It produced many dark fantasies that are better left undocumented here.
At nineteen I left home. I told my father I wanted to study theoretical physics.
‘Why?’ Ned asked.
‘Because,’ I replied, ‘only physics can unravel the riddle of the universe.’
Ned shook his head and stated categorically that I was making a bad decision, that I would not be able to support myself. In this city there were taxi drivers with physics degrees, and he wanted no child of his to embark on such an unreliable profession. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you want to study physics, get an engineering degree.’
But I had no desire to be an engineer, a fixer, a manager of the known. Instead, with a defiant sense of chancing my luck, I enrolled in an Arts degree, majoring in pure mathematics and medieval history.
Ned was furious. It was the first time I had seen him not just angry but enraged. There was more than one shouting match, but I had a scholarship and I was prepared to get casual work if I had to. It was time to leave home.
For the first two years of my studies I lived in a run-down student terrace in Newtown with mattresses on the floor and an outside dunny. At night and into the early morning I served watered-down spirits from behind the bar of the Purple Parrot, a louche nightclub in King Street. The licensee of the Parrot was a middle-aged Londoner known as Coop who had served with the British SAS, or at least that’s what he told the staff, his ‘boys’.
I was fascinated by Coop, for he was the opposite of my father: exotic and venal, a pugnacious man, tall and thickset with a bald head, heavy jowls and a watery, myopic stare. He drank too much and could be extremely rude, but in his good moods he was charming. And he seemed to like me. ‘Hello, old dear,’ he’d say when I arrived for work, and he would pat me on the shoulder as if I were a favourite nephew. ‘I’ve got you sussed,’ he’d say, ‘you’re smarter than the others.’ Sometimes after closing he would go into the kitchen and cook for the staff, and his food was always better than the chef’s. It had a delicacy that was surprising. But when roused he could be vicious and would brawl with the lethal economy of the soldier he once was.
As I got to know Coop I saw that he was neither a good man nor a bad one; he could be rude, savage and sadistic, yet he could also be generous and at times sentimental. When sober he treated the club’s patrons with elaborate courtesy, but when drunk he would harass them out of the club and shut the doors. Then he would order his ‘boys’ to open some French reds and we would sit around while he reminisced about his army days. In those early morning hours a certain mood would come over him, an uncanny melancholy threaded through with menace.
Or, if he was in a roistering mood, we would move on to the small apartment he kept in Glebe for his all-night parties, where occasionally he would orchestrate a live sex performance. Here he kept a riding crop mounted on the wall, and it was no mere ornament since what he wanted most was to be beaten and humiliated. More than once I wandered into the lavatory for a leak only to stumble over Coop, down on his knees and pleading with some startled young woman, perched on the bowl with her knickers around her ankles, to urinate on him. Not that he was ever fazed at my intrusion. ‘Hello, old dear,’ he’d say, and, gazing up at the girl looming above him, he would smile, beatifically. ‘All I want is for her to piss on me. It’s not much to ask, is it?’ Then he would sigh. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ They were all beautiful.
After I graduated I looked around and thought: what now? On the recommendation of the father of a friend I joined an oil company as a trainee manager and worked for eighteen months in a state of casual boredom. One of my achievements was to reduce the number of forms used in the personnel section from nineteen to three. For this I was commended as a ‘thinker’. Though I liked the men I worked with, the job demanded too little of me. After six months I enrolled in intensive night classes in the new science of computing and found I was a natural. I was one of the first. Within two years I was working for a new start-up company in Chatswood.
By then I had moved on from the Parrot. I couldn’t be bothered with its self-conscious wickedness. It was the striving to be wicked, the desperate contrivance of it, that bored me, not sex itself. I do not want to give the wrong impression here, since there was never a time in my youth when I wasn’t consumed by the intensity of my sexual cravings. But what I sought was a loss of self that blotted out the critical intellect, not sharpened it – something to switch off the thinking mind.
