by David Roland
I remembered the Children’s Court assessment I had conducted in a woman’s home. She’d had her two young children removed from her recently. I was to provide a report detailing her side of events, giving an opinion on her psychological health and outlining what I thought needed to happen if she were to have responsibility for the children again. She was a single parent. I had settled down in her lounge room, where she had invited me to sit, seeming ready to talk things through, when she grabbed a kitchen knife and made to lunge at me. Then, apparently thinking better of it, she put it down. Instead she began to rage at me, vitriol pouring from her mouth.
I stood up, extending my hand in the stop position — like cops do — and said, ‘Stop. Stop.’ Trying to cut through her stream of venom, I said that I would terminate the interview if she didn’t allow me to speak. But it was like trying to put out a fire with a flammable liquid; her face reddened and contorted even more. So I backed out the front door to the sound of her screams, which travelled all the way down her garden path. She continued ranting, following me and walking out onto the road, as I drove off.
Now I felt shocked that I could have thought at the time that this was an incident I should take in my stride, just another event in a normal workday.
If only I could re-do the interview with Doctor Waverly. But the insurance-claims system was a one-shot game.
WHILE WAITING FOR my claim to be determined, I attended a course given by a Tibetan Buddhist instructor that a research scientist at the Dalai Lama’s teaching had recommended to me. It was inexpensive and practical. He taught calm-abiding meditation.
My sessions in the cubby house became more defined. Now I started with a brief body scan to get in touch with my inner sensations. I imagined that I was breathing in white light, conceiving of it as cleansing and uplifting. In the pause before exhaling (the ‘calm abiding’), I pictured red light nourishing and dispersing throughout my body. On the exhalation, I visualised dark-blue light releasing all negativities. All the while, I kept my eyes partly open, with my gaze turned downwards. At last, I thought, I had a solid mindfulness-meditation practice.
THE INSURER RECEIVED Doctor Waverly’s report a few months after the interview, and sent me a copy. In it, he agreed that I was suffering from anxiety and depression — although I did not qualify for the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, he said, because I had not been directly threatened. He concluded that I was not fit to work in my usual occupation.
The insurer accepted my claim, and a pattern of completing monthly claim forms with my GP commenced. The payments covered our living expenses, but little else.
I faced each weekday morning with fear and loathing, going into the home office like a miner entering a pit while knowing that the dust was damaging his lungs, even shortening his life. I dealt with the lawyers’ telephone calls and the creditors’ threatening letters, and juggled our dwindling funds between bank accounts to pay the latest bill, credit-card payment, or loan repayment — if we could.
The unrelenting nature of these dealings caused a constant chatter in my head, leaving little space for positive thoughts. I wanted to run away, even desert the family, to ‘go bush’. I imagined that this would stop the noise, but I knew in reality that the relief would be temporary.
One particular day, a Tuesday, had been a series of financial setbacks, and I needed some quiet time. As a rule of thumb, we liked to get the children ready for bed at eight o’clock on school nights, with lights out by eight-thirty. I usually read to Amelia, while Emma was keen to sleep, and Ashley was allowed to have the lights on a little longer and do her own thing, quietly. If we didn’t follow this routine, the mornings became dominated by goading grumpy children to get ready for school.
I’d gone out for a long walk that evening to try and clear my head. When I came home, I wandered downstairs and found Anna, Emma, and Amelia cuddled up on the couch, watching television. It was almost eight-thirty. ‘Why aren’t you in bed?’ I snapped.
‘Can we just watch to the end of the show?’ Emma asked.
I felt my blood rising. What was Anna doing? ‘Turn the bloody TV off,’ I barked.
The girls pressed in closer to Anna.
‘David, you’re overreacting,’ Anna said.
‘Get into fuckin’ bed now,’ I shouted, glaring at the girls.
Their faces went white and their eyes widened, but they didn’t move.
