The Green Bell

by Paula Keogh

  His energy and motivations are deeply rooted in his inner world. He has a mercurial style and a way with language, creating imaginary worlds or recalling them from legends, spinning stories on short walks to the hospital cafeteria or while waiting for doctor’s appointments. He’s volatile, one minute animated and enthusiastic, the next moody and introverted. I find these transformations exciting, mystifying.

  Love has drawn my entire life’s dreaming together in one sleight of hand and transferred it to Michael. He’s highly creative, compassionate, funny, attentive. Being with him is a dynamic play of feeling, music, imagining and storytelling. My ego is shattered. I find it hard to make decisions, to think rationally. For me, our shared self fills this vacuum. As Michael’s beloved, I have an identity to inhabit, one that takes me right out of my small and limited existence, placing me in the myth of romantic love.

  *

  Michael tells me that he’s having a hard time getting his current book, Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, published. He says that people just can’t cope with his work.

  Then he tells me that he’s bisexual, and that some of the poems in Memoirs are about his sexual relationships with men. Although I’m surprised at first, it makes sense. Michael has a fluid sensuality and an androgynous personality, a blend of the masculine and feminine that complements his fine, angular body. I’ve never known a man like him before, and I haven’t known anyone who’s openly homosexual or bisexual.

  Growing up in the Church, I formed the idea that sex between unmarried people was sinful, a lustful act, while ‘conjugal love’ between a married couple was holy and pure. But since losing my faith, I’ve rejected these ideas. For me, sex between consenting adults involves a natural pleasure that people should be free to engage in as they wish, whether they’re homosexual, heterosexual or bisexual. The only hitch for me is that I can’t bear to share a sexual partner with someone else.

  Michael makes bisexuality seem an obvious way of being. He speaks of how easy it is to love both men and women, and says it would feel unnatural to be limited to having sex with only one gender. He feels that he’s a third sex, both male and female, or either, depending on who he’s with or what’s happening.

  I envy his ability to talk so unselfconsciously. I can engage in sex with pleasure and without inhibition, but I can’t talk about it. There’s some deep disconnect in me between language and the life of the body. My mind refuses any speech relating to body parts, functions, pleasures; it’s all forbidden, off limits, except as an abstraction. I feel as though that part of my brain is actually missing.

  The more Michael talks about his sexuality, the more I realise how little I understand of his life. I’ve read about homosexual literary figures like Oscar Wilde, and I know that sexual acts between men are still illegal in most of Australia, but I don’t know what the personal costs might be for someone like Michael speaking and writing so openly. What I do know is that his sexuality means ostracism, bigotry, danger. I’ve read of ‘poofter bashings’, and of a man being pushed into the Torrens River and drowned for being homosexual. It was claimed that police were responsible.

  I know Michael in my soul while at the same time I don’t know him at all. I like this sense that he exists beyond my understanding and somehow beyond this life, in the world of his poetry where there are no limitations and no rules.

  Alone and sleepless in my bed, I realise that while Michael is still something of a mystery to me, I don’t really know who I am either. I’m questioning everything, and I can’t find a place anywhere. Michael, at least, identifies with a range of subcultures: hippies, junkies, the poetry scene. He looks and acts as if he’s on the side of the revolution; he describes himself as a ‘freak’ and derides ‘straight’ society. But while people might assume I’m a hippie because I have long hair and wear jeans, and sometimes long dresses, I don’t think of myself as one. I don’t think of myself as part of any group – even though, like Michael, I’m alienated by our materialistic society.

  We’re both outsiders committed to finding new ways of living and being, and there are no clear-cut lines for us. We’re emotionally tied to some conservative values and opposed to others. Michael is a bit of a wheeler and dealer, at least as he describes it; he has bought and sold properties despite being a strong critic of capitalism. He wants to be a revolutionary poet but also supported by the established poetry scene. And he’d like us to get married. He says that he wants nothing to do with ‘straight’ society, but he craves acceptance and acknowledgement.

