The Green Bell

The Labyrinth

The week after his overdose, Michael walks out of a meeting with his psychiatrist and tells me he’ll be leaving M Ward today.

I’m shocked. I always thought we’d leave together. I suspect he has to go because of his overdose, but he doesn’t offer this as an explanation. He’s distracted and depressed, and it’s obvious that he doesn’t want to talk about what’s behind this decision.

He says he’ll go back to Caloola Farm, about twenty-five miles away near the village of Tharwa. He was staying there before he came to M Ward, and he tells me that the vibe is friendly and the people are cool. The Anglican priest who runs Caloola is an old friend of Michael’s who set the place up as a sanctuary for refugees from the city: junkies trying to kick a habit and people who just need to get their heads clear. Michael will help with the farm work and live in one of the huts dotted around the property.

As one, Michael and I walk out the door and take the path to the green bell. We sit with our arms around each other, and I wonder if this is the last time we’ll be here together. I feel the gravity of Michael’s life, the burden of who he is to himself. He says he can’t cope with life, that there’s no place for him. I hear a bitterness in his voice, and I wonder how he’ll manage outside the ward and how I’ll manage without him here.

We’ve known each other for just over a month, thirty-two days; we’ve spent thirty of those days together and talked into the nights. The thought of him going grips my heart.

Back in the day room, everything is the same. The fluorescent lights give the space an ashen sheen, the painting of Ned Kelly still hangs on the wall, and patients sit around waiting for something, anything. It’s all familiar except Michael’s face, which is sculptural and sunken as if I’m already seeing it from a distance. Rough brushstrokes suggest a moustache and beard, and dabs of blue catch the light of his eyes.

‘You’re preoccupied,’ he says, sizing me up.

‘I don’t like farewells.’

In the hospital foyer, Michael makes some phone calls. It’s all arranged. He’s leaving straight after lunch, catching the bus to Tharwa.

Sitting at our favourite corner table in the cafeteria, we talk about visits he’ll make, letters we’ll write, and how we’ll soon be living in a place of our own. I am holding myself together, just.

The mood has shifted, as it so often does with Michael. He’s now enthusiastic about going back to Caloola to work the land and tend sheep. He talks about becoming strong and fit, and he asks me to call him ‘Jack’.

I like the name. It reminds me of my father’s generation: down-to-earth, capable, sensitive men who don’t take themselves too seriously and have an irreverent sense of humour. With this new name, Michael plans to reinvent himself as a grazier poet, a man of the land. He says he’s tired of the old Michael, sick to death of all his worries and problems. I look at him and see a desperation in his desire to walk away from himself. I tell him that I don’t want someone completely different – I want to keep some of the old Michael. We decide that I’ll call him ‘Michael Jack’.

After lunch, he appears in the day room looking like a hippie farmer. He’s wearing his favourite outfit of beanie, jeans and air force boots, and his hessian bag is slung over his shoulder. We walk to the foyer, and after kisses and goodbyes, I’m standing outside the hospital under a blue sky, watching him walk along the footpath away from me. He takes a few paces, then turns and walks backwards, waving. As he passes a fence, he does a little jig in his heavy boots, nearly tripping over a low pole.

He calls out as he recovers his balance, ‘I’m gonna get strong, get some muscle. You wait and see.’

‘I’ll write.’

‘I’m counting on it.’

He strides off towards the bus stop.

For some moments I can’t think what I should be doing. I can’t face the people on the ward, so I make my way to the cafeteria. I float along the corridor in a daze, feeling invisible as people bump into me on their way past. In the cafeteria, I buy a coffee but ‘our’ table is occupied, so I find another one, feeling displaced. When I raise the cup to my lips, my hands are trembling. I think of Michael’s hands, shaking as he held his cigarette, shaking when he gripped an album cover. When you hold on too tightly for too long, something gives and the trembling starts.

I imagine sitting next to him on the bus, taking off through the countryside together into our future, but at this moment there’s only my shaking cup and the spilled coffee on the saucer. I begin to have difficulty breathing. The emotion I’ve been holding down since Michael told me he was leaving bursts through. I’m a moth in fright, fluttering my wings but unable to fly. Michael is gone. I must get back to my room.

