The Green Bell

The Last Month of Summer, Early 1973

I’m woken from sleep by a soft knocking at the door of my room. I know it’s Michael. He comes in wearing his old air force boots, and although I’m still in bed trying to drag myself to consciousness, I notice that the top flaps are undone. The curtains are closed, and my room is still gathered into itself, all soft contours and veiled light. Michael walks towards me smiling, bouncing across the floor with an excitement that alerts me to the possibility that this is no ordinary visit.

‘Hello, you,’ I say. I sit up, hold out my hand and pull him onto the bed. ‘How’s things?’ I’m still thick with sleep, but I notice that he’s looking at me differently, as if weighing me up in some way.

‘I met up with Sally last night,’ he says.

‘Sally?’

‘You know, Sally – the night nurse from M Ward. We bumped into each other at a party in Turner.’

‘Oh, yeah, how’s she going?’

‘She’s great. She asked about you.’

‘Oh? What did you say?’

‘I said you were as crazy as ever, just enjoying it more.’

‘Yeah, right,’ I say, smiling. ‘So, how was the party?’

‘Really cool. The most amazing thing happened. I’m really getting my health back, Pauls, I can really feel my strength coming back. Sally’s got these Great Danes – huge, they take up the whole of the lounge room. We played with them, it was crazy …’

I’m now listening from a deeper region of myself. My mind becomes alert and clear. I see my room as if I’m looking in through the window, watching Michael and me sitting on my bed, the space around us chaotic. Clothes hang over chairs, papers are scattered over my desk, and I want to impose order, get things under control.

I hear footsteps in the hall of the house upstairs and muffled sounds of talking. I look back at Michael. ‘Have you ever had a dog?’ I ask. I’m not sure where this conversation is going, but I know that it’s going somewhere.

‘Yeah, I used to have a corgi, the Queen’s dog, but that was a while ago. Had a cat too. Cats are mysterious and they purr, like this – purrrr.’ Michael leans towards me, nuzzling my neck. ‘I think I’m a cat purrrson.’

I laugh, pull his head closer and run my fingers through his hair. But I still sense a strange vibe. Michael is high, and I’m both confused and hyper-alert.

‘So Sally has cats too?’ I ask.

‘No, just these Great Danes. Amazing dogs – gorgeous, aristocratic beings. You should’ve seen them.’ Michael’s eyes are shining. ‘They’re huge but really gentle. We were playing on the floor with them …’ His expression is eager, expectant. ‘The party was so cool – everyone was out of it. Sally and I were high. It was quite a night. We went back to her place afterwards, and I stayed the night with her. We slept together –’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well … we made love.’

I close my eyes against the pain in my heart. ‘What does this mean?’

‘Nothing, just that we were there together and –’

‘But what does this mean for us?’ I’m just not getting it.

‘It doesn’t make any difference to us. You’re everything to me, Pauls. This doesn’t affect us at all. It was nothing. Her husband was away, and it just happened.’

‘Just like that,’ I say. So many things just happen. Planes fall out of the sky. People die in their beds.

I listen to Michael’s descriptions of how crazy the whole night had been with Sally. The tightness in my throat becomes more intense, so narrow it obstructs all the words I want to say. Words so huge they can’t get through. Other words – small, light things – slip out instead. Their thin sounds float in the space between us like confetti. They say it’s okay. They say I understand. That I can see he’s happy. That it’s great he feels so well. I smile, and I keep smiling. A mechanical clown at a fun fair.

When he walks towards the door to leave, I try to follow but find I can’t make my legs move. It takes me a few seconds to get myself up, go outside and kiss Michael goodbye. He waves to me as he rides away on his Kawasaki. I stand in the doorway holding on to the frame, watching him through eyes of jealousy and loss as he disappears. My vision blurs. I couldn’t be more shocked if he had hit me.

That evening, I stand in the hallway holding the phone to my ear, taking a deep breath. Michael has asked me how I am.

‘I’m not so good,’ I say. ‘I feel terrible. Can’t understand what’s happened.’

‘It’s nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing. Don’t worry about it.’

‘I don’t want to see you tomorrow. I need to work things out.’

‘That’s cool.’

I’m silent. I can’t speak. I hear through the receiver the sound of breathing.

‘Okay then,’ he says. ‘See you in a while.’

‘Michael,’ I say urgently, before he can hang up, ‘do you still love me?’

‘Of course I do. I told you, what happened makes no difference to us.’

I don’t believe him. ‘Okay, good,’ I say. ‘See you soon.’

