Axiomatic

by Maria Tumarkin

  Astrid’s send-off was at Sacred Heart Church in St Kilda—

  born 23.03.1985

  died 21.12.2012

  it said on the photocopied flyer, Vanda was wondering who’d come. When the start time arrived the pews were scattered with caseworkers and agency people. Lawyers: only Vanda. So that’s what it would be like, Astrid farewelled by people who liked her and cared but were her paid minders (poorly paid, whatever) not kin. This was a sore point with Astrid, how people were paid to care about her, no one actually did. I never even met her. Something about the way Vanda invited me. I did not consider not coming.

  Music first then Father John reads the eulogy by Astrid’s adoptive mother, Maureen. She has not flown down from interstate. ‘Astrid used to love music, used to love playing with the stereo knobs. She would twist the knobs and I would say “no”. So she would stretch one hand to be slapped and with the other hand continue twisting.’ The two-year-old lasted twenty-five more years, longer than many imagined. Her death was quieter than most would have guessed. How odd, she was usually careful with drugs, someone says. ‘Astrid used to be the happiest, most cheerful, delightful baby. Then she hit the terrible twos, I used to joke she never got out of them.’ Father John takes a breath. I picture a mother digging into her raw self for the image of a child, not doomed yet to become a tormented adult.

  On the flyer’s a photograph—Astrid sitting pretty, smiling, right leg bent on the chair and you only see cuts on her arms if you know they’re there. I place myself in front of another photo, which balances on a little church stand. Dark long hair. Athletic frame. Few people keep their looks after years on the street; this goes for women—self-evident?—more than men. Astrid stayed beautiful, beaming, the genes maybe, same ones that left Maureen powerless when trying to keep Astrid home, if you believe in them. She’s in purple, her favourite. Ice skates. Once she was a teen ice-skating whiz at intermediate level of the Aussie Skate program. How photographs lie, this is known, the ones that age us, the ones peeling decades off faces like mudcakes off gumboots, this one at my eye level which makes Astrid’s future look like it could save her from her past. What do photos’ little lies matter? The dead are slipping away, all help’s needed if we are to cling to the smallest parts of them.

  Strange to be in a virtually deserted church on a January afternoon. The world feels OK, slow, out of our hands. City’s a half-empty auditorium. Hot out I suppose. Too hot for memorial service clothes, even St Kilda style, unfussy. Astrid did not like clothes. She stripped, ran, police would call a local clinic connected to Alfred Hospital psych services and say ‘a naked African-American woman is on the streets’ and the psych people would go ‘oh, yes, that’s one of ours’. Vanda likes clothes. At the memorial service she is wearing black and red, one of her signature combinations. Every time she wears it, whichever season, it works. Hers is an old-fashioned glamour, Hepburnian (Katharine not Audrey). Katharine H compared herself to Campbell’s tomato soup, savoury, no frills (must remember to ask what canned merchandise Vanda thinks she most resembles).

  Don’t forget the end of the day, Vanda said to me once. It’s when community lawyers, social workers, agency people go home into beds while for others the search starts. That’s when you glimpse the ‘common humanity’ figment coming undone. A death sometimes is like end-of-day writ large, people abandoned in their unadorned nakedness, stark loneliness, like in George Orwell’s ‘How the Poor Die’. The day she said it we were sitting drinking wine (hers red, mine white). Astrid was alive.

  Father John is inviting people to say a few words. Only Vanda gets up. ‘I admired Astrid’s pluck, her guts, as well as being immensely frustrated by it. She had police, corrections and magistrates, everyone, wrapped around her finger, everyone playing her game.’

  You dispense with the sad, limp air for a moment there, Vanda. You bring the friction back, the fight in the room.

  ‘And I know we didn’t completely fail her. There were moments of hope we gave her.’ Vanda sits back down. Who was she just addressing—Astrid, Maureen in another state, herself, god who must not be totally indifferent when young raging women leave this world by accident or design? Father John reads from the prophet Isaiah about god removing the mourning veil, destroying death, wiping away tears (best translation this secular Jew can do) and afterwards, teas and supermarket biscuits in our grip, he tells me: ‘People have tried lifting the veil for Astrid but ultimately death does it. Lifts that veil.’ Death undoing the grief of living, I get it, I think. Vanda had mentioned Father John does funerals, a proper ceremony, for people with no relative even to come collect the body.