I picked up the remote, flicked the television off, and threw it on the ground. It made a thwack as it hit the hard surface and came apart, splaying across the floor. I was saturated with rage. I turned to the large, old-style television, sitting at waist height on its wooden stand, grabbing its sides and yanking it forwards and backwards. ‘Why don’t you do what you’re told!’ I yelled, still facing the television. My right foot lashed out, kicking the stand. A pain zinged up my leg.
I turned and saw Anna and the girls scampering up the stairs. At last!
The pain in my foot was excruciating. I went to sit on the verandah to cool my temper and my foot. When I came inside, the girls were in bed with the lights out; Anna was talking softly with Emma. I left them alone.
The foot pain continued throughout the night.
It was a subdued atmosphere the next morning as the kids got ready for school without fuss. I felt sheepish.
During the day, I saw Doctor Sunbury and told him what had happened. He examined my foot and said I’d broken my second toe. He bound it to the next toe to act as a splint. ‘I’ve done the same thing myself,’ he said wryly. I took this to mean he had kicked the television in anger too; I wasn’t the only monster around.
That afternoon, Anna and I talked. I told her how much of a strain it was dealing with financial matters. When I went into the office, I said, I was in a war zone. Life was so focused on finances: paperwork that carried little real meaning but had to be dealt with nevertheless. The creditors harassed us, insistent on repayment plans, and hit us with penalty fees and default interest — as if we were naughty children and a good slap was all that was needed to get us to behave properly.
I told her that I’d had a shouting match on the phone with a lender the day before. The woman I had spoken to from the bank had kept hitting us with penalty interest and late-payment fees, even though she knew we had the property for sale and were hungry for any offer we could get, and that the mortgage would be paid out once we sold. She was aware of the parlous state of the property market. Finally we had got our first buyer, and they had paid a holding deposit. The previous day, at the last minute, the purchaser’s bank withdrew their finance approval — a symptom of the nervous credit environment. So the sale had fallen over. The woman from our bank said that we would be up for more fees. She was so heartless, callous in her disregard for our situation.
‘They hassle and hassle. They don’t give an inch. Complete bastards!’ I said to Anna. Tears welled up when I told her how humiliating it was for me to front up to other health professionals and admit that I was not coping.
Anna appeared to understand, but she was more concerned that the children were scared after my outburst last night —Emma had cried afterwards. She thought I should speak with them. ‘It’s better that we see through this difficult time together, rather than separate,’ she added.
This was the first time in a while she had spoken clearly about our future. I was buoyed that she wanted us to stay together; I assumed she meant that we could still work things out.
When the girls came home after school, I sat down with all three of them; Ashley was just back from camp. ‘Girls, I’m sorry I got mad last night. It’s not you. We’re having difficult times with money at the moment and Daddy is trying to sell our houses so we can get right again. I wasn’t really mad at you.’
They looked relieved. I saw that my stress had been affecting them, and I felt terrible.
I HAD R
ESTARTED my sessions with Wayne. In my next session, I asked him why I had erupted like this. I hated myself for yelling at the girls and Anna. It had shocked me as well as the family.
‘We often take our anger out on those closest to us,’ he said. ‘They may be the target, but not the real threat. You can’t undo what you’ve done. Anna had the right idea: check in with the children, help them to feel safe, and express regret for your actions. And forgive yourself for being human. Do what you can to make it less likely to happen again.’
I wondered if being male was part of it. When Anna shouted at the girls, they didn’t jump as they did when I yelled. Was I more threatening because of my maleness? Did I speak more sharply than her? Was it because I had a deeper voice or was physically stronger? Perhaps it was because I’m a quiet person; when I shout, it’s more of a shock. I couldn’t tell how fearsome I appeared to the children, and to Anna. I had never hurt them and couldn’t imagine ever doing so.
I’d always thought that my children would not be afraid of me; that they would always feel able to come to me. Yet I’d noticed they went more to Anna than to me if they wanted comforting. I was not as connected to the girls as I once was, as though there was grit in our relationship mechanism.