I’m burning with jealousy, the emotion that hates itself. My self-pity obsesses over my many failings. I’m not desirable, not exciting, not cool. Not interesting, beautiful, fun. Not part of the scene.

The next morning, I wake up to the sense that a catastrophe has occurred. Then I realise the commonplace nature of my heartbreak and turn to the wall, unable to face the day. I’m no longer Michael’s beloved, and I miss him already. There’s nothing left of my dream of him or my vision of the life we planned to share. I’m annulled and in pain. I don’t know why – there’s no point to it, no reason. Why do I need an exclusive love? My feelings are acid in my heart, my brain, corroding my sense of self. Unforgiving and unforgiven, the wound ulcerates. I am no longer the one.

I curl into the pain, hating the feelings that crush me, the weakness that takes me so far down that I’m unable to get up or speak. Another person speaks, functions in the world in my stead. I’m trapped inside the darkness again, head full of noise and abject silences.

There it is: I can’t move, and I can’t sit still.

A few days later, Michael and I decide to see a film in Civic. We don’t talk about what happened. After the movie, sipping coffee in the outdoor section of Gus’s cafe, we try to make conversation, but a deep pall has settled over us. I can’t take for granted that I understand what he’s saying, or that he understands what I’m saying, so I tread, step by careful step, through this new terrain, trying to establish a sense of where we’re going. Michael is subdued, though, and I’m nervous and tense. When I look at him, my eyes lose focus, and he seems a long way away, unreachable.

‘I’m working on Going South,’ he tells me. ‘It’s shaping up as a sort of autobiographical prose work.’

‘So it’s about your life now? Are you writing about us?’

‘Um, well, not really … some bits, perhaps …’

‘What have you said about us?’ I ask, trying for a light, teasing tone. ‘Is it all doom and gloom?’

‘There’s really not much about the present in it,’ he says, flatly.

We both look sideways as a couple walks past, arm in arm. In the pause that follows, Michael puts his hand over mine. I pull away.

He strokes his beard as if nothing happened. I stir the coffee in my almost empty cup. A huge anchor drags through our deep silence. I feel something emerging, coming loose, but I don’t know what it is.

‘I don’t think we should get married just yet,’ I say. ‘I think we need more time. To work things out.’

I see the shock on his face and realise what I’ve said.

‘That’s cool,’ he says eventually.

He looks out across the street to the car park, his glasses glinting in the headlights of a passing van. I wait for him to look back at me. Instead, he reaches for his packet of cigarettes and takes one out. I pick up my tobacco and concentrate on rolling a plug, licking the edge of the paper and poking the strands in at each end with a match. Michael leans over and lights my cigarette before lighting his own. After inhaling deeply, he starts coughing – harsh, wrenching eruptions.

When they subside, he asks, ‘Doing anything tomorrow?’

‘Haven’t any plans. What about you?’

‘Not much.’

Another silence descends. We’ve both finished our coffee. The bill is on the table.

I sense myself falling. Nothing to hold on to, nothing to hold me together. In the chill air I try to breathe, but my chest has cramped as if I’ve just been told of a death.

I’m searching Michael’s face for signs, but it’s a pale mask. The man I know has disappeared. There’s no part of him that I can reach. If I touch him now, he’ll shrink from me. His eyes are distant, his mood restrained and cold.

I hadn’t planned to postpone the wedding, hadn’t even thought of it until the words came out. I’ve done something irrevocable.

‘It’s not long till the last bus,’ I say. ‘I guess I should be going.’

During the sleepless hours of the night, I realise that I’ve deceived myself. Immersed in the belief that our love was perfect, I’ve ignored the ambivalence, the questions, the loneliness that’s crept into it since we left M Ward. Now I’m defeated by Michael’s infidelity. I replay the moment he placed his hand over mine and I pulled away, and I’m gripped by regret. Maybe if I could have loved him in that moment, all would be well now between us.

The days pass. I can’t concentrate, can’t speak to people. The only person I want to talk to is Michael, but he can’t be reached by phone. I obsess over the possibility that he wants to end our relationship. I retreat into my room under the house.

Then he rings me from a phone booth in Sydney. He talks about seeing friends there and going to parties; I respond with light chatter. Neither of us is able to confront our issues. I don’t tell him that I’m spending the days and nights in anxious reflection. I don’t say that I’ve realised my suggestion at the cafe was an attempt to force a way through to a conversation about our problems.

