The Green Bell

by Paula Keogh

  At high school, there was an emphasis on intellectual questioning in subjects like literature and history, and on social issues such as capital punishment, but faith was seen as another category entirely. It transcended the intellect. Many of the nuns who taught us were inspiring women who modelled independent thought – except on matters of faith. Until Julianne and I went to university, it would have been very difficult for us to question Church doctrines. As a teenager, I believed deeply, unquestioningly, in God and His Church, and I wanted more than anything to be loved by Him and the people in my life.

  With Michael, I’ve found the love I longed for. My heart is practically breaking with love for him – and the fact that he loves me is an epiphany. Whatever we’re feeling, whatever is happening on the ward, we look to each other for reassurance and understanding. Even in the silences, we’re listening to each other. Our love is, for me, an initiation into a world free of guilt. A world where all that had once been sin – rebellion, wildness, pleasure – is now holy, almost sacramental.

  From time to time, when I’m with Michael, I feel a flash of energy, a surge of confidence. I remember dancing at Dimitri’s that Saturday night before my breakdown. Raising my arms high, stamping my foot down. A flare sent out from a past self.

  3

  Julianne

  The noise in my head doesn’t like me being happy. I wake up from a long, involved nightmare with the sensation of a spider’s web covering my face and a stream of abuse filling my mind. Slut idiot, slut bitch, ugly, turn the other cheek, check the other chart, the fires of hell, the hell fires. It’s early, long before breakfast time. I make my way to the day room and start writing in my notebook, trying to distract myself from the noise.

  But there’s something new, a sense of hope that I have when I’m with Michael, a light inside me that’s not madness. It’s so very small and fragile, though, a glow worm in a cave of bats, unable to withstand the noise as it increases in volume and ferocity. I stand up, knocking over my coffee in my rush to get back to my room.

  As I pass the vacant nurses’ station, a phone is ringing. And ringing.

  Its call is insistent. I can’t bear the sound. In my room, I throw myself on the bed and cover my ears. But the phone’s still ringing.

  It’s four years earlier, and I’m standing at the phone table in the hall of my parents’ house, not quite awake, holding the receiver in my hand. I hear Mrs Gilroy’s voice and wonder why she would be calling so early. Then I feel myself bend forward, leaning on the table for support. Mrs Gilroy is saying that Julianne died in the night.

  My mind becomes hollow. I hear the words but their meaning falls away. When I hang up the phone, my mother is standing in front of me, grasping her dressing-gown at her chest with one hand. I stare at her, trying to find words to tell her what has happened. Even as I say them, they make no sense to me. I turn and walk out the back door.

  I run into the yard, thrust forward by a blind momentum. I cross the wet lawn and make my way towards the hooded shape of Mount Majura and the track into the bush. I’m conscious of every step and the icy air on my face. I hear birdcalls and breathe in the smell of earth. In the half-light, the tree trunks appear stark and grotesque, and stillness hangs in the air like a spell. I’m aware of my breath, sharp and tight, and the blood rushing through my body. I keep moving fast. The skin on my face is taut, my eyes are wide open, my breath is now coming in fierce surges, in and out.

  When I pass a dam, the vegetation changes and I stop walking. The path ahead leads into a dense expanse of trees that seems remote and sinister. I stand quite still, struck by the strangeness of a place I know so well. Pink and orange light is splashed across the sky behind the dark form of the mountain.

  In the silence, I hear myself think: It’s the first day of her death.

  The words are a shock. I’m back in M Ward. I look around my room and try to orientate myself. ‘The first day of her death’ is not an idea I can process. Although my mind refuses its meaning, my heart knows that Julianne is dead. I know I will never see her again. But I’m circling her death, circling and looking, trying to see, moving away then returning, as if I’m waiting for her to wake up and explain it all to me. Because her death is impossible. We never thought we would ever die.

