The World Was Whole

by Fiona Wright

  But the bursting of such bubbles can be smaller and less spectacular too: in the week before my hospital admission, I walked one morning along the coastline from Bronte to Bondi, trying to unwind some of the fear and thrumming anxiety that I felt each time I thought about what I was about to do, trying to fill the time with ceaseless, bodily activity in order to distract my brain. I stopped in Bondi for a coffee (my habitual breakfast at the time) and a man sat at the low table across from me with a toddler beside him; cutting the crusts off some of his toast, he squashed huge chunks of avocado onto it and passed it to the child, who giggled in delight. The woman seated next to him, middle-aged and wrapped in lycra, cooed at the little girl, and said, she’s a very trendy baby, already eating avocado toast! and I couldn’t help but add, melodramatically, but how will she ever afford to buy herself a house! The woman – and the young man too – looked at me blankly, before one of them eventually said, that’s probably not on her mind right now, and I realised suddenly that they had no idea what I was talking about. They were floating in a bubble entirely different to my own.

  The hospital, of course, was its own bubble – and set up deliberately to be so – but what this meant was that there were patterns of conversation, routine jokes and repetitions that became the fabric of the days there. I started drinking instant coffee, perhaps because everyone around me was constantly sucking it back, and then I started liking it (I drink it still). I learnt how to wrap the cuff of the blood-pressure monitor, twice daily, around my own bicep, and which buttons to press to make it inflate – although not how to read the numbers it displayed. My heart stopped hammering in my chest at snack times when I put the same things on my plate: a kiwifruit in the morning, a box of sultanas in the afternoon, three Jatz and a pre-packaged square of cheddar cheese at 8 p.m. I joined in on the in-jokes, most of which involved comparing the levels of bloating that our changed hospital diets had induced in all of our bodies (I’ve never heard so many jokes about constipation and farting in my life, despite growing up with a brother and a toilet-humoured father). One evening, when my friend Laura visited, I lifted up my shirt to show her my distended stomach and she just looked at me, puzzled and silent, and it was only then that I realised how odd a thing this was to do. We adopted each other’s habits of speech: you’re a good egg and, you got this and, oh, what fresh hell is this, the refrain whenever we were served something that was difficult or just plain disgusting. These things were what we needed to feel slightly less uncomfortable, to feel a little bit connected, to survive.

  There was a dark side to this too, because we couldn’t help, at times, but copy the habitual ways the others ate – separating trail mix into its component pieces on our plates, or slicing apples into impossible piles of translucent wafers, eating ridiculously slowly every time. In all the other hospitals I’ve been to, these kinds of rituals, called ‘safety behaviours’, were not permitted at the table, in part for this contagiousness, but this hospital was more lenient, more pragmatic, in its approach. We don’t mind how you get the food in, the dietitian, a wonderfully kind woman, said, as long as you get it in.

  But I started feeling guilty and somehow greedy because my breakfast, one piece of toast (either undercooked or burnt, and more often than not stone-cold) and one glass of full-cream milk, didn’t take me anywhere near thirty minutes to complete, and I’d sit at the table with my empty plate and glass in front of me, awkward and ashamed.

  On the weekend at almost the exact midpoint of my admission, I was given leave to travel back to Newtown, to the place that is my home. It was the weekend of the Newtown Festival, the annual fundraiser for the neighbourhood centre, always abundant with acrobats, a chai tent, an early-morning dog show with a look-alike category. It was a glorious day – that crisp, sharp light of late spring, a hot breeze shaking jacaranda flowers onto the road – and I walked to the festival down Eliza Street, where the inhabitants of a crumbling terrace were playing music and barbecuing vegetarian sausages in their tiny front courtyard, a bubble-blowing machine angled out over the street. The street itself was thronged and milling. A beautiful young woman with a shaved head and silver glitter pressed onto her eyelids placed a sticker in the shape of a heart onto my chest. I ran into one of my housemates in the park, an old colleague, and then the girlfriend of a woman I used to live with; a little further on, I saw one of the nurses from the hospital, although it took me a moment to place her properly, dressed in denim and wearing jewellery, rather than navy-blue scrubs and a duress alarm.

  Later, I met a friend in a café on King Street, and the barista said, we haven’t seen you here for a while, and reached for the skim milk before I’d even had a chance to speak. I used to bristle when this happened, when a waiter or a bartender asked if (or assumed that) I wanted my usual, it used to embarrass me acutely, because I didn’t want anybody else to recognise how predictable, habitual, routine I could not help but be. It seemed to be a failing and a fault, but on this afternoon, all afternoon, I felt it as a recognition of my place, of my home and my inextricability, almost, within it. A recognition, perhaps, of my very self, which I felt sharply and acutely because I had been away, was still away, deliberately removed from my regular life and its patterns. But all of this remained continuous, and it was comforting to see how I might slot myself back in when I returned.

  When Alex drove me back to hospital, heading into the spilling sun westwards down Parramatta Road, it was all I could do not to cry.

