The Green Bell

Inside the Green Bell

he is white pain flowering

he touches me

we fly

laugh at the sky

Michael wants us to get engaged. There’s an urgency about it for him, an enthusiasm for the wedding ceremony and for the idea of marriage that I find irresistible. It’s simple and obvious: I love him, I can’t imagine life without him, so we get a day pass from M Ward and go on a mission into Civic Centre to buy our engagement rings.

It’s one of Canberra’s archetypal spring days: cool blue sky and warm sunshine, with the hint of perfume from wattles in bloom along the road and plum trees pink with blossom. Michael and I hold hands and make jokes about being escapees, free at last. But in Civic Centre the streets are too close and too hectic. People hurry by, cars swerve around corners, loud music blasts from a record shop, and I feel exposed and uncertain. I can barely process the light, the noise, the rush, but we have rings to buy, so I take deep breaths.

As we cross Garema Place, we see a small market selling crafts and jewellery. Without hesitation, Michael steers us towards a colourful stall with handbags hanging above a table of silver jewellery. We’re attracted by the rings with Celtic designs. Michael becomes excited as he tells me about the ancient Book of Kells in Dublin’s Trinity College Library, the delicate knots and patterns painted on its pages.

‘Look at this, Pauls,’ he says, interrupting himself and holding a ring out for me to examine. ‘It’s the infinity symbol repeated in a circle.’

I take the ring and see that it’s composed of two silver bands twining around each other. I think this symbol is perfect for us. Our love is about space: it’s limitless.

‘“Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,”’ Michael quotes. ‘Good ole William Blake knew a thing or two.’

I put on the ring – an exact fit.

Michael quickly tries on a few with the same design until he finds one that fits him. He gives it to me and insists that I take off the ring I’ve just put on. ‘Let’s exchange rings,’ he says. I like the idea and hold out my hand. He slips my ring on the fourth finger of my left hand. I do the same with his, pushing it over his knuckle, my heart radiant. The moment the rings are on, Michael is kissing me.

The Spanish man behind the counter laughs. ‘You’d better watch him,’ he says. ‘He’s after your heart.’

As we walk away, arm in arm, I can’t stop smiling.

Later, when we’re eating toasted sandwiches at a cafe, Michael tells me more about Jumping Creek, the small property he owns near Candelo on the south coast of New South Wales. ‘You’ll love it, Pauls,’ he says. ‘The house is a bit dilapidated and neglected, but the countryside is really pretty. Rolling hills all around and a creek running through. It’s just waiting there for us to fix up, make a home of it.’

‘It sounds perfect,’ I say. ‘My dream house is small but has big windows, lots of light, wooden floors and stone walls.’ I imagine living with Michael in this house. Flowers on the windowsills and a view from the kitchen sink: green hills, watercolour sky, drifting clouds. I hold this image in my mind and feel a sense of homecoming.

Michael raises his hand and smiles. ‘I’ll wave my wand –’

‘And cosy,’ I continue, laughing. ‘Rugs and cushions thrown over the floors.’

‘A den! It’ll be our place. Let’s have the wedding down there, invite all our friends. Make a festival of it, lots of people and music.’

‘Vivaldi and Dylan. All our favourites.’

‘Purcell and The Incredible String Band,’ he says. ‘We’ll have the ceremony inside the birch spinney, then throw a huge party.’

Michael’s hand is lying flat on the table, his new ring on his finger. I put my hand next to his, noting the contrast between them. One is the hand of a pianist, long and bony but strong, with fingernails that are short and ovoid. The other is pale and small, but looks capable and trustworthy with its square shape and blunt fingers. I can hardly believe it’s mine. It feels separate from me, lying there like a porcelain sculpture, unreal next to Michael’s tanned hand with its knotty veins and nicotine-stained fingers.

I like these different hands, and they like each other. All afternoon, as we negotiate shops and crowds, they seek each other out; they play together, showing off their silver finery. They are like the hands in that Escher sketch, bringing each other into being. Him drawing her drawing him.