Buried in my room, I try to recover my faith in our future. I consider new and different possibilities for us – perhaps we could have an open relationship like de Beauvoir and Sartre. But I’m not convinced. I remember that in The Prime of Life, de Beauvoir admits to being deeply disturbed by Sartre’s infidelity. After his affair with Olga Kosakiewicz, de Beauvoir asked herself if the whole of her happiness with him didn’t depend on a gigantic lie. I know I’m not de Beauvoir but, like her, my response to Michael’s infidelity is to question the very foundations of our love.

Without those foundations beneath me, I can’t find the self-confidence to embrace a new dream. How can I once again be his beloved? I fixate on what he may be feeling, how he is, what he’s doing. I wonder if he’s as lost as I am, or if he’s out having fun, feeling free and unconcerned about what’s happened between us.

Our relationship has been undermined by madness and depression, damaged by drugs and ‘free love’. It’s been made fantastical by the illusions and delusions that we hold about ourselves and each other. Self-doubt and silence have created distances beyond the possibility of touch.

My mind races, thoughts attack me, and sometimes the noise returns. I know that my reaction is extreme, but I’m in the grip of something stronger than me. I fear I’ll go mad again.

Michael rings me after he gets back from Sydney, and I drive Mum’s car to see him at the Hall bungalow. My medication has been increased, and I’m sedated, less volatile. I’m determined to reach through to Michael. We sit in the kitchen, subdued and tentative with each other. We talk about his trip and, remembering the night I postponed our wedding, I put my hand over his as it lies between us on the table. I leave it there for a minute or so, but it feels awkward. I reach for my tobacco pouch and roll a cigarette. I smile. I’m friendly. I’m lost. We’re tired. I drive home, headlights in my eyes.

Over the next week, we spend a couple of nights together at Hall with Richard, Kate and Simon. Michael and I are still quiet, nervous with each other, our speech laboured. Our talk is of anything but love, and he doesn’t hold me. I don’t hold him. He doesn’t tell me what he’s feeling; he talks about getting high at parties and being out of it. We don’t mention what I said at Gus’s cafe: it’s as if it never happened. Yet it’s built a wall between us – a wall I want to smash, but my anger at myself, at him, at the whole situation is buried in an unreachable vault. I’m in an emotional lockdown. Tranquillised.

Michael and Richard decide to visit a friend of Michael’s in Melbourne, Mirka Mora. She’s a Romanian Jewish artist, a survivor of the Holocaust, who emigrated from Paris to Melbourne in 1951, becoming famous for her art and her lively bohemian lifestyle. Mirka describes herself as a ‘free spirit’ who believes that you should never compromise – in art, in love, or in life. She’s very like Michael, totally committed to her work, and she lives with spontaneity and a great sense of play. When Michael and Richard return from seeing her, they tell me of trips around the city and experiments with a variety of exotic drugs.

I still can’t find a way through to Michael. Sometimes he’s manic, but mostly he’s aloof. We’re in stasis; my words are stillborn and our conversations barren. One night, sitting across from each other in the living room at Hall, I become aware of him looking at me. I look at him. In the instant we see each other, we both look away, stung.

Early one morning as I’m dressing, I see that an envelope has been slipped under my door. Michael must have come to my room while I was asleep. I pick up the letter with a surge of hope. In happier times, he sometimes left affectionate messages and declarations of love under my door.

The envelope contains a copy of the Swinburne poem ‘A Leave-Taking’. It’s handwritten on lined white paper, and I recognise Michael’s writing immediately, though it looks rushed. I read quickly.

Let us go hence, my songs she will not hear,
Let us go hence together without fear.
Keep silence now for singing time is over
And over all old things and all things dear.
Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear
She would not hear.
Let us give up, go down, she would not know
Let us go seaward as the great winds go
Full of blown sand and foam. What help is there?
There is no help, for all these things are so.
Though all the world were bitter as a tear
She would not hear.

It looks as if he copied it from memory – there are crossings out and rewritings, and many of the original lines have been omitted or altered. The word ‘help’ is written above the word ‘hope’, which he’s struck through and corrected. I read the poem again and again. How has it come to this? She would not hear.

My confusion and incredulity increases, though the message is clear: our relationship is over.

I need to talk with him, to find out what’s real. Am I a woman of stone? The moment that question occurs to me, I know the answer. In repressing my hurt and betrayal, I’ve repressed all other feelings, including love. Michael is acutely sensitive, and he knows me well. My emotional withdrawal has been worse than any words I could have said in anger and pain.

He’s right. Our singing time is over.

