That night when I got home the trolley was still out the front of our house. I pushed it back in front of number eighteen. If it had even a rudimentary consciousness it would have been confused. The next morning it was back in front of our place again, with a loaf of mouldy bread in it. Were the builders upping the ante by sending back a loaded trolley?
Our response would be vital.
I went inside and, over the banging from both sides, shouted to Lucy. ‘Let’s vomit in it.’
Lucy raised half an eyebrow. It’s something very few people can do and it has a particular meaning that approximates to, ‘What a novel idea. It is entirely without merit.’
‘Then they’ll think we ate the bread and we got sick. They’ll feel guilty.’
This time the eyebrow went right up. Then she went back to her magazine.
‘I’ll do it,’ I shouted over the drilling, knowing I wouldn’t.
She didn’t even look up.
I fussed about for a bit, then went out the front again to see exactly how mouldy the bread was and what sort of loaf it had been. I don’t know why. I carried Bibi in my arms to elicit as much sympathy for myself from myself as I could. I opened the front door and saw they had struck again.
This time it was number twenty-two. Some time in the last ten minutes one of them had nailed a metre-long Masonite plank to the top of our adjoining fence. It wasn’t in my way, but I was outraged. How dare they do it without asking. Just to show them I wasn’t someone they could simply walk all over and expect no retribution from, I grabbed it, broke off a tiny corner and threw it at their stupid house. The wind caught it and it blew away. I looked at the plank. No visible difference, really. I looked at Bibi. I think we both knew I’d made my point.
I slammed the door loud enough to almost hear it over the drilling. As I stomped down the hall it occurred to me that it was all very well to pat myself on the back for having been able to enjoy myself on a four-hour holiday in Haberfield after turbo-charging up with coffee, but that when it came to trying to maintain peace of mind when things weren’t perfect I still had a way to go.
But I wasn’t as bad as I used to be.
In 1996 I was working as a lawyer for legal aid, and had been since 1994. I worked at various local courts around Sydney representing pretty much anyone who turned up and satisfied three criteria: they had been charged with a criminal offence; they didn’t have a private lawyer; and they didn’t have much of an income. Since I joined legal aid I had represented people charged with shoplifting, assault, armed robbery, drug possession, drug supply and even murder.
Each day I met people with fucked up lives. Of course they were all, to a large degree, responsible for that themselves. But almost invariably, when I asked a few questions of a client, a history of a disjointed and unpleasant childhood would emerge. Typically he (and it was ‘he’ about 90 per cent of the time) would have a history of receiving violence from one drunken parent and indifference from the other, drug addicted one—if they had contact with both, that is.
I had grown up having no understanding of why anyone would take heroin, but when someone explained to me that it was the ultimate pain-killer, I slowly started to get it. And I began to understand how lucky I had been to be born into comfortable middle-class circumstances to parents who were good to me.
When I say I began to understand, I mean that in a purely intellectual way. I understood how emotional pain can motivate short-term pain relief through drugs such as heroin, and how that can lead to addiction and that can lead to crime. I reasoned how all this could happen, and I tried to display empathy with my clients without being a complete wet blanket. My primary job was to give them legal advice and representation, but sometimes it was also to try and help in a more holistic way. My message to clients became, ‘Shit happens and it’s probably happened to you, but in the end it’s up to you— and only you—what you do about it.’
But I remained an outsider. It wasn’t my world. I came into it at 8.30 each morning and left it again at 5. Which was a good thing.
Occasionally something crossed over emotionally. Once I represented a young woman who was probably mildly intellectually disabled and who had a late-night job packing shelves. It was pretty lonely work, and to pass the time she had started to eat the odd chocolate bar. Then another one, and perhaps a packet of snakes as well. As the weeks went by she kept eating and eating, and eventually she had effectively stolen a thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise from her employer. At court she was terrified, as was her mother. She’d never had her daughter assessed to see whether she was intellectually disabled—but she referred to her daughter as her ‘special’ one. The whole thing was very sad. The magistrate saw it that way too, and put the girl on a good behavior bond, effectively ending the case. But driving home I couldn’t get the image of her frightened face out of my head and had to pull over because I was crying.
Over the next few moths I’d think of her and wonder why. Mainly though, I did what they tell you to do, and what you make yourself do automatically—I distanced myself. And I had another focus, my comedy career.
It is obvious now that doing gigs three nights a week and trying to find more time to write, on top of working full-time, was running me down, and that creeping exhaustion played a part in what was to come. But at the time I was oblivious. Perhaps I sensed that I was so busy rushing from one thing to another I didn’t have time to actually enjoy anything. But if I did sense it, it didn’t seem important.
One day I had a coffee with a friend, Steve, another criminal lawyer. We swapped work stories as you do, and Steve told me how someone in a case he was involved in had claimed that Steve had tried to pressure him into changing what he was going to say in court. Steve wasn’t a person who would ever do something like that and, as he was acting for a client who was broke, he certainly would have had no financial motivation to do anything inappropriate. But someone had phoned Steve later and told him he was being investigated for attempting to influence a witness, a very serious offence that could lead to a jail sentence.
