The Green Bell

by Paula Keogh

  In 1941, when he was nineteen, Dad enlisted in the army and spent over four years at war, mostly fighting Japanese forces in New Guinea. While on a week’s leave, he and Mum were married in the church near the kindergarten where they’d first met. By the end of the war, he had a ten-month-old daughter, Irene, whom he’d never met.

  Mum has told me the story of how she waited for him on the day he was due home, sitting on the veranda with their baby and his mother. The house was on a corner, so she had a good view down the street to the bus stop. She watched as people got off the bus, walked for a while then disappeared into houses along the way. Buses came and went. She saw someone in uniform but looked beyond him to the others because he seemed like an old man. He had a limp, and he was thin and hunched over, carrying a large kit bag on his shoulders. It was only when he turned to walk in the gate that she recognised him.

  Dad has buried his experiences of his childhood and the war in parts of his soul unreachable, perhaps, even to himself. Beyond the roles of the public servant passionate about his work and the responsible family man, he isn’t easy to know well. For all his energy and enthusiasm, he’s a man who doesn’t open up readily about his personal life, although occasionally he lays down the law in the family, brings us into line.

  Two years ago, after I’d been living away from home for about a year, I moved into a share house. One night, Dad turned up in a rage. I’d never seen him like that before; I don’t think I’d even seen him angry. He’d heard that I was living with three men, so he’d come to take me away. My brother John had come with him, afraid that Dad would have a heart attack – he has a heart condition. Dad insisted that I pack my things and stay at John’s place. My housemates were taken aback, and I was mortified, but I obeyed for the sake of Dad’s health. As far as he was concerned, I was living in sin with not just one but three men, and he had to save me from humiliation.

  I was, in fact, having a relationship with one of my housemates. I’d met him at university. We only ever spoke of Julianne briefly; my unacknowledged grief was a black hole at the centre of our relationship, and after eighteen months we drifted apart.

  My parents’ world is so different from mine that the idea of telling them about this relationship had never entered my mind. They see my sexuality as sinful; they’re ashamed of me. I don’t know how I could live with them again. My father, in particular, is here in the labyrinth, fierce and protective, but an obstacle to me finding my way out.

  *

  Identity is, above all else, a pattern that enables you to have coherent responses to other people and the world around you. Without this pattern, I have to think myself together at every moment. I never know what facial expressions, what actions, what speech will be sane and right. What to do, what to say, how to be? My family, the friends who visit, the nurses – they look at me, waiting for a response. A distant part of my mind issues orders: smile, say yes, take the medication, nod.

  I’m holding on to my love for Michael as the thread that will help me find my way out of M Ward. But anxiety has made me watchful and cautious. I worry that I could lose him at any time. Day to day, with the arrival of his letters, I monitor the changes in his state of mind.

  Michael’s overdose jolted me out of the illusion of our union into the realisation that we’re separate people. And now that I’m on my own in the ward, I have to take on the burden of my distinct self with all its inadequacies. I’m forced to move from ‘we’ and ‘us’ to ‘him’ and ‘me’, but I can’t remember who I was before I met him.

  Memories of him keep me going. The day before he left for Caloola, we were granted leave passes to visit my room at Ursula College to organise my things. I needed to vacate the room, so my parents had offered to take my belongings home once they were packed up. Michael and I joked and fooled around as we swept books off the shelves and emptied the cupboards. The late afternoon light was radiant through the yellow curtains, and the untidy collection of my possessions overflowed from bags on the floor. When we’d finished, Michael and I lay together on the narrow bed. He played with my hair as we talked, twisting it around his fingers and stroking it back from my face.

  I want to follow him out of M Ward. But as I weave along the dark paths of the labyrinth, I’m discovering that the minotaur has many faces, many forms. He’s the psychiatrist, he’s my father, he’s ECT and medications, he’s my own inability to stand up for myself, he’s the absence of a place to move into. Spooked by one shadow after another, I hold on to the thread of my love, trying to solve the problem of how to live.

