The Green Bell

M Ward,
September 1972

The day room is where I wait – for time to pass, for something to happen, for meaning to return. Windows along one of the walls allow light to enter, but the space seems grey as if a faint dusting of ash hangs in the air and covers the surfaces. Patients hunch over tables or rest deep in the lounge chairs beside the walls, staring into the distance or mumbling to themselves. Occasionally someone erupts: a fist comes down on a table, or a chair is knocked to the floor. I’m startled for a minute, then the gloom settles over us again like the memory of a death.

My usual place is a lounge chair in the corner. My legs jerk back and forth, and my arms are folded tightly around my chest. Other patients are also sitting alone, settled in after the morning medication ritual, resigned to wait out the long stretch of time until the bell is rung and lunch is served. I’m hyper-alert, aware that everything around me is thick with meaning. The curtains, the tables, the pictures on the wall – they all mean something sinister, something I can’t quite grasp. I write poems in my notebook but I can’t speak to others of the noise inside my head. When they call me ‘Paula’, I tell them that I’m Julianne, but they don’t hear me. I say it louder. They turn away.

I stare at a print of a Sidney Nolan painting that hangs on the wall opposite the windows. It shows Ned Kelly inside a heavy suit of black armour riding a horse across the desert towards the horizon. His back is turned to the viewer, and he is alone in the landscape. Blue and white sky shines through an oblong in his helmet. I stare at him, willing myself into his armour, longing for my head to fill with the colour blue, with space. I want to be Ned, turn my back on this life and ride a horse across the desert to the horizon. Ride out of this room into the distance.

I try to keep away from other patients. If someone comes close I pick up my pouch of tobacco and, with the concentration of a watchmaker, I roll myself a cigarette. To be in close proximity with another person is excruciating; their energy is too strong, too intrusive. The occasional exception is a patient I think of as ‘the Man from Kosciuszko’. A bear of a man, he sometimes talks to me of his work on rescue missions in the Snowy Mountains. I like him because he has a dog, a border collie called Jessie. One night he broke down in tears and told me how much he missed her.

Sometimes I have visitors who join me in the day room – my parents or friends who sit awkwardly, talking in low voices. Conversations tend to drift into delicate silences until someone thinks of an item from the evening news or a piece of family gossip. An effort is required by us all in the giving and the taking. Someone will start speaking but lose confidence, leaving words dangling in the air. Eruptions of laughter sound like bursts of scripted applause. My world is inaccessible to anyone attempting to enter, to engage. I’m always tired after visitors leave. Sad and tired.

When my mother comes in, she brings a small bunch of sweet peas or lavender from her garden. She always asks, ‘How are you today, love?’ I turn away. How can I reply? The question ‘How are you?’ is complicated. I can’t look at her. It’s me that’s not right. Not my kidneys or my tonsils. My self. How can it reply? It has lost the language of the everyday, the gestures and rituals of relationships. I sometimes think that my words are germs, infecting anyone who hears them.

One Friday afternoon, two weeks before I’m taken to the psychiatric ward of the Canberra Hospital, I ride my bike to the National Library to find journal articles for an essay on the Russian Revolution. Perhaps there are signs that I will soon have a breakdown, but I don’t read them, don’t realise what they mean. I’ve been under pressure with deadlines, but I don’t for a moment see that M Ward is my future.

Once inside the library I pause in the entrance hall, taking in the light that streams through the high leadlight windows. I look up and hear music – orchestral music playing in the red, yellow and purple patterns of glass, a kaleidoscope of sound. I turn around, elated. When I look away to see if other people have heard it, the music stops. Confused, I come back to myself and walk into the reading room.

Later, as I’m leaving the library, a young woman appears, sailing towards me, sandy hair flowing behind her. Her height and stride are familiar, and when she speaks I remember her from 1968, four years ago, my first year at university. The year my friend Julianne Gilroy died. The woman in front of me was in the same philosophy tutorial as Julianne and me, studying the work of Descartes and arguing points about truth and doubt. Now, as we talk, I realise that former classmates have not forgotten my dramatic departure from university at the end of that year.

‘Is everything okay now?’ she asks, appraising me.

‘I’m fine,’ I say with a bright smile. ‘Absolutely fine.’

