The Green Bell

by Paula Keogh

  After a brief meeting with my brothers on their way out to a party, my parents, Michael and I sit down to eat in the dining room. Dad engages Michael in a discussion about the varieties of fish he’s caught off the rocks down the south coast, and Michael talks about the decline of the whaling industry in Bega. The Michael I saw at dinner with his mother reappears; he’s on his best behaviour, and his manners are impeccable. He charms Mum – much to her surprise, I think.

  During dessert, the conversation turns to poetry. ‘So, Michael, what inspires you to write a poem?’ Mum asks formally.

  ‘It’s hard to say,’ he says, wiping his lips with a serviette. ‘Anything could inspire me, but it’s always something of a surprise.’

  ‘Have you ever written a poem about a gum tree?’ she asks.

  ‘No, actually, I haven’t.’ Michael’s tone suggests that he’d definitely consider it.

  ‘Well,’ Mum says, putting down her knife and fork and leaning forward, ‘if I were a poet, I’d write about gum trees.’

  ‘That would be a fantastic obsession for a poet,’ he says, delighted. He’s obviously taken by the idea of a poet dedicated to a single topic.

  ‘It is a bit of an obsession, I suppose.’ Mum smiles. ‘When I die, I want to be buried under a gum tree in the bush up the back.’

  ‘What’s your favourite type of gum?’ Michael asks.

  ‘The ghost gum. There was a pocket of them at Tumbarumba where I spent my holidays as a child. Lovely old trees.’

  ‘I’ll write a poem about them for you,’ Michael says.

  After dinner, Dad and Michael go into the lounge room with their glasses of wine, and Mum and I retreat to the kitchen to do the washing up. During a lull in our conversation, she brings up the subject of me coming home to live. ‘I’ve put your bags from Ursula in your old room downstairs and given it a clean,’ she says. ‘It’s all ready for you.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ I say.

  Simple as that. It’s decided. I’m moving back home after three years of living on my own. It’s still not what I want, but there’s really no other option. While I’m grateful to have somewhere to go, I feel reined in.

  *

  As my parents settle into their lounge chairs to watch a TV program, Michael and I come downstairs to my old room. There are no longer any posters on the walls, and my books are still in boxes next to the bookcase, but the eiderdowns on the two single beds are the same. The cave-like feeling from the exposed bricks is familiar. As I sit on one of the beds, Julianne’s face appears in my mind’s eye. I’m reminded of the two days and nights we spent here as her life fell apart, but I don’t want to remember that time. I want to think of the Julianne who lived like an Amazon – bold, curious and courageous inside the music. And I want new memories of this space.

  I lock the door behind us, aware of my parents upstairs, then I cover a bedside lamp with a red scarf and light candles and incense. I like the look of the room now in the glowing light, and there’s an exhilarating sense of privacy. Michael goes over to a stack of records and flicks through them, choosing some and putting one on the player. He sits at the end of my bed, and we talk, smoke cigarettes and listen to the music.

  There are no fluorescent lights, no harsh angles and no dramas. Just the two of us. The mystique of the green bell seeps into this space, making it feel round and familiar. We weave the night around us like a cocoon, fragile and ephemeral, as we sit on my bed together, the sounds of Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence filling the room. Tonight we can be close and intimate. At last we’re truly alone together – at least until Michael has to go upstairs to his room to sleep.

  Michael returns to Caloola the next day, and I’m discharged from M Ward after living there for seven weeks. Relieved, in the end, that I have a place to go, I pack up my things and Mum drives me home. All I needed was time with Michael to sense a new beginning. I’ve emerged into the fresh air, all obstacles dealt with, the necessary compromises made. The future is falling into place – not exactly the way we hoped, but we’ll soon be together again, and this time we’ll be out in the world. Life is about to open up. The labyrinth is behind me.