I’m hopeless with remorse. By the time night comes, my mind is a threshing machine that I can’t turn off. I feel that the world is about to turn on me again, pin me to the wall. The next day I stay in my room, only going upstairs to scavenge for food. Mum asks how I am as I hurry back down. My room is cold even though it’s hot outside. I put on the electric heater, shivering and sweating, and try to make my mind deal with what’s happened. It can only dictate orders: Keep the door closed, keep everyone out, she would not hear. Let us go hence. What help is there?

Two days pass and my mind settles. I know I have to see Michael, talk to him honestly about our relationship. I drive Mum’s car out to Hall and step through the open door of the bungalow into the living room where Michael, Kate and Richard are sitting over cups of coffee. Michael jumps up and greets me with a smile and a generous, gangly hug as if nothing untoward has happened. He’s in high spirits, seemingly happy and at ease with himself, and he claims to be getting stronger and healthier every day.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen this playful Michael. He jokes around, showing off his muscles in a mock strongman pose. To demonstrate his strength, he picks me up and twirls me around the room, laughing and dancing. We fall into each other’s arms in a spontaneous hug and, for that moment, it seems that we’ve rediscovered our love.

As we move away from each other, our eyes meet for a long moment. In that look, everything that’s happened between us is acknowledged. It’s a naked, disenchanted glimpse of our vulnerability, and an affirmation of what we shared, what we’ve been through together. An assertion of love and not-love. Together and separate. A key turning the world. We can now say the words we need to say. We’ve found each other again.

The weight of Michael’s arm around my shoulders is a comfort as we sit on the lounge, drinking coffee and talking with the others. I’ve arrived just in time, they tell me: Michael is about to catch a plane to Sydney. He’s going there to post bail for his dealer who’s been busted. To me, this is a bitter disappointment. I’m determined to talk to him, work things out and assure him that I love him.

Hope is possible, but must be deferred. I’ll have to wait until he comes back on Tuesday.

I breathe in the smell of soap, freshly washed clothes and cigarettes as I lean against Michael’s chest. He is so familiar and so close; I bite the inside of my cheeks to stop myself collapsing into tears of frustration and exhaustion. His arm rests over me as if it belongs there. We’re together again at last, and then suddenly it’s time for him to go.

Late in the afternoon, a day after Michael’s expected return from Sydney, Kate’s car pulls into the driveway. I sense from her silence and intensity that something catastrophic has happened, and we go straight to my room.

‘Michael has OD’d,’ she tells me. ‘He’s in a hospital in Sydney. Unconscious.’

I sit on the edge of my bed. I can’t speak.

‘It looks bad,’ Kate says. ‘He’s in a coma.’

‘I have to see him.’ I get to my feet and reach for my bag.

‘He’s not allowed visitors. His family are with him.’

That’s all Kate knows. There’s nothing to be done. I stand there, numb. The pressure in my chest turns off all feeling and sensation. Only my eyes move. They look at Kate, at the flowers on her faded tapestry jacket and at her thick sandy hair falling over her shoulders. They see her pale face and her blue eyes wild with shock. Once again, the axe is suspended above me.

A week passes. Michael remains in a coma. Whenever I shut my eyes, I see him lying in bed in a hospital room, his face like the Turin shroud. Each day in my room, I light a candle and I pray obsessively. Please, God, please don’t take him.

Another week passes, and nothing changes. My life becomes very small, very precise. All the daily tasks and concerns are reduced to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This goes there, that fits here. One foot in front of the other. Get up, get dressed, eat, drink, speak. Each piece in its place.

Occasionally I go to lectures or sit at a library desk with books open in front of me. I talk myself through the days. But when night comes, there’s only the image of Michael lying alone and unmoving in a hospital bed. I imagine visiting his room, lying next to him, stroking his face and gently waking him. In my own room, I light more candles, and I play Bob Dylan, Nina Simone and Vivaldi as if the music will wake him if I can only listen deeply enough. My own sleep is a fall into shadowy dreams that leave me in the morning with the familiar sensation of spider webs covering my face.

Another week passes. I’m standing on a cliff edge, about to fall. Feeling the updraft of vertigo, the lurch forward. The problem of how to get through the day, then the night, then the day again. At times I forget to shower and change my clothes. I’m desperate for a miracle. I imagine Michael walking through my door in his jeans and boots, his bag slung over his shoulder. ‘G’day,’ he says, smiling.

Somehow summer has turned into autumn, and Easter has arrived. On Good Friday, Kate and I go for a walk through a long plantation of pines and maples in Braddon. We can think of nothing but Michael.

