The Green Bell

Julianne

The noise in my head doesn’t like me being happy. I wake up from a long, involved nightmare with the sensation of a spider’s web covering my face and a stream of abuse filling my mind. Slut idiot, slut bitch, ugly, turn the other cheek, check the other chart, the fires of hell, the hell fires. It’s early, long before breakfast time. I make my way to the day room and start writing in my notebook, trying to distract myself from the noise.

But there’s something new, a sense of hope that I have when I’m with Michael, a light inside me that’s not madness. It’s so very small and fragile, though, a glow worm in a cave of bats, unable to withstand the noise as it increases in volume and ferocity. I stand up, knocking over my coffee in my rush to get back to my room.

As I pass the vacant nurses’ station, a phone is ringing. And ringing.

Its call is insistent. I can’t bear the sound. In my room, I throw myself on the bed and cover my ears. But the phone’s still ringing.

It’s four years earlier, and I’m standing at the phone table in the hall of my parents’ house, not quite awake, holding the receiver in my hand. I hear Mrs Gilroy’s voice and wonder why she would be calling so early. Then I feel myself bend forward, leaning on the table for support. Mrs Gilroy is saying that Julianne died in the night.

My mind becomes hollow. I hear the words but their meaning falls away. When I hang up the phone, my mother is standing in front of me, grasping her dressing-gown at her chest with one hand. I stare at her, trying to find words to tell her what has happened. Even as I say them, they make no sense to me. I turn and walk out the back door.

I run into the yard, thrust forward by a blind momentum. I cross the wet lawn and make my way towards the hooded shape of Mount Majura and the track into the bush. I’m conscious of every step and the icy air on my face. I hear birdcalls and breathe in the smell of earth. In the half-light, the tree trunks appear stark and grotesque, and stillness hangs in the air like a spell. I’m aware of my breath, sharp and tight, and the blood rushing through my body. I keep moving fast. The skin on my face is taut, my eyes are wide open, my breath is now coming in fierce surges, in and out.

When I pass a dam, the vegetation changes and I stop walking. The path ahead leads into a dense expanse of trees that seems remote and sinister. I stand quite still, struck by the strangeness of a place I know so well. Pink and orange light is splashed across the sky behind the dark form of the mountain.

In the silence, I hear myself think: It’s the first day of her death.

The words are a shock. I’m back in M Ward. I look around my room and try to orientate myself. ‘The first day of her death’ is not an idea I can process. Although my mind refuses its meaning, my heart knows that Julianne is dead. I know I will never see her again. But I’m circling her death, circling and looking, trying to see, moving away then returning, as if I’m waiting for her to wake up and explain it all to me. Because her death is impossible. We never thought we would ever die.

When Mrs Gilroy rang, she asked me to help with the children, so after I returned from the bush, I rode my bike to the Gilroy home. I had automatically clicked into my helpful and positive mode, but it took me longer to react to things. I was following myself through the morning’s events, unable to catch up. I helped the younger children get dressed while the older girls took care of breakfast. No one was hungry and no one had much to say. A large bowl of homemade yoghurt sat on the kitchen bench, catching the light from the window. So white and smooth and perfect in a blue porcelain bowl.

The children were resentful when it was time for them to go to school. They wanted to stay in the house together, but as neighbours and friends came to get them, they dragged themselves and their large schoolbags up the drive to the street, subdued and uncomprehending, one after the other.

The silence in the house felt brittle as glass. I wandered from room to room, holding on tightly to my singular existence. I picked up clothes and put them on beds; I stacked dishes in the sink. In the lounge room, I studied the framed photos along the top of the piano. Next to assorted family portraits – and one of her father, who had died a year earlier – there was a photo of Julianne. It was a black-and-white image of her looking directly into the camera lens with a serious expression, her eyes quizzical. ‘Who are you?’ she seemed to be asking, reversing the role of the camera, refusing to be the object of its gaze.

