It’s not unusual for someone to occasionally feel that the shit might hit the fan. But what usually happens is that when time passes and it doesn’t, you gradually relax. But I couldn’t. As each day passed I worried with even more intensity, using every spare moment to think up new ways that someone, somewhere, could bring about my downfall.
It started to get absurd. Initially my fear might have been useful as a wake-up call to ensure that I triple-checked everything I did and never put myself in a position where I was vulnerable. But as the days went by I continued to obsess about getting in trouble somehow. It’s a great thing, the human brain, but mine turned against me. It ignored logic and would not, could not, stop worrying about something that wasn’t going to happen.
What if, what if, what if . . .
It became the first thing I thought about every morning and the last thing I thought about at night. I thought about it on the bus, at work, when I was out. I thought about it when I woke up at 4 a.m. for a piss. I thought about it when I was on stage doing stand-up. My mind would go rushing around the familiar tracks again while my mouth switched to auto pilot. I became adept at carrying on conversations with just half my brain involved, as the other half continued the seemingly vital task of racing down and around all the scenario paths. It always seemed that if I could just think about it a bit more, just think it through one more time, I’d be able to work out a way of proving to myself that nothing could go wrong. But I never quite could.
If I caught myself not worrying, it was as if I had let my guard down. There seemed to be safety in worry—it meant I was preparing myself as best I could, that I had my guard up so that if something did happen, at least I would have done my best to anticipate it.
Sometimes it occurred to me that I had a higher risk of getting cancer than of getting into trouble and yet that was no help. I’d never been near cancer, so at some basic level I didn’t really believe that cancer could ever threaten me. It was far away.
In retrospect, my obsessive worrying was a way of trying to exert control over something outside my control. Endlessly trying to anticipate every possible sequence of events was less scary than accepting there were things that I didn’t know and events that might affect me that I couldn’t do anything about.
The fact that a part of me knew this was an inevitable risk of being a criminal lawyer and that all my colleagues faced it too, and that getting in trouble was very unlikely, didn’t help. But it did, unfortunately, make me too embarrassed to talk to any of my fellow lawyers about it and get them to help me analyse the possibilities in a realistic and logical way. I thought that if I did, they’d think I was crazy. Which in a way I was—I knew I was over the line of rational anxiety into crazy doom fantasyland, but knowing it didn’t help.
What I should have done then was quit, or gone on long term leave. But most of the job I liked, it was what I wanted to do and leaving would feel like failure. My life looked like a good one and even though the man at the centre of it was having the worst time of his life, he was dammed if he was going to let anyone know.
From the outside my life looked the same. I got up in the morning and went to work, I lived with Lucy and I worked as a stand-up comedian two or three nights a week, persuading people that their everyday lives were full of hilarious things to laugh at. Sometimes when I was at work or out, I had to sneak away to the toilet for five minutes, just to sit down one more time and think through all the possibilities, to get them straight in my head. It was like an addiction, but without the good bits. But I never missed any sort of work commitment. I don’t think anyone I didn’t tell—and I told very few people—ever knew there was anything wrong. Friends and workmates might have thought I was a bit quiet, but nothing more. Years of stand-up had taught me how to project calm and confidence even when I didn’t feel it.
But I felt for all that time as if the most important part of my life had been taken away—the part where I enjoyed things, where I had fun, laughed and thought it was good to be alive. It wasn’t there any more. I was swamped by fear.
I missed one social commitment, a friend’s Saturday birthday lunch. I lost it at home an hour before we were due. I was sobbing, overwhelmed at how I had so quickly and conclusively lost control of my life. I remember realising that I seemed to have lost the capacity to feel joy. It was gone and life had become something to endure, a storm to be waited out. So we didn’t go. Another time Lucy and I were in David Jones at Bondi Junction, buying our first whitegood together, when I became overwhelmed, and started trembling as I held a blue kettle. We didn’t buy it. I stopped reading detective stories, because any reference to courts or police would get me going. But I stayed a lawyer. All the work I did I triple-checked, and I made sure I protected myself from any unlikely way in which things could go wrong.
Occasionally I mentioned my nagging fears to someone, and they would always give me the same sensible but impossible-to-follow advice: Just forget about it.
Eventually I saw a counsellor, a sensible and understanding woman who looked like Cher. She suggested I carry in my wallet a card with the word ‘STOP’ written on it, and whenever I got into my anxiety loop take it out and look at it. She said that if I did this I’d feel better within a couple of days. It didn’t work.
I tried a kinesiologist. She read my innermost thoughts by poking and prodding me and asking me to push my hand against hers. She told me it was clear that I had a problem with my relationship with my father. I told her that maybe I did, but that it was nothing compared with the problem I had of obsessively worrying about the possibility of getting into trouble. She told me that I should think of the worst possible thing that could happen, then embrace it and look for positives in it. I told her the worst possible thing that could happen was that I would go to jail, and asked her what sort of positives she saw in that.
There was silence.
‘Well,’ she said eventually, ‘you could become that comedian who’s been to jail. That would be a good selling point, wouldn’t it?’
