Births Deaths Marriages

by Georgia Blain

  By the time the police came, Jonathan had barricaded himself in the bathroom. I watched them break the door in.

  ‘Please don’t hurt him,’ I said over and over again. ‘Please don’t hurt him.’

  They drove away with him in the back of the paddy wagon, and I stood on the footpath, still asking them to be gentle, long after they’d gone.

  ‘The book is changing,’ my mother told us as she struggled with the work in the years following Jonathan’s death. ‘I can’t just write about the illness.’ She tried to explain and I listened with dread. ‘I need to write about him. I need to write about us.’

  I didn’t understand. I would look at the piles of paper on her desk, divided into different categories – times in Jonathan’s life, theories about the illness, interviews with psychiatrists – all labelled. She would start typing in the first light of morning, continuing through to the darkness of evening, and I would resent the hold he still had on us.

  ‘Why are you doing it?’ I would ask her, when I broached the topic, which was rare.

  When she first started to write, she spoke to us about her book helping others. A layperson’s guide to schizophrenia, it would demystify the illness, it would assist families struggling like we had; this was the justification she gave us. As the work became personal, she maintained this argument, never faltering in her belief that this was the best way to achieve her aim.

  At that stage, I didn’t understand how writing about oneself could ever amount to more than a purely personal exercise. If this was what she needed to do, then so be it, but there was no point in publishing it. Believing you could effect a change through such a book was, as far as I was concerned, foolish. I recalled my own attempts at writing about Jonathan and the evening I had shown him my poem. Why couldn’t my mother see that remaining submerged in his life wasn’t only painful for her and for us, it was also futile?

  But she didn’t.

  I would visit her and sit on the floor of her workroom, her dog resting its head in my lap, as I waited for her to finish, to come to the end of a sentence, so that we could eat lunch or dinner. I would see the drafts piling up next to her, but I wouldn’t look at them.

  It was his death that she found unbearably hard.

  I can’t put it down on paper, she told me, and I remember thinking simply that she shouldn’t.

  When the police rang to tell her they’d found Jonathan, she had to identify his body. He had overdosed again. He’d been doing it regularly, always taking himself off to emergency to have his stomach pumped. This time he didn’t make it. They found him outside the elevator of the hostel where he was living. My mother does not know if he was trying to get to the hospital or not. It doesn’t really matter. He had been hovering on that line between life and death for a while, uncertain as to which side to stay on, until eventually, on that day, he simply couldn’t make it back.

  Surprisingly, it was only recently that I managed to retain the details surrounding his death. Despite my mother having told me how it happened, and having read her book, it seemed the facts never quite sunk in sufficiently to remain embedded. I kept forgetting. But, on the last occasion when I asked her to tell me exactly what had occurred, I managed to hold onto the information, to keep my grasp on it, rather than watching it slip, vapour-like, out of my hand.

  But I’ve always had a clear memory of the days that followed. Soon after my mother had identified Jonathan’s body, she flew to Adelaide to tell me. She didn’t call first, and when I opened the door to find her standing right in front of me, the dampness of the drizzly afternoon a blank backdrop to the strangeness of her presence, I had no idea why she was there. Perhaps I hadn’t received a message, maybe she had told me she was coming to visit and I’d forgotten. She didn’t speak, and as she drew me close and hugged me, I knew something was wrong.

  That afternoon I left her lying on my bed and I walked around the suburb. The streets were flat and empty, bordered by neat bungalows built in the forties. I wished I lived in one of them, that I was someone other than the person I was. I wanted to go home to one of those ordinary houses I’d imagined as a child; a place where the furniture was brown and faded; the television was on, a soft hum of noise from the lounge; a roast was cooking; a floating of days that came and went, pleasant and unremarkable.

  The ground was damp; orange, red and yellow leaves stuck to the soles of my shoes. My breath frosted and my skin was tight with cold. The sense of coming to the end of this journey enveloped me. I picked at the threads on my brand-new cherry red jumper and tried to work out what I was feeling. Grief, yes. Relief? That was harder to acknowledge. It had been enough to live through his life. It was simply too much now to deal with the aftermath. I wanted it all gone, vanished, over at last. And so I turned for home, to my mother sleeping in the darkness of my bedroom, and the boyfriend who was waiting for me. I was okay, I said, crying briefly as he and I stood in the cold corridor, our voices hushed.

  I know now that it must have been hard for him, and for my friends. I gave them no way of talking to me about Jonathan. I continued living my life as I’d always lived it. He was gone, and just as I had not known how to deal with his existence, it seemed there was no easy way to understand the space now occupied by his absence.

  Five years later, when my mother finally finished her manuscript, she gave me a copy in a red folder. She was sending it off to the publishers. She wanted me to read it first.

  I held it; the plastic binding was bright, the wad of paper inside was thick, white and unblemished. I flicked at the edge of the pages with my thumb, listening to the rustle they made. I opened it randomly and read a few sentences. I closed it again.