I tumble along the corridor and plunge into M Ward, past staring eyes and into my room. A mute scream clutches my throat. I open drawers, throw clothes onto the bed, bend to pick up records from the floor. The room is impersonal; it doesn’t want me here anymore. It’s time. I must leave.

The panic recedes with this conviction, but before I can organise my belongings, two nurses appear, standing like prison guards at the door. The bunch of keys on the belt of the short one looks like a closed fist. ‘Paula, what’s this? You’re not going anywhere,’ she says, coming into the room.

This is the first time my freedom to leave the hospital has been questioned. ‘I’m leaving,’ I say. The effort of asserting my will takes so much energy. I turn back to the bed and begin to fold my clothes.

‘You’re not scheduled for release, you know that.’

I take a deep breath. ‘This is an unlocked ward, and I’m a voluntary patient. I can leave whenever I want.’ My body sags like a rag doll. The noise in my head is scornful of my weak voice.

The nurse with the keys gives a meaningful look at her colleague and leaves the room. I turn back to the task at hand. When I find my sarong, I bundle all my clothes into it. Now my possessions are ready to go.

Go where?

A man steps past the nurse into my room. He introduces himself as the doctor on duty and says, ‘Okay, you need to think this through.’ I face him. Although he isn’t a large man, he seems to take up all the space and oxygen in the small room. ‘You can be held in the hospital if we consider you’re a threat to yourself or others.’ He sounds formal and tired, and his eyes roam my face for signs of comprehension, as if he’s already explained this a number of times. But this is the first time I’ve heard it.

‘I’m not a threat to myself – or others.’ Breath catches in my chest. Each word is an effort.

‘Look, you could be considered a threat to yourself. You’re scheduled to see Doctor Hawke tomorrow morning. You can discuss plans for leaving the ward then.’

He turns to go, and I stand in the empty room, staring at the bundle of clothes and the records and books. Somewhere deep inside me, beneath the pressure of my chemical straitjacket, I want to scream and not stop screaming. Break windows, kick doors.

What am I still doing here in M Ward? When I was brought here, I was totally unable to make decisions. All I knew was that I wanted the madness to stop, but I had no idea how to make that happen. The medical staff seemed to know what to do. I signed forms, had ECT and mostly took the medication. M Ward offered me a place to be when I was in crisis. There was no alternative method of treatment.

Now that the crisis is over, I don’t think that the ECT is helping, and I’m not sure about the medication either. My brain feels singed, I’m heavily sedated, and I’m confused by memory loss. I can’t remember the subjects I’ve been studying or the names of my friends. I forget news my mother brings me about the family and, when she asks, I can’t account for the way I spend my time. I still don’t have the will and confidence that enables people to appear as themselves and speak of normal things. I’m disconnected from what’s known as reality – even from my parents who come regularly to see me, and my brother, Phil, who rides his bike all the way from school to visit.

But Michael has entered my inner world, become part of its system of meaning. He alone understands what’s real to me; he acknowledges my reality. He’s the bridge between my madness and the world outside. I can speak truly to him.

After talking with him about Julianne and accepting the fact of her death, I’ve discovered a hard knot of anger at the core of my grief. Although the coroner found that she died from ‘poisoning by an overdose of a combination of sedative drugs’, no explanation was given. The drugs had been prescribed by her psychiatrists, but no one took responsibility; no one was found negligent. Julianne had said to her mother, ‘They’re killing me with these drugs, please take me home,’ but Mrs Gilroy felt she had to accept the authority of the psychiatrists. Questioning their power seemed, and still seems, impossible. Complaints get no response. No one cares when people die in psychiatric hospitals; there’s no concern within society to ensure that thorough enquiries are held into deaths associated with madness, as if these deaths don’t matter.

