The Green Bell

by Paula Keogh

  Paula Keogh has a PhD in creative writing from La Trobe University and received the 2015 Affirm Press Mentorship Award for the development of The Green Bell at Varuna, the National Writers House. She taught at RMIT for nine years, and has lived in Canberra, Adelaide and Toronto, but considers Melbourne home.

  Published by Affirm Press in 2017

  28 Thistlethwaite Street, South Melbourne, VIC 3205

  www.affirmpress.com.au

  Text and copyright © Paula Keogh, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher.

  All reasonable effort has been made to attribute copyright and credit.

  Any new information supplied will be included in subsequent editions.

  All reasonable effort has been made to verify the assertions in this book. Events, locales and conversations are recounted to the best of the author’s recollections.

  Epigraph and quotes from the poems of Michael Dransfield taken from Michael Dransfield: Collected Poems, UQP, 1987, edited by Rodney Hall (‘Geography III’, ‘The inspector of tides’, ‘Minstrel’, ‘Portrait of the artist as an old man’, ‘The hermit of green light’, ‘Miss Havisham’, ‘Chaconne for a solipsist’ and ‘Like this for years’ also appear in Michael Dransfield: A Retrospective, UQP, 2002, selected by John Kinsella) are used with kind permission of University of Queensland Press. Other quotes from Michael Dransfield’s poems, letters and diary entries used with kind permission of the Estate of Michael Dransfield.

  ‘The Man Watching’ [3 I. excerpt] from SELECTED POEMS OF RAINER MARIA RILKE, A TRANSLATION FROM THE GERMAN AND COMMENTARY by ROBERT BLY. Copyright (c) 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Lines on p.231 from ‘Five Days Old’ by Francis Webb (Collected Poems, edited by Toby Davidson) used with kind permission of UWA Publishing.

  Lines on p.208 and 227 from ‘Little Gidding, Four Quartets’ and lines on p.15 from ‘The Hollow Men’ by T.S. Eliot (Collected Poems 1909–1962) used with kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry available for this title.

  Title: The Green Bell / Paula Keogh, author.

  ISBN: 9781925475524 (paperback)

  Cover design by Karen Wallis, Taloula Press

  Main cover image: Christopher Ash

  Background cover image: Shutterstock/Voyagerix Author photo by Roslyn Osborne

  Typeset in Sabon 11.5/17.5 pt by J&M Typesetting Proudly printed in Australia by Griffin Press

  The paper this book is printed on is certified against the Forest Stewardship Council® Standards. Griffin Press holds FSC chain of custody certification SGS-COC-005088. FSC promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.

  For my daughter,

  Rowan Kathleen Mangan,

  with love

  In writing this memoir, I have relied on my personal notebooks and letters, Michael Dransfield’s poems and journals, his letters to me, my medical records, and conversations with members of my family.

  In the process of remembering, I discovered that memories draw on both reality and imagination to recreate the dramas that make up what remains of our past. They are the subjective traces of our lived experience, and I am constantly amazed by their generative power, their capacity to bring people to life, and the gifts of identity and meaning that they give us.

  In the interests of privacy, I have changed the names and physical characteristics of certain people in this story, including the medical staff and patients at the Canberra Hospital.

  GEOGRAPHY III

  in the forest, in unexplored

  valleys of the sky, are chapels of pure

  vision. there even the desolation of space cannot

  sorrow you or imprison. i dream of the lucidity of the vacuum,

  orders of saints consisting of parts of a rainbow,

  identities of wild things / of

  what the stars are saying to each other, up there

  above the concrete and minimal existences, above

  idols and wars and caring. tomorrow

  we shall go there, you and your music and the

  wind and i, leaving from very strange

  stations of the cross, leaving from

  high windows and from release,

  from clearings

  in the forest, the uncharted

  uplands of the spirit.