Once down the library steps, I take off on my bike, riding hard. I’m frustrated that no matter how hard I try to pass for normal, I simply can’t get away from my past. Not for the first time, I imagine myself escaping Canberra and making a new start somewhere, a warm place where no one knows me.

On impulse, I decide to take the long way home, across Kings Avenue Bridge and around the lake. With the winter air slicing my cheeks and the wind in my hair, I turn onto the long arc of the bridge and begin to cross the pale waters of Lake Burley Griffin.

Canberra has no past and it feels beautiful but empty, like a Zen garden – although the scale is wrong. It seems to have originated in a dream of intersecting circles and radiating lines too vast for human reach and footstep: a sculpted city of lonely monuments, architectural curiosities and glassed-in government buildings spread out around the artificial lake like pieces of an abandoned board game. Too new to have settled into the earth, too geometrical to have emerged from it, the city has a lightness of being, a cool detachment. It doesn’t yet belong to the landscape. It’s the image of a future without a history.

Canberra’s inhabitants have no past here either, no stories that connect them to this place. A cluster of federal public service employees, they were sent from Sydney and Melbourne to administer government departments and populate the capital. Uprooted and separated from their extended families, and surrounded by distance and absence, they burrowed into suburbs and learned to love their cars.

My family was part of this interstate migration; we left Sydney when I was nine years old to start a new life here. The trees that now provide a canopy were only saplings in my childhood. Streets were laid down through paddocks, houses appeared, and suburbs spread across the valley. I grew up playing in partially constructed buildings, watching the Molonglo River rise across the flood plain and create Lake Burley Griffin. Waiting for the future to arrive in a place where everyone came from somewhere else and no one was old.

I ride around the lake, past the windswept fountain, past Blundells Cottage and the rotunda, racing towards Black Mountain, the Brindabella Ranges in the distance. I imagine Canberra as an immense gallery through which I glide, observing and admiring. Steel and concrete join the architecture of earth, sky and water to create a city of grand statements and wide streets, swept clean by the wind from the Snowy Mountains. In the icy afternoon sunlight, it shines like a mirage. Depth is illusory. A vision of sky drifting in the lake. The haunting sound of carillon bells echoing across the water.

My city, myself. Floating above my body, the city floating above the landscape, I’m as light as light. I remember myself as a young girl, twirling around in my floral skirt, my rope petticoat brushing my thighs, my arms spread wide. Barely aware of flesh and blood, and hardly knowing I was of the earth, I lived in air and sunshine. I banished darkness from my conscious world and ignored my body’s secrets, the guilty blood, the night terrors. In the country’s empty capital I grew up taut and shiny. Being good, being pure, being happy. Nice.

The evening after my visit to the library, I ride my bike to my waitressing shift at Dimitri’s restaurant and stay on for an after-work party. The restaurant is tucked away in the ground floor of a 1960s motel on Northbourne Avenue, and it has the feel of a hideaway. With its dim lighting, low ceiling, and brown and beige decor, it looks like any other motel dining room – but its appearance is deceptive. For Dimitri’s family and friends, it’s the village taverna they left behind on the other side of the world. On occasional Saturday nights, once the customers have left and our work is done, the records are brought out, the stereo is turned on, and the party begins.

Dimitri’s family and friends arrive in a flurry of greetings, claiming tables and carrying plates dripping with baklava and lemon cake. I don’t speak Greek but tonight I feel I do. Eating mezethes with the others and drinking wine, I’m sure I know what people are saying. Listening to their voices, I see dark interiors and sense unspoken longings. I hear the playful teasing of old friends, the flourishes of gossip. When they break into English to include me, I take on the rhythms and inflections of their speech, enjoying the shapes the words make in my mouth.

In odd moments, I seem to be watching myself as I gesture expansively – flicking my long hair back from my face and flouncing my skirt around my knees. My mind is straying, playing with me, like the aura some people experience before a migraine. I drink water and try to steady myself.

From across the table, I watch Dimitri smoking a cigarette in his customary extravagant way, talking and laughing – a short man with a wide smile and a voice that comes from deep inside his chest. You can hear his breathy conversation from the other end of the restaurant, even when he’s speaking softly. He treats all his workers as if they are part of his extended family – and, in fact, most of them are. Everyone is included in his after-work parties.

