8

Back Home,
November 1972

Within a week, the stress of being home starts to take its toll. My face aches from the effort of smiling as I try to fit in with my family, with meal rituals and customary ways of relating. Everyone is polite and considerate, and the strain of all this niceness is excruciating. I want to smash something, break through the veneer so that everyone can relax and go back to being themselves. My family tiptoe around me as though I might detonate if they say the wrong thing, or collapse if they bump into me. The spontaneity and looseness I remember has gone. I long to excuse myself and go down to the sanctuary of my room so that they can relax, and I can be alone with the lethargy and depression that has settled in me like a dirge.

The family home is a solid, cream-brick house built in the mid-1960s, with views across to the Brindabella Ranges at the front and the foothills of Mount Majura at the back. At ground level there’s a double garage and my room, with wide steps in between leading up to an open porch and the front door. For Mum, buying the house was a dream come true, bringing together her love of the bush with her desire for the suburban quarter-acre block. She knew that this was the house for her when she stood at the kitchen window and looked out onto a spread of gum trees and wattles.

This morning, with Mum out shopping and the boys at school, I sit alone in the dining room eating a late breakfast, kept company by the empty house and its silence. Sunlight streams through the sheer white curtains and shines on the honey-coloured wood of the table in front of me. The carpet swirls in patterns of orange and brown, and the chairs stand upright and formal. It’s like a stage set, waiting in readiness for the actors to appear and the drama to begin. I drink my coffee and think of the time when I was at high school and, except for my eldest sister, Irene, we all lived at home, and the house was full of people and activity.

There were eight of us, including Mum and Dad: Irene had entered the Brigidine convent a couple of years before we moved to Hackett. My four brothers played rugby union, Anne and I were on netball teams, and we rode our bikes everywhere. Weekends were a whirl of activity, with friends dropping in, people coming and going, and on weekdays there were routines of meals around the table, homework and washing up. I can almost hear the voices echoing through the house – my brothers yelling out to one another, my mother urging us to hurry up, and my sister Anne singing along with Elvis Presley on her transistor radio as she washes the dishes.

Memories of Saturdays return with a particular immediacy. I hear the noise of the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine, and someone screaming from the shower that the hot water has run out. I think of Jim revving his motorbike in the driveway, Robert rubbing down his horse in the backyard, and Mum in the kitchen, cutting up vegetables for soup and giving instructions to anyone walking through. There was always something happening: doors slamming, the phone ringing, people talking.

And there was always music. As Mum did the housework, she sang along to the war songs of Vera Lynn and to songs from musicals like Oklahoma, South Pacific and The Sound of Music. In the evenings, Dad would usually sit back in his lounge chair enjoying a glass of wine and some cheese and biscuits as he listened to Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and some of the American-Irish songs like ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’ and ‘Galway Bay’. I played the pop songs of the 1950s and ’60s whenever I got the chance: Gene Pitney, Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield, the Beatles. I bought A Hard Day’s Night with money I’d earned from babysitting the neighbours’ children and danced to it in my bedroom, singing along until I knew the lyrics off by heart.

As the 1960s progressed, the practice of the nightly family rosary gradually gave way to the pressures of individual schedules and the impact of television. The religious prints on the walls also disappeared over time, superseded by landscapes: paintings of the Australian bush, mostly featuring Mum’s favourite tree. The print of Jesus in Gethsemane that had hung on the wall in the lounge room disappeared without anyone commenting on its absence. The Madonna and Child in the hallway was replaced by photos of the family.

In my early teens, I took a picture down from my bedroom wall that had been a favourite during my childhood. It depicted a guardian angel hovering protectively over a child as she walks across a footbridge suspended above a rocky abyss. I used to gaze at it, imagining myself on the shaky bridge, anxious about the prospect of falling but reassured by the presence of the angel with his enormous wings and gentle eyes.

Eventually, only the matching pictures of the Sacred Hearts remained, hanging above my parents’ bed in the room at the end of the hall. In one, Jesus points to his bleeding heart; in the other, Our Lady holds her shawl aside to expose her heart as she gazes sorrowfully into the distance.

