The Green Bell

by Paula Keogh

  On the first day I go looking, I find the house that I want to live in. It’s on a hill at the edge of Warburton in the Yarra Ranges, surrounded by the foliage of mountain ash, beech and tree ferns. In just a few weeks, Pippa and I have moved out there and made it home. Pippa is protective, sharp as a whip, and she’s been a constant companion to Rowan and me for twelve years.

  Within a month of moving to Warburton, I learn that Pippa has cancer and is dying. Her sad brown eyes know it, and her body is weak. At night I lie with her on the floor in front of the fire, communing in the way that you can with a dog. During the day she likes to be carried to the car for a trip down to the river, where she lies on the grass in the sun watching the ducks, lifting her head slightly to sniff the air as they waddle past.

  On a day when Mum and Irene are visiting from Canberra, Pippa can’t stand up and her breathing is laboured. I ring the vet, who comes and gives her a lethal injection. She dies in Mum’s arms. Irene digs a grave, and we bury her wrapped in a blanket. I always thought I’d be living in the bush here with Pippa. Her death teaches me something about mourning and, though I miss her, her loving energy remains in the house for weeks.

  After Pippa’s death, I lie in bed at night listening to frog songs, the mating sounds of wombats, the wind in the trees and the silence. I open myself to the energy of the place, write poetry and short stories, and sink into a kind of peace I’ve not experienced for a long time.

  But after some months, that peace becomes stagnation. I am lost again. I find the starry beauty of the night cold and lonely, as if the abyss has swallowed me. I lose myself in the darkness of space, in a feeling of non-existence. I am nothing. As I walk along the banks of the Yarra through tree ferns and mountain ash, I try to convince myself that everything will be alright if I can just keep putting one foot in front of the other. If only I can just keep walking, endlessly moving through the landscape of trees and light. If only I can just keep walking, I’ll be healed.

  Around this time, my mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She’s no longer able to live on her own, so Irene moves to Canberra to live with her, and my brother Phil often drops in to visit. I ring Mum every second night, and we talk of family and everyday life. The bond between us deepens; life has given us a language we can share.

  Rowan’s birth brought a breakthrough and renewal in my relationship with both my parents. In motherhood my defensiveness melted; I could appreciate how much they must have suffered as a result of my madness, and how unbending I was with them. The highs and challenges of parenting have provided a common focus for Mum and me, while Dad’s enthusiasm for all sorts of projects, from working for Saint Vincent de Paul to learning about computers, brought the two of us together. When he died five years ago, my mourning was helped by the rituals that Catholics do so well. I kissed his cold forehead as he lay in his coffin in the funeral house, and my grief broke open when ‘Pie Jesu’ was played at his Requiem Mass the next day. Now, years later, as Mum’s memory falters and I sink into depression, we’re a mutual support for each other through our phone calls and my visits to Canberra.

  Whenever I walk along the riverbank at Warburton, a soft green energy bathes my mind. The Yarra is fresh and young up here in the mountains, and it rushes and tumbles over rocks in a torrent, home to platypus and fish, and a source of a vigorous energy. The vegetation is lush and varied, the mountain ash are tall and regal, and, in the night, the sky has more stars than I ever dreamed.

  Even so, I can’t escape the pain of my existence. I want to die. There’s no obvious reason for this, but I can’t stop thinking about dying. I draw deeply on Viktor Frankl’s writings in order to shift this thought and develop strategies to get myself through the days. I know why I need to live; I just have to work out how.

  I join the local library and begin a reading affair with memoirs written by solo sailors who circumnavigated the world in their small yachts. There are a huge number of these books, and I understand why – I can’t get enough of them. There’s something in their stories of solitary endurance that obsesses me. From their experiences of wild storms as they navigate the Horn and the Cape of Good Hope to their frustration at being becalmed in the Doldrums, I accompany them on their journeys. In their stories, I find the determination to get through each day as best I can, whatever the conditions in my inner world. Suffering is part of the deal. Endurance is all.

