The Green Bell

by Paula Keogh

  It’s dark by the time we get back to Lennox. As we walk towards Michael’s room, I see a motorbike parked next to the railing and a man sitting on the steps under a veranda light. When Michael asks me to wait in his room, I suspect he’s buying drugs and doesn’t want me to be involved. Afterwards, as I put on the electric kettle for coffee and chat about the afternoon, I sense a change in Michael’s mood. He’s restless. We move around each other awkwardly until it becomes clear to me that he wants to be alone. I decide to leave, and we walk under the street lamps to the bus stop. We’re holding hands, but our conversation has large holes in it, and although Michael stays with me until the bus comes, I can tell he’s anxious to get back to his room.

  On the bus heading home, I think about the parts of his life that Michael doesn’t want to share with me. I’ll need to adjust to a different sort of relationship now we’re out of the protected environment of M Ward. The fact is, I don’t really understand the role that drugs play in his life. He talks of wanting to stay clear of them, but at the same time he craves them and seeks them out. The ‘yes’ fighting the ‘no’, the desire in conflict with the intention. The crucible of addiction. For Michael the need may be more psychological than physical, but at this point in his life, drugs are an obsession. I try to convince myself that the meeting with the biker was just a dope deal, but I’m worried that Michael wants something stronger.

  I think of his desire to be Jack, his attempt to get away from the ‘drug poet’ identity, to get clean and healthy, break free of feelings that keep him trapped in his idea of himself as worn out, wasted, useless – the image he has of himself when he’s suicidal. ‘Jack’ is associated with times he feels optimistic, confident of his poetry, and strong.

  At the end of loving notes that he leaves me, he signs himself ‘Jack’. Once, after an all-night session with friends at Lennox House, he rode his bike to Hackett and slipped a note under my door. He’d drawn a cartoon of us on his Kawasaki, and another of him wearing a hat, his long curly hair covering his body, his arms outstretched. There’s a speech bubble with ‘wed me’ written inside it. He has signed the note Michael Jack, with Jack written large and underlined.

  I decide that I’ll try to call him ‘Jack’ rather than ‘Michael Jack’. It might help him make the transition to a new identity.

  *

  After only a few days, both Michael and his possessions seem to belong at Lennox – and he’s found a spot at the end of the veranda to park his Kawasaki. He’s made friends with the other residents, and is spending a lot of time with Simon and Chris, who enjoy his humour and enthusiastic raves. They’re also supportive of him, recognising that he’s psychologically strung out. One night recently he was particularly depressed, convinced that he couldn’t go on living, that he didn’t have it in him to face another day. Chris talked him through it, offering the comfort of friendship and conversation.

  A few times, after an afternoon at Lennox, Simon cooks up healthy vegetarian meals for us, and we talk about politics, sure that humanity is on the verge of a breakthrough to a new level of consciousness. Simon has a large collection of blues records, so we listen to Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith as we sit together in his small room, sharing stories, laughing at ourselves, believing in love and the future. Both Chris and Simon have a subtle way about them and many interests in common with Michael, particularly music and ideas about the green revolution, and when Michael’s mood is free and easy, the conversation is animated, laced with humour and enthusiasm.

  Then, late one afternoon, Michael rings me and tells me that he’s had some bad news. His friend, Charles Buckmaster, a young Melbourne poet, has taken his life.

  I catch the bus to Lennox, fearful for Michael. We sit in his room, and he talks about Charles’s last visit to Sydney. He tells me rambling stories of all-night conversations about poetry and life that are now agonising for him to remember. Charles’s death confounds Michael, challenging his sense that it’s his responsibility as a poet to live without a safety net, to push boundaries, to seek out new modes of poetic consciousness through whatever means he can, whatever the cost.

  A kind of vicarious grief eats away at me as I helplessly give him my sympathy. We lie on his bed holding each other as the room gets dark. ‘Too many deaths, too much loss,’ he says. ‘They take so much of me with them, there’s nothing left.’

  I feel I have no words to offer him, no comfort I can give.