When the music starts to play, I feel a rush of anticipation. This is my favourite time of the night. I push my chair back and make my way to the dance floor with the others, swaying to the beat. ‘Wait for me,’ says the effusive Cosima, laughing as she follows. ‘You’ve become such a Greek. A green-eyed Greek.’

As usual, I stumble at first, feet in my way. But then the music lifts me up and around, and soon I’m dancing with the others, moving to the faster rhythm, raising my hands high. In a single movement, I step forward with the women, creating an inner circle while the men in the outer circle surround us. As one, they move forward, eyes wild and dark, approaching with a surge of masculine energy.

Something shifts, and I discover a reciprocal power in myself. Sensations are magnified. I turn with the women to face the men, and I’ve never before felt so strong, so fierce. I stamp my foot down, and again I raise my hands high. My body wakes to a faster pulse as the dancing becomes wilder. Shadows loom on the periphery of my eyes and chandeliers flicker like jewels. I’m in ecstasy, a whirling dervish but with more abandon, more release, and a kind of grace I’ve never felt before. As if my body has its own kind of wisdom, an energy that knows exactly each movement, each step, each turn.

Fireworks explode in my mind; colours thrill me. The bouzoukis play through my soul, vibrate through my body, pound in my blood. I’m possessed by the music and the dance; by a power, primal and sensual.

I lose myself. Raising my hands high, stamping my foot down.

When the music stops, I’m dizzy, blinking fast, the room circling around me. I find my way back to the tables with the others. They’re also breathing hard. Their eyes shine like marbles. I’m disoriented. Elated. Not sure what just happened.

The days pass, but I’m still under the spell of the dance. I’ve been winging my way from tutorial to lecture to coffee with friends. Now, in a quiet moment, I stand at the window of my room at Ursula College watching a sunset light up the sky like a visual anthem.

I sense something coming, something big, but I don’t know what it is. Lights are brighter, moods are wilder, and thoughts race across my mind. The world has become stranger and more exciting than I ever imagined it could be. And I want this strangeness, this excitement. It’s as if I’m in a canoe speeding along a river, feeling the rushing wind, hearing thunder moving closer, too exhilarated to care that Niagara Falls is around the bend.

At moments I sense that something isn’t quite right, but it’s impossible to satisfy this appetite, this restless craving for more and more life. I’m not simply happy – I’m euphoric. I’m doing mental cartwheels; my body is singing.

I no longer care about the essays I should be writing. The point is to live, not waste time trying to understand this philosophy, that ideology, this theory. Kierkegaard, Marx, Skinner. I’ve spent months working through my books, staying up late trying to make sense of them. But now all I want to know is, what did their authors feel, how did they live? There’s nothing in the textbooks on that, so I’ve packed them away under my bed.

In my narrow room, I dance to the soundtrack of Zorba the Greek and study the map of Greece pinned to my noticeboard, circling the names of places I just have to go to. I see myself living on a Greek island, swimming in the ‘wine-dark sea’ and learning the language. I stay up all night sitting on my bed, smoking cigarettes and reading Sappho’s poetry. I try to write poems that have the sensual immediacy of hers – fragmentary, impressionistic pieces – but I can’t stem the streams of writing that flow from my pen.

One night, in a sustained burst of energy, I read Prospero’s Cell by Lawrence Durrell. I’m excited by his descriptions of the bohemian lifestyle of 1930s Corfu, and I can’t wait to live there. I decide to buy a ticket to Athens as soon as I have the money, whether or not I’ve finished my exams. I’m thrilled by the idea of myself in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat, sitting at an outdoor restaurant on Samos or strolling along the black-pebbled beach on the volcanic island of Santorini. Or maybe I’ll work on a fishing boat off the coast of Ithaca.

In my room crowded with anti-war posters and an overflowing bookshelf, I’m seized by the power I experienced while dancing at Dimitri’s. I want to live like that: connected, open, passionate.

I spin like a top across the surface of my days, unable to resist the energy driving me forward, unable to sleep. Sitting at a desk in my favourite corner of the library, I read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and make copious notes, heart pounding at the thought of ‘the horror, the horror’. In an English tutorial, feeling reckless and inspired, I share with the other students the ideas racing through my mind. As I speak, I’m there, deep in the African night.

It’s not like me to be so vocal; I’m usually the quiet student who’s done the week’s reading but lacks the confidence to speak.