And it was my experience that this could never be contrived, that it came at you unexpectedly and often from the most unlikely places; could spring out of the mundane like a scarlet flower blooming through a crack in a stone wall. What I wanted was to lose myself in the moment, to be in a place so utterly right that all sense of separation would fall away. I wanted more than sex, I wanted communion, but this ‘wanting’ was more in the thinking than in the living, and my relationships with women were erratic. I lost interest easily; needed to be able to do what I liked on impulse without consulting anyone; was not one of those young men who was prepared to settle gratefully into an early marriage, de facto or otherwise. Sometimes the idea of love – love that would hold me captive and abject – was terrifying.
Only sex could blot out my painful awareness of separation, and the more reckless, the better. There was an affair with an older married woman that led to me being king-hit at a party in Bondi. An irate husband appeared on the scene and suddenly I had an inkling of how callow I was, that some people were playing for higher stakes, that their whole world was in the balance, whereas I was just looking for illicit kicks, a kind of hit-and-run fix. And it could be good, that fix, it could be very good: purging, cathartic. Afterwards you felt a lightness of being, like all your blood had been run through a white-hot crystal and cleansed of its dross. Sometimes at the point of orgasm I thought the rush would consume me forever.
By then I was in my mid-twenties and already beginning to feel a slight decline in my physical powers. One evening, while drinking with an old schoolfriend, I was induced to take up jogging, persuaded that it could give me an endorphin high. In fact, after only a few weeks it gave me a sprained ankle, but the pack I jogged with had a drink once a week in a karaoke bar, and at one of these sessions I encountered Jo Chalmers.
The thing that first attracted me to Jo was her voice: warm, and spliced with a wry humour. She was the only person I had seen who could sing karaoke and look natural, neither vain nor awkward. She was there with a group from work, and after she sang I went over, three parts shot, and asked her out. ‘Call me in the morning when you’re sober,’ she said. And I did.
We lived together for four years, and although we never married I still think of her as my first wife. The commitment is the same, whatever they tell you, and the break just as hard. To be fair to Jo, for much of the time I was with her I was distracted; spent long hours at work and assumed she would understand. Her own work was demanding too, and there were weeks when we talked for longer on the phone than we did in our small apartment. And maybe it was her voice I fell in love with: just listening to her sing in the shower could lift my spirits. But best of all I liked to hear her sing in the car when we went on long trips together, often to Canberra to visit her parents. And together up and down the Hume Highway we would work our way through hits from the sixties and seventies to which Jo always knew the words, crazy songs like ‘Li’l Red Riding Hood’, and then we would howl all along the freeway, and laugh until we were light-headed and veering into the white line.
When other people clowned they were embarrassing; when Jo was silly she enlarged, she broke open the frame. At her best she had a gift for joyful trivia that could short-circuit my analytical logic, my restless discontent. But when she was angry her anger seethed like volcanic lava trapped beneath tectonic plates, and then she would withdraw from me, and I from her, and we would play games with one another, serious war-like manoeuvres carried out on a plane of mute hostility until we both were locked into
a silence that neither could find a way out of. As time went on, our life together evolved into painful periods of unspoken resentment, punctuated by increasingly lukewarm periods of truce.
And all through this time I continued to feel that strange blend of passion and detachment, of yearning and apathy, which made nonsense of the world beyond the strict, organising logic of my work. There were days when I felt an electrifying spark propel me through the day, but then there were days when everything seemed hollow, a cheerless merry-go-round, and it was an immense effort to get out of bed. Though many people thought of me as a workaholic, as obsessive, it was as if the system had crashed and I would have to lie prone on my back and run the instructions through my head: ‘Now get up, then have a shower, then have some breakfast. Don’t skip it, you’ll regret it later. Then walk to the train, take your time if you have to, if you’re late it won’t matter, just get there, one step at a time …’ After half an hour of lying there, rehearsing the moves in my head, talking myself into it, finally I would throw back the covers. Sometimes, just occasionally, I would sink back and plead a virus, but mostly I would get up and work my way through the program. And by mid-morning it would be okay, which is not to say that by the next morning the malaise wouldn’t have re-settled over me, like fog descending in the night, and I would have to arc up the program again. And this could go on for days or, in a bad period, weeks. And no-one knew. Jo would just remark on me being ‘moody’ or ‘sluggish’ and make some crack about getting more exercise.