  ‘I have studied the science of departures’—first line of Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Tristia’; and

  who knows when the word ‘departure’ is spoken

  what kind of separation is at hand

  Mandelstam thought it was impossible to know. Vanda has lost enough clients, to drugs mainly but not only, to know the probabilities and likelihoods. She must have sensed Astrid was unlikely to make it. Still her death was shocking—sixty years premature, in another world. ‘We all thought she’d die a more violent death. Suicide by cop.’ Provoking police was not out of character for Astrid. ‘Or something.’ Vanda says she wanted to be in jail. ‘Felt much safer there. She used to lie down under cars, too.’ Two baby hands—one’s twisting the knob, the other’s offering itself for a ritual slap.

  How wild, how angry, was she? Fiona at Alfred psych services was never scared of Astrid ‘except this one time I went to the cells and she was there like an animal. Wanting to be put in jail. Out of control. She was terrifying.’ Fiona’s colleague Jacqui tells me Astrid wouldn’t watch violent flicks, or open violent books, not ever, she liked ‘soft stuff, soapies and weepies’. Vanda says Astrid’s behaviour had hallmarks of sexual abuse—who, where, when, no one knew. She always went out of her brain around a certain time of year, her birthday, and invariably there’d be sexual overtones to it, her history of early abuse, whatever that was, being compounded by sex assaults that happened while working the streets and this stuff had to spill out some way, where? Whether Astrid’s sharp mind—‘insightful’: Vanda—made things worse or better for her is unknowable. Vanda and Astrid would talk for hours in a space known as the Women’s House. Astrid was doing a degree, indigenous studies were part of it, and she was interested in maybe one day expanding into law. To actually practise law—with her criminal record—what a miracle it’d be. They weren’t kidding themselves Astrid in a white wig and robes was a chance, but they talked about how she should go get a law degree anyway, she could do a lot of good with it. ‘I honestly thought I was going to win this one,’ Vanda says. Something else won. Take abandonment, add abuse, then addiction, next mental health flare-ups. What do you get? Damage. Think again. She was an African-American without an African-American community. Family in America wanted nothing to do with her. So, what then? Loneliness. Of a cosmic kind. ‘The alonest person I [that’s Vanda] have ever met.’

  A nearly unattended funeral. Whole person—gone—no one to be beside themselves with loss. Fingerprints on people and objects fade, become invisible, until it is as if they touched no one, nothing. Only their adoptive mother is feeling worse hourly. Fiona talked to Maureen—not inconsolable, but close—the day before the service. The mother does not have the daughter’s anger. Just guilt. ‘We’ve learned not to feel guilt in the interests of sanity,’ Vanda says.

  Just left the church and already I am forgetting. Like Astrid is a splinter of plywood and a river is taking her. River Lethe. River Time. All the talk about the sanctity of human life.

  As if knowing your life is precious is a default state of the human psyche. As if everyone comes from this knowingness and always instinctively returns to it.

  How about all those people for whom their life does not feel precious? Why not is often the easy bit to get: they were abused, abandoned, beaten to the point of forgetting they had a body, betrayed, humiliated, caught
out by their socioeconomics like a mole in a spring trap. They were not loved or not loved enough. Lost someone, witnessed something, got into drugs or drink early, missed having their mental illness diagnosed, all of it, none of this. A harder question is can the feeling your life’s worth shit be fixed, whether from outside in or inside out? Can it? All the services offering legal aid, food, counselling, employment (tedious employment), shelter, they cannot get close to this worth-shit feeling. I do not mean the needs they take aim at sit at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid (let’s blow up the dumb pyramid). I mean this feeling’s impervious to being messed with, it is too deep and diffused, a mystery even to its host, it is precognitive, it is metaphysical, both. And when this feeling is there it skews the survival instinct, instils that take-it-or-leave-it sense. Force of gravity’s just too weak to pull you in. To keep you in. People, plans, debts, windfalls. Intangible stuff that holds you in—just not strong enough to stop you giving it away. ‘The weightlessness of giving up.’ I came across this expression in Kristina Olsson’s Boy, Lost.

