Staying

by Jessie Cole

  ‘But Mum …’ Luca finally spoke up, his voice uncertain, tremulous. ‘Why?’

  The unanswerable question hung in the air. Heavy with sorrow it hovered about us, filling our ears and our minds and our hearts.

  ≈

  I had always experienced occasional headaches, but after my father’s death they had become almost ever-present. I often woke with a dull pain behind my eyes that persisted steadily until I readied myself for sleep. I went to different specialists over time, and the diagnosis was always ‘tension headaches’. When I asked if this was stress-related—that is, if ‘tension’ equalled ‘stress’—no one seemed to think so. Simple painkillers, paracetamol and the like, were prescribed. It didn’t feel right to take painkillers all day every day, so I limited myself to two paracetamol tablets once a day. Mostly I chose to take them right before bed, so I could drift into a pain-free sleep.

  The headaches bothered me, but they also seemed somehow normal. An outward expression of how I felt inside. Sometimes the pain drifted into a migraine, blurring my vision, wiping me out. But that was less common. Living with chronic pain is a half-life—everything is muted, shrouded in a kind of fog. I tried all kinds of home remedies: heat-packs, homeopathics, herbal teas and supplements. Nothing worked. In the scheme of things—the relentlessness of mothering small children—my headaches were background until they were foreground. A presence, always lingering, but sometimes rising up to knock me out.

  The afternoon George arrived I was suffering. I’d had a migraine the day before and was finding it hard to resurface. George was an old city friend of my father. When I was a child he would appear on our doorstep from time to time, bringing with him a small band of drinkers. They were a raucous bunch, full of outlandish stories. They’d sit around the kitchen table and talk politics and women and sex, and my mother was always shutting the door so we didn’t have to hear. As a child, I’d liked them all, these madcap men, though George was my favourite. He was a writer who’d spent a lifetime writing non-fiction books on obscure topics that were never published. He drank beer for breakfast and laughed so much his face was set in permanent smile lines. He was Czech, and apparently his own father laughed so vigorously he often fell flat on his back.

  Occasionally, when I was a kid, we’d visit George in Brisbane. He lived in a sectioned-off part of his long-suffering mother’s house. In his bathroom, he had a photograph of his own penis on one side of the basin and on the other the vagina of a girlfriend. As kids, these genital portraits were right at our eye level, and we’d inspect them with curious mirth. In the rest of the house he had perfect skeletons of frogs and lizards mounted behind glass and arranged on the walls, and there was an indoor climbing vine that had almost taken over the rafters. In another life he’d practised as a psychologist, and my father once told me the coffee table in his waiting room had a glass top with a giant horse’s penis below it that was slowly decaying.

  After my father’s death, George rarely visited. The gang of drinkers had mostly disbanded, and I assumed he didn’t like to be reminded of my father’s messy demise. On the day after my migraine, he turned up unexpectedly. He was subdued, not laughing, muttering every now and again, ‘Oh, it’s a terrible thing, your father. A terrible thing.’

  This was a fact, though it had been six years since my father’s death. In the aftermath of my migraine, my children’s voices seemed loud and demanding, and George’s grief was a little hard to bear.

  It bothered George that I hadn’t finished university. That I had chosen the forest and babies over books and the world.

  ‘It’s such a shame. She can’t just do this with her life,’ he’d say to my mother, indicating our house with a sweep of his arm, taking a long sip of his beer. ‘It’s a waste—she’s got brains.’

  I explained to him about my headaches. Evidently, I’d never mentioned them before.

  ‘But that’s untenable,’ George said, shocked. ‘I mean, it’s no good.’

  George liked to solve problems. The psychologist in him. He asked me a bunch of questions about my pain, and then declared he might have the answer.

  ‘Alexander Technique is what you need,’ he stated firmly. ‘I have a book about it. I’ll send it to you.’

  A week or so later I got the book in the post, searched the Yellow Pages for a practitioner and made an appointment. It seemed a whim. Nothing had worked in the past. I had no real expectation of the alleviation of my pain, but I dutifully made the appointment. I don’t know why I needed crazy George of all people to tell me my pain was untenable, but it seemed that I did.

  ≈

  The Alexander practitioner had a private studio out in the hills, which was unusual but not unheard of. Varda was diminutive in stature but large in presence, with expressive, vibrant blue eyes. She welcomed me, and we had a chat about my headaches. As the conversation wound down, she said, ‘Often pain in the body is related to our emotional experiences. I’m also a trained counsellor. Is there anything about your life you’d like to share?’

  I stared at her a moment, trying to read the situation.

  ‘Well,’ I murmured. This openness was unprecedented. ‘There are a few things …’

  I offered up the bare bones of my story. Varda’s eyes widened and I looked away. I had overshared, again, and now she would wish she hadn’t asked. I glanced back, deeply apprehensive, but she held my gaze.

  ‘I have a lot of experience with trauma,’ she said steadily. ‘This is a safe space, and I’d like to hear your story.’

  I didn’t think of myself as someone who had experienced trauma. I associated it with wars, soldier PTSD. Some things had happened, yes. But shouldn’t I be over that by now?