I tried hypnotherapy. The hypnotherapist was a plump grey woman in her forties called Amanda, who had a kindly-aunt manner and operated out of a small, musty office up a little alley behind a dentist. The only other hypnotist I had seen was the ‘Extraordinary Martin St James’ in a plush auditorium at the North Sydney Leagues Club, so this was a bit of a comedown.
She explained that she would hypnotise me and then implant suggestions deep into my subconscious. I remembered Martin saying something similar, but hoped Amanda was going to do something more helpful than make me think I was a chicken every time someone said the word ‘interval’.
‘Now shut your eyes,’ she said. I automatically obeyed. Maybe I was hypnotised already.
‘Now, James, listen to me carefully,’ said a big black man. My eyes jumped open but there was only Amanda smiling at me.
‘Close your eyes and relax,’ said the big black man’s voice again. It was somehow coming out of Amanda’s mouth. I tried not to smile, and the fact that I wanted to already made it $60 well spent.
‘James, your eyes are heavy, you are going deeper and deeper,’ said the voice. I tried to go with it.
‘You are completely relaxed, and sliding deeper.’
I wanted to be hypnotised. I really did. It could help me.
‘Your eyelids are heavy. You are going deeper.’
Yes, I was. Wasn’t I?
‘All your cares are drifting away as you go deeper and deeper. You are so deep that your conscious mind has let go and is floating and still you go deeper and deeper.’
Any minute now, I’m sure.
‘Your breath is slow and steady and you are going deeper.’
No, actually I’m not.
‘Deeper and deeper.’
Maybe it was my fault. I couldn’t let go, I was incapable of relaxing. I was a remedial hypnotisee. The only thing going deeper and deeper was her voice.
‘You are now in a deep hypnotic trance,’ she said, which s
ounded very impressive, except that I wasn’t.
I thought about letting her know that we had actually got a bit ahead of ourselves, but I didn’t want to draw attention to her, or our, or my, failure. Poor thing, stuck in a leaky back room. To be honest, she probably lost me with the lack of props. Martin had had a big gold medallion that he waved about and that’s the sort of thing I expected from a hypnotist. Without props I felt cheated.
She continued, telling my subconscious that it would let go of all anxiety, live in the present and embrace the possibilities of every moment. It sounded great.
When she’d finished I opened my eyes and looked dazedly around the room, trying to give the impression of being disorientated. I almost said ‘where am I?’ but thought that might be laying it on a bit thick.
After I shelled out, I tried to end on something positive. ‘Thanks very much. That stuff about embracing the possibilities of every moment really made sense.’
Then I realised that if I had been in a deep hypnotic trance I wouldn’t have known she’d said that. From the look she gave me I think she realised it too. I scuttled out.
eight
a ferry to rydalmere
What I should have done was spend a month catching ferries. It’s hard to worry about anything on a ferry.
The plan was to catch one from Circular Quay up the harbour, past where it became a river, to Parramatta. To get the complete public transport experience we decided to first get the bus to Bondi Junction, then the train into the city.
People on buses and trains look as if they are trying to endure the trip, so that when it ends, if they have managed to survive, their lives can begin again. I’ve never seen anyone over the age of fifteen giggle on a bus or a train, unless they were drunk and irritating. The prepared bury their heads in a newspaper or book, while the rest either stare enviously at the prepared or memorise the map on the front wall of the carriage that shows how all the train stations connect. (They, curiously, are on both buses and trains.)
The good thing about the bus is that it is able to push into traffic. On buses the rear-view mirror is purely decorative. The driver may look in it to admire the view, but no matter what he sees behind him he’s still going to pull out, and it’s up to everyone else to get out of the way. And they do. The bad thing about the bus is all the stops. Just when you’re about to press home the advantage that all the pushing-in has afforded you and really get going, there’s another stop. They’re way too close together. In most parts of Sydney people at different bus stops can talk to each other.
‘It’s good this one, you should come up here. There’s this great whisky ad on the shelter. It’s really artistic.’
‘Nah, the bus’ll get to this one first and I’ll get a seat. You’ll have to stand.’
Trains feel more modern. You go underground and get a ticket from a machine, then a disembodied female voice, which sounds as if its owner is wearing a very sensible beige suit, tells you that the next train on platform one is going to ‘Cronulla. First stop Edgecliff. Then Kings Cross. Then all stations to Redfern,’ etc. Twenty seconds later, it tells you again. Then again. And again. And so on. Great if you have Alzheimer’s. Or if you like being told things over and over again.
You can watch telly on the platform too, although it’s only ads, news, ads, weather and ads. Of course if you don’t want to watch it you can just face the other way, and if you don’t want to hear it, well, tough. It’s on.
There’s more room on a train, but from Bondi Junction to the city, less of a view. Unless you like tunnels. Actually, even if you do like tunnels it’s not much of a view because, as you’re in a tunnel, it’s too dark to see the tunnel. There is, however, a good view of the entrance to and exit from the tunnel.
