Peace at all Costs

One of the major plot points of the first ever episode of the comedy series Black Books comes from the dissatisfied accountant Manny Bianco who accidentally swallows The Little Book of Calm and absorbs its wisdom into his body, then his being.

A nervous wreck at the start of the episode, the camera pans to our Manny in a hospital bed the morning after being told the book would likely shift position and kill him. Rather than being in agony, however, he is sat upright, a halo of radiant light shooting forth from his head like an Elizabethan ruff, an all-knowing smile on his face.

'When you rest,' he says, in mellifluous tones, 'you are a King surveying your estate. Look at the woodland. The peacocks on the lawn. Be the king of your own, calm, kingdom.'

To a fault, the violent pursuit of tranquility is one of my defining qualities in stressful situations. The past few weeks at home have called on this occasionally useful survival strategy so often that I have been able to sit outside of myself and watch the beatific mask slide, serene, down my face and suffocate all my other instincts. Mum's coping strategies are the stuff of habit and experience; chiefly, she yells. At my brother. And at the world. I do not offer this appraisal in judgment.

Nature has given us many ways to evade predators and threat. The cuttlefish hides via visual mimicry or, at a pinch, confuses with its more analogue ink cloud while jetting away to safety. Other animals tunnel or climb or even barter, after a fashion, by offering their now severed tails as a decoy trade for freedom. The horned lizard, which only reminds me a little of my mother, manages to cut all blood flow from its head, allowing pressure to build and then burst through micro vessels around its eyes. The result is a stream of blood that shoots from the corners of the reptile's peepers for up to 1.5m, chemically engineered to taste disgusting to dog and cat adjacent predators.

'There must be,' I said to Mum on the couch during a moment of rare peace this week, 'some acceptable middle-ground between our two approaches. There must be, between us, some version of a normal person.'

We both laughed, because we were both wrong and we both knew it.

'If you bottle it all up you'll go and have a heart attack,' Mum said.

'Well that depends how big the bottle is,' I said.

A few days later, for the first and only time in recent memory, I snapped. I stalked out of my room and yelled twice: 'Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!' Not my proudest moment but in my defence the argument going on elsewhere – of which I could hear every word – was ruining the carefully constructed fantasy in my head. To make amends, I doubled down on my path to Temu-sainthood. Two miracles required. The first was existence, I decided. The second: survival.

Everyone has been trying. My brother has been trying. His girlfriend has been trying. The kids are pretty cool while also being kids. Mum has been trying. I have been trying, too, slicing through the tension with the Japanese blade of my sanguine smile, hearing all but responding directly to nothing. I am one of those pointless Large Language Model AIs, designed to make people feel better about themselves via the imitation of human connection.

'One of the blokes I was in with was done for trying to blow up the Bandidos [outlaw motorcycle gang] clubhouse with TNT strapped to a drone,' my brother tells me. I am not sure that this actually happened, but that is none of my business.

'Tough day at the office,' I say, a cigarette in my hand, staring at a garden bed of pansies in the full winter sun.

Or, after Mum and my brother spent most of my second two hour creative writing class – that I now teach from bed in my room over zoom due to lack of space anywhere else – yelling at each other for various failures, causing my brain to revert to an ancient panic, I glide from my room the following week to forewarn them before the third class begins.

'If I hear so much as a single raised register from either of you,' I explain, my own voice soft and warm, my knife-smile clearing the thicket of unease before us, 'while I am teaching my class I will, and you really must me believe me when I say this, set fire to this house.'

Toby laughs: 'Oh you're too much, brother!'

Mum conceded the point and I taught the class from my room at the other end of the house in glorious silence. It's not that I am not angry about all this. My anger has always lived within me but this is Australia and it only rents; I am the landlord and, as such, it has no rights. To the extent that it is allowed to make any modifications at all to the self in which it dwells, these are temporary and by design inoffensive.

My brother was released from jail just a week before the Australia census, a national snapshot of people living in any particular house on one specific night and undertaken just once every five years. I was home and was prepared to fill in the form for both myself and Mum but now, rudely, there were four additional people at home on the Tuesday night.

'You just had to get out a week before the Census,' I told him, 'so now I have to fill it in for six fucken people.'

He laughed. I was genuinely annoyed by this state of affairs, of course, because regular readers will know that any form of administration or groundless email, any meeting that either begins with no purpose or quickly exhausts it while nevertheless dragging on, is the chief mechanism by which any discontent in my corpus is hauled to the surface and exposed. But! I do not give in to any subterranean ill because the surface is where I live. Even a hologram of peace is acceptable to me, you just need to squint a little to blend it in with the surroundings.

In jail, my brother tells me he did 10,000 steps a day in his tiny cell. He has always been incapable of sitting still, a character trait unique to him in our family, though constraints have always made him worse. School, TAFE, prison. To distract himself, he paints.

'Is that a moon or a banana,' I said when I arrived home from trivia one night. There was this big yellow crescent in what looked like the sky chasing what I assumed was a butterfly.

'It's a moon,' he said.

He decided to repaint some of the many garden ornaments Mum has in her collection. A snail, several gnome-type things which are hideous and incapable of being rehabilitated by any cosmetic fix short of a sledgehammer. One of these statues is a gnome clutching an over-sized toadstool. Toby repainted it in the brightest colours and when he was done he showed it to me.

'Hang it in the Louvre,' I said.

'The what?'

'It's a big museum,' I said.

'Oh right. Do you think I'd get any money for it?'

I should have made a show of thinking for longer but replied immediately instead: 'No.'

The following day I found Mum outside repainting her rabbit ornaments. She had chosen more natural, muted colours.

'It's my therapy,' she said.