LATER THAT MONTH, we were unable to settle on the purchase of a block of vacant land by the beach I had committed to buy the previous year, with the idea of building a holiday home for the extended family. The developer’s lawyers wrote letters demanding payment and threatening litigation. I had always been able to repay debts, but now I felt ashamed and powerless.
What could we do? Our family solicitor was having a personal crisis. Anna made contact with a new solicitor. At his request, we completed a statement of financial position. We met with him soon after. He sat at his desk, holding a piece of paper with handwritten notes before him, his elbows resting on the table. It was like being in the presence of a headmaster, awaiting disciplinary action.
Eventually he looked over his black-rimmed glasses and said, ‘You are in a very serious position. Very serious indeed.’ And, as if this wasn’t clear, ‘It doesn’t look good for you.’ The creases in his neck came alive with each statement.
I wanted him to stop saying how serious our situation was; it made my sinking feeling sink further. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stay in his office if he kept this up. He outlined the worst-case scenario — eventual bankruptcy — and the best-case scenario — ‘You might just scrape through and be left with nothing.’
He thought that bankruptcy was worth considering: it would make the stress of dealing with creditors go away immediately, and then we could make a fresh start. I sensed a human response through his gravitas, as if he had known loss as well. He appeared to have a handle on our situation, and Anna trusted him, so we engaged him to develop a strategy to deal with each potential litigation threat. We asked him to communicate with the developer’s lawyers immediately, with the aim of seeking a negotiated settlement over the block of land: a settlement that took account of our real financial position.
After this meeting, I nicknamed him: Doom and Gloom. I came to dread going into his office, because it always seemed to involve bad news.
Over the coming weeks, Doom and Gloom’s letters were met by a wall of indifference. A battle loomed.
Anna’s property-investing relative recommended a barrister, whom we engaged on the assurance that he’d get us ‘out of this mess’. He turned up at our house driving a late-model Mercedes, bringing with him a manner and a business suit that announced, Don’t worry, I’m in control now. Leave it to me. After a to-ing and fro-ing of letters and telephone calls between him and the developer over two weeks, he was finally told, ‘We’re going to make an example of this bloke’ — meaning that Anna and I would be sued, with the prospect of bankruptcy our only prize.
Bankruptcy.
As our financial security had deteriorated, I’d come to envy those still in work, with children whose educational opportunities remained on track. There would be no option for our children outside of the local high school, which had a mixed reputation, and we wouldn’t be upgrading our decade-old cars. The plain-labelled, generic brands in the supermarket became attractive. When I received Doom and Gloom’s first bill, I realised that his fee for reading an email was almost the same as one term of weekly dance classes for one daughter. With two girls who loved dance, I queried his bill and put off paying it so that they could continue their classes. It seemed that when you were down, the kicks in the guts piled up.
The Monday night after the barrister told me we would be sued, Pandora’s box opened. My sleep was infiltrated by a parade of horrors: the first psychopathic murderer I’d encountered; the alcoholic client who didn’t turn up for his counselling session and stabbed his wife in the bathtub; the paramedic I treated after he was called out to a road accident to find the charred bodies of a mother and a child. There I was, conducting an assessment of a father with a history of violence in the same room where a community worker had been stabbed weeks before. Here was my mother’s psychiatrist colleague, shot dead by one of his patients. There was the child with a developmental disability who had climbed into a bathtub of hot water, suffering third-degree burns, due to his parents’ negligence. The survivors of sexual abuse and violence, the accident victims, the victims of crime — on and on it went.
The next morning, I was a ball of agitation, memories trapped in my head like spiders in a collector’s jar. My mind had become a prison of horrors. I could understand why people with psychotic delusions were so tortured: how do you escape a prison that is stuck on your shoulders? I wanted to bang my head against a wall to knock the toxic memories out. It was only when I wrote out descriptions of each memory in my journal, pinning them down onto the page, that I got some release.