In another photo, she stood in line with some of her sisters, her expression thoughtful, somewhat wary, as if she had retreated to a contained and unyielding part of herself. This wasn’t the Julianne I knew. I wanted her to come home. In the empty house I waited for her to come back from the swimming pool. I was sure she must be there, or at the library. She would walk in the door any minute. If I just waited long enough, she would come.

The phone in the Gilroy house rang a number of times that morning. I answered it and listened while people expressed shock and disbelief, then I told each one what news I had, that a notice would be placed in the paper regarding the time of the funeral.

Sometime in the afternoon I went home. I had an essay to write about the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy on the early writings of Marx. I found the ritual of writing a relief from the pressure in my chest. I went through my notes and made points for the essay plan. I worked on the introduction and came up with my argument, drawing on discussions Julianne and I had engaged in as our belief in God had collapsed. We’d talked about Feuerbach’s idea that God is a product of human longings and wishes, and I wrote about how this idea had influenced Marx’s ideas on religion. It became urgent that I finish the essay, which was due the following week.

That evening, sitting at the table having dinner with my family, I looked at the slices of bread on a plate and found them incomprehensible. I couldn’t think of the word ‘bread’, only the word ‘companion’, a word that Julianne and I had particularly liked. At school, we had been obsessed with finding the derivations of words and had discovered that ‘companion’ is derived from the Old French, meaning ‘with bread’. We decided that we were companions. We broke bread together. I sat there at the table, staring at the bread, unable to think of anything but the word ‘companion’, unable to look away.

My family were quiet, the conversation subdued. My mother had hugged me earlier and offered sympathy, but I was unused to displays of affection and didn’t respond. No one mentioned Julianne. No one, including me, knew what to say.

Michael appears at my door, interrupting my memories of that stunned day. He’s smiling, saying something about breakfast and offering his hand to help me up from the bed. We walk down the corridor to the day room, but I can’t speak. I can’t even look at him. It’s the first day of her death. When breakfast is served, I eat. When the medication trolley comes around, I take the pills and syrup and swallow them. But throughout the morning, I’m mute, skeletal with grief.

Later, I sit on a couch staring straight ahead at the wall, aware of Michael sitting by my side. I know when he’s taking a drag on a cigarette, turning a page of his notebook or sipping his coffee. I hear him say things, but it’s the sound of his voice that makes sense to me, not the meaning of his words.

Someone has put a record on, and ‘Danny Boy’ is playing. ‘It’s you,’ the voice sings. ‘It’s you must go, and I must bide.’ Tears roll down my cheeks.

I nap in my room during the afternoon and wake to see Michael perched on the chair under the window. ‘You’ve been asleep,’ he says, putting down a book.

I sit up and try to think where I am. Try to remember who this person is.

‘It’s late afternoon,’ he says. ‘Time for Chopin.’ He shows me the cover of the record he has put on my portable stereo. ‘I nicked this from the day room,’ he says.

While the light fades and shadows creep up the walls of my room, we sit together, feeling the melancholy in the music.

‘Some things can’t be said,’ Michael says as he turns the record over. ‘But then there’s Chopin.’

As if on cue, there’s a banging on the half-open door, and a nurse appears. She says it’s time to go to the day room.

Different realities coexist in me like a set of Russian dolls. Except that the dolls inside me are all talking at the same time, feeling contrary emotions, seeing intersecting images that won’t stay still. Loud monologues persist, mocking and sneering. It’s all a confusion of impressions, sensations, feelings, faces. Or sounds, music, voices, noise. Hands gesturing. Eyebrows insinuating. The past inside the present inside the future. Love and death and all the imaginings, a mish-mash. They’re all real and they’re all mad. Truth and lies competing with one another for my mind.

This is my madness, and I can’t tell it as it is. Madness is anti-story, anti-chronology, anti-plot, anti-character. It breaks language. It throws mud in the face. It makes story impossible. The minds within the mind won’t let me be.

Even so, I move, I act, and my story continues. The body’s truth with its red heart, and a mouth that wants to speak, urges me on.

‘What was Julianne like?’ Michael asks.