Growing up, I was always being told what a big, happy family I came from, and this became important to my sense of identity. I congratulated myself on coming from a happy home, and except for the occasional beltings when we were younger and arguments during our teens, it was. But the usual unhappiness and conflict that’s part of life wasn’t admitted, not openly. We all hid our heartaches and disappointments. Whatever was happening, we smiled through it.

Anger wasn’t tolerated, though on rare occasions it burst through. Our parents never argued or raised their voices to each other, and we didn’t raise our voices to them. Occasionally a door was slammed, and if Mum was upset with someone, an oppressive silence descended on the house. There were also times when I stormed off into the bush as a teenager or hid myself in my room with a book, but the direct expression of negative emotion wasn’t acceptable. Our response to conflict was to withdraw, repress, adapt.

Endurance was particularly admired. Hardship and suffering were to be borne in private, without comment. No matter the crisis, it was important that we ‘got on with things’. We were like colourful boats bobbing around in the sunshine on a sea of submerged emotion.

My mother was just as resilient as my father. She once told me a story from her childhood. She was five years old, distressed because she had fallen over and her knee was bleeding. Pop, unemployed and disabled, said to her, ‘Come on now, soldiers don’t cry.’ When she told me this, I thought of him in the trenches hearing the sounds of his mates dying in the fields nearby and suffering the pain of his wounded leg. Not crying. Not feeling. And I thought of her as a little child, learning the lesson.

Experiences of war have also impacted deeply on my father’s life, though he’s rarely spoken of them. During the war, he was responsible for telegraphic communications back to headquarters and had to go ahead of the company into enemy territory to lay down the telegraph wires. Once the company had taken that section of land, messages could be sent back down the line. It was extremely dangerous work. In one brief anecdote, he told us that his battalion had been transported to Sanananda in New Guinea in seven war planes, but only one was needed to bring back the survivors.

Mum and Dad are constitutionally cheerful, and their capacity for optimism created a dynamic home life for us when we were growing up. I know that I was often animated by their energy. But when I was a child, I also found myself inexplicably anxious and sad, and I was ashamed of the way that my darker feelings made me an outsider, someone apart and alone within the family. Those feelings were drowned in the currents that flowed beneath our lives.

The year after my first breakdown, when I was nineteen, I returned home from the hospital and faced the realities of a fragmented mind. Still in shock from Julianne’s death and unreachable, I no longer felt ‘at home’. My withdrawn mood and my agitation unsettled the family then, just as they’re doing now. It’s as though I’ve become the face of darkness in the house. I’ve always been an introvert among extroverts, but now I need a different environment in which to face my struggle to discover myself and find some sanity. I have to work out how to deal with the dissonance between the weight of my psyche, and the normality and lightness in the house.

For three years before my admission to M Ward, I came and went as I liked, and I created living spaces that allowed me to shut myself away when I needed to be alone. In 1971, I had a room at Lennox House, an old workers’ hostel that had been converted into cheap accommodation for students in the 1960s; I also lived in share houses and at Ursula College. Now things are different, and I see that the family home represents an identity I need to leave behind me, a smiling persona that’s like an albatross around my neck.

Over coffee I sit in the airy dining room, turned in on myself. My inner world is dark and chaotic, as is my room downstairs. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever emerge into the light, into a world that isn’t dense with imaginings and intense emotion.

*

One afternoon a letter arrives from Michael. I open it eagerly, recognising his spidery handwriting on the envelope. Inside he has written the date: ‘midnight, eve of Armistice Day, 10 November 1972’.