  *

  When Mrs Gilroy rang, she asked me to help with the children, so after I returned from the bush, I rode my bike to the Gilroy home. I had automatically clicked into my helpful and positive mode, but it took me longer to react to things. I was following myself through the morning’s events, unable to catch up. I helped the younger children get dressed while the older girls took care of breakfast. No one was hungry and no one had much to say. A large bowl of homemade yoghurt sat on the kitchen bench, catching the light from the window. So white and smooth and perfect in a blue porcelain bowl.

  The children were resentful when it was time for them to go to school. They wanted to stay in the house together, but as neighbours and friends came to get them, they dragged themselves and their large schoolbags up the drive to the street, subdued and uncomprehending, one after the other.

  The silence in the house felt brittle as glass. I wandered from room to room, holding on tightly to my singular existence. I picked up clothes and put them on beds; I stacked dishes in the sink. In the lounge room, I studied the framed photos along the top of the piano. Next to assorted family portraits – and one of her father, who had died a year earlier – there was a photo of Julianne. It was a black-and-white image of her looking directly into the camera lens with a serious expression, her eyes quizzical. ‘Who are you?’ she seemed to be asking, reversing the role of the camera, refusing to be the object of its gaze.

  In another photo, she stood in line with some of her sisters, her expression thoughtful, somewhat wary, as if she had retreated to a contained and unyielding part of herself. This wasn’t the Julianne I knew. I wanted her to come home. In the empty house I waited for her to come back from the swimming pool. I was sure she must be there, or at the library. She would walk in the door any minute. If I just waited long enough, she would come.

  The phone in the Gilroy house rang a number of times that morning. I answered it and listened while people expressed shock and disbelief, then I told each one what news I had, that a notice would be placed in the paper regarding the time of the funeral.

  Sometime in the afternoon I went home. I had an essay to write about the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy on the early writings of Marx. I found the ritual of writing a relief from the pressure in my chest. I went through my notes and made points for the essay plan. I worked on the introduction and came up with my argument, drawing on discussions Julianne and I had engaged in as our belief in God had collapsed. We’d talked about Feuerbach’s idea that God is a product of human longings and wishes, and I wrote about how this idea had influenced Marx’s ideas on religion. It became urgent that I finish the essay, which was due the following week.

  That evening, sitting at the table having dinner with my family, I looked at the slices of bread on a plate and found them incomprehensible. I couldn’t think of the word ‘bread’, only the word ‘companion’, a word that Julianne and I had particularly liked. At school, we had been obsessed with finding the derivations of words and had discovered that ‘companion’ is derived from the Old French, meaning ‘with bread’. We decided that we were companions. We broke bread together. I sat there at the table, staring at the bread, unable to think of anything but the word ‘companion’, unable to look away.

  My family were quiet, the conversation subdued. My mother had hugged me earlier and offered sympathy, but I was unused to displays of affection and didn’t respond. No one mentioned Julianne. No one, including me, knew what to say.

  *

  Michael appears at my door, interrupting my memories of that stunned day. He’s smiling, saying something about breakfast and offering his hand to help me up from the bed. We walk down the corridor to the day room, but I can’t sp
eak. I can’t even look at him. It’s the first day of her death. When breakfast is served, I eat. When the medication trolley comes around, I take the pills and syrup and swallow them. But throughout the morning, I’m mute, skeletal with grief.

  Later, I sit on a couch staring straight ahead at the wall, aware of Michael sitting by my side. I know when he’s taking a drag on a cigarette, turning a page of his notebook or sipping his coffee. I hear him say things, but it’s the sound of his voice that makes sense to me, not the meaning of his words.

  Someone has put a record on, and ‘Danny Boy’ is playing. ‘It’s you,’ the voice sings. ‘It’s you must go, and I must bide.’ Tears roll down my cheeks.

  I nap in my room during the afternoon and wake to see Michael perched on the chair under the window. ‘You’ve been asleep,’ he says, putting down a book.

  I sit up and try to think where I am. Try to remember who this person is.

