Madness (19 page)

‘Patterns in the stars!' I shout.

‘Shhh . . . you've left all your doors and windows open.'

‘What?'

‘Come on. Come on, please.'

‘No.'

‘Where are your shoes?'

‘No idea. Sorry, oh my god, that's so funny!'

‘It's not bloody funny.'

‘Did you see the coronal loops of the sun?'

‘No.'

‘Millions of brilliance, rays from Ra—'

‘You can't stay out here. Come home. Please.'

‘Piss off, honey, I'm communing with a woman and a man and the sun before it bursts.'

‘Come and have a drink with me.'

‘Yippee, right-oh.'

We walk up the drive. Lights are on, doors and windows open, Jane's Addiction blaring.

‘We're going to see Jenny in the morning,' says Naava.

‘Groovy.'

Naava sleeps on the couch downstairs. I sit up all night reading Gerard Manley Hopkins out loud to the cats.

‘It just came to me like magic – an epiphany!' I explain to Jenny in the morning. ‘This could be a world first, another step forward for Homo sapiens, think of all the money I'm going to save and no more time wasted shopping for food.'

‘What are you talking about?' asks Jenny.

Naava opens out her hands, palms up.

‘I'm a heliotrope! I've got sunshine in my veins!' I say.

‘Can you tell me what's been happening Naava?' asks Jenny.

Naava talks quietly. I can't hear her properly because of the buzzing in the room. As she talks, Jenny opens a drawer in her desk and pulls out a sheet of tablets.

I roll my eyes. ‘Here we go.'

‘Risperidone,' says Jenny. ‘Soluble.' Meaning the tablets will dissolve in my mouth without water.

I like Jenny and I respect her, so I take the tablet. It tastes like peppermint. Jenny gives Naava the packet of risperidone. ‘I'd like you to have another one tonight,' she says to me. ‘Okay?' Then she looks at Naava. ‘And I'll notify the Crisis Assessment Team.'

‘Cats, cats, cats,' I say.

In the evening, Zoë comes over after work. There is a tiny segment of my mind that recognises that Zoë and Naava are worried, and it appreciates that they are here. The rest of my mind is intent, fluid, pure. The Crisis Assessment Team arrives at 9 p.m. in their generic white car. I sit up straight on the floor of the living room and expound the chaos theory of evolution, ‘Change can happen in bursts, it's not always sequential, if DNA mutates in positive ways, then as trees grow new branches, there are infinite possibilities. Right?'

Silence.

‘Okay,' I whisper to my feet, rocking back and forward, ‘Fractals are unanswerable questions. Fractals are unanswerable questions.'

One of the team goes outside to make a phone call, the other says, ‘We're going to take you into hospital, Kate, your mood is elevated and you're pretty pre-occupied and Jenny tells us that you haven't been eating properly, is that right?'

‘I've got sunshine in my veins.'

Zoë packs a bag of clothes. I add notebooks and coloured pencils, the
Norton Anthology of Poetry
in two volumes, a Hebrew-English dictionary and a bottle of gin. Zoë takes out the bottle of gin.

On the way to the hospital the streetlights penetrate my irises and fingerprint my retinae.

‘Why aren't you eating?' asks Graham, one of the consultant psychiatrists on the inpatient unit, in the morning.

‘I'm generating energy from the sun. You remember the equation for photosynthesis: carbon dioxide plus water mixed with chlorophyll and sunlight equals glucose and oxygen.'

‘You are not a plant, Kate.'

‘I know, I KNOW, that's precisely why this could be an evolutionary event. Breathe with me. I'll breathe your carbon dioxide. You breathe my oxygen. A cosmic force is slouching towards Bethlehem, just like Yeats said.'

‘Are you hungry?'

‘Hungry is for ephemerals.'

Graham turns to Brenda, the registrar. ‘What dose have we got her on?'

‘Olanzapine 20 mg and lithium 1000.'

‘Right.' He stands up. ‘See you tomorrow.'

I go back out into the courtyard with my notebooks, rolling my jeans up, taking off my jumper and shirt and stretching out on one of the wooden benches next to Claude in the sun. Claude is in his early thirties, tall, very pale. Thin. He's wearing tight black jeans and a black shirt with long sleeves and a collar. His black fringe covers his eyes.

