Madness (10 page)

It's autumn. The plane trees outside my window at work are losing their leaves. The air has an edge to it, a raciness, the dark descends quickly. The exotic dark. It's mania weather. I talk and walk fast, I write fast. I'm reading five books at once; I sing in my head while carrying on a conversation, I compliment people.

‘You're looking sexy today,' I say to my manager. He stops and half-smiles. After work I walk all the way home. There is magic and colour in the air and I may burst from my skin; inhabit something larger in both space and time. Nights like these, the boundaries of everything shift around me. Walls, floors, sound – especially sound. Music saturates the room, clings to my skin, flows like fine wine. I am a risk-taker, a Russian-roulette-player. As soon leap off a mountain as walk down the street. I am cool – I like Nine Inch Nails really loud, and the Tea Party, Jane's Addiction, Rancid, punk-anything, acid and flame. Each note is a colour, there is colour everywhere, tonight I am DIVINE.

Arthur Boyd created a series of paintings about Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, exiler, despot. In one, he is painted from above, all deepest yellow, his arms outstretched and his fingers grasping the gold air. He is dying. I fall in love with it and ring the South Australian Art Gallery: can they make me a reproduction? I need it. It is essential. All meaning is to be found in this painting.

I try to explain it to Winsome, sitting on the very edge of the chair, my lap piled with books, earphones around my neck still playing.

‘Everything is very beautiful,' I say. ‘Look at the way light is stuttering through your glass ornament – it's all about the blue and then it's white and then it's gone! I can't keep up with the pace of light, I think it's extraordinary that we can see light at all; I wish I'd studied special relativity but my brain simply refuses to hold onto the facts. There's definitely something wrong with some of my neurones, though I'd secretly prefer to visit an art gallery because art is where light gets to show herself off, don't you think? And so I wonder—'

‘Kate,' says Winsome. ‘You're keeping me entertained, but I don't think you are well. Have you got an appointment with Aaron?'

I sigh and stand and pace along the wall by the window. ‘Tomorrow.'

‘Good. What are you doing tonight?'

‘Painting my fence blue. Blue is such a universal colour. It's honest, but its depths are full of mystery. Isn't it amazing that it can be both at the same time?'

‘Yes. How did you get here?'

‘Tram, which is excellent—'

‘Kate,' says Winsome again. I stop pacing. ‘Come and sit down.'

‘I can't, I really can't, look!' I stand on my tiptoes and throw my arms out wide; I'm silhouetted like a star against the window for all the people in the street to see.

The next day I put on a lot of make up and go to work an hour early. I drink ten cups of coffee. I do jumping jacks in the toilet with my headphones on. I wonder if the BDSM house will take me on as a Mistress.

In the evening I visit Aaron. ‘How are you?' he asks, as usual. I stand in front of him with my hands on my hips, sticking my pelvis out.

‘Do you kiss with tongue?' I say, and then I start giggling and I can't stop, I keep giggling and now tears are seeping out from the sides of my eyes and smudging the mascara I put on this morning for the first time in years. I'm rocking back and forth on my feet, laughing and crying in equal measure. Aaron doesn't say anything; he reaches over to the phone on his desk and rings the CAT team.

‘Are you taking your lithium?' he asks, mid-conversation.

‘Of course,' I say. I have no idea where the bottle of lithium is – somewhere in my bedroom, probably under the bed where the cats sometimes pee.

He hangs up the phone. ‘Are you sleeping?'

‘Thorough waste of time.' I sit down. ‘I do miss dreaming though. You know Freud thought that dream-life was just as important as waking-life for the illumination of the psyche. I think I agree with him, well I do at this particular moment, God, your taste in art is awful, Aaron.'

‘Kate,' says Aaron. ‘I would like you to take one of these – now.' He pulls a blister pack of tablets out of his top desk drawer. His desk is old, made of some wood with lines and whorls and stained dark chestnut.

‘What's this?' I ask.

‘Seroquel. It's an atypical anti-psychotic. Also good for hypomania.' He stands and says, ‘Just stay there a minute.' I sway from side to side on the chair singing the Cat Power song ‘Good Woman.' Aaron gives me a glass of water and a round, white tablet.

‘How much?' I ask.

‘200 milligrams,' he says.

I stare at it. The tablet is changing shape in my palm. It's circular, then oval, then it expels a part of itself and becomes two tablets.

I stare at Aaron. ‘What are you doing?'

‘I'm trying to stabilise your mood.'

He waits, leaning on his desk with his arms crossed. The creases in his shirt catch the light and shine. I smile.

