by Paula Keogh
But since Michael’s death, something has been rising within me, a surging, erratic energy that I’m riding like a wave, hoping I can make it to land, hoping I don’t drown. Survival is the imperative, but waves are unpredictable. You might catch a wave that turns into a tsunami. Or a bitch wave – that’s the kind I’m riding now. She would not hear. This is who I am. And being this person, being this bitch, makes me strong.
The coroner finds that Michael’s death was caused by ‘acute broncho-pneumonia and brain damage following a self-administered injection of an unknown substance’. My mind flees from the details of his death. Sometimes, though, I see a fleeting image of Michael holding up a syringe and flicking a fingernail against the barrel. I almost feel something – but then the image is gone, and I’m on to the next thing. I am a million miles from him, from the green bell. The time I spent with Michael, our plans, his smile, have vanished from my life. I’ve become the unfeeling woman of Swinburne’s poem that Michael slipped under my door. Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear, she would not hear. I could say that I’ve lost the capacity to feel, but it’s truer to say that after he died I rejected the feelings that came. I would not let them in. They were robbers battering on my door, come to steal my life and sanity. After a while, the storm passed, the feelings stopped coming, and now I have none at all.
When thoughts of Michael circle me in the night, I take an intellectual approach. I reason that each person is ultimately responsible for themselves. But another voice objects that if we aren’t responsible for one another, for the tangled lives that we live with other people, what’s the point of it all? Still another voice insists that we live in hazard; we’re subject to forces far greater than our own desires, and free will is a fiction.
But no matter how these thoughts obsess me, I know that there’s no reasoning, no understanding – and no absolution. She would not hear.
*
The dimly lit room in the Hall bungalow smells of smoke, though the fire is low now and a draft blows in under the door. Our dinner plates are empty, and our conversation about Michael has become choppy. Thoughts are cut off in mid-sentence; it’s impossible to complete an idea. Too much is unthinkable, and nothing can be said with any confidence. There’s a sense of confusion, loose ends.
‘It’d help if we knew why he … or what he was … ’ says David.
‘We’ll never really know why,’ I say.
‘Some think that it was you,’ Kate says.
Eyes turn on me.
‘Who says that?’ I ask mildly.
‘People,’ says Kate.
‘You?’
‘No. Not me. People in Sydney.’
I say nothing then. I know people think that I broke off my engagement to Michael and this was the reason he overdosed. I also know that regret is an emotion that turns back on itself, holds tight and will not let go. It has the logic of a steel trap. It will not release me from its jaws.
But I’m the bitch. I cope.
In ‘Still Life’, a poem dedicated to me, Michael wrote: ‘we’re much too close for any one / but death who watches & for god / who knows’. Death and God are a formidable duo, and I’m determined to have nothing to do with either of them – or with love. I’m obsessed by lines from a Wallace Stevens poem about a man, a woman and a blackbird. I feel that these lines are about love and death. From the time of his overdose in M Ward, a blackbird stood between Michael and me, creating an unholy trinity, an unsolvable mystery. Or a knot impossible to untie. People die for love, die of love, die without love, die in love, die in spite of love. I live in spite of death.
The wave I’m riding has brought me to land. I know that I’m not dead, though I live in cryonic suspension. Cold, frozen, hardly real. Kept awake at night by the noise, I can’t look away from Michael’s death, but I can’t bear to see it either. I can’t make amends; I can never fix things or make our lives good again. I can’t make him feel better. I turn away because in the morning I have to get up and walk out into the day, into the naked sunlight. There’s no way back from here.
I know I’ll never love again the way I loved Michael. The passion and illusion of that type of surrender will not return. But I’m determined to survive. I float outside the stream of life, and I stay sane – if sanity is what this is. I’m Prufrock; I prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet, and I get through the days.
As the months pass, time loses its pace, becomes haphazard, forgetful. I want things to matter, but they don’t. There’s only the cold weight of each day, the misery of each night descending, the persistent sense of loss – and the vast distance between myself and others. I guess this is grief. If it is, its hallmark is absence. He’s no longer here.