It’s late. my pills aren’t working so I’ve taken more. Not enough, just enough, maybe. Got the shits, the ta-ta’s. Lonesome is my mountain hut, everything working for me & nothing working for me. I work hard every day & it’s a long day & it’s a long night to come home every dusk … I wish I could live to be with you now …

Tomorrow (today now) is Armistice Day. I was feeding a lamb tonight with its bottle and for no apparent reason I started to cry. Dad died on the 26th of this month last year. You are the only thing I bother living for. Literature & grants and sales make me momentarily excited, often for several hours. But it’s the same me, scrambled brains & uselessly useful body. It’s so hard staying alive. If it weren’t for you I’d give living a miss. It’s all too much. I get badly suicidal every night! Richard & Carla are good to me but life without you is really ‘scraping existence from day to day.’ … What a joke. All i have is you, is yours …

Please be with me all day on the 26th of this month, i’ll have a sad bad day, & night especially. Perhaps i could stay at your place (apart i guess) that night & you talk to me and get me through …

I call Caloola right away, but the phone rings out and my panic increases. Phrases from Michael’s letter repeat in my mind. He puts all his energy into trying to make a life, but he’s an instrument tuned to a minor key, and his tenderness, his melancholy, is heart-breaking. I take off through the backyard into the bush. I have to move. I rush along the track that leads through gums and acacias to the top of Mount Majura.

I don’t know what to do in response to his sorrow, his hopelessness. His faith in me only makes me fearful. How can I become strong enough to give him the support he needs? In M Ward, I was there with him when he felt desperate; from a distance, I just don’t know how to help him. His grief drags him into a deep place within himself where all his sufferings converge: a crucible of loss and doubt and anguish.

He’s obviously in a critical state. As I stumble up the steep track to the mountaintop, I want to shout, send out a distress signal, a flare: Help! Help! We have an emergency! But that’s not how it works in this sort of ongoing crisis.

I’m useless. I don’t feel I’m substantial enough to keep him alive. I don’t even have the energy to get to the top of Mount Majura. I find a grassy slope and sit there, exhausted, my mouth dry, breathing hard.

When I return to my room, I read and reread his letter, trying to think of what to do. I look at the poster I’ve put up on my wall entitled Desiderata. ‘You are a child of the universe,’ it proclaims. ‘You have a right to be here.’ It doesn’t feel like that for either of us, but particularly Michael. I go upstairs and call him again. He’s not available, so I leave a message: ‘Please come to Hackett tomorrow.’

*

Next day, Michael rings from Tharwa to let me know he’s on his way. When he rides up on his motorbike, I’m sitting on the front steps waiting for him. He parks next to the porch, takes off his helmet and shakes his hair free. When we hug I let go of my anxiety for a moment, pressing my face into the curve of his chest, into the musky smell of cigarette smoke and dust. He feels real and present, and I feel weak with relief.

‘How’s things?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, good, but I’m thirsty. Any chance of a cuppa?’

We go upstairs, tentatively negotiating around each other as we try to knit together the loose ends of our time apart. Michael is hard to reach, and I’m tight with anxiety again.

‘I got your letter,’ I say. ‘Sounds like things are pretty bad.’

‘It was a long night. Can’t take these sorts of nights anymore, Pauls, just can’t take them. But it’s okay now, we’re here. It’s cool.’

‘We’ll be together for the twenty-sixth, for your father. Stay here. We’ll get through it together.’

‘Yeah, thanks, that’d be good.’ Michael looks away through the window to the bush outside and sips his tea.

‘Written any poems?’ I ask after a while.

‘Nah, nothing you’d call poetry.’

A silence settles on us. Over our cups of tea we try to make conversation, shrink the distance dividing us, but our reunion is strained. Michael says he needs to leave Caloola but hasn’t found a place to live in Canberra yet. In the quiet between stilted exchanges, we hear the clinking of dishes from the adjoining kitchen as Mum does the washing up.

In the afternoon we wander through the bush around the foothills of Mount Majura. Michael spots a tree next to a dam and spreads his jacket in its shade. As we sit there, I remember the times we sat inside the green bell talking, making plans, holding each other. Now, our talk is soft and desultory. Words seem inadequate. More silences shape the conversation. Michael is subdued, and I’m faltering. Just being with him is enough to open me to joy again, but it’s a small, hopeless sort of joy.

