Peter Pan

By Olenka Drabczynska 

This story is about my brother, who missed his football try outs, got knocked off his bike on the way to athletics, did not move with my family and me to NZ, instead stayed in London, and went to St Martins School of Art; he is my real life Peter Pan, turns out he’s also a heroin addict.

Peter Pan lived in Hackney, rent free in Mum’s house.

The scene: his sweaty and bony body lying on an unmade double bed surrounded by empty bottles and half drunken glasses of wine, with a syringe or two on the night stand. Dishes piled up in the sink downstairs, mould growing furrier and darker on baked bean imprinted plates. Mum, being the stiff-upper lip British woman that she was, took a no nonsense approach to parenting; she picked him up by his ankles, put him on a plane, cleaned the house – as if nothing had ever happened.

It’s all a blur as to how he got to that point. Was it my mum leaving my dad for his best friend? Was it abandoning him in a different country? Was it his flatmate, the drug dealer? I am his younger sister – what could I have done? Could I have thrown the needles away? Could I have stopped it? Could I have just been there?

Mum’s first approach was to try cold turkey; the sweating, crying, erratic and violent behaviour was a consequence. Professional help was soon sought, and he was put on methadone. 

Rehabilitation in NZ is an interesting thing for a drug addict. Unless you are of harm to yourself or others, there are no Betty Ford Clinics and counselling occurs between once a week and once a month – depending on severity. And when it comes to a significantly intelligent person like Patrick it can be quite easy to skew the system in your favour.

Patrick is well read, artistic, and naturally academic – nowadays  one of his many freelance jobs is being paid to write other people’s Master’s Theses. He is a charismatic, flirtatious, well-educated sweet-talker. If you ever came to meet him, you would never guess that he was a drug addict. And over the years he’s mastered the performance. This benefits my mother a lot in her ‘keeping up appearances’ state of mind. I’m not sure if our extended family truly knows about my brother’s situation.

There has been the odd slip up; I was living in Wellington and on a night out, I came home to an uneasy feeling as if someone had been in my house, but nothing had been stolen. I walked around the house a couple of times and then settled with the fact that I must just be paranoid. It wasn’t until after I got out of the shower, I caught a glimmer of an empty chocolate wrapper. 

At Christmas, even as adults, Dad would treat us both to giant stockings full of galaxy bars – a real treat that I would savour for at least a couple of months. Patrick til Boxing Day!

When I saw that unwrapped foil with just the few velvety milk chocolate crumbs, I was livid – I knew exactly who had been in my house. I made my way downstairs to the empty bedroom to find the window smashed, and glass splayed across the carpet.

I called him immediately; unsurprisingly he rejected my call. My boyfriend who was with me handed me his phone and I called again.

‘Patrick.’

‘Hi Lenk!’

‘So? What happened?’

‘Well, you weren’t in and I needed a place to sleep’ – I lived opposite a hospital and a homeless shelter. 

‘Did you think to call me?’

‘My phone was dead’.

‘Public phone or asking someone?’

‘Oh I didn’t think of that’.

The conversation went on with him throwing out every excuse that he could to justify his actions. My mum paid me for the emergency repair, and insisted Patrick would pay her back. I never trusted that that would happen. It came to a point for me where had had enough of his excuses and my mum covering for him; there’s never a consequence.

When he faced me in person, he resembled a 5-year-old boy who had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar before dinner. And it felt like his punishment matched.

As he grew older, Patrick’s mental health declined; with his research, he was convinced that he was bipolar, but there was certainly more going on that would make it a more complex diagnosis. Thanks to his substance abuse, his mind and rationality steadily deteriorated.

He would lie so well to people that I think he himself believed the lie. Patrick’s love of literature made him a wonderful storyteller. Every single detail was carefully considered and for a while no one could doubt the charismatic personality.

A memorable story he told was how he was a study a for Psychology Master’s students; we chauffeured him to these made up appointments. Mum finally found him out when she spent a morning traipsing around the university trying to find various fake rooms, only to be told by a faculty advisor that no such study existed.

Thus started what my Mum likes to call ‘The summer of voices’.