We come across a fabric shop called George’s and stand together at the front window, looking at a roll of cotton wrapped around a mannequin. I lean against Michael, and he puts his arm over my shoulder. The fabric has a vivid border, a swirling design of flowers and leaves, and we decide that it would make the perfect wedding dress.

Then, in the optometrist’s where Michael is getting his glasses fixed, I catch sight of myself in a mirror. My mood sinks. I see an imposter, a girl in jeans playing at being normal. I smile at her while the noise in my head attacks me for thinking that Michael could possibly love me. I turn the ring around on my finger, but I have lost my lightness.

At a health food shop in an arcade, we do a serious sweep of the counters, making extravagant plans for macrobiotic diets and yoga retreats. But when I try to pay for a bag of almonds, I can’t count out the right change, and my hand dipping into my purse is shaking too much to pick up the coins.

Back at the hospital, we show off our rings to the other patients and the nurses. ‘We’re getting hitched,’ says Michael to the group gathered around us. ‘A wedding, marriage, kids, the whole trip.’

I’m standing next to him, amazed at the picture he’s painting, daring to believe that we can make it happen. Just weeks ago, I wanted to die. Now I’m planning an idyllic life in the countryside with the man I love.

‘They’re not proper engagement rings – you’re supposed to have diamonds,’ says ward prefect Lydia, pointing at my hand.

‘Not for this engagement,’ says Michael, smiling. ‘See the Celtic infinity knot? Diamonds are old hat. Take it from me, these are official. Very cool.’

Michael is wearing his yellow and purple-striped beanie and a Nepalese waistcoat, and I’ve changed into my favourite dress of flowing cotton in a Native American print design. Hand in hand, we waft around the hospital corridors, oddly matched, strangely translucent. I’m in a state of shock, but this time it’s the shock of happiness, the belief in a future with a man who, in spite of everything, loves me.

Later that night, Michael shows me a poem called ‘Always a season’ that he wrote as we sat together at a table in the day room. He tells me it’s dedicated to me.

all is new

more than once

under the sun

see all

for the first time

or as

for the first time

‘a time for peace

I pray

it’s not too late’

and yes

there is for love

always a season.

During my teens and childhood, my imagination was inspired by archetypal figures. I was captivated by the various faces of the suffering Christ and by the lives of saints such as Francis of Assisi. I collected holy cards of bright winged angels and archangels. In high school, I was entranced by the love poetry of The Song of Songs. Later, I moved on to the vagabond, Bob Dylan, with his uninhibited sexuality, his poetic lyrics and his voice like broken marbles.

Michael fits the same archetype as Dylan – a kind of masculinity that I find exciting, a physicality that is fluid, ambiguous and roguish. He’s a shy exhibitionist, sensitive and outrageous, old-fashioned and avant-garde, earnest and ironic. His manner of listening, his responsiveness to the lives of others, and his ability to be present to whatever is happening makes him many friends on the ward. But he also attracts critics – people either love him or hate him. He’s vocal about his drug use and his lifestyle as a junkie and a hippie, and some people don’t like this openness. It’s a quality that’s somehow both an expression of naivety and a deliberate baiting of prejudices.

Still, Michael speaks everyone’s language on the ward, whether it’s talk of drugs or depression, or patients just feeling hassled and out of it. He takes our despair and desperation, and turns it into poetry. For Michael, we’re all ‘prisoners of the Hotel Grand’, a band of escapees from reality occupying a purgatorial space, belonging nowhere. The day room is the hotel lobby, our visitors emissaries from another world.

One of these emissaries is a family friend of mine, Father Peter Gannon, a young priest with a ruddy face and open smile. Michael likes him and enjoys his sense of humour. They sit together in the day room, laughing and telling jokes, while I lurk around, ungrateful and resentful. I believe that the priest is trying to get me to return to the faith; although, as Michael points out, he doesn’t actually talk to me about religion.

After Father Gannon leaves the ward, Michael tells his jokes to the other patients and me. ‘What do storks do on Sunday? Fly over the convent to scare the hell out of the nuns!’ Our friends scream with laughter.