  – Michael Dransfield

  CONTENTS

  October 1972

  1 M Ward, September 1972

  2 Make Love Not War

  3 Julianne

  4 Inside the Green Bell

  5 Life as a Poem

  6 Liminal Spaces, October 1972

  7 The Labyrinth

  8 Back Home, November 1972

  9 Village Life

  10 The Last Month of Summer, Early 1973

  11 Survival Is the Password

  12 The Quest

  Epilogue: A Place in the World

  A Note on 1960s Psychiatric Care

  References

  Acknowledgements

  October 1972

  For an hour or so, the night has no secrets. We’ve slipped out of the hospital and are walking along a path by the lakeshore. Above us, the full moon shines on a quicksilver world – so bright and dark and so in awe of itself, I want to kneel down and pray.

  I breathe in the smell of eucalyptus and feel the chill in the air. I’m free and as light as a bird. At the edge of the lake I step along the top of a stone wall, one foot in front of the other, my arms spread like wings to keep my balance. Michael walks on the path beside me, talking about comets and solar winds, and I glide in his dream of space, feeling vast, wide open to the night. A wind blowing through me.

  I tell him I no longer have a name. ‘Names close you off from the world.’

  He laughs, and I can tell he knows exactly what I mean. ‘You’ve become a nymph,’ he says. Then he spins around on one leg in a spontaneous dance, hair frizzing out from under his beanie, his coat unfastened and loose. With his vintage air force boots strapped below the knee, he looks like a wild man from the Russian steppes, a rangy Cossack. He whirls around again, this time catching me in his arms, and we are dancing, lake and trees flashing by, his eyes bright as onyx.

  Inside my head, a voice breaks through from another place. ‘The night doth magnify my soul,’ it says, and I think of angels. Someone or something has reached inside me and turned up the volume of my being, so loud all I hear is wings and silence.

  ‘Catch me if you can,’ Michael calls, disappearing into a spinney of trees. I follow but I can’t find him. When I call out his name, he replies from above, and I look up into a gum tree silhouetted against the sky. At first I can’t make out where he is, and then I see him lying on a branch sloping upwards from the trunk. His arms are outstretched, his body suspended in the moonlight above me.

  My eyes lock on the image.

  I see a castaway in an oversized coat and heavy boots extended on a cross, facing the sky. Where his shirt has ridden up, his skin is white and exposed, and his unbuttoned coat hangs below the branch like a broken sail.

  When Michael slides down from the tree, I put my arms around him. Darkness has shown its other face and I want to protect him. But inside his coat he’s as thin as a bone, and all of a sudden I can’t stop shivering.

  1

  M Ward,

  September 1972

  The day room is where I wait – for time to pass, for something to happen, for meaning to return. Windows along one of the walls allow light to enter, but the space seems grey as if a faint dusting of ash hangs in the air and c
overs the surfaces. Patients hunch over tables or rest deep in the lounge chairs beside the walls, staring into the distance or mumbling to themselves. Occasionally someone erupts: a fist comes down on a table, or a chair is knocked to the floor. I’m startled for a minute, then the gloom settles over us again like the memory of a death.

  My usual place is a lounge chair in the corner. My legs jerk back and forth, and my arms are folded tightly around my chest. Other patients are also sitting alone, settled in after the morning medication ritual, resigned to wait out the long stretch of time until the bell is rung and lunch is served. I’m hyper-alert, aware that everything around me is thick with meaning. The curtains, the tables, the pictures on the wall – they all mean something sinister, something I can’t quite grasp. I write poems in my notebook but I can’t speak to others of the noise inside my head. When they call me ‘Paula’, I tell them that I’m Julianne, but they don’t hear me. I say it louder. They turn away.

  I stare at a print of a Sidney Nolan painting that hangs on the wall opposite the windows. It shows Ned Kelly inside a heavy suit of black armour riding a horse across the desert towards the horizon. His back is turned to the viewer, and he is alone in the landscape. Blue and white sky shines through an oblong in his helmet. I stare at him, willing myself into his armour, longing for my head to fill with the colour blue, with space. I want to be Ned, turn my back on this life and ride a horse across the desert to the horizon. Ride out of this room into the distance.