  Some, maybe a lot, of this stuff comes from a place beyond us, from a time before we got born or can remember. How to speak of this beforeness? How to speak of things being passed on if they are not histories and habits so much as structures of feeling, also if it’s unclear who or what is doing the passing on, plus why? Cycles of abuse. Cycles of poverty. Intergenerational transmission of trauma. Sorry, no can do, I tried and the words stuck in my throat.

  Vanda has come to think those non-existent fairytale endings are always about the self-appointed rescuer, never the prospective rescue-ee. In Vanda the miniseries she wouldn’t be raining redemption down on the heads of her co-star clients. Sunsets. Half-smiles of empowerment. Hope sweeter than flat lemonade in a jam jar. A Christmas not long ago she was crossing a park. She heard someone weeping—man, woman, at first she couldn’t tell. It was a young woman thrown out by her boyfriend, abandoned by her family, on the streets for a few days, desperate, distressed. Takes someone with a special thickness of skin to walk past a crying person who has nowhere to go at Christmas. No, leave humanity out of it, Christmas too; Vanda being Vanda couldn’t bear walking past. That day she was leaving for Tasmania to spend Christmas with the family of a man she was seeing at the time. ‘Come on,’ Vanda said to the young woman, ‘let me buy you a coffee.’ Everything was closed. So they went to Crown Casino. What the fuck was she doing? After coffee Vanda took the woman home—Vanda’s home was a bedsit—feeling, she tells me, good about the idea of this young woman having a bath, food to eat, warm bed, books to read. Clean, fed, warm, safe. Everything Vanda would have wanted and needed. She left the woman at her place and got on the plane to Tasmania.

  The man she was seeing thought she was crazy. Vanda called home. The woman did not pick up. When Vanda got back to Melbourne the place was deserted and everything in it not quite right. Mould in a coffee cup, days-old newspapers. The neighbours revealed the young woman’s family had dragged her away. Later Vanda found out she threw herself off Jolimont Station railway bridge: didn’t kill herself but broke every bone.

  ‘I wasn’t prepared to take all the steps.’ This is what Vanda says and why, I realise now, she’s telling me this story. ‘I gave her what I would have wanted. But I wasn’t prepared to give up my non-refundable flight to Tasmania and do things difficult for me—call counsellors from the Salvos, deal with mental health stuff…’ Vanda says when we pick people up we are responsible for what we’re doing and it is our responsibility to go all the way.

  Says the fox in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: ‘People have forgotten this truth but you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.’

  Does it mean a little help is often worse than no help? We’re talking and I am getting a pulling feeling in my stomach. I get it when something important is happening and it’s easy to miss. My body starts pulling on me from the inside. Vanda remembers a client going off at her for no good reason. This woman had a crime compensation claim taking forever to wind its way through the system in Alice Springs. Vanda’s only part in it was making a couple of what’s-going-on calls to the Alice Springs legal aid people. In the woman’s eyes Vanda became the symbol of the obfuscating, stalling system. Usually Vanda’s unshaken when clients get angry but 2009 was a bad year—it started with bushfires, then Vanda’s best friend died from liver cancer—and she snapped. Gave it back at the woman. Shortly after that the woman was involuntarily committed. Again nothing to do with Vanda except she now knew that all along the woman was in serious trouble in her head. Later the woman killed herself, Vanda heard. ‘And you ask yourself, perhaps if I didn’t snap? Perhaps she was looking to me for hope?’ This is not guilt of a whalehearted community lawyer talking. It’s a dilemma and it’s pressing, how to be in the presence of strangers who look like they may be sliding, falling, drowning and you just happen to be walking by, or seeing out of a corner of an eye some slippage, and if you’ve lived enough, tried one or two things, got your thermals wet maybe, you know obvious answers do not apply here and the likelihood of making things worse whatever you do is crushing.