Growing up, I was serious and obedient. I tried to be one of the good girls, stay safe, play by the rules. But too much has happened over the past few years, and I no longer believe in that. Goodness doesn’t protect you from loss, from friends dying, from confusion and madness. I no longer care if I break the rules. Earnestness clings to me, though, however hard I try to shed it. Even when I rebel, I go about it in a considered way, more an intellectual position than an inspired act of mutiny.

‘You know you’ll go to hell,’ my mother said when I told her during my first year at university that I’d lost my faith and would not be going to Mass. I was sorry she was suffering on my behalf, but her warning has never bothered me. I no longer believe in the fires of that particular hell.

I believe in this life, and I want to throw myself into whatever it offers. I’m determined to have adventures, travel the world, discover truer ways of being. In the past, I looked up from my books, saw the wilder side of campus life and longed to be part of it. Now, my inhibitions are dissolving. I can dance. I can speak.

One evening, a blind is pulled down on this bright world.

On a television set in the college lounge room, I watch a broadcast on the Munich massacre. The world is reduced to a black-and-white screen. The images are graphic, shocking. I’m catapulted back into a world of terror, into the inner turmoil caused by the political and social conflicts of the past ten years – particularly the Vietnam War. I feel I can’t take one more explosion of violence, one more senseless death.

Later, in my room, I sing along with Bob Dylan until I’m numb from the density of emotion in the songs. In the morning I play and replay ‘Farewell Angelina’, looking out at the wintry landscape of the campus, the black lace of tree branches, the sodden lawns. Sitting at my desk, I fill a notebook with pages of poetry, stopping only to press my hands against my eyes for the relief it gives. I read Walt Whitman’s poems and, inspired by his advice, ‘Dismiss whatever insults your own soul’, I throw out my collection of articles and leaflets on the war. I draw a yellow butterfly and tape it to the wall above my desk.

While my inner world is full of poetry and imaginings, the world outside feels distant and empty. I want to take hold of something with both hands, something external to myself, and make it matter to me. But I’ve been unable to reach through to anything solid.

I miss my friend Julianne. She was the one person who really knew me. After she died, I felt on the outside of life. I was standing in the darkness, looking through a window into a room glowing with light and love. I could see the fire blazing in the grate, and people sitting around a table, talking, eating and laughing. But I was locked out.

On the night I danced at Dimitri’s, I became one of the people in that room, at that table. I’m now, inexplicably, on the inside of life. But the energy that’s rushing into me is immense, irresistible, a waterfall, a torrent of sounds and colours, thoughts and sensations that sweeps me up, swirls me around, draws me under. I’m freefalling into the whirlpool at the bottom of Niagara.

I wake late in the day, late for my class. I take the quickest route across the campus, rushing along the track to the creek, across the footbridge and between the rows of white poplars, heading towards the building that houses the English department. I run up the stairs and open the door into a room crammed full of students and as stuffy as the under-deck of an old trawler. The tutor lifts his head and glances at me as I take a seat. He murmurs something and looks back at his book. I’m sure he’s just been talking about me.

He clears his throat and begins reading aloud T.S. Eliot’s long poem ‘The Hollow Men’. His voice drones through the airless room, dirge-like and despairing, conjuring images of formless shapes, shadows, rats in dank cellars. His voice is like quicksand. I’m drawn down into it, and I can’t get traction. It’s dense and sonorous, and it’s suffocating me. I’m in ‘death’s dream kingdom’, and nothing is as it was. I hold on to the sides of my chair. I’m falling.

I hear a crack inside my head – not loud, but long. A splitting sound.

The tutor’s voice is breathy and elongated as if resonating through a pipe. My head is a radio; sounds are coming from inside it, not from the world around me. I look down at my hands and try to steady myself. The voice proclaims: ‘The eyes are not here / There are no eyes here / In this valley of dying stars’.

I grasp with absolute certainty the only real thing: I’m alone and freezing cold.

I’m dying.

When the reading ends, silence descends over me like a hood. I have to get back to my room as quickly as possible. I must not talk to anyone. In this valley of dying stars.

It’s been night for a long time. I’ve put an extra blanket on my bed, and I’m wearing a jumper over my pyjamas but I can’t get warm. I’m so cold I can’t move. The college is asleep; the only sound I hear is the distant humming of the central heating system.

It’s clear that, like Julianne, I’ve died.