  *

  After two years at Warburton, I return to the city. I know that I need professional help again, but I don’t know where to turn. Eventually I’m referred to a psychiatrist, and I feel that this is my last option. I tried medication before, and it didn’t work for me, but I’ll try it again because I’m desperate.

  Fortunately for me, the psychiatrist’s manner and methods of treatment are nothing like my experiences in the late 1960s and early ’70s. This man has kind eyes, and he asks me questions about my inner world. He listens to my story, and we experiment with different antipsychotics, but they have powerful negative side effects; the mental relief that comes is undermined by heavy sedation, jangling nerves, mental fog and weight gain.

  Then, after a couple of years during which I begin to think I’d prefer my madness to the side effects, the psychiatrist and I decide to try a new drug for schizophrenia that has recently become available.

  What follows is remarkable. The side effects are minimal, and the madness retreats. A truce is declared; if I’m not stressed out, the noise remains behind enemy lines. I lose my fixation on death, and depression lets go of me. I’m aware of being sedated, and there’s weight gain, but these are prices that I decide to pay for the relief I’m experiencing. I still have problems sleeping, but as long as I avoid situations that increase my anxiety, my mind is benign, considerate.

  I’m now free to delight in ordinary, everyday things. This morning when I went out to collect the newspaper from my front garden, I breathed in the early morning air saturated with the smell of jasmine, lavender and earth, and it was like inhaling an elixir. I’m committed to an ongoing apprenticeship, learning how to live with the world as it is, with the self that I am. The world has let me come inside after all, and there are times when existence is quietly ecstatic. A singing, breathing life.

  Julianne and Michael are on the inside of my soul, on the underside of my skin. They’re alive as themselves in my inner world. I dream of them. I miss them. I keep having impressions of their presence – in the corner of a room, on a stairway or sitting across the table from me. For brief moments the other world forgets about me, and I’m cut loose to be with them again. In the darkness, in odd corners, they gather around me, the beloved dead, the original guardian angels. Sometimes they simply walk by me and are gone the instant I see them. Gone. Not gone. Gone.

  I venture out on a new quest to explore the world around me. This time my quest-ion is: What will I do with this new life I’ve been given?

  EPILOGUE

  A Place in

  the World

  In Scotland, as I walk the West Highland Way, my mind opens to the deep silence of the landscape, and my heart opens to sound: the wind, the rushing of a stream, my footsteps. Silence and sound, living within each other. There is no noise here – or in my mind.

  I’m on the first of a series of walks I’ve planned for my five-month journey around Europe. I want to get to know the landscapes of countries that fire my imagination, and stay in cities I’ve always wanted to visit: Paris, Dublin, Barcelona, Prague. I have my pack and my maps, and I’m on my way.

  On the first morning of my walk in Scotland, I leave the village of Tyndrum and pass through Auch-ach innis chalean (the field of the hazel meadow). The conical shape of Beinn Dorain appears before me, rising into blue sky. The weather is fresh and clear. Sunlight sparkles on the dew dotting the grasses along the track, and, on the mountain flanks, long drifts of purple heather disappear into the distance. Swallows and other small birds flit across the sky, and alders, birch and conifers cluster along the ba
nks of streams and at the edge of a small loch.

  As I walk beneath Beinn Dorain, I begin to feel its depth as my own depth, its reaching for the sky as my own reaching spirit. I’m soaring in this high, spare landscape, like the spellbound horses of the Dylan Thomas poem, walking out onto ‘fields of praise’.

  The next day I walk around the head of Loch Tulla, and then onto the vast expanse of Rannoch Moor. I pass hollows of scrubby myrtle and stop to rub the leaves together for the pleasure of inhaling their sweet perfume. Although a pale sun is shining, I’m alert to the weather; I’ve been warned that the moor is the most serious stretch of the West Highland Way because its exposed track offers no shelter and no easy retreat if the weather turns nasty.

  The moor is wild and high. I’m alone with kestrels and falcons, wild heather, and the wind. I pass only one other walker as I make my way across this wide stretch of land. He raises his hand in a salute and continues on without slowing. The silence here is infinite. The space eternal. I feel as if I’ve dissolved, become elemental, at one with sky and distance.