I study the shadows of the tree on his face, breathe in his smell, enjoy his voice. I’m somewhat reassured by his presence, but during the pauses in our conversation, phrases from his letter repeat in my mind. It’s so hard staying alive. The pale light of the sky plays on the surface of the muddy dam, and birds call out in the stillness. I lay my head on Michael’s chest, listening to the rhythm of his heartbeat, feeling his despair. My love is also my pain, and I don’t know how to reconcile myself to the contradiction.

*

After dinner that night, we go down to my room. My parents seem happy for us to spend a few hours here together before Michael goes back upstairs. He takes my old photo albums down from my shelves and insists on looking through them. Family scenes in black and white describe the passage of my childhood. Michael and I sit on my bed, the albums open across our laps, watching a skinny little kid in shorts turn into an awkward adolescent in a beanie and scarf. Michael teases me. ‘You were such a smiley, pie-faced kid,’ he says. ‘Looks like you ran wild.’

He particularly likes the photos of my family taken at Patonga near the Hawkesbury River, where we had a beach shack built by my grandfather and a friend. Michael’s curious, so I tell him stories of times we spent there, becoming more and more caught up in the memories as I describe the place and our escapades. The shack consisted of a large room surrounded on three sides by a wide veranda open to the elements from waist height, and it overflowed with children – our family, another family of five children, and two brothers, Frankie and Malcolm, from the boys’ home at Westmead.

We slept on camp stretchers on the open veranda, and in the morning we folded them up to make space for playing. At night I’d look out at the stars, listening to the cries of gulls, the pounding surf from the other side of the peninsula, and the wind whipping through the bushes along Patonga Creek. I felt an awe that lifted me beyond myself and overwhelmed me. I felt small and huge at the same time, my heart beating beneath my pyjama top.

In the day, I was one of a loose band of wayward kids. Once we learned to swim, at about age four or five, we could go off for the day with the older kids. For the swimming test, Dad would hold us over the side of the rowboat with a rope around our chests while we swam along, kicking our feet hard.

As I describe these childhood holidays to Michael, the grey cloud that had weighed on us during the day dissipates, and our mood lifts. I’m feeling traces of the excitement and happiness I felt at Patonga, and Michael wants me to tell him more stories of our time there. It surprises me how vivid the memories are and how immediate the feelings. I tell him of swimming in the tidal creek until we were sunburned and sleepy and our skin tasted of sand and salt. The exhilaration of chasing schools of blue soldier crabs, watching them disappear into the holes they dug in the sand with their stick-like legs. The dreaminess of wandering along the beach, collecting shells and driftwood to take home. And the fun of fishing from the wharf with Dad, catching flathead off the sandbanks at the Point and rowing up to the mangroves in a neighbour’s boat. I would drag my hand in the water, watching the reeds waving in the slanting rays of sunlight below.

I describe to Michael the trees I climbed to find a solitary place to read and daydream. And I tell him about searching for little frogs under rocks near a creek, and the reaction when I tipped a bucket of them onto the floor of the town post office. I don’t know why I did that, but I remember the commotion and my excitement as dozens of frogs jumped around the floor, people yelling and squealing.

I ask Michael if he, too, ran wild as a kid. ‘In my mind I did,’ he says. ‘I was already writing poems and sending them into The Argonauts when I was seven. The most exciting thing for me was getting my poem read on the radio one afternoon.’

I try to draw Michael out about these poems, but he just wants me to tell him more about Patonga. It’s then that I remember our family’s five minutes of fame.

Dad had taken us for a walk around the cliffs one afternoon. We played in the rock pools, looking for crabs and sea snails in the crevices, laughing when we busted the beads on seaweed necklaces and water squirted out. But then Dad started herding us close to the bottom of the cliff, trying to get us to hurry as the sea rushed in over the rocks. I could tell he was alarmed. The sea had cut off our way around to the beach, and Dad insisted we climb the cliff-face before the whole rock shelf was submerged.

I scrambled up through the small scratchy bushes, with Dad helping me find places for my bare feet to push off from. Somehow, one by one, Dad got us all to the top. By then it was late afternoon, and the bush was dense, the area rocky. We tramped through the scrub, keeping close to Dad, collecting wood for a fire. Later, we lined up facing the sea, cooeeing in our loudest voices as we waved our shirts above our heads. I remember the exhilaration of the adventure and my fear, especially when it got dark.