As though I was awake one moment and asleep the next, I have no memory of the transition. But it happened. All life has left me. Even my room is lifeless, the ghost of a room, with my bedside lamp throwing shadows on the walls and moonlight reflecting in the mirror like the pearly sheen of an abalone shell.

Being dead feels real to me. It feels right. I’ve crossed the river, and I know who I am. I’ve come home. I’m dead. I’m Julianne. With her eyes I see the bookcase and the desk as if for the first time. I see how forthright the angles are, how precise the junctures, how smooth the flat planes of the wood. And these hands in front of my eyes are her hands. My hands. I’m free at last of the hollow world, the meaningless gestures. This death is true. I know who I am.

But as the night wears on, I fall into another kind of death. It’s no longer a relief to be dead – it’s terrifying. Thoughts attack me, a tirade of accusations and profanities that see betrayal in the things around me. The books on the shelves are full of lies, my coat on the back of the door will never keep me warm, and the drawing of a yellow butterfly has no meaning. I see the world now as the dead see it.

There are no eyes here.

In the morning, I try to wash my face in the bathroom sink, but I can’t make sense of the water spiralling down the plughole into darkness. All is sinister, uncanny. I see death in everything, as if it has always been there but I haven’t noticed it before. I’m seeing with Julianne’s eyes now, and information is crashing in from all directions.

At breakfast in the college dining room, I line up along the buffet counter. The mouth of the woman behind the trays of food is making sounds in a language I don’t recognise. I take some cereal and find a chair at an empty table. As I eat, I realise that the thoughts in my head are being broadcast from a distant site. I feel a bit sick. I’m sure war has been declared. Something terrible is about to happen. Across the room, people’s eyes are communicating in code; everyone’s blinking and glancing. The girl who’s taken a chair at the other end of my table keeps looking at me as if she’s about to say something obscene. The air is dense. It’s hard to breathe.

When I return from breakfast, I can’t go into my room. The door handle has become a silver orb with sinister powers. I can’t move. People try to help, but I’m dead, unreachable, under the power of the orb.

It’s all part of a huge, impossible problem I have to solve. But my head is full of noise coming from somewhere else, breaking into my thoughts and replacing them with threats, coded messages, commentary. This noise hates me. In some part of myself, I’m aware of it coming out of my mouth and the bizarre faces of people pressing in on me.

The next thing I know, I’m lying on a bed in a hospital ward. I don’t know how I got here or how long I’ve been here. A doctor in a white coat is holding up a needle, preparing to inject me. A nurse stands to the side of a trolley that supports a rectangular black box with dials and cords. I recognise it from the last time this happened, four years ago. It’s the machine they use for electroconvulsive therapy. As I watch a second doctor adjust the knobs, I realise you don’t die once only. Death is not a one-off event.

I tell them I’ve been raped. Mind rape. But they don’t want to know.

I sit on the couch in the day room, my arms wrapped around my chest, holding myself tight, trying to cope with the pressure of the thoughts and images behind my eyes. I’m trapped in the underbelly of the mind, tormented by a relentless monologue. Words with no reason to be here. Red mud blood, thick wet blood, red, shit oh shit, the bastard horror, take it off, idiot, off. My head is full of this noise; spiders dance on my skin, electricity surges along my nerves. The sensations in my body are unbearable. A huge spider is crouching on my hair, crushing my head with its legs, laying eggs in my brain.

All I know for sure is that I’m Julianne and I’m dead.

My life has disappeared; no one recognises me for who I am. While my family members and friends seem familiar, I don’t really know them. I’m Julianne. But who am I to tell me who I am? There are no words to say what my life is like: the thoughts that attack me, or the way that curtains and electric lights are possessed by threatening powers. The safety net of language has holes in it, and I’ve fallen through. Whenever people visit me, someone starts speaking in tongues. I don’t know if it’s me or them. Words are potent and hostile. Language betrays me, and people’s faces are carnival masks of confusion and distrust. Eyebrows especially catch my attention. They are the face’s punctuation marks, signing off on the threat in the eyes. I can’t look. I turn away.

Attending to my existence takes all my attention as I defend myself against chaos in sleepless dreams of war. Images from films, books and visits to the Australian War Memorial torment me: Pozières where my grandfather lost his leg, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, My Lai. Visions of battlefields. Word grenades exploding in my head. The cries of dying men. My grandfathers in the trenches of the Western Front. Bodies of concentration camp inmates. I’m in a ward or a war – I can’t think which, or what the difference might be.