My therapy, both of which useful forms of dissociation, have been running outdoors in the sparkling late winter sun of southeast Queensland and playing clinical-grade amounts of Civilisation VII on the console in my room. I have otherwise been largely unable to think about anything at all because there is no escape anywhere at home from the constant noise and movement.

Whatever frustration has been left dormant in me throughout the day has found an appropriate expression in retaliatory attacks against Confucius or Augustus whenever they have wronged me.

'Fucking Confucius,' I would announce to my family whenever I left my room. 'He's really done it this time. I'm going to wipe him off the map.'

And they would agree that whatever it was that had happened I was probably over-reacting.

This past three weeks has been the most I have spoken to my brother in probably 15 years. The hardest part, when I am in my room trying to work, or more likely trying to exact revenge on Confucius, I can hear him talking at the other end of the house and he doesn't just sound like our father but feels in every way as if he is. It is beyond uncanny. I haven't heard my father's voice in almost 20 years and now he's out on the back patio talking about ooshies!

'Hey do you know where Dad is,' he asked me the other day.

'What on Earth do you want to know that for?'

'He's got my gun.'

Hmmm. What gun, I asked, why do you think he has your gun?

'Remember the .22 he gave us when I was 13?'

I did not. But also! When you were 13! That was 29 years ago!

'No I don't know where he is,' I said, finding it amusing that the gun has been out of our lives for almost as long as our dad.

My brother just shrugged and moved on to the next item on whatever agenda it is he keeps in that mind of his.

After three weeks they found a place to move, a sort of donga at the back of his girlfriend's father's place. For long and complicated reasons this wasn't necessarily an option at first but, like I said, we're all trying.

'It's a former hotdog stand,' his girlfriend told me with a grin, 'it's got the window shutters that open out and everything.'

When she told me this I couldn't help but howl with laughter and then I tried to explain the TV sketch that became a meme, about a man who drove his hotdog car into the wall of a shop and then snuck out of the wreck to join the crowd of shocked onlookers, pretending he didn't know who the driver was.

We're all trying to find the guy who did this.

We all knew it wasn't as funny a situation as we were making out. It was grim, actually, but the sharp edge of my smile cut through all of that, keen as the day it was first formed.

Addenda

Birder Believe It

As is common in one's late 30s, I'm told, I've been paying more attention to birds in my daily life. This might have something to do with the complete dearth of interesting birds in Paris. When we caught the train to Bordeaux on our way to the beach on the French Atlantic coast last month I saw an eagle circling above the city and realised it was the first bird that wasn't a near-comatose pigeon or sparrow that I'd laid eyes on in about six months. I even yelled at my friends: 'Eagle!' And pointed at it, the way a child does a cow in the field when they are accumulating words for the first time. Nobody else seemed to care. But I cared, because eagle!

One of the joys of being home in southeast Queensland, then, has been all the birds. On my late afternoon run one day I was returning home, the sun setting behind Mount French was a giant fireball perched atop the mountain, and a kestrel was, to my eye, hovering right in the middle of it, holding its position mid-air while its wings beat a mighty rhythm, eyes scanning the grassland below for food. It was gorgeous.

I've been walking the 4km return trip into town quite a lot, too, because I sold my car before I moved to France and Mum had become the designated chauffeur for my brother and his girlfriend, rendered licence-less through habit, and the kids, and their frankly silly schedule. The upside of this is that the walk into town takes me down to the Teviot Brook on each trip. I call this circuit the march of the ne'er do wells because I pass the same people more or less everyday, one of whom is a man called Fat Boy who I wrote about in my first book One Hundred Years of Dirt because he stabbed my brother's friend in the neck with a severed golf club. He, too, is without licence. The others I like to guess: suspended licence or keen walker?

Returning home one afternoon I startled an enormous mass of white from bush along the banks of the brook and witnessed what I am certain was a white-bellied sea eagle taking off like an overloaded air force helicopter. It happened so fast I didn't get a picture but on another day I saw it circling overhead and managed to get some truly terrible but nevertheless important documentary evidence.

The Fassifern Field Naturlists note that the white-bellied sea eagle is seen in the otherwise landlocked Scenic Rim area, but only occasionally with about 3-4 sightings each year. I'm doing my bit.

This same walk serves up a daily dose of kookaburras and startling blue male superb fairy wrens with their harem of beige women, so delicate and flighty all, but the greatest treat was just waiting for me in the low-branch of a gum tree by the police station, where my brother only has to report for bail twice a week now because they're never there. On the edge of town, I saw what I thought was a hawk and then noticed its crest and thought it was just a pigeon – still, a more lively breed of pigeons have we then the docile urban sort grown fat on the excess of Parisien life – but then I thought it was way too big to be a pigeon. This is the sort of expertise I bring to the realm of twitching. I'd never seen whatever this was before, but it was definitely a bird of prey. And it was just sitting on this branch. So, I waited for an inordinate amount of time for it to fly off and managed to get this photo as it did. Airborne zebra-ass bird.

A Pacific Baza, or crested hawk, I learned thanks to the distinctive striations along its undercarriage. I hope nobody is ever able to identify me just by the stretch marks on my belly, by the way, but I was elated. I had never seen one of these and the Fassifern Field Naturalists note that this bird is seen only uncommonly, perhaps once or twice a year, and I'd just papped the thing. Incroyable.

Other Joys

Facetime with the niece and nephew is always a treat but especially when Mum and me are in the same place. Hugh is obsessed with the chickens – thanks Nanny Mort – and starts each call with a demand to see the eggs. 'Show me the eggs nanny,' he says, often in lieu of a hello. And Rory is now one! She had her birthday recently and has developed such a strong sense of self that my sister is terrified and I am ecstatic. Second child always the coolest, obv. Also some of you have told me she looks like my Mum and I can absolutely see it, as can my sister's soon-to-be in-laws. They're calling her Mini-Mort.