Over the past week, a photograph of me as a boy had kept cropping up in my mind. In it, I was wearing shorts, a checked shirt, and sandals. Like a hurdler, my legs scissored over my grandma’s low fence, my arms pumping, a gleeful, triumphant expression on my face. I had always jumped over grandma’s fence — I’d never walked through the dinky little gate. I wanted to go back to that carefree boy and say, ‘I’m sorry; I messed up. I’ll find a way for you to avoid this pain.’ But I couldn’t; that boy was now me.
That night, Nick and I caught up to rehearse a Bach duet we’d started to learn. We set ourselves up in his family’s music room, surrounded by a piano and guitar cases, sheet music splayed on the sofa. I was still feeling raw. Yet when he closed the door, I was cocooned from the outside world; now my world was black dots on a page, and the sound of our two melodies.
Although the notes in the Bach piece were not exacting, timing was crucial, and mine felt off. It was as if I was being held back by something, as though a hand was dragging on my shoulder. ‘Sorry, Nick, my timing’s out tonight,’ I said.
‘Oh no, you’re sounding fine,’ he said.
I wasn’t sure if he was being kind or if I was imagining that I was off. I supposed, given the last two days, I was just out of sorts, and a good night’s sleep would see me right in the morning. I looked forward to that.
DIAGNOSIS
8
ON FRIDAY MORNING, the day after I am discharged from Lismore Hospital, Anna and I arrive at Seaview Psychiatric Clinic. It’s warm for winter; I take off my jacket. We sit down in a quiet, carpeted corner beside the reception desk. The walls are beige, the ceilings white. A water cooler stands by the far wall. Two others are with us in the waiting area, their heads down, beside relatives, with packed bags in clumps around them. I too have a bag, and a guitar.
Anna is wearing her business lipstick: the deep crimson. Her wonderful smile is hard to imagine now, her face is so taut. We sit in silence.
There are four doors leading off the waiting area. On each, above the word PSYCHIATRIST, is a doctor’s name. With the location of their rooms at
the bow of this elongated building, these psychiatrists are like captains of the ship. Eventually the door nearest us opens, and the long, familiar figure of Doctor Banister appears. He’s wearing his trademark tweed jacket with elbow patches. ‘Come in,’ he says, looking concerned.
We follow him in. He sits at his desk, facing away from us. Taking a seat on the two chairs behind him, we have a view of his back as he punches away at a laptop. On his desk is a crammed concertina file and the laptop, but little else. It looks as if Doctor Banister has just moved in or is in the process of moving out, even though I know that he’s been working here for a long time.
After a few moments, he swivels in his chair to address us, speaking to Anna. ‘Tell me what happened … before you took David to hospital?’
She begins her account. Almost immediately, it becomes clear that I am superfluous to their conversation. That’s okay with me. The rise and fall of their voices becomes the sound of summer insects — an aural backdrop as I explore the corners of the room. I notice that it has five unequal sides, like a warped pentagon. I’m still not quite sure if I’m dreaming, or if what’s happening is real. I might be Alice, and a white rabbit, or something else very unexpected, will appear at any moment.
I see the unframed paintings: originals on canvas. None is hanging; instead, they rest on the floor, propped up by the walls. I’m taken by the large portrait of a young woman. She looks sad, with a long face, small lips, a pointy chin, and dark pools for eyes. Deep red and ochre filters down her face, to her shoulders.
Why are all these paintings here?
Doctor Banister asks me a question, yanking me back to reality. ‘David, what do you think brought this on?’
I really am in a psychiatric establishment.
It’s an effort to find an answer to his question. ‘I … I was very anxious. A barrister came to speak with us. He said that the developer wants to sue us. After he left, I had a huge panic attack; I couldn’t stop the trauma memories from coming back. I think it was too much.’
