by Lech Blaine
‘You didn’t think to mention that?’ said Hannah.
‘It cracked me up. I thought she was being funny.’
Since Mum believed that her ex-husband and son wanted to kill her, neither was an appropriate caregiver. Hannah was in the middle of final-year exams. She had a pivotal assessment the following day. I had time on my hands, but no licence. It was 8.30 pm: too late for a Greyhound.
My sister offered a clear-eyed plan: I could find a friend who might provide a last-minute lift. If this wasn’t possible, she would drive us herself and return to Brisbane the following morning, forgoing sleep.
I rang Vincent and explained in basic outline the family crisis.
‘I’ll come straight over,’ he said.
Vincent neglected to mention that he needed to drive back to Brisbane first thing the next morning for an exam. Twenty minutes later, he arrived in a blue VW and we hit the road. ‘So what’s going on?’ he asked.
I’d consistently rebuffed Vincent’s offer of someone to talk to. But now I confessed to my mother’s drinking problem, and the marriage breakdown precipitating a mental collapse. We talked about the aftermath of the car crash and my arrest for drink driving. I told him about Christopher and the antidepressants.
‘I never thought I’d see a shrink,’ I said. ‘But I’m actually starting to feel pretty good.’
Vincent stared ahead. ‘I was on antidepressants for a bit.’
‘What?’ I asked, as if to say: how could you be depressed? Vincent had seemingly so much to envy – a golden child from a rich family on the fast track to a productive adulthood. But he had suffered a post-Schoolies correction, he said, bottling up all his grief until after graduation. For a month, he barely left his room, cycling between day-long blankness and nightly crying fits.
‘My mum was freaked out,’ he said. ‘The GP gave me a Prozac trial.’
‘Did it help?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t really notice a difference after I stopped,’ he said. ‘But I probably wasn’t that depressed. I think I just needed to process how fucked up that year was. So, for you … I can’t, like, imagine it.’
At the hospital, Vincent idled outside the sliding doors of Emergency. ‘Do you want me to come in?’
‘Nah. Shit’s probably about to hit the fan. But thanks for this. And for everything. I really do appreciate it. And needed it.’
‘Call me whenever.’
Mum was in the waiting area, tired but wide-eyed, like someone three pills deep in a nightclub at 3.00 am.
‘Where’s the money, honey?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know about any money, Mum,’ I said.
My mother grinned at Ingrid with vindication. ‘See, I knew he would come! He’s on my side. Not his father’s. But not for a lack of trying: that bastard turned all my kids against me. But Lech’s mine. Did you know that, Ingrid? He’s mine.’
I smiled at my mother until I couldn’t fake it. Physically, she was diminishing. A gut hung above skinny legs, revealing no trace of feminine shape. Bloated cheeks topped sinking jowls.
For the next six hours, Ingrid and I maintained the charade that we were taking my mother for a general health check-up due to her insomnia. We didn’t disagree this might be a side-effect of a poisoning attempt.
‘People are finally listening!’ she said. ‘All those years of being ignored. But I’m going to find the money. I don’t even believe in money! But the greed of the man …’
Around 4.00 am, my mother was finally ushered into one of the observation rooms. The doctor asked the enthusiastic subject to recite the day, month and year, her date of birth, the name of the prime minister.
Frustratingly, my mother nailed the impromptu game of trivia. This gave the doctor confidence that she wasn’t deranged enough to be committed to a psychiatric ward. We had a conversation in the hallway.
‘You can’t let her leave like this,’ I said.
‘Unfortunately, she doesn’t meet the threshold for an involuntary mental health order. But I can give her some medication to take the edge off.’
The doctor provided valium and temazepam, and a referral for a psychiatrist. We left as the sun was rising. Ingrid dropped us home. My mother swallowed the valium with a glass of town water. She chain-smoked beside the jacuzzi for fifteen minutes. I sat at the computer in the poolroom.
‘Lovely to see you,’ she mumbled while stumbling past.