*
Somehow I’ve become mad again. I’m in Callan Park Mental Hospital in Sydney, and I’m trying to remember what happened.
I came down here with a man I was going out with. Stayed with some friends of his in Balmain and partied on without proper sleep for days. During a night spent in a park by myself, I lost connection with reality. As dawn broke over the harbour, I watched a motorboat slash the pink membrane on the surface of the water. The person I’d become split open. The bitch couldn’t hold it together after all.
I was talking to people in a coffee shop about bees when an ambulance arrived and took me to an emergency ward. A doctor in a white coat gave me a hug, his hand holding my head hard to his chest. I could feel his heart beating. He told me that everything would be okay. A sharp pain caused by the pen in his top pocket pressing into my forehead brought me back to myself. For a few seconds the madness was contained. I could breathe. I was safe. The pain from the pen felt good.
Then I was brought here, to Callan Park, a large Victorian-era institution. There seem to be hundreds of patients. My dorm is a long room with eight beds lined up, each bedhead against the wall. As I walk from my bed along the narrow room to the door, I smell stale menstrual blood. I turn away, grasp the crisscrossing bars at the windows and look out onto the grounds below. I’m locked inside a cage with the noise. At the door, there’s a glassed-in booth for the staff. It’s a severe institution, and I’ve been committed. They won’t let me leave.
During the long stretch of afternoon, anxious minds obsess over old sorrows, and people are restless. I’m sitting on a bench in the huge dining room, talking to Ken, a nurse with long hair and eyes that are small behind the thick lens of his glasses. His manner is slow and casual, and though he looks heavy in his white uniform, he moves lightly among the patients. He calls me Hiawatha because my hair is in plaits and I’m wearing loose hospital pyjamas.
I feel I can ask Ken questions. Before this moment, I was pacing the cavernous but crowded spaces of the hospital, confused and tense. Now, Ken’s explaining to me why the doctors won’t let me leave, and he’s talking about how I might change their minds. I’ve refused to sign the consent forms for ECT, and I’m desperate to leave. Ken tells me there will be an assessment in a few days. Doctors will decide then if I’m sane enough to be let out.
Ken explains it’s important that I don’t hear voices – I must tell the doctors that I’ve had a problem with critical thoughts, but I’ll be fine if I can return to Canberra and continue on with my life. We practise saying this. Ken prompts me, running through the questions they’ll ask about my life in Canberra and the side effects of the medication they’ve given me.
I’m determined to be sane at this meeting. Not mad, sad or bad. I will brush my hair and go in smiling. Say the right things.
Afterwards, I sit on a bench in the dining hall and make a vow to myself. I promise I’ll never again have ECT or allow myself to be put into a mental hospital. I know that I have to be careful how I live – the wild life is not for me. I tell myself that I must find a way to deal with reality, with loss and grief, without breaking open. Bitch, slut, schizo, whatever, I’m going to be sane, and I’m going to live my life as a poem. For Julianne. For Michael. For myself. Survival is the password.
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I soon find out that the assessment went well. I’m cleared to leave. The clerk at the desk gives me back my handbag and my clothes. I catch a taxi to Central Station and eventually find a bus to Canberra. I’ve been at Callan Park no more than a couple of weeks, and I’m ready to start again. I must mourn Michael and let him go. I must find a way to live with everything that’s happened. I just don’t know how.
*
When I first see the village of Captains Flat, it looks scarred and beaten, as if it suffered a disaster sometime in the past and never recovered. Huge slagheaps dominate the main street, and surrounding mountain ranges brood in the distance. It’s hidden away in the Southern Tablelands, forty miles south of Canberra. I now live on its outskirts, in an old timber house set back from the road behind a row of coarse shrubs.
The Flat is not so much a town as a relic, what remains of a once-booming mining community. Dilapidated houses, many of them empty, sink into long grass behind collapsing fences, and a dusty general store sells what I need to keep me going. Downstream from the abandoned mine, the riverbanks are scorched bare of vegetation. The pub – which once boasted the longest bar in the country – is now mostly boarded off. Drinks are served in a dimly lit room with a dartboard hanging on the wall and boxes of dominos lined up on the windowsill. Thursday is darts night, and sometimes a meat raffle is held on a Friday. I’m an outsider in the town, but so is everyone who lives here, in their own way.
