Madness (7 page)

rouge rough fat arse red fucking lunatic

Outside I can see the nebulous blobs of light where cars are whisking by in the rain and the night, but it is quiet in here. A nurse quietly checks my blood pressure and pulse and takes my temperature. I try to sleep. Rose and Henry lie beside me, their clothes, velvet and linen, smoothed out on the bed. They start to sing, a low, graceful cadence.

chords flow over our brow, deep in ink and pure silk, swim beneath composure, open outward, lotuslike, enter us and refract, blur, cover white walls, move in our white skin

A skin graft is a sliver of skin shaved from a large area like the thigh and transplanted to the area of injury after the debridement of damaged tissue. New blood vessels begin growing from the recipient area into the transplanted skin within 36 hours. My skin grafts look like punched out circles of the brightest red, gel-like and impossibly fragile. I ring work and tell them I've had ‘surgery.' I imagine they'll think it's the gynaecological kind. My parents visit and bring me flowers; we don't talk about the reason for the wounds, but I appreciate their quiet support. I tell ward staff that the whole thing was an accident, that I dropped the bottle of hydrochloric acid on my foot. They ask me every morning if I would like to ‘speak to someone'.

I wait in the light from the window in the day and I wait in the light from the corridor at night for healing. The people in my head are quieter here but there are still cameras in the air conditioning vents and at the back of the television. Leering. I'm embarrassed to use the bedpan.

The hospital chaplain asks if he can sit and talk with me awhile.

I shift in the bed so I can face him.

‘How are you?' he asks.

‘Fine. Thank you. Kind of . . . fine. Well. Ah.'

The chaplain's expression is mild, like warm milk. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I wish I could embrace someone. Not the chaplain necessarily, but someone. A fine, beautiful embrace.

‘How is it, being here in hospital?' he asks.

Slowly. To hold . . . to give . . . and to hold.

‘Yes. Sorry,' I say. ‘Pardon?'

‘How is it, being here in hospital?'

rough fat arse red fucking lunatic

They stick back in like knives. I flinch. Rearrange the blankets.

‘Well. A lot of things . . . I get so confused. And. It's like having stumbled out of the normal stream of life.'

‘It is okay to have some time out.'

I nod.

‘Who is at home with you?'

‘Home alone.' I try not to sound too pathetic.

‘Friends?'

‘Yes. I love them.'

‘Friends are a blessing.'

‘Yes.'

‘Peace be with you.'

‘And also with you.'

The clouds move swiftly past my window, dark grey on light grey on dark grey, forming shapes like mountains in the air. It rains. There is beauty in the way sunlight streams through a gap in the clouds, the smallest glimpse of heaven. I listen to the sound of rain on the roof and sleep.

The plastics registrar sends me home in the morning with a plaster cast on my leg and a pair of crutches. Home is books and music, Rose and Henry, a safe place, a sanctuary. Home is also benzos and booze.

kill fucking ugly useless lump of flesh useless unless keep the fires burning burn and sway get your head read all red underneath flesh

I sit in an armchair with a cat on my lap and think about this. I try to breathe. I find some Jim Beam in the cupboard under the sink and pour half a glass and drink it, letting my throat and gullet burn. Soon enough I'm being washed in warm water, swung gently from side to side as in a low tide, my head just above the edges of the waves. While drunk I have a frank conversation with Zoë on the phone about alcohol and about suicide. We touch on ownership, abandonment, integrity, grief, hope, meds and therapy. We touch on death and what it means to still be alive in spite of everything. We reminisce, we laugh. I agree to think about finding a therapist, and I also decide to make a formal complaint to the Patient Advocate at the hospital where I was refused treatment. In part I say, ‘. . . Surely you will agree that this is a serious breach of care and blatant discrimination on the part of Dr X. Further it demonstrates his inexcusable ignorance of the nature of acute mental illness, and the possible repercussions for patients, like myself, who are then left to manage on their own. The consequences for me may well have included non-healing of the wounds, serious localised infection and septicaemia.'

