For the next two days there would be laughter: games of charades, rounds of bridge, impromptu skits. Tall shoulders to be tossed from, into the water; strong arms to help us build boats and forts. Handsome men drinking “Hey Mabel, Black Label” beer after splitting logs and stacking the woodpile. Was there too much drinking? I have no idea. All I remember is that most of the adults smoked cigarettes or pipes—and we did, too, sneaking them into our homemade tepee. It was a poor plan. The smoke billowed out the top and we were caught, red-handed, forced to chain-smoke until we turned green.
At night, lying under white sheets, little needles of sunburn prickling our shoulders, our noses peeling for the umpteenth time, my cousin and I would decide that no, we weren’t going to sleep, not when the adults were telling dirty jokes downstairs. And so we would eavesdrop, and then whisper very quietly, because “for the last time, kids,” my uncle had warned, “it’s time to go to sleep!”
Then it would be Sunday night, and we would all wave as the cars, honking, disappeared around the curve, and the cycle would begin again.
Often there was a visitor I loved: the painter A. Y. Jackson, a close friend of my grandparents. A bachelor with an infamous appetite for my grandmother’s jam—jam that would dribble down his sweater vests along with his cigarette ashes when he chuckled at my grandfather’s jokes. Looking at his belly, I knew why Aunt Esther had never married him. “I’ll be away many weeks of the year,” he had warned when he proposed. “Make it fifty-two, and I might agree,” was her response.
Or that’s how the story went. Maybe he never really wanted to get married. Maybe he was afraid of marriage the same way he was afraid of fire. In one of the cottage bedrooms, he had had my grandfather install a thick rope, attached at the windowsill so he could shimmy down it in the event of a blaze. (He never used it, but Dougie did, when we played hide-and-seek.)
Clearly, this was a man who liked to escape, just like my father. He stole my heart because he taught me how to steer a paintbrush with my thumb, and because he painted a naughty little sketch of a Shell station with the S missing. He was just about the only bachelor I had ever met, a rambling guy whose snowshoes hung on the wall beside the fireplace. But I used to think that maybe he’d outfoxed himself, taking all those painting trips and somehow forgetting to get married and have his own little family to go home to.
Year after sunburned year, this was how we lived. If my father was away more than most—and he always was—summers buffered my mother from her pervasive loneliness. She flourished near family, and so did we.
When this chapter ended—when her parents died too young, and her drinking started—I used to think that those summers at the cottage were like money in the bank or gas in the tank: she had accumulated so many good memories for us that it took a long time to get to zero.
Of course, we did get to zero, and far, far beyond in those many years when her drinking was dire, when she seemed to give up eating and sleeping, weaving down the halls like a passenger on a bumpy train, the sound of ice cubes declaring her arrival. But that was much later, after the cottages had been split up and the cousins had scattered, a long time after Africa.
Rural South Africa, 1963
The birth of anxiety.
An outdoor music festival. I am ten years old, about to sing my first solo, “All Through the Night.”
Suddenly, the large Afrikaans woman next to me starts to slap my arm. I can’t understand a word she’s saying. (Turns out, I’m not clapping for her son, my competition, who’s taking a bow.)
Now it’s my turn to take the stage. I freeze.
The audience starts to mumble.
The judge walks over to see what’s wrong. My father comes, too. He talks me into performing. Maybe after the lunch break, suggests the judge. I nod. I can do this, on one condition. I don’t think I can face the crowd. The judge smiles. No, it’s not essential to face forward.
After lunch, I keep my promise. On uncertain legs, I climb the stage. I turn to face my teacher, Mrs. Duplessis, at the piano. My back is to the audience.
At the end of the afternoon, I’m awarded second prize: first for voice, marks off for delivery.
Many years later, as I wrestled with major depression and a serious case of writer’s block, the judge’s verdict would become a constant in my head: “First for voice, marks off for delivery.” Code for: you’re failing.
For decades I forgot this incident. Then it reappeared, just as I was to deliver a cover story on teenage suicide. Frozen at my computer, I would hear the judge’s words, over and over, in my head.
In Montreal, as my world unraveled on the fifteenth floor of the student residence, I heard it again: “First for voice, marks off for delivery.”
What does this story have to do with my drinking?
Everything.
Liquor soothes. It calms anxiety. It numbs depression. Ask any serious drinker: if you want to find your off button, alcohol can seem like an excellent choice.
But not when you’re ten.
Back then, as I sat with my parents on sticky chairs on an unforgiving African afternoon, my confidence was deeply shaken. I was pink with humiliation. And I felt my parents’ confusion at my behavior. I had always been top of my class. I had accelerated at school. I had never blown anything this badly before.
It was a wobbly time for me.
For my parents, our move to Africa was their great romantic adventure. For the first time in their marriage, they had finessed their situation and were truly together in a sustaining fashion: making a home on an acre in Mount Ayliff, a village of a hundred people nestled in the hilly terrain of the Transkei. All of a sudden there was a cook, a maid, a garden boy. Each night, my father would park his Land Rover out front and saunter through the door, darkly handsome in his khaki field clothes. He would light the propane lanterns—there was no electricity—and cast a warm glow through the long-halled house. My mother was delighted.
For me, he was our bachelor father, and everything seemed new. At dinner, when my mother’s back was turned, he’d line his peas on his knife and toss them down his gullet, pressing his finger to his lips: “Shhhh!” “What, John? What did you just do?” We’d giggle. When she wasn’t looking, he’d open the fridge and swig milk straight from the bottle. This guy didn’t seem to know the rules.
At bedtime, he’d read to us: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. My mother was in love with him, and we were, too: this dad was different than the person I expected, but he made the house hum. My mother was chatty, extroverted, radiant. They entertained, and there was laughter. This was an era of cinch-waisted dresses and “sundowners.”
I knew I was meant to be happy. But for me there was a deep sense of foreboding, a shadow I could not shake. And it went deeper than the obvious disappointment that I was no longer my mother’s primary companion, the eldest with special privileges.
More often than not, I felt like the bad fairy at the birthday party. There was a deep, subterranean rumble I could feel, although I couldn’t put my finger on it. Something was not right.
It started with our trips to the library, back in Canada, when we were busy getting shots and passports. While the librarian was loading my sister’s arms with animal books—books full of lions and poisonous snakes—I was reading stories about violence in the Belgian Congo, murder. I was deeply skeptical about this trip, and my fears seemed justified. When our plane landed for refueling in the Congo, en route to Johannesburg, I thought that the cleaners were boarding to kill us: I ran to the washroom, burst in on a man shaving, and promptly threw up. When my father introduced us to the snakebite kit in the kitchen, my fears were confirmed: