Intimate Antipathies Page 10

  Mad people, even those like the old Holden Caulfield who lie in their hospital beds monologuing about their brief time in the arms of lunacy, are never free to forget about madness, lest some fresh fever lay its insidious claim on their minds. I learned this the ugly way, forgetting all about what it was to be mad, forgetting all about the doctor and his cryptic remark about some interview he’d had with Patrick White’s biographer. The receptionist called and left messages about making new appointments, but only the desperate have time for therapy and I wasn’t in despair anymore. At some point, when the distemper and antipathy roared back into me with a vengeance, I left my wife and child and moved in with friends and began hiding away from the world, and was by then too embarrassed to let the doctor know how badly things had fallen apart. The more this shameful fall was hidden the deeper the pit became, and it wasn’t long until this downward trajectory erupted into a full-blown bout of psychosis. Had I not returned to Dr Young’s care, and faced the pitiless disgrace of my circumstances, it would have been the death of me.

  Somewhere along this spiralling collapse I came across an article in the newspaper about the doctor. Months after he’d spoken to the papers and been interviewed by David Marr, when he labelled the government complicit in the use of torture against detainees, and after a Lateline interview where he defended the credibility of workers who were sacked and defamed for speaking out about the abuse of children they had witnessed, the news broke that the Federal Police had tapped his phones, stolen his metadata and questioned colleagues who dared to speak to him. Little wonder that those in power would target Dr Young, he had the temerity to say that the Australian government had deliberately permitted the harming of vulnerable people in order to dissuade them from considering Australia a viable destination. I watched his interviews on YouTube soon after reading about his violated privacy. It was strange to see his deep-set blue eyes and his taut expression at full size and in colour on the pages of the paper, stranger still to watch him sitting across from David Marr, both tall thin men in suits, and hear my doctor saying, ‘The detention system is designed to make people suffer.’ I recognised the room; he was in my chair. The bookshelf behind him was the same one I’d sat beside during our many conversations, and I could imagine the cool garden through the window that the camera couldn’t see.

  Towards the end of the interview Dr Young tells David Marr, ‘When you go to Manus Island, and you walk down what is called “the walk of shame”, between the compounds, and you see the men there at the fences, it’s an awful experience.’ Marr replies by asking, ‘Did you feel shame?’ and the doctor tells him, with his large eyes unflinching, ‘Absolutely, yes. And you have to feel shame. You have to experience that – you have to understand that – to understand what that feeling’s about.’ Marr, with his hand rubbing at his temple asks, ‘Is that why you’re talking now?’ And the doctor says, ‘Yes.’

  The doctor put me on Paroxetine for life, and Seroquel carried me through the psychosis, and now every morning after breakfast I crack open one of those pill boxes old people get so they don’t lose track of their drugs. No doubt the doctor has recovered from the violation of his privacy, though he seems more reticent than ever to talk about his whistleblowing phase. What good his actions did is not for me to say, and I wonder if he doesn’t despair at how little anyone outside the Guardian seems to care. If it gets him down, he doesn’t say, and I suppose it’s none of my business, since I’m only there in his leafy little clinic for my own sanity, and for anyone who needs help with that kind of thing there’s no one better in the mental-health business. If I were the sort of person who leaves reviews online, he’d have all five of my stars, and I’d leave a line or two saying, ‘If you’re out of your mind, this is the guy to go see.’

  A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

  Fond memories first: the greyskinned trees and the hill-dimpled fields of the Kingswood campus crowded up to the windows of empty classrooms, the idyll outside bisected by the distant murmur of the Great Western Highway. Our group would meet once a fortnight in those eerily quiet and disorderly rooms between the bustle of tutorials where Marshall McLuhan quotations had dried onto the whiteboards and I admit to rolling my eyes at the others when they buried their heads in notebooks or read deeply from their manuscripts. We were typical undergrads I suppose: a girl named Allison who was ostentatiously in love with the ‘bohemian’ boy, Eddy; two tiny twins from the Mountains who synchronised their outfits and plaited their hair like characters from a children’s cartoon; a shaggy bearded laddie from Kingswood who wore hipster glasses (this was in a time long before the term hipster came to mean almost anything to do with the white middle-class world); and a revolving host of wannabe poets and posers who so closely resembled one another that they have become unified in my memory.

  To be sincere with you, I thought I knew more about every available world than all these comrades combined, on account of being beaten, repeatedly, by skater-skinhead-homeboys and meth-mangled housos on the streets of Liverpool in my youth, and also because I’d trawled through the mania of Henry Miller’s classics in the university’s Werrington library between semesters, alone on the empty hills of the campus while the others spent their free time playing pool at the uni bar, drunk, discussing sustainable ethics between the cracking clop of the balls and their timid hollering at the bar staff about the patriarchy. All they knew about literature, I reckoned, was how to make cutting remarks on Hemingway’s machismo.

  One night, I was coaxed into the social world by one of the pixie-sized twins, who said, slinging her arm up towards my shoulder, ‘Stop being so negative, it’s such a clichéd attempt at seriousness through cynicism and it’s just sad – y’know there’s a lot going on that you can’t even imagine, can you? You won’t learn anything stuck in your room like a hamster in a colon.’ In the bar, name forgotten, Eddy scoffed when I mentioned loving The Old Man and the Sea for its flagellant misery. I didn’t mind him scoffing at my readings, but the next thing I knew his tobacco breath slid into my nostrils; he leant towards me on his pool cue, like a gargoyle clinging to a doorframe, and he said, ‘Hemingway’s problem was that he was afraid he’d never be as much of a man as Gertrude Stein.’ What did I care about Hemingway? I wondered, looking at the grin Eddy bore me as he moved back towards the pool table; Papa was just another headless horseman as far as I was concerned, but to say something like that about the man – something Eddy had no doubt stolen from a YouTube debate between Martin Amis and Terry Eagleton – shook me around like an eight-ball.

  The light in the room was almost as loud as the hip-hop classics on the playlist (all black music was played ironically in Penrith back in those days). Next to a dance floor the size of a coffin, the twins were sitting on stools and they nodded in solemn agreement about Ayn Rand having nothing to offer re the problems of the blooming twenty-first century – a subject Eddy had meandered into. The shaggy-faced hipster could confirm this perspective, having recently read an article online about Late Era Capitalism and Slavoj Žižek’s theory of divine violence which said pretty much the same thing.

  It was possible I was just jealous, lacked charisma, but then again, I wasn’t the only one who left early that night: Dani, the person I’ve held back from describing so far, as if it were some sort of secret, in fact was a true book nerd, whose cold command of the English canon made her the de facto head of our group. Earlier in the night, she took a dart from the board on the wall and told Eddy, whom she was taller than by a head, on account of his terrible posture and her thick Blundstone boots, ‘The cult of the self is a shallow grave, and Rand was pushing on an open door, far as that goes – but I doubt anyone here has read a single word, outside of a title, or inside a cover, of one of her books – specially not you, Ed.’ They all laughed with her, softly, supposing it was a joke, except Eddy, who rolled up his sleeves as he skulked to the bar and pawed at it, timidly, like a tiger who’d leapt and failed.

  Dani and I left together – co
incidentally – that night; she took her leave by the back and I went out the front, unnoticed, our paths intersecting in the dark, which had somehow consumed the sound of our footsteps. She started when we first saw one another in the shadows and said, ‘Jesus, you scared me,’ her eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  ‘He scares me, too,’ I told her, not sure if it was a joke, and instantly ashamed of having said it.

  The moon was in every window of the empty buildings on the campus, and the strange squat lanterns along the paths were filled with the silhouettes of dying insects. In an unspoken agreement – negotiated with careful oscillations in our pace – we walked to the end of the road together.