  I’m caught in my own confusion of affiliations and values. One minute I’m an atheist, the next an agnostic, the next praying desperately to God for help. On some days I’m a feminist strictly opposed to patriarchal values, while on others I find myself dreaming of a wedding dress and a bouquet. I’m intellectually attempting to work it all out while emotionally unable to connect with a sense of self.

  Our contradictions are woven through the stories we tell each other of our lives. M Ward is a place of storytelling as much as it’s a space of gloom, extreme moods and empty routines, and our tales are healing. They weave our lives together in the face of a madness that threatens to tear everything apart.

  *

  One evening when the day room is full of patients and visitors, Michael tells me that he’s made a deal with Sally, a nurse who often does night shift. If we’re careful and are back before ten, we can slip outside for a while. Sally has henna-red hair and a bright, bantering energy that lightens the mood on the ward. She gets on better with the patients than with the other staff, and she’s turned a blind eye to night absences before. Grateful for the reprieve from the crowded day room, Michael and I take off to the lake shore.

  It’s dark inside the green bell, and the night air is cold. We wrap ourselves in Michael’s coat for warmth and lean against the tree trunk. I hear water rats rummaging among the reeds, and through the willow branches I see the flickering lights of the city across the water.

  The night is still and silent, and our voices are soft so as not to break the spell of our closeness, our warmth. Here in the green bell, intimacy is as easy as breathing.

  Michael talks about our wedding and our life at Jumping Creek, describing the music filling the house, the cottage garden we’ll create, and the friends dropping in to visit. We tease each other about our plans and laugh at the audacity of our hopes for a ‘normal’ life.

  I roll us cigarettes and, not wanting to pollute the earth, Michael collects our butts and saves them in my empty Drum tobacco pouch. With Michael’s arm around me, happiness and tenderness rise within me like waves from a deep ocean. I feel an ecstatic sense that the world is alive, that I’m alive.

  I turn towards Michael as his face appears in the flash of a lit match, its planes and hollows exaggerated by the upward tilt of the flame. He seems suddenly a stranger, haunted and old. As he inhales on his cigarette, his eyes gleam with an otherworldly fire, some fierce and ageless wizardry.

  I glimpse the vast and unknowable nature of his being, a spark of the eternal in him, and feel the shock of his otherness, his other-worldliness. I’m spooked, jolted out of our shared mood.

  Michael senses my withdrawal and makes a joke, and, as we laugh, I see him again as his familiar self. But I know I have seen something in Michael, something distant and ancient, and it’s eerie and unsettling, and thrilling.

  Soon I’m aware only of Michael’s presence, the soft air around us, and the damp, loamy smell inside the green bell. As I place my warm hand on his cool cheek, he presses his face into my palm and smiles. I know I’ll never forget the way he looks at me, never be this happy again.

  Sorcerer, note how the stars attend our banquet

  And all the trees dance to our song

  We drink yet our cup is overflowing

  Ah truly, what have you done?

  See in the water the long willow drifting

  Time is an anchor and love’s set us free

  The lake is the sky and cre
ation’s exploding

  In your eyes; come, dance with me.

  We’re sailing off in a ship of fools

  Let heaven take care of the way

  From here there is no place we’ve need of to go

  Blind lovers, we’ve looked on the sun.

  5

  Life as a Poem

  It’s a sunny morning and light fills the day room. Kitchen staff are busy collecting our used breakfast plates and cutlery, stacking them on trolleys, their movements quick and deliberate. A small group of patients are talking at a table over coffees; others have taken solitary places on couches and chairs under the windows. Michael and I turn our backs to the room, sit on the floor in the corner facing the stereo cabinet, and listen to Chopin – nocturnes, waltzes, mazurkas; some melancholy and interior, others a dance of grace and joy, a play of sound that whirls around us. We imagine living in the city of music, nineteenth-century Vienna, attending concerts and balls in the palaces, wearing glorious clothes, fluttering our fans.

  When another waltz begins, Michael turns up the volume, stands and, with a bow, takes my hand. The next minute we’re dancing around the tables in a giddy release while someone claps and the Man from Kosciuszko waves his arms as if conducting an orchestra.