When nurses respond in their firm way to my erratic behaviour, I’m sure they’re going to kill me. When I’m particularly agitated, I’m held facedown on the bed, pants pulled low so they can inject me with a tranquilliser.

Turn off, turn off, stand up, up, orders from headquarters, the head’s exploding, the head, someone’s pulled the plug.

At times I’m taken to the locked isolation room: a small cell-like room with a mattress on the floor and a square peephole in the door but no handle. High on one wall is an oblong window. Whenever I look up, a rectangle of light moves towards me, becoming bigger and more intense as it approaches. What does it mean? Where is the undertaker?

Every second day after a night of thirst and fasting, they come and take me to the female dormitory, used in the mornings for ECT. The beds are stripped to the undersheet. The anaesthetist in his white coat stands at the end of the bed beside the ECT machine. Something plastic is pushed inside my mouth. Gel is placed on my temples. Then I’m dragged under, into unconsciousness.

There are no eyes here.

I’m Persephone, abducted by Hades into the underworld. I’m dead, and nothing will ever be the same again.

doctor says how are you today

I say, am I today

he says, we’ll start another

series of ECT treatments on Monday

I say, another series of ECT

he says, you responded

well to the last lot

I say, the last lot

he says, that’s

all for this week

can’t get up from the chair

so he gets two nurses who

pull me up and steer me out

one says, is anything wrong

I say, wrong

the other one says

here’s your medication

and I swallow the pills

I have conflicting attitudes to the medication. There are days I would swallow any drug available, take anything at all, to get rid of the chaos. At other times I’m suspicious, sure that the drugs and the ECT will kill me. So I pretend to take the pills, then spit them out later. The psychiatrist says that the treatment will silence the noise in my head but, instead, it silences me.

The hospital staff move as if they don’t want to be here. They’re not unkind, though; at times they’re sympathetic, and there’s a moment of contact, a shared understanding. The exception is Sister G, a middle-aged woman with a jutting chin and thin lips, a sharp tongue, and a uniform that’s belted tight around her waist. She can be nasty and she sees everything. She seems to believe her job is to obey a system that considers us a management problem. When she’s off duty, the place relaxes; sometimes, down the corridor, the nurses can be heard chatting and laughing together.

The passing of time is marked by medication rituals, doctors’ appointments, visiting hours, and bells that announce meals. When the nurses bring in the medication trolley, we line up like communicants to receive a cup of water and a smaller paper cup containing our syrup or pills. We each take a mouthful of the water and swallow the drugs, watched intently by the senior nurse. Afterwards, one by one, we turn away from the line, crush the containers in our hands, and throw them in the bin. The ceremony is complete. We go back to our place at a table or around the edges of the day room, sedated and tranquillised, returned to our personal agonies.

Some patients talk to one another, but mostly we’re locked away in our isolated and isolating inner worlds. Group therapy is held to get us talking, but it’s a torturous experience that just leaves me feeling even more remote from other patients. We tend to avoid eye contact, staring into the distance or pacing around the day room and along the corridor. We see ourselves in one another and want to keep our distance, respectful of our shared need for privacy.

One night, I’m sitting in the day room writing in my notebook when I look at a patient leaning against the wall. I notice his hand going back and forth repetitively from his forehead to his nose to his mouth to his chest. As I watch, I realise it’s not me who is looking. It’s the mind behind the eyes that’s doing the looking. And I’m not my mind.

I see that the mind has no identity. It’s an abstract thing, disconnected from me, with its own agenda. Glacial and remote, it takes note of every detail. It is utterly foreign. Extraterrestrial. It sees the bone structure beneath people’s faces, the glinting light on the scissors in the nurse’s top pocket, the dregs in the coffee cup. But the mind will not disclose to me the meaning of what it sees.

I can’t understand what anything means.

As the days of waiting circle around one another, fragmentary memories of Julianne emerge. I glance up from my dinner and see her on the chair opposite, looking at me with a half-smile, and a rush of joy or pain – I can’t tell which – tears through my chest. Another time, coming into my room, I see her bend over to pick up her bag, and I notice the delicacy of her hands and the softness of her hair as it falls across her face. Sometimes I hear her say things like ‘pass me that book’ or ‘let’s take the bus’. I’m upset by these visitations, but as soon as she disappears I want her back.

