Births Deaths Marriages

by Georgia Blain

  Despite the ambiguity of those words, the locals have hung onto them. Many wanted to believe that MacArthur was assuring them he would be back, but if that was in fact his intention, it was a promise he didn’t keep. Time has shown that this is not a town to which people return, and what remains there has little chance of surviving.

  I kept the pamphlet but I didn’t stop to see the monument. With the green jumper I had bought for Odessa on the seat next to me, I drove away from Terowie, glad to be leaving the place behind.

  THE FINAL ANALYSIS

  JUST BEFORE ODESSA’S BIRTH, ANDREW AND I MADE A deal. We would stay together for the first two years, no matter what.

  I can’t remember the statistics, but this was the period when a couple was most likely to split. I read the article out loud to him, and we shook hands.

  ‘Two years?’

  ‘Two years.’

  It was a deal made in jest, but keeping it was harder than we’d anticipated. We were constantly tired, I was struggling with being a mother, and we were broke. It was not a matter of suddenly finding ourselves face to face with poverty, but rather the slow settling of an ugly worry. Bills were left sitting in piles because we were simply unable to pay them until the next promised cheque arrived, credit card debts were at the limit, childcare fees built up and bank accounts were empty, and the flat we had been living in was going to be re-occupied by the owners. With no savings to cover paying a bond and the inevitable rent hike, we tried to find somewhere that was cheap enough for us to afford. The place we chose was, to say the least, depressing, although we attempted to convince ourselves otherwise. A two-bedroom apartment on a major bus route, it hadn’t been touched by the owners for many years. Cupboard doors came off their hinges, paint flaked down from the ceiling onto exposed wires, drains blocked, and what we had hoped would be a useable garden was an impenetrable swamp overgrown with sticky weeds.

  It was during that time that I developed my first ever bout of insomnia. I had always been someone who slept, and I’d had little sympathy for friends who didn’t, dismissing them as neurotic. I had no understanding of how devastating sleeplessness could be. Odessa was going through her first childhood illnesses. There was nothing serious, just colds and flus that made her cry out, but I spent most nights awake, listening to the grind of the bus gears on the street below, my frustration slowly building into a fury, an extraordinary anger at how something as simple as sleep could elude me.

  Tiredness combined with financial anxiety led to fights. I began to blame everything on Andrew’s lack of work. Andrew is a filmmaker. The fact that he makes films was, in the early days, an attraction. He had – and still has – an artistic sensibility that I admire. He warned me, once, that the film industry could be very destructive on relationships, and I assumed he was talking about long periods apart and furtive affairs on set. He was. But what neither of us reckoned on were the months of unemployment and the crushing disappointment when each promise of a well-paid job collapsed.

  When I complained about Andrew’s career choice, he would tell me that he never criticised my decision to become a writer, a way of life that is also neither stable nor lucrative. Worse still, it is an occupation that demands constant introspection, a state that only contributes to my propensity for moodiness, and feeds on my already considerable insecurities.

  Sometimes I would imagine what our lives might have been. If I hadn’t dropped out of law, if he hadn’t missed out on getting into medicine by two marks – and I would see him there, in his surgery, perhaps tinkering around with cameras on the weekends, leaving me at home to write.

  ‘Would you have been content?’ I’d ask him.

  ‘Probably,’ he’d tell me.

  I’d let myself indulge, just a little longer, in the vision.

  But it is the man he is that I fell in love with. And despite his assertion that he would have been happy as a GP, I know him well enough to know that this is unlikely, just as I would never have been happy with the life I could have made for myself as a lawyer.

  As our bickering intensified, I saw the fortune-teller who predicted a lifetime alone if I left Andrew. Soon after that we went to see a counsellor together. It was Andrew’s idea, and I agreed, not really believing he would ever make an appointment.

  I’d been to a therapist twice before; once in my early twenties, after Jonathan died, and then again, about six years later, when the relationship I was in came to a bad end. I’d grown up with a mother who believed in therapy, and who often suggested it to me. She had gone to groups, an idea that I found abhorrent. Even the thought of a one-on-one session was difficult, but I was young enough to believe my mother when she told me it could help, and I was depressed. The second time I went, I seriously questioned the whole exercise. I would sit in the waiting room ostensibly looking at a book of Georgia O’Keeffe prints, but really listening to the couple that had the appointment prior to mine.

  She talked. Constantly. In fact, I’m not sure if I ever heard him respond. ‘But you said,’ and her voice had an ugly whine to it, ‘you said that we would do the garden together, that we would spend more time with each other, that we would take time out for our relationship. No, you did. Don’t deny it. That’s why I am disappointed. And that’s all I’m saying that I am. Disappointed. Because it was a promise you made, and it was important to me. Just some time together. I don’t think it’s a lot to expect, just doing the garden together, it was all I wanted.’

  With the book of prints open on my lap, I would will her to shut up, to stop. ‘Don’t you know?’ I wanted to ask her. ‘Don’t you know how you sound?’ Clearly not.