  8

  Back Home,

  November 1972

  Within a week, the stress of being home starts to take its toll. My face aches from the effort of smiling as I try to fit in with my family, with meal rituals and customary ways of relating. Everyone is polite and considerate, and the strain of all this niceness is excruciating. I want to smash something, break through the veneer so that everyone can relax and go back to being themselves. My family tiptoe around me as though I might detonate if they say the wrong thing, or collapse if they bump into me. The spontaneity and looseness I remember has gone. I long to excuse myself and go down to the sanctuary of my room so that they can relax, and I can be alone with the lethargy and depression that has settled in me like a dirge.

  The family home is a solid, cream-brick house built in the mid-1960s, with views across to the Brindabella Ranges at the front and the foothills of Mount Majura at the back. At ground level there’s a double garage and my room, with wide steps in between leading up to an open porch and the front door. For Mum, buying the house was a dream come true, bringing together her love of the bush with her desire for the suburban quarter-acre block. She knew that this was the house for her when she stood at the kitchen window and looked out onto a spread of gum trees and wattles.

  This morning, with Mum out shopping and the boys at school, I sit alone in the dining room eating a late breakfast, kept company by the empty house and its silence. Sunlight streams through the sheer white curtains and shines on the honey-coloured wood of the table in front of me. The carpet swirls in patterns of orange and brown, and the chairs stand upright and formal. It’s like a stage set, waiting in readiness for the actors to appear and the drama to begin. I drink my coffee and think of the time when I was at high school and, except for my eldest sister, Irene, we all lived at home, and the house was full of people and activity.

  There were eight of us, including Mum and Dad: Irene had entered the Brigidine convent a couple of years before we moved to Hackett. My four brothers played rugby union, Anne and I were on netball teams, and we rode our bikes everywhere. Weekends were a whirl of activity, with friends dropping in, people coming and going, and on weekdays there were routines of meals around the table, homework and washing up. I can almost hear the voices echoing through the house – my brothers yelling out to one another, my mother urging us to hurry up, and my sister Anne singing along with Elvis Presley on her transistor radio as she washes the dishes.

  Memories of Saturdays return with a particular immediacy. I hear the noise of the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine, and someone screaming from the shower that the hot water has run out. I think of Jim revving his motorbike in the driveway, Robert rubbing down his horse in the backyard, and Mum in the kitchen, cutting up vegetables for soup and giving instructions to anyone walking through. There was always something happening: doors slamming, the phone ringing, people talking.

  And there was always music. As Mum did the housework, she sang along to the war songs of Vera Lynn and to songs from musicals like Oklahoma, South Pacific and The Sound of Music. In the evenings, Dad would usually sit back in his lounge chair enjoying a glass of wine and some cheese and biscuits as he listened to Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and some of the American-Irish songs like ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’ and ‘Galway Bay’. I played the pop songs of the 1950s and ’60s whenever I got the chance: Gene Pitney, Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield, the Beatles. I bought A Hard Day’s Night with money I’d earned from babysitting the neighbours’ children and danced to it in my bedroom, singing along until I knew the lyrics off by heart.

  As the 1960s progressed, the practice of the nightly family rosary gradually gave way to the pressures of individual schedules and the impact of television. The religious prints on the walls also disappeared over
time, superseded by landscapes: paintings of the Australian bush, mostly featuring Mum’s favourite tree. The print of Jesus in Gethsemane that had hung on the wall in the lounge room disappeared without anyone commenting on its absence. The Madonna and Child in the hallway was replaced by photos of the family.

  In my early teens, I took a picture down from my bedroom wall that had been a favourite during my childhood. It depicted a guardian angel hovering protectively over a child as she walks across a footbridge suspended above a rocky abyss. I used to gaze at it, imagining myself on the shaky bridge, anxious about the prospect of falling but reassured by the presence of the angel with his enormous wings and gentle eyes.

  Eventually, only the matching pictures of the Sacred Hearts remained, hanging above my parents’ bed in the room at the end of the hall. In one, Jesus points to his bleeding heart; in the other, Our Lady holds her shawl aside to expose her heart as she gazes sorrowfully into the distance.

