by Tara J Lal
On the day of Luke’s invite, I had a couple of drinks after work, trying to postpone going to his place, not sure of what to expect. So when I arrived rudely late, I was somewhat embarrassed to find only Luke and his best friend and his girlfriend there. I had thought it was just a casual thing. Feeling uncomfortable, I tucked into a few more beers. When Luke’s friend and girlfriend got up to leave, I assumed it was time for me to go too. His friend looked at me surprised, as if to say, ‘Aren’t you staying?’ It was only at that moment that it occurred to me that maybe this was a date. Maybe Luke liked me. His friends left and there was a distinctly awkward moment on the couch. I was so surprised by the realization that Luke liked me that I didn’t really have time to think about whether or not I wanted anything to happen.
‘How do we do this?’ Luke smiled before leaning over to kiss me.
I was instantly shocked by how good it felt. I hadn’t even been able to imagine kissing anyone other than Anthony. Now, without warning, I was cocooned in another man’s arms. I felt safe and loved once more. I wasn’t about to let that feeling go. The following week Luke cooked me dinner and we started dating. He was generous and kind, always protective of me. But I didn’t feel any deep connection.
As soon as Anthony found out I was seeing Luke, he asked me to marry him in his boyish laid-back ‘why don’t we’ kind of way. I looked at him, the man I still loved, his beautiful naive innocence, and I wished he had asked me three months earlier for I would have jumped at it then, but it was too late now. Deep inside, as much as I wanted to believe him, I knew it was no more than a knee-jerk reaction to seeing me with someone else. The trust had been broken.
Luke adored me. I knew there were differences. He didn’t seem to have any passion for anything; I had all the drive, and I didn’t like that. But I ignored them: the feeling of safety and warmth when he held me was like a drug, powerful enough to put everything else aside.
I told Luke I loved him because I knew it made him happy. Maybe I meant it, at least in that instant, or maybe it was just fear masquerading as love, for I could feel an insidious fungus travelling through my body, a creeping feeling of unease that I tried hard to ignore.
I finished my degree and Jo and Dad came out to Australia. Together we took a guided camping trip to Uluru. I got on well with our tour guide who, like me, had a love of hiking and canyoning. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that he liked me. Unlike Luke, he had interests: things he was passionate about, like photography and the outdoors.
When we returned to Sydney, I felt deflated on seeing Luke. I could no longer ignore our differences. On New Year’s Eve, when I looked at him all I could think of was how much I still loved Anthony, and how different that love was.
I was about to turn thirty. Life wasn’t the way that, as a kid, I’d thought it would be at thirty. I didn’t have a job, I had only just finished studying, and I had no home. So much was uncertain, but there was one thing of which I was sure: I didn’t want to be with Luke.
I broke up with him, and on my thirtieth birthday I shared one last kiss with Anthony. It confirmed what I already knew: that we no longer had what we’d once shared. But being alone was not an option I wanted to entertain either, so I sent a card to our tour guide, Jack, thanking him for the holiday and suggesting we meet up next time he was in Sydney.
We arranged to go walking in the Snowy Mountains. Meanwhile, Luke and I had fallen into a ‘friends with benefits’ arrangement. I hadn’t been able to let go of him, just as I couldn’t with Anthony. It was as if I was only defined by the love others held for me. Luke didn’t like the idea of me going away with Jack, said that Jack had played the oldest trick in the book when he’d told me that he had forgotten his sleeping bag. I didn’t particularly fancy Jack but I let the fantasy of a life spent hiking in the mountains take over. When he kissed me for the first time it felt like a lizard was sticking its tongue down my throat. That’s okay, I thought. I can teach him.
One morning, when Jack was at my place, the doorbell rang. It was early and I couldn’t think who it could be. When I opened the door, Luke was standing in front of me. He said he’d been walking and thought he’d drop by.
‘Uh … uh … hi … um … Come in.’ Shit. Why did I say that?
Luke didn’t know that I was seeing Jack. When he walked into the living room to find Jack there, grinning like a Cheshire cat, Luke just glared. We had a cup of tea. I talked too much, about anything that sprang to mind. Luke wasn’t angry, he never got angry. He was flat.