  Towards the end of the path across the moor, I find myself in the realm of the massive mountains of Coire Ba: Stob Dearg, Buachaille Etive Mor, Glen Etive and Glen Coe. They rise up like great songs do, disappearing into the immense silence of sky. I see a golden eagle, wings outstretched, gliding high. I take off my pack and sit on the ground, watching this flawless bird until it disappears behind a cloud. I find my bag of nuts and raisins, and take time to savour their sweetness and the fresh mineral taste of the water from my bottle. The mountains pound in my heart like drums.

  Walking up a rise in the track across the moor, I see in the distance a white speck that must be the Kings House Hotel at Glencoe. I anticipate the sensation of drinking Guinness – the pleasure of quenching my thirst, and the smooth and bitter taste as the cool liquid slides down my throat. At the end of the day, I finally reach the hotel. The first thing I do is release the straps of my pack and let it sink to the ground. Then I make my way to the bar. Quietly euphoric, I buy a pint of Guinness.

  The hotel’s interior is dim, but I sense the mountains and their light all around me. I’m sore and tired, I need to have a shower and get out of these boots, but this Guinness fills me like a meal. As I sit at a table, after-images from my day’s walk drift through my mind – heather and grasses, light on the surface of the lochs, mountain peaks. Little birds flitting and dipping in the air; the golden eagle that made me think of Michael. And I think with anticipation of the food I’m about to eat and the soft bed waiting for me. Bliss. Tomorrow I face the Devil’s Staircase, and then my journey will continue down to Kinlochleven and on to Fort William.

  *

  After trekking along the West Highland Way, I go to Spain and walk part of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, and later I walk around the wild west coast of Ireland. In between, I travel to Copenhagen, Prague, Wales and the Lake District of England.

  I also go to Paris, in memory of Julianne and the trip that we never took. As I walk along a narrow Left Bank street, my thoughts are interrupted by the sense of her presence. She’s walking with me, gesturing with her hands as she talks, her French self free and at home. The Seine flows like silky caramel between stone walls, street artists exhibit their paintings, and green sunlight shines in the trees along the riverbank.

  Jules is here with me. In some reality, in some way, she is here. We’ve made it to Paris after all.

  *

  For the last leg of this five-month journey, Rowan and I meet up in Florence with plans to travel in Italy, Croatia and Turkey. We’re both open to whatever comes our way, and we find each other easy company. We spend our days walking arm in arm through the winding streets of old European villages and sipping coffee in street cafes. We narrowly escape bed bugs in a hostel in Florence and share a single bed in the last budget hotel room available in Siena.

  On the night crossing to Split in Croatia, we stand on the bow of the ferry sharing a small bottle of duty-free apricot brandy, exhilarated by the starry darkness, drunk on the pleasure of sea, wind and motion.

  In Dubrovnik, we wander along the cobbled lanes of the old town and, at the end of the day, find a makeshift outdoor bar on a clifftop. Sitting in the warm evening, I become nostalgic as love songs from the 1950s play through the speakers and the blazing orb of the sun melts into the sea.

  In Istanbul, we stand awestruck below the golden mosaics in the Aya Sophia. Later, with the wind in our hair, we ride a ferry down the Bosphorus to a small fishing village.

  Throughout this journey, there are experiences of art, music, people, churches and, of course, food. I’m in love with the human imagination and spirit, and with that alchemical vessel, time. New thoughts appear, and I savour the enigmatic smells and the rush that comes with the illusion that I’m a stranger to myself, as if something of our exotic surroundings has rubbed off on me and I don’t recognise who I am. Each new day is a festival, a ceremony of becoming, a rite of passage.

  On the plane leaving Australia for this long journey, I wrote a poem that repeated the line, ‘Everything that has happened before now is past.’ Now, as I travel home, I grasp the truth of this thought. My madness has retreated, and I have confidence in the life opening up for me. This journey has been my pilgrimage to give thanks for the world that’s welcoming me like a mother. More often than not, I can trust my mind to be steady and benign, and I’ve rediscovered the ‘recreational thinking’ that Julianne and I so enjoyed. I’ve also embarked on a wild, audacious love affair; it doesn’t survive the distance between our home countries, but the memory remains, and the happiness.