  It was summer and I was living in a two-roomed flat on the southern cliff tops of Bondi. This was my sixth home in five years. After leaving Adelaide for Sydney, I’d moved from house to house. I tried working as a journalist and then as a lawyer. I dyed my hair blonde, brunette and then black. I had been depressed and now I was happy. Life was opening up before me, and the folder in my hands took me back to a place I didn’t want to revisit.

  Outside my window sharp white light skimmed and skipped across the surface of the ocean. With pillows propped up behind me, I sat on my bed and began to read. I didn’t stop. Through the heat of the day, the softening of the afternoon and into the early evening, I stayed where I was, immersed in a story I knew well, but that still seemed strangely new. I was gripped, wanting to know what happened next, even though the ending would not bring any surprises. I remembered how I’d loved my brother as a child. I remembered the despair and the distress, and I saw my mother as she had been all those years, chasing after him, running, running, never quite catching him, never able to bring him back.

  When I came to the last few pages, I wept. I rang her crying and I could only tell her it was good, she had done a good job. And then I walked along the darkness of the beachfront, the strangeness of the day still there, cloaking me. Japanese tourists swam in the ocean, squealing as unseen waves emerged ghost white from the black depths. Along the boardwalk, a lone skate-boarder weaved up towards the ramp at the northern end, crouching low as he passed. In front of the surf life-savers’ club, I leant against the railing and looked out.

  My mother had given Jonathan back to us, and not just a sentimentalised version of who he had been. It was all there, but in being able to read about it rather than having to directly experience it, I could allow myself to love him and grieve for him. But this was not just a private gift. It was going to be published. It was going to be read by friends, acquaintances and people I had never met. Turning away from the railing, and back to the south end where I lived, I felt fear. This would be the framework through which I would be seen, and it was not shame of Jonathan that breathed heat onto my anxiety. I had gradually come to understand, both intellectually and, to a lesser extent, emotionally, that he had been ill and that this illness was not something that had to be hidden. My fear was more to do with the prospect of m
y sorrow being out there for others to see.

  So, when the first few people tried to talk to me about the book, I barely responded. They asked me how I had felt reading it, and I could only say that it had been an odd experience.

  I had no idea what you went through, friends would comment.

  I would just smile and say that, yes, it had been hard.

  Soon the attempts to talk came from acquaintances: people I barely knew, men and women I had only just met, began to tell me how much the book had meant to them. I had an aunt, they would say, she was always odd; or, my cousin, he was like your brother; or a neighbour, a best friend – it seemed the world was filled with those of us who had lived with a mental illness.

  With each conversation, I became more adept at discussing our lives. I found I could recount various episodes when Jonathan’s illness had been bad without wishing I’d never begun to speak. Other people had been through what we had been through. Many had fallen apart. I’d used so much strength in keeping a distance between Jonathan and myself. Letting go of that hold was an immense relief.

  But this slow acceptance of my mother’s book and eventual pride in her work, didn’t mark an end to my grieving. Instead, it signalled the start. There were now two quite separate stories. There was the story of our family in the book. This was public property, and it circled, separate and complete, around us. And then there was the person who had grown up in this family and who had tried for years to deny all that had happened. Removing this denial in such a public sense finally opened the way for me to begin to understand Jonathan and the effect he had on my life. I peeled my gloves back, fingers outstretched, finally ready to touch, only to find that it was a process of tentatively lifting layers of emotion. Like shedding skin, I let go slowly, dropping the hot tightness of my grief to reveal a heavy sadness, peeling that back to find moments of sharp pain for the brevity of his life, lifting that to reveal the ache of missing what he might have been. I came to realise that these layers were infinite, the trick was not to drown in them, but to know them for what they were and to let myself experience them one by one as they emerged.

  Late one summer afternoon, I took my daughter Odessa down to the beach. It was still hot, low clouds pressing down on a soupy ocean where people bobbed up and down in lukewarm milkiness. She ran in and out, alternately terrified and excited, seaweed encircling her ankles, clumps of sand coating her limbs. We built a dam, dripping Gaudi turrets that collapsed as the tide splashed over us, and I took her back out into the sea, swinging her round and round like a washing machine, her pale green eyes the colour of the ocean.

  Standing on the sand drying ourselves, we looked down to the shore, ready to head home, when the stillness of the early evening was broken by the shout of a young man. I glanced quickly to where he stood, waist deep, slapping the surface of the water with his fist as he swore loud and angry profanities, his rage alarming in its lack of focus.

  Almost immediately, everyone within hearing range swam back to shore; the fear that he had generated was palpable.

  He stood alone, his voice louder now.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Odessa was shrinking to my side, and I held her hand, surprised and ashamed at my own anxiety.

  It’s all right, I attempted to reassure both her and myself. He won’t hurt you.

  Why was he shouting like that? Was he angry?

  He was sick, I said, not sure how to explain.

  Where?

  The sickness was in his head. It made him hear things, voices that made him shout like that, voices that we could not hear.

  I didn’t know for certain that he had schizophrenia, but there was something in his actions, in his manner, that was familiar enough to make me attempt the explanation I gave.

  We dressed and began our walk back to the car, her questions building, backing up against each other as she tried to understand this sickness of the mind. Had I ever had it? Would she ever catch it? Could you die from it?