Tonight the moon is full and I’ve climbed to the top of the highest slagheap. Balanced on the rim of the mound and surrounded by shadows and outer space, I smoke a cigarette and my mind clears. The skeletons of a broken crane and other mining equipment lie around me at odd angles of collapse. I breathe in the acrid smell of damp slag and sulphur, and listen to the feral cats yowling as they mate in the darkness. The air in my nostrils and on my cheeks is as sharp as ice.
Earlier today I saw a dead wedge-tailed eagle. It was laid out on the footpath in front of the pub, wings spread to their full span, its head in profile and its cedar-brown eye glassy and fixed. I stopped and looked. The bird looked back at me with that one unseeing eye, its beak open in a silent death shriek. After a long moment, I stepped around it and continued on my way. Now, as I sit on top of the highest slagheap looking down at the town, I see in the foreground an image of the eagle. I look away but, against the dark sky I’ve turned towards, I see again the fixed shape of the dead bird, its wings outstretched in a parody of flight, its head bowed.
Everything about the slagheaps is stripped back. Dead tree trunks rise from stagnant ponds like claws reaching up from the underworld of the mines. In the daytime these ponds are fluorescent pink and orange with chemical seepage. Here in the moonlight they shine like mirrors. I feel at home here; I crave this landscape. I come here when the moon is bright so I can see my way to make the climb. It’s too steep to clamber straight up – I have to angle my way across and around the side. I always stumble and slip, my feet dislodging rocks and gravel as I go. There’s nothing to hold on to, and it’s a long way down if you fall.
This place speaks to me of things that can’t be said, of meanings that have to be endured alone. I sit here in some pre-verbal state of communion – not with Michael as himself, but with his death. I’m at one with the remote intimacy of the stars. I’m devoid of all feeling. These slagheaps are the landscape of my grief: austere, impersonal, cold. I belong here.
*
As I try to reach through to something real, I listen to music. The sound enters my heart and changes its rhythm, strengthens its pulse. I’m sure it even makes my blood richer, redder, as it enters my soul, bringing hope and life.
I’m obsessed with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2 in C Minor. I experience the love in the music and my love for the music, and each time there’s a breakthrough to life. Julianne is with me. We’re in the music. The world is playing.
Listening to this concerto, I come to understand madness in a new way. In one of its guises, madness is bondage to a reality that’s insular and personal. It offers you the kind of truth you see when you’re in pieces: a broken, defeated sort of truth. But Rachmaninoff’s music allows me to see that madness is also a profound journey into the depths of the human soul, into my own soul.
As the intensity and momentum of the music peaks, I’m at the mercy of a power that can crush me. I’m wrestling with the dark angel, with the exquisite musculature of the music. I’m about to lose everything. But then the twin narratives of longing and loss enter the fray, weaving their energy through the melody. The encounter with the angel becomes a dance. We circle each other. Nothing is resolved, but everything is acknowledged. There is no danger now that I will fall into chaos. The truth of the music draws me back into life. The tragedy as well as the beauty of our hazardous existence is affirmed. I discover that others have fallen into the abyss – and then found their way back. People like Rachmaninoff.
When the music ends, I’m weak and trembling. I’ve lived through something profoundly disturbing, something that has put me in touch with the invisible, with voices that refuse to be silenced, with the darkest oceans of night. The emotional weight of the music leaves me humbled. I think of Rilke’s poem ‘The Man Watching’:
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
Rachmaninoff’s concerto overpowers me like ‘some immense storm’, but it doesn’t leave me feeling strong, only cleansed, somehow blessed. I accept that I know so little about life and how we all came to be, where we’re going. Often after this music, I need to sleep.