All of us in M Ward are troubled and self-absorbed, and Michael is no exception, but he has a way of sharing his world that gives the rest of us hope for another sort of existence. He’s diffident and reticent at the same time as being attentive and focused. He carries about him an air of aloof attention, a stooping tallness that’s both angular and graceful as he bends to listen more closely to the person he’s talking to or as he leans forward in a chair to listen to music.

Into a bleak environment, Michael brings soul – the dreaming, imagining part of ourselves, a sense of the essence of things, the inner life.

The sign Nil by Mouth is hanging on the door of my room. It means I’ll be having ECT tomorrow – the first of another series of treatments. I’ll be having it every second day for a week or more. I’m angry. I flick the sign with my hand as I walk past, and it falls to the floor.

‘Nil by Mouth,’ says Michael in a lilting accent as he picks it up. ‘Sounds like a Welsh railway station.’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t think any trains are coming tonight. We’re stuck here.’

He hangs the sign back on its hook, and we settle into my room.

‘No trains scheduled, perhaps,’ he says, ‘but it’s the unscheduled ones that have the most interesting destinations.’ He stretches back into the chair by the window and places his hands behind his head. ‘So, where would you like to go?’

‘Anywhere away from here.’

‘Let’s make it St Petersburg, or Tierra del Fuego – or, for something completely different, how about … Gundagai?’

‘Gundagai?’

I laugh, but my stomach is tight with fear. The night before ECT is always terrifying; each time, it feels like the last night of my life. I dread the fasting, the thirst and the waiting, the machine behind my head, the doctor and a nurse at my side, and the anaesthetic dragging me into unconsciousness.

Julianne seems very near to me as I think of what’s ahead. Her presence hovers so close, I don’t know if I’m clinging to her or she to me. What I do know is that I have to resist falling into her death again.

Michael is reading my book of Japanese poems, and I’m going through the contents of my drawers, obsessively folding and refolding my clothes and putting them in piles on my bed. I imagine the dormitory set up for ECT treatments, and it takes on a strange, nightmarish quality. I think of myself lying with my head at the wrong end of the bed, listening to the machine as it’s wheeled closer. The doctor in his white coat is hovering over me like a ghost, fiddling with the dials, checking his watch. The fear in these imaginings sucks the air out of my lungs.

I’m starting to stir, don’t know where I am. The room comes and goes. Vision is blurred. I’m thick with drugs, body heavy and unresponsive. Brain is stunned and burnt. Can’t work out where I am. Who I am. What’s happening.

I become aware of sounds, a voice close by that seems to be chanting a prayer. As I drift, its rhythm is a focus, something familiar that draws me upwards. I’m trying to open my eyes, then closing them against the sliding geometry of the room. The voice fades, and I fall away. My brain is sore.

Sometime later, the voice starts again. As I focus on the pitch and rhythm, someone takes my hand. I can’t find his name, but I’m aware that he’s someone I love. Someone who gives me a clearer sense of myself. Someone who strokes my hand.

I lie there listening to his voice as it flows over me. His words start to make sense: he’s playing a game. He’s asking me if I’m Helen of Troy, waiting for Paris to return. Or Lilith, goddess of the night. He suggests that maybe I’m Anna Karenina, or possibly Marianne from the fish’n’chip shop. Then he bends down and whispers in my ear, telling me I’m Pauls, his beloved. ‘You’ve had ECT. You’re dopey from the anaesthetic.’

I begin to remember. I’m aware that he’s Michael, and I know who I am. Through the fog, I find my way to him. I am his beloved. I turn over in the bed and fall asleep.

After that, Michael always sits next to my bed while I sleep after shock treatment. It’s impossible not to love someone who sits by you as you sleep. It’s a most delicate, most profound intimacy.

One evening after dinner, my parents arrive in the day room, my mother carrying a small bunch of sweet peas, my father dressed in a suit and tie. It’s been a while, and I’ve been looking forward to them coming – I want to tell them my big news. I bring them to the table where Michael and I have been sitting, and I introduce him to them.

As soon as we sit down, I extend my hand to show them the ring. ‘Michael and I are engaged.’ My mother looks at it, then at Michael and me, confused and alarmed. This is the first time my parents have met him. This is not how things are done.