Julianne was diagnosed on the basis of a ten-minute interview. ‘Paranoid schizophrenia,’ the doctor said. With that judgment, she was claimed by psychiatry. Her passionate spirit was reframed in terms of symptoms that had to be eradicated. Her experiences were recast as signs of illness, and no psychiatrist asked her to tell her story or listened to her opinions about treatment. Her family heard her and loved her; her friends knew who she was. But in the narrow corridors of psychiatry, she was known only by the label she had been assigned. In the end, they took her life from her, they took her from her family, and they haven’t been held accountable for what they did.

I want to leave M Ward. I don’t want to take any more medication. But I’m afraid of becoming mad again.

Since Michael’s departure, I feel as if I’m in a labyrinth, going around in circles, losing my way as I try to avoid the minotaur at its centre. When I panic, the walls become narrow, the paths baffling and intricate, and I imagine that I’ll never find my way out, that I’ll spend the rest of my days circling around in the darkness.

If I reach the exit, what then? My parents have offered me my old room, but all my instincts tell me that this is a bad idea. My state of mind is likely to disrupt the whole family – but it isn’t only that. My parents are stoic, serious. Family is everything to them, and while they insist I’ll always have a home under their roof, I know they’re anxious about the impact of my lifestyle on my younger siblings. I haven’t gone to Mass since my first year at university, and I’m vocal about my views on religion and politics. In their eyes, I’ve rejected everything they brought me up to believe. It’s also clear that they still disapprove of my plan to marry Michael.

They’re in an impossible situation: they worry about me, but I can’t be the daughter they want; I love them, but I need to find my own place in the world. I’m twenty-three, Michael is twenty-four. It’s time to move on and create a life of my own with him at Jumping Creek. The three months until our wedding seem an eternity.

I still want to avoid conflict with my parents, though. I want to hold on to the bond between us.

In the afternoon sunlight I lie on my bed, my mind spinning with memories I haven’t thought of for a long time.

Like the time my father and I stayed at Tathra on the south coast of New South Wales. I was nineteen, and I’d recently been released from hospital after my first breakdown. Dad arranged for the two of us to stay at a friend’s beach house. This was very unusual: I’d rarely spent time alone with him, as we normally did things together as a family. I felt tentative and awkward as the familiarity of our usual roles gave way to the bare reality of two people sharing a small space for a week.

The holiday house was like the ones we’d stayed in during the summers of my childhood, basic but comfortable. There was lino on the floor and old couches around the walls, a green laminex kitchen table and a radio on the shelf above the bread bin. Our talk was mostly of ordinary things: how the fishing had gone, the weather and the daily routines. Each evening we listened to the news on the radio as Dad prepared the fish we’d caught and I cut up vegetables. After dinner we played card games, mostly rummy and poker. Dad tried to teach me his favourite, five hundred, but I couldn’t grasp the rules.

I was heavily medicated on the antipsychotic drugs Largactil and Mellaril. I couldn’t read because of their effect on my eyes. My mind was often blank; at other times, it pursued problems that I couldn’t possibly solve, like the origin of the universe or the end of human suffering. I became anxious and talkative. Dad negotiated these episodes with a gentle tolerance, not saying much but being attentive. His acceptance of anything I said, however delusional, was like an embrace from a benign beyond. The stranglehold on my mind was loosened, leaving it free for a while from the need to obsess and argue.

For Dad, whatever the season, if you were down the coast you went fishing. During our week at Tathra, we fell into a morning routine of negotiating the rocks until we found a spot where his fisherman’s instinct told him we’d catch something. We spent hours attuned to our lines as waves crashed onto the rock shelf and gulls eyed the bait.

On one of those blue-and-white days when sunlight sparkles on the water and wind whips the waves into peaks, Dad was standing close to the edge of the rocks, his line between his fingers. I stood off to his side trying to bait my hook. My hands trembled from the medication and the prospect of putting sharp metal into the flesh of a dead fish. I began to cry as I held the hook in one hand, the bait in the other.

Without comment, Dad gently took the hook from me, baited my line and, with a smooth and arching movement, threw it far out into the water. I stood there next to him on the rocks, feeling the pull and ease of the ocean through the line in my fingers, the wind and the sea spray on my face, and the closeness of Dad beside me. I had the thought that somehow, one day, things would work out.