  As I told her about my brother, she listened, eyes wide.

  It was the first time I had attempted to explain his life, and his death, to her. He didn’t die from the illness, I said, but it made him so unhappy he no longer wanted to live. Sitting in the back of the car, her questions continued, and as we drove home, I tried to answer her. Later that night, she told Andrew all about the man on the beach. She remembered everything, and then she turned from him to me as she tried to find out more about this brother who had died.

  Just as he had entered my life again when my mother wrote her book, he was back in yet another way.

  And was Jonathan there? she would ask me each time I mentioned my childhood. What did he do? What did he say?

  His life and death fascinated her. It was a romantic tale in a gothic sense, the kind that children love, and she was attempting to flesh this out. I, too, found myself trying to shape him. I wanted him to be more than just the figure of the strange man shouting in the sea, but I also did not want to deny the effects of his illness.

  I told her stories. He was good to animals. He had once calmed a frightened horse. The mare would not let anyone else near. She liked that story. How had he calmed her? He talked to her, softly, until she was still enough for him to stroke her cheek.

  He was always drawing. He had an amazing talent. Was he as good at it as she was? Maybe even better.

  He used to trick me into giving him half my pudding and I fell for it every time. How did he do it? He pretended he had finished and I would feel sorry for him.

  He was often in trouble. What kind of trouble? He was dreamy, vague, he didn’t listen and the teachers would get cross. That’s not very fair, she would say and she would look at me as I agreed that no, it hadn’t been very fair.

  One afternoon, as I watched her playing an imaginary game, I heard her use his name. Soon it became commonplace, her games nearly always incorporating a boy character called Jonathan.

  He was my uncle, she told me.

  I agreed that yes, he would have been, if he’d been alive when she was born, and I wondered, for a moment, what he’d have been like if he’d lived, if the illness had burnt itself out, or he’d learnt how to deal with it.

  Odessa was building something new. Slotting piece next to piece, I watched the person she was making grow; the uncle she never knew, the older brother who made me laugh, the boy character in her games, the son whose death made my mother cry. The person she was creating was her own, very different from the one I had lived with. He will continue to change as her knowledge of the world grows, becoming, I know, part of the stories she uses to understand me, her mother, a person who loves her and will, at times, fail her.

  When we take the dog for a walk, she asks me, once again, to remember. This time I tell her about the day he taught me to ride my bike. I am a child again, out the front of our house, wobbling on my new two-wheeler, one foot in the gutter, the other on the footpath as I try to get on, while he holds it steady.

  But, no, that is not the story she wants to hear.

  ‘Tell me the one about the boy who lived down the street,’ she says, ‘the one who was mean to you all.’

  And I switch back to a particular favourite; the time when Jonathan defended his younger brother against the neighbourhood bully.

  ‘Well –’ I begin, only to stop almost immediately.

  It is a realisation that makes me smile. In remembering, I am beginning to forget the illness that had until now suffocated all else. The detail that had once been the whole has taken a new place; one part only in a pattern that is much larger than I’d ever realised.

  ‘And then what?’ Odessa demands, her voice rising a pitch in irritation at my sudden silence.

  Jonathan is there, embedded in the mesh that holds me to her, to Andrew, to my mother, to my father, and beyond that small circle, the next and the next. A faint stain of colour that tinges, bleeding out into those close to it, tinting the hue of all that follows. To have thought I could ever erase him is now incompreh
ensible.

  ‘Go on,’ she urges.

  His life was brief. It has been told publicly and, like all lives, it has also been told privately. As this new version of a person I thought I knew spreads out before us, there is, finally, something uncomplicated in my feelings towards him. He was my brother and I have found I can love him without fear or anxiety, at last.

  But with no patience for such small epiphanies, Odessa just tugs at my sleeve.

  ‘Where was I?’ I ask.

  ‘The bully,’ she says, and as I take her hand, I go on, telling her the story she has asked to hear.

  A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN (2)

  IT IS STRANGE TO FIND YOURSELF CIRCLING THE PLACE where you started; not right there but close enough to be disturbingly familiar. Because now, here I am, a mother, in a room that is the largest in the house, and I am writing about us.

  As I say this, I am aware that I am being careful with my words. I avoid saying that this room is my room. I also want to clarify that I am not actually in the house. The room is in the garden, and until a few days ago, it was simply a tin shed, with a cement floor, no windows and a fluorescent light that flickered.

  The woman who lived here before us used to do her sewing out here. Her name is Nancy, and she worked two jobs to pay off the house before she sold it to us. During the day, she was a cleaner at the airport. In the evenings, she sat at her machine and sewed sheets, while out on the front verandah her husband drank, throwing his empty tins and cigarette butts into the parched garden below.

  We’d been looking for somewhere to live for more than a year. Our search had covered almost every suburb in Sydney, from the foothills of the Blue Mountains, to the southern suburbs and up to the Central Coast. Exhausted from the whole process, we had reached the point of accepting almost anything. Nancy’s house was rundown, but it was close to the city and the agent swore to us that no one else was interested. We thought we might have a chance at the auction.