‘We didn’t want diamonds,’ I say. ‘This is an infinity engagement ring. Michael has one too.’

‘You’re … engaged?’ Mum says, clearly disturbed.

For what seems like a long time, no one says anything.

Then Michael says, ‘Yes. We love each other and we’re going to get married.’

‘There’s no need to rush this,’ Dad says, pulling himself up on his chair.

‘What do you mean? Aren’t you happy for me?’ My voice rises above the hum of conversation in the room. People stop talking and look in our direction.

My father takes my mother’s hand to steady himself. It’s important not to make a scene. ‘Of course we’re happy for you,’ says Mum, though it’s quite obvious that they’re not. Her tone is that of someone placating a child.

‘This is not something we need to talk about right now,’ says Dad. ‘We’ll have lots of time to discuss this when you’re well again.’

‘Michael and I are getting married as soon as we get out of here and find a place to live,’ I say, determined that we settle this now.

‘You aren’t well at the moment,’ Dad says carefully. ‘I think you should wait a while before you make a decision like this. At least six months.’

Silence descends on the table again. I feel the weight of their opposition, and I’m suddenly unable to stand up against them.

Michael turns towards me and takes my hand. ‘Perhaps we could wait three months,’ he says. ‘What do you think, Pauls?’

‘Okay,’ I say, relieved that the tension has been diffused.

The conversation immediately turns to other topics. Before long, Mum and Dad are leaving, the small posy of sweet peas still lying on the table. I want to throw it in the bin. I don’t want sweet peas; I want them to be happy for me. I’m angry with myself for needing their approval, angry that I’m ‘unwell’, frustrated that everything is so complicated. I pick up the posy, take it to the laundry and put it in a vase, feeling trapped.

One day when we’re in the green bell, Michael tells me the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. It’s overcast outside the bell, and shady and warm inside. As he talks, Michael is massaging my forehead and pressing down on the base of my skull. I relax easily into his tales of Camelot. According to the legend, Michael tells me, Queen Guinevere is condemned by King Arthur to burn at the stake for her infidelity, but at the last minute Lancelot sweeps in and saves her from the pyre.

Michael kisses my neck and claims that he is my Lancelot and I am his Guinevere. He plans to save me from M Ward and make a life for us at Jumping Creek. We’re hopeless romantics, children playing dress-ups, but I enjoy the illusion. I’m happy to borrow some of Guinevere’s glamour, and I’m charmed by the idea of Michael as a twentieth-century knight, riding courageously through the taboo regions of our culture, writing poems about his journeys and then sweeping me off to a rural retreat. I’m his beloved, captivated by the dream of love.

Later, alone in my room, I begin to imagine what marriage with Michael will be like in a practical sense.

Being a romantic doesn’t seem compatible with my feminism. As I see it, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre are the ideal couple – but they never married. When Julianne and I read de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she became my hero. She wanted to be a writer and a philosopher, and she refused to marry Sartre even though he proposed several times. She believed marriage would prevent them from having the equal relationship that she wanted, and I agreed with her.

But now I’m beginning to think that a different kind of relationship is possible.

I’ve just turned twenty-three, and I want to be a feminist and a romantic. I decide that Germaine Greer is wrong in her critique of romantic love: that it’s an egoistic, lustful, masochistic, sentimental fantasy. I prefer to go with Shulamith Firestone’s view that love is only destructive in the context of inequality. I can’t imagine Michael wanting to be in a position of power over anyone.

For Michael, it’s important that the life we live is true and real. When I talk about de Beauvoir’s objections to marriage, he says, ‘There’ll be no hubby and wifey stuff with us. We’ll be real – really you, really me. No acting out roles, laying down rules.’ I agree, and I’m pinning all my hopes on us blazing a trail into unpredictable territory.

I don’t see, around me, any examples of the sort of marriage I want. My parents have a strong bond and it’s obvious they love each other, but they don’t seem to have an equal partnership. Their marriage works because of strict gender roles: my mother’s domain is the home; my father’s is the outside world. I don’t want to be confined to domesticity, and I want the right to have opinions on politics and world events.