  After a last cup of coffee, I decide to leave, and Michael offers me a lift home on his Kawasaki. The thought of riding into the night brings a sense of release from the grief of the day. We take off along University Avenue under the dark forms of oaks and silver poplars, round past the Academy of Science, taking the curves like dancers leaning into the wind.

  One sharp bend feels too fast, too wild. I clutch Michael tight, but wind whips my face, my hair, and there’s no ground beneath me. I’m not breathing. As we take another bend, tilting into the road, I’m sure I’m going to die. We weave around cars – he’s going the long way to avoid the lights – and I’m frozen with terror. When he pulls up in the driveway at home, I can barely step off the bike. Feeling sick, I sit on the steps, shaking and mute.

  Michael says that he wasn’t going too fast, and it’s true. Something just freaked me out. I’m unnerved by Charles’s death; it feels ominous. But I can’t explain what happened, and I feel weak and miserable that I’ve added my neurotic fears to the desperate emotion of Michael’s day.

  Before he leaves, he holds me for a long time, his hand pressing the back of my head against his chest, his body close. We don’t say much. He revs his bike and takes off down the road. I go into my room, close the door. I have a desperate need to sleep. As I lie in bed, I try to draw on memories of us in the green bell, but all I feel is a sense of something collapsing inwards, smothering us.

  *

  Michael’s room at Lennox smells of stale incense and cigarette smoke. It’s late afternoon. He’s lying on the bed, and I’m sitting near him, smoking a cigarette. A blind is at an angle across the window, and the room feels empty, abandoned. Michael’s coat hangs on a hook on the back of the door, and his air force boots lie discarded next to the desk.

  My cigarette smoke swirls through shards of late afternoon light as if through river water. I find myself thinking about drowning, how it might feel. The pressure on the chest, the panic, then the letting go into release and oblivion. Outside, parrots are screeching in the plum tree, competing with the sound of someone playing guitar in the adjoining room. The guitarist is learning Dylan’s ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’. They sing a line, stop, repeat it, correcting a chord, then the tedious repetitions and interruptions begin again.

  I’ve been here for a couple of hours, dipping into a Raymond Chandler novel that I found on the desk. I’m restless and anxious; I don’t know whether to leave or stay. Michael is fully dressed, still wearing his beanie, his face turned towards me. He’s not asleep, but neither is he awake. He looks peaceful, and I don’t want to intrude, but I don’t know how long he’s been like this or what he’s taken, and I’m worried. I lie down beside him and ask him again if he’s okay. He finds my hand and squeezes it weakly.

  Later, I rinse a cup in the corner sink and make myself a coffee. As I smoke another cigarette, I realise that the guitarist has stopped playing and the parrots have fallen silent.

  When darkness seeps into the room, I get up and turn on the desk lamp, creating an oval of yellow light that gives the impression I’m on a small boat, drifting at sea. A few scattered books and papers, a coffee mug, a red Swiss Army knife clutter the deck, and Michael’s blue paisley headband hangs motionless from the back of a chair. I’m becalmed. In the doldrums. I pick up another book from the desk and flip through the pages before putting it down again. When I touch Michael lightly on the shoulder, he shifts onto his back, and I think I see the trace of a smile on his face.

  I lie down next to him again, listening with my body to his breath
ing. I surrender to the sequence, in and out, until I’m breathing for us both, pacing my deeper breath to his shallow rhythm. For the moment after each out-breath, time stands still. We are held in the deflated space of no-breath, no movement, no life. Then we breathe in, and the waiting seeps through me again, like mercury flowing in my veins.

  *

  After Christmas, Michael moves out of Lennox House and goes to live with Simon in Hall, a village outside Canberra. Simon’s bungalow is on the edge of town, overlooking grassy hills that disappear into the Brindabella Ranges. Michael keeps his room at Lennox so he’ll have somewhere to crash after parties, but Simon’s place is now home.