  *

  On the day of a scheduled meeting with Doctor Hawke and my parents, Michael rides his motorbike to the hospital from Caloola. I wait at the front doors for him, pacing the foyer. He arrives looking tired, although he hasn’t ridden a long way. We don’t know what this meeting is about, and it feels as if we’re being summoned to account for ourselves.

  We walk up to my parents, who are sitting outside the doctor’s office. When Michael leans down to greet my mother, she smiles but says nothing – I suspect she’s as reluctant to be at this meeting as we are. My father gets to his feet and shakes Michael’s hand, and they stand together, making conversation. Dad is dressed for work in a suit and tie; his short silver hair is oiled down, and his face clean-shaven. Michael, towering over Dad, is wearing his yellow-and-purple beanie, a colourful Nepalese waistcoat and dusty jeans. He carries his bike helmet under his arm, and a small canvas bag is slung over his shoulder. I’m glad to see them talking across their cultural divide.

  Once we’re all in his office, Doctor Hawke seats himself behind his desk, looking like a judge opening proceedings. Michael, Mum, Dad and I sit down in a row opposite him. I can’t see Michael from my chair, and I feel cut off from him and weighed down by the presence of my parents and Doctor Hawke. I can’t breathe. I lean forward, unable to sit up straight under the burden of their authority. I feel like a prisoner in the dock, waiting to hear my sentence proclaimed.

  Doctor Hawke clears his throat. ‘Paula is schizophrenic,’ he declares to no one in particular. He goes on to detail my medical condition and treatment as though we aren’t already all too aware of it. I begin to feel that his words are a form of treachery committing me to a life in which I’m nothing more than a victim of the chemicals in my brain, a creature with no possibility of self-determination.

  ‘Paula isn’t well enough to commit to marriage at this point in time,’ my father says. ‘We want her to live at home, at least while she’s … unwell.’ He sounds concerned and reasonable, but I feel invisible. It seems there’s no hope for me. I shouldn’t expect to make choices for myself.

  The words gathering around me dissolve. I lose the sense of the conversation, and I can’t speak. Here in this room with the psychiatrist, my parents and my fiancé, I can’t find the language to say what I want to say. I’m doubled over with the effort of trying to drag words from the place in my chest where they’re lodged. I can’t bear my passivity, my meekness, my failure to speak for myself. It isn’t just that words don’t come to mind. It’s that they don’t have the meanings I want them to have.

  I’m dispossessed of the power of the word. ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ All that power and weight and light are too much for me. If a word is God, how dare I speak? The words I want to say aren’t of God; they’re of some other power. A dark, chthonic, mad testimony to a new kind of life, to blood and flesh and desire. Sacred profanities. I want to speak words that will unsay the power in this room. I want to say ‘night’, and let it take me away. Say ‘love’ without breaking. Say the words traced in rivers. I want to say words that will bring me into the world. I want to break the spell.

  I become aware that the focus has switched to Michael. I hear Dad saying, ‘I’d like to know how you think you’re going to support my daughter.’ His voice is severe and insistent, and he turns in his chair to look at Michael.

  ‘I have income fro
m my writing,’ Michael says simply. He uncrosses his legs and places both hands flat on his jeans as if to emphasise there’s nothing more to be said.

  ‘We aren’t saying you can’t get married,’ Mum tells him, dry and tense. ‘We just want you to wait until Paula is well enough.’

  I no longer feel that Michael and I are the subject of this conversation. The two people being discussed are clearly incapable of thinking for themselves, making decisions or knowing what they want.

  ‘You will need to consider the practical details involved …’ Doctor Hawke outlines the medication regime I must follow once I leave the hospital.

  After what feels like an eternity of half-heard conversation, Michael’s voice breaks through to me. ‘We’ll wait three months before we get married,’ he says. ‘That’s what we agreed to, and we’ll stick to that.’

