Strange harmonies

Alvin in London is a feat in itself, as he does not really like the capital. For instance, he is very suspicious – perhaps rightly – of travelling on the tube. He has very real concerns about the escalators, does not like going underground, and struggles with the pressure of numbers.(All of which could be said about me, from time to time, too). Nevertheless, he managed, firmly gripping the handrail, and making full use of the space available to him. Indeed, watching Alvin labour up the stairs at Tottenham Court Road, I was drawn to wonder whether London Underground should employ him to slow down the pace of life, and stall the march of rampant materialism. Trying to offer him assistance, I took in the puzzled looks of one or two commuters, confronted with this unexpected if minor delay. Why were they puzzled?

One of the great advantages of having a brother like Alvin can be located in this. His approach to life regularly encourages you to think creatively. He draws attention to the habitual perspectives we take up in life, and reframes them in interesting ways. How do you negotiate a city like London with a person who will have no truck with stairs? How do you find a toilet that is not up or down stairs? What are the best places in London without stairs? Why does everyone need to be barging into one another at a breakneck speed whilst on stairs? How much does London need its stairs? What did stairs ever do for us, anyway?

An Alvin siblingship is a means of exploring assumptions, beliefs, and opinions. His interjections in a conversation are often radically unusual, but can be very much to the point. His opinions are robust, and inevitably draw out one’s own. Alvin does not always pay heed to the rhythms of a conversation, and his contributions can be disorientating, at first, but can also refocus a discussion. At home, my Dad and I sometimes get to talk windily about history and politics. When we’re pulling apart the minutiae, Alvin has a tendency to jump in there with a sharp question. He won’t always stay for the answer.

At family events, Alvin takes things at his own pace. I can recall one such time when he was milling about with his headphones on, having seemingly abandoned the opportunity to speak to anyone. I asked him how he knew what was going on with the music ramped up? He said he just ‘ups the ante.’ I didn’t really know what he meant by this, but what became clear was how effectively he had mined for information. He knew more about the relatives as a whole than anyone else did. He had dug up several secrets, in fact. This made me think how evasive people can be, what a masquerade is on, but when faced with the directness of an Alvin, a person has to react in some way. There is a tendency to dismiss or marginalize the experiences of people affected by mental illness, but we really ought to be listening to them much more closely.

But why do we have to keep telling ourselves to listen? Had I been listening at all?

Alvin will often, perhaps unknowingly, turn the question back on you. ‘I’m not mentally ill anymore,’ he stated recently, adding, shortly afterwards, that he has been in the past, but not now. He attributed any problems he might have to, above all, neck pain. ‘Do you think I’m mad?’ he then posted. Difficult question to answer. I said that we can all behave madly, at times. ‘What mad things do I do, then?’ he pressed me. I said that I thought it was strange to avoid the stairs in a city of millions, to which he made no comment. He left it for a few seconds, and then stipulated that a game on the Nintendo would be the best remedy of all. He was evidently not offended by what I had told him; perhaps he wondered why I didn’t see things his way. Alvin went upstairs to get the game, because he doesn’t mind the stairs at my folks’ place, or in Ipswich. Better stairs there, more reliable? I don’t know. We were in a private sanctuary of shared memories here: the experiences we had growing up together, the games we played, the music we liked.

These are strange harmonies, all the more serene for the messy stuff that goes about them. It makes me think about an argument that I once read about the development of the human capacity for language running alongside the emergence of mental illness. Well, I don’t know about that, but there is a joy in Alvin’s sometimes loose approach to sentence construction. Allowing for the fact that I have seen him, when unwell, simply unable to communicate, or tormented by his communications, there is a quiet heroism in his use of language. Sometimes it is hard to speak at all, particularly when we are unsure about our meaning. Good communication is a sign of health, as well as being highly creative. It takes courage.