I think of him now, standing on the rocks along the shoreline, his fingers tending to the line while his mind travels to regions known only to himself.

In my other favourite image of Dad, he’s dancing the soft-shoe shuffle in the lounge room singing ‘Underneath the Arches’, the iconic song of the Great Depression. It tells of homeless men sleeping beneath a railway bridge, dreaming of the future and remaining optimistic as they make the best of homelessness. The song captures Dad’s attitude to life: he relishes being alive. No matter what project he’s working on, there are a thousand others he can’t wait to get stuck into. And no matter where he travels, there are a hundred other places he’d like to go. Boredom is alien to him.

I remember him sitting down to dinner with us all and saying, with a wry smile, ‘I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.’

But there’s a darker side to Dad, one I don’t think of that often. Late at night he sometimes sits in his green chair in the corner of the lounge room, a whiskey in his hand, melancholy and inaccessible.

When Dad was quite young, his father was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, the trauma of the war having caught up with him. Dad keeps his feelings about his father’s madness and absence from the family to himself. What I know of this time comes from Mum’s stories about how Dad shouldered much of the responsibility for the family after his father’s breakdown. It was the Depression, and Dad was the second eldest of five children. As a young boy, he grew and sold vegetables to help with the family finances, and he spent cold winter afternoons walking along train tracks, picking up the coal that railway workers threw off the trains for people to collect.

In 1941, when he was nineteen, Dad enlisted in the army and spent over four years at war, mostly fighting Japanese forces in New Guinea. While on a week’s leave, he and Mum were married in the church near the kindergarten where they’d first met. By the end of the war, he had a ten-month-old daughter, Irene, whom he’d never met.

Mum has told me the story of how she waited for him on the day he was due home, sitting on the veranda with their baby and his mother. The house was on a corner, so she had a good view down the street to the bus stop. She watched as people got off the bus, walked for a while then disappeared into houses along the way. Buses came and went. She saw someone in uniform but looked beyond him to the others because he seemed like an old man. He had a limp, and he was thin and hunched over, carrying a large kit bag on his shoulders. It was only when he turned to walk in the gate that she recognised him.

Dad has buried his experiences of his childhood and the war in parts of his soul unreachable, perhaps, even to himself. Beyond the roles of the public servant passionate about his work and the responsible family man, he isn’t easy to know well. For all his energy and enthusiasm, he’s a man who doesn’t open up readily about his personal life, although occasionally he lays down the law in the family, brings us into line.

Two years ago, after I’d been living away from home for about a year, I moved into a share house. One night, Dad turned up in a rage. I’d never seen him like that before; I don’t think I’d even seen him angry. He’d heard that I was living with three men, so he’d come to take me away. My brother John had come with him, afraid that Dad would have a heart attack – he has a heart condition. Dad insisted that I pack my things and stay at John’s place. My housemates were taken aback, and I was mortified, but I obeyed for the sake of Dad’s health. As far as he was concerned, I was living in sin with not just one but three men, and he had to save me from humiliation.

I was, in fact, having a relationship with one of my housemates. I’d met him at university. We only ever spoke of Julianne briefly; my unacknowledged grief was a black hole at the centre of our relationship, and after eighteen months we drifted apart.

My parents’ world is so different from mine that the idea of telling them about this relationship had never entered my mind. They see my sexuality as sinful; they’re ashamed of me. I don’t know how I could live with them again. My father, in particular, is here in the labyrinth, fierce and protective, but an obstacle to me finding my way out.

Identity is, above all else, a pattern that enables you to have coherent responses to other people and the world around you. Without this pattern, I have to think myself together at every moment. I never know what facial expressions, what actions, what speech will be sane and right. What to do, what to say, how to be? My family, the friends who visit, the nurses – they look at me, waiting for a response. A distant part of my mind issues orders: smile, say yes, take the medication, nod.

I’m holding on to my love for Michael as the thread that will help me find my way out of M Ward. But anxiety has made me watchful and cautious. I worry that I could lose him at any time. Day to day, with the arrival of his letters, I monitor the changes in his state of mind.