  I take a deep breath and begin reconnecting to myself.

  Not long after Michael’s statement, the meeting concludes with Doctor Hawke announcing that I need to stay in hospital for a while yet. In a way, I’m relieved. I don’t have the confidence to go out into the world; something is still not right with me.

  Michael said he’d come to the meeting if it wasn’t going to be heavy. It was heavy. We walk to the foyer with my parents, ignoring the meeting in our forced conversation. The only thing I can think of is that we’re now definitely committed to waiting three months until we’re married.

  In the meantime, I must find the words I need to speak the fragments of my life together. ‘Words made flesh’, words grounded in my body, my heart, not this Tower of Babel in my mind. Madness doesn’t have true language: it has bitterness and fear and confusion. It kills living words, cuts them off at their roots. I am mute in its presence, but somehow I must learn to talk back to the madness. When I can do that, I’ll be able to say what I need to say to psychiatrists, to my parents and to a society I don’t feel part of. Speak true words. Speak of the secret, forbidden things: grief, loss, anger, madness.

  *

  While Michael’s at Caloola, we write letters to each other almost every day. In the first week, his words reflect a happy and positive frame of mind, and he sends love my way.

  I love you so intensely that i wish i were still in hospital there to love you and watch over you. My shepherding instincts are for, towards, you. You are my love. It (love) grows stronger every hour, every moment. The past and present and future are ours, ours to share and plan for.

  The idea of getting married gives us hope and a sense of direction. Michael’s now thinking of an official church wedding. He writes, ‘How would you feel about St John’s here in Canberra? My great-uncle Reg Dransfield was rector there and is buried there … it’s High C of E which is exactly halfway between Catholic and Presbyterian.’

  My family will be disappointed that the ceremony isn’t Catholic, but there’s no way I can stand in front of the altar in a Catholic church and make vows. The Church of England seems a good compromise, and I know Saint John’s, a beautiful old stone building with stained-glass windows. I also like Michael’s idea that in view of the church wedding, our ceremony at Jumping Creek will become a private, unofficial event: ‘We’ll have a magic Scarborough Fair ceremony, just you & i & the land & the Lord.’

  We’re already talking of our lives as a married couple. ‘If I had a bad accident,’ Michael writes, ‘you would get a good widow’s pension. Home savings accounts too we’ll have.’ We’re searching for ‘somewhere kind’, for an escape, somewhere to go when our ‘soul is worn out’. A place where life can truly be lived as a poem.

  Although Michael has embraced the status of non-conformist, in some moods he no longer wants to be an outsider. I can see his ambivalence about this position. He stands at the gates to the city and feels exiled. He still wishes to be a dissident – but accepted as such. Even more, celebrated. Not cast out.

  What would society be without its rebels, its poets and artists? I think of the poem in which Michael wrote, ‘love / let live / all who are different or strange’. Those who are misfits, those who question and criticise, those who are simply different – they’re the aberrant genotypes of our species.

  A park ranger once told me that ten per cent of monarch butterflies take a different migratory path to the main group. He said that if the other ninety per cent were wiped out by an environmental catastrophe, the ten per cent that took the alternative route – the aberrant genotype – would help guarantee the survival of the species. I want to believe that people like Michael and I are aberrant genotypes, and as with the butterflies, our unconventional experiences and paths have some meaning and value. Although it’s hard to hold on to this idea in the face of feeling useless and hopeless, in theory I believe that people who are different ensure the vitality of our species.

  Michael’s sense of not being accepted undermines his confidence in himself and has become a source of pain. But a light shines on the horizon. He seems to think that our marriage will mean a degree of acceptance while allowing love and poetry to remain the focus of his life.

  We’re clinging to something tied to stability, something enduring, something that represents wholeness, at a time when we’re fragile, broken and adrift. In M Ward, though, we faced none of the challenges of the real world. When Michael was here, all we had to do was be together. Our love is a hothouse plant, unfamiliar with harsher climes. We’ll need to find, in ourselves, practical skills and inner strength; we’ll need to connect enough with external reality to get ourselves a place to live and an income.