Seeing and hearing Julianne external to myself challenges my belief that I’m her and brings on a new series of anxieties. Without her identity, who am I? If I’m not my mind and I’m not Julianne, where have I gone?

In the day room, I think of Julianne as she was the first time I saw her. The memory erupts full-blown, and I’m transported back in time. I’m twelve years old, sitting at my desk at the back of the first form classroom. Julianne is standing still and alert to the side of two nuns: our headmistress, Sister Clare, and our form teacher, Mother Aloysius. Wearing the brown uniform of her previous school and holding her head at an angle, Julianne has the look of a deer that has just stepped out of a forest into a clearing. There is a sense of space around her, a quiet poise, and I’m curious. When Sister Clare introduces her as the oldest of six children and French on her mother’s side, Julianne looks out the window and frowns. She’s in another world; her eyes are distant and squinting slightly, as if she’s thinking of a problem she needs to solve.

Back in M Ward the classroom retreats, but Julianne is still standing in front of me with the same thoughtful look. I’m unable to bear the sight of her, so much herself, so real and present that I want to shake her, wake her up. I also want her to go; she doesn’t exist. But when she leaves, I’m desperate with self-reproach. Where? Where, ma chère amie? Tu es un pomme, je suis une poire, tu es trop drôle, disparu, disparu. I beat my chest hard with my fist until my ribs ache. A nurse comes, gives me water and pills, and helps me walk along the corridor to my room.

The next day I’m in ‘death’s dream kingdom’ again, almost blind from the cold and the loneliness. I’m a mannequin-ghost haunting the ward, my skin pulled tight across my bones, careful not to let my eyes give anything away. Sitting back on a couch in the day room, my legs crossed, I lift my cigarette to my mouth, take a drag, then exhale slowly and look around through the smoke. My eyes see everything, every little thing: the servitude of the chairs as they wait at the tables, so patient and receptive. The weight of the shuffling bodies as they move across the floor to the kitchen alcove. The light grazing the green lino. And all the angles that cut into the space around me: ceiling, walls, windows. Sharp and decisive. Too much information. No meaning. No pattern.

I’m numb and deeply sedated. The noise inside my head has grown less strident, and the hallucinations of war are less explosive. But I still can’t convince myself that I’m alive.

There are rules for everything, and everyone except me knows what they are – how to arrange your face, when to say certain things, what to do when someone looks at you. These rules enable people to act without having to think it through. But no intuition or knowledge emerges to direct me, so every interaction is fraught. I have become a thing that can’t see the connections between things. I write in my notebook:

energy of ages

boring holes in my skull

where eyes would be

if only I could see

My mind is white and cold. I’ve lost my soul. I am a moth. I’m no one.

That night I slip out the door of the ward and make my way through the hospital grounds to the shore of Lake Burley Griffin. Gum trees and pines loom in the darkness along each side of the track and, ahead of me, reflections of hospital lights shine like pieces of broken crystal on the surface of the water.

I’ve lived my life and now it’s over. This is where it has brought me, face to face with yet another death. I know it for what it is, and I’m ready to embrace it fully. I’ll be Ned Kelly in Nolan’s painting, turn my back on this world and ride into infinity. I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want this life to end. I want to become sky. Become nothing. I pace along the path next to the stone wall on the lake’s edge with only one thought in my mind: to drown, to do something that will make sense of it all. No longer dead as Julianne, I’m now dead as myself, and I can’t bear it for even one more night.

I stand motionless on the edge of the lake, imagining how it will feel to let the dark water close over me as I sink to the bottom: the peace, the quiet, the letting go under the weight of the water. The fantasy grips me, and I lose touch with myself entirely.

Then a water rat runs across my foot. I’m wearing sandals, and the sensation of claws on my skin is revolting. The shock of it brings me back to the reality of the night.

I look again into the water, but this time I gauge its depth. It wouldn’t be that easy to drown. I’m a strong swimmer. The instinct to save myself, to rise to the surface, will take over. The shore is right here.

There’s no way out after all. I turn around and make my way back to M Ward. I’m worthless, pared down to nothing. I’ve come to the very end of possibility.