by Paula Keogh
The afternoon drifts, and I fall easily, inevitably, into love. Into a dream of love. Into his blue eyes, his otherworldliness and gentle presence. Everything about him. The way he remains attentive during the silences in our conversation, as if silence is a special form of communication. His manner of speaking; his private school accent threaded through with 1960s Americanisms and Australian slang. The way his eyes almost close when he smiles, and I look for it, wondering if anyone else has noticed that in him.
Michael has walked into my life like someone with a message for me. I see him sitting by the window, gesturing as he speaks, his smile quick and impish – and everything he says is something I need to hear. I want to ask him to read some of his poems aloud but feel this would be an intrusion. So I imagine him reading. His voice is of air and breath and walking.
*
Except for sleeping, Michael and I are inseparable. Each morning we meet in the day room over breakfast and compare our nights spent apart; the dreams and poems, the sleepless thoughts and wonderings. Only after this reunion can we move into the day together. We make trips to the cafeteria in the general hospital for coffee and stroll to the mailroom to collect Michael’s letters.
As we sit at a corner table of the cafeteria, Michael holds my hand in both of his and tells me that he loves me. ‘Last night I wrote five new poems,’ he says, smiling, his head at an angle.
We’ve known each other for three days. I smile. I love him too. I tell him, and it feels like the most amazing thing I’ve ever said.
The next morning Michael and I search the lake shore for somewhere calm and private. Sunlight plays on the water and small boats sail in the distance as we make our way along the path, scattering ducks as we go. Taking a turn, we catch sight of a weeping willow sweeping the ground and, further out, bending into the water at the edge of the lake. I sense we’ve found our refuge.
Michael pulls aside the branches, and we walk into a room of filtered light, a round space enclosed by cascading greenery. For a moment we stand there, quiet, our eyes adjusting to the shade. Then Michael says, ‘It’s a green bell,’ and repeats the willow’s Latin name, ‘Salix babylonica,’ as if it were a prayer, an invocation. I think of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, remembering from childhood a picture of their arching vaults and climbing terraces. The drapery of leaves, the play of light and shadow.
We sit on a bare patch of ground and settle in. Michael has his arm around me, and I lean into his musky warmth, listening to the lapping of the lake on the shore, the warbling of magpies from the trees behind us, the distant hum of hospital machinery. Sunlight filters through the soft down of new growth, and long tendrils of leaves hang around us like sheer curtains, protecting us in our secret green idyll.
As I notice the faint smell of water reeds and duck droppings, I remember as a child collecting eggs from the chook house in the early morning. I would stand quite still, breathing in the odour of damp straw as I held a warm, full egg in the cradle of my hand. With this memory, the minds within my mind retreat. The air is mellow, easy to breathe, soothing. Jangling nerves are humbled, and gratitude eases into each breath.
Michael lights my cigarette and then his own. The mood is slow and quiet as we smoke and talk about our favourite trees. I describe a dinosaur-like Moreton Bay fig I climbed in the Sydney Botanical Gardens when I was a child, and Michael laughs about a blue gum he planted in an inner-city backyard, speculating about its height and whether or not it has survived. Casuarinas that grow along the Cotter River and rows of poplars on the road to Cooma link to more anecdotes, while wattles, elms and Japanese maples play on the edges of this arboreal litany. We agree, though, that despite all their qualities, none is as sublime as this green willow bell.
We’re truly alone together for the first time, and I’m aware of the sexual tension in the air. I trace the outline of Michael’s lips with the tip of my finger and imagine the taste of him. It seems absurd to me that I’m inside a green bell about to kiss a man whose smile is like music. I laugh at the thought of it, and that’s when he draws me to him.
Eventually we realise that we’ve been away from the ward longer than we should. We walk back through the trees, arm in arm, rippling with happiness.
*
Michael writes down poems as they come to him, wherever we are. Once, when we’re leaving the mailroom, he writes a poem on the envelope of an unopened letter. We talk about his poetry, and he tells me that three books of his poems have been published and a fourth has been sent to some publishers. Writing poetry is more than a daily practice for Michael – it’s his passion, the core of who he is.