  Michael writes to me about finding a job, and about his ideas for his new prose book and other writing projects. He has been awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant of $2500 and wants to use the money to pay off his mortgage on Jumping Creek. We’ll fix the cottage up and live there on money from his writing and my casual work. I’ll take a year off from uni – at the moment I’m not sure if I could manage study, but I’m determined to finish my degree once Michael and I have established our life together.

  After less than two weeks at Caloola, though, Michael’s letters begin to describe experiences of illness and weariness. He writes of ‘freaking out’ as he endures the long nights in his small hut, and he describes ‘strange, bad days’.

  o dearest sweet Paul

  I’ve had a very strange bad day, and night now. Must be my stars out of line. Was violently ill this morning, rested til lunch, washed up all our dishes & spent afternoon and evening with Richard up at the shearing shed … Haven’t a clue what’s wrong with me. Perhaps it’s pneumonia & kidney disease. Anyway I feel terribly sick …

  I’d thought that overall Michael’s health was gradually improving, but it seems he’s still physically very weak and mentally fragile. He wants to feel the sense of accomplishment that comes with contributing to farm work, but his efforts are taking a toll.

  Got the shits real bad, claustrophobia in this tiny hut. Went back down to the homestead & talked farming & psychiatry talk & was given loving help & coffee & a pinch of port to drink. Took a Nardil and all my proper pills. It’s like the B.I. shits but have had no speed for a week.

  A tone of desperation seeps through Michael’s descriptions of his days, and it’s becoming obvious that he won’t stay long at the farm. We’re both standing at the end of a wharf ready to depart, but there’s no ship in sight and no place to go.

  *

  Michael’s mother comes to Canberra to see him and have a meeting with his psychiatrist. And she wants to meet me. Michael writes, ‘You will meet her, she you, you will love each other. Talked to her for 9 minutes today trunk call. Cost me $2.50 but worth every penny.’ This meeting is important to him, and I feel that I need to be sane and composed.

  We go out to dinner at the Travelodge Motel. Michael is full of our plans, wanting his mother’s approval for the wedding and our move to Jumping Creek. Mrs Dransfield is gracious and interested. She listens carefully to Michael’s animated description of the wedding at Saint John’s
. She is, I think, pleased by the family connection to the church.

  Michael is sitting up straight and eagerly outlining the future he’s planning with his prospective wife. I’m seeing a new side of him: a coming together of the brilliant young poet, the good son and the conscientious husband-to-be. He’s charming and funny as we eat our dinner, and I’m impressed by his vision of our future.

  I’m also sitting up straight, putting forward my most rational self. When Mrs Dransfield asks me about my life, I speak of our hopes of living together, along with our plans to travel to Vienna and Greece, possibly India. Michael is her only son, and I’m aware that I’m not exactly the person she would be hoping for as a daughter-in-law. I feel as though I’m tripping up with every sentence I utter.

  At one point in the dinner, I see the three of us as if we’re actors in a play and I’m watching from the wings. I see in the angle of Mrs Dransfield’s head that she isn’t taken in by our performances. I think she sees us as romantics, not lacking in dreams but not adequate to the task of making them real.

  Afterwards, Michael rides back to the hospital with me in a taxi. He reckons the night has been a great success. I’m not so sure. I used to have a best self that I could produce for such occasions, but now the most I can do is scrape together fragments of a self and hope that it will get me through.

  *

  My parents agree to Michael and me staying at their house for the weekend. I’m amazed by this shift in their attitude – maybe they’re starting to accept us. I apply for a leave pass, and Michael rides in from Caloola. When he arrives, my mother shows him to the front room upstairs, and he throws his shoulder bag and coat over the chair at the desk. I look at the narrow bed that he’ll be occupying, and I imagine the impossible: him slipping downstairs and spending the night with me.