I did an inventory of the liquor supplies. The fridge was filled with Bundaberg rum. My father’s relinquished Scotch collection sat, dust-covered, in the rumpus room. I stockpiled the lot in a basket and hid it at the top of my old wardrobe in the granny flat.
The next day, I woke to find my mother frantically wringing out wet clothes in the laundry. It was the ritual of someone trying to cure insanity through routine.
‘What a lovely surprise to have you back!’ she said. ‘You never should have left. Free rent here. And I could do your washing for nothing if you mowed the lawn every once in a while. Think about it.’
The hallway walls had been fleeced of family portraits, leaving only the outlines of frames. I found the missing pictures lined up on the kitchen bench. A hammer had been taken to my father’s face. In a few, my mother had used scissors and glue to place my face over his. We looked like inbred siblings.
‘Mum,’ I yelled. ‘Come here.’
The hands of the vandal were wet from wringing.
‘What the hell is this about?’ I asked.
She reviewed her project, pleased. ‘Lech, he’s out of my life. You’re the only man I need now.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Deadly,’ she said, and went back to the laundry.
I swept up the shards of glass with a dustpan and brush, and sent my father an update. the doctors don’t reckon she’s insane enough yet. but you’ll be glad to know that she’s taken a hammer to your photos
better than to the head, he said.
good point, I wrote, and hid the hammer with the alcohol. I called Dr Rattray and gave a blunt summary.
‘She’s been suffering from depression for a while,’ he said, ‘but I never knew that she was such a heavy drinker. How long has this been going on?’
I had no idea. My family had made a livelihood from bad drunks, who did shots of tequila before swearing at bartenders and vomiting on their feet. But Mum was a shy, medicinal alcoholic, seeking a sly solution to anxiety. Her drinking never produced outbreaks of anger or abuse.
‘Seven years,’ I said. ‘Ten, maybe.’
‘Bring her in late this afternoon. I can see her after my regular appointments.’
I found my mother hanging sheets from the Hills Hoist.
‘We’re going to see Dr Rattray later,’ I said.
‘What for?’ she asked.
‘A team meeting.’
I fell asleep in the granny flat. Late in the afternoon, a crazed guardian angel shook me awake.
‘Where is it?’ she asked.
I screwed up my face. ‘Where’s what?’
I went into the kitchen. The fridge and cupboards were emptied.
Shards of crockery glistened in the spilt milk.
‘This is ridiculous! I’m a fifty-year-old woman!’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Mum squeezed my wrists. ‘Tell me where it is. Now!’
I put my hands on sunken shoulders. ‘Come with me to the doctor,’ I said, ‘and I’ll give it back to you.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘I promise.’
I called a taxi. Inside, she accused the cab driver of being a spy for my father. He kept a straight face to the interrogations. At the clinic, Dr Rattray waited behind the counter. The receptionists had gone home.
‘Lenore, what a lovely surprise,’ he said.
‘Fuck off,’ she whispered. We went into the office and sat down. The doctor spoke slowly.
‘Lenore, I think you need to go to the hospital. What do you reckon
?’
‘No! No, no, no, no, no!’
Mum muttered a foreign language of complaint, beads of sweat collecting on her forehead.
Dr Rattray called for an ambulance, while typing up a mental health assessment order. The paramedics arrived quietly, without sirens. The matriarch was strapped to the gurney in the back of the van.
One of the paramedics was the mother of a girl I knew from high school. ‘You’ve had a tough eighteen months, haven’t you?’ she said as we arrived. ‘All the best with your mum.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
Mum was delivered to the same consultation room where I learnt that Will was dead. I sat in that small, bright space with a sense of vindication. Contrary to the promises of optimists, one catastrophe had not stopped another from happening.
‘Hello, Lenore,’ said the doctor. ‘Do you know what day it is today?’
Pure blankness.
‘Can you tell me the name of your lovely son?’
My mother flunked the quiz. She gulped for breath, lock-jawed. Eyelids slid shut as sounds slipped from her lips. Then she collapsed onto the floor.
Back-up surged into the room. My mother was injected with sedatives. A nurse explained that radiologists would examine her body to confirm that there were no organic reasons for the delirium, such as a brain tumour or a blood clot – a matter-of-fact way of saying she might be terminally ill rather than clinically insane.