When he got up to leave, I showed him to the door and he looked at me.
‘Thanks for telling me, Tara,’ he said, deadpan. Then he walked away.
I felt like a five-year-old kid caught stealing sweets from the local shop. You’re a bitch, I thought to myself. But then I reasoned that I hadn’t really done anything wrong. We’d broken up, after all. I started getting good at kidding myself.
I went up to Darwin to see Jack, still searching for the ‘fullness’ that seemed to elude me. Jack said he was going to move to Sydney to be with me. I pictured our life in the mountains together, outdoors, peaceful.
Back in Sydney, Luke and I caught up for coffee. Despite everything that had happened, he still wanted to be my friend. When we got up to leave, he kissed me, igniting once more that fire of attraction, and I melted.
We were back at my place when the phone rang. I let it ring.
Please, God, don’t let it be Jack.
Then I heard his voice come through the answer machine. I started to sweat. Luke and I pretended not to hear, but the sound seemed to fill the living room.
‘Hi, T. It’s Jack! I’m finally on my way to Sydney. Can’t wait to see you! Look after yourself. Bye for now.’
I turned to Luke. ‘Shall we have a glass of wine?’
I blindly, desperately, defended my behaviour to myself. Luke and I are just friends, I told myself. He knows about Jack. Jack and I aren’t really together because he isn’t in Sydney yet. This is just a one-off. No big deal. Just like that, kidding myself morphed insidiously into outright lying. I could feel my brother’s disappointed eyes boring into my soul as his very own sister fractured his dreams of pure hearts.
When Jack arrived I felt the familiar nausea almost instantly. Two days later, I broke up with him. He sat on my sofa and cried. The only feeling I had was one of guilt.
He looked at me through his tears. ‘How can you do this? Why?’
‘I’m sorry. I made a mistake.’ That was all I had to give him.
I couldn’t answer his question. I had no inkling then of what had brought us to this, no desire to take a peek inside myself, for I was too busy grasping for any band-aid I could in a vain attempt to stem the flow of blood from my haemorrhaging wound. Jack told me I was a nice girl but that I had issues I needed to sort out. You’re the one with the issues, I thought, and I believed it. No matter that the counsellor I had seen with Anthony had kept probing at my past. I was fine.
I continued to bash my way through the bush blindly, heading vaguely for some unknown place, applying band-aids as I went, haunted by my brother’s words, how I betrayed him.
God, how I dream of passions of pure hearts. I cannot speak of feelings so well. I have a terrible desire to speak only in truth and only with purity, but this desire is a branch of my egotism, my desperate poisoned desire to be different.
I got back together with Luke again, revelling briefly in the high of the reunion, until the incessant, nagging voice telling me that I did not love him could be ignored no longer. I didn’t know then that band-aids can’t fight fungus. Indeed the moisture they trap merely fuels its growth.
I lived in a continuous state of internal conflict; my behaviour was so incongruent with the values I held. It was as if I were holding a jousting match between my ego and my true self. It was just as Adam had said:
If I could but hold a frame of sweet honesty in my head, un-perpetrated by the thrusting delusions of egotism … then I coul
d enjoy bliss.
I could not hold the honesty, for to do that I would have to entertain the crippling pain of the past. Instead, I kept running, but the truth followed me, as did the pain. It hunted me down wherever I went; my constant predator. I tried to protect myself with denial, but denial is flimsy and invariably gives way, like a camouflaged trap on the forest floor.
The feeling of being safe in the arms of a man was like taking a hit of morphine. It took the pain away, almost instantly. For a few stolen moments, I could once more be that little girl, sitting on my mother’s lap, feeling her arms around me … cuddling me, loving me and protecting me. To feel even for a second safe in the arms of another, to have for just one moment what my mother had given me all those years ago, no matter what damage it inflicted on others, was my constant lure, the habit that I could not kick, and it fed the cancerous growth within my spirit.
Even as a teenager, my brother had sensed the essence of the malignancy within us both.
