Intimate Antipathies Read online

  What could a man in a car, sitting in the gloom of a tunnel underneath Sydney with his young son in the back seat playing a game on his device, possibly have to say to prepare the boy’s spirit for the experience of being eaten alive? Perhaps he would wish to communicate, with some gestures and a tone of voice he has reserved for a time of great urgency, the significance of an experience some years now in the past: a memory of the boy’s arrival on this earth. The precise memory the man in the car might wish to translate to his young son would begin on the morning after he was born, when, being told by other men that it is customary to celebrate the birth of a child by smoking a cigar, the man had left the confines of the hospital for the first time in many days, on his own, and had gone to a nearby beach to fulfil this custom. The man had found a cheap cigar in a service station, bought a lighter too, and stood on the steps of the boardwalk near the beach. There, looking out at the breaking rhythm of the surf, he attempted to light the cigar and smoke it for several minutes, uncertain how to successfully perform either action.

  The sky was clear and the sun was warm and the beach was crowded with people in their late-November undress, and at last – the rich, muddy taste of the cigar becoming wet and tart in his mouth – the man managed to generate a cloud of smoke he felt was fitting enough for the ritual to be satisfied. He experienced a mild dizziness, and was about to discard the still-burning cigar by squashing it against the bricks of the boardwalk, when he noticed the crowds of people on the beach beginning to point at something moving in the waves. Two whales, a mother and her calf, bobbed on the surface, the high white sun licking their slick black bodies as everyone stood transfixed on the sands. The man stumbled forward, seeming to be the only person moving on the scene, astonished at what he saw – the slow, careful nudge of the mother whale as she breached from out of the depths, her immutable bulk caressing the slick body of her calf, their gentle forms seeming to glow in the diamond gleam of the water spraying into the air around them.

  The man, who had not slept a moment in the forty-eight hours before this vision on the beach, saw in that mammalian tenderness some echo, obviously, of his own circumstances. When his child had been born the night before, he had watched the soft naked creature emerge from the swollen, bloodied body of his wife with an open-mouthed amazement. First, after hours of struggle and strain from his wife and the midwives, the child’s head had come forth, a strange alien shape, then the small fat body was moving of its own accord, bobbing on its mother’s breast in search of the dark circles of her areola, the mother asking in disbelief through his cries and motions, ‘He’s alive? He’s alive?’ as if it were unthinkable to her that a living thing had appeared from her body, the flesh of her flesh granting new life.

  Soon the doctor handed the wet, wriggling form of the boy into the man’s arms, and although the nurses had told him he would cry when his child was born, he had not believed them. In the hospital room, with the baby jiggling in his shaking arms, he felt for a moment as though all his ancestors were standing to applaud. It was not a sensation of pride he felt blowing through the tight confines of the hospital room, but a great release of joy – another life, with all its potential tragedy and comedy, had come into the world, and the man himself had played his part.

  When, of course, no wave of locusts arrived, and the traffic began to clear, my young son and I proceeded from the tunnel into a pale blue Sydney morning. When we had driven far enough away, I pulled over to the side of the road to catch my breath. My son didn’t notice, his attention fixed to the game on his device, in which he was building castles, block by block, occasionally speaking to inform me how much improved his structure was becoming in the world he was moving through, especially in relation to the peasants around him who were building rudimentary block houses of their own.

  When I’d relaxed enough by the side of the road we proceeded through the quiet calm of the inner west, neither of us speaking until we came to the driveway of my wife’s new house. ‘Time to go,’ I said. Without looking up, my son told me he wasn’t finished. I told him there’d be plenty of time for building things some other day, took the device out of his hands, and reached into the back to unbuckle him from the booster seat. ‘Let’s go,’ I said in the tone of an order, but he grabbed hold of my arm and said ‘I don’t want to go; I want to stay with you.’ We looked at each other for what seemed like a long time. It was impossible for me to think of anything to say to him except, ‘You can’t.’ He let go of me and squirmed out of the car, running up the street beside his mother’s house and standing with his arms by his side under the shade of a conifer tree. There was golden light now, the sun caught behind a cloud above the street, and a young man was walking his dog on the opposite side of the road. I was hoping this stranger’s presence would help to tame my son, thinking he’d be embarrassed to be in a stand-off when someone else was there to see it, but he stayed still under the tree, with an expression on his face that I’d never seen before. ‘You gotta go to school in the morning,’ I said, not sure how that observation related to our current situation but hoping it would have some effect. He shook his head and said, ‘I’m not coming.’ Neither of us spoke. I tried instead to wave him over, adding ‘I’ll see you tomorrow’ when the waving proved futile. When the young man with the dog rounded the corner and disappeared from sight, I ran up the hill, reached out, and snatching my son up, carried him to his mother’s door. He was heavy, and he hung onto me while I walked up the stairs and handed him over to her. She hugged him close and shut the door, and I went down and sat in the car. For a while I sat there and listened to the empty street. The device I’d snatched from his hands was on the passenger seat, and I picked it up to inspect the building project he had been so keen to complete. He’d created a long tunnel, and navigating through it I came to a small cottage where there were two beds. One had a sign next to it with my son’s name and the other had a sign beside it reading, ‘Dad’. There was a chest next to our beds, and he’d put food and supplies of axes, swords and shovels in there. On a wall he’d hung a painting of a flower in a vase, and the other walls were lined with bookshelves. Out the window there was a blocky garden with a picket fence, and some chickens laying eggs, and beyond that was a lake surrounded by trees and the sun going down behind a mountain top.