I didn’t worry about calling Dad or Hannah until tomorrow. Mum wasn’t going anywhere fast. I drifted to the taxi rank.
‘One Evergreen Court, Glenvale, please,’ I said after a brain freeze.
‘Too easy, mate,’ said the cab driver. ‘Long day, eh?’
‘You wouldn’t read about it,’ I said.
Mum passed the scans with flying colours. Her brain was free from tumour and haemorrhage. She didn’t have a urinary tract infection. The patient was transferred to the psychiatric ward within a leafy section of the hospital.
I met with a doctor and a psychiatrist, shocked that I was old enough to take legal responsibility for a grown woman. ‘A psychiatric diagnosis is a lot harder to pin down than a physical one,’ warned the doctor. But based on my field reports, and my mother’s physical presentation at the hospital, the medical professionals had collaborated to make a preliminary diagnosis. ‘Wernicke–Korsakoff’s syndrome,’ said the psychiatrist. He made it sound like a computer virus.
What it meant was: long-term drinking had inhibited my mother’s intake of thiamine. The deficiency had reached a critical level. Unlike a computer, much of the damage was irreversible. Many sufferers of the syndrome ended up in care facilities.
One benefit of a breakdown was that the hospital could try to sandbag as much of her sanity as possible.
‘This could be a positive thing,’ said the doctor.
A nurse led me down the hallways with an access card. Awards for good behaviour hung along the walls, as in a kindergarten. The door was marked with an initial: L. Blaine, the same as mine. I hesitated, picturing my mother strapped against a mattress in a straitjacket.
Inside, a daytime soap opera played on a wall-mounted television. She slurped yoghurt with a dessert spoon.
‘Hello, baby,’ she said. ‘When are we going home?’
‘Not yet. How are you feeling?’
‘Great! Unlike your father’s, my body is in excellent shape.’
When the credits rolled, Mum pressed a buzzer to call the nurse back. She grabbed some pens and an A4 notepad.
Outside, we sat in a gazebo.
‘I’ve worked it all out,’ she said.
Mum assembled the sheets into a flow chart. Each page was covered in immaculate handwriting.
‘Everything makes sense,’ she said.
The schema was incomprehensible. ‘Not exactly.’
Mum gestured to take a closer look. It was a tree of her life from birth to adulthood, she explained, charting links between luck and loss, chance and catastrophe. I didn’t recognise most of the names or dates. A red cross indicated catastrophe. The pages were covered with red crosses.
One phrase was rewritten in undulating flourishes. It said, WE BEGIN AGAIN OVER AND OVER AND OVER.
Her face grew lucid. ‘Everything’s already happened.’
We sat quietly until a nurse arrived to take her back inside.
Before I left, my mother provided a shopping list of urgently required items: liquorice allsorts, knickers and a carton of Longbeach Menthols.
‘Bring them back by dinnertime,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget.’
I was led down a different hallway to the exit. Near the front station, the doors to the rooms featured small squares of shatter-proof glass. Some of them filled with vacant gazes as we walked past. The nurse answered a question that I wasn’t going to ask. ‘The harder cases.’
I walked into a stagnant afternoon. There was nowhere to go, so I did laps of the hospital grounds. The people arriving were too stricken to see me. The people leaving saw everything. They smiled without flashing teeth.
I remembered the day I left for Brisbane. In the rear-view mirror, a loving mother had waved glumly at a reluctant son.
I’d split her in two: the tender, intelligent bookworm she’d been when I was a child, and the burden of nerves and resentments she’d become. If I’d looked closer, or knew what to look for, I might’ve seen more signs. Mostly, I was too shaken by shame to admit that her problem was mine.
——
My mother was in the psych ward for a fortnight. It is both inspiring and terrifying how quickly the brain of a psychiatric patient can return to legal functionality.
‘I’m better than before,’ she said.
