Madness (11 page)

will smoulder black and red

‘Will smoulder black and red,'

the stench of your skin shall never leave you

‘The stench of your skin shall never leave you.'

‘Mmm,' Aaron says.

‘You can shoot me if you like,' I say. ‘It won't matter.' And then I sit for a moment next to Steve, who has an extraordinary halo of orange hair reaching in spirals into the middle distance. He doesn't speak to other patients. I watch him put a cigarette between his lips and light it. As he inhales, saliva on his lower lip gets caught by the sun and catches fire.

‘Shining and burning,' I whisper to him, but he doesn't acknowledge me.

A nurse arrives with my midday syrup.

‘Barukh atah adonai eloheinu melekh ha'olam, she hakol nih'yeh bid'varo,' I say, and swallow.

‘Are you Jewish?' asks the nurse.

‘No, but when I was twenty-four I wanted to (a) play Méditation by Jules Massenet on the cello, and (b) understand fire. So you see?'

‘Not really,' she says, frowning.

‘Nerves are blue, nerves are yellow,' I say.

if you watch your heartbeat you may survive

Someone is singing.

‘I'm so confused.' I start twisting my head round with my hands; if I twist hard enough, I may be able to wrench it off my neck. Anna finds me thus, sits down beside me and quietly takes both my hands in hers.

‘My eyes are full of glass,' I tell her. We sit in silence until Steve starts talking out loud to his voices, who appear to be plaguing him. He paces along the end of the courtyard over the spreading shrubs, hands in fists.

‘No!' he shouts. ‘No!' The veins in his neck fill and pulse. Sonia, a dual-diagnosis patient (intellectual disability and mental illness), walks past in a short floral skirt; her naked lower buttocks hang down like paired cauliflower heads.

My boss rings. He is fairly irritated that I disappeared from work without notice. I attempt an explanation, but the people in my head are interfering with my hearing – I pick up every third word he says, in between they shrill –

asphyxiate decapitate dilate weeeeeeee

Consequently he doesn't make any sense.

‘You don't have any leave left,' he says.

‘I think I'll resign,' I say. ‘Yeah, I want to resign. I'm not wasting any more time with work.'

‘That might be best,' he says.

The birds are singing; such a vivid sound. I've become a surge of red, a soul stretched tight, caught and bound by the shadows in the trees, the trees whose green feeds me over and over, whose light crazes skin into a thousand tributaries, like the visions of one, or millions. I walk into the common room where a woman I haven't seen before is standing quite alone. I lean against a wall and watch her. She holds herself together with her arms and hands that reach tight under her breasts and keep her from fragmenting. The flatness of her eyes stretches on and on and her breath is lifeless air, and her soul, risen to heaven and spurned, has fallen back into her body and burned.

‘Ashes. Dust,' I say softly and open my mouth wide and eat into my gathered palms.

Two more weeks pass in which everything – person, sky, air, dream, eye – is the most significant entity, the most vital piece of existence on earth. My parents visit, Zoë visits, Tanya and Chris visit. It's wonderful to see them.

‘What have you been doing?' they ask.

‘I've no idea,' I answer. ‘Have I been here long?' My voice is dry and hoarse.

‘I've got laryngitis,' I tell Aaron.

‘No,' he says, ‘You've merely worn your voice out.' I give him a squashed version of the finger.

Winsome rings, calm and velvety, and I explain about the white cat and the tax office, the slow burning of toes and how yesterday the saliva on Steve's lip caught fire which is remarkable, given that saliva isn't usually flammable.

‘What's happening about your job?' Winsome asks.

‘The job? No idea.'

Margaret, the ward social worker, helps me apply for unemployment benefits. The Department of Family and Community Services calls unemployment benefits, labour–market-assistance-related-income-support, which makes me laugh. My handwriting appears on the page wobbly as a snail trail; my eyes flutter among words but refuse to focus.

There is such a shortage of acute psychiatric beds that patients are almost always discharged mildly unwell. Readmission after another crisis in the community is not uncommon.

As my father walks with me across the road to his car, I lunge towards the traffic, heady with the possibility of flight or at least of invincibility in the face of collision. My father circumnavigates my right upper arm with both hands and holds on like a python till we're on the other side.

The floor of my little flat appears to be alive. Piles of books, piles of photographs and magazines look like squat bodies, their heads made of CDs stacked without their cases. There are Chinese incense sticks, pages of writing, notebooks, three atlases – all open, drawings and paintbrushes and cigarettes and empty vodka bottles and spilt red wine. A body made of five astronomy textbooks is next to one of four dictionaries and a King James Bible. The largest of the piles is unopened mail. There are clumps of black words cut out from newspapers and words stuck all over the walls, crookedly. Beneath them is a poster of the Hebrew aleph-bet. There are puddles of candle wax in murky green and pink on the window ledges and splotches of candle wax on the carpet that look like burst fireworks. A silver menorah I have never seen before is balanced on ee cummings'
73 Poems
and a copy of the Qur'an. Everything is covered in a fine rain of ash.