It’s late at night, and there’s no one else in the dimly lit day room. We’re sitting together on a couch again, enjoying the opportunity to be physically close in private. I feel the weight of his arm around my shoulders and the delicate sensation of his fingers playing with hair at the nape of my neck.

‘Julianne liked thinking,’ I say slowly. ‘And languages. When we were twelve she told me her goals in life were to speak French fluently and live in Paris.’ I pause for a moment. ‘And she was bold.’ The word comes to me unexpectedly. I remember Sister Clare once told Julianne that she was as ‘bold as brass’. I liked this phrase and used it to tease Julianne, though secretly I loved the image. Her boldness was one of the things I admired about her. She was brave, bright, shining. The way she jumped in at the deep end of any topic of conversation, eyes flashing.

As I talk to Michael tonight, I’m able to remember Julianne without fear of going over the falls into chaos. I’ve survived the memories of her that have returned, and Michael’s question is an invitation that I want to accept. With him, it’s safe to think about her.

Now, in the shadows of the day room, it’s almost as if I can see her next to me, holding her head at an angle and looking into the distance, her eyes squinting in that familiar way as if she’s searching for something. Then she looks directly at me, her eyes soften and relax, and she gives me her entire attention.

Returning her gaze, I’m able to comprehend the circumstances of her death with a clarity I’ve not experienced before. I can look her in the eye; I can see what happened. Face it. Survive in the face of it.

Words escape me, pouring out before I can think of what I’m saying. ‘She died in a hospital in Sydney. They killed her because she spoke about secret things. They don’t like you doing that. They zapped her mind with electricity until her heart gave out. They killed her. And she knew what they were doing.’

Michael’s hand strays to his throat, and his thumb begins to stroke the small depression at its base. Except for this movement, he’s quite still, facing me. His presence is as reassuring as my own breath, drawing me to the place where all my confusions merge into the single thought of her.

‘You’re saying that Julianne died from ECT?’ he asks.

‘Yes, and from the drugs they were giving her.’

‘So this wasn’t you?’

‘No. Julianne. Her, not me.’

‘And this was in a psych hospital?’

‘Yes, a psych hospital. We’d been at uni. Everything got too intense – the war, the Church, her father’s death, everything – and she had a breakdown. They brought her here, to M Ward –’

‘Here?’ Michael is obviously taken aback.

‘Yes, her bed was in the women’s dorm. I visited her here.’

‘You sure, Pauls?’ Michael is looking at me strangely.

‘Yes, that’s what happened. She was here in M Ward, and then they took her to a hospital in Sydney. She died there. Her heart stopped beating. At midnight.’ I pause and take a breath. It’s important I get this right. ‘The post-mortem report said the cause of her death was poisoning from an overdose of the drugs they gave her, but I think it was from ECT as well. I read a newspaper article about it.’

‘That’s just so …’ Michael pauses. ‘I don’t know what to say. You both had breakdowns, ECT, the works. No wonder you’ve been confused.’ He takes my hand. ‘And you’d known each other since you were kids?’

‘I always knew her,’ I say.

The whole story spills out then, with no distinction between reality and delusion, between Julianne and me, between now and then. It comes in fits and starts at first, and then in an unstoppable flow of memories, tears and release. And as I become used to speaking of my past, I begin to feel less overwhelmed by the energy of the narrative. I find my self in the place where true words come from. I am what I say, and what I say has meaning. It brings me to life.

Michael listens in the way you always hope you’ll be listened to when it matters. A rhythmic listening, an ear in the heart. His kindness makes me realise how lonely I’ve been since Julianne died.

Later, lying in bed and trying to sleep, I still feel overwhelmed by grief but now also by exhaustion. It’s four years since Julianne died, and I think this is the first time I’ve cried over her loss.

During my first breakdown in 1968, I was in shock, disconnected from my loss and anguish. In this state of emotional paralysis, I didn’t grieve Julianne – I was her. When my delusion fell away, she disappeared. The ECT and antipsychotic drugs eradicated her from my life until my second breakdown, when the delusion returned. The feelings I did have, of dislocation, confusion, despair, didn’t seem to be associated with anything I could name.