Dad made a huge fire using his matches and a detective novel he’d brought in his back pocket with his tobacco. The fire was seen by people on a fishing boat, and the alarm went out. It was after midnight when we got home. Mum made a pot of tea and a huge pile of toast dripping with jam and butter. We were ravenous. The next day, our adventure was reported on page three of a Sydney newspaper under the headline ‘Family Stranded on Lion Island’. I couldn’t understand how the paper had got it so wrong, and I wanted Dad to tell them we’d just been caught out by the tide on the mainland.

Inspired by the memory of tea and toast, I put together a snack for Michael and me. We make plans to go to Patonga and explore the Hawkesbury River, writing poems of our journey. We’ve emerged from our despair. When Michael goes upstairs to the spare room, I go to bed and fall asleep, grateful for this temporary reprieve.

*

With every parting from Michael, there’s a wrench, an anguish. When he leaves the following morning, I return to my room feeling emptied out. The image of him riding away down the road on his Kawasaki, the oversized helmet perched on top of his thin, upright back, stays with me. There’s something in it of that Nolan print of Ned Kelly: his back to me, the helmet, and him disappearing towards the horizon.

My room with its small window and exposed brick walls is dark and empty without him here. I think of him in his hut at Caloola, feeling restless and claustrophobic as he struggles through the nights, and I can’t sit still. I tidy my room. Return clothes to drawers and cupboards. Stand books and records upright on the shelves. Move my record player to a side table. I’m able to deal with the chaos in my room, but I have no notion of how to deal with Michael’s state of mind, or my own.

I don’t like the word ‘depression’ – it makes me think of a dip in a bitumen road. I prefer to think I’m sad. My heart is heavy. I’m despondent, dispirited, disconsolate. I’m dreary, dull, miserable. I’ve got the blues. But these words are somehow too resonant and graphic for the thick, slow state I’m in now. I accept that it’s more true to say that I’m depressed. I can’t bring any light into my life, and I can’t get up in the morning. I’m a dip in a bitumen road.

I can’t stop thinking of Michael’s last letter to me, of his struggle to stay alive. He has put all his faith in me, and I don’t know if he realises I’m just not that strong.

*

I sit at the table in my aunt’s dining room in Carlingford, Sydney, surrounded by my grandmother, aunt and uncle, and my mother. I stare absently out the window at the row of pink azaleas in the garden. They’re so perfect, they don’t look real, but nothing does these days. I’m living in a film of my life. After a couple of weeks at home, I agreed to come with Mum to visit family in Sydney, thinking it might inject some life into me, but I’m lost, unable to contribute to the conversation.

My grandmother looks like the picture of a grandmother, like the Queen Mother. She’s wearing a blue dress and a pearl necklace, and her silver hair is curled and neat. When we arrived I wanted to bend down and hug her, but she’s so small I thought I might break her. Now I notice her bright, bird-like eyes as she sips her tea. They miss nothing. Not my discomfort or the uselessness of my hands, moving from the table to my lap and then under my arms as she tells us about a recent tennis match that she watched on television. The discussion turns to Evonne Goolagong’s chances of winning the Australian Open. I become aware that my tea is cold and my piece of sponge cake is untouched. It’s just too perfect to bite into.

No one is looking at me, and I can’t look at them. In spite of the lively discussion, there’s an awkward energy around the table. The faces of people I’ve known and loved all my life seem strange. My mind retreats into a baffled, distant region of itself. I drift in and out of the conversation, attempting to follow what’s being said but losing track, slipping off into random images. The geometrical pattern of the lino. The photo of my grandfather on the dresser. The handle on a drawer. Or I slip into the dark fantasies of my inner world and stare into the distance. I can’t focus on anything for long. Something catches my eye, or a thought trips up my mind, and I forget where I am.

A phone call from Michael brings me back to myself. As my aunt hands me the receiver, I realise that she hasn’t been told that I’m engaged, and I haven’t told her myself.

