Something Familiar

A few months ago my brother Toby went back to prison for the first time since his inaugural stint circa 2010. I was in Paris at the time and Mum was left to figure out what was happening and why, though we never really got any answers and, to be perfectly frank, neither of us tried very hard.

'It is what it is,' Mum kept saying over the phone, developing a sudden and assured ontological bent that would have infuriated generations of philosophers.

He was – is still, I think – staring down a year in gaol. He was upset and began calling Mum often. His girlfriend outside, who has two children, also kept calling. It was a miserable time for everyone at home and, selfishly, for me, too. I didn't want to deal with any of it.

'It is what it is,' Mum said again.

There was a time, when my brother was violent and living forcibly underneath Mum's house, that we wished he'd go back to prison. There was a time when we tried to get him taken back in, if only to protect her, all of which was to no avail. I remember being angry when he first went away for three-months, all those years ago, because it happened so long after the original offence that he had started rebuilding his life again. Prison is not a reformer's first instinct. If anything, it is a school for more crime, one big networking event; like Harvard Business School but with lower entry fees. You meet people in prison, all kinds of people, and then you get out having been thoroughly demoralised and diminished with a shared bond. This is why people who used to work at McKinsey & Company still talk fondly about The Firm, even though terrible things happened there.

In short, it is rare that one simply leaves prison. People tend to graduate.

Toby was always in trouble and wears his share of blame, and developmental explanations, over the years but it was the meth that really did him in. His brain has changed irreparably. Talking to him is like speaking with a toddler. If you think I have poor executive function, hoo boy!

Over the past few months we received some updates from Toby. The first was that he appeared to have become a practising Christian on account of his cellmate, a man who calls himself a Soldier of God.

'Well that sounds a bit aggressive,' I said to Mum.

We were raised Catholic, but in the old-fashioned latent Irish sense which means we are naturally deeply suspicious of anybody who takes their religion as an invitation to rhetorical flourish. That's for the priest, buddy, everyone else just has to sit there and deal with it. My brother was never religious in any meaningful sense, unless you count the period during his psychosis when he began communing with snakes in the mountains and even then the snakes never seemed to say anything of note.

'It would be funny,' I continued, 'if we all had to start going back to church because Tob is now going.'

Later, Tob was given a new cellmate, a man who was doing time for apparently assaulting four police officers at once. He was keen to write his memoir and my brother, an evangelist for my writing, told him he should read my first book One Hundred Years of Dirt and then promptly used his prison 'top-ups' to order it in as a gift for his new friend.

As I was preparing to fly back to Australia late last month there was some talk that perhaps my brother would get bail. I landed in Sydney with my shingles and my cocktail of drugs and laid low for three days before flying back to Queensland on Monday. That morning, Mum tried to call and asked me to ring her back "asap". There are some messages you don't want to get from your mother. That is one of them. Another is 'I've discovered macramé'.

'Tob is eligible for bail,' she told me when I called back while walking through the mid-morning clamour of Sydney's Broadway, 'but they won't give him bail at his old address because there is someone else living there who is known to the police and has a criminal record.'

Which means, of course, that the only place left for him to go was our place.

'It's your house,' Mum said, 'so I'm asking if you're OK with it.'

'I bought it for you,' I said, 'it's your house!'

Very soon I realised that she was not necessarily asking for permission but sharing the stress of doing something neither of us wanted but in which, for reasons of blood and pity, we both felt compelled.

'Well, of course,' I said, 'it's fine.'

I did not think it was fine. And part of me feels guilty for thinking this way. I moved overseas for a few reasons, most of which were related to a very slow onset personality disorder I seemed to develop while covering robodebt and dealing with the obsequious little worms who enabled it and got away with it, but this was not the whole story. I left Australia behind because I was trying to escape this sort of stress, this suffocating reminder that no matter how far we've come there was always one thing or another threatening to drag us back into the weeds. It is not a thought that makes me feel good about myself but there it is.

Now I was flying back to spend a couple of quiet months with Mum in the peaceful house and garden she's been maintaining and the very next day my brother was going to be moving in and we would have to be setting up his new life again. Mum picked me up at Brisbane airport and we drove back to Boonah caught between our familiar dual-band mode of dark humour and a stress so electric it could pulse and fry the avionics of the nearby airforce base jets.

Mum announced that she had been planning on getting the outside doors done in that tough 'crim safe' mesh so she would feel safer at home. As she drove, I paused for a second, feeling the moment for any warnings signs against humour, finding none that could stop me.

'You know,' I said to her.

'Hmmm,' she said.

'You might be the first person in the world to get crim safe mesh on the house and then put the criminal on the inside.'

We both laughed and wheezed.

'He's going to want to play my PlayStation,' I said.

Before I could even finish the thought Mum had snapped: 'No.'

We laughed again.

'I have some jobs for him to do,' she said.

'So let me get this straight,' I continued, 'you're getting the house fortified, he'll be on lockdown after 9pm with no TV and no games and you're putting him to work? Sounds like he just got released into another prison.'