  Richard Hopkinson, an old friend of Michael’s, has arrived from Sydney and is also living in the bungalow with Simon; Michael met Richard when they both worked in the Taxation Office in Sydney, in what they call ‘a former life’. Chris Ash and his partner live next door, and various friends regularly drop in, including Kate McNamara from M Ward.

  Kate’s been writing more powerful poetry, and she brings drama and excitement to our encounters. Our friendship develops over cups of tea and conversations about poetry, astrology and magic. Whenever we’re faced with a decision, we throw the coins to consult the I Ching, taking to heart the oracle’s advice, enjoying the imagery, the ritual, the pondering. I love Kate’s candid language and emotional volatility, and feel dull and slow beside her. When we delve into Chinese astrology, we discover that she was born in the year of the dragon, while I was born in the year of the ox. It seems that our personality traits are preordained.

  Michael and I think it’s destiny when Kate and Richard quickly form a romantic liaison. Richard is calm, ironic, easy to be with. He writes poetry, loves the Black Mountain poets and the Beats, and has a wry sense of humour – a perfect match for Kate. Like Michael, Richard is enthusiastic about drugs, and they have a long history of shared experiences, the source of many stories they recount in moods of great hilarity.

  When all of us are together, poetry and music are our focus, and Simon’s bungalow becomes a communal hub.

  *

  In January, I re-enrol in my course at ANU. Michael is happy to continue living in Canberra and is supportive of my plan to finish my degree, so we postpone our Jumping Creek dream and talk about finding a place to live locally. We want to stay close to the community in Hall; there’s a sense of shared understanding in our friendship group.

  Social occasions are informal and often spontaneous. When Chris and his partner get married, we all go to the ceremony, holding bouquets and enjoying the rituals. It’s the height of summer, and we have picnics beneath the pine tree in the backyard. On hot nights we sit around in the kitchen with the doors and windows open, talking and listening to music.

  But we’re another band of ‘displaced Romantics’ and, for me, things aren’t always as straightforward and relaxed as they appear. I still feel cut off from my experiences, as if my deeper being is detached and adrift. While I smile and seem to be part of what’s happening, the connection is superficial. I sense that this detachment is a side effect of my medication, but anyone who’s been depressed knows this state. I struggle with the burden of a grief I can’t put a name to. A glass wall separates me from the people I care about.

  My distress closes on me like a cell door. Michael feels this too. We talk about the green bell as something lost. It’s as if sadness makes us blind, and we’re feeling our way through the darkness, holding hands, sharing our heartache. We try to protect ourselves from the loss of light, from the loss of our encounter with ecstasy, but here, in the depths of melancholy, it’s hard to hold on to the thought that ‘this too shall pass’.

  *

  One warm night, I impetuously decide to take the plunge and smoke a joint.

  We had one of Simon’s famous vegetable curries for dinner and are now listening to Neil Young’s Harvest. The doors are open to let the cooler air waft in. As usual, the table has collected pouches of Drum tobacco and cigarette papers, ashtrays erupting with butts, dirty coffee cups and, thanks to Simon, a basket of fruit. I like to imagine a time when Michael and I will have a place like this to ourselves, a place with a jar of flowers on the windowsill, an open fireplace, and our own kitchen table crowded with friends.

  When the joint comes around to me, I take it and inhale, enjoying the aroma. After a few light drags, I relax into the warmth of the night, and the easy, loose conversation. A soft, benign high. I float in the music. It’s a revelation. I begin to understand why people take to it so readily.

  Later that night, Michael and I spread a rug under the pine tree. There’s no moon, the air is soaked with the smell of resin, and we drift in the darkness, talking softly until gravity has its way and we’re lying flat out on the ground, awed by the night and the fields of stars above us. I tell him that I understand his enthusiasm for marijuana, his ‘magical herbal cigarette’, and he squeezes my hand, pleased that we can now share this mood.

  But a week or so later, after sharing a joint of hash with Michael, I discover that I can’t move. We’re alone together at Hall, sitting on a lounge in the area that doubles as living room and kitchen. It’s dimly lit at the kitchen end, and music plays on the small stereo, drums beating, guitars wailing, as if there’s been a catastrophe. My heart is palpitating wildly, my breathing is shallow and laboured, and the dread and fear that I associate with nightmares press down on my chest.