‘Take the Seroquel, please.'

The tablet is furry round the edges where it has mixed with my sweat. I put it in my mouth and take a swig of water and swallow down its bitterness.

‘Happy?'

‘Thank you,' he says. ‘The CAT team are going to visit you later tonight.'

‘Excellent,' I say and stand up and bow so that my forearms touch the ground. ‘It has been a pleasure doing business with you, Sir.'

Aaron almost smiles.

The CAT team this evening consists of Angela and Gary. Angela is eight months pregnant.

‘Can I use your loo?' she asks as soon as I open the door. I sit on the floor with a pile of books in my lap, mainly poetry, and keep reading while the CAT team ask questions.

‘Can we have your car keys, Kate?' asks Angela. ‘We're worried about you driving too fast. What do you think?'

‘Yeah, yeah. Probably.'

I can hear someone singing, ‘. . . Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes! His floating hair!'

‘Who is singing?' I ask looking around the room and into the corners of the ceiling.

‘We'd like you to take a week off work.'

‘Ah hah.'

‘Here's some seroquel for you to take with your lithium in the morning.' The tablets, in their silver casing, look like tiny UFOs. I put them in my pocket and follow Angela and Gary down the stairs

and out into the street where night holds fast to the sky.

‘Check out the stars!' I say, whirling around.

‘Go to bed, Kate. We'll see you tomorrow.' I wait until their car turns into High Street, and then I drop the seroquel in one of the big green rubbish bins out the front of my block of flats. I don't sleep.

Seroquel (quetiapine) is one of a class of drugs known as atypical antipsychotics. It binds to serotonin receptors and dopamine receptors in the brain and is effective for people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, particularly those with acute mania. Seroquel is sedating. It slows thought, reins in excessive activity and improves sleep, but I have no intention of taking anything that might curb this flight.

In the morning I go into work as usual. Rather than reading articles on childhood asthma from the
Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health
, I spend the day writing poetry. I'm seized with the desirability of words: their ability to sculpt new worlds, fantastical and pure.

The CAT team visit in the early evening and give me some more seroquel, which I deposit in the rubbish bin on my way into the city. I've got a bottle half full of Coke and half full of vodka. Behind Safeway there is a small park with some children's play equipment and a fluorescent light on the wall that flickers. Sitting in a circle on the grass are two old men in jeans and two young men in tracksuits.

‘Hiya,' I say, finding a spot on the grass.

‘Hey,' says one of the young men. The old ones nod their heads in my direction. They've got a couple of joints going between them.

‘Got any money, love?'

‘Heaps.'

‘Get us some smokes?'

‘Sure!' I'm in Safeway and I stride fast up and down the aisles with their glorious colours and I buy five kinds of nail polish and two cartons of Marlboro Reds and then I go next door for a slab of VB. Back outside the wind has picked up.

The men aren't keen to share their marijuana, but they take the booze and the smokes as I go around shaking everyone by the hand.

‘Would you like some nail polish?' I ask one of the old men. He has a hatched beard; he's wearing an army coat fraying in long lines of cotton at the wrists. I offer the little bottles, Electric Pink and Royal Rajah Ruby and Lacy Not Racy. He laughs and shakes his head at me and lights a cigarette.

I spin off into a club down the street, with its door open, music and light spilling out. The music is hip-hop, loud, with a good bass. I stand next to a couple who look Latino – they've got such shiny eyes and hair, and such silky skin I could run my hands like honey all over them. I dance with the nearly empty bottle of vodka and Coke in one hand. At 2 a.m. they turn the music off, though I'm still dancing (the only one still dancing), wet inside my coat, blisters running up my heels.

‘God, that was good,' I say, as one of the staff ushers me out. I stand on the pavement, stick my hand out for a passing taxi.

‘Do you know any other languages?' I ask the driver, whose name is Alekso.

‘Macedonian,' he says.

‘Say “I love you” in Macedonian.'

He pauses, looks across at me in the gloom of the taxi with his brown eyes that are catching the dobs of streetlights and reflecting them. ‘Te sakam,' he says.

‘Te sakam, Alekso,' I say.

At home I write PROMETHEUS in red in one of my notebooks. I gather a pile of paper, bills and letters; some unopened, and kindle it in my courtyard with a match. The flame skirts the edges of the paper like it's teasing, then it flares as it finds oxygen in the night air. I crouch in close; I can feel heat on my eyes, stands of hair singe round my forehead with a tiny phzz. This is holy fire, the sort that Moses encountered on Mt Horeb. There are faces in the flame, jokers and fire angels, Prometheus himself with his half-eaten liver and Munch's scream. I don't blink for so long the fine layer of liquid over my eyes evaporates, leaving them dry as hard-boiled eggs. I try to kiss the flame, touch it, hold it, but it's slippery, it lights upon a spot in the night, sucks the air, is gone.