  I try to keep away from other patients. If someone comes close I pick up my pouch of tobacco and, with the concentration of a watchmaker, I roll myself a cigarette. To be in close proximity with another person is excruciating; their energy is too strong, too intrusive. The occasional exception is a patient I think of as ‘the Man from Kosciuszko’. A bear of a man, he sometimes talks to me of his work on rescue missions in the Snowy Mountains. I like him because he has a dog, a border collie called Jessie. One night he broke down in tears and told me how much he missed her.

  Sometimes I have visitors who join me in the day room – my parents or friends who sit awkwardly, talking in low voices. Conversations tend to drift into delicate silences until someone thinks of an item from the evening news or a piece of family gossip. An effort is required by us all in the giving and the taking. Someone will start speaking but lose confidence, leaving words dangling in the air. Eruptions of laughter sound like bursts of scripted applause. My world is inaccessible to anyone attempting to enter, to engage. I’m always tired after visitors leave. Sad and tired.

  When my mother comes in, she brings a small bunch of sweet peas or lavender from her garden. She always asks, ‘How are you today, love?’ I turn away. How can I reply? The question ‘How are you?’ is complicated. I can’t look at her. It’s me that’s not right. Not my kidneys or my tonsils. My self. How can it reply? It has lost the language of the everyday, the gestures and rituals of relationships. I sometimes think that my words are germs, infecting anyone who hears them.

  *

  One Friday afternoon, two weeks before I’m taken to the psychiatric ward of the Canberra Hospital, I ride my bike to the National Library to find journal articles for an essay on the Russian Revolution. Perhaps there are signs that I will soon have a breakdown, but I don’t read them, don’t realise what they mean. I’ve been under pressure with deadlines, but I don’t for a moment see that M Ward is my future.

  Once inside the library I pause in the entrance hall, taking in the light that streams through the high leadlight windows. I look up and hear music – orchestral music playing in the red, yellow and purple patterns of glass, a kaleidoscope of sound. I turn around, elated. When I look away to see if other people have heard it, the music stops. Confused, I come back to myself and walk into the reading room.

  Later, as I’m leaving the library, a young woman appears, sailing towards me, sandy hair flowing behind her. Her height and stride are familiar, and when she speaks I remember her from 1968, four years ago, my first year at university. The year my friend Julianne Gilroy died. The woman in front of me was in the same philosophy tutorial as Julianne and me, studying the work of Descartes and arguing points about truth and doubt. Now, as we talk, I realise that former classmates have not forgotten my dramatic departure from university at the end of that year.

  ‘Is everything okay now?’ she asks, appraising me.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say with a bright smile. ‘Absolutely fine.’

  Once down the library steps, I take off on my bike, riding hard. I’m frustrated that no matter how hard I try to pass for normal, I simply can’t get away from my past. Not for the first time, I imagine myself escaping Canberra and making a new start somewhere, a warm place where no one knows me.

  On impulse, I decide to take the long way home, across Kings Avenue Bridge and around the lake. With the winter air slicing my cheeks and the wind in my hair, I turn onto the long arc of the bridge and begin to cross the pale waters of Lake Burley Griffin.

  Canberra has no past and it feels beautiful but empty, like a Zen garden – although the scale is wrong. It seems to have originated in a dream of intersecting circles and radiating lines too vast for human reach and footstep: a sculpted city of lonely monuments, architectural curiosities and glassed-in government buildings spread out around the artificial lake like pieces of an abandoned board game. Too new to have settled into the earth, too geometrical to have emerged from it, the city has a lightness of being, a cool detachment. It doesn’t yet belong to the landscape. It’s the image of a future without a history.