‘Where are you?’ I ask Michael. I need to be able to see him to make his voice real.

‘Tharwa. The booth outside the post office. Had to beg for change. How’s Sydney?’ His voice crackles through the line.

‘It’s awful. I’m missing you. What’s happening?’

‘You wouldn’t want to know. I’m a total wreck. Hit rock bottom last night. There’s –’

‘I can hardly hear you, the line’s breaking up. What did you say?’

‘Nothing. Nothing. You’re too far away anyway. I’ve got the horrors, Pauls. Haven’t slept the last two nights. Got a bit of sleep last night, but woke up in a sweat about three. I had this dream, dead birds falling from the sky. Horrible feeling, hollow, there isn’t any –’

‘I didn’t catch that. Can you hear me?’

‘Just putting in more coins, hang on … All done.’

‘You sound awful, babe. What a horrible dream. Have you talked to Richard?’

‘Everything I say makes me feel like a fool … claustrophobic … Don’t think I can –’

‘The line’s cutting out, I can’t hear you properly. Sounds like you’re on the edge. Come stay at my place.’

‘Yeah, I’ll come in. When will you be back?’

‘Monday. Just remember –’

‘What was that? Can’t hear you. Forget it. What’re you up to?’ His voice is as thin as wire.

‘I love you. Think of you all the time. Wish I was with you.’

‘Come back. I have a –’

Dial tone.

My cousin’s room is fairy-floss pink and white, and I’m sitting on the bed, doubled up with helplessness and longing. Phrases from my conversation with Michael sound ominous as they return to me, disconnected and broken. I think of him standing in the phone booth, the dead birds of his dream falling from the sky, and I want to know what he was going to say when the line cut out.

The slow work of getting through the rest of the day takes all my energy as I try to resist the sedative effects of the medication and the fall into circular, self-pitying introspection. After dinner I try to phone Michael at the farm, but the line is engaged.

That night I keep waking up from a nightmare involving an organ grinder playing music faster and faster until it sounds like a siren. In the morning I send Michael a telegram, conveying my love, as specified, in ‘ten words or less’.

*

Home from Sydney, I play the music I love, but it either overwhelms me with misery or I can’t relate to it. The emotional rawness of Nina Simone’s voice is too painful, and Vivaldi’s music creates a world I can’t enter. Only Dylan reaches through to me, though there’s no comfort in listening to his songs, just familiarity and nostalgia.

I’m no longer deluded, and I’m not suffering from hallucinations, but the depression I’m in will not shift. I’m also having problems adjusting to my new medication. I was suffering negative side effects from the previous drugs, so I’m now taking Stelazine and Cogentin as well as Largactil. They slow everything down so that emotions and reactions are sluggish and thick, but they also put me on edge, make my nerves jangly and irritable. My nervous system seems to tingle unpleasantly with mild electric charges – but in the ocean of my mind, thoughts drift like debris.

No amount of counting my blessings makes any difference to my defeated lethargy. For hours I lie on my bed like a corpse in the darkness. Eventually I’m able to direct my limbs to move. Brush my hair. Go upstairs. Eat dinner with the family. Stare at the television. A mannequin at home.

One afternoon I manage to catch a bus into Civic and walk over to the ANU library to borrow some books. The supplementary exams I need to sit if I want to pass my year at university are coming up next month, and I’ve decided that I want to take them after all; I don’t want to add yet another year to my degree. But at the library I can’t read well enough to find book titles in the catalogue, let alone study. The medication is still affecting my eyesight. Words still blur on the page. I can only focus for a few minutes, and I can’t take anything in. My plans are nonsense.

Life in the world demands action, competence, decision-making – all abilities I strive unsuccessfully to find in myself. The wild energy swings of M Ward have passed, and everything seems flat and closed off. Where once Michael and I shared every nuance in our feelings and thoughts, now we have to organise meeting places and navigate issues of transport before we can even begin to talk. Such logistical problems confuse me. In the face of these complications, my sedated mind wants to shut down, turn to the wall, sleep.