  The whole time in this hospital I couldn’t wait to get out, and when I try to account for the weeks I spent there, all I can think is, I endured. So much of the time there I felt frustrated, and bored, and almost unbearably lonely, even though I had a regular parade of evening visitors, even though I was almost never actually alone. But I felt different here, and unbelonging, and I’m still trying to understand why. It surprised me, because in each of my previous day programs, the recognition and the friendship I had found in the other patients had been profound, and profoundly useful too. The psychiatrist was fond of telling me that every patient feels like the odd one out, feels like they don’t belong, that it’s one of the many deceptions that our disease insists upon, but I couldn’t help but think (and perhaps this is the very definition of madness) that in my case it was actually true.

  The psychologist Peter Freund describes emotions as spatial in their expression, we feel up or down or level-headed or flat, as if the body is oriented and placed by how we feel. And the reverse too, he argues, may well be true – that how we feel positions our sense of the body in space. The more complicated of these spatialisations have to do with unity or disunity – I feel collected, I feel grounded, I feel complete; or else a bit scattered, all over the place, beside myself, utterly lost. It was disunity I felt so deeply in the hospital, removed from my usual spaces, from my routines, from my friends, in rooms bigger and airier, as well as far more populated, than any in my narrow house, on the hospital grounds surrounded by parked cars but not pedestrians and always full of groups of chain-smokers, mostly from the drug and alcohol ward downstairs.

  On the day that I left the hospital I left early, so that I could arrive in Petersham, just up the road from where Alex lives, in time for breakfast, one of our shared rituals. I ordered coffee, real coffee, sweet-bitter and smooth, the cup a deep, mineral grey. Toasted sourdough, bread that was chewy and seedy, not wet and white; I held my handbag on my lap, because it still felt so novel, so pleasurable to be carrying it around. (Coffee I had known I’d miss; carrying a handbag, far less so.) Later, I unpacked my clothes, vacuumed my bedroom, watered the pots of cherry tomatoes growing in my small backyard. I’d missed my home, the habits I have that shape it and are shaped by it, the small delights it gives me across the day. I felt collected, grounded. And I thought, I must remember this, in the coming months, as my habits and routines become once more invisible because of their ordinariness, their everyday repetition. I must remember how they help me, hold me. I walked along King Street, ju
st to feel it on my skin.

  PERHAPS THIS ONE WILL BE MY LAST SHARE HOUSE

  On a disgustingly hot day in February, barely three months since I was discharged from the hospital, on one of those days when the air is so hot that you feel it dry your eyeballs, I helped Alex move house. He and his housemates had been issued with an eviction notice a few weeks earlier; it came less than a day after they’d asked their landlord for some repairs – including fixing some exposed power points, and the back fence of the property, which leaned sideways at an angle easily large enough for a decent-sized person to climb through. When Alex received the notice he immediately rang the Tenants’ Union for advice, and what he was told was yes, this is clearly a retaliatory eviction, yes, it is definitely illegal, and yes, you have a very clear-cut case and all the evidence you need, but there’s no point taking it to tribunal, because all you’re likely to get is a bit more time to move or lower rent until you do, but the eviction notice will not be overturned. What he was told, that is, is you are right, but you don’t actually have rights. Alex is the second of my friends within a year to be evicted after asking for repairs.

  By the time he moved, though, Alex was excited – he and his household had found a much nicer house, albeit a lot further out from the city and at a much higher price, a place so newly renovated that all of the drawers in his built-in wardrobe still had protective plastic film over the handles. Three days before he moved I opened my inbox to find my own eviction notice waiting there. I’d been living in this house, my home, on Pine Street in the north end of Newtown, for three years and nine months – the longest time I’d lived in a house since I left my family home – and though the building had its problems (cracked walls, a dropping cornice, a door so eroded by water damage that it felt like balsa, to say nothing of the owner’s DIY plumbing job that saw the whole back portion of the house thud and judder whenever we used the garden hose) I loved the place. I loved looking out from my front window over the street and watching the waves of people – RPA nurses in the very early mornings, then harried-looking office workers with their freshly washed hair and takeaway toast in brown paper bags, the chattering schoolchildren mid-afternoon – streaming to and from Macdonaldtown Station at the end of the street; I loved reading in the back room with its painted white floor and windows that streamed with sunlight in the afternoon, the weird rectangular bathtub that felt like lying in a tiny swimming pool. I felt settled there, centred in my routines and movements, so much so that when I told each of my friends about the notice the first thing any of them said was, I’m so sorry, you love that house. I count amongst my closest friends two of the women who I lived with there, strangers before we became housemates, family now. Our agent rang me to let me know that they were sorry to be losing us as tenants, that we hadn’t done anything wrong, that our landlord had decided to sell. I opened up the house twice in the next two weeks to let tradesmen walk through and put together quotes for the work they’d need to do to make the place presentable for sale.

  The day before Alex moved, in the late afternoon, I started sorting through my clothes, the ones in my lopsided Ikea wardrobe and the ones stored in plastic boxes under my bed (the only space available), gathering up the items that I rarely wear to give to charity – I do this every time I move, but it was only this time that I finally let go of a pair of tailored pants, olive green and pin-striped, that I once loved, that I had bought only a few months before I first got sick, and that I’d always hoped would fit me again one day. I do the same thing with my bookcases every time I move, although I never find as many books with which I’m willing to part. I went to Alex’s house that evening to help him dismantle his furniture and pack the final boxes – the removalists were due at seven the next morning – and brought along my toolbox, because he doesn’t own one, and it felt eerie and awfully prescient, suddenly, to be boxing up his bed linen, knowing that I’d soon have to do the same.