  Canberra’s inhabitants have no past here either, no stories that connect them to this place. A cluster of federal public service employees, they were sent from Sydney and Melbourne to administer government departments and populate the capital. Uprooted and separated from their extended families, and surrounded by distance and absence, they burrowed into suburbs and learned to love their cars.

  My family was part of this interstate migration; we left Sydney when I was nine years old to start a new life here. The trees that now provide a canopy were only saplings in my childhood. Streets were laid down through paddocks, houses appeared, and suburbs spread across the valley. I grew up playing in partially constructed buildings, watching the Molonglo River rise across the flood plain and create Lake Burley Griffin. Waiting for the future to arrive in a place where everyone came from somewhere else and no one was old.

  I ride around the lake, past the windswept fountain, past Blundells Cottage and the rotunda, racing towards Black Mountain, the Brindabella Ranges in the distance. I imagine Canberra as an immense gallery through which I glide, observing and admiring. Steel and concrete join the architecture of earth, sky and water to create a city of grand statements and wide streets, swept clean by the wind from the Snowy Mountains. In the icy afternoon sunlight, it shines like a mirage. Depth is illusory. A vision of sky drifting in the lake. The haunting sound of carillon bells echoing across the water.

  My city, myself. Floating above my body, the city floating above the landscape, I’m as light as light. I remember myself as a young girl, twirling around in my floral skirt, my rope petticoat brushing my thighs, my arms spread wide. Barely aware of flesh and blood, and hardly knowing I was of the earth, I lived in air and sunshine. I banished darkness from my conscious world and ignored my body’s secrets, the guilty blood, the night terrors. In the country’s empty capital I grew up taut and shiny. Being good, being pure, being happy. Nice.

  *

  The evening after my visit to the library, I ride my bike to my waitressing shift at Dimitri’s restaurant and stay on for an after-work party. The restaurant is tucked away in the ground floor of a 1960s motel on Northbourne Avenue, and it has the feel of a hideaway. With its dim lighting, low ceiling, and brown and beige decor, it looks like any other motel dining room – but its appearance is deceptive. For Dimitri’s family and friends, it’s the village taverna they left behind on the other side of the world. On occasional Saturday n
ights, once the customers have left and our work is done, the records are brought out, the stereo is turned on, and the party begins.

  Dimitri’s family and friends arrive in a flurry of greetings, claiming tables and carrying plates dripping with baklava and lemon cake. I don’t speak Greek but tonight I feel I do. Eating mezethes with the others and drinking wine, I’m sure I know what people are saying. Listening to their voices, I see dark interiors and sense unspoken longings. I hear the playful teasing of old friends, the flourishes of gossip. When they break into English to include me, I take on the rhythms and inflections of their speech, enjoying the shapes the words make in my mouth.

  In odd moments, I seem to be watching myself as I gesture expansively – flicking my long hair back from my face and flouncing my skirt around my knees. My mind is straying, playing with me, like the aura some people experience before a migraine. I drink water and try to steady myself.

  From across the table, I watch Dimitri smoking a cigarette in his customary extravagant way, talking and laughing – a short man with a wide smile and a voice that comes from deep inside his chest. You can hear his breathy conversation from the other end of the restaurant, even when he’s speaking softly. He treats all his workers as if they are part of his extended family – and, in fact, most of them are. Everyone is included in his after-work parties.

  When the music starts to play, I feel a rush of anticipation. This is my favourite time of the night. I push my chair back and make my way to the dance floor with the others, swaying to the beat. ‘Wait for me,’ says the effusive Cosima, laughing as she follows. ‘You’ve become such a Greek. A green-eyed Greek.’

  As usual, I stumble at first, feet in my way. But then the music lifts me up and around, and soon I’m dancing with the others, moving to the faster rhythm, raising my hands high. In a single movement, I step forward with the women, creating an inner circle while the men in the outer circle surround us. As one, they move forward, eyes wild and dark, approaching with a surge of masculine energy.