  The drive back west was easy, there was no stopping in the tunnel. Back at home, my brother and his fiancé had left, and Mum was sleeping on her recliner, the television still showing highlights from the wedding. I got a text from my wife to thank me for trimming my son’s nails, and I sat on the couch with a beer and drifted into a state close to sleep. A vague awareness that my mind couldn’t quite grasp overcame me, and a dream unfolded through a heavy, all-consuming fog. When I woke, I couldn’t remember the dream, only that it started with my son and me being back in the car. We were parked by the side of the road near the end of the tunnel and the only sound was the dim rumble of cars going by, and the clicking of the blocks my son was assembling upon the castle towers on his device. His neck was bent towards the screen, his brow creased in concentration, a worried look in his eyes. Through the window behind him there was an enormous construction being built, the beginning of a new highway which would solve all the congestion and change the nature of the city. There had been protests, people were upset about the tunnels being dug under their homes, the noise and smell of the machines and the earth being dumped in great mounds by schools and playgrounds. My son’s steady finger dropped a careful block onto his virtual tower and when the startling intensity of this movement was complete, I changed the gears with one hand, turned the wheel with the other, and accelerated into the stream of traffic heading east.

  THE WHISTLEBLOWER’S LAMENT

  At this midpoint on my life’s journey, the only advice I have to offer the reader is that if you should awake to find all sanity expunged, you should have prepared some means of being taken to a quiet street off the Pacific Highway in the suburb of St Leonards. There’s a clini
c there with a cool garden of palms and ferns out the front, and when you get there, ask to speak to Dr Peter Young. I understand this sounds like absurd advice because, although this plan of action has worked on several occasions to restore my own fevered mind to proper working condition, it is ludicrous to propose every person coming across this odd account will be free to engage the talents of a sole mental-health professional who, despite his prodigiousness, is but one man. But the fact that there exists even one head-shrink who possesses the capacity to heal a mind as humbled beneath all reason as my own, ought to serve as a message of hope to anyone who finds themselves lost in the bleak hinterlands of internal disorder.

  For those distressed enough to go looking for help when their inner workings start misfiring, but unfamiliar with the lay of the mental-health scene, it should be pointed out that the first port of call is your local general practitioner, who cannot personally help you with your madness, but will know someone who can. Some readers of this essay might be lucky enough to have an established relationship with their GP, a doctor to whom you and the family have turned in times of misadventure, disease, and the occasional illness. Then there are those who have no idea whom to consider at all when they get ill, let alone whom to speak to when they become sick in the head, and have to resort to googling some variation of ‘local doctors’ in order to initiate first contact.

  Many years back, when I first became desperate enough to go looking for help, the results of just such googling was a certain medical centre, an establishment sitting at the heart of the popular inner-city Sydney suburb, just across from where a tapas bar now abuts an anarchist’s den, and every Saturday the markets sell dreamcatchers, and a mystifying line of Japanese tourists assemble for watermelon cakes at the little bakery on the corner, and the cops roll over the square by the medical centre doors with their lights silently flashing so couples will part, coffees in their hands, to let the squad cars roll on into the uptown traffic. Incidentally, at the time I first found it online, this medical centre happened to be one of the worst-rated general practices in New South Wales.

  Not wanting to malign their reputation unjustly, I stopped for a bit after writing the previous paragraph to check whether things have changed at the medical centre since those days. I offer the reader these accounts posted online by patients who’ve allegedly attended the place within the last year:

  (1) ‘The experience here was more painful than the condition I went to get checked out…it was like speaking to a bus driver about rocket science’; (2) ‘The receptionists here are extremely rude and seem to have a deep hatred for all that is good and holy’; (3) ‘After she finished taking my blood pressure she mumbled, “you’re fine now get out”.

  As I got up to leave I made a comment about the appalling service I received. The good doctor simply looked at me and screamed “close the door you stupid boy!”’

  To say these reviews are representative of the general consensus is an understatement, and on the afternoon I first discovered this much-maligned centre, worse reviews than these were the predominant impression online. There was one important caveat to these negative reports – one still observed in the current litany of online reviews – a strict agreement across every account that there was a doctor who served as the centre’s one redeeming reason for being. It happened Dr Lee was the GP I encountered when I first went looking for help, or perhaps this account would have an even bleaker ending than the one I’m intending to tell.