Now, Michael has helped me connect with the fact that Julianne is dead. He has come inside my inner world and shown me her death and my loss. I can now think about her, talk about her, remember her without breaking open. Eventually, I fall asleep.

When I wake up a few hours later, I sit in the dark on the easy chair beside the window, aware that I’m alone. Julianne is gone, and I am here without her.

A stream of memories takes me back to our first year at university. One day I was waiting for her in her room at Garran Hall when the door flew open. She was dancing around in her favourite yellow dress, waving a prescription for the contraceptive pill in the air and proclaiming that this was the beginning of a new era in her life.

We’d both been reading D.H. Lawrence, and I remember us sitting in the cafeteria talking about his poetry. Julianne said that his poem about the red geranium was her favourite. She was excited, telling me that she agreed with Lawrence that yearning is the most important precondition for creativity. She said, ‘To be creative, you have to long to create something beautiful, something that hasn’t existed before.’

I wonder what Michael would make of this idea; I must ask him tomorrow.

Tonight, memories of Julianne keep coming. I see us sitting at the desk in her Garran Hall room, analysing the Pope’s encyclical on birth control. We try to apply the rules of logic that we’re studying in our philosophy class but, in the end, we decide that logic isn’t the issue. For us, famines and desperate poverty and mothers watching their children starve are the issues. I hear the precise inflections of Julianne’s voice, see her smile as she turns to face me. It’s the complicit smile of someone acknowledging that we have no other choice; we can no longer believe in the infallibility of the Pope. For us, this is a momentous realisation.

Julianne is present and as close as my breathing. I’m reminded of how she talked with her whole body. She almost danced when she solved a problem or reached a decision she’d been struggling with. Now she’s here with me, and I can’t stop crying. I never fully realised how much the emptiness in my life was due to her absence from it. And I never understood the impact of her father’s death. In spite of our closeness, it remained a void: unapproachable, unspeakable.

Tonight, my grief is myself, experienced at last, spoken and acknowledged. It’s where my breath goes to and comes from, the pain and the loss I’ve not allowed myself to feel. Telling Michael has been the turning point for me. That, and the closeness I feel now to Julianne. I begin to believe I can live.

In the following days, I’m still distracted by memories – of Julianne, of growing up, of our first year at university. I’m trying to piece it all together, see it as a whole rather than as fragments scattered through my mind like the aftermath of a catastrophe.

I remember clearly the day Julianne lost herself.

At lunchtime I was waiting for her in the Garran Hall dining room. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew something was wrong. I turned to the door and saw her waving a newspaper in the air and shouting about Vietnam. ‘They’re dropping bombs, napalm. They’re killing children. It’s criminal. We have to stop it,’ she cried.

People stopped eating and turned towards her as she made her way between the tables, continuing her tirade about the war, the killings, the villages on fire.

I rushed to her, and when I put my arm around her, she collapsed against me, sobbing uncontrollably.

Once we were in her room, she sat on the bed, taking my hand in both of hers, pulling it towards her and shaking it. ‘What’s wrong?’ she cried. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I had no idea what to do, what to say. I stared around the room as if an answer would magically appear from the bookshelves or walls.

Our first year at university had started out as a huge adventure. On the first day of term we’d sat in the cafeteria, excitedly thumbing through our new textbooks and talking about the subjects we were taking.

Now, in M Ward, it seems much longer than four years ago. So much has happened. We were eighteen and so naive.

In 1968, the world erupted into chaos. There was so much to take in, so many new ideas for us to integrate into our understanding of life. The Vietnam War intensified that year, and every night there were news reports of soldiers killed, villages burned to the ground, bombs dropped on civilians. In the United States, millions of people marched for civil rights or protesting the war. There was violence and mayhem, cars burning, people killed, cities on fire. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. In France, wildcat strikes were held across the country and, for a while, the government of Charles de Gaulle was on the point of collapse.

Here in Australia, young men were being put in jail for refusing to register for national service, and anti-conscription groups were becoming more militant.