As for my ‘great love’ for Sarah, well I think it is more of a pursuit of an ideal, of an image, even the possibility of it having something to do with Mum has crossed my mind, but maybe that’s nonsense as I fell madly for girls before she died and all that has happened is that with growing older, the ‘passion’ has become deeper. Why I say this is because when I think of Sarah, I think nothing of her face, her manner, herself, but just some blurred image and deep sadness as though torn away from some love.
The cancer that killed our mother had metastasized into our lives, the symptoms of which became evident through our relationships. Neither Adam nor I knew what we were searching for. He searched as a teenager. At thirty, my search had still not begun.
CHAPTER 21
I started my intern job as a physiotherapist at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. I had always hated hospitals. My first memory of them, when I was seven, was being in the emergency department at the Royal Free in London. Adam had hurt his arm. I didn’t like the smell; it made me feel sick. The room had started to swirl, and I had fainted.
Now I walked into the intensive care unit at St Vincent’s and my throat immediately tightened. I looked around me at the fragile bodies, seemingly violated by the very tubes and machines that kept them alive, hovering on the brink, between life and death. I saw ashen-faced family members staring pleadingly at their loved ones. I saw myself.
I started treating a French Polynesian lady who had been in intensive care for several months. She had an antibiotic-resistant bug so she was kept in isolation. She had a tracheotomy so she couldn’t talk and she didn’t speak much English. I felt desperately sorry for her. I watched as day after day a relentless string of doctors came and peered and prodded her. I was always nervous when I treated her, for her connection to life seemed so tenuous. I was terrified I might do something wrong.
I looked into her eyes and I recognized the fear in them. Perhaps it was our shared fear that connected us, for gradually she and I found our own language to communicate, a mixture of hand signals, mime, spoken and written words. It was my job to help her to exercise, and to cough so she could clear her lungs of mucous. Every day she would look at me so sadly, as if to say: ‘I’m dying, I don’t want to do this,’ and I would look back: I know. I don’t want to do this to you either. She knew I had to do my job, and she knew also that she would not survive.
We found a compromise of sorts. I would barter with her in our mime language.
‘If you do un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six leg raises, then I won’t speak French to you any more.’
She found my ridiculous attempts at speaking French amusing. She’d smile, as much as the tubes would allow, and that would give her enough energy to lift her leg off the bed, at which point I’d cheer as if she was running the last four hundred metres of the marathon in a forty-degree heat, which essentially she was. At other times, when she could no longer smile and encouragement seemed banal, I’d squeeze her hand and look in her eyes.
If I couldn’t get her to cough hard enough I’d have to suction her, sticking a tube down her throat to suck out the gunk in her lungs, to prevent her from drowning in her own mucous. I hated doing it, watching the fear in her eyes as I took hold of the tube. She would blink to sign that she was ready. Some days she would refuse.
For me, the act held its own horrors. I always pictured the nurses suctioning my brother as I watched on helplessly as his body jolted from the unwanted invasion of his body.
On the days my patient refused to be suctioned I would continue to mime and scribble and talk, until eventually we might manage ten leg extensions. Then we’d both take a deep breath and smile, and I would write triumphantly in her notes: 10 × leg extensions: 2kg.
I think she knew I was struggling with some issues of my own, something deeper. I’m sure she sensed my ferocious self-doubt, for one day she scribbled on a piece of paper: You are very good.
She died soon after that and it dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, while I may not have been able to ‘save’ her or even make a difference as a physiotherapist in the way I was supposed, I had made an impact on her life simply by connecting. But, as Adam said:
How dare I compliment myself, I am frightened to …
I thought of the picture on my living room wall, The Art of Life, the two lonely souls in hot-air balloons, and the line linking the balloons to each other. Perhaps connection formed the essence of life. If I had been able to connect with Adam, would he have died?
Soon after, I had a hauntingly intense dream.