I could only have explained it then by saying that I in which the battery had gone flat. And it was true that simple things could recharge it for a while: a book; a walk in the bush; a swim. But there were whole weeks when I felt oppressed by the sheer ordinariness of life, its mindless repetition. Birth, death, decay, birth, death …
This was the pattern of my being. I had always oscillated between feelings of grandiosity (I deserved better) and phases of dejection (I deserved nothing) but now, in my late twenties, the periods of brooding grew longer. In combative moods I told myself that it was life that was inadequate, not me. It was life that was never quite good enough.
And then one day I had a seminal experience.
The company I worked for was one of the earliest to pick up on the faddish new corporate training methods, a whole lot of slick guff about team-building. Suddenly there was money for the new psychology and everybody was out to gain an edge.
It was nine-thirty on a wet Wednesday morning. Outside, the late summer rain was being blown onto the smoky glass windows of our company conference room, while inside, the members of my section were being solemnly addressed by a smooth young motivation counsellor called Drake.
Drake was not much older than me but full of a kind of bland certainty, worn like a sheer outer skin. He was so neat, so finely pressed, that it was hard to take him seriously; he looked like one of those square-jawed men in a David Jones catalogue, whose affectedly casual demeanour only makes them look studied and unnatural. And while he talked constantly of dynamism, everything about him suggested a stiff calculation, not least his repetition of the phrase ‘in my humble opinion’. There were the usual accoutrements of the lecture: a whiteboard, a thick purple marker, a litany of trite phrases intoned as if they were the Book of Revelation revised.
In the global era, Drake announced, the old hierarchies would no longer apply. Management styles must change, but first there must be openness and trust. In order to develop openness and trust, team members must find a way to bond. In order to bond, they needed to put their lives in each other’s hands. They needed to put sinew and bone and muscle on the line.
On the line? On what line? Well, on a line of thin nylon cord, as it turned out. At the end of the morning session Drake announced that phase two of the program was a day-long jag of abseiling.
Strictly voluntary, of course.
It was just after four on a Sunday afternoon in late March when the minibus delivered us to the door of our hotel in the Blue Mountains, a rambling colonial summer home with long enclosed verandahs that suggested secretiveness and a lazy, rich seclusion. In the evening, before dinner, we gathered in the bar, a narrow room lined with red velvet, and there, cossetted by the warmth of an open fire, we drank and joked about sudden death.
‘It’s the one thing that even serious rock-climbers fear,’ said Greg, an earnest member of my own project team, ‘because you are totally dependent on the rope. When death occurs on a climb, it’s almost always in the abseiling phase.’
‘Yeah, but abseiling conditions on a rock climb are totally different from what we’re going to do,’ said Karen. ‘Greg is just trying to scare the shit out of us.’
One of the group, Phil, had done it before.
‘What’s it like?’ Melanie asked him. Melanie was one of the company’s auditors. She had been reluctant to come in the first place but had allowed herself to be teased into it by her supervisor.
‘The further down you go,’ Phil remarked, taciturnly, ‘the thinner the rope looks.’
After the meal, half-tanked and heavy-lidded, we were ushered into a small seminar room. Here we were addressed by a guy called Dave, abseiling expert and leader of the team of handlers who were to take us over the drop the next day. Dave and his crew were all hardened climbers, a kind of outdoor priesthood for whom this kind of corporate play was their bread and butter. They might not believe in it for a minute but it paid them enough to spend half their year on the slopes of the Himalayas, or scaling some forbidden mountain in the Javanese archipelago. And I wondered why they were drawn to extreme risk. Were they nerveless optimists who knew no fear, or was it fear itself that drove them on in meaningless conquest?