‘The government says it will halve the rate of homelessness in ten years, and they will too, because half of the homeless will be dead in ten years,' he says, sitting with his hands clasped over his head, blue veins communicating that universal thing – despair.

‘Drum sticks aren't ecological. They're an extenuating circumstance. Hands are all you need. Though it is up to interpretation – no-one has exclusive rights,' I reply.

‘What?' he says, looking up.

‘Extenuating circumstances. Are you being circological?'

‘You said ecological.'

‘No, I meant the complete opposite.'

‘Huh?'

‘Extension of the hand, that's it. Here's a message from Jesus, can you divine me? Put your hands in mine, I'll divine you; I'll divine your thoughts.'

Claude shakes his head.

‘Are you speaking figuratively?' he asks after a while.

‘Regardless, we are in fact, seven-point-stars, all of us in here. Did you know, technically, the piano is a percussion instrument because it has hammers? Then again, it has strings. It has keys! Is that it?

‘You're such a bullshitter,' says Claude. He stands up and walks away and sits down over the other side of the courtyard.

‘You know what?' I shout. ‘My mouth has its own little brain – it's a very small brain, not much more than a brainstem really, and it doesn't have an off-switch.'

And then I start to cry though I'm not at all sad. Even my eyelids are sunburnt.

Tadiwa is Zimbabwean. She's my regular contact nurse.

‘Are most of your family back home, Tadiwa?' I ask.

‘Yes,' she says. Even her yes is lilting. ‘In Harare.'

‘Is it hard?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are they safe?'

‘Well . . . it is in God's hands.'

‘Something has happened to time,' I say to Zoë and Deborah. ‘It's stopped following the rules of second, minute, hour. It runs backwards, then races forwards, swallowing the ticks in between before we have a chance to live in them. Have you noticed?'

‘No, not really, Kate.'

‘Never mind, I'm writing it all down, keeping tabs. Later my notes will be given in evidence.' I pull out my notebooks and flick through the tatty pages. ‘See?'

Zoë and Deborah smile and nod.

‘When did you last eat?' asks Brenda one morning.

‘No idea oh my god energy I reckon I'm conductive connect me up to some copper wire and I'll generate electricity alchemy was all about transforming lesser metals into gold Isaac Newton was an alchemist this is the elixir of life round round rock clock dans les veines de Pan mettaient un universe that's Rimbaud for you he totally got it unlike you lot Christ have you no souls there's a fire angel out in the courtyard maybe you need to burn up a bit to discover something that actually matters my jumper in tatters elastic will stretch so far then it shatters my cat's tail has rhythm like Emily Dickinson–'

‘Shut up for a second, please,' says Graham.

I glare at him and get out my notebooks and some coloured pencils. I can't find my fountain pen or my stash of coffee nor my bottle of gin but I have my notebooks.

‘It's been two weeks. You need to start eating,' says Graham.

‘When you grasp the complexity of the situation you won't make suggestions,' I reply.

‘You have twenty-four hours in which to change to your mind,' says Graham calmly. ‘If not, we're transferring you to HDU and we'll insert a nasogastric tube.'

I walk out of the room, back to the courtyard and lie down on the concrete. Sunshine and carbon dioxide.

‘I've got Vanilla Ensure or Resource Fruit,' says Tadiwa, coming into my room the following morning, holding a can in one hand and a tetra-pak in the other.

‘Will it save your family?'

‘Pardon?'

‘If I drink this.'

‘I'm not sure about that. But you're going to end up with a tube down your throat if you don't drink it.'

‘Will it save your family?'

‘No, Kate.'

I shake my head.

‘Vanilla Ensure or Resource Fruit?' asks Tadiwa, the morning after.

‘Will it save your family?'

‘Well it will help me, and I'm part of my family.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Yeah. I don't want you to have a tube.' She smiles then, full of light, and she pulls the lid off the can of Ensure and holds it out and I take it and drink some and it's like condensed milk.

‘Finish it?' says Tadiwa.

‘Enough.'

‘For me?'

I drink it slowly. It's so glutinous and sweet I want to vomit but I drink it.

‘Good on you, I'll be back at lunchtime,' says Tadiwa.

‘Now Kate, you're at risk of re-feeding syndrome,' says Brenda in the afternoon.