  After several minutes of listening, I would enter the therapist’s lounge room (where she saw all her patients), and find myself reluctant to speak. Everything seemed infinitely banal, and my answers to her questions were usually brief and evasive.

  She didn’t seem to mind. I was probably a relief after her previous session. I would vaguely allude to what had gone wrong in my relationship, boring myself as soon as I opened my mouth, and she would try to respond in a constructive manner. During our last appointment (one that must have followed a particularly trying session with her previous clients), she just shrugged her shoulders in response to my half-hearted attempt to explain how I felt I’d failed in love yet again.

  ‘You know,’ she told me, ‘in all my years in this job I’ve come to the conclusion that it just boils down to luck. Whether you fall in love, whether they love you back, whether it lasts or doesn’t, whether you are successful in work, everything. Luck.’

  After that, there really wasn’t any further for us to go. When she asked me if I wanted to make an appointment for the following week, I told her there didn’t seem much point, and she agreed. I thanked her for all she’d done and she told me it was nothing.

  When Andrew eventually booked a session with a government-funded agency that specialises in relationship counselling, I realised he was serious. My secret hope that everything would somehow fix itself in the intervening time hadn’t come to fruition, and we found ourselves sitting in the waiting room, next to a scraggly palm that had wilted under the harshness of the fluorescent lighting, filling out the pre-session questionnaire.

  It was question number four that I couldn’t answer: Why are you here? with two blank lines underneath.

  I had an endless list of grievances: his constant lateness; his stubbornness; his messiness; his impractical nature; and our worry about money.

  Not getting on, I wrote, and I quickly stole a look at his form.

  Would like to improve the relationship. And I mentally added another complaint to my unwritten list: an infuriating optimism.

  We were ushered into a room that faced a one-way mirror. We couldn’t see beyond it, but the team of psychologists who sat behind it could see us. It was a new approach to relationship counselling, and one we had agreed to try. ‘The team’ – and that was how they were always referred to – would listen in on our sessions, and
assist our counsellor where necessary.

  It wasn’t long into our first appointment before I felt the crushing pointlessness of what we were doing. We’d been asked for examples of our bickering, and all we’d done was fight about each scenario we brought up, both of us insisting that our own interpretation of what had happened was correct.

  ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ we said, after another ten minutes had passed.

  The therapist agreed, but not before the team had used the interconnecting telephone several times to clarify various aspects of one of our arguments.

  We began again, each of us taking it in turn to talk more generally about where our frustrations lay. I did not speak as Andrew described the distress of not having work, and of losing his confidence.

  He didn’t interrupt as I talked of how hard I found it to accept the reality of the film industry. It wasn’t going to change and I couldn’t force him to leave it, yet I had become progressively more resentful.

  How could we resolve it?

  Neither of us knew, and we sat next to each other, staring into the blankness of the mirror.

  When the counsellor thanked us for speaking so honestly, I knew the session was almost over. She told us that we could go and have a cup of tea in the waiting room, while the team prepared its report.

  Ten minutes later, we were back, sitting side by side in the orange plastic chairs, listening to the team’s verdict.

  ‘Georgia,’ the therapist read from a sheet of paper, taking care to glance at me regularly, ‘the team acknowledges that you have set very high standards for yourself, having a baby, working and publishing two books, all in a very short space of time.’

  I cringed as she continued, not daring to glance at Andrew as she read out a report that I felt painted me as an overachieving, demanding perfectionist, despite its careful wording.

  ‘Andrew,’ and she turned to him, ‘the team acknowledges that you experience a very tough time when you are underemployed.’ And he, too, maintained eye contact with the therapist only, as she turned all that he’d attempted to articulate into a positive experience.

  ‘To both of you, we can see that you are working hard in your struggle to come to terms with the differences in your personalities. The differences bring richness to your relationship and create tensions between you; this is normal and understandable. You have the opportunity for the relationship to teach you what you both need to learn so that you can both hear and respect each other.’

  She smiled and told us that she looked forward to seeing us next time.

  Outside, we finally looked at each other.

  Andrew pressed the elevator button. ‘Your report was better than mine.’

  ‘No it wasn’t.’ I told him I thought I’d sounded like an obsessive pain in the arse.

  ‘Well, at least she didn’t say you were a loser.’

  Two days after that first session, a copy of the team report arrived in the mail. I tore it up as soon as I opened it and threw it in the bin. That evening, Andrew found it. Unlike me, he likes to keep everything – flyers from films he sees, old invitations, pamphlets for courses that he may want to do; the clutter piles high on his desk.

  He couldn’t understand why I’d thrown it away.

  ‘Because it’s crap,’ I told him.

  ‘I know,’ he said, but he taped the paper back together and put it in one of the many drawers he uses to try to hide all that he hoards.

  In the period before our next appointment, we began to fight a little less, but neither of us felt this improvement was the result of therapy. Odessa was sleeping better and the promise of a job for Andrew had finally come to fruition. Walking along the beachfront, Odessa kicking her legs in her pram, we looked out at the pale line of the horizon and breathed in the salty freshness of the air. We stopped at the park on the north end, both of us sitting on the bench, while Odessa rolled in the sand, shovelling great fistfuls into her mouth. In the warmth of the late afternoon sun, Andrew put Odessa in the kid’s swing, pushing her high into the sky, and I watched them both.