Michael’s overdose jolted me out of the illusion of our union into the realisation that we’re separate people. And now that I’m on my own in the ward, I have to take on the burden of my distinct self with all its inadequacies. I’m forced to move from ‘we’ and ‘us’ to ‘him’ and ‘me’, but I can’t remember who I was before I met him.

Memories of him keep me going. The day before he left for Caloola, we were granted leave passes to visit my room at Ursula College to organise my things. I needed to vacate the room, so my parents had offered to take my belongings home once they were packed up. Michael and I joked and fooled around as we swept books off the shelves and emptied the cupboards. The late afternoon light was radiant through the yellow curtains, and the untidy collection of my possessions overflowed from bags on the floor. When we’d finished, Michael and I lay together on the narrow bed. He played with my hair as we talked, twisting it around his fingers and stroking it back from my face.

I want to follow him out of M Ward. But as I weave along the dark paths of the labyrinth, I’m discovering that the minotaur has many faces, many forms. He’s the psychiatrist, he’s my father, he’s ECT and medications, he’s my own inability to stand up for myself, he’s the absence of a place to move into. Spooked by one shadow after another, I hold on to the thread of my love, trying to solve the problem of how to live.

On the day of a scheduled meeting with Doctor Hawke and my parents, Michael rides his motorbike to the hospital from Caloola. I wait at the front doors for him, pacing the foyer. He arrives looking tired, although he hasn’t ridden a long way. We don’t know what this meeting is about, and it feels as if we’re being summoned to account for ourselves.

We walk up to my parents, who are sitting outside the doctor’s office. When Michael leans down to greet my mother, she smiles but says nothing – I suspect she’s as reluctant to be at this meeting as we are. My father gets to his feet and shakes Michael’s hand, and they stand together, making conversation. Dad is dressed for work in a suit and tie; his short silver hair is oiled down, and his face clean-shaven. Michael, towering over Dad, is wearing his yellow-and-purple beanie, a colourful Nepalese waistcoat and dusty jeans. He carries his bike helmet under his arm, and a small canvas bag is slung over his shoulder. I’m glad to see them talking across their cultural divide.

Once we’re all in his office, Doctor Hawke seats himself behind his desk, looking like a judge opening proceedings. Michael, Mum, Dad and I sit down in a row opposite him. I can’t see Michael from my chair, and I feel cut off from him and weighed down by the presence of my parents and Doctor Hawke. I can’t breathe. I lean forward, unable to sit up straight under the burden of their authority. I feel like a prisoner in the dock, waiting to hear my sentence proclaimed.

Doctor Hawke clears his throat. ‘Paula is schizophrenic,’ he declares to no one in particular. He goes on to detail my medical condition and treatment as though we aren’t already all too aware of it. I begin to feel that his words are a form of treachery committing me to a life in which I’m nothing more than a victim of the chemicals in my brain, a creature with no possibility of self-determination.

‘Paula isn’t well enough to commit to marriage at this point in time,’ my father says. ‘We want her to live at home, at least while she’s … unwell.’ He sounds concerned and reasonable, but I feel invisible. It seems there’s no hope for me. I shouldn’t expect to make choices for myself.

The words gathering around me dissolve. I lose the sense of the conversation, and I can’t speak. Here in this room with the psychiatrist, my parents and my fiancé, I can’t find the language to say what I want to say. I’m doubled over with the effort of trying to drag words from the place in my chest where they’re lodged. I can’t bear my passivity, my meekness, my failure to speak for myself. It isn’t just that words don’t come to mind. It’s that they don’t have the meanings I want them to have.

I’m dispossessed of the power of the word. ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ All that power and weight and light are too much for me. If a word is God, how dare I speak? The words I want to say aren’t of God; they’re of some other power. A dark, chthonic, mad testimony to a new kind of life, to blood and flesh and desire. Sacred profanities. I want to speak words that will unsay the power in this room. I want to say ‘night’, and let it take me away. Say ‘love’ without breaking. Say the words traced in rivers. I want to say words that will bring me into the world. I want to break the spell.

I become aware that the focus has switched to Michael. I hear Dad saying, ‘I’d like to know how you think you’re going to support my daughter.’ His voice is severe and insistent, and he turns in his chair to look at Michael.