  ‘It’s late afternoon,’ he says. ‘Time for Chopin.’ He shows me the cover of the record he has put on my portable stereo. ‘I nicked this from the day room,’ he says.

  While the light fades and shadows creep up the walls of my room, we sit together, feeling the melancholy in the music.

  ‘Some things can’t be said,’ Michael says as he turns the record over. ‘But then there’s Chopin.’

  As if on cue, there’s a banging on the half-open door, and a nurse appears. She says it’s time to go to the day room.

  *

  Different realities coexist in me like a set of Russian dolls. Except that the dolls inside me are all talking at the same time, feeling contrary emotions, seeing intersecting images that won’t stay still. Loud monologues persist, mocking and sneering. It’s all a confusion of impressions, sensations, feelings, faces. Or sounds, music, voices, noise. Hands gesturing. Eyebrows insinuating. The past inside the present inside the future. Love and death and all the imaginings, a mish-mash. They’re all real and they’re all mad. Truth and lies competing with one another for my mind.

  This is my madness, and I can’t tell it as it is. Madness is anti-story, anti-chronology, anti-plot, anti-character. It breaks language. It throws mud in the face. It makes story impossible. The minds within the mind won’t let me be.

  Even so, I move, I act, and my story continues. The body’s truth with its red heart, and a mouth that wants to speak, urges me on.

  *

  ‘What was Julianne like?’ Michael asks.

  It’s late at night, and there’s no one else in the dimly lit day room. We’re sitting together on a couch again, enjoying the opportunity to be physically close in private. I feel the weight of his arm around my shoulders and the delicate sensation of his fingers playing with hair at the nape of my neck.

  ‘Julianne liked thinking,’ I say slowly. ‘And languages. When we were twelve she told me her goals in life were to speak French fluently and live in Paris.’ I pause for a moment. ‘And she was bold.’ The word comes to me unexpectedly. I remember Sister Clare once told Julianne that she was as ‘bold as brass’. I liked this phrase and used it to tease Julianne, though secretly I loved the image. Her boldness was one of the things I admired about her. She was brave, bright, shining. The way she jumped in at the deep end of any topic of conversation, eyes flashing.

  As I talk to Michael tonight, I’m able to remember Julianne without fear of going over the falls into chaos. I’ve survived the memories of her that have returned, and Michael’s question is an invitation that I want to accept. With him, it’s safe to think about her.

  Now, in the shadows of the day room, it’s almost as if I can see her next to me, holding her head at an angle and looking into the distance, her eyes squinting in that familiar way as if she’s searching for something. Then she looks directly at me, her eyes soften and relax, and she gives me her entire attention.

  Returning her gaze, I’m able to comprehend the circumstances of her death with a clarity I’ve not experienced before. I can look her in the eye; I can see what happened. Face it. Survive in the face of it.

  Words escape me, pouring out before I can think of what I’m saying. ‘She died in a hospital in Sydney. They killed her because she spoke about secret things. They don’t like you doing that. They zapped her mind with electricity until her heart gave out. They killed her. And she knew what they were doing.’

  Michael’s hand strays to his throat, and his thumb begins to stroke the small depression at its base. Except for this movement, he’s quite still, facing me. His presence is as reassuring as my own breath, drawing me to the place where all my confusions merge into the single thought of her.

  ‘You’re saying that Julianne died from ECT?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes, and from the drugs they were giving her.’

  ‘So this wasn’t you?’

  ‘No. Julianne. Her, not me.’

  ‘And this was in a psych hospital?’

  ‘Yes, a psych hospital. We’d been at uni. Everything got too intense – the war, the Church, her father’s death, everything – and she had a breakdown. They brought her here, to M Ward –’

  ‘Here?’ Michael is obviously taken aback.

  ‘Yes, her bed was in the women’s dorm. I visited her here.’

  ‘You sure, Pauls?’ Michael is looking at me strangely.

  ‘Yes, that’s what happened. She was here in M Ward, and then they took her to a hospital in Sydney. She died there. Her heart stopped beating. At midnight.’ I pause and take a breath. It’s important I get this right. ‘The post-mortem report said the cause of her death was poisoning from an overdose of the drugs they gave her, but I think it was from ECT as well. I read a newspaper article about it.’

  ‘That’s just so …’ Michael pauses. ‘I don’t know what to say. You both had breakdowns, ECT, the works. No wonder you’ve been confused.’ He takes my hand. ‘And you’d known each other since you were kids?’

  ‘I always knew her,’ I say.

  The whole story spills out then, with no distinction between reality and delusion, between Julianne and me, between now and then. It comes in fits and starts at first, and then in an unstoppable flow of memories, tears and release. And as I become used to speaking of my past, I begin to feel less overwhelmed by the energy of the narrative. I find my self in the place where true words come from. I am what I say, and what I say has meaning. It brings me to life.

  Michael listens in the way you always hope you’ll be listened to when it matters. A rhythmic listening, an ear in the heart. His kindness makes me realise how lonely I’ve been since Julianne died.

  *

  Later, lying in bed and trying to sleep, I still feel overwhelmed by grief but now also by exhaustion. It’s four years since Julianne died, and I think this is the first time I’ve cried over her loss.

  During my first breakdown in 1968, I was in shock, disconnected from my loss and anguish. In this state of emotional paralysis, I didn’t grieve Julianne – I was her. When my delusion fell away, she disappeared. The ECT and antipsychotic drugs eradicated her from my life until my second breakdown, when the delusion returned. The feelings I did have, of dislocation, confusion, despair, didn’t seem to be associated with anything I could name.

  Now, Michael has helped me connect with the fact that Julianne is dead. He has come inside my inner world and shown me her death and my loss. I can now think about her, talk about her, remember her without breaking open. Eventually, I fall asleep.

  When I wake up a few hours later, I sit in the dark on the easy chair beside the window, aware that I’m alone. Julianne is gone, and I am here without her.

  A stream of memories takes me back to our first year at university. One day I was waiting for her in her room at Garran Hall when the door flew open. She was dancing around in her favourite yellow dress, waving a prescription for the contraceptive pill in the air and proclaiming that this was the beginning of a new era in her life.

  We’d both been reading D.H. Lawrence, and I remember us sitting in the caf
eteria talking about his poetry. Julianne said that his poem about the red geranium was her favourite. She was excited, telling me that she agreed with Lawrence that yearning is the most important precondition for creativity. She said, ‘To be creative, you have to long to create something beautiful, something that hasn’t existed before.’

  I wonder what Michael would make of this idea; I must ask him tomorrow.

  Tonight, memories of Julianne keep coming. I see us sitting at the desk in her Garran Hall room, analysing the Pope’s encyclical on birth control. We try to apply the rules of logic that we’re studying in our philosophy class but, in the end, we decide that logic isn’t the issue. For us, famines and desperate poverty and mothers watching their children starve are the issues. I hear the precise inflections of Julianne’s voice, see her smile as she turns to face me. It’s the complicit smile of someone acknowledging that we have no other choice; we can no longer believe in the infallibility of the Pope. For us, this is a momentous realisation.

  Julianne is present and as close as my breathing. I’m reminded of how she talked with her whole body. She almost danced when she solved a problem or reached a decision she’d been struggling with. Now she’s here with me, and I can’t stop crying. I never fully realised how much the emptiness in my life was due to her absence from it. And I never understood the impact of her father’s death. In spite of our closeness, it remained a void: unapproachable, unspeakable.

  Tonight, my grief is myself, experienced at last, spoken and acknowledged. It’s where my breath goes to and comes from, the pain and the loss I’ve not allowed myself to feel. Telling Michael has been the turning point for me. That, and the closeness I feel now to Julianne. I begin to believe I can live.