In every carriage there’s at least one person who everyone else stares at. Bondi Junction is at the end of the Eastern Suburbs line, so when a train gets there and everyone gets off, all the seats are facing what was forwards, but on the way back will be backwards. There’s always someone, usually a tourist, who gets on first and sits at what they think is the back of the carriage. Then everyone else gets on, flicks their seat across to face forwards on the way to town, and soon the carriage is full of front-facing passengers all staring at the poor person trapped on the only backward-facing seat. They either have to tough it out and stare right back, trying to give the impression that they prefer travelling backwards and being stared at, or accept the humiliation of acknowledging they’ve made a mistake and get up and swap the seat over. If they go for the second option, it is almost certain that they will be sitting on the one seat in the carriage that is broken and won’t flick over and thus get stuck fruitlessly wrestling with it, which of course triples their embarrassment.
The train is efficient. You’re in town before you know it and if you scavenge you can usually find a newspaper a commuter has previously absorbed and discarded. Everyone usually gets a seat, unless it’s peak hour when only the lucky and the ruthless do. (I’ve always thought that those with something to read should get priority for seats because if they have to stand they miss out on more.)
But I feel incomplete at the end of a train trip, because there’s no one to thank. We all just slink off to push into the escalator queue and deliver our tickets to a machine. On a bus there’s that nice moment at the end when you thank the driver. Hell, he was only doing his job but he did it well. Didn’t crash, at least. And you get to find out which of your fellow passengers are not as nice as you (the ones who don’t say thank you).
We emerged into Martin Place, the centre of big end of town action. It’s a long dark space 30 metres across that runs half a kilometre east-west up the city for five blocks. If it was meant as a break from buildings and streets then it’s been successful, but it hasn’t become anything more than that. It’s a place people walk through, not to. It hasn’t quite become anything more than that road-shaped bit in the middle of the city where there isn’t actually a road.
Part of Martin Place’s problem may be that, unlike its cousin Pitt Street Mall (are places and malls cousins? siblings? enemies?), which is flanked by places of commerce such as music, clothing, book and food shops, Martin Place is flanked by places that allow for the creation of infrastructure that facilitates the occurrence of commerce—like banks, law firms, merchant banks, insurance companies, investment banks, and other types of banks. Slightly less exciting. Unless you’re a banker.
Even when they put on free lunchtime entertainment in the Martin Place amphitheatre (which, uniquely for an amphitheatre, doubles as an entrance to the train station) you get the feeling that the seats fill up mainly because, hey, what else are you going to do in your lunch hour while you eat your sandwich and try to forget about banking. There’s only one road with seats in it and this is it.
Few linger in Martin Place, except backpackers and tourists who feel that, given it’s where the GPO is, they should stay a few minutes as a sign of respect. Far more numerous when we arrived were the suited-up and briefcased, all hurrying as if they were late, or important, or both. Each, no doubt, had pressing concerns, important deadlines and phone calls, emails, faxes, pagers, text messages and even real people to respond to, but I wondered if anything would actually have gone wrong if I had produced a Pied Piper-style flute and led them all onto the ferry for a morning of skiving off.
It’s important to be nice, but it’s even more important to feel like you’re important. Ten years earlier my corporate lawyer boss had rung me three days into his holiday to sort out all the problems that must have cropped up in his absence. When I told him there weren’t any he’d sounded kind of disappointed.
We headed down to Circular Quay past Macquarie Place, a far smaller, triangular-shaped public space that works, possibly because one side of the triangle is a pub from which alcohol is allowed to be bought and drunk outside. Sydney has never been as good as it should be at getting outside eating and drinking spaces right. Oxford Street in Darlinghurst/Paddington,
King Street in Newtown, Campbell Parade on Bondi Beach and many more should have it down pat, but to our eternal shame, non-sunny Melbourne does the outdoor café infinitely better.
From Macquarie Place it’s another couple of hundred metres to Circular Quay. As you approach the quay, beautiful harbour views should open up, but tragically they don’t. The raised railway line that cuts Circular Quay off from the city is right up there with the Bondi Beach carpark in terms of architectural stuff-ups. It’s an enormous barrier that removes the harbour from the city so that as you descend the hill toward the water you don’t see water, you see concrete. It’s not just a railway line— there’s a road above it too, the Cahill Expressway, so the whole thing does facilitate the moving of lots of people who need to move, but the only reason there aren’t continual complaints about it being an eyesore is that everyone has got used to it.
The upside is that once you pass under the railway it’s as if you have been completely removed from the city. Expansive harbour views open up and the average walking pace decreases from just shy of Commonwealth Games qualifying (not Olympic Games qualifying, that would be exaggerating) to a leisurely meander. No one hurries by the water, or walks as if they think they’re important.
There are always buskers at the Quay, and a cut above the normal standard, too. There must be an entrance exam. Rather than acoustic Neil Young and Nirvana, you get West Indian drums, puppet shows and good street theatre (not three words that often fit accurately together), the best example of which was a mimic who followed a metre behind his ‘target’, imitating exactly their walk and mannerisms until they noticed, at which point he would immediately turn on his heel and surf the wake of someone going back the other way. The highlight was when a young ocker bloke turned around, caught him and didn’t like it, and the mimic showed he could do voices too.
A Month of Sundays Page 7