  ‘I hate that twit,’ I said to her, referring – I hoped it was clear – to Eddy. She didn’t say a word, and now the sound of us walking and the armada of gum trees beyond the edge of the campus felt oppressive. I took a long look at Dani’s pale profile in the dark but the night had arranged her curled blonde hair so as to obscure every clue from me, and I tell you that didn’t seem fair, and the walk went on in silence until at last I said, ‘I have to go to the train station.’

  For a moment, I thought she was about to laugh, though I wasn’t quite sure why she might find a comment like that amusing.

  ‘Good luck,’ she said without looking, and turned, without so much as a farewell wave, down a path through the park on her way to the dorms and I let out a sigh, suddenly aware of a painful feeling, as though my shoulders were carrying an enormous weight.

  The next week we met as normal. There was a game we played as a collective in those chair-scattered rooms with the bald light flickering above us and the air-conditioner blowing like the burner of a hot air balloon from the ribbed vent in the corner. It was Dani’s Game – a house-rules adaptation of Exquisite Corpse in which you were asked to ‘write a sentence, fold the paper, pass it on’ until Dani decided it was time to read. I didn’t think it was much of an exercise. Dani – being a woman stepped directly from a Jane Austen fan club – didn’t think much of my sentences, so I thought. She crossed her legs with a careful pull at an ankle-length skirt and her toffee-thick curls shook and her bosom was strapped tight to her chest beneath a lime-green top. In the case of Dani, it feels right to use the word ‘bosom’, since there seemed to me something out of step with time and language about her, either too late or too early in existence for my thoughts and words to brush against without dislocating, becoming archaic. She unfurled the group’s resulting narrative and read it aloud – it was always her job to read things aloud – and the outcome, as always, was an elegant nonsense of prose all the way to the last syllable. I detested how repetitive each exercise became, how gentle and domestic – and how co-operative everyone tried to be – because I was dumb and young enough to believe there was something worthwhile about Miller’s descriptions of winged lead erections and obsessed with the fields outside filled with ghosts on the run from history – which was the sum total of Australian literature in my cynical readings of Henry Lawson and Christos Tsiolkas.

  Indeed, in the mode of cynic, I made much sport of Dani with my girlfriend at the time, a Greek Anglo girl with long black hair and eyes dark and evil enough to make me want to hold on to her in the night – the kind of girl I liked in those delirious days.

  Outside in the car park after our group meetings my girlfriend would have her Commodore running for me, the ‘done-up’ exhaust shuddering like a pawing lion on the crest of the hilly campus, and as we’d ricochet onto the highway she would say, ‘Tell me, Pendragon, what happened in your stupid group this time.’ I’d tell her whatever absurdity Dani had ended on, for instance, according to her, that Nabokov had told his students that the most essential requirement for becoming a great reader was a sense of their own spinal column. My girlfriend, whom I don’t wish to name and who, for some reason, gave to me the titles of British kings, would expose her crooked teeth as she grinned at these accounts, smiling to herself while I watched the university receding in the passenger’s wing mirror, my thoughts straying for a moment to Dani’s dangling blonde curls and her pale blue sternness, like a shallow pond on a spring afternoon. My hand wound its way into my girlfriend’s hair and onto the pale skin at the nape of her neck, while the uni was swallowed by the accelerating distance.