Patrick drove himself mad questioning what he believed. Even when he was sober and not using, I would have conversations with him where I could see his mind wonder and his eyes glaze over as if he was listening to something or someone else. We would sit in the car, and he would begin to just chat away to himself. It would start off as distant mumblings and then just grow in to full blown arguments with imaginary people. As events unfurled, it became clearer as to what he was experiencing inside his head.

I remember the time when Patrick’s demons really began to surface. It was one of those very special unpredictable summer nights. Staying with my Mum and stepdad, we had just enjoyed a beautiful day on the beach and, as we had grown further apart over the years, there was a moment treasured when I was able to confide in Patrick about my self-turmoils and he had lucidly offered sound concern and advice.

Over that year, I had developed quite a bad relationship with food, and had my own addictions related to image and fitness. I had developed bulimia. My mum was oblivious to notice; her focus was Patrick. Our family didn’t have issues. And I never had the heart to tell my dad. So I finally opened up to Pat, which, for me, was quite a special moment. With his addiction and me moving away from home, we had grown somewhat apart. I distinctly remember him telling me not to be stupid and of course tell Dad; I shouldn’t deal with this alone. I asked him to tell Dad, which he promised. But he never did.

We joked about our parents and our own shortcomings and made a plan to carry on the evening with a trip to the movies.

I remember jokes around the dinner table and then a sudden switch. Patrick’s lucid, charming and talkative self ceased mid-sentence. He froze, dropped his fork and whispered inaudibly to himself. My mum, choosing to distract from the situation tried to carry on the conversation with failing unimportant small-talk. 

Whisper again. Slightly louder this time. Mum asks me a question about work, visibly uncomfortable by the situation.

‘No, I can’t!’

‘Can’t what darling?’

‘Stop it, you can’t make me do it!’

‘Do what, Patrick?’

‘This is not the right time’.

By this time, it is no longer a whisper, frustration is growing in his face. He removes himself from the dinner table and paces ferociously around the room. Visibly losing the argument with whomever he is speaking with, he sits himself down on the floor in the corner of the room cradling his knees. Mum attempts to get close to him but he lashes back, almost hitting her. After a few moments, he tells us he is feeling unwell and excuses himself to bed. We cancel the movie night. 

The rest of us sit watching TV for the next hour or so until we hear these faint, irritated grunts coming from Patrick’s bedroom. Mum goes to check on him only to find the room turned upside down and a hole in the wall, which his punch has made in anger.

He was crying, sweating, and naked. The sky outside, to match, was grey and flashes of lightening filled the darkness. Mum couldn’t calm him; my stepdad stands there shocked. As I try to wrack my brain to remember what he was saying, all there is screaming, yelling and crying; nothing coherent. 

He took to the front door, in his sweaty birthday suit and walked out the front gate and down the front road. Mum followed, and then me; the humid rain hitting our faces.

It didn’t take long for the neighbours to call the police and for their red and blue lights to show up at the house. His erratic behaviour made it almost impossible for us to get him inside, but we eventually did and whatever my mum said made the police leave the naked, soaking wet screaming 30-year-old male alone. 

There were a few other times that summer that Patrick suffered and argued against his demons. He told us countless time that Intelligence was watching him in connection with him helping a girl out of domestic abuse. It turns out this was all the voices inside his head, but the police did contact our house when they had reports of my brother calling through men in the telephone book accusing them of violence.

But because he believed the voices to be his reality for some time, there was no convincing him otherwise. I managed to miss a punch from his as he slammed his fist into the wall next to me. That was the last time I spent time with him before I moved over to the UK.

But of course none of this was enough for the public health system to intervene. 

He does not remember these moments, nor that I ever confided in him. But that’s not surprising. Every time I try to recount a moment we’ve shared together with him, they’re not quite there anymore. 

I want him to remember how he would mock me dancing to N*SYNC on my own in my bedroom, how he once made me give him my white chocolate magnum ice cream because he had convinced me that there was a monster in it, or that every summer he would take me to Covent Garden to watch the street artists. Or that time he and his mates yelled at the girls who were picking on me and calling me names on the way home. He was my older brother, hero and best mate. 

Peter Pan, age 36, now lives rent free at home with my dad. He occasionally attempts to steal alcohol from my dad’s liquor cabinet. He spends all night in his own Neverland and all day in bed. The lost boys don’t follow him anymore. They all grew up. But as my Mum says, he’s fine.