*
Canberra has drawn me back, and I’m now living in a suburban red-brick house in Kingston. It’s one of a row of houses that face a Greek Orthodox Church, just a short walk to the lake. The Maltese landlord leans on a stick and shuffles up the front steps to collect the rent every fortnight. He lived in the house for nearly thirty years and supplied local florists with flowers. One day he tells me that in spring the yard used to be full of daffodils, poppies, lilies, crocuses and hyacinths. Now there’s just a jumble of broken wooden crates and weeds. And no matter the season, the house is always cold, even though I’ve hung a curtain to keep the heat in and painted the window frames bright yellow.
It’s been two years since Michael died. I’m studying the final subject of my degree and working as a research assistant. I spend my days in a small, windowless cubicle in the National Library; I read journal articles and feel as if my life has reached a dead end. I was in a relationship but it broke down some time ago, so my social life now consists of long cups of tea with Kate McNamara and the occasional night at the union bar.
In the library cafe, I meet Leo, a PhD student who is forthright about politics and very sure of himself. One evening we have a picnic dinner at the Cotter River and, as darkness falls, we decide to go swimming. The cold water is breath-taking. I move against the current, watching the last of the light gleam and disappear into the depths. The dark shapes of the casuarinas mark the bank; high above, the evening star appears below the curve of a new moon. I feel warm inside my tingling skin, my body pushing against the river, the water’s energy rushing through me.
Later that night, after a glass of wine, Leo and I are in bed together when my cat, Sappho, leaps from the wardrobe onto Leo’s bare back. Leo roars with rage and tosses Sappho off the bed. I jump up and try to comfort her and placate Leo, who is yelling and pulling on his jeans while turning to the mirror, trying to see the scratches on his back. It’s obvious he’s hurt, so I start running around the house in search of bandaids, while Sappho, back on top of the wardrobe, glares at us and yowls.
I apologise frantically to Leo, but he’s furious. He will not accept apologies and will not wait for me to put bandaids on his back. ‘Fuck that cat! What the hell was it doing?’ Making a threatening gesture at Sappho, he storms out of my house, slamming the door behind him.
I don’t expect to see him again.
I soothe my nerves by stroking Sappho, who by now is sitting comfortably on my lap by the heater, purring in her superior feline way. I’m still shocked. I lean close into the warmth of the heater for comfort until Sappho looks at me and meows, and the whole incident in the bedroom suddenly strikes me as funny. I start laughing, and before long I can’t stop. I’m not sure whether I’m laughing or crying. Tears are rolling down my cheeks, and I’m convulsing so hard that I slip off the chair onto the floor.
Then I’m in no doubt that I’m sobbing, deep and gruelling surges of grief that bring with them searing memories of Michael.
Hours later, when there’s nothing left in me, no memories and no tears, I make my way to bed. When Dad was exasperated with some aspect of our behaviour, he would urge us to ‘wake up to ourselves’. Right now, in some essential way, I’ve woken up to myself. The hard truth of myself.
I open my eyes the next morning to the ringing of bells. The church across the road is celebrating a feast day, and I can hear cars massing outside in the rain. I lie in bed depleted and leaking tears, listening to the bells and the rain on the roof. Hours pass. I begin to move into the day. I sit at the table under the front window, sipping my coffee and watching the crowds huddle under umbrellas as they file out of the church. Droplets of rain coalesce and run in tendrils down the grey window, and I see that there’s no truth in my life. I realise with a surge of pain that I’ve been sleepwalking through the days. I see myself at parties, drinking wine and laughing. Or sitting at my desk in the library under the fluorescent lights, busily taking notes. Apart from when I’m listening to music, I skate across the surface of my days, estranged from feelings and from people.
I’m no longer psychotic, but I’m not sane either. Madness threatens to hijack my thinking at any moment. Hypercritical thoughts attack my actions, my reactions. I’m anxious all the time. As I talk to people or cross a road, outrageous images flash through my mind: I’m tearing open my shirt and exposing my breasts, or falling into a crack that opens in the concrete. Once, as I stand on the footpath, I see myself stepping in front of a truck coming along the road. During a conversation, I imagine that the walls are about to fall on me. Constructing a sane personality that can function in the world is like trying to build a hut in the middle of a river. Sanity is an achievement, one that takes enormous effort, minute by minute.