We’re still getting to know each other. We establish that we’re both Virgos, born a year apart and grown up in the suburbs – Michael in Brighton-Le-Sands, Sydney. He tells me about his father who died last year, and his mother, Elspeth, and sister, Frances, who still live in Sydney. He describes his ancestral connections to the Russian aristocracy, and to titled families in Poland and Czechoslovakia. He shows me his ring, engraved with the family crest, and gives it to me to try on, to feel the weight of it.
He also describes himself as sixth-generation Australian, descended from pioneering country people who lived on the south coast of New South Wales. In his personal dreaming, Michael sees himself as the child of both high European culture and rural Australia. He’s entranced by European music, poetry and traditions, but he also prides himself on his connection to farmers: down-to-earth, fair dinkum people who work hard and live simply, without pretensions to grandeur and wealth.
I tell Michael of my experiences with Catholicism, the wars my father and grandfathers fought, and my mother’s stories about the Great Depression. These are my defining cultural imprints. Like Michael, I’m sixth-generation Australian, but descended from Irish Catholics who settled in Sydney: Hanlons, Sullivans and Hennessys, as well as Keoghs. My extended family were close during my early life, but after my parents moved us to Canberra when I was nine, contact was limited to the occasional holiday. Mine is a family of seven children: insular, exuberant and clannish.
I show Michael the poems I’ve written about my maternal grandfather fighting in France in World War I, and he encourages me to write more. His grandfather also saw action during that war, and both our fathers fought in World War II. The way we see it, these family histories makes it all the more necessary for us to oppose the war in Vietnam. We believe that people our age must end the cycle of violence in which each generation of young men is sent away to killing fields across the world.
But in spite of the similarity of our backgrounds, Michael seems to be everything I’m not. Compared to his wild life of drugs and rebellion, mine has been tame. Many of his anecdotes have a heroic flavour – stories of himself as a rebel and adventurer, living like an outlaw on the edge of society. He talks of taking risks and getting high on whatever drugs he can find. ‘I’m coming back as an eagle, flying high on the wind, seeing for miles,’ he says. ‘The Celtic name for eagle means “eye of the sun”. Cool, eh?’
At other moments he’s nostalgic, talking of his need to escape the claustrophobia of the city and take off into the country. In colourful details, he describes the two properties he bought in the New South Wales countryside: a beautiful old Cobargo house called Marchpane that he no longer owns, and a small acreage near Candelo called Jumping Creek with a stone cottage surrounded by grazing cattle.
After telling me about these idyllic places, Michael shifts back to his enthusiastic accounts of drug taking. I know Alan Ginsberg’s poetry, and I’ve read about the ideas of gurus like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, but I haven’t been inspired to ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’. My experiences of psychosis are too close, too disturbing. I tried marijuana a few times, but it made me anxious and fearful. I want an ordinary, everyday consciousness, one I can rely on to construct a reality that holds firm. And I want to be at university – I’m desperate to finish my studies.
Even so, I’m interested in Michael’s
descriptions of himself as a ‘junkie’. I empathise with his desire for spiritual and artistic breakthroughs, and when he speaks of how drugs expand his mind, I’m curious. His descriptions of what happens when he takes drugs don’t make it sound at all like being mad. He focuses on their pleasurable effects, talking about them like a zealot. They are, for him, a source of creativity and insight.
‘But you’re here to get off drugs,’ I say.
‘Yeah, right,’ he says, grinning. ‘Had too much of a good thing.’
*
I have an appointment today with the psychiatrist. I take quick glimpses of him as I sit in my chair in front of his desk. As usual, he’s wearing a dark suit and a wide tie, and the horn-rimmed glasses that seem too small for his round face. I know that the nurses like him, but I can’t see why. He seems detached and cold to me, and I don’t trust him.
He tells me that another series of ECT treatments will be conducted. I nod. He says he’s changing my medication to include something stronger to help me sleep. I nod again. I’m now able to accept that the intention in M Ward is not to kill me. I understand that the aim of the psychiatrists is to eradicate the madness in me. The problem is that the treatments destroy my spirit, my passion, my soul. Then again, so does the madness.