For Julianne and me, 1968 was an initiation into a disintegrating society. That year we lost our innocence. I would sit in the lounge room at home with my family, watching violent black-and-white images on the small television screen spark and disappear. My heart was filled with feelings I couldn’t identify, couldn’t give voice to. I didn’t know how to manage the intensity of my responses to violence, war, injustice, racism. I was trying to understand it all – as if it made sense.

I was also questioning the roles that women were conditioned to play in society. I was introduced to the feminist ideas of Simone de Beauvoir through her memoirs, and to Betty Friedan’s in The Feminine Mystique. I now noticed that the world reported in the news was one of men and their exploits: men in suits, men in military uniforms, men reporting on their lives. When women appeared, they seemed like dolls – men’s pretty accessories. I imagined a different path for myself. I wasn’t going to stay at home looking after children my whole life; I wanted to be involved in what was happening in the world.

One night I watched a television documentary about the hippies who were congregating in San Francisco and going to rock concerts, dancing wildly and smoking marijuana. They looked like revellers at a medieval-style carnival or a fancy-dress party, and I was fascinated. Sensational news stories in the Australian media described how these hippies were espousing the virtues of ‘free love’ and advocating the use of drugs. Stories appeared of drug-affected youths jumping out of high windows in the belief that they could fly and running naked through the streets claiming to have seen God. It all seemed like a wild, unnerving madness to me.

My home life was rooted in religious beliefs and rituals, and family routines. Sunday Mass was followed by a roast dinner or a barbecue on the banks of the Murrumbidgee. When we were younger, my siblings and I had knelt with Mum and Dad for the nightly ritual of the rosary, and on weekdays I’d ridden my bike through the breaking dawn to early Mass. In winter, there was ice on the puddles in the lanes, and my fingers on the handlebars were stiff, but I loved those early mornings, the Latin of the Mass, the mystery of Communion.

We’d been raised to believe unquestioningly in the authority of priests and nuns. When my mother had told the parish priest that I wanted to go to university, he had warned her I’d lose my faith if I studied philosophy. And he was right.

For months Julianne and I argued this way and that on Church doctrines and dogmas. In our philosophy class, we studied arguments for the existence of God and found them unconvincing. Eventually, we took our first breaths as atheists together. But while doubt had been an expansive experience, outright disbelief stripped us of all our certainties. God had held everything together: our sense of who we were, our families, our community and society. He had been the answer to all our questions.

In the end, I discovered there was not one prayer left in me. The doctrines and the rituals simply fell away. And once God ceased to exist, I lost the ground of my being. The universe seemed cold and impersonal; death cast a long shadow on my life. I didn’t know where to look for truth and meaning. Life seemed random and absurd.

I was falling into the darkness, cut loose from nearly every bond except with Julianne. Our friendship was the one thing that made sense.

In the myth, the day Persephone was abducted into the underworld started out like any other. The sun shone brightly while Persephone and her friends played and collected flowers in the fields.

The day that Julianne went mad had also begun like any other. As usual, we’d planned to meet for lunch and then spend the afternoon studying together. Instead, Julianne was seized by a dangerous god and carried off. Life was never the same again. When she sat on her bed and asked, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I had no answers.

I suggested that we go home to her family, but she didn’t want to worry them. So we spent the next two days and nights together at my family home, ensconced in my room. It was on the ground floor and had its own entrance from the garden, and it became our refuge as Julianne became more distraught. I had no idea what was happening. Once, when we went upstairs, she saw my mother doing the ironing. ‘The trouble with you Keoghs is you’re all too bloody normal,’ she said as she walked through the dining room.

In my room, Julianne obsessed about the war. She wanted to give a speech to the old men in parliament who were sending boys off to fight. She wrote it down quickly, not pausing to think, covering page after page, begging the government to consider the suffering involved, urging them to listen to their hearts. I was overwhelmed and awed by the speed of her thoughts, and the wildness and intensity of her feelings. Her mind was a whirlwind, drawing everything into its orbit, including me.