Dave was in his mid-thirties, raw-boned with a shaved head and an earring. He had that taut, wiry look that outdoor types seemed to develop, but he was an appealing character, quiet and low-key.
Unlike Drake, he had a way of talking that was surprisingly poetic; even now I can recall some of Dave’s talk. ‘You have to remember that the body doesn’t expect to be standing on the edge of a deep ravine looking down into space,’ he said. ‘The body expects to feel solid earth under its feet, because that’s what Nature intended. The body has its comfort zone and it doesn’t always like to have it tested.’
And we all sat there, like novice altar boys, and soaked it up.
The following morning was warm and the late autumn sun shone through the windows of the dining room. At least, we told ourselves, we would not have to deal with discouraging weather. At breakfast there were some who tried to keep up the sardonic banter of the evening before but by the time we boarded the minibus and were halfway to our destination the tension had begun to have a dull, flattening effect.
The bus delivered us to the foot of a cliff, where one of the trainers, Julian, was waiting to escort us up a rocky track. It was a long and tiring walk, and it gave us even more time to contemplate what we were about to do.
‘Why do we have to walk up first?’ asked Angus, overweight and puffing. ‘Why couldn’t we just drive to the top?’
‘So they can scare the living daylights out of us,’ said Ivo, another member of my project team. ‘They have to get some fun out of this too.’
By the time we arrived at the cliff-top, Dave and another of the handlers, Ingrid, were waiting for us on a narrow ledge of rock that jutted out over the canyon below. I remember the brightness of the light, so bright the scene looked almost two-dimensional, as if painted on canvas, and I recall even now how the rock ledge was bare, save for a stunted, wind-blasted banksia, a kind of bush bonsai, its foliage bent permanently to one side.
Ingrid and Julian stood about in artificially languid poses while Dave explained the drill. It soon became clear that the only on-site preparation we were to get was a five-minute talk by Dave in which he explained the harness, how the ropes were secured and the essentials of the technique that would, if followed correctly, get us to the bottom without turning upside down, or
have us spinning hopelessly in midair, not to mention swinging face-first into a wall of yellow rock.
Phil was the first to go down, because he’d done it before, and his descent went without mishap. Then Melanie stepped forward nervously and I observed the subtle change in Dave’s demeanour, the way in which, while adjusting Melanie’s harness and explaining how the rope worked, he stood directly between her and the edge so that she was unable to look down over the drop. But at the point where he eased her backwards and positioned her so that her heels hung over the ledge, Melanie threw an untimely glance over her left shoulder at the yawning chasm now only inches from her expensive new walking boots, and her body froze. Suddenly she was hyperventilating, and – jerking forward – she bolted like an agitated puppet towards the scrub, the rope trailing behind her in an abject tail until she reached the first line of heath. There she stopped, chest heaving, and vomited into a bush.
Dave moved across to comfort her, indicating with a nod of the head that Julian should take over at the edge.
Julian set about the work of rigging up a second harness. ‘Who’s next?’ he asked, and I stepped forward.
The preliminaries were methodical, almost monosyllabic, and as I went about the business of fastening my helmet and adjusting a harness which dug uncomfortably into my crotch, I felt surprisingly calm. At what point, I wondered, would the adrenaline kick in? There was no time to offer a word or even a grimace of commiseration to Melanie as I stood taking in Julian’s instructions, nodding and repeating the key phrases of Julian’s drill, especially the bit about keeping your legs straight as you made your descent, otherwise you would fly-face first into the rock wall of the cliff.
Finally, I was set, heels hanging over the edge.
‘Are you right?’ asked Julian.
I nodded.
A Short History of Richard Kline Page 2
