The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
And here he was now, the squeaky wheel, with a team of four intensive care doctors working on him, extubating him. Over the last week there have also been the paramedics who ministered to him at his home – where he failed to hang himself – and in the ambulance. Then the nurses who admitted him here, where his second hanging attempt almost succeeded, and then the parade of consultants who have appeared frowning and noting while he’s been in the coma.
Much, much grease.
That’s how it tended to go with my younger brother.
“A troubled man,” one consultant or other sighs, looking over Gary’s medical records. Silver of hair and pen, these men. Used to fine meals in the dining rooms of sandstone houses in leafy parts of Glasgow. But they must make their living down here, in Ayrshire, where they face long queues of people who subsist on fried bacon, cheap cigarettes and grain alcohol. Who come to them pouch-eyed, cancerous, peering through a fog of tonic wine and state-sponsored tranquilisers. “Troubled.” My sister Linda and I look at each other. Ah, good doctor, how much time do you have?
Many of us have the Chaos Sibling in our lives, the one for whom any set of rules might have done except for the prevailing ones. The one clutching a fork as they go stomping through this world of soup. The one for whom every straw is the last straw. For whom the first straw was the last straw.
A brief litany…
The Christmas ruined when Gary nodded out into his food.
The simple favour of giving him a car for free that turned into a living nightmare for every other member of the family.
The party he threw where our parents’ house got wrecked, an act of teenage lunacy when he was almost 30.
The piggy bank of mum’s he meticulously robbed of close to £400.
The shares my sister sold on his behalf that ended in a death threat for her.
Him phoning me to borrow some money that ended in a death threat for me.
These were the phone calls where he’d descend into gangster talk, prison talk. “Listen tae me ya fucken prick, ah’ll cut your fucken throat.” Of course, if you know how to look for it, humour is never far away from the Chaos Sibling. There was the uncle’s funeral where he sidled up to me at the wake and asked to borrow a couple of hundred pounds. “But Gary,” I pointed out, ever-so-gently, “you still owe me two thousand from that thing last year.” A long pause. The “V” of a frown between his eyebrows.
“Fuck sake, John,” he finally exclaimed. “You should have reminded me about that…”
Linda. Bent double with laughter later, when I told her.
Having an ally helps mightily with the Chaos Sibling. You are blessed if you have someone you can share it with. For Linda and I as we got older, many a phone call would begin with the words, “Have you heard the latest?” Or, more succinctly, “Right, strap yourself in…” One of us would have got the filtered, pasteurised version from mum and would share it with the other, doing the usual, exponential upgrade in the process, to get the true gauge of how bad Gary’s behaviour had been. Mum’s allowances: He was tired. He’s not been well. His headaches are bad just now. It’s that boy he’s hanging out with. Because the parent never gives up. The doting mother waiting at the prison gates on the morning of the third or fourth release, believing that this reunion will be the final one. The dutiful father writing the cheque for the fourth or fifth stint in rehab, believing the same. Meanwhile, the siblings raise their eyes at the ratio of slack getting cut on one side to the number of fucks being given on the other. At the sheer volume of oil getting pumped into that wheel. A litre. Then a bathtub full. A tanker. A Saudi province. And, of course, all the oil of Arabia never quiets it. On and on it grinds. More, always more.
Until even the deepest well runs dry. And there he sat, our brother, in the middle of the night in the middle of his life, at a dining table covered in final demands, with a brother and a sister who were barely speaking to him, with a stepladder and a noose out in his garage and a Stanley knife clutched in his fist. But he’d didn’t step off the ladder or slice through his own jugular, he called 999 and said – “I’m scared I’m going to kill myself.” And then those paramedics came. He didn’t want to die. He just wanted someone to come and take him away from all the chaos, the chaos he’d spent a lifetime generating. And it worked – for a couple of hours. Until something went wrong again in the hospital, and he almost succeeded in hanging himself from a door in a cubicle off the A&E department, using his sweater as a ligature.
I say “almost”.
It took him four days to die.
Sometimes Linda and I will look back at all the chaos and we’ll find ourselves pondering all the chaos that might still have been to come, as Gary moved into his 50s, his 60s, like a mad old dog, grizzled and barking on into the night. And we say the thing that perhaps only the survivors of the Chaos Sibling can say to each other, whispered late at night, when we’re both in our cups, the thing unsayable in the realm of suicide – I’m glad he’s dead.
We sit there, sipping our wine. Hearing only silence where once the wheel creaked and squawked.
John Niven is a novelist and screenwriter. His memoir “O Brother” – about families, black sheep and surviving suicide – is published August 24th by Canongate