  Growing up, I was always being told what a big, happy family I came from, and this became important to my sense of identity. I congratulated myself on coming from a happy home, and except for the occasional beltings when we were younger and arguments during our teens, it was. But the usual unhappiness and conflict that’s part of life wasn’t admitted, not openly. We all hid our heartaches and disappointments. Whatever was happening, we smiled through it.

  Anger wasn’t tolerated, though on rare occasions it burst through. Our parents never argued or raised their voices to each other, and we didn’t raise our voices to them. Occasionally a door was slammed, and if Mum was upset with someone, an oppressive silence descended on the house. There were also times when I stormed off into the bush as a teenager or hid myself in my room with a book, but the direct expression of negative emotion wasn’t acceptable. Our response to conflict was to withdraw, repress, adapt.

  Endurance was particularly admired. Hardship and suffering were to be borne in private, without comment. No matter the crisis, it was important that we ‘got on with things’. We were like colourful boats bobbing around in the sunshine on a sea of submerged emotion.

  My mother was just as resilient as my father. She once told me a story from her childhood. She was five years old, distressed because she had fallen over and her knee was bleeding. Pop, unemployed and disabled, said to her, ‘Come on now, soldiers don’t cry.’ When she told me this, I thought of him in the trenches hearing the sounds of his mates dying in the fields nearby and suffering the pain of his wounded leg. Not crying. Not feeling. And I thought of her as a little child, learning the lesson.

  Experiences of war have also impacted deeply on my father’s life, though he’s rarely spoken of them. During the war, he was responsible for telegraphic communications back to headquarters and had to go ahead of the company into enemy territory to lay down the telegraph wires. Once the company had taken that section of land, messages could be sent back down the line. It was extremely dangerous work. In one brief anecdote, he told us that his battalion had been transported to Sanananda in New Guinea in seven war planes, but only one was needed to bring back the survivors.

  Mum and Dad are constitutionally cheerful, and their capacity for optimism created a dynamic home life for us when we were growing up. I know that I was often animated by their energy. But when I was a child, I also found myself inexplicably anxious and sad, and I was ashamed of the way that my darker feelings made me an outsider, someone apart and alone within the family. Those feelings were drowned in the currents that flowed beneath our lives.

  The year after my first breakdown, when I was nineteen, I returned home from the hospital and faced the realities of a fragmented mind. Still in shock from Julianne’s death and unreachable, I no longer felt ‘at home’. My withdrawn mood and my agitation unsettled the family then, just as they’re doing now. It’s as though I’ve become the face of darkness in the house. I’ve always been an introvert among extroverts, but now I need a different environment in which to face my struggle to discover myself and find some sanity. I have to work out how to deal with the dissonance between the weight of my psyche, and the normality and lightness in the house.

  For three years before my admission to M Ward, I came and went as I liked, and I created living spaces that allowed me to shut myself away when I needed to be alone. In 1971, I had a room at Lennox House, an old workers’ hostel that had been converted into cheap accommodation for students in the 1960s; I also lived in share houses and at Ursula College. Now things are different, and I see that the family home represents an identity I need to leave behind me, a smiling persona that’s like an albatross around my neck.

  Over coffee I sit in the airy dining room, turned in on myself. My inner world is dark and chaotic, as is my room downstairs. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever emerge into the light, into a world that isn’t dense with imaginings and intense emotion.

  *

  One afternoon a letter arrives from Michael. I open it eagerly, recognising his spidery handwriting on the envelope. Inside he has written the date: ‘midnight, eve of Armistice Day, 10 November 1972’.