I lie in bed and wonder about sleep; I keep counsel with the night. Rose and Henry lie together holding hands, the cool breeze sliding in between their fingers, titillating. Thoughts zig zag and merge into dreams. This is what it is to be alone, to be without the touch of another human being, a quiescent soul. I put on Schubert's String Quartet in D Minor:
Death and the Maiden
. The
andante con moto
movement swells purely and falls and rises again. I take a lorazepam. The night stretches out in the strange quiet and later abuts the light as it becomes inch by inch brighter. My big cat stretches, curls his big feet inward, lengthens them towards the ceiling, sighs and goes back to sleep.

At the Community Clinic, Jim says I should stay off the venlafaxine. Michael is clearly agitated, pacing and talking to himself, his cap pulled down low. I leave him alone. Rachel and Hana are playing pool.

‘You deserve to win,' says Hana.

‘These balls are hypnotic,' says Rachel.

‘You can't take them home,' says Hana.

‘I want to put them in my garden. I could make a sculpture, a bird or a frog.'

‘Go on then.'

Rachel arranges the balls on the table into a bird with red wings and a yellow beak and blue feet.

‘That's a serious bird,' I say.

‘I was a graphic designer in another life,' she says. ‘Before the DSP vortex.'

‘The what?'

‘Disability Support Pension. Otherwise known as – life outside life.'

I nod. Hana nods.

Helen and I discuss psychotherapy. She gives me the business card of a private psychiatrist in Richmond, Paul L. ‘He has a good reputation,' she says. I stare at her and pocket the card.

Paul's clinic is an old double storey home complete with wrought iron lace work and a fountain in the front. The stairs creak under my crutches. Despite the size of the building, his room is pokey, painted sandy brown and without a window. He has M.C. Escher on all four of his walls – things metamorphosing and reappearing, birds in disguise, fish being liberated from diamonds and squares. I leave after fifty minutes. All I remember about the session are the birds and fish and the bill for $110 and Paul's eyebrows that are so pale his forehead goes on forever.

A week later Paul suggests I see him in his own home in the inner east, where he does evening appointments. His home is a Victorian terrace, there are several fat cats sitting on the porch. He ushers me into a room with a bookshelf running floor to ceiling and a chaise lounge up against one wall.

‘Do you like Leonard Cohen?' he asks. ‘I think you'd like his poetry – start with
Stranger Music
.'

‘I'll note it down,' I say.

‘How do you feel about hypnotherapy?'

‘Oh God no.'

‘It could be very helpful – for you.'

He gets up from his chair in the corner and sits down next to me on the lounge, less than a hands-breadth away, I can feel his warmth.

‘It's perfectly safe,' he holds his arms out wide and then lets one of his hands browse my knee as it comes back down, a fleeting touch. I shiver, then freeze. My mouth moves but everything else is stuck shut. The people in my head roar.

‘I'll think about it.' I try to say it normally, he is so close, my lungs hurt, he is so close, I want to get off the lounge, my legs fail me.

‘Good, you have a think about it,' he says, smooths down his pants and stands up. ‘See you next week.' I get to my feet by swivelling around and pushing myself up with my arms. I walk like I do when I'm drunk, watching my feet, thinking about the right place to put them down, and recommence breathing in my car. There's sweat and urine in my pants.

One day I leave work early and go for a walk in the park near my block of flats. I'm limping along without crutches, without the plaster cast that is lying alone on my living room floor. In the park a young boy is playing football with his father. He kicks the ball high into the air right into the blue of the sky; it lands a few feet in front of him which he finds tremendously funny. His father chases him to the ball, both of them running and laughing, then they roll over and over, the freshly mown grass covering their clothes like fur.

I sit down on the edge of the oval with my notebooks and some Octavio Paz to read and write and think. The inner world, the heart of things, where truths lie mired by the inconstant voices of reason and unreason, are doubly mired by the people living in my head – the bitter ones, the sarcastic ones, the demons, between whom there is an ever-evolving dance that allows me little rest. I'm not managing. I need help, but I don't know how to find the right help. In the sky cirrus clouds are forming a long, fibrous mare's tail, signalling an approaching storm. I wonder how soft they are. The sky in between is a perfect blue.