The psychiatrist who treats me is called Doctor Hawke. The nurses say he is ‘my psychiatrist’ but I can’t use that term. It connects me to him in a way I can’t bear. His name is also a problem, and I don’t like to use it to refer to him. It doesn’t feel true to me. The thing is, hawks are magnificent birds: proud, intelligent, beautiful, and they have amazing eyesight. They can see eight times better than humans. I look at the psychiatrist’s eyes, and they see nothing. I sit here, five feet away from him, and he doesn’t see me. He sees symptoms. To him, I’m just a case of schizophrenia, a disease that has to be eliminated. As a person, I’m ignored, my questions are brushed aside, and when I try to understand what’s happening to me from within my strange and estranged reality, I’m silenced.
As far as the psychiatrist is concerned, I have a chemical imbalance in my brain and that’s that. The answer is ECT and medication. I’m totally left out of the equation.
Michael has a different experience of his psychiatrist, a sympathetic and responsive man. But Michael doesn’t have much faith in the treatments. He’s also frustrated by the way some people react to him, as if being a junkie and a hippie makes him less deserving of medical support. A few staff members clearly believe that his illness is self-inflicted and that he isn’t entitled to the treatment other patients are getting. Sister G is openly contemptuous of Michael. Whenever she sees him, she becomes as stiff and tight as a military officer. And when she comes across the two of us, she makes a tutting sound through her teeth before turning away on her heels. Her prejudice is directed not only at Michael but also at Andy, another recovering drug addict.
Michael doesn’t want to be in M Ward, and neither do I, but we can’t cope out in the world. We feel we have no choice but to stay in the hospital and hope that we can somehow come through to health and sanity.
*
Michael believes that the earth is dying – this is a reality for him, one he carries like a wound. When he talks about the effects of oil spills or pollution, or the Vietnam War, he turns inward. There’s a sense of helplessness then, and only his dark humour gets us through. He becomes ironic, aware that the same old conversations won’t help anything.
We’re sitting with some other patients at a table in the day room when the discussion turns to Vietnam.
‘You lot don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,’ says the Man from Kosciuszko. ‘If it weren’t for our troops in New Guinea, this country would be run by the Japs now. We’ve got to defend Australia, stop the Viet Cong before they get here.’
‘This is a different war, different situation,’ says Andy. ‘The Viet Cong aren’t interested in invading Australia. It’s a war within their own country. We should let them sort it out themselves. Vietnam for the Vietnamese.’
‘What do you reckon, Mick?’ says the Man from Kosciuszko. He never calls Michael by his full name. ‘How are we going to stop those bloody Viet Cong from invading Australia?’
‘You don’t have to ask what he thinks about the war,’ says Andy. ‘It’d be obvious, wouldn’t it?’
‘You’d probably have to do something pretty extreme to stop the Viet Cong,’ Michael says thoughtfully, glancing at me with a wicked gleam in his eye. ‘Probably need chemical warfare.’
‘You’re joking,’ says Andy, grinning.
‘You reckon?’ says Michael. ‘You’d need to get Dow Chemicals or maybe Monsanto to make a really toxic herbicide, give it a cool name, maybe “Agent Orange”, and drop it all over the country. Maximum damage.’ He takes a long drag on his cigarette. ‘Yeah, chemical warfare would be the way to go. Poison everyone in the area – pity about the civilians, the women and the kids, but, hell, that’s war. And it’ll destroy the crops too, so if people aren’t already dead from the toxicity of the stuff, they’ll starve to death. You’d contaminate the rivers and kill off the forests at the same time. Let those commie Viet Cong know you mean business. Call it “war”. Say we’re defending Australia.’
Michael stubs out his cigarette in an ashtray and speaks quietly, in an offhand way. ‘Agent Orange is chemical warfare and it’s been used for years in Vietnam by the Yanks, and probably by us too. But the Viet Cong aren’t going away.’
‘Ah, you think you’ve got it all worked out,’ says the Man from Kosciuszko, pointing his finger at Michael. ‘But you have no idea what it takes to win a war.’
‘Yeah, well, maybe not,’ says Michael. He sounds weary. He raises one hand and makes the peace sign. ‘Hey, man, make love not war.’ As he gets up to go into the kitchen, he asks the Man from Kosciuszko if he wants another coffee.