Instead of sleeping, I sit in bed, reading. There's a sort of buzzing in my head like tinnitus, but more tactile; inside the beehive in my skull the bees are edgy. I get up and look at my face in the mirror. My eyes are all pupils, black and cavernous. The whites are shot red.

Someone is singing, ‘Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes! His floating hair!'

On the train to work people are staring at the way I manage to curl air in through my nostrils and blow it out again through my mouth, coloured and alive. I'm creating life from a conglomeration of gases: nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide. Is this what God did when he created the firmament of the heavens and the celestial spheres? Is this what it is to be holy?

At work I write about orchids.

Of the four classical elements in alchemy, air is symbolic of action and purity, it is hot and wet. It follows that all I need to stay alive is air. I hold this revelation, this epiphany, folded to my breast as I would a love letter. Instead of having lunch I buy a leather desk chair for around three months' salary.

In the evening, Gary and Angela visit and I take the opportunity to wonder about the difference between theology and divinity and the meaning of divine, and whether divinity of the spirit is inevitably corrupted by the mind, but all Gary and Angela are interested in is seroquel.

‘You don't appear to be slowing down,' Angela says, sitting on the very edge of the lounge chair with knees wide apart to accommodate her belly.

‘I know, it's fabulous, isn't it? Maybe I'm immune. Seriously, what if I've got special liver enzymes that metabolise Seroquel in the blink of an eye?' I wink at her and smile.

‘I don't think so,' she says, looking at Gary.

‘Okay,' says Gary. ‘Here's your evening dose. We're going to watch you take it. Go and get some water.'

On the way to the kitchen the people in my head and I agree that seroquel is not a good idea. This space, this time, this realm is an ideal grace. It is pure, as vital as blood, and boundless. I return with a glass of water and Gary slips two white tablets from their silver casing into my palm. I tip my head back and flick the tablets over my back teeth to the inside of my right cheek. I drink the water, letting it slide down the left side of my mouth and throat. I smile at both of them and take the glass back to the kitchen and remove the soggy, bitter-white mush, my head inclined a fragile inch. Mavis, my big black cat, opens her eyes wide, wide.

The remainder of the night passes. I wake up on the floor in the living room with bits of fluff in my mouth and my head on a copy of
The Diary of Frida Kahlo
. Frida painted in oils mostly, so I stop off on the way to work at Eckersley's Art and buy tubes of Cadmium Red, Vermillion, a bottle of sun-refined linseed oil, two flat hog-hairbristle brushes and several stretched canvases. By evening, however, it is clear that my real vocation lies with the women of the night in Greeves Street, St Kilda – there is something in the dark sea air, something amorous and slightly racy.

inject connect sex

‘Where or what is your brightest part?' I ask the woman sitting opposite me on the tram. ‘Would you say it was your soul?'

A young man stands on the pavement in front of the National Theatre. He's very thin, very feminine (and beautiful). I sit down with my back to the dusky-pink bricks and stare at the veins in his forearms, lines of pillowed-blood, perfect under the skin.

‘I could fall into your eyes and die,' I say.

He looks at me and frowns. ‘You right?'

‘I said, I could fall into your eyes and die.'

‘Look, I don't even know you, just piss off out of my space.'

‘Jesus! What if we're buried together? What're you going to do then?'

He walks away down Carlisle Street in his tall black-heeled boots and I reel in the other direction up Barkly Street and then left into Grey Street. The Sacred Heart Mission is shut for the night; the iron gates are closed and quiet. On the roof of one of the buildings are three thick cream crosses; on the other building there are five. Three crosses for the holy trinity and the three states of matter. Five crosses for the four limbs of the body and the head in the centre. The upper windows of the op shop and the main building have eyes with stained glass irises.

all the colours burst amid echoes raaaaw

‘Roar!' I yell at the night.

At home I open all the curtains in my flat and light all the candles and put them on windowsills. I light fists of sandalwood incense and arrange them in vases on either side of my newly created shrine to Dylan Thomas. The television is on and the radio is on and the CD player in my room is on because I can absorb sound in all three dimensions and process each independently. There are books covering the floor, lining the walls, strung across the ceiling.

‘You haven't been taking your seroquel or your lithium, have you?' asks Angela, when she and Gary arrive ten minutes later.

