by Lech Blaine
Inside, I reunited with my barrister, who was busy shaking hands with an array of current and former clients. That morning, the courthouse seemed to be filled with Dad’s old customers. A drunk waved at us, sleeves of a hoodie raised to publicise the tattoo of a scorpion.
‘Tommy!’ he said. ‘We’re both innocent, brother.’
‘Fuck me dead,’ my father muttered.
LECH BLAINE was one of the first names listed beside the courtroom. The magistrate presided over interchangeable human pains. ‘You’ve had a hard life,’ he said to a deaf driver caught behind the wheel twice in the same day. ‘But you seem determined to make life harder. Next time you’ll be leaving in handcuffs.’
When my case was called, the barrister gave a five-star performance attesting to my remorse. ‘This is a young man with a bright future dealt a bad hand by a tragic accident,’ he said. ‘Can anyone blame him for losing control of his life? He deserves a second chance.’
The magistrate rifled through references from former teachers and local politicians, along with Dr Rattray’s diagnosis. He agreed I was a fine young man of enormous potential who’d slipped off the rails.
‘The aftermath of that car crash hasn’t ended yet,’ he said. ‘It will go on for some time. But I hope that now you get the help that you so desperately need.’
The justice system was designed to forgive white private schoolboys like me. I was suspended from driving for six months and placed on probation for a year.
‘No fine or conviction,’ said the magistrate.
I imagined screaming, I’m guilty! I could’ve killed someone! Lock me up and throw away the key!
‘Thank you, Your Honour,’ I said.
Even the newspaper was sympathetic. They reported the court appearance alongside a photo from my interview after the car crash: The court heard that Blaine was seeing a psychiatrist and medicated for depression. The magistrate said a number of character witnesses noted a change and the incident was out of character.
My most objective character reference was the action I’d been arrested for. What I really wanted was official confirmation that Will, Hamish and Henry deserved to be alive more than I did, but no one was going to give me that.
And the ruling on Dom’s guilt or innocence was still months away.
Back in Brisbane, I got a job as a waiter at Easts Leagues Club, a cathedral of pokie machines. I did Dry July, not in a social media stunt to raise money for charity, but to keep a promise to my probation officer. I needed to visit her at decreasing intervals for the next year.
‘You want to know the common denominator for most of my clients – black, white, rich, poor?’ she asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘Getting on the grog,’ she said. ‘People like you could put people like me out of a job if you gave up drinking.’
I nodded, while privately disagreeing. Sobriety reduced the likelihood of my pain spilling over into public display, but it didn’t cure the underlying despair. In the short term, it sharpened it, because there were no distractions.
Another condition of probation was regular appointments with a psychologist. My sister – a high-achieving psychology student – organised free therapy with a decorated professor named Christopher. The only catch was that my confessions would be livestreamed to a theatre of graduate students.
I agreed to the innovative arrangement, and completed an exhaustive mood disorder quiz before the first session. Christopher wore a nice suit and expensive shoes. I’d located the antithesis of my stiff-lipped, single-syllable, thick-forearmed father. ‘Good afternoon, Lech,’ he said, gently shaking my hand. ‘It’s delightful to meet you.’
The sound engineer hooked up our microphones before disappearing. We skipped through the legal formalities. All of the aspiring shrinks fifty metres away had signed confidentiality agreements in order to glimpse the kaleidoscope of my soul.
‘Do you have any questions?’ asked Christopher.
‘What technique are we using? CBT? Psychoanalysis?’
‘I tend not to be that formal. Therapists use fancy labels to reassure themselves they know exactly what they are doing, when in reality we are working it out.’
Despite a litany of degrees, Christopher had a practical approach to the science of the mind, seeing himself as more handyman than engineer. He wanted to start at the beginning. ‘This might seem unorthodox, but I don’t want to speak about the traffic accident until we have a portrait of who you are. How did your parents meet?’
Over the next three sessions, I spontaneously narrated the oral version of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Larrikin’. Towards the end of the third session, as I waxed lyrical about those moneyless and mostly unremembered years in the bush, my sentimentality became tinged with embarrassment.
‘Sorry for getting nostalgic,’ I said. ‘I’m making my childhood sound like a Slim Dusty song.’
‘But you were clearly showered with affection.’
‘That’s why my early childhood seems a bit irrelevant. Everyone treated me like I was God’s gift.’
‘That’s why it’s important to explore. While gratifying at the time, I imagine the withdrawals must’ve been severe. The adoration couldn’t last. But you knew how good it felt. So, naturally, you wanted to re-create that.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It was a blast!’
‘This explains the soul-crushing desire for success.’
‘Well, yeah.’
Therapy dredged up a memory from my youth that I had repressed, until Christopher withdrew it brutally from my psyche.
I was nine years old. My father paid me one dollar in the morning and two dollars at night to help open and close the corner store before and after school. One Saturday morning in spring, he played nervously with his handlebar moustache. ‘We need to have a chat, champion,’ he said, switching off the horseracing on the TV. This meant it must be serious.
I nodded, certain I was about to receive a pay rise. Dad fetched me a Crows Nest creaming soda from the fridge and himself a Diet Coke.