My parents clean quietly and graciously. The pages of some books are stuck together with nail polish and are thrown out, but the nail polish on the covers of others has advanced in the way of Joan Miró, and must therefore be classed as art. The phone is off and the gas and electricity are off and my father arranges for re-connection and pays the mound of bills.

It takes another five weeks to find my right mind. Initially the CAT team visit every evening to monitor medication and mood. Time re-asserts itself into seconds and minutes and hours, trees are no longer animate in the way of animals, my speech resumes a normal rate and flow. Most importantly, the manic chaos of thought is filtered by my frontal lobe – flight of ideas and inappropriateness is recognised somewhere in my brain as flight of ideas and inappropriateness. The shine over everything is muted into simple sunlight or shade and the colour of a post box ceases to set my heart racing.

I take the tram to Port Melbourne and walk east along the beach. In places the tide is right up to the stonewall and I splash through early winter water and my shoes leave a momentary impression in the sand. Ah, impermanence. Seagulls call out. The wind is vigorous, there's sand now in my mouth and hair and sand stuck to the wet ends of my jeans. I keep my mouth shut and breathe and smile at the rawness of it – sea and sky. The light is changing from sharp white to a pensive ivory and though the sea and wind are endlessly shifting, there's a certain kind of stillness in the repeat of the waves.

Winsome and I reflect.

‘It's good to see you out of hospital,' she says. ‘How are you?'

‘Unemployed. But also un-mad.'

‘Hmm.' She looks at me for a while, not staring, just looking. Her eyes are clear; their touch doesn't hurt my eyes, or my skin, or my heart.

‘I fucked up,' I say.

Winsome shifts slightly in her chair.

‘I . . . um . . .'

‘Were you taking your lithium?' she asks.

I sway back and forth on the couch.

‘As prescribed? Every day?'

‘No.'

We sit. And my stupidity oozes down between my legs like menstrual blood and onto the wooden floor. It is the darkest, darkest red.

‘And now?'

‘Consequences,' I say. ‘No money, no sense of usefulness, no sense of mattering.'

‘You matter to your family. You matter to your friends.'

I nod. ‘And they're so precious and I love them, but . . . it's like I'm drifting miles out to sea.'

Her eyes say she understands.

‘And I can't trust my brain, which is really frigging awful.'

‘Yes.'

‘It's awful.' I pull at my hair.

‘Well it seems to me essential that you take your lithium as prescribed, every day.' She pauses. ‘In a sense having a mental illness is no different from having diabetes. You take your medication in the same way diabetics take their insulin, and you keep on taking it until your physical body gives out and you die of something else.'

Somewhere, in the uncharted depths of grey and white matter, a part of my brain is blindingly aware that she is right.

Unemployment. One day falls into another, all a kind of bare grey. The cloudy sky slides together with the horizon. Bliss is a cup of barista-ed coffee. Bliss is a rainbow lorikeet flying up from the grass right in front me, so close his fiery chest heats my face and I can hear the flrrrr of his wings.

My biological clock keeps odd time. I wake at midday to feed the cats, get out of bed properly at three in the afternoon and at two AM I'm at the 24-hour supermarket for coffee beans. For the remainder of the night I drink coffee and crunch up chocolate-coated coffee beans like a horse and read and sometimes I write odd, jerky poems that are really a series of questions though they don't quite make sense as either questions or poems.

Friends from my former workplace in cancer research shout me lunch every few weeks and we chat about art and friends and football and family . . . all the normal conversational sorts of things. With them I feel less superfluous, more human. Jane, the director of the department, suggests I try a yoga class.

‘Exercise? Are you completely mad?'

‘It's not just exercise,' she says. ‘It's about the body connecting with the mind and the mind connecting with the soul.'

I roll my eyes. ‘Exercise.'

Walking home, I pass the local Iyengar yoga studio. There's a sheaf of pamphlets in a plastic box out the front and I take one, stick it in my bag and forget about it. A day later there's a postcard amongst the mail – a photograph of two old, wrinkly hands pressed together, palms touching, fingers pointing up. Underneath it says Namaste. I bow and say ‘Namaste' back to the hands and go inside and uncork a bottle of merlot and pull out the yoga pamphlet.

The studio has a certain feel – a warmth that is more than the sum of the temperature, the wooden floor and sunlight through the high windows. People are lying or sitting cross-legged on mats along the walls. Some have cotton belts around their legs, some have blankets and bolsters. It is quiet.

‘The purpose of all yoga is, according to the 2000-year-old text by Patanjali, to restrain the fluctuations of the mind and bring greater self knowledge,' says Thomas, our teacher for the twelve-week beginner program. ‘You'll learn to respect your body and be alive in your body. It will become a vehicle for self-exploration.'

‘You need the CAT team, love,' I whisper. I'm sitting in the corner of the room and one of the double-braided ropes bolted to the wall is pressing hard into my back.