My brother and I are walking together down a long dusty road in India, a few dishevelled shacks on the side of the road and a couple of lonely figures shrouded in saris, only their silhouettes visible in the fading light of dusk. They are standing, watching; present but aloof. I cannot see their faces. Adam leans heavily on me. He is ill, painfully ill. He cannot stand properly. He cannot walk. There is an urgency to move forward yet I begin to buckle under his weight, trying to support him as his legs give way beneath him, like a rag doll. ‘We must move forward,’ I urge him, but his weight is too great for me. I look ahead of me at the long road as it disappears in a haze of dust on the horizon. ‘Please help … Someone help us …Help!’ I call but no sound comes from my mouth for my throat has a vice around it. I feel a deep entombing pressure, a gnawing, suffocating heaviness. Panic rises within me. The figures on the roadside remain still, watching, silent, my own voice mute as I collapse under the pressure. No one helps. They only stand and watch as the earth swallows me and my brother slowly, and we sink into nothingness …
I awoke, paralysed with fear, sweating. I felt my brother’s soul upon me.
Sorry, Ad. I couldn’t help you. I couldn’t save you.
That dream encapsulated perfectly so much of what lay unaddressed within my heart. Adam’s death had left me with a seemingly unending feeling of failure. My love hadn’t been enough. I hadn’t been able to save my brother or my mother. I couldn’t even help my father. I had never felt guilt*, only overwhelming helplessness and shame. The feelings drove me to rescue anyone I could, so that it wouldn’t have all been in vain, except it was never enough. I was never enough.
I often looked at people in intensive care and wondered if they would ever get out. I had a patient in his late fifties who had been in the high dependency unit for months. He had a tracheotomy, and I couldn’t see how he would ever get better; his body, along with his will to live, was wasting away before my eyes.
It was Christmas Day when I decided to take him outside to get some fresh air and see the sky. We hooked up the machinery, the tubes, the bags of solutions and the oxygen and wheeled him through the sliding doors of the hospital’s front entrance, only to be greeted by a wind that carried with it the smoke and ash from the bushfires that were raging around Sydney in 2001. So much for fresh air, I thought as I watched him slump a little lower in his wheelchair, lapsing into semi-consciousness. I prayed that this wouldn’t be the last breath of outside air he ever took. I didn�
��t know then that those fires would soon be a part of my life.
Several years later, I was walking down the street near my home one morning, when I passed a middle-aged man. He looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place him. Then I noticed the marks of a tracheotomy scar on his neck. I realized it was my patient, the picture of health, strolling along in the fresh spring air. It served as a reminder to me that, just as smoke and ash clear, so people can and do come back from hopelessness.
I thought of Adam. Could he have come back from his desolation?
I want to die now … Well, I don’t really …
Then I think of other patients, the ones with traumatic brain injuries. The ones with whom I had found it impossible to connect. Incoherent and frustrated, they had been robbed not only of their social skills but also their personalities.
Barry was one of those. He’d throw his arms and head around in anger and frustration. One day I would be thinking that I had made a difference, only to find out on the next that he had forgotten everything I’d taught him. His family told me he’d been a fun-loving larrikin with a sparkling sense of humour before his motorbike accident.
Would I want that for Adam?
I recalled the nurse’s words: ‘Adam will never be the same if he survives this.’
I knew then that it was better that he had died than he had lived a life of dependency and anguish, no longer the beautiful person he had once been.
I arrived at work one morning to find the receptionist absent from her usual spot at the front desk.
‘Where’s Annie?’ I asked a colleague.
Without answering, he handed me a letter written by Annie from her bed in a psychiatric hospital. She had just attempted suicide. With intense horror I read the words on the page in front of me as she struggled to explain her actions. I felt every word of her desolation, her guilt and her regret. I saw how the darkness had ever so slowly enveloped her, strangling her ability to see a way out. Her words reached into my soul, to the delicate part where Adam lay and grasped the hopelessness and the despair. I wanted to run, to get out. I headed straight to the bathroom, locking the door behind me, desperately trying to keep the dam in place that held behind it an ocean of tears. I had a list of patients to see, so I willed myself not to cry, squashing the tears back down until only a faint persistent trickle expelled itself as a glassy film across my eyes. I struggled through my day at work, desperate to get home. Compassion was calling me, screaming at me to reach out to her. Finally I sat down to write and the words streamed from within.