‘I have income from my writing,’ Michael says simply. He uncrosses his legs and places both hands flat on his jeans as if to emphasise there’s nothing more to be said.

‘We aren’t saying you can’t get married,’ Mum tells him, dry and tense. ‘We just want you to wait until Paula is well enough.’

I no longer feel that Michael and I are the subject of this conversation. The two people being discussed are clearly incapable of thinking for themselves, making decisions or knowing what they want.

‘You will need to consider the practical details involved …’ Doctor Hawke outlines the medication regime I must follow once I leave the hospital.

After what feels like an eternity of half-heard conversation, Michael’s voice breaks through to me. ‘We’ll wait three months before we get married,’ he says. ‘That’s what we agreed to, and we’ll stick to that.’

I take a deep breath and begin reconnecting to myself.

Not long after Michael’s statement, the meeting concludes with Doctor Hawke announcing that I need to stay in hospital for a while yet. In a way, I’m relieved. I don’t have the confidence to go out into the world; something is still not right with me.

Michael said he’d come to the meeting if it wasn’t going to be heavy. It was heavy. We walk to the foyer with my parents, ignoring the meeting in our forced conversation. The only thing I can think of is that we’re now definitely committed to waiting three months until we’re married.

In the meantime, I must find the words I need to speak the fragments of my life together. ‘Words made flesh’, words grounded in my body, my heart, not this Tower of Babel in my mind. Madness doesn’t have true language: it has bitterness and fear and confusion. It kills living words, cuts them off at their roots. I am mute in its presence, but somehow I must learn to talk back to the madness. When I can do that, I’ll be able to say what I need to say to psychiatrists, to my parents and to a society I don’t feel part of. Speak true words. Speak of the secret, forbidden things: grief, loss, anger, madness.

While Michael’s at Caloola, we write letters to each other almost every day. In the first week, his words reflect a happy and positive frame of mind, and he sends love my way.

I love you so intensely that i wish i were still in hospital there to love you and watch over you. My shepherding instincts are for, towards, you. You are my love. It (love) grows stronger every hour, every moment. The past and present and future are ours, ours to share and plan for.

The idea of getting married gives us hope and a sense of direction. Michael’s now thinking of an official church wedding. He writes, ‘How would you feel about St John’s here in Canberra? My great-uncle Reg Dransfield was rector there and is buried there … it’s High C of E which is exactly halfway between Catholic and Presbyterian.’

My family will be disappointed that the ceremony isn’t Catholic, but there’s no way I can stand in front of the altar in a Catholic church and make vows. The Church of England seems a good compromise, and I know Saint John’s, a beautiful old stone building with stained-glass windows. I also like Michael’s idea that in view of the church wedding, our ceremony at Jumping Creek will become a private, unofficial event: ‘We’ll have a magic Scarborough Fair ceremony, just you & i & the land & the Lord.’

We’re already talking of our lives as a married couple. ‘If I had a bad accident,’ Michael writes, ‘you would get a good widow’s pension. Home savings accounts too we’ll have.’ We’re searching for ‘somewhere kind’, for an escape, somewhere to go when our ‘soul is worn out’. A place where life can truly be lived as a poem.

Although Michael has embraced the status of non-conformist, in some moods he no longer wants to be an outsider. I can see his ambivalence about this position. He stands at the gates to the city and feels exiled. He still wishes to be a dissident – but accepted as such. Even more, celebrated. Not cast out.

What would society be without its rebels, its poets and artists? I think of the poem in which Michael wrote, ‘love / let live / all who are different or strange’. Those who are misfits, those who question and criticise, those who are simply different – they’re the aberrant genotypes of our species.

A park ranger once told me that ten per cent of monarch butterflies take a different migratory path to the main group. He said that if the other ninety per cent were wiped out by an environmental catastrophe, the ten per cent that took the alternative route – the aberrant genotype – would help guarantee the survival of the species. I want to believe that people like Michael and I are aberrant genotypes, and as with the butterflies, our unconventional experiences and paths have some meaning and value. Although it’s hard to hold on to this idea in the face of feeling useless and hopeless, in theory I believe that people who are different ensure the vitality of our species.