‘Stand erect with your feet together,' says Thomas. ‘Stretch your toes like a fan on the floor. Make sure your weight is even on both feet.'

I've never considered my feet.

‘Tuck in your waist. Create as much space as you can between your pelvis and rib-cage.'

Waist. Pelvis. Space.

‘Open up the chest.'

I breathe in.

‘Feel
the opening of the chest.'

Heart, lungs, breath, beat.

‘Stretch the spine from lower back to neck. Keep your head centred over your legs.'

Vertebrae, disks, nerves.

‘Bring your attention to the alignment of your body,' Thomas says. Then he says nothing for about a minute, and I'm left with a dawning, surprising, conscious kind of proprioception.

Class ends in corpse pose, which in theory is a time for relaxation and quiet reflection. The people in my head mutter and I can't close my eyes in case they catch me unawares, but as I lie here on my back, covered in thick, heavy blankets . . .

slow . . .

slowly . . . my limbs loosen and fall away.

I'm warm, connected to the floor and at the same time, floating.

B.K.S Iyengar says, ‘the student's body assumes numerous forms of life found in creation – from the lowliest insect to the most perfect sage.'

‘Who are the important men in your life?' asks Winsome.

‘My father.'

‘Anyone else?'

‘Marc Chagall and Leonardo da Vinci.'

‘Who else?'

‘Bach and Schubert, Arvo Pärt, Andre Kertész, oh – and Faulkner of course, Patrick White . . .'

‘They're all dead, Kate.'

‘No no – Arvo Pärt's alive, he lives in Estonia and he's the greatest modern composer. Have you ever heard his piece, Tabula Rasa? Sublime.'

‘I think you know that's not the point.'

‘Yeah.' I bow my head, close my eyes. Then the shaking. ‘Shit. Weird?'

‘No. You're scared?'

‘Yes.' The shaking.

‘Of intimacy?'

Yes.

‘You're safe here. You are safe,' says Winsome. She pauses. ‘Intimacy is about being your real self in the presence of someone else.'

I nod.

‘For you, I think, we are working towards uncovering some really nurturing parts of your self that will enable you to feel more at home in your own skin. That will do for the moment.'

When I leave her office I breathe all the way in, I breathe. Opening my chest, feeling the anterior ribs, pectoral muscles, cold air like manna.

At home my friend Tanya hands me a banana. I look at its skin, suspiciously. I sniff it; hold it by its blackening tip. Then I snap off the end and peel it. The banana must have the ability to release molecules into the air like perfume because ripe banana smell is everywhere. I touch its pale flesh and one of the fibrous strings comes loose. I pull all of them one by one so they hang down around it like a waterfall.

‘Eat the bloody thing,' says Tanya, laughing. I bite and hold and chew. It has a surprisingly fresh taste – somewhat untainted – rain and earth and sunshine. I smile. It's the first piece of fruit I've eaten in three years.

In class we practise warrior pose and tree pose and I learn something about strength and something about stillness and the potential of the two together. It feels good.

‘With reflectiveness and self awareness,' says Thomas, quietly, ‘your yoga practice becomes a mirror to the self. Your body is an instrument with which to express your mental and spiritual being.'

The people in my head laugh and laugh–

yeah you bitch you're a fucking nutcase ha ha ha break your fingers go on do it we said do it

‘Bring your consciousness to your core. Feel the lift running up the back leg, across the belly and chest and into the arms.'

The class is quiet and concentrated, all of us gazing forward.

Every time I leave standing straighter, walking taller. It feels good.

I get to the supermarket in the late morning, along with mothers and prams and old women with walking frames – beginnings and endings – and I find the fruit and vegetable aisle and buy carrots, tangerines, pink lady apples. Back home I discover the kinaesthetic pleasure of fruit and vegetables – their extraordinary evolution of colour and shape and texture and taste, and I begin crunching up raw carrots like a horse, instead of coffee beans and chocolate.

Aaron monitors the high-dose lithium with regular blood tests. The side effects sit somewhere between nuisance and aggravation: nausea, thirst, pissing a lot (a consequence of the thirst), lethargy, hand tremor. And my mind is slow. I have no spark. Even my attempts at humour are dreary.

‘This drug is fucked up,' I say to Winsome.

‘Pardon?'

‘Sorry. I mean I'm not sure if the benefits outweigh the adverse effects.'

‘Kate, it's certainly not perfect and I'm sorry you have to go through this, really I am, but we have some insight into the pattern of your illness, don't you think?'

‘Yes.'

‘So please trust me when I say you must take your lithium. Otherwise you will become unwell again. And I sense that there is a sliver of trust . . .?'

I smile suddenly and the room floods. ‘Yes.'

A couple of candles are sometimes lit in the otherwise dim foyer of the yoga studio. I love their cylindrical light.

Andy is our new Wednesday teacher. His body is all muscle. His posture is that of a ballet dancer and he moves like perfectly coordinated fluid. I can't help grinning, watching him.