‘No, but I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm really not, it's because I'm at one with all the world: the physical, the mortal, the metaphysical. Think of natural fractals: no matter at which level you look – macro or micro or nano – they're perfect, and I understand – it's like when the solo treble hits high C – it's rapture.'

Gary and Angela confer.

‘We're going to take you for a review at the hospital,' Gary says.

‘Why?'

‘We don't want you doing anything silly, anything you might regret.'

‘This is the craziness of the world: there's never a good answer to the question why.'

Angela goes around blowing out candles while Gary rings ahead on his mobile and then he takes my keys and locks the flat and Angela walks me down the stairs to their sensible, white car and we drive very sensibly (very slowly) to the hospital.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mania was variously described as a frenzy without fever, an insensibility tense with internal vibrations, a secret fire of open and burning flame, an agitation of cerebral fluid. Early physicians theorised that the cause of the illness lay in the ‘continuous and violent movement of heat, the spirits and the humours.'

At the hospital I introduce myself to the night staff and ask one of the nurses whose eyes are bewitching me if I can give her a hug, which she allows, arms straight down by her sides. I'm given a measuring cup of dark red syrup and four white tablets.

‘The blood of Christ, the body of Christ, Amen,' I say.

Because I am thus far compliant, I'm given a room on the main ward opposite the staff station. It's very white – walls, bed, linen, floor – but I have Dylan Thomas with me for illumination, all of his honey-coloured words.

In the morning I stride round and round the courtyard listening to the Stone Roses on repeat until I'm called in to see Aaron, who works on the public ward in the mornings and sees his private patients in the afternoons.

‘The CAT team have filled me in,' he says.

‘Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes! His floating hair!'

I turn around to see who's singing.

‘Who's singing?' I ask.

‘We'll have to give you an injection in the buttocks if you don't settle down soon,' Aaron says.

Zoë comes to visit – it's fantastic to see her and I go round introducing her to everyone.

‘How are you?' she asks.

‘Who so regardeth dreams is like him that catcheth at a shadow and followeth after the wind. That's from Ecclesiastes,' I reply.

‘Right,' she says. ‘Your cords are on backwards.'

We're out in the courtyard, smoking. ‘Hah!' I pull my jeans down and my shirt up and stand for a moment in my underwear, feeling the air move on my breasts and legs.

‘The tax office phoned yesterday,' I say. ‘They're developing a kind of new philosophy; it's to do with how they assess whether people have to pay tax or not, I mean, there's got to be more to it than just how much you earn, right? Circus performers shouldn't have to pay tax and I'm going to write the new policy.'

‘Okay,' says Zoë.

I start pacing, ‘That white cat is invading me.'

‘There's no cat, Kate.'

‘No? But there are different degrees of light; it's all about angles and diffraction, so there could be a cat; you just can't see it.'

Staff walk me inside to Aaron's consulting room.

‘How are you today?' he asks.

‘I have absolutely no idea,' I say. ‘I'm wrinkled with drugs, unplug the firebug or we'll all go up in flames.'

‘How did you sleep last night?'

‘Queen Mab raped me. Hah! The fairies' midwife!'

‘Are your thoughts still racing?'

‘I don't know what they're doing, ô sales fous ô sales fous ô sales fous ô sales fous—'

Aaron interrupts me, ‘What are you saying?'

‘O filthy lunatics . . . Rimbaud. Yes? No.'

I spend hours in the art room writing columns of words that rise from the page into strange spirit phrases and engulf me.

At least twice a day I burst (literally) into tears like I've had a frontal lobotomy, and at least twice a day, for no particular reason, rage rises up through my innards and strangles me about the throat so that I take to stuffing a pillow in my mouth.

This morning words are not to be trusted, their power is omnipresent, they bruise me. I can't sit still long enough to hover over more than a phrase. Aaron responds by increasing the seroquel.

At lunch a very tall young woman is standing right in the middle of my personal space.

‘I know you from somewhere,' she says, staring.

‘Really? Are you a reincarnation?'

‘You're a spy.'

‘Nope, not today.'

‘You're a spy!' she shouts, and suddenly she kicks me, hard, right on the tender-bone of my shin. I never find out her name. By the time my heart slows down, she is marched off by two staff to the High Dependency Unit.

Aaron finds me later, pacing around the courtyard in bare feet.

‘How are you?' he asks.

if the clock strikes nine times
shout the people in my head.

‘If the clock strikes nine times,' I say.

the head of a swallow shall lie at your feet

‘The head of a swallow shall lie at your feet.'

and your toes will burn slowly

‘And your toes will burn slowly,'