The Black Monk

Life, what is it but a dream?

When Alice and Javine first began talking, it was all about Cedric.

Growing up in Auckland, Alice Lidell had spent more time with her brother, Cedric, and their friend Ezra, who lived in the house behind theirs, than with anyone else. Her brother was a thin boy with green eyes and curly hair, who had a talent for creating chaos.

The street. The Lane. Ezra’s house was behind the Lidells’ large wooden villa. Three houses beyond that was the townhouse where their cousin Mitch lived with Uncle Lin and Aunt Lydia. In the bend of the Lane were two bungalows side by side, and in those lived the big boys. Alice remembered those boys slouching down the street in their school uniforms; they were almost the size of grown men. The thug with small eyes and a hard face was the leader. The others were not as inventively evil, but they were stupid and violent, and their favourite game was torturing Ceddy.

Alice recalled one day, it must have been summer; the water running from the garden hose across her fingers was warm. She, Mitch, Ezra and Ezra’s sister, Lu, were under their veranda cleaning out the cage of Ezra’s pet ferret, Marty. They had to be careful handling Marty because she tended to bite. They were absorbed in the task until Ezra said, ‘What’s that?’

It was a high-pitched sound, maybe a dog. They put Marty back in her cage and went in the direction of the noise, across the garden, through the neighbour’s property, over the fence and into the street.

A rainstorm had just passed, the air was hot and humid, and steam rose off the road. Breaking through the cloud, the sun was so powerful you could feel it burning your skin. The Lane was quiet: few cars came down this dead-end street, and there was no one around. The giant pōhutukawa trees spread so thickly they almost made a tunnel. There was no wind, only the rain dripping off the trees and the gurgle of water running through the gully. Ezra’s dog ambled along the verge, following the sound. All the Lane dogs roamed free in those days.

The sound echoed: a voice, crying.

Alice noticed a hose running out of the nearest garden, across the pavement and into the stormwater drain.

Ezra ran to the kerb and said, ‘Jesus Christ.’

Covered with a heavy iron grate, the drain was in the gutter at the edge of the road and was big enough for a man to fit down.

This is what had happened: the big boys had waited for Ceddy after school, had captured him as he walked home, and had dragged him to the bend in the Lane. First, they’d beaten him up, ripped his shirt, broken his glasses and stolen his schoolbag. Then they’d taken the grate off the drain, lowered Ceddy in, fitted the grate back over the hole and run a hose out from one of their gardens. They’d turned on the hose, pushed it through the grate and left the water flowing. The cavity must have been blocked; the water wasn’t draining away. They told Ceddy they were going to leave him there until the space filled up and he drowned. He was too short to reach the grate.

Ceddy was frantic, the water was rising. The big boys were nowhere to be seen.

Whenever Alice recalled it, she was still horrified.

The adults thought the kids should sort out their own differ­ences. Their mother, Rula, made a virtue of saying, ‘I don’t interfere. Let them work it out for themselves.’ She was self-righteous about it.

Ceddy had to walk home every afternoon knowing some­thing like that could happen to him again. Those boys were so stupid and reckless, and they enjoyed torturing Ceddy so much, you could imagine them killing him without even meaning to.

The adults shrugged and said, ‘Kids. Little shits. What can you do?’

Cedric got hooked on cannabis when he was sixteen, which intensified everything about him. He became so addicted and was so frequently stoned, he once hallucinated a black figure, the shape of a man cut out of the air, revealing the void of the universe behind. He grew even more nervous, erratic and strange after that, often talking about trips and visions.

One afternoon when the adults were out, he removed all his clothes and wandered around the house in some kind of ecstasy, while Ezra and Alice looked on in wry disbelief. Aunt Lydia said she’d once seen Cedric dancing along Symonds Street in the rain – ‘a vision of joyousness’ she called it, sentimentally.

Alcohol and drugs increased Cedric’s melodrama. It was hard for him ever to be self-contained. He freaked out, overreacted, had a tendency to run out of the room bellowing.

Alice remembered him creating a scene at their grandmother’s funeral: first by singing in a loud, fluting voice, as if mocking the proceedings, and then by laughing audibly as the coffin was lowered into the floor at the crematorium. The laugh itself wasn’t normal; you would have thought it was coming from a theatrical woman.

You had to forgive Cedric a lot. He was an addict, and he was strange, though the family had always flatly denied he was, and no one ever had him assessed to work out what was wrong.

His behaviour wasn’t all that outlandish in Dempsey terms. Honestly, the nerve-wracking histrionics on their mother’s side of the family! It only took a couple of Dempseys to make a scene. There were aunts who went in for feuds, uncles and cousins whose heated arguments ended in stagey threats and shouts.

Funerals, weddings, twenty-first parties: they could all fall apart. If Cedric wasn’t laughing at a funeral, he’d be singing an impromptu solo. He jumped up at a family gathering and delivered one of their aunts an uninvited tribute in a fake Māori accent, thanking her for caring for him when he was a child. She’d never spent five minutes looking after him; it was entirely invented.

Throughout this bizarre performance, the aunt’s family members were looking sideways, shaking their heads. You never knew what he was going to do, or why. He was the most unusual person Alice ever knew, as if, in him, there were an imp that stuck its fist in its mouth and blackly laughed at ordinary dignity and restraint. Alice wasn’t like that; she longed for predictability, normality, structure.