  The receptionists at the inner-city medical centre are treated ungallantly by online reviewers, but through the haze of sickness I admit to having found their stoic detachment an ideal model for just how the rest of the world ought to be. They exuded a perfect indifference as they processed my Medicare card, a solemn and impassive air – just the kind of unobtrusive human interaction a confounded mind tolerates best. I clung to the edge of their reception desk like an errorplagued automaton reporting for rewiring until one of the women, a short blonde with ice-blue eyes and snowy cheeks, handed me a slip of paper with my name printed on one side and a doctor’s on the other. She told me in her thick Slavic accent to take the slip up the double flight of creaking stairs and slide it under the closed door of the doctor in Room 4. I did as ordered, taking the groaning stairs two by two and slotting myself between the other hunched patients arranged in opposing rows of grey chairs against the wall. Next to me was an old white-haired man whose withered hand clutched the head of a cane, and across from us were two broad-shouldered women with matching mermaid tattoos and little piercings set in their cheeks.

  The slip of printed paper I stuck under the door marked 4 was eventually sucked up by an unseen hand. At this weird sight the old man nudged my knee with his cane and with a cavernous smile said, ‘It’s a bit like a brothel this place.’ Under any other circumstance I might have been tempted to feign a false air of offence and say loudly enough for the rest of the patients to hear, ‘What do you mean a brothel? Why would I know what a brothel is like?’ simply to amuse myself at the old man’s expense, but, as people like to say these days, I was unwell, so there was nothing to do but nod and stare and the old man gave up on me as a means of distraction, and turned his attention back to the spot in the wall between the two women.

  The magazines in waiting rooms rate somewhere close to a leper’s undies on my scale of things I don’t want to touch, but if you look at their covers for more than a second, stacked on the table, you don’t need to pick them up to stay informed – Prince Harry was back in his Nazi outfit, the Kardashian sisters walked the beach in string bikinis looking candid and Junoesque against the blue California waves, and couples of whom I only vaguely knew, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis perhaps, were said to be breaking up in Tinseltown. There was framed art on the waiting-room walls, but not knowing much about the subject I couldn’t pick the style or say for sure that they had one – a forest scene, purples and pinks in the skyline, horses, they might be, on the hills. Notes in all caps stuck on the doors warned us to turn off our phones for the sake of sensitive equipment, and a young mother with thick brown boots thumped and thudded her pram backwards up the long double-stairs, the baby asleep inside despite the bumpy ascent. When they both reached the top the mother’s plump face was slick and red and she collapsed into an empty chair with a definitive grunt.

  The various doors opened every so often and a name was called, and the chairs would rearrange and new people came stomping up the stairs to take their place in the collective waiting. The situation we were in was a little like the funeralparlour scene in Camus’s The Stranger, or so it struck me for a moment, though thinking on this bolt of connection I could not explain to myself where exactly the analogue resided. A plasma screen hung on the wall above door number 3, on which was playing a repeat of a morning show called Today. The hosts of this program and their roaming reporters were investigating the creation of the world’s largest lamington, which had been brought into being in a parkland in the suburb of Olympic Park. Through one of their intrepid reporters the excited hosts interviewed the chef, a dark-haired, nervous-looking woman, who seemed unsure how to explain or to feel about her strange masterpiece.

  A door opened on the far side of the hall and my name was called. I sat in the busy little room with Dr Lee and saw precisely why she alone was spared the scorn of the online reviewers. When you place your distress in the hands of others, you can take on the hysterical bearing of some small mammalian critter caught in a snare, a prey creature whose heart is likely to burst if external intervention is not tender enough. Dr Lee seemed to know by some amalgam of instinct and experience just how to treat me in my derangement, and an aura of clinical motherliness emanated from her every pore, so that I could confirm the intensity of my illness to her by beginning, in an unseemly fashion, to cry. It didn’t matter that I’d lost all continence in front of this stranger with a stethoscope, who was handing me tissues at regular intervals. She consoled me with the knowledge that she had in her possession a form de
veloped precisely for those who report to their GPs with my symptoms. On this form there was printed a chart asking the patient to indicate their state of mind on a scale where (1) is best and (10) is worst. The questions on this form include: How would you rate your interest or pleasure in doing things? Or your capacity to concentrate on tasks, such as reading the newspaper or watching television? How positive do you feel about being with friends and family? For once in my life I was able to assess myself a perfect (10) across every dimension of measurement. The doctor, radiating something like an impassionate love, continued to pass tissues as I regained some composure while dealing with the quiz, and when that was done she read over the answers and said, ‘Have you made plans to kill yourself?’ She met my eyes and added, with an empathic look, ‘I have to ask you this.’

  Yes, I told her, I had been thinking perversely of a film I’d seen at the house in St Peters – Encounters at the End of the World – by the director Werner Herzog. The scene that had preoccupied my thoughts was the one where Arctic explorers simulate snow-blindness by putting buckets on their heads, and attempt to navigate by way of a rope wrapped around their waists. The buckets they are wearing to obscure their vision have crude faces painted on their sides, and as the disoriented explorers bumble about in the falling snow – getting nowhere and tangling into each other, tying themselves in knots with the rope that is meant to keep them together – the old Bavarian director intones these words in his monotonous, existential manner: ‘At first the participants seem to be heading in the right direction. But soon the man in front veers off course, pulling everyone else with him. This one mistake soon leads to another, and in moments the entire group has wandered hopelessly off course. The primitive faces on the buckets lend their futile attempts to navigate in the simulated darkness a dimension of sinister comedy.’