Her exams over, Hannah did most of the negotiations with the hospital to end the involuntary treatment order. Mum was discharged on the proviso that someone else live at home, at least for the summer. So I quit my job and moved in with her. A social worker visited once a week. Meals on Wheels delivered lunch and dinner.
‘I should have a nervous breakdown more often,’ said my mother, grinning at the tinfoil containers.
My mother’s licence was suspended. Dr Rattray sent a letter to the Department of Transport and Main Roads stating that she was a danger behind the wheel, based on intelligence from Hannah.
Mum blamed my sensible sister for stranding us in the suburbs. ‘Your sister’s a snitch!’ she said. ‘Fancy complaining about my driving. There’s nothing wrong with it. Is there?’
My mother had infamously got her licence by doing a driving test with the local copper in Chinchilla. He had picked up a free carton of beer after taking the publican’s wife for a quick lap around a town without traffic lights.
‘I reckon you’re a fine driver,’ I said.
‘Thank you, darling! I’m lucky that you’ve got my back.’
As a bureaucratic olive branch, Main Roads provided a registration plate for a mobility scooter. I helped my mother select a model. Each morning, she flew to the newsagency at the end of the cul-de-sac.
‘Yahoo,’ she said. ‘I’m a real wild child!’
Soon, the recuperated patient was back to volunteering at Lifeline three days a week. I got a job at the Spotted Cow, which was patronised by local private-school alumni. During the day, I worked through Don DeLillo’s oeuvre. At night, I poured craft beers and chardonnays for affluent alcoholics.
I walked to and from work, fifty minutes each way. Sometimes the return leg didn’t start until after 3:00 am. Tile turned to Colorbond as I power-walked to Glenvale via Mort Estate. Picket fences and stickers for fake security systems filled me with wonder. I was a nocturnal flaneur, fleeing from the slow burn of my own loneliness.
I woke up after lunch and swallowed a pink antidepressant without thinking, before having a Nescafé Blend 43 with Mum. Our exchanges grew more revealing. She asked about my mental health. I asked about hers. She admitted to missing my father with irrational passion.
‘That doesn’t sound i
rrational,’ I said. ‘You were married forever.’
‘Maybe I’m not that crazy,’ she said.
Summer seeped into spring. The death of another season triggered thick humidity and drought-breaking downpours. One sunny afternoon, my mother sat on the back patio drinking a can of Pepsi Max. The back lawn was reborn. I mowed and whipper-snipped. Dried-up dog shits exploded into white puffs beneath the Victor.
‘My beautiful baby,’ she said, clapping as if I was deactivating landmines. ‘You’re bloody amazing!’
We found ways to braid our days with flickers of intimacy. It wasn’t a slapstick family sitcom, or a cathartic outpouring. But we existed under the same roof without the tightknit bitterness of my high-school years.
‘You’re a good son,’ she said.
That December, uni students fled back to Toowoomba for holidays. They arrived with wider vocabularies, waistlines and repertoires of sexual positions. Invitations for social gatherings leaked out online.
I missed most of the piss-ups due to working the late shift at the Spotted Cow. Vincent updated me on the drunken hook-ups on Sunday afternoons.
‘I’m having a party on New Year’s Eve,’ he said.
‘Damn. I’ll be working. It’s the busiest night of the year.’
Vincent drove over to my house in Glenvale every second or third weekday. We went for grocery trips, picking up the sweets and Pepsi Max that my mother kept secret from her dietician.
‘Thanks, Vincent,’ said Mum. ‘Lech’s lucky to have a mate like you.’
Vincent always brought an acoustic guitar with him. We spent the start of the summer covering songs by Pavement and the Silver Jews, before trying to rewrite ‘Range Life’ and ‘The Wild Kindness’ with different chords and lyrics. I pictured tall, skinny Vincent as Stephen Malkmus to my unkempt and sullen David Berman. Grandiosity was the surest sign that my depression had lifted.
I replaced the filler lyrics I wrote in high school with the post-modern poetry I’d been jotting down since leaving for university.
‘No offence,’ said Vincent, trying to bring me gently back to earth. ‘But your confessional lyrics are way better than the cryptic shit.’
‘You just don’t get it,’ I said.