Having always respected the discipline and art of psychology, I heave the Yellow Pages onto my bed and look up ‘psychologist'. There are hundreds listed. I find one whose practice is nearby – Jane. It takes me several days to gather the courage to call her. In the meantime I take benzos and supplement with alcohol to drown the internal cacophony.

pierce piece bit ride the horse sunlit shit keep floating drown drown yourself gutter black

Jane asks me why I want to see a psychologist. I tell her about the depression. The day-in-day-out grind that is living with depression. I tell her I've suffered bouts of it lasting months since I was sixteen and that I don't understand why. And I tell her that I don't trust psychiatrists. She listens. We agree to an initial session in a week.

Despite the heat I wear a long skirt, stockings, a jumper and a grey overcoat made of merino wool. My hands are shaking. I take the tram and then walk to Jane's office, outside of which I stand for a considerable period of time. Once inside I sit in the waiting room with
Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann. It is beautiful writing, in parts it sings. It is also terribly serious, a little oppressive and a little depressing. On the wall is a Rene Magritte print
The Empire of Lights II
, a tantalising scene of a house in the evening with a day-lit blue sky and clouds overhead. The dark and light of the mind? A representation of the conscious and the unconscious?

‘Come on in, Kate,' says Jane.

‘Thank you.' I wrap the overcoat around me tightly.

keep the fires burning you are dead kill her you are dead the trees are shivering

The room is rectangular with windows down one long side letting the light in. There are two black lounge chairs set almost opposite one another on an Afghani rug. One wall is a bookshelf half full of books and the other a fireplace with glass ornaments and a black and white photo of the Lubavitcher Rebbe on the mantelpiece. I sit down.

‘Tell me about yourself.'

My legs are shaking and my hands are shaking and my voice comes out wavery and thin like the end of a whistle. I can't breathe with the depth of her eyes across the room.

‘Well . . . I'm twenty-eight, mostly ordinary. Normal childhood and all that, um, I'm an only child. Grew up on a farm. Both parents alive and well. I live on my own. No children because I'm afraid I'd be a dreadful parent. I work and . . . I'm crazy about wilderness and all kinds of music and feline personalities and I'm a peacenik or a wanker whichever way you choose to look at it. That's it really. Oh, and I hate – I mean hate as in wish to kill – pretty much everything about me. I guess you should know that.'

We agree to two more introductory sessions. I walk home with the sunshine at my feet and I walk through part of my shadow, and keep walking past the green grocers with their piles of oranges and spring onions and potatoes, past the clothing shops and the boys busking with flute and violin outside the newsagency, past the bottle shop. I turn the corner and walk by the tram tracks and have trouble looking up into the sun.

the glare will blind you bind you raw we' ll bury you

Rose and Henry are home. I take a couple of lorazepams, little yellow suns.

touch me
says Rose. Henry runs the back of his hand from the very top of her head over her cheek, her neck, her breasts. Soft as a moth's wing, a mere breath. Rose shivers. I curl up with a scotch and soda and with
Midnight's Children
, and am immediately immersed in Kashmir pre-partition. The people in my head can hardly get a word in, they shuffle and mumble on the outskirts of consciousness. I hit my head, hard, to keep them in their place.

The sky outside has splotches of red where the clouds meet the blue; my eyes feel raw. I take another yes-I-love-you benzo and lie down to await its effect: the drowsing dreaminess, the gentle half-sleep. I watch the clock tick tick and breathe on every alternate stroke. Rose and Henry watch me from the corner of the room. I slide, the room quietens.

On the footpath of Fitzroy Street on a Saturday afternoon a man sits with a llama tied up by his side. The llama looks mildly surprised. Someone is busking with a didgeridoo. It is very warm, the concrete shimmers whitely, the asphalt shimmers blackly. Couples walk by with babies, their prams shrouded. An enormous black dog hops along on three legs. I wonder if everyone is questioning what it is to be alive on this particular day at this particular time. I am amazed by it. Two bikers sit at the next table. Heads shaved, reflective sunglasses, beards, earrings – gold and silver hoops, leather jackets, black jeans, leather boots. It is disconcerting not to see their eyes.

Down on the beach the waves break their salty stories over the shore, sea gulls dance on gusts of wind and there are people kite-surfing out in deeper water. I sit on the low concrete wall and dangle my feet in sand that is coarse and warm and yellow. The sand tickles between my toes. I keep my normal face on – the face that says I am-just-another-young-woman-enjoying-the-beach-on-the-weekend, perhaps waiting for her boyfriend or her husband to bring ice cream and love.