  Every time I’ve moved house, or more precisely, the last four times I’ve moved house, I’ve thought: perhaps this one will be my last share house. Every time I’ve moved house, I’ve realised that ‘the market’, as the agents say, has moved too in the intervening time, and I have had to adjust my expectations of how much rent I’m willing to pay. Every time I’ve moved house, since I first moved out of home (how much difference that single word makes) it has been because of forces outside of my control – a series of escalating rent hikes, one ridiculously high but somehow still legal rent hike, an owner moving back into his property, a defaulted mortgage, a sale. And I know it’s not just me who’s in this boat, as leaky as it seems – recent research shows that more than a third of all Australians rent their home (twenty years ago, this was much closer to one quarter), and eighty-three per cent of them have no fixed-term lease, or are on a lease of twelve months’ duration or less. One in five young renters, under the age of thirty-five, have been living like this – month-to-month at worst, year-to-year at best – for a decade or more of their lives, and one in ten have moved house eleven times or more. Six per cent of renters have – like Alex – been evicted after making a complaint about or asking for repairs. When this research was released, in February last year, the newspapers reported on it as though its findings were some kind of surprise. My friends and I just rolled our eyes – our only surprise was seeing our lives, for once, represented in the mainstream press.

  Share-housing, of course, is only one kind of renting – and the reasons I’ve been doing it for so long are, I know, because my circumstances are unusual. I can’t afford to live alone (as a quarter of all renters do) either financially or emotionally: because I work almost entirely by myself, the isolation of living by myself would be all the more acute, and even dangerous given my precarious mental health. I’ve never been coupled-up enough, or for long enough, to live with a partner (as forty-four per cent of renters do, more than half of whom have children). I love living in Newtown, not because it’s near the city but because it’s in the inner west, a place that has a left-leaning and creative kind of culture and where I can usually walk between the places where I like to go, and I know that it is a privilege, and an immense one at that, to even have the choice of renting here in the first place. I know that people like me – middle-class, educated, and overwhelmingly white – have already pushed out so many of the older, working-class migrant families who once lived here, and who in turn ‘cleaned up’ the ‘slums’ that these suburbs once were. But even still, for almost the entire time I’ve lived in rentals I’ve lived in what is officially termed ‘financial housing stress’, paying more, and often much more, than thirty per cent of my income on rent. Almost half of all renters – across the country as a whole, not just in inner-urban environments – live with this financial stress. And about the same proportion still aspire to own a home.

  This aspiration, I think, is the much larger misfortune here: Sydney has recently become the second most unaffordable city for housing in the world (behind only the incredibly densely populated and land-limited Hong Kong). Its median house price is now more than twelve times the median income of its inhabitants – the definition of ‘unaffordable’ is any multiplier larger than three. This median price increased by nineteen per cent over the course of 2016 alone, while average wage growth in this time was a meagre two per cent. Currently almost a half of all mortgages approved are for investors, rather than home buyers, when barely twenty years ago investors made up only fifteen per cent of the market. There’s something broken here, and brutally so, and it means that renters, that entire third of our population, are facing higher rents and greater instability, all the while watching the prospect of ever owning a home of their own retreat further and further from the realm of possibility.

  It took me and my housemates – one new, one coming over from the house on Pine Street – four weeks to find a new home: we went to inspections on almost every Tuesday and Thursday evening (for which they both had to leave work early), all morning on the Saturdays across that tim
e, we filled in applications for every property before we viewed them and kept a spreadsheet of addresses, agents, opening times; as much as we tried not to get invested (no pun intended), we imagined our lives inside the spaces we saw professionally photographed online – we did this even though I kept saying that looking at Domain is like looking at Tinder: you don’t actually know anything until you meet in person. We looked at houses that were tiny, that were mouldy, one that had taped-up windows with handwritten signs saying DO NOT OPEN – WINDOW FALLS OUT; none of these houses were being offered for less than $850 per week. The application process is utterly opaque and requires more points of identity than the application for a passport. When we finally found a place, and were accepted as tenants, we were told that the lease must start at the beginning of the very next week (it was already Wednesday) or the owner would choose a different group of renters, so we had no choice but to rent two properties simultaneously until the notice period on our old house had passed. We paid our bond and rent in advance; we paid removalists, we bought cleaning supplies and hardware items to fix small patches of wear-and-tear damage, we paid to have five more keys cut, because the new landlord had not provided us with three full sets. We spent four evenings scrubbing the old house, even though we knew that it was tradies and not tenants who’d be moving through there afterwards, so there was no reason for the house to be so spotless, and even still, the agents refused to refund the entirety of our bond because we couldn’t remove all of the marks from the interior of the oven. (Over a quarter of all tenants have a dispute like this with agents, and twenty per cent of all bonds are not returned in full.)