‘When was that?’ I asked
‘Um … ’bout six months ago.’
‘And what happened?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Never heard back from them.’
‘You must have been terrified,’ I said.
‘It did scare the crap out of me at first,’ he replied, ‘but after a while I forgot about it.’
‘Forgot about it!?’ The idea of forgetting about something so potentially earth-shattering seemed bizarre to me.
‘Yeah, something new to worry about must have come up.’ He laughed.
I didn’t. I felt shaken. I had never thought about this dangerous side of being a criminal lawyer before. If something like this could happen to Steve, then surely it could happen to me.
I started asking fellow lawyers if there had been a time when they, too, had almost been sucked into a case. Many of them had a similar story. It seemed that if you were a criminal lawyer for long enough, it was almost inevitable that at some point someone would make a complaint about you.
And then somehow, instead of shrugging my shoulders and getting on with it, I started to become obsessed with the idea that sooner or later someone would make an allegation about me. I had always gone out of my way to be completely above board in every way, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how many one-on-one conversations I had to have as part of my job, and how easy it would be for someone to try and get me into trouble. I started to get very paranoid.
I started playing mental tapes of every work-based conversation I’d ever had and wondering which was the one that was going to get me into trouble. I started thinking about it all the time. And the more tired and run down I got, the more I thought about it. I became obsessed with the idea that something terrible was going to happen to me and spent hours imagining what it would be in ridiculous detail. Looking back on it, I somehow lost control of my mind. It started to spend all its time in places that were very unpleasant indeed.
Whenever I had free time I would spend it worrying. I ran through every possibility. What if, in that case three weeks ago, someone accused me of this? What if it was some other case? The police could be on their way to see me now. They could be. Maybe they weren’t, though. Maybe someone had made a complaint about me and it was in a pile somewhere and next Tuesday, or the following Wednesday, or the Thursday after that, someone would read it and come to see me. Or maybe not. The possibilities went around and around and around. My thoughts were an exhausting, repetitive worry-loop, trying to anticipate events I couldn’t control and which, in fact, didn’t exist. It seemed unfair. I had worked hard over the past few years to get away from being a miserable corporate lawyer, to get going in two jobs I enjoyed. I seemed to be getting somewhere and now, all of a sudden, it all seemed vulnerable. From feeling completely safe I had somehow thought myself into a position where I was imagining, with terrifying intensity, something going very wrong. And it wasn’t even because I had a guilty conscience. I hadn’t done anything wrong. What was going on?
It’s not unusual for someone to occasionally feel that the shit might hit the fan. But what usually happens is that when time passes and it doesn’t, you gradually relax. But I couldn’t. As each day passed I worried with even more intensity, using every spare moment to think up new ways that someone, somewhere, could bring about my downfall.
It started to get absurd. Initially my fear might have been useful as a wake-up call to ensure that I triple-checked everything I did and never put myself in a position where I was vulnerable. But as the days went by I continued to obsess about getting in trouble somehow. It’s a great thing, the human brain, but mine turned against me. It ignored logic and would not, could not, stop worrying about something that wasn’t going to happen.
What if, what if, what if . . .
It became the first thing I thought about every morning and the last thing I thought about at night. I thought about it on the bus, at work, when I was out. I thought about it when I woke up at 4 a.m. for a piss. I thought about it when I was on stage doing stand-up. My mind would go rushing around the familiar tracks again while my mouth switched to auto pilot. I became adept at carrying on conversations with just half my brain involved, as the other half continued the seemingly vital task of racing down and around all the scenario paths. It always seemed that if I could just think about it a bit more, just think it through one more time, I’d be able to work out a way of proving to myself that nothing could go wrong. But I never quite could.
If I caught myself not worrying, it was as if I had let my guard down. There seemed to be safety in worry—it meant I was preparing myself as best I could, that I had my guard up so that if something did happen, at least I would have done my best to anticipate it.
Sometimes it occurred to me that I had a higher risk of getting cancer than of getting into trouble and yet that was no help. I’d never been near cancer, so at some basic level I didn’t really believe that cancer could ever threaten me. It was far away.
In retrospect, my obsessive worrying was a way of trying to exert control over something outside my control. Endlessly trying to anticipate every possible sequence of events was less scary than accepting there were things that I didn’t know and events that might affect me that I couldn’t do anything about.
The fact that a part of me knew this was an inevitable risk of being a criminal lawyer and that all my colleagues faced it too, and that getting in trouble was very unlikely, didn’t help. But it did, unfortunately, make me too embarrassed to talk to any of my fellow lawyers about it and get them to help me analyse the possibilities in a realistic and logical way. I thought that if I did, they’d think I was crazy. Which in a way I was—I knew I was over the line of rational anxiety into crazy doom fantasyland, but knowing it didn’t help.
What I should have done then was quit, or gone on long term leave. But most of the job I liked, it was what I wanted to do and leaving would feel like failure. My life looked like a good one and even though the man at the centre of it was having the worst time of his life, he was dammed if he was going to let anyone know.