  As the plane comes in to land in Melbourne, I decide that I will go back to university and study Michael’s poetry.

  *

  Life is very different for me now. While studying, I work part-time in a range of different jobs, including teaching young adults with intellectual disabilities and teaching English to carers in an aged-care facility. In 2006, I’m offered a part-time job at a university as a language and learning advisor. While doing this work, I complete a PhD. This study is life-changing and deeply rewarding, alongside my work with students and my colleagues – especially my colleagues. I’m one of the lucky ones: my workplace nourishes my soul as well as my material existence. I become grounded in the world. I sleep, really sleep, for the first time since Julianne died.

  During these years, my relationship with Rowan grows and develops. In spite of the challenges she faced as a child and teenager, she’s become a person whose nature is to love and create. She has a courageous intellect and has made a life for herself and a community of friends. She embraces what the world has to offer, explores ideas, and is curious and open. I’m immensely grateful to have Rowan in my life. She wants for me to be myself, despite everything, and this is what I want for her too – because of everything. Our relationship is a celebration of the life we live, sharing our thoughts and dreams, and the mundane burdens of our days.

  As Michael wrote in a poem he gave me: ‘The most of love is simply sharing.’

  *

  At the same time as I’m finding a place in the world, my mother is losing hers. As her Alzheimer’s disease progresses and her memory fades, she loses herself, her family, her past. Every morning she looks blankly at Irene: ‘Who am I?’ she asks. ‘Who are you?’

  My sister gives her a few facts, some vivid paint strokes, an outline of a person: ‘I’m your daughter, Irene. You’re Pat Keogh. You were married to Ron for fifty-three years.’

  ‘Did he love me?’ Mum asks.

  This is the question that, for more than a year, has been her obsession. At the end of her life, my mother wants to know if she was loved. She moves slowly into the day, feeling her way into her clothes, into the identity Irene constantly creates for her.

  Sometimes Mum weeps quietly: ‘I don’t know where I am,’ she says. Sometimes she’s in extreme distress: ‘Who am I?’ she cries out from the doorway into her bedroom. Leaning o
n her walking frame, she pulls herself down the hall of the house where she’s lived for over thirty years. ‘Why am I here?’ she asks of the space around her. Her mind is a watery bewilderness. Unborn thoughts float in her eyes. She takes tentative steps, one at a time.

  My mother is a soul without a home, lost in the most absolute sense. There’s no consolation in thinking that she doesn’t know what’s happening to her. Her suffering is her knowledge. She knows. She looked up at me the other day with eyes that had no light in them and asked me, ‘Am I alive?’ In the pause before I could answer, a hole opened in my heart. I took Mum’s hand to comfort her, but she was unreachable, standing alone and lonely in some wild, inscrutable place on the very edge of life. I remembered the lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport.’ And I thought to myself, They do worse than that.

  Mum lingers in a lonely twilight, forgetting herself, her life, and those who love her. At the mid-point of the disease she still had language, the occasional spark of humour, the capacity for gratitude, and the ability to take pleasure in the sight of babies and the taste of ice-cream. But now, the loss of her self is devastating, totalising. Without memory you’re lost in deep space.

  When I was a child, the Russians sent a dog into orbit. I read about it in a newspaper that my father brought home from work. I remember standing at the table and staring at the photograph of a dog in a harness, sitting up in the spaceship. Her name was Laika. In response to my insistent questions, Dad admitted that there was no possibility of her returning to earth. When I was lying in bed at night, unable to sleep, I’d imagine Laika travelling alone through endless space, slowly starving to death. I pictured her sitting in the cockpit of the spacecraft, endlessly staring into the night sky. Totally alone. The only thread of consolation I could find was the hope that she didn’t know what was happening to her. It was a slight hope, though. I believed she knew she’d be alone forever, strapped into the spaceship, dying of hunger and loneliness.