She was always in suspense, waiting for the room to fall apart.

Cedric had calmed down since he was young, but he’d been an alcoholic and drug user for decades. He’d got several music degrees and currently had a good place as a teacher down in Wellington, and while he tended to get fired from jobs, he always managed to find another one. He’d been in and out of AA, barely managing to keep his career, never staying sober for long but never quite hitting rock bottom.

Alice remained in Auckland after university, and she only saw Ceddy when she visited Wellington. Now, he seemed to be running out of luck and had taken to ringing her, wildly drunk. He was living alone and getting through over five bottles of wine a day, his department having moved to online working because of the pandemic. He was in trouble at work, hadn’t been answering calls, and staff had complained he was drunk in Zoom meetings. His head of department liked him and valued his talent but was frustrated by his behaviour and was starting to issue warnings.

‘Five bottles a day,’ Alice said on the phone. ‘Christ, Ceddy. How are you still alive?’

He laughed. ‘I’m a beast,’ he said. ‘I’m just a beast.’

They had long conversations ranging over everything: their childhood in the neighbourhood, his life. He told her about his past relationships, his sexuality, his adventures with drugs, his oddball, often comical thoughts. They laughed a lot. He said he trusted her. He admitted to lying to everyone about his drinking. He was adamant he wouldn’t go to rehab. Alice said he had to, there was no other way now to get clean, to detox. He’d gone too far to give up on his own.

‘I’d escape,’ he said.

He mentioned he had a shoe fetish, specifically sandshoes. That created a lot of laughs between them. She asked how the hell that had happened, and he said soon after he started high school the kids had ambushed him behind the gym and beaten him with a sandshoe. It was funny but also dark, since the fetish must have come from trauma.

‘If you look in my wardrobe,’ he told her, ‘you’ll find a hundred pairs of sandshoes.’

Alice urged him to go to a counsellor. She told him only an expert could get to the bottom of his fucked-up shoe closet.

His laugh. Ceddy laughed like a man not properly anchored to the world.

He said he didn’t want to go back to AA because he was sick of the way they went on about God. Alice told him to think of God as a metaphor, as an acknowledgement you weren’t in control. There must be lots of people who ignored the religious part and still benefitted.

Lately he’d become obsessed with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He was angry about it, as she was, horrified by the appalling savagery of the bombing, so much so he wanted to go down to the Russian Embassy and ‘make some sort of protest’.

‘Good on you,’ Alice said. ‘Only watch out. Don’t get arrested.’

She didn’t say much about herself in these long calls, but he didn’t seem to mind or notice. He rang on her birthday, and they talked for a couple of hours. Two days later, she asked if he remembered the call, and he said he didn’t.

He would binge in a rolling blackout for four days straight. He was taking various drugs; his health was bad. One of his anti-psychotic medications proscribed alcohol, but Ceddy was washing down the pills with bottles of wine.

It was so extreme that Alice tried to talk to the family. She ran into Rula at the shops and raised the subject of Ceddy. Someone needed to do something, she insisted. He was drinking himself to death.

Rula refused to believe he was drinking at all. She said coldly, ‘Leave it out. Be generous.’ She wouldn’t hear there was anything wrong with him. Alice wondered if on some level Ceddy knew this, that he was required to report only that he was doing well. Perhaps he’d been subtly shamed for his problems all his life. They weren’t acceptable, so he hid them, and they got worse. He was committing a long, slow suicide.

Leave it out. Be generous.

Alice thought their cousin Mitch, who was close, might help her work out a solution. Trying to jolt her with reality, she sent an email saying Ceddy was drinking himself to death. But Mitch only said she was shocked by the email, replying that it was awful to be told someone is dying. When Alice pressed the point, her cousin wrote, Are you sure you’re not just being toxic about him? You once wrote a short story about him dying.

There were so many arguments and discussions about Ceddy, they tended to blur in the memory. Alice recalled an earlier attempt to discuss the problem that quickly fell apart. She had dropped into the old family house. Rula had served coffee on the deck, and after Alice had begun to explain about Cedric’s ‘trajectory’, as she called it in her nervousness, her step­father, Thom, shouted, ‘Okay, Alice, you’ve had your coffee. Now fuck off!’

Rula pointed a finger and said, ‘I know about alcoholics. I know them. Cedric is a high-functioning alcoholic. High functioning!’

Alice didn’t say, Oh, high functioning – the best kind. You can put that in fancy letters on his gravestone.

That time, he went into a state of collapse. He was admitted to hospital and medically detoxed over three days. His flat was so run down it had to be cleaned by a specialist commercial team. He came out of hospital alcohol-free, but still refusing to enrol in a residential rehab. The options were controlled drinking until you entered rehab, or going cold turkey and dealing with the withdrawal symptoms. He opted for cold turkey and reported he was in agony with shakes, living his life in blocks of five minutes.

Alice’s husband, Jon, said that Ced trying to detox by himself was at best doomed to fail, at worst a recipe for disaster. Within a week, he was drinking again, back up to a three-litre cask of wine a day. Plus a bottle of vodka.

After his admission to hospital, the family finally admitted Cedric’s drinking was out of control and that he needed a resi­dential rehab. But still he refused. He couldn’t face the idea of never drinking again. No doubt he was afraid.

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