  But I did not tell my girlfriend about the time Dani came to my sentence when the afternoon light was low, and, by God, in front of the whole group, hesitated. It was the final meeting of that feeble cohort, and the exchange between Dani and me was something not to be shared. It all went as clockwork, up until when she unfurled the corpse as always, standing at the front of the class with the rest of us arranged in chairs like her personal scholars, hand-picked for the honour of following every elegant moment of her precise pronunciation. But this time, how I tripped her up good! In a moment of electrified rebellion I had invented, though it is hard to explain it now, a sentence I was sure would be a spanner in her proverbial works. And I was right! For the briefest of moments I had her frozen as the ice-man in his tomb! It is embarrassing to me now, but I tell you, Dani’s sudden halt in narration seemed at the time a tremendous victory for an undergrad like me, who was ashamed of coming from nowhere and having read nothing. It’s hard to explain, but I’d never met someone like Dani – who seemed unlikely to strike anything unexpected in her life, and who would sail forever across the surface of existence, seeing the universe divided, however arbitrarily, into the ocean and the sky as she passed over it with an even keel…Anyway, that’s how I thought it was with Dani; and when she halted, I felt like a great fish who had learned to crawl, just for a moment, from her sea into her sky. The class was quiet and the slightest wriggle of panic made itself known on every blank face in the room. Eddy alone was willing to break the quiet – he crossed his arms over an Elmo-buttoned hoodie and furrowed his brow and said, ‘What’s wrong, Dani?’ Dani mouthed the syllables I’d written and I knew she was struck by something sickly, something devilish. I might as well tell you the truth, although it doesn’t make for good reading. I’d written: ‘Satan punched the horse in the head.’ The twins laughed when she said it aloud, and then Dani read it again to herself. The group – I don’t know how to explain this – suddenly appeared to me a mass of lonely bodies (except perhaps for the twins) in which each saw for a moment that they were deceiving themselves if they had ever thought, even for a moment, that the world they could see and hear and taste was there to be shared with anyone else. Perhaps I was overdoing it, but I believed it was a good lesson for a room full of writers. In any case, the contagion of shame flared through the room like fire, and the way the sun was setting made it seem as though the classroom was beginning to blush.

  Dani’s brown eyebrows, which were slowly sinking, started to twitch, and the others shifted in their seats. She thought it over. The twins looked at one another, and the bearded boy in his hipster spectacles glanced over their thin rims at me with a quizzical affectation, unsure which way the wind would blow.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Dani asked, her hand still clutching the accordion manuscript our collective had created.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

  She looked around and her eyes were filled with a heaviness that might have been annoyance.

  Dani cancelled the group. She shut it down for all time. The others filed out. Eddy with his arm around Allison, the twins and the hipster with their heads low shuffled off towards the uni bar to work out where the world had gone wrong. By another unspoken agreement, Dani and I stayed until it was just the two of us left: she sat on a desk, arms folded over the Exquisite Corpse, crushing and cradling it all at once as I slowly rose from my seat.

  ‘Why’d you end the group like that?’ I asked her. ‘Can’t you put up with one ugly sentence?’ I tried to keep eye contact, but her eyes were too blue and the room seemed to get heavy with the light leaving the sky and weighing on us alone, so that our reflections appeared on the windows like parallel witnesses to our exchange.
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  ‘Look at where and who you are,’ she said as I picked up my bag of Sexus, Plexus and Nexus, nervous she might recognise their shape and see through the whole affair. ‘You’re not a new thing, you’re a fossil of the old world – you and every man-child like you, and, for your own sake, change – before we all get bored to death.’

  Dani and I never saw one another again as undergrads. Except in my dreams – where, for no reason, for nothing to do with what had happened in the anaemic past of that memory, Dani’s pale phantom would walk the streets of Liverpool, past the slowly rising apartment blocks and the burning council chambers and the cemetery gates, and up the small mountain toward my house with its high view of the surrounding suburbs. I’d roll in the damp sheets and toss my head, and she’d follow me into Westfield parking lots and Chinese restaurant alleyways (sometimes in nothing but a green raincoat), her curls tinged silver in the moonlight and the light of her eyes like the curved edge of a spoon held up to the stars. She would stand in judgement at the head of my bed some nights, and pace the halls of libraries in ruby-coloured shoes. I thought, in waking life, of contacting Dani. Her name occasionally appeared in the Australasian Literary Society mailing lists, or on academic conference tables. In the café strips of Newtown’s King Street where the sun was always setting and spilt-red twilight cascaded upon the rooftops, I thought once or twice I’d caught sight of her curls, disguised by a new style or updated to suit the season. It made no sense, and I could not change with the times.