  ‘No one likes to hear about it,’ I said warily. ‘It’s way too intense.’

  ‘That’s not a problem for me. I like intense.’

  This in itself was a revelation.

  ‘You do?’

  Varda nodded, her gaze direct. I could see that she was thinking.

  ‘It’s as though your adolescence is in brackets,’ she said, holding up two hands to illustrate. ‘Your sister’s death at the beginning and your father’s at the end.’

  I nodded, still in shock that someone was willing to discuss it.

  After this initial appointment, I went back fortnightly. And so it began, a detailed recounting. Varda gave me permission to speak of what I had thought to be unhearable. She allowed space for whatever words came out, whatever memories came up, and the sense of wrongness in my communication that I had carried with me so long began to dissipate in her presence. She said: ‘Sorrow is a terrain you can enter and leave. You can explore it, but you aren’t stranded there.’ She said: ‘I will go with you.’ She said: ‘You can call me any time you get stuck.’ And she was always true to her word.

  ≈

  When I first met Varda, I had lost faith that there was a language I could speak that could be heard. Outside of the forest, I felt like a person stranded in a foreign land where none of the words I used made any sense. Whenever I tried to broach a topic that was meaningful to me, I felt I was speaking gibberish. In grief, language itself seems to fragment. If, on top of that, no one can hear you, the sense of dislocation is compounded. I had become resigned to this feeling of misunderstanding or remoteness, the blankness of people’s faces in response to my words, but it hurt me greatly to move through my life so unheard. It is hard to overstate the importance of being able—after so many years of silence—to simply speak. I didn’t know how much I needed someone to bear witness to the happenings of my life, but when I met Varda and she looked into my eyes, the shadow-walker in me—that terrifyingly wounded being that had no place in the world—came forward. At first that part of me was timid, expecting to be repulsed, but Varda was undaunted. I talked about everything—my sisters, my father, my mother, my brother, my children, Gabe, the lot. There wasn’t anything that Varda could not hear.

  Every fortnight she would coax me onto her table and t
ry to help my body release some of the strange tension it held. There was no massage, but a light lifting of limbs with some verbal instructions. ‘The neck releases the head, forward and up …’

  It was normal, apparently, for emotion to be released along with this tension, and Varda would often ask me what I was feeling. So unused to the question, mostly I wouldn’t know. She would ask me then about any images that came to mind, any memories or thoughts. And this would lead—always—right back to my childhood. Varda chose her words carefully, each one imbued with a very specific meaning. I’d never met someone so particular about language. Intelligence hummed in the air around her, almost electric. I found myself listening closely to each word she spoke.

  When Varda said, ‘Try writing some things down,’ I listened. I started writing in secret at first, as I did most things, but the words came tumbling out. In writing, there was no uncomfortable silence, no awkwardness, no withdrawal of connection, just the open space between what was in my head and what was on the page, and the liberation of it was giddying.

  ≈

  I stood in the shower, water streaming down my body, a delicate blanket of lines. Sliding my feet across the tiles, I looked up to feel the heat against my forehead. The seconds spun by—spiralling time—my life measured in small heartbeats. The flicking of my fingernail against the wet skin of my thumb, the sunlight glowing through the underside of leaves, the repeating bird sounds that blended in the back of my mind. I thought about the terrain of sorrow, how I could come and go. I had spent so long at home in the forest, but since meeting Varda I’d started wondering about the world outside. She was a practitioner, yes. A therapist. Talking to me was her job. But maybe there were other people out there who liked intensity as much as she did? Maybe there was a tribe?

  Looking out at the garden sea, I leaned over and traced the letters of my name in the misty steam of the glass. I existed. Varda had heard me speak, and maybe there were others.

  ≈

  The thing about hiding is that eventually you have to emerge. You can choose safety over risk as long as you wish to, but it will limit your experiences. Connection with others is a balm, and for me this connection had become sorely lacking. In town on a summer break, the shiny-shiny girls—my brainy high school pals—swooped in from their busy city lives to visit, whisking me out to a local pub in a seaside tourist town not far from the green garden sea, but the riotous clatter of the place was overwhelming. In school we’d all been going in vaguely the same direction, but since then our paths had diverged. At the pub these old friends were as lively as ever, but I found a corner and stuck to it stubbornly until they agreed to take me home.

  Out in the world, I often felt panicked. There were none of the things that in the forest were grounding or safe-feeling. Most specifically trees, but also animals and the movement of nature: the wind shifting around me, the flickering of insects and the flashing of birds—the gentle sway of things. I found these natural rhythms immensely comforting. But it was also the way these entities reached out and touched me. To go anywhere—to the toilet or my bedroom—I had to move through the wilderness. As I walked, the plants brushed my arms. I got leaves and things stuck on me. In just wandering about, I was entering into a connectivity with nature that felt lively. It’s easy enough to say you ‘brush past’ a tree, but somehow it felt more like the trees were reaching out and touching me, caressing me with fondness. With the absence of these entities, the world outside my home had come to feel deeply foreign.