‘I’ve decided to move away from Toowoomba,’ he said.
I was delighted by the news. During the 2000 Olympics, we did a road trip to Barcaldine, the birthplace of the Labor Party, to inspect a pub for sale. I wanted to be Dad’s number two at an even bigger enterprise. It didn’t concern me that Barcaldine was twelve hours away. ‘To B-B-Barcaldine?’ I stuttered. ‘When are we m-m-moving?’
My father could hardly make eye contact. He talked to me as if we were bankrupt business partners, not father and son. ‘Unfortunately, you’re not coming with me. Your mother wants to stay in Toowoomba. And I respect her decision. But I need a new business opportunity. This place could send us down the gurgler.’
My father explained he had mortgages to pay, and the logistical difficulties of spending holidays with him in the bush, and the brutal reality that sometimes husbands and wives have different priorities in life.
Nothing he said to justify it mattered. The fact that he’d even contemplated leaving without me drove a dagger into my belief that the two of us were a history-making team.
‘This is about your future,’ he said. ‘We can’t go broke. Or you’ll be eating baked beans from the tin for dinner every night.’
‘Who cares?’ I said, eyes wet. ‘I love baked beans!’
‘Baked beans are great,’ he said. ‘In moderation.’
I went home and wailed in the mildewed sunroom. The canvas blinds cast bars of sunlight against the wallpaper, turning it into a prison cell.
‘Baby,’ said my mother, running in. ‘What’s the matter?’
I told her: Dad was taking off. We were getting left behind. A naive smile spread across Mum’s face. Dad so frequently threatened to pack up his belongings and buy a rundown pub in the middle of nowhere – places like Charleville, Taroom, Julia Creek – that she had stopped taking his wanderlust seriously. ‘He’s pulling your leg,’ she said.
‘Ask him!’
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sp; Mum called my father – three hundred metres away at the corner store – to confirm that I’d fallen for another of his convincing pisstakes.
‘Your son’s upset,’ she said. ‘He thinks that you’re moving north.’
She listened to the shopkeeper sternly clarify the gravity of the latest business proposition, which he’d leaked to me first. Chagrin was replaced with anguish. Mum couldn’t speak, so deep was her sense of rejection from a man who inspired devotion by spreading his attention thin.
‘Whatever happens,’ she said to me, ‘we’ll be okay, baby.’
I was an old head on young shoulders. ‘No, we won’t.’
My father’s confirmation of the plan made me start wailing again, and now Mum was howling too. The timing didn’t seem like a coincidence. John was about to graduate from high school, a year after Steven. Dad was taking off and leaving me behind with the female faction of the family because I had a heart the size of a split pea.
That day, I wept like never before. Nothing that serious had ever happened to me. I figured that he might stick around if I stopped crying all the time and became more like my older brothers: tough guys with dry eyes and bulging biceps. ‘I’ll do anything to make him stay!’ I cried.
Dad didn’t end up leaving for another six years. But the prospect of his rejection was an axe constantly hovering above my heart. The character traits of a larrikin were minted into my sensitive soul by chasing the admiration of a larger-than-life father.
It was a major breakthrough. With the jury of postgraduate students, who I’d mostly forgotten were watching, Christopher and I analysed my intensifying allegiance to a brave patriarch over an anxious matriarch. This led to a coming of age that was both high-achieving and utterly self-destructive.
‘It sounds like you have no stable anchoring point about who you are,’ said Christopher. ‘Besides an underlying desire to be loved, especially by your father.’
‘I just want to stop relying on positive feedback.’
‘That’s really been our overarching project here. Just being who you are, rather than performing an act.’
Christopher didn’t make me take an oath to tell the truth. That was the difference between a courtroom and his office: what mattered wasn’t whether an event happened precisely as I remembered it, but the emotions it evoked.
‘You love talking about your dad,’ said Christopher, ‘even negatively. But you struggle talking about your mum.’
‘I don’t really think about her that much. She’s got a drinking problem. We haven’t connected for a long time.’
Christopher listened to my blinkered interpretations, before countering them. ‘There is no stronger bond than the one between mother and child,’ he said. ‘I think you have repressed the excruciating pain of losing it. Especially when all of your other siblings missed the worst of her alcoholism.’
——
By October, the serotonin levels in my brain had consolidated after eighteen months of depletion, freefall and sluggish recovery. My lows became higher and the highs longer, boosted by Pristiq, regular exercise and weekly sessions with Christopher.
As we moved through my puberty, the emotional geologist excavated my deepest shames. I told him how I started watching porn at eleven. In Grade Eight, I reached third base before I could ejaculate, cementing sexual activity as both exhilarating and humiliating.
‘So I don’t know what the hell you call that,’ I said.
‘Modern masculinity,’ said Christopher.
The only topic still more taboo for a young man than suicidal ideation was sexual dysfunction. With some discomfort, I confessed that I had struggled to enjoy sex with Frida and others, despite an adolescence spent furiously yearning to root anything with a pulse, as my father would say about John.
‘You are describing a textbook case of performance anxiety,’ said Christopher.