  Vanda and I both saw the Australian Story episode where a prominent rugby league player, first one out of the closet, tells of a troubled homeless boy he met on one of those hospital visits to sick kids that footy stars do especially the stars who are a soft touch. Years later as a teenager the boy lived with the player in a house he shared with a close female friend. The boy got off drugs, serious drugs they were, and went to school. He was safe and taken care of. After six months it emerged police were monitoring the boy because in the past he was seen entering houses of known paedophiles. The player, who had only recently come out—his dad begged him don’t, and couldn’t stop wishing his son was hetero—was a suspect. He got cleared fast enough and police asked him to pressure the boy to testify against the paedophiles who’d abused him. The boy knew enough to land key people behind bars. Most likely it wasn’t burning desire for justice that got him talking. Maybe it was a way of repaying this famous sorted-out man whose respect he wanted. But testifying broke the boy. He stopped going to school, went back to drugs and older men. Homeless again. The player hardly ever knew where he was. One time police called the player after arresting the boy and the boy shouted wildly into the receiver for the player to get him out of there—this after months of no contact. The player had had enough. Had done so much for this boy, and for what? Any association now risked destroying him professionally. ‘No, this guy is not my responsibility,’ said the player to the cops. Four years later they found the boy’s body: stabbed to death, wrapped in carpet, dumped in a shallow grave. Forensic reports suggested the murder was committed shortly after the player got the phone call. The boy’s evidence could have brought down a paedophile ring so let’s not be surprised by what happened to him. The player, tortured by the boy’s death, dreams of replaying that phone call. Everyone around the player says not your fault, you did all you could, more even. The culture says it too. The man is beginning to believe it.

  ‘I am sorry,’ says Vanda, ‘but it is your fault. You were to blame. I say it without judgment. You picked someone up and you expected a fairytale.’

  A friend based in Cambodia for years who keeps going back—she’s past eighty, it doesn’t stop her—holds off clapping when another selfless young Australian sets up yet another orphanage in poor struggling Cambodia. ‘Most of the children would only find a place in that orphanage because their parents have good connections,’ my friend says. These are the small fries though. More worrying to my friend is that orphanage’s likely proximity to higher-up corruption, to organised crime, proximity a selfless Australian can’t see or foresee. It is not a question of charity and its corrosive ways in second and third world countries. My friend knows the damage that can happen when people force their way into complex ecosystems they do not understand.

  Tempting to suppose a fragile, dysfunctional society isn’t co
mplex, can’t satisfy its people’s needs for meaning or a sense of self, and intervention can only help. Equally tempting to think a drug-taking boy who prostitutes himself to older men and lives on the streets must be taken off streets because anything’s better than the streets because the streets promise him nothing but denigration and self-destruction. Except the idea of human dignity isn’t up to much if it does not encompass recognition that people who look like they have little or nothing may, in fact, have a great deal to lose.

  Hang on—‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’ Is this not on every cereal packet, Vanda? Meaning, don’t block ears, avert eyes, speed up walking in response to another’s cries. But what if the something good men and women do is largely nothing masquerading as a something, or if the something’s worse than nothing because it plucks people out of their own world then dumps them, with fewer resources, less hope, once the good people collapse in their inevitable moral exhaustion? Helping someone in unspoken expectation of their often impossible rehabilitation is frequently worse than not helping. Vanda has not always known this, knows it now. It is a difficult knowledge. Would paralyse me. What am I saying? It has paralysed me.

  Take drugs. Vanda: ‘Many lawyers and judges do not understand, or pretend they don’t, that in telling people to give up drugs they’re asking them to give up friends, support, sense of self, credibility, their way of spending time, everything.’

  Even after climbing on top of addiction, like scaling a mountain, only your two legs are in a sack, things may get lonely or boring and how easy it is to slip. The time after rehab or jail is dangerous. Easy to overdose and die: body cannot take the usual doses. So when some or most retake up drugs it’s not like ring the village bells. Painful back and forth is how it goes. In court one Tuesday, noticing deputy chief magistrate Popovic’s unmatronly air when she mentions kicking addiction, it’s no breezy onwards-and-upwards business, I get goosebumps.