*
Since Michael’s arrival, I’ve become more aware of the existence of other patients. Sitting around the day room, Michael will often strike up conversations, drawing people out, interested to hear their stories or just chat.
We’ve quickly befriended Kate McNamara, a student who was at university in Sydney. I am in awe of her. She has wild blonde hair and sea-blue eyes behind red-framed glasses. When she speaks, you know she’s speaking her truth. She says exactly what she thinks and doesn’t care what people think of her. She is a goddess woman. She lives at the extremities of experience and jokes about it. Writes poems that take you there.
I can now see how much I have in common with the other patients. In our different ways, we’re in extreme states – lost, displaced and unhinged.
I’m distracted by a boy of about fifteen who stalks along the corridor and around the day room, muttering, his shoulders hunched, his eyes darting. I think of him as the ward sentry. To him, everything that happens signifies a threat. I see him pacing, encased in isolation, churning with anxiety, and I turn away, unable to bear his desperation.
We’re all dealing with uncertain levels of control. Yesterday, an older man exposed himself to a female patient who was wandering near the male dormitory. She taunted him, ‘Okay, you’ve got it out, now what are ya gonna do with it?’ She screamed with laughter and pretended to tear open her shirt.
A tall woman, Lydia, occasionally explodes with paranoid accusations against anyone in her vicinity. She has thick black hair and disturbing Frida Kahlo eyebrows. She thinks she’s the ward prefect and takes it on herself to make sure everyone behaves themselves. ‘Lustful hands are the devil’s work,’ she says any time she catches Michael and I hand in hand or sitting close together on a couch.
Then there’s a pale woman who sits alone in the day room staring into the distance, sometimes crying. She looks cold even though she wears a thick, oversized cardigan, her pockets stuffed with handkerchiefs. Every evening a man in a suit arrives and sits with her, holding her hand, occasionally stroking it. His briefcase contains photos and cards that he takes out to show her, one by
one. He speaks softly, but she rarely responds. I always feel defeated when he leaves, as if I’m somehow responsible for the sadness in the slope of his shoulders as he slips out the door.
*
One afternoon, resting together in the green bell, Michael and I talk about our childhoods. We’re excited when we discover that we both listened to the ABC children’s radio program The Argonauts. I feel as if we know the password to the child in each other.
‘Do you remember the song? “Fifty mighty Argonauts –”’ Michael begins.
‘“– bending to the oars”,’ I join in.
‘“Good rowing!” Shit, I loved that program, Pauls.’
The Argonauts presented segments covering geography, history and the arts. It introduced me to the idea that children could make up stories and write poetry. Based on the Greek myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece, it encouraged the romantic idea that life is an adventure, a heroic journey, a sea voyage in pursuit of a cherished goal. With your fellow Argonauts, you brave the dangers that beset you along the way and stay on course, until you retrieve your inheritance, the golden fleece.
The discovery of this piece of shared history proves to me and Michael that we are kindred spirits, fated to meet.
Talking to Michael, I see my childhood in a new light. I never felt free as a child to express my ideas or my feelings. Although we had a great deal of physical freedom to explore and wander, freedom of expression wasn’t valued. Existence was something to be earned, minute by minute, by being good, being obedient, being pure. Sin had to be avoided at all costs, so I lit candles in front of the statue of Our Lady, and I worshipped at the altar of a God nailed to a cross and crowned with thorns.
For me, Catholicism was a religion of dark compulsions, dark mysteries, guilt and sin. The belief that God could see everything I did, hear every wicked thought, dominated all the small and large dramas of my childhood. In the wooden confessional, I admitted my sins to a shadowy figure behind the grille, desperate for my guilty soul to be wiped clean. The day of my First Confession I wet my pants as I knelt in the pew, waiting to confess something; I was seven years old and terrified of what would happen behind the wooden door. I knew my badness was much worse than the petty sins I confessed to, but I couldn’t name it, so I couldn’t be forgiven. It was nothing I did exactly, it was just something I was, and Confession could offer no relief. I prayed anxiously about everything, but especially I prayed to be good. I dreamed of being a nun.