  Varda suggested that I’d ‘trauma-bonded’ with my homeplace, the way an abused woman does with her partner. Trauma bonding, she explained, occurred as the result of ongoing cycles of abuse: intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates powerful bonds that are resistant to change. But Varda had never been to my house. She hadn’t known the tender embrace of my forest. Cycles of abuse? There were seasons—cyclical, yes—and sometimes storms and floods. Occasionally, it even hailed. But this place had loved me doggedly since I was the smallest child. It was where I experienced the loss of Zoe and where my father went mad and where everything I knew of family had collapsed in on itself and exploded—and yet at the same time it was where I felt most held and most understood and most myself. We’d grown here together—the forest and I—planted by my parents, and we were intertwined: a support system of interlinking branches, holding each other upright.

  Despite this, there was always room for the unexpected. One day, when I was going down the walkway to my bedroom, a large swarm of bats began flying up and down the passage. They were small but vigorous, fluttering right up into my face and chest. I stood still, head ducked, hand shielding my eyes, waiting for them to settle or disperse. Caught in an unforeseen moment, unprepared and vulnerable. Suddenly I was living inside a bat colony. I had to walk the gauntlet of bats before I could enter or exit a room. It hadn’t been the case the day before. See how everything could change in the blink of an eye? In the forest, every day things grew or died. Nothing was static. Some days, a lone butterfly would waft in from outside and land upon me for the merest second, and then be gone. Over the years, I had awoken with doves on my head, snakes curled in the bottoms of my cupboard drawers, toads in the shower, and the translucent underbellies of frogs pressed up against the glass of my doors. Once trapped inside, the frogs became dry, entangled in spider webs and dust, and I had to scoop them up, running them under a tap until—clean and moist—they were ready to go back outside. The constant knock of nature on my door, an earthen rhythm of syncopated heartbeats.

  There was no other choice but surrender.

  ≈

  After my terror at the noisy pub with the shiny-shiny girls, I thought I’d try something easier and I drove with Milla and Luca to the beach. The boys sat in the back, watching the flickering of the trees outside, enveloped in the early-morning hush. For this outing, I’d chosen with care from the curving coastline east of my home. I’d avoided the white sands and brisk winds of my childhood and driven instead to an unfamiliar, neutral stretch of sea. Milla and Luca raced from the car, across the prickly grass, and along the sand to the water.

  In the rush to get out of the house I had left the bag with all the towels and hats and drinks at home by the door, and so arrived light and unhindered by seaside paraphernalia. The beach was quiet, and a little way off a man stood fishing.

  Milla plunged into the water, laughing and splashing. Luca inched in slowly, staying in the shallows, keeping his head up and dry. Sitting on the sand, I watched my two boys in the water. Milla romped in the surf, going out further and further, until I had to stand and call him in, while Luca skipped about at the shoreline, jumping the frilly waves and occasionally submerging his little body in their ebbs and flows. I couldn’t relax with my two boys so far apart, and found myself panicking every time Milla went under a wave. Walking to the water’s edge, my gaze followed my older boy’s form. Milla was a robust swimmer, and the waves were not rough. Watching him play in the sea, something tight within me gave way, and I dug my feet into the sand.

  Luca scrambled along the shore picking up shells and digging haphazardly. He approached the lone fisherman. I knew he would be asking something. Why are there waves? How is there sand? The man smiled down at him and then up at me in reassurance. I wondered if I should bring Milla in from the waves and rescue the fisherman from Luca’s tireless inquiries, but the man laughed then, a deep, warm sound.

  The waves lapped at my ankles and splattered up to wet behind my knees. I was wearing a simple green sundress and I tucked it up so the waves wouldn’t splash the hem. As I watched Milla in the surf, my mind flew off towards the blue line of the horizon. I breathed out in a sigh.

  Suddenly I heard Luca’s high-pitched scream.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, shit!’ the man shouted. ‘Mate, show me your hand.’

  I ran towards them. The fisherman was holding my son’s whole hand firmly between his palms. ‘He grabbed the hook when I was reeling it in,’ he hissed. ‘
Shit! Hold him still while I try and get it out.’

  I pulled Luca towards me, my eyes blurring with tears. The fisherman tugged tentatively at the wedged hook. Luca screamed.

  ‘Fuck, it’s all the way through. Fuck … fuck,’ the man muttered.

  Luca shrieked even louder, white with fear. Milla scrambled in from the surf and stood beside me.

  ‘Mum, what are you going to do?’ The corners of his mouth turned down. ‘Mum?’

  I shook my head, a small sob escaping from some deep place inside me. When either of the boys got hurt, it broke the circle I believed surrounded them, the circle of safety. The very idea of their vulnerability undid me. Accidents, illnesses—I felt the world was coming apart. All that trauma coming up to bite.

  I swiped at my eyes with the back of my hand. The man looked at my face, then back at Luca’s finger with the barbs of the hook protruding.

  ‘Okay, mate, just wait, one more try.’ Delicately, the fisherman grasped the base of the hook. He gave it a sharp, hard wrench and the metal barb came free. My son’s finger trickled blood and I scooped him up and whispered to him as I cried against his hair. The man stood there watching us, his face pale and sad and sorry. In my arms, Luca was quiet. Milla stayed close beside me, dripping and quivering.

  The