Michael’s sense of not being accepted undermines his confidence in himself and has become a source of pain. But a light shines on the horizon. He seems to think that our marriage will mean a degree of acceptance while allowing love and poetry to remain the focus of his life.

We’re clinging to something tied to stability, something enduring, something that represents wholeness, at a time when we’re fragile, broken and adrift. In M Ward, though, we faced none of the challenges of the real world. When Michael was here, all we had to do was be together. Our love is a hothouse plant, unfamiliar with harsher climes. We’ll need to find, in ourselves, practical skills and inner strength; we’ll need to connect enough with external reality to get ourselves a place to live and an income.

Michael writes to me about finding a job, and about his ideas for his new prose book and other writing projects. He has been awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant of $2500 and wants to use the money to pay off his mortgage on Jumping Creek. We’ll fix the cottage up and live there on money from his writing and my casual work. I’ll take a year off from uni – at the moment I’m not sure if I could manage study, but I’m determined to finish my degree once Michael and I have established our life together.

After less than two weeks at Caloola, though, Michael’s letters begin to describe experiences of illness and weariness. He writes of ‘freaking out’ as he endures the long nights in his small hut, and he describes ‘strange, bad days’.

o dearest sweet Paul

I’ve had a very strange bad day, and night now. Must be my stars out of line. Was violently ill this morning, rested til lunch, washed up all our dishes & spent afternoon and evening with Richard up at the shearing shed … Haven’t a clue what’s wrong with me. Perhaps it’s pneumonia & kidney disease. Anyway I feel terribly sick …

I’d thought that overall Michael’s health was gradually improving, but it seems he’s still physically very weak and mentally fragile. He wants to feel the sense of accomplishment that comes with contributing to farm work, but his efforts are taking a toll.

Got the shits real bad, claustrophobia in this tiny hut. Went back down to the homestead & talked farming & psychiatry talk & was given loving help & coffee & a pinch of port to drink. Took a Nardil and all my proper pills. It’s like the B.I. shits but have had no speed for a week.

A tone of desperation seeps through Michael’s descriptions of his days, and it’s becoming obvious that he won’t stay long at the farm. We’re both standing at the end of a wharf ready to depart, but there’s no ship in sight and no place to go.

Michael’s mother comes to Canberra to see him and have a meeting with his psychiatrist. And she wants to meet me. Michael writes, ‘You will meet her, she you, you will love each other. Talked to her for 9 minutes today trunk call. Cost me $2.50 but worth every penny.’ This meeting is important to him, and I feel that I need to be sane and composed.

We go out to dinner at the Travelodge Motel. Michael is full of our plans, wanting his mother’s approval for the wedding and our move to Jumping Creek. Mrs Dransfield is gracious and interested. She listens carefully to Michael’s animated description of the wedding at Saint John’s. She is, I think, pleased by the family connection to the church.

Michael is sitting up straight and eagerly outlining the future he’s planning with his prospective wife. I’m seeing a new side of him: a coming together of the brilliant young poet, the good son and the conscientious husband-to-be. He’s charming and funny as we eat our dinner, and I’m impressed by his vision of our future.

I’m also sitting up straight, putting forward my most rational self. When Mrs Dransfield asks me about my life, I speak of our hopes of living together, along with our plans to travel to Vienna and Greece, possibly India. Michael is her only son, and I’m aware that I’m not exactly the person she would be hoping for as a daughter-in-law. I feel as though I’m tripping up with every sentence I utter.

At one point in the dinner, I see the three of us as if we’re actors in a play and I’m watching from the wings. I see in the angle of Mrs Dransfield’s head that she isn’t taken in by our performances. I think she sees us as romantics, not lacking in dreams but not adequate to the task of making them real.

Afterwards, Michael rides back to the hospital with me in a taxi. He reckons the night has been a great success. I’m not so sure. I used to have a best self that I could produce for such occasions, but now the most I can do is scrape together fragments of a self and hope that it will get me through.