  Before long a nurse appears and turns the music down, then frowns and sweeps out of the room. As we go back to our place on the floor, Michael is overtaken by a coughing fit – a harsh ripping of his chest that takes every bit of his attention. When it finishes, he narrows his eyes in exaggerated frustration and turns the music up again, very loud. For a few defiant moments it fills the space around us. Then, as he turns it down, he smiles and shrugs.

  We get an ashtray from a table and light cigarettes. Michael blows smoke rings for my amusement, and they drift on the air between us. When he finishes his cigarette, he leans forward and moves into a rave about the music of Erik Satie. He says that all poems are songs, and poets wandering minstrels. I see the dream he’s in and enter it without hesitation.

  Michael’s raves come in bits and pieces, so I can hardly put them together, hardly take it all in. Highs and lows, loves and hates, narratives of flight and coming down. Light seems to flicker through his being in shifting patterns as his mind entertains the many contradictions in his life and the world around him. With his thin body, long arms and strong hands, and his small, delicate head, Michael moves as though he’s not quite at home on the earth. He’s acutely sensitive to touch, to voice and sound, to ambience. He wears his soul as a skin, his only skin.

  I write in my notebook, Here in a nuthouse, crazy about you, and hand it to him. ‘Dig it,’ he says, and we laugh – at ourselves, at the absurdity of everything. We make more plans for what we’ll do when we get out. A long walk through the forests down the south coast. A journey by boat to Vienna and Greece. A future together.

  *

  ‘You know, religions are amazing fantasies,’ says Michael later that day, as we walk towards the general hospital cafeteria.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I say.

  ‘Well, religions are fantastic stories.’

  I think about this for a minute. ‘You can’t say that religions are just stories. Every religion claims that its beliefs are the truth.’

  ‘They do,’ Michael says, turning towards me, ‘but my religion says they’re all stories and they’re all true.’ His eyes are shining.

  ‘So who’s your God, then?’ I ask, puzzled. I think that Michael’s family is Presbyterian – and he went to Sydney Grammar, an Anglican school – but in all our discussions my sense was that he didn’t believe in any religion.

  He answers, ‘All of them, all the gods. I bow to Yahweh, Shiva, Allah, Jesus, Buddha –’

  ‘Buddha’s not a god.’

  ‘He’s a god to me – and so are Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus.’

  ‘Then so are Hera and Aphrodite.’

  ‘Definitely! They all come from the imagination,’ he says, ‘and that’s what I worship – the imagination. And I serve them all. All the gods, all the goddesses.’

  ‘That’d be chaotic. You’d never know where you are.’

  ‘Do I look like someone who wants to know where he is?’ he says, grinning.

  ‘Well, you’d at least want to know what is true,’ I say. I’d like to be clear on this.

  ‘All the invisibles are true. There’s no such thing as a false fantasy.’

  ‘But fantasies are, by definition, not true.’

  ‘Not real, maybe,’ he says.

  We walk in silence for a few moments. This is a lot for me to take in. Although I’ve lost faith in the God of Catholicism, I still carry a reverence for truth, and believe that truth and fantasy are opposites. Michael’s ideas run counter to almost everything I’ve previously understood. I’m holding out for the experience of revealed truth, something I can believe without doubt. I’m no longer an atheist, but I’m not sure if I am an agnostic either. Maybe God is the intelligence of the universe, the designing force inherent in everything. A sublime energy. The earth itself, the night sky, the stars and the galaxies, spiralling infinity. ‘God’ seems like another word for the whole of creation. But that doesn’t really get me anywhere. I still don’t understand how it all holds together.

  ‘What about the sacred in your scheme of things?’ I ask Michael.

  ‘Hmm. I reckon it’s when the gods visit. Like now –’ He pulls me towards him and kisses me.

  In the cafeteria, we start speculating about black holes. I’m fascinated by them and want to understand how they’re created, even though I haven’t even the most basic grasp of physics. ‘The problem with you is that you want to understand everything,’ says Michael. ‘I just want to feel okay. I think we’re both screwed.’