  It’s late. my pills aren’t working so I’ve taken more. Not enough, just enough, maybe. Got the shits, the ta-ta’s. Lonesome is my mountain hut, everything working for me & nothing working for me. I work hard every day & it’s a long day & it’s a long night to come home every dusk … I wish I could live to be with you now …

  Tomorrow (today now) is Armistice Day. I was feeding a lamb tonight with its bottle and for no apparent reason I started to cry. Dad died on the 26th of this month last year. You are the only thing I bother living for. Literature & grants and sales make me momentarily excited, often for several hours. But it’s the same me, scrambled brains & uselessly useful body. It’s so hard staying alive. If it weren’t for you I’d give living a miss. It’s all too much. I get badly suicidal every night! Richard & Carla are good to me but life without you is really ‘scraping existence from day to day.’ … What a joke. All i have is you, is yours …

  Please be with me all day on the 26th of this month, i’ll have a sad bad day, & night especially. Perhaps i could stay at your place (apart i guess) that night & you talk to me and get me through …

  I call Caloola right away, but the phone rings out and my panic increases. Phrases from Michael’s letter repeat in my mind. He puts all his energy into trying to make a life, but he’s an instrument tuned to a minor key, and his tenderness, his melancholy, is heart-breaking. I take off through the backyard into the bush. I have to move. I rush along the track that leads through gums and acacias to the top of Mount Majura.

  I don’t know what to do in response to his sorrow, his hopelessness. His faith in me only makes me fearful. How can I become strong enough to give him the support he needs? In M Ward, I was there with him when he felt desperate; from a distance, I just don’t know how to help him. His grief drags him into a deep place within himself where all his sufferings converge: a crucible of loss and doubt and anguish.

  He’s obviously in a critical state. As I stumble up the steep track to the mountaintop, I want to shout, send out a distress signal, a flare: Help! Help! We have an emergency! But that’s not how it works in this sort of ongoing crisis.

  I’m useless. I don’t feel I’m substantial enough to keep him alive. I don’t even have the energy to get to the top of Mount Majura. I find a grassy slope and sit there, exhausted, my mouth dry, breathing hard.

  When I return to my room, I read and reread his letter, trying to think of what to do. I look at the poster I’ve put up on my wall entitled Desiderata. ‘You are a child of the universe,’ it proclaims. ‘You have a right to be here.’ It doesn’t feel like that for either of us, but particularly Michael. I go upstairs and call him again. He’s not available, so I leave a message: ‘Please come to Hackett tomorrow.’

  *

  Next day, Michael rings from Tharwa to let me know he’s on his way. When he rides up on his motorbike, I’m sitting on the front steps waiting for him. He
parks next to the porch, takes off his helmet and shakes his hair free. When we hug I let go of my anxiety for a moment, pressing my face into the curve of his chest, into the musky smell of cigarette smoke and dust. He feels real and present, and I feel weak with relief.

  ‘How’s things?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, good, but I’m thirsty. Any chance of a cuppa?’

  We go upstairs, tentatively negotiating around each other as we try to knit together the loose ends of our time apart. Michael is hard to reach, and I’m tight with anxiety again.

  ‘I got your letter,’ I say. ‘Sounds like things are pretty bad.’

  ‘It was a long night. Can’t take these sorts of nights anymore, Pauls, just can’t take them. But it’s okay now, we’re here. It’s cool.’

  ‘We’ll be together for the twenty-sixth, for your father. Stay here. We’ll get through it together.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks, that’d be good.’ Michael looks away through the window to the bush outside and sips his tea.

  ‘Written any poems?’ I ask after a while.

  ‘Nah, nothing you’d call poetry.’

  A silence settles on us. Over our cups of tea we try to make conversation, shrink the distance dividing us, but our reunion is strained. Michael says he needs to leave Caloola but hasn’t found a place to live in Canberra yet. In the quiet between stilted exchanges, we hear the clinking of dishes from the adjoining kitchen as Mum does the washing up.

  In the afternoon we wander through the bush around the foothills of Mount Majura. Michael spots a tree next to a dam and spreads his jacket in its shade. As we sit there, I remember the times we sat inside the green bell talking, making plans, holding each other. Now, our talk is soft and desultory. Words seem inadequate. More silences shape the conversation. Michael is subdued, and I’m faltering. Just being with him is enough to open me to joy again, but it’s a small, hopeless sort of joy.