In the eye of the storm of madness there’s a kernel of sanity that’s so clear and so true, you think you’re in the presence of Truth distilled and laid bare.

My instinct was to protect her, keep people away. I could see how disturbed she was, but I kept thinking that she would soon recover, come back to herself, and I was caught up in our crazy conversations. We laughed until we cried about the absurdities of the world, about the Pope, about sex, about the Buddhist concept of ‘no-mind’.

‘My head’s exploding,’ Julianne told me. ‘It’s on fire.’

By Monday morning, my mother was aware that something was wrong and made an appointment for Julianne at the local doctor’s clinic a few blocks away.

I gave her some of my clothes to wear. She was less talkative as we walked down to the clinic in the bright sunshine. ‘Do you think he can help me?’ she asked. I told her I was sure he could, and I tried to hide that I was worried. Coming out of my dark room into the light and the familiar streets, I saw that we’d crossed some line, though I couldn’t think what it might be. Neither of us had had much sleep, and Julianne was clutching my arm so tightly it hurt. She’d put my jumper on back to front.

In the waiting room, one wall was covered in postcards from all over the world. I stood staring at them while Julianne was in with the doctor. My eyes registered the different scenes, the tropical beaches and the European cities, but I couldn’t think. My mind was blank except for a buzzing headache, the sound of locusts gathering.

I remember what happened next as if the events are occurring now, in front of me.

I hear Julianne shouting. Minutes later, the doctor opens the door, takes a couple of strides out of his office and asks the receptionist to call an ambulance.

Julianne appears close behind him, her hair a mess, partly tied back and partly falling over her face, her eyes intense and bright. She’s holding the bust of a woman’s head high above her like a trophy. The logo of a well-known contraceptive pill is attached to its base, and I realise it has reminded Julianne of the Pope’s ruling on birth control.

I take the bust out of her hands, place it on the desk and hug her. She puts her arms around me and her head on my shoulder. She begins to cry. I hear the doctor talking on the phone. ‘Paranoid schizophrenia,’ he says. ‘Immediately.’

Everything takes place very fast, but stylised, not quite real, a movie scene that I’m watching from the front row. The ambulance pulls up at the door of the clinic, and two paramedics jump out. The doctor leans down to speak to one of them while the other puts his arms around Julianne’s shoulders and guides her to the door.

It’s clear that she doesn’t want to go with him; she pulls away and stares at me, confused. Without hesitation, the paramedic turns her back towards the door and escorts her outside. I follow, hearing the ambulance doors slam shut, the motor revving. I stand there on the footpath, watching the ambulance disappear down Madigan Street.

I’m numb. They’ve taken her away. I’ve abandoned her. I walk home along the suburban street, registering nothing.

One rainy day in M Ward, Kate McNamara introduces me to a new way of thinking about the word ‘mad’. We’re sitting with Michael at one of the laminex tables in the day room, drinking coffee and talking about life on the ward.

‘I don’t think I’m ever going to get out of here,’ says Kate.

‘Yes, you will,’ I say. ‘You’re unwell right now, but things will get better.’ I’m aware that I sound exactly like my mother.

‘Unwell! I’m not unwell. I’m mad. And so are you. You’d better get used to it.’

‘Mad?’ No one has ever said this to my face before. I feel as if I’ve been injected with a cardiac stimulant.

‘Yes, mad, like the rest of us in here. Don’t look so startled. We’re all lunatics. That’s why they’ve locked us up.’

‘But we’re not locked up,’ I say. ‘We’re voluntary patients, and this is an unlocked ward.’ Our conversation is making me anxious.

‘So you voluntarily have ECT, do you?’

I’m confused. I’ve never thought about this before. ‘I think I might have signed some papers,’ I say. ‘Yes, I think I did.’

‘Christ, Pauls, that clinches it. You really are mad.’

‘But we’re not locked up in here.’

‘Technically, you’re right. We’re not locked up, but we might as well be. Where else can we go?’

