Going right back into a time of innocence and helplessness, I have a bleak memory. I remember being curled up in a foetal position under an overstuffed Victorian armchair, tugging nervously at the strands of yarn I’d managed to pry loose from the upholstery above my head. I remember the agony of discovering that even in a confined space, my improvised fort, I couldn’t hide from the sneering old man, just as I couldn’t hide from the enormous sadness that sometimes invaded my small frame. I remember my mother crouching down to hug me. I remember feeling inconsolable. I remember the old man not going away.
The old man. This isn’t a person I’d talk about in therapy, not something I’d divulge to my best friend over cappuccinos or mention on a date. The old man is weird, awful; a voice, a vision, one of the most violent features of my life. He appears when all hope is lost and all that’s wholesome and good has deserted me. When I’m shredded and bewildered, the old man is there to taunt me.
I suppose I was about five years old when I first became aware of him. In front of the dining room was a patio with a makeshift ‘roof’ of wooden lattice. That day, the sun shone and the trellis was over-hung with wisteria, wafting lilac colours and fragrance over my curly head. I don’t remember having any toys in front of me; I was playing with Tania, my ever-present imaginary friend.
At the time my family had an unkempt dog named Bundle, who rather resembled a bear. He would leap up onto the lattice above the patio and sprawl there while we ate alfresco below. Bundle could cause an uproar at a Sunday luncheon. But that morning it wasn’t Bundle who interrupted my childish games.
I suddenly felt something hovering over me, and an eerie chill went through me. Life went into spooky slow motion; my every move, placing a hand in front of my face to look at the fingers, checking, slowly, slowly, yes, each one, all five, all there. I sensed something or someone looking down on me, slurring through my consciousness. I became quite still, too afraid to look up. Then I heard the distinct sound of laughter. Ugly laughter. No one there to protect me; even my imaginary friend Tania had vanished. Funny thing that: we don’t control our imaginary friends – or our imaginary enemies.
Fearfully, reluctantly, I looked up at the wisteria blossoms and saw the gnarled, gaunt face of an old man laughing at me. It was a loud, theatrical laugh, ‘Ha, Ha, Ha!’ Although the laughter came from above my little head, it seemed to inhabit my entire body, witnessing my shame.
Shame about what? The laughter mocked my silly, childish games, my imaginary friend, my lack of real friends, my inability to stop sucking my thumb, my fear of Spike Milligan’s Badjelly the Witch. My fear of sleeping in a room without my siblings, my fear of the dark, my petty fibs and peculiarities, even the way my little heart was pumping so fast when the world around me seemed to be moving so slowly.
The old man’s laughter brought shame to the way I liked to wear my Laura Ashley party dress to painting classes, hem too long, trailing behind me in the dirt. Shame that my friend Brian and I had hidden behind the bunk bed and eaten my sister’s Smarties. Why should a small child feel shame? I was engulfed by it, too helpless to defend myself, to say, ‘I’m just an ordinary little girl and you’re nothing, just a figment of my imagination. Poof, go away, go to pot.’
It’s all fine and well to describe this now, but some days, well, I’m still too small and vulnerable to face the old man, and maybe it’s just the saddest thing in my world.
It would be comforting to think that aliens had abducted me as some sort of absurd explanation for the apparition. But of course that’s not the case. Instead, I’m periodically visited by – or, in psychological terms, I conjure up – an awful vision: the sound of an old man who laughs at me. I imagine a Jungian analyst would have a field day with me and my archetype of an old man whose awful laughter penetrates into the very marrow of my brittle bones. He arrives, not with a Tarantino-like violence or a Tom Waits lyrical and ironic sadness; no, he comes swirling out of nowhere with a contempt and a rage that is so ugly and other, so apart from me as I know myself. He haunts another girl in me, a girl who is damaged, weathered and worn out. He turns up very occasionally, and only when things are at their very bleakest – when there’s not a ray of light in the sky.
Fortunately, he comes alone (although I imagine his partner Suicide is tagging behind somewhere), and he doesn’t give me any instructions on how to live my life, no barked orders or mysterious commands. He’s never filled me with religious zeal. He’s just frightened and diminished me, causing me to forget who I am, to lose my bearings and my grip, not just on reality and self-worth, but also on my life force.