  But despite this improvement, Andrew was still insistent that we go back, that we ‘play the hand out’, as he likes to say. Two weeks later we found ourselves in the consulting room again, sitting upright, feet firmly on the nylon carpet, as we faced the team behind the darkened glass window.

  The therapist asked us if we’d read our report when it had arrived.

  I looked at the ground and blushed as Andrew told her that we had. I waited for him to continue, but to my relief, he said nothing about the fact that I’d torn it up and thrown it away.

  Later, as we waited for report number two, he made me a cup of tea, smiling as he jiggled the tea bag in the polystyrene cup.

  ‘You expected me to tell on you,’ he said.

  And I tried to hide my grin as I drank the tea, the tannin sharp and unpleasant, the liquid burning my tongue.

  I’d been grateful he’d kept quiet about the report. In fact, during that second session, I’d felt a growing allegiance between us. The therapist had turned, for the first time, to the subject of our respective families; a subject that couldn’t help but be ripe plunder for any counsellor, and one that we’d both tried to avoid for that very reason.

  It had started when Andrew had briefly referred to his father’s death two years earlier.

  ‘How did he die?’ the therapist asked.

  Andrew told her. His father had battled with bipolar disorder for many years. He hadn’t been properly treated, and after his last manic high and a subsequent change in medication, he’d jumped off a bridge.

  The telephone connecting us to the anonymous team began to ring hot.

  How had this affected us as a couple, they wanted to know, and I admitted that I hadn’t been much of a support. My brother had also had a mental illness and had also killed himself, and Andrew’s father’s death had brought up a resurgence of that grief. In fact, I still found it hard to talk about that time without crying.

  I reached for a tissue and the telephone rang again.

  Could Andrew talk a little more about his memories of his father?

  Andrew said he could, but he really didn’t want to – and it wasn’t because he was avoiding the subject, he hastened to add, but he felt he had dealt with it as best he could. He would prefer to get back to resolving the difficulties in our relationship.

  The counsellor nodded. Could I talk a little more about my brother?

  I, too, said that I was reluctant to delve into it, that I had seen therapists at the time, and that I also felt that I was as resolved as I could be, despite the fact that this might not appear to be so. I reached for yet another tissue. ‘I’m just like this,’ I said.

  ‘It feels like a sidetrack,’ Andrew explained. ‘It’s not why we’re here.’

  The telephone rang again.

  Could we discuss what had happened in our relationship at the time of Andrew’s father’s death?

  I looked at the ground as Andrew said that it had been hard for both of us.

  I was ashamed as I listened to him say that he understood why I’d found it difficult, and as I remembered how consumed by my own despair I’d been, I knew what I’d also known at the time – I hadn’t helped him in the way I would have liked.

  ‘But she was still a support,’ Andrew said, and I glanced across at him, wondering for a moment whether he was lying for me.

  He wasn’t looking in my direction. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘But I really don’t want to go on and on discussing this.’

  Later, as we sat in the tearoom, I wanted to ask him whether he’d spoken the truth when he had described me as a support. I also wanted to apologise for the way in which I’d behaved. I tossed the tea into the sink, the steam rising into the fronds of the palm, and turned to where he was scribbling in his notebook, jotting down a list of things he had to do before the new job started, flicking through the pages of his diary as he did so. I looked at the list in irritation.
It was another habit that drove me to distraction; What is to be done always written across the top and the same items underneath. I was about to make a sarcastic comment, but he put the pen away.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I’ll have time to come here again for a while.’

  I was relieved.

  The therapist opened the door and we both stood up. The team was ready for us, she was sorry it had taken so long. ‘But rather a lot came up.’ She smiled. ‘We do appreciate your understanding.’

  We followed her down the corridor, neither of us saying a word, until just outside the room, Andrew turned to me.

  ‘Straight As again?’ He was referring to the impending delivery of our next report. I pinched him, just gently, on the bottom, as we took our seats in the orange plastic chairs.

  It had been a useful session, the therapist told us as she came to the end of her summation, and we agreed that it had.

  ‘But I don’t think we’ll be able to come back,’ Andrew said. He explained about his upcoming job. He was sorry, he added, when she told him that two sessions weren’t enough. There was nothing he could do about it. ‘I have to take the work.’

  She understood, but she hoped we would reconsider our decision. We were making progress and it was important to continue.

  ‘Do you think we made progress?’ I asked out in the reception area.

  Andrew did.

  I was surprised. As we went down to the car park, I told him I was glad it was over. I had hated the team, and the reports. I expected him to agree with me, but he refused to write off the whole experience as a waste of time.

  ‘We listened to each other,’ he said.

  And as I remembered him talking about the difficulties he had in coming to terms with his lack of work, and the sadness and respect I had felt for him as he described trying to deal with this, I had to agree that we had.

  ‘So you think we’d benefit from going back?’ I asked.