‘Re-what syndrome?'

‘Re-feeding syndrome. Your electrolyte and glucose levels in the blood could change very rapidly once you're eating again. Your heart can go into a dangerous kind of arrhythmia.'

‘Yep,' I say. I'm fascinated by Tadiwa's necklace, its Byzantine rose-gold is whispering stories.

‘So, we're going to do a blood test twice a day for a few days.'

‘Yep.'

‘Are you hearing me?'

‘For they will inherit the earth,' I whisper.

‘Good,' Brenda says.

In the evening I sit next to Claude in the common room. The people on television are high-pitched and the women are dressed like lorikeets.

‘The Disability Support Pension keeps us below the poverty line but there's always millions of tax payers' dollars to promote sport,' says Claude.

I get up and shake his hands – first right, then left. ‘Gentleman,' I say, ‘You speak the truth. I have to go and write that down verbatim.'

‘Claude, here are your meds for tonight,' says Maree, one of the nursing staff.

‘I'm just trying to outrun the devil and the churches are all locked,' says Claude.

Maree waits.

‘No such thing as sanctuary. No such thing as refuge,' he says to his feet.

‘Okay, well take these, please.' Maree has a tiny plastic cup with several tablets in it, and some water.

‘How do you expect to unlock a unique mind with the same damn key?' I ask Maree. ‘Why would the same key fit into every brain, when each houses the central nervous system, the mind with all its idiosyncrasies and even the soul?' I rock back on my heels. ‘No wonder this medication is crap. No wonder there are so many side effects. Medication should be tailored to individuality. House keys and car keys are – why do you keep shoving stuff that is blunt as hammers down our throats?'

‘There's always ECT,' says Maree dryly.

‘ECT is worse. It's a fucking jackhammer. No, that's not right – it's a sanctioned version of the electric chair.'

‘Have youz got any perfume?' asks another patient. ‘Do I stink or what? Oh I feel sick, all I can smell is smoke. Where's Shane? See how red my shoes are? Hey! Have youz got any perfume or not?'

‘Yeah,' I say. ‘In my room.'

‘Can I have this?' she asks.

‘Yeah.'

I sit on the bed. How have I come to be here, useless as a baby, equally reliant, equally incompetent. Equally? Less even?

Mania is initially as seductive as a snort of coke, a first orgasm, a religious epiphany. The world fizzes. And the illness progresses.

One is gripped, vice-like, by irritability and wild risk-taking with money or sex or drugs or alcohol or all four together. One is swallowed up into the guts of a chimera, wherein lie delusions and hallucinations and chaos.

The day before I'm discharged, Deborah picks me up and we drive to a small bluestone church in Fitzroy. The Anglo-Catholic incense – is it frankincense? Myrrh? It smells like cloves and cardamom. The choir starts to sing ‘Spem in alium'. . . I have never put my hope in any other but in you. ‘Spem in alium' is a motet written for forty individual parts by Thomas Tallis. The choir sings in the round – spaced out along the walls and the front and back of the church so the music passes from north to south and east to west or sometimes south to east to north and then west. Voices like syrup, like black ice reflecting, like autumn and clouds and the dusky sky – love and sorrow and grace and love. The polyphonic sound touches and lips and falls and runs and rises and my body dissolves; I disappear altogether, all there is and all there will ever be is this – this music. Spem in alium nunquam habui præter in te, Deus Israel.

‘Love this music,' Deborah says when the choir finishes. ‘Love you.'

‘Love this music,' I say. ‘Love you.'

The poetry anthology, the Hebrew dictionary and notebooks and now-too-big clothes are packed to come home with Zoë and Naava and I, along with a bottle of lithium tablets and some olanzepine.

We debrief on the couch.

‘How long was I in hospital?'

‘Three weeks,' says Zoë.

‘The front fender has almost fallen off my car. And the driver-side door panel's all warped. Jesus. What did I do?'

‘We don't know.'

I begin to weep. The weeping regresses into guttural sobs. Then I breathe, suck it all up inside and am still. Parsha (The Pygmy Tiger) curls onto my chest. I put my hands around her abdomen – lightly, and watch my fingers spread a little apart with her breath and I can feel the beat of her heart. Ah, this thing called life.