When I’m ‘up’, I resound as high and magnificent as a towering wave, but inevitably I crash – and the old man’s always lurking nearby to laugh at the ensuing chaos. I can go for years without hearing from him, until I begin to hope he’s gone, gone to the North Pole, where it snows and they have Christmas, gone where the goblins go, hey ho, hey ho. Then he reappears when my self-esteem is shrivelled up, when I’m a very small person curled up inside a thimble, so small and vulnerable that I scarcely exist. My skin thin, my nerves raw. When every car on the freeway seems aimed like a weapon poised to crash into me, when the falling of the Twin Towers can go unnoticed, the blooming of camellias unobserved.
When I’ve departed for a place where nothing and nobody can reach me, then, somehow, he finds me, curled up, hiding on the floor in the tiny nook underneath my dressing table with a chair to hide my fractured form. Rocking to and fro, to and fro, hither and thither, all helter-skelter, nothing is orderly; I am dislocated, disordered, falling apart – and I hear him roaring, ‘Ha, Ha, Ha!’
My inner world speeds up and the outer world slows down. Like Jimi Hendrix screeching on a painful cocaine guitar, there’s no melody, no symphony, no quiet refrain. Only that unbearable laughter, jeering at me, making me cringe. I have no idea what his appearance means or what he wants from me.
I don’t know how he gets inside me. Like Dracula zooming in with exposed fangs through taboos of raw garlic, brandished crucifixes and a circle of my own personal protective Holy Crusaders, my laughing old man invades uninvited. He can penetrate medication and Chinese tinctures. Nothing keeps him away. He belittles and diminishes me, and I have never lashed out at the intrusion, never confronted him and challenged, ‘You have no place here! What do you want from me?’
My old man seems satisfied just to be there, laughing mirthlessly, thinking, ‘Rahla Marilyn Fenster, you are a failure, you are nothing, a nobody, a waste of society’s resources! You’ve never achieved anything and you never will. You’ve never held down a job, earned any money you could hold on to. Every time you begin doing something worthwhile, you manifest a crying germ.’
A crying germ is like flu. Except instead of sneezing and being snotty, I just cry. Flu doesn’t respond to quick fixes; it responds to days in bed, hot toddies and chicken soup. So, too, with crying germs. I have to wait out the depression. I cry at people, strangers mostly, because it seems as if they all hate me: the people at the bank, the ladies working in the shop, everyone in the world. The safest thing is to take to my bed and cry, ‘Waah, waah, waah.’ And then, like flu, it slowly drifts out of my system until, finally, my body is all cried out. It’s a germ, a crying germ.
The old man would continue to mock me. ‘What is actually wrong with you anyway? If you’re so sick, where’s the blood? Where are the X-rays showing broken bones or fluid on the lungs? Face it, you’re fabricating the whole thing to get attention. You’re not a fully functioning member of this universe. You might as well be dead. Everyone is watching you and it’s all really very funny – Ha, Ha, Ha!’
Sure, this is me talking, it’s me projecting. The old man doesn’t exist, not really. The laughter is my own self-taunting invention. But when that harsh resounding laughter crashes down on me, erupts from above and within, then I become nothing. The summer garden around me doesn’t help, the sound of the sea or the birds singing fades away. I can’t string beads, talk, write or take enough drugs to drive him away. He hovers there, floating above and around me, laughing, gloating.
Even though I now know that this vile old man is a product of my own deranged mind, a part of me goes on believing that perhaps he’s my punishment. Maybe he’s there to remind me that, in the end, I’ll always be nothing more than a broken girl.
When I’m good, I’m grand, and when I’m not, I manage just, only just, to survive. And I’m grateful just to survive. Forget Joan of Arc. There’s no bright side to hearing voices and seeing visions. There are a lot of jokes about it – it’s a subject susceptible to good jokes and, God knows, I’m always up for one. But I’d rather not talk about this than make light of it, because it’s so terrifying, so dark, so not funny. I can’t put on a brave face, because the reality for me is appalling.
It’s the ultimate cruelty and the ultimate sensation of losing all control precisely because it’s a torture that comes from within; my mind turning on itself. That my mind was capable of victimising me in this way when I was just a child makes me so very sad for that little girl playing under the wisteria.