When Toby was finally released from prison late on Tuesday evening – Mum and his girlfriend M had been waiting most of the day for the paperwork to be processed – he was crying. By the time he'd arrived home he was almost manic, telling me about various cellmates and prisoners he'd met and showing me the mindfulness colouring pages he did every single day he was away. At one point, Toby read aloud from his bail conditions like he was a preacher on early morning television. His girlfriend M stayed the night and then the two kids moved in.

There are now six of us in a three-bedroom house. I have a licence but sold my car when I moved to France and the only other person with one is Mum, so she has become the driver, just like old times, in the multi-day mission to get my brother some identity documents so that he could get a phone so that he could register it with the police so that he could maybe start looking for another place to live but, of course, this is inner-regional Australia and the rents have gone bananas as house prices rise and rise. The same reason I bought this house for Mum, because she had nowhere else to go and no way to stop working even as a homeowner herself at the time, is the same reason my brother and his girlfriend have nowhere else to go. There is a sickness in this country and we can call it the hoarding of wealth. I remember recently Mum passed on the news (I was watching from afar anyway) that house prices might begin to flatten out or even – gasp! – fall as a result of some recent Australian government tax changes.

'Good,' I said. 'I hope they all do.'

Even in a country town with a premium on housing there are precious few services. There is still, as has always been the case, no public transport. Not so much as a bus to the nearest big town where the Centrelink offices are. Toby has to report every day to the local police station which, across multiple attempts and two days now, has been closed. According to the woman on the police-link phone in the next city, he is already technically in breach of his bail conditions because the police have not seen him in person at the cop shop that was closed that he nevertheless reported to.

Whatever frustration I feel about my brother and his behaviour, I feel it many orders of magnitude more strongly for the human misery on which so many of these systems seem to run. Even as a guy with a job many moons ago I recall struggling to produce 100 points of official identification for rental applications because each step in the process just felt so monumental. I have a lot of sympathy for anyone caught in these ouroboros administrative machines not because I experienced all of it but because I tasted just a fraction of how maddening it can be. Make no mistake, we are the luckier ones and my brother, because of our luck, is in a better position than almost anyone else that is released from prison on bail; if they manage to get released at all. He still has a court date in the future. He will probably still have to go back inside.

I left for Paris because I had become an angry, angry man and, as I understood it, nobody had ever been angry in Paris at the machinations of absolutism or empire. Everybody just drank and smoked and blew out their lips like a horse and said bof to show they had given up on life. Now, on my temporary return, I have been thrust fully back into the same categorical swamp of Max Weber's iron cage. The logical endpoint of bureaucratic rationalisation throughout the spheres of life is an erasure of the individual and, critically for me, the individual's sense of self and the conditions that apply uniquely to them.

It's been such a treat to see Mum but the reminder of the stress in which we used to live, in which we swam for God's sake, has dulled my mood. I feel it for myself, of course, but for her even more. I feel it for the kids, sweet things, who have moved into the house with us and I wonder what their future looks like. They love Toby and he loves them. Whatever his faults, he has always been living out this fantasy with other people's children about being the kind of dad we never had. And he is. He is kind and fair and decent. Still, I look at how far we've yet to go – I am 40 next year, Toby is 42 soon, Mum is in her late 60s – and then I see the kids and their faces, sleeping on a blowup mattress next to the foldout couch in the spare room, four people in one tiny space and my heart hurts. They're smiling and laughing but my heart hurts. I used to smile and laugh, too, because what other choice was there?

The saddest part is that this is emotional and financial luxury to them. Apart from anything else, the house where they were living was overrun with rats and all kinds of snakes and possums that leapt from ceilings and directly on to the kids. Then there were the other people staying there, out of it, presumably, on whatever drug they fancied or could get that day.

Children are hardy little things but I remember the uncertainty and the forever-tension of that life, a sort of rigor mortis of the soul, and it hurts. It hurts to remember because I have been trying to forget.

I am mad at being made to remember. I am mad at myself for being mad.

But I've always remembered.

Addenda

My Brother Jack

In happier (?) news, Mum showed me the ashes of our blue heeler Jack who died a couple of months ago when I was in Paris, inconveniently in the middle of a nervous breakdown. My nervous breakdown, not the dog's. And she told me the story of the man who delivered the ashen remains to her house, in a large box. Jack was a big boy who weighed close to 28kg when he died, having lived a long and full life biting the legs of chairs when they moved and snoring like a truck's horn.

When the man arrived lugging the box with Jack in it he was greeted by Mum at the door, alongside her cat Charlie who is not at all the size of a large dog. He motioned to the cat and then said: 'Oh what a beautiful cat!'

And Mum replied: 'That's his brother Charlie, he's still in mourning.'

The man looked at the cat and then felt the box in his hands and, after a brief pause, said, with more than a hint of confusion: 'But these are really heavy ashes.'

Love forever, Jackie boy.

Do the Ror

My little niece Rory turned one and I get to see her again in a few weeks. She is the cutest thing on the planet and is already learning to stand her ground against her older brother when he wants all the attention. Just like her mum. Brings a tear to the eye.