I wonder what a true partnership would be like. I’ve never seen one, but I’m determined that there will be no strict gender roles and obligations in my marriage to Michael. Ours will be a journey into a new and creative way of being together.

We pass the days in our usual hangouts – my room, the day room, the hospital cafeteria and the green bell – sharing memories and fantasies, delusions and self-deceptions, and finding happiness in our strange fit with each other. But it’s a broken wholeness: love in a time of madness, a blind and wild joy rampaging through bodies mired in grief. For long moments, the mind is quiet, just a witness, startled and wondering.

Other times, it ruminates and probes, and Michael is often the focus of these ponderings. He perplexes me. He’s the kind of puzzle you can’t solve, because it doesn’t conform to any familiar principles. He’s a shapeshifter, a chameleon. While he resembles the representations of Christ that filled my imagination throughout my childhood, and fits my idea of the vagabond, he could also be a revolutionary from Trotsky’s day. He’s an adventurous, chivalrous knight, but he’s also a social critic, very much of these times.

His energy and motivations are deeply rooted in his inner world. He has a mercurial style and a way with language, creating imaginary worlds or recalling them from legends, spinning stories on short walks to the hospital cafeteria or while waiting for doctor’s appointments. He’s volatile, one minute animated and enthusiastic, the next moody and introverted. I find these transformations exciting, mystifying.

Love has drawn my entire life’s dreaming together in one sleight of hand and transferred it to Michael. He’s highly creative, compassionate, funny, attentive. Being with him is a dynamic play of feeling, music, imagining and storytelling. My ego is shattered. I find it hard to make decisions, to think rationally. For me, our shared self fills this vacuum. As Michael’s beloved, I have an identity to inhabit, one that takes me right out of my small and limited existence, placing me in the myth of romantic love.

Michael tells me that he’s having a hard time getting his current book, Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, published. He says that people just can’t cope with his work.

Then he tells me that he’s bisexual, and that some of the poems in Memoirs are about his sexual relationships with men. Although I’m surprised at first, it makes sense. Michael has a fluid sensuality and an androgynous personality, a blend of the masculine and feminine that complements his fine, angular body. I’ve never known a man like him before, and I haven’t known anyone who’s openly homosexual or bisexual.

Growing up in the Church, I formed the idea that sex between unmarried people was sinful, a lustful act, while ‘conjugal love’ between a married couple was holy and pure. But since losing my faith, I’ve rejected these ideas. For me, sex between consenting adults involves a natural pleasure that people should be free to engage in as they wish, whether they’re homosexual, heterosexual or bisexual. The only hitch for me is that I can’t bear to share a sexual partner with someone else.

Michael makes bisexuality seem an obvious way of being. He speaks of how easy it is to love both men and women, and says it would feel unnatural to be limited to having sex with only one gender. He feels that he’s a third sex, both male and female, or either, depending on who he’s with or what’s happening.

I envy his ability to talk so unselfconsciously. I can engage in sex with pleasure and without inhibition, but I can’t talk about it. There’s some deep disconnect in me between language and the life of the body. My mind refuses any speech relating to body parts, functions, pleasures; it’s all forbidden, off limits, except as an abstraction. I feel as though that part of my brain is actually missing.

The more Michael talks about his sexuality, the more I realise how little I understand of his life. I’ve read about homosexual literary figures like Oscar Wilde, and I know that sexual acts between men are still illegal in most of Australia, but I don’t know what the personal costs might be for someone like Michael speaking and writing so openly. What I do know is that his sexuality means ostracism, bigotry, danger. I’ve read of ‘poofter bashings’, and of a man being pushed into the Torrens River and drowned for being homosexual. It was claimed that police were responsible.

I know Michael in my soul while at the same time I don’t know him at all. I like this sense that he exists beyond my understanding and somehow beyond this life, in the world of his poetry where there are no limitations and no rules.