My parents agree to Michael and me staying at their house for the weekend. I’m amazed by this shift in their attitude – maybe they’re starting to accept us. I apply for a leave pass, and Michael rides in from Caloola. When he arrives, my mother shows him to the front room upstairs, and he throws his shoulder bag and coat over the chair at the desk. I look at the narrow bed that he’ll be occupying, and I imagine the impossible: him slipping downstairs and spending the night with me.

After a brief meeting with my brothers on their way out to a party, my parents, Michael and I sit down to eat in the dining room. Dad engages Michael in a discussion about the varieties of fish he’s caught off the rocks down the south coast, and Michael talks about the decline of the whaling industry in Bega. The Michael I saw at dinner with his mother reappears; he’s on his best behaviour, and his manners are impeccable. He charms Mum – much to her surprise, I think.

During dessert, the conversation turns to poetry. ‘So, Michael, what inspires you to write a poem?’ Mum asks formally.

‘It’s hard to say,’ he says, wiping his lips with a serviette. ‘Anything could inspire me, but it’s always something of a surprise.’

‘Have you ever written a poem about a gum tree?’ she asks.

‘No, actually, I haven’t.’ Michael’s tone suggests that he’d definitely consider it.

‘Well,’ Mum says, putting down her knife and fork and leaning forward, ‘if I were a poet, I’d write about gum trees.’

‘That would be a fantastic obsession for a poet,’ he says, delighted. He’s obviously taken by the idea of a poet dedicated to a single topic.

‘It is a bit of an obsession, I suppose.’ Mum smiles. ‘When I die, I want to be buried under a gum tree in the bush up the back.’

‘What’s your favourite type of gum?’ Michael asks.

‘The ghost gum. There was a pocket of them at Tumbarumba where I spent my holidays as a child. Lovely old trees.’

‘I’ll write a poem about them for you,’ Michael says.

After dinner, Dad and Michael go into the lounge room with their glasses of wine, and Mum and I retreat to the kitchen to do the washing up. During a lull in our conversation, she brings up the subject of me coming home to live. ‘I’ve put your bags from Ursula in your old room downstairs and given it a clean,’ she says. ‘It’s all ready for you.’

‘Thanks, Mum,’ I say.

Simple as that. It’s decided. I’m moving back home after three years of living on my own. It’s still not what I want, but there’s really no other option. While I’m grateful to have somewhere to go, I feel reined in.

As my parents settle into their lounge chairs to watch a TV program, Michael and I come downstairs to my old room. There are no longer any posters on the walls, and my books are still in boxes next to the bookcase, but the eiderdowns on the two single beds are the same. The cave-like feeling from the exposed bricks is familiar. As I sit on one of the beds, Julianne’s face appears in my mind’s eye. I’m reminded of the two days and nights we spent here as her life fell apart, but I don’t want to remember that time. I want to think of the Julianne who lived like an Amazon – bold, curious and courageous inside the music. And I want new memories of this space.

I lock the door behind us, aware of my parents upstairs, then I cover a bedside lamp with a red scarf and light candles and incense. I like the look of the room now in the glowing light, and there’s an exhilarating sense of privacy. Michael goes over to a stack of records and flicks through them, choosing some and putting one on the player. He sits at the end of my bed, and we talk, smoke cigarettes and listen to the music.

There are no fluorescent lights, no harsh angles and no dramas. Just the two of us. The mystique of the green bell seeps into this space, making it feel round and familiar. We weave the night around us like a cocoon, fragile and ephemeral, as we sit on my bed together, the sounds of Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence filling the room. Tonight we can be close and intimate. At last we’re truly alone together – at least until Michael has to go upstairs to his room to sleep.

Michael returns to Caloola the next day, and I’m discharged from M Ward after living there for seven weeks. Relieved, in the end, that I have a place to go, I pack up my things and Mum drives me home. All I needed was time with Michael to sense a new beginning. I’ve emerged into the fresh air, all obstacles dealt with, the necessary compromises made. The future is falling into place – not exactly the way we hoped, but we’ll soon be together again, and this time we’ll be out in the world. Life is about to open up. The labyrinth is behind me.