‘I’m no shrinking violet,’ I said. ‘I’ve just spent three months spilling my guts to a roomful of total strangers.’
‘The crucial difference is that you’re not expecting any of my graduate students to love you.’
Christopher listened to my meandering history of grand romantic infatuations combined with consistent physical dissatisfaction, before offering a blunt synopsis of the underlying problem – not to provide comfort, but so that I could finally start disarming my neuroses.
‘Your sex life has become overlaid with all of those woeful emotional longings. You were trying to beat your brothers to the punch. Be admired as a real man by your father. And find substitute sources of love to your mother.’
‘What the fuck?’ I said. ‘I’m definitely not thinking about any of them when I’m having sex with someone.’
‘Of course not. It’s subconscious. But the physical pleasure of sex becomes an afterthought. In that moment of potential pleasure, you regress to a little boy, not a man. Adding a physical layer to a psychological shame.’
I sat in silence for a few minutes, unable to make eye contact with Christopher, until nodding softly in defeat.
‘You are petrified of getting rejected again,’ he said.
‘Or maybe I haven’t found true love.’
‘I’m not sure that’s a prerequisite.’
‘So any hole is a goal? You are my father!’
‘I don’t want to advocate promiscuity, Lech. But you are eighteen. You can’t re-create the romantic intensity of Romeo and Juliet with every girl you sleep with.’
Christopher could see things that I remained in denial about. I wanted a crush to justify my existence.
Eventually, we entered the final act. Christopher and I joined the dots between a larger-than-life little boy and the suicidal hoon arrested for drink driving. His students scrutinised my symptoms for clues to a diagnosis.
‘How did you meet Tim?’ he asked.
I introduced the other passengers in the order they appeared in my life, pretending that the narrator didn’t know what was coming.
How did you meet Will?
How did you meet Hamish?
How did you meet Henry?
I was forced to recall their personalities and physical characteristics. I lamented the lost possibility of drifting amicably apart, flawed and forgetful men, untouched by trauma.
‘I found this group of mates who embraced my weirdness, but still knew how to have a good time,’ I said. ‘And they were good people. Educated. Creative.’
‘They were boys you could relate to,’ said Christopher.
‘Right. I didn’t have any contradictions, because they hadn’t known me since I was a kid. I wasn’t a nerd or a jock. I was just smart and funny. And they loved me.’
And so a psychologist with a DIY ethos deceived a highbrow survivor into grieving. The clichés of public tragedy had reduced my friends to abstract casualties. Christopher made them real to me again, by making me real to myself.
I confessed how I frequently wished, on a molecular level, that I could sacrifice my survival for theirs.
‘Do you think about where they’d be now?’ he asked.
‘Never. What’s the point? It is what it is.’
‘The accident wasn’t inevitable,’ he said. ‘It will be incredibly painful. But I think you need to allow yourself to imagine what might have been. Or you’ll never know what you lost that night.’
My diagnosis was a let-down. The expert agreed with Dr Rattray: I suffered from the universal mood disorder of being someone’s son and brother, of loving too much and not getting enough love.
‘We all exist on a spectrum,’ he said. ‘And you are closer to bipolar than the average person. But your emotions don’t strike me as symptomatic of a chronic condition.’
‘What do they strike you as?’
‘As revealing someone who is slightly more prone to sadness than the average person. But who is also more capable of creativity and compassion.’
‘That’s comforting. But also really depressing.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it feels like I’m never going to be cured of anything. This will just go on and on and on …’
‘That’s right!’ he said with gleeful negativity. ‘It’s the insuperable tragedy of human existence, really, isn’t it? We are all stuck with who we are.’
‘Particularly me.’
‘I don’t want to destroy your ego, Lech. But you are pretty normal. Take it from someone who knows.’
I nodded, even though it sounded naive. But the more masks I saw behind in the years to come, the more I would realise that Christopher was right: everyone I knew was struggling against something huge and hidden. We are all haunted by past mistakes and heartbreaks, and trapped within the invisible prisons of our brain chemistry and DNA.
Unmotherly
Nobody was too surprised when my mother went insane. For years, my family had speculated about her topsy-turvy nerves like they were risky shares, always on the verge of going bust. But none of us did much to stop it from happening.
My mother’s friend Ingrid called on a Thursday night in the middle of November to say that Mum had sent a series of paranoid emails and text messages: she had a theory that my father and John were plotting her murder and aiming to sell her house for a vast profit.
‘I’m up at the hospital with your mother,’ said Ingrid. ‘To make sure that she hasn’t been poisoned.’
Ingrid, a qualified psychologist, had convinced my delusional mother to visit Emergency on the logic that the doctors could confirm if she’d actually been poisoned.
‘She’s having a mental breakdown,’ Ingrid whispered.
Hannah and I listened on loudspeaker to Mum interrupting Ingrid in a hostile voice. ‘Your father is up to something!’ she shouted. ‘I’m top of his hit list!’
We called the apparent assassin, who’d just bought a three-star motel five hours away in Bundaberg. He had timed his exit from Toowoomba to perfection.
‘That makes sense,’ he said. ‘She’s been sending me the most bloody bizarre text messages. About how she’s going to dig up all the buried money.’