  I’m nauseated and begin to hallucinate. The shadows in the room lurch towards me, swiftly retreat, then tilt again in my direction, playing with me, threatening. I look at my hands as they dissolve, a sickly flesh colour sinking into the blue of my jeans. My yellow sandshoes distort the shape of my feet, and the colour repels like vomit. It’s hard to take a breath. Michael sees my distress and holds my hand until I come back to myself.

  Only days later, I’m at a party with Michael in a student house. Rock and roll is pounding, lights are dimmed, and plates of finger food cover a table pushed into the corner of the lounge room. People are talking loudly over the music, and others are dancing. I’m on the periphery of the upbeat mood, drinking red wine and participating in the odd exchange with anyone passing by. Tense and restless, I’m not quite able to lose the feeling that I’m playing at being here and having fun.

  I go in search of Michael and find him outside with a few others. As I approach, they look my way and go quiet. ‘What’s up?’ I ask.

  ‘We’ve got some speed,’ Michael says. ‘I’ll come in later.’

  ‘I want some,’ I say. Feeling reckless, wanting to be part of the scene.

  ‘Nah, you don’t. Why don’t you check out where Kate is?’

  But I insist and, after some hesitation, Michael gives me a small white tablet that I quickly swallow. I’m ready for anything.

  Back inside, we join a few people talking on a couch. Not long after, I feel an intense anxiety, and my nervous system surges with a sharp, unpleasant energy. I stand up, walk outside, can’t stay still, go inside, start dancing. I can’t speak, can’t stop this electric charge that’s singeing my nerves. I can’t bear it; there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I find a glass and drink water from the kitchen tap, go back into the lounge room to dance, having to move to release this bitter and nasty energy.

  I know then and there that I’ll never do anything like this to myself again. My medication may be interfering with the drugs’ actions, or I may simply have a particular sensitivity. Whatever the reason, the drugs that many people are happily ingesting are poison to me. The one exception is the sought-after prescription drug Mandrax (methaqualone), a sedative-hypnotic that I’ve been prescribed to help me relax and sleep.

  From the time Michael moved to Lennox House, the fact that I wasn’t taking drugs opened up an uncomfortable space between us. It’s clear now that they represent a significant gulf. He’s on one side, wanting to escape from the ordinary world, escape from himself, and I’m on the other, desperately and earnestly trying to gain a foot
hold in everyday reality.

  Ironically, for all the talk within the counterculture about being free and uninhibited, on the subject of drugs Michael and I are mute. I want to get away from hallucinatory worlds where my vision collapses around me, and sounds and voices play with my sense of reality, whereas Michael wants to lose himself in such experiences. I want to be connected to other people in a normal, everyday world, one in which days unfold predictably and nights lead to undisturbed sleep. I want to be able to walk in from the darkness, as in my fantasy, and sit at the table surrounded by light.

  Michael has been enthralled by the romance of drugs, and he still gets into raves about their mind-expanding effects, but, with me, he talks about wanting to ease the pain, escape his despair, and get through stressful social situations. I think that now he needs drugs in order to bear the burden of himself. He speaks of wanting an ordinary life of small pleasures among people he calls ‘real’ – people who hold to what he sees as old-fashioned virtues such as honour, honesty and courage. He craves authentic, down-to-earth experiences with people. But while he knows that the drugs are a threat to everything he aspires to, this knowledge doesn’t help alleviate his dependence on them.

  In one of his letters from Caloola, Michael wrote, with underlining, ‘Drugs? Forget it!’ He wrote in another letter, ‘I’ve not had any ephedrine tablets since yesterday morning. Too much like taking drugs.’ And once, in one of those moments when love makes all things seem possible, he whispered to me, ‘I wouldn’t swap you for all the poppies in Afghanistan.’ He insists that love is his drug of choice, that he gets high on love, but I’m beginning to wonder if love will be enough.