own parents approve of such a thing? I ran home, barrelled up the stairs and stood panting at the threshold of Philip’s room. He was lying inert on the bed, a sliver of drool forming at the corner of his mouth. I wanted to hug him but was too afraid. Instead, I tried to imagine what my brother had endured; wasn’t at all surprised that he longed to be dead.
***
As we settled into our new home, unpacking the same worries, the same fears, the same endless hostilities, Philip formed his first and only relationship beyond the family.
One of our neighbours, an old man named Bernard Putts, was an extremely skilled craftsman, a carpenter by trade, but a specialist beyond compare who could carve an angel from the bough of a tree. He worked from home and could be heard toiling in his converted outhouse late into the night, persuading his lathe to sing. He rarely spoke and was reluctant to look you in the eye, but his skills were in great demand, often forcing him to turn work away that he knew he wouldn’t have time to complete. He worked tirelessly and would have done so, I suspect, in any circumstance, but his gift was a good provider and he lived a frugal but comfortable life. He was an artist, Mother explained, and his medium was wood. We were in awe of him from the moment we arrived.
Apart from Philip, of course, who deferred to no one and freely bore the marks of a differentiated life. Perhaps it was this that appealed to Bernard Putts, the fact that Philip was a kindred spirit, a soul consumed by some ponderous obsession that had driven him to pursue an existence we could never understand.
Ultimately, it didn’t really matter; Philip had wandered over into Bernard’s yard one day and a pattern had been irrevocably defined. He would stand watching Bernard at work, sometimes for hours at a time, and the aching sadness that he seemed to exude would slowly and miraculously retreat. Mother had tried to discourage him, had even apologised to Bernard on Philip’s behalf, but the old man had just smiled and said, “He’s happy here”, before patiently returning to work.
I couldn’t quite understand Philip’s fascination back then, nor Bernard’s passive acceptance of the intrusion, but I have a clearer perspective on it now, and it fills me with a warmth I can barely describe.
They were happy; purely happy. It was as simple, and as complicated, as that.
***
If they ever spoke to each other I certainly didn’t hear of it, though Bernard would provide Philip with sandwiches and squash when he stopped for lunch, and a chair when the weather grew warm. In turn, Philip would take Bernard peculiarly-shaped pieces of wood he managed to dislodge from unseen places around the house, which Bernard would patiently stockpile until he had enough to make Philip a bird in mid-flight or a leaping tiger or some other impossible treasure that Philip would lovingly arrange in his room.
It was a strange relationship, certainly, but it was beautiful too, in its way, undemanding and secure, until the day Mother went round to Bernard’s house and found Philip lying in a hand-made coffin, his dreams of extinction complete.
Mother was appalled, but for all her anxiety it seemed that Philip was perfectly at peace. The coffin was exquisitely crafted and had been lined with crushed velvet to better accommodate the body inside. Apparently, when Mother made the discovery, Philip had his eyes closed and his hands drawn creepily across his chest, playing dead to the sound of Bernard’s beguiling lathe.
It should have ended there, I suppose, the bizarre friendship having reached a point at which it was impossible not to become concerned. But when he was forbidden to enter Bernard’s yard, Philip invoked the Mother of all rages and began destroying every wooden item in his room, whereupon Father used said items to beat him to within an inch of his life.
It was an ugly display and it completely changed the balance of power in the house. Father realised how close he had come to doing serious bodily harm to his own son and became much more subdued, a whiskey-addled figure in the corner of the room whose life had been frittered away. Mother remained as impassive as ever, lost somewhere in the hinterland between her troubled marriage and what she’d imagined it to be, and Amy and I began to spend more time at school, finding countless ways to avoid going home.
As for Philip, his privileges were eventually restored and he returned to Bernard’s workshop as though he’d never been away. He assumed his place in the hand-made coffin and fell asleep to the dull clink of the old radiator rattling the pipes.
But when he woke up, he had coughed up blood, and his eyes were yellow and sick. He felt weak, he said, his teeth were cold, and he could no longer stand the sight of his skin. When we took him to the hospital, he kept his eyes closed for the entire journey, holding Mother’s hand and making a noise through his teeth like a lathe.
***
Philip died at 3:18 in the morning and when a tired Dr Bradshaw broke the news Father surprised us all by bursting into tears. It had been an exhausting twelve hours or so and we were all drained, but we tried to convince ourselves that this was exactly what Philip had wanted all along.
Mother thanked Dr Bradshaw for his efforts and guided what remained of her family into the starlit night, uncertain how next to proceed. She allowed Father to weep on her shoulder, catching his head effortlessly when it slipped, and held tightly to mine and Amy’s hand.
We waited for a taxi and clung to each other, wondering where Philip might have gone. Wherever it was, I hoped he was at peace, leading an imaginary life.
END
Copyright © James Cooper 2007
The Other Son appears in the collection You Are The Fly.