From the outside my life looked the same. I got up in the morning and went to work, I lived with Lucy and I worked as a stand-up comedian two or three nights a week, persuading people that their everyday lives were full of hilarious things to laugh at. Sometimes when I was at work or out, I had to sneak away to the toilet for five minutes, just to sit down one more time and think through all the possibilities, to get them straight in my head. It was like an addiction, but without the good bits. But I never missed any sort of work commitment. I don’t think anyone I didn’t tell—and I told very few people—ever knew there was anything wrong. Friends and workmates might have thought I was a bit quiet, but nothing more. Years of stand-up had taught me how to project calm and confidence even when I didn’t feel it.
But I felt for all that time as if the most important part of my life had been taken away—the part where I enjoyed things, where I had fun, laughed and thought it was good to be alive. It wasn’t there any more. I was swamped by fear.
I missed one social commitment, a friend’s Saturday birthday lunch. I lost it at home an hour before we were due. I was sobbing, overwhelmed at how I had so quickly and conclusively lost control of my life. I remember realising that I seemed to have lost the capacity to feel joy. It was gone and life had become something to endure, a storm to be waited out. So we didn’t go. Another time Lucy and I were in David Jones at Bondi Junction, buying our first whitegood together, when I became overwhelmed, and started trembling as I held a blue kettle. We didn’t buy it. I stopped reading detective stories, because any reference to courts or police would get me going. But I stayed a lawyer. All the work I did I triple-checked, and I made sure I protected myself from any unlikely way in which things could go wrong.
Occasionally I mentioned my nagging fears to someone, and they would always give me the same sensible but impossible-to-follow advice: Just forget about it.
Eventually I saw a counsellor, a sensible and understanding woman who looked like Cher. She suggested I carry in my wallet a card with the word ‘STOP’ written on it, and whenever I got into my anxiety loop take it out and look at it. She said that if I did this I’d feel better within a couple of days. It didn’t work.
I tried a kinesiologist. She read my innermost thoughts by poking and prodding me and asking me to push my hand against hers. She told me it was clear that I had a problem with my relationship with my father. I told her that maybe I did, but that it was nothing compared with the problem I had of obsessively worrying about the possibility of getting into trouble. She told me that I should think of the worst possible thing that could happen, then embrace it and look for positives in it. I told her the worst possible thing that could happen was that I would go to jail, and asked her what sort of positives she saw in that.
There was silence.
‘Well,’ she said eventually, ‘you could become that comedian who’s been to jail. That would be a good selling point, wouldn’t it?’
I tried hypnotherapy. The hypnotherapist was a plump grey woman in her forties called Amanda, who had a kindly-aunt manner and operated out of a small, musty office up a little alley behind a dentist. The only other hypnotist I had seen was the ‘Extraordinary Martin St James’ in a plush auditorium at the North Sydney Leagues Club, so this was a bit of a comedown.
She explained that she would hypnotise me and then implant suggestions deep into my subconscious. I remembered Martin saying something similar, but hoped Amanda was going to do something more helpful than make me think I was a chicken every time someone said the word ‘interval’.
‘Now shut your eyes,’ she said. I automatically obeyed. Maybe I was hypnotised already.
‘Now, James, listen to me carefully,’ said a big black man. My eyes jumped open but there was only Amanda smiling at me.
‘Close your eyes and relax,’ said the big black man’s voice again. It was somehow coming out of Amanda’s mouth. I tried not to smile, and the fact that I wanted to already made it $60 well spent.
‘James, your eyes are heavy, you are going deeper and deeper,’ said the voice. I tried to go with it.
‘You are completely relaxed, and sliding deeper.’
I wanted to be hypnotised. I really did. It could help me.
‘Your eyelids are heavy. You are going deeper.’
Yes, I was. Wasn’t I?
‘All your cares are drifting away as you go deeper and deeper. You are so deep that your conscious mind has let go and is floating and still you go deeper and deeper.’
Any minute now, I’m sure.
‘Your breath is slow and steady and you are going deeper.’
No, actually I’m not.
‘Deeper and deeper.’
Maybe it was my fault. I couldn’t let go, I was incapable of relaxing. I was a remedial hypnotisee. The only thing going deeper and deeper was her voice.
‘You are now in a deep hypnotic trance,’ she said, which sounded very impressive, except that I wasn’t.
I thought about letting her know that we had actually got a bit ahead of ourselves, but I didn’t want to draw attention to her, or our, or my, failure. Poor thing, stuck in a leaky back room. To be honest, she probably lost me with the lack of props. Martin had had a big gold medallion that he waved about and that’s the sort of thing I expected from a hypnotist. Without props I felt cheated.
She continued, telling my subconscious that it would let go of all anxiety, live in the present and embrace the possibilities of every moment. It sounded great.
When she’d finished I opened my eyes and looked dazedly around the room, trying to give the impression of being disorientated. I almost said ‘where am I?’ but thought that might be laying it on a bit thick.
After I shelled out, I tried to end on something positive. ‘Thanks very much. That stuff about embracing the possibilities of every moment really made sense.’
Then I realised that if I had been in a deep hypnotic trance I wouldn’t have known she’d said that. From the look she gave me I think she realised it too. I scuttled out.