It’s a crisp day, and the ground is covered in a deep layer of autumn leaves. We wade through them, walking along in the shade, breathing in the smell of mulch and pine needles.

When we come to a clearing, Kate recites the opening lines of Michael’s poem ‘The hermit of green light’: ‘only the wind and a river know the way to his / hut in the woods, and sometimes only the wind’.

A bizarre, inexplicable energy explodes in us, and we start picking up piles of leaves and throwing them at each other and into the air. All the pent-up emotion of the previous weeks bursts through. A desperate manic wildness takes over. There are leaves in the air, on my face, and in the kaleidoscopic patterns of light in my eyes, gold and red, whirling and falling.

When I get home, I discover I’ve lost my engagement ring. My hand feels naked suddenly – my ring must have slipped off in the flurry of the leaf-throwing. Its loss seems a terrible omen. I take the steps two at a time and rush into the house, desperate to borrow Mum’s car. I grab the keys off the telephone table and drive back to the park.

I rush around until I find the place where we’d thrown the leaves in the air. I kneel on the ground and brush the leaf mulch aside with my hands.

The smell of the earth and the mulch takes me back to the green bell. I drag my knees around like a crazed penitent until, after only minutes of looking, I see my ring lying among some leaves as if it was placed there. The small silver band is barely dusty.

I’ve found my ring. The impossible has happened.

Relief comes in enormous breaking waves. I’m kneeling, bent over the ground, crying, succumbing to the emotion, sobbing in hard loud bursts that leave me gasping for breath. Then a movement in a tree, maybe a bird, distracts me, and something shifts.

In the space of a breath, I feel Michael’s presence. He’s here with me, as close as my breathing, as familiar as the sense of coming home that I always have when he holds me. I smell his hair; I feel his love. Every cell in my body is singing. It’s the strangest feeling, as if I’m surrounded by thousands of bees humming, buzzing, the air vibrating, drenched in sweet perfume. Michael is here with me, and I have my ring, my infinity ring, in my hand.

Then he’s gone as suddenly as he came. But I know I will see him again. We’ll be together, hold each other. I know it.

The Wednesday after Easter, I’m in the university cafeteria sitting at a table having a coffee and smoking a cigarette. The place is full of students back at uni after the break, lining up to get lunch, talking and laughing with each other. I don’t see Simon approaching. Before I know it, he’s there, sitting in front of me, his sandy hair brushing the rims of his glasses, his eyes pale. His posture is formal, upright.

I think of the afternoon with Kate on Good Friday, the leaves in the air, my lost ring. I look at Simon, and I know. I know that what I felt that day was Michael leaving this world, not coming back to it. His visit had not been a good omen after all. I stub out my cigarette and breathe in, suspended in time, waiting for the axe to fall.

Simon tells me that Michael died on Good Friday.

He tells me that the funeral has already been held.

A moment later, I’m no longer the person I was. I’m torn open and shut down all at once. It’s possible that in some part of myself I knew this day would come, but I never knew it would feel like this. I consider finishing my coffee and decide against it. Simon is offering to drive me home, and it’s raining, so I accept, grateful and relieved. I can’t trust myself. The centre is everywhere. Anything could happen.

Simon concentrates on the road. His jaw is set forward against his grief. Both hands are on the wheel. In the silence between us, the windscreen wipers grind back and forth, erasing the droplets pounding the glass. The rhythm repeats in my head: here/gone, here/gone. The traffic crawls along. I think of a storm that rolled in towards the coast some years ago when I was at Narooma. The inky black of the sea, the purple sky, the wind as it dug at the trees on the shoreline. I hold myself firm on the seat of Simon’s car. There’s no shelter and nowhere to go. Michael won’t be coming back from Sydney. He’s been cremated. My mind is eclipsed by this thought. The totality of it.

I sense the storm coming closer. Somewhere in me, an energy is gathering that wants to tear to pieces everything in its path. We’ve stopped at a red light, and Simon is saying that Michael’s mother will be coming to Canberra in a few days to collect his things. I think of the hessian bag he carried his belongings in: his notebook and poems, letters, a few books, clothes, a little statue of the Infant of Prague. I know that when these treasures are gone, when my rage has laid itself waste and my pain is debris at the bottom of a cliff, the shoreline will have changed. When the storm is over, there will be claws where my hands are. After a death, you’re not the same.

Michael is gone. Cremated. There is nothing to be done. No goodbye. No rituals to attend. No words to be said over his coffin. No leave-taking. No grave to visit. Gone.