She has a point, one I’m well aware of. I look at her, and something shifts in me. Kate isn’t afraid to say she’s mad. She’s defiant and forthright. Not ashamed, not humiliated. She doesn’t hide herself away, or try to pretend everything’s fine.

When I had my first breakdown, I was taken to a private psychiatric clinic located in a large old building on a hill in North Sydney. One of the other patients in my room used to steal my toilet bag and clothes. When I asked for them back, she would say, ‘We’re all God’s mad creatures,’ and walk off. I mulled over the idea that I might be mad, terrified by it. Being mad felt shameful and sinister, and I would never say the word out loud.

I’ve been diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’, but that hasn’t helped me at all; it means nothing to me. I’d hardly heard the word before Julianne’s diagnosis. And the explanation that I have a chemical imbalance in my brain is confusing. The word ‘schizophrenic’ makes me feel cut apart, split open. It makes me feel that something incomprehensible is happening to me, whereas I can relate to the word ‘mad’ even if I find it deeply disturbing.

Schizophrenic, I belong to science; mad, I belong to the human race.

We all understand King Lear’s confusion and despair. And Hamlet – his hallucinations tell us of his grief. Don Quixote’s tale is a classic for a reason. We can relate to the madness in these stories and many others. All through history, there have been mad people who’ve seen things that aren’t there, heard voices when no one is speaking, who’ve become strangers to their loved ones.

But I can’t relate to the idea of schizophrenia, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

I’ve heard a saying that words are either like trees or like sores. Words that are like trees put roots deeply into the earth and reach high into the heavens. I don’t know if the word ‘mad’ reaches into the heavens – though I suspect it did for Julianne – but it does reach into history and into our souls. It’s part of the spectrum of human experience. It speaks to me and to people generally, mad or not, while the word ‘schizophrenic’ is like a sore, making me ill and cutting me off from other people.

Sitting here with Kate and Michael in the day room, I now see myself in a whole new way. Since my diagnosis I’ve felt humiliated, unworthy and degraded. But as Kate says, I have to get used to the idea that I’m one of ‘them’, the mad ones. I have to see that madness is something that could happen to anyone. I need to acknowledge the state I’m in, wholly admit to it.

Easy to say, harder to do, but I can at least begin to think more freely about my experiences, and those of Julianne, Michael, Kate and other patients in the ward. ‘Mad’ is a heavy word, but I think I can carry it. I already feel stronger.

For the first time since I’ve been a patient in M Ward, I go into the female dormitory for a reason other than ECT treatments. The last time I visited there was when Julianne was a patient four years ago. Kate and I have been talking about her favourite metaphysical poets, and she wants to show me a book of poems. As we walk into her room, I’m shocked by a flash of recognition. I look towards the corner next to a window.

There we are: Julianne and I sitting cross-legged on the bed. Julianne is telling me about a vision she had that revealed to her the connection between music and mathematics. She explains carefully that music is a series of interlinked mathematical problems and their solutions. She closes her eyes for a few seconds, enclosing this thought in the interior space of her being. Her voice is slow and deliberate, each word drawn up from somewhere deep inside her. She says that music is in our bodies, in the sky. In someone’s scream. It’s in a flower. In everything.

But then she pauses and looks directly at me, a flash of excitement in her eyes, her voice lit up. ‘You know, the world’s not like we thought. The world plays. It’s music. We live in music, and it lives in us.’

As Kate and I walk out of the dormitory, it hits me. That visit to Julianne was the last time I saw her.

I’m overwhelmed by memories. I see Julianne as she was through thousands of our conversations, her familiar gestures matching the rise and fall of her precise and emphatic speech. I think of how she’d look when she was searching for the right word: she’d narrow her eyes and stare into the distance beyond my shoulder. She’d laugh and brush her hair back off her temples with both hands, then shake her head, letting her hair fall around her face again. She completed this little ritual with a self-conscious deliberation, adjusting her glasses and smiling her slightly myopic smile.

I think now that beneath all her confusion, Julianne saw the world as the mystics see it. She understood a profound truth that I reach for but can’t quite grasp. In some essential region of herself, Julianne was whole and unbroken within the music.