  He’s right that my craving for answers is a problem. Once you’ve been mad, you can never again take the realm of the real as the only truth. I’m no longer content with bare reality. It’s never ‘what you see is what you get’; there’s always something beyond appearances. But I can’t pin down the idea of God, just as I can’t explain Michael. They’re mysteries. Everything is. And my brain can’t accept this. It can’t understand that there are no final answers to my questions.

  *

  For Michael, poetry is life itself. Living life as a poem is the true purpose of existence. He tries to view each event and every object through the eyes of his imagination. He has a way of being in the world that’s open and spontaneous, a willingness to throw himself into whatever’s happening and see through to its essence, its truth. There’s never a sense of him being only half there.

  When he was nineteen, Michael wrote in his diary: ‘poetry is the blood in my veins, my mind, what I drink and who I kiss and who most I fear. It is me.’ He seems to feel that poems are written through him, that in the act of writing poetry he becomes an instrument of a greater power. Sometimes he thinks of this power as a living poetic tradition, at others as the gods to which, in his unique way, he surrenders with passion, with devotion.

  I’ve been writing poems since I was fourteen, but I haven’t shared them with anyone – even Julianne, though she knew I wrote poetry. Now, tentatively at first, and then with more confidence, I give them to Michael to read, grateful that he takes them seriously as poems and as personal communications. He probes me with questions: ‘What does this feel like? What does it make you think of?’ After reading one of my poems, he says, ‘With the first line, you stick the knife in. In the last line, you turn it.’

  He gives me copies of his books Streets of the Long Voyage and The Inspector of Tides, both inscribed with loving dedications. He tells me that his third book, Drug Poems, was released at the beginning of the year, but he hasn’t a copy on him to give me.

  I start by reading his poem ‘Letter to people about pelicans’, and one afternoon when we’re in my room listening to music, I tell Michael that I like its passion and irony, its absurdist humour. He says, ‘What’s a poem when we’re all dying, the earth’s dying,
the animals are dying?’ In the diffuse sunlight, we talk about a future where cities have become like the Warsaw ghetto, overcrowded and unbearably bleak.

  Michael points to the silver Star of David he’s wearing around his neck. ‘I’m a Jew,’ he says. ‘We both are.’ The truth in what he says has nothing to do with ancestry. With the Holocaust just a generation behind us, Jews constellate persecution and suffering on an archetypal level. Michael feels that he’s one of the chosen – and one of the cursed. And he thinks I am too.

  *

  We’re bent over coffees at a day-room table when a man walks up to us, takes a chair and begins talking. He has unruly dark hair and a beard, and he speaks to me as if he knows me. I’m polite to him, but it’s only when he introduces himself to Michael as ‘Ross’ that my memories of him begin to surface.

  I met Ross at a house party a couple of years ago. He was in the kitchen opening a bottle of beer with his teeth while looking sideways at me standing in the doorway. He and his two friends had a loutish energy about them, telling jokes and handing out drinks to anyone passing through. We got talking. He drove me home that night in his old green Riley with running boards down the sides and deep leather seats. We kissed in the car park of the Mount Ainslie lookout, listening to the Rolling Stones. In the next couple of weeks we saw each other a few times, but then Ross left for Sydney and I hadn’t seen him since.

  I study him as he and Michael make small talk. He’s changed entirely; no wonder I didn’t recognise him. His hair used to be shorter, and he was clean-shaven. And he had an easy smile that seems to have disappeared entirely. In its place is shocked confusion, as if someone has just shut a door in his face. Or as if he’s forgotten who he is – or doesn’t care to know.

  ‘Yeah, got conscripted,’ he says to Michael. ‘Got the dummy’s ticket in the birthday lottery. Was over there way too long.’

  ‘Shit, man. What rotten luck. I got one too, but didn’t pass the medical.’

  ‘Yeah, well, them’s the breaks,’ Ross says, looking away.