Alone and sleepless in my bed, I realise that while Michael is still something of a mystery to me, I don’t really know who I am either. I’m questioning everything, and I can’t find a place anywhere. Michael, at least, identifies with a range of subcultures: hippies, junkies, the poetry scene. He looks and acts as if he’s on the side of the revolution; he describes himself as a ‘freak’ and derides ‘straight’ society. But while people might assume I’m a hippie because I have long hair and wear jeans, and sometimes long dresses, I don’t think of myself as one. I don’t think of myself as part of any group – even though, like Michael, I’m alienated by our materialistic society.

We’re both outsiders committed to finding new ways of living and being, and there are no clear-cut lines for us. We’re emotionally tied to some conservative values and opposed to others. Michael is a bit of a wheeler and dealer, at least as he describes it; he has bought and sold properties despite being a strong critic of capitalism. He wants to be a revolutionary poet but also supported by the established poetry scene. And he’d like us to get married. He says that he wants nothing to do with ‘straight’ society, but he craves acceptance and acknowledgement.

I’m caught in my own confusion of affiliations and values. One minute I’m an atheist, the next an agnostic, the next praying desperately to God for help. On some days I’m a feminist strictly opposed to patriarchal values, while on others I find myself dreaming of a wedding dress and a bouquet. I’m intellectually attempting to work it all out while emotionally unable to connect with a sense of self.

Our contradictions are woven through the stories we tell each other of our lives. M Ward is a place of storytelling as much as it’s a space of gloom, extreme moods and empty routines, and our tales are healing. They weave our lives together in the face of a madness that threatens to tear everything apart.

One evening when the day room is full of patients and visitors, Michael tells me that he’s made a deal with Sally, a nurse who often does night shift. If we’re careful and are back before ten, we can slip outside for a while. Sally has henna-red hair and a bright, bantering energy that lightens the mood on the ward. She gets on better with the patients than with the other staff, and she’s turned a blind eye to night absences before. Grateful for the reprieve from the crowded day room, Michael and I take off to the lake shore.

It’s dark inside the green bell, and the night air is cold. We wrap ourselves in Michael’s coat for warmth and lean against the tree trunk. I hear water rats rummaging among the reeds, and through the willow branches I see the flickering lights of the city across the water.

The night is still and silent, and our voices are soft so as not to break the spell of our closeness, our warmth. Here in the green bell, intimacy is as easy as breathing.

Michael talks about our wedding and our life at Jumping Creek, describing the music filling the house, the cottage garden we’ll create, and the friends dropping in to visit. We tease each other about our plans and laugh at the audacity of our hopes for a ‘normal’ life.

I roll us cigarettes and, not wanting to pollute the earth, Michael collects our butts and saves them in my empty Drum tobacco pouch. With Michael’s arm around me, happiness and tenderness rise within me like waves from a deep ocean. I feel an ecstatic sense that the world is alive, that I’m alive.

I turn towards Michael as his face appears in the flash of a lit match, its planes and hollows exaggerated by the upward tilt of the flame. He seems suddenly a stranger, haunted and old. As he inhales on his cigarette, his eyes gleam with an otherworldly fire, some fierce and ageless wizardry.

I glimpse the vast and unknowable nature of his being, a spark of the eternal in him, and feel the shock of his otherness, his other-worldliness. I’m spooked, jolted out of our shared mood.

Michael senses my withdrawal and makes a joke, and, as we laugh, I see him again as his familiar self. But I know I have seen something in Michael, something distant and ancient, and it’s eerie and unsettling, and thrilling.

Soon I’m aware only of Michael’s presence, the soft air around us, and the damp, loamy smell inside the green bell. As I place my warm hand on his cool cheek, he presses his face into my palm and smiles. I know I’ll never forget the way he looks at me, never be this happy again.

Sorcerer, note how the stars attend our banquet

And all the trees dance to our song

We drink yet our cup is overflowing

Ah truly, what have you done?

See in the water the long willow drifting

Time is an anchor and love’s set us free

The lake is the sky and creation’s exploding

In your eyes; come, dance with me.

We’re sailing off in a ship of fools

Let heaven take care of the way

From here there is no place we’ve need of to go

Blind lovers, we’ve looked on the sun.