MELA BRYCE IS NINETEEN AND PREGNANT. SHE IS WELL educated with an honours degree, but she ‘hears voices’ and is sometimes paralysed with paranoia. She is an undiagnosed chronic and severe schizophrenic. I sit in her womb, growing cell upon cell, unaware of anything to come or why I chose her.
My parents met bushwalking. This is the official story: Mela and Francis are walking separately under a blue sky interrupted only by a canopy of eucalyptus leaves. As Francis marvels at cockatoos and kookaburras, he trips over a log. Mela is also in wonder at nature’s creation when she sees that a man has stumbled. Oh dear, she thinks, that poor fellow is scrambling under the weight of his backpack. She helps him up.
The bush rescue leads to a six-week courtship. In the beginning Mela’s parents, Thelma and Roger Bryce, are civil to Francis, distantly polite. But then, all too quickly, Mela becomes determined to marry this young Chinese man. It turns out he is thirty-eight – not so young after all.
He drives Thelma and Roger through the suburbs of Perth, showing off his properties to emphasise his eligibility. Technically they aren’t really Francis’s properties – Theresa has made investments in Perth to ‘assist’ Francis’s independence and to give her an excuse to fly in and check on her younger brother: a block of flats, an apartment here and there. She has also bought a catamaran that is docked on the Swan River. Of all the places in the world she could have made these investments, she chose Perth – a beautiful, rough backwater – because family is family and Kwa is Kwa.
‘Look, look.’ He gestures excitedly, with one hand on the steering wheel. ‘Look, I’m a very rich man!’ He breaks into laughter and waves his hand again in the direction of Theresa’s block of flats.
Mela sits silently in the back seat, Thelma next to her, and Roger is in the front.
Thelma and Roger feel sick with worry. Mela has broken the news she is pregnant to this man they’ve just met, a man almost twenty years her senior, and that she plans to marry him. Her parents are heartbroken. She attended an exclusive girls’ school and is enrolled at university. This is not the life Thelma and Roger imagined for their daughter. And there is something else: they don’t know what to tell Francis about his fiancée’s mental state. They themselves don’t understand it, and doctors are uncertain about Mela’s symptoms and behaviour. For the past four years, Roger and Thelma have simply hoped for the best.
In the car, Thelma looks at her eldest daughter, who is about to wed and have a baby when she seems like only a baby herself, still at university and barely an adult. Mela looks straight ahead, and Francis turns up the radio to fill the awkward silence.
Next on the Kwa portfolio tour is a property by the beach, in Scarborough’s Snake Pit, which in the 1950s was a gathering ground for bodgies and widgies to meet over rock ’n’ roll. Now, in the 1970s, it is a place for hoons and bikies to meet over burnouts and hard liquor. Roger and Thelma appear alarmed by this location.
Francis pulls over to the kerb, and Mela, Roger and Thelma follow him onto a vast vacant lot of land overgrown with weeds. There’s a large fenced-off council swamp with a stormwater drain jutting out into algae-covered water, with a couple of ducks, who seem to have lost their way, paddling on top. Apart from these signs of life, it is a barren wasteland.
‘This,’ says Francis triumphantly, ‘is where we will live.’
Francis and Mela tie the knot. The wedding ceremony takes place at Mela’s parents’ home in the affluent riverside suburb of Bicton. Despite Roger and Thelma’s devastation at their daughter’s decision to marry this stranger, they grit their teeth, and they invite only their closest of friends for moral support. They will never fully accept Francis into their family, but they are certainly not about to allow their first grandchild to enter the world illegitimately.
Awkward photos take place against timber-panelled walls, in a home reception atmosphere that is forced and tense, perfectly befitting the shotgun nuptials. Thelma and Roger pose alongside the bride and groom. It is unfashionable to smile, and they don’t feel like it anyway.
A photographer ushers the group onto a balcony, where Thelma casts her eyes out at the boats on the Swan River, rocking gently on glass-like water. She glances at her nineteen-year-old daughter then back down to the beach where Mela used to play for hours with her brother, Roger, and sister, Zora. A typical Perth girl living an atypical privileged life. Mela would dress up and roller-skate up and down Blackwall Reach Parade at a time of little traffic and unlocked flyscreen doors. Girls’ annuals populated her bookshelves, and theatre and ballet attendances punctuated her calendar. But then puberty struck, and day by day the voices became louder, persistent.
Now Mela is studying for her Diploma of Education – post honours – and is pregnant and married.
Tears well in Thelma’s eyes. Maybe the baby will save her, she thinks.
Having travelled Western Australia extensively while staying in backpacker accommodation and YMCAs, Francis dreams of owning a travellers’ retreat. He decides that his arid Scarborough property is the perfect place for one.
After the wedding he and Mela move in together, and he begins building his compound for travellers, right next to the swamp. Inside my mother, my cells form and assemble like construction blocks, while Francis lays the first bricks of his empire. Very quickly his buildings begin to sprawl: one house then another attached, creating a duplex that he can rent out immediately; a huge brick barbecue area – perfect for frog and snail racing when I get there; a shed with a ladder to a roof that connects to a tree, leading down to the swamp – excellent tadpole breeding grounds; another house, this time of weatherboard and asbestos; another shed with a mezzanine floor to double its storage capacity; a flat roof on the original house where he can later build a shed.
‘You can never have too much storage.’ Francis surveys his growing kingdom. ‘It’s good metal. It’s good wood. It’s good things. You never know when we will need it.’
Mela has never lived away from her parents until now. Each night she continues to seek solace with Thelma, if not in person then over the phone. Mela’s ‘voices’ inhabit teachers, fellow students, people in the street. ‘Everyone is out to get me, Mama,’ she cries. ‘They want to kill me!’
Since she was fifteen, Mela has gone through significant mental ‘episodes’. Thelma’s lack of vitamin D during gestation in bleak London is one reason doctors give for these symptoms.
At sixteen, Mela was diagnosed with manic depression. When she was seventeen, doctors prescribed an electric-shock treatment called ECT: electroconvulsive therapy.
The doctors at Perth’s Graylands Psychiatric Hospital insisted Mela must be separated from her parents while she underwent the ‘necessary’ treatment. She struggled against the grip of two large orderlies, trying to follow her parents out, but the orderlies were strong, and Thelma and Roger left them to it, reassuring each other that this was the right thing to do. Being strapped to a hospital bed then having her brain charged with four hundred volts for six seconds was a terrifying and immobilising experience for Mela. She was still just a girl, and ECT – normally prescribed for depression and schizophrenia – seemed an extreme approach to manic depression. She suffered side effects including nausea, memory loss, headaches, jaw pain and muscle aches.
Two weeks later when the Bryces collected their daughter, they were met by a broken child, worse than when she’d arrived, frightened and desperate. In low and measured tones, doctors spoke of improvements, but her parents saw none and promised never to return Mela to this type of medical care. From now on, they decided, her condition, still undiagnosed, would be contained and managed at home, brushed beneath the carpet.
They don’t tell Francis how bad it can get; he will find out in his own time.
I don’t want to come out of my mother. Perhaps I know what I’m about to land in.
Mela walks the length of Scarborough Beach, all the way to the Trigg rocks and back, pushing her bare feet into the sand. The autumn breeze skims off the ocean, cooling her face. It’s a mild day, but Mela is beginning to sweat. I am a week late. My mother cannot stand it anymore and tries to run, a heavy footed plod through the coarse granules, her enormous belly rising and falling.
Finally Mela is induced, and at 1 am on 23 May 1974 at King Edward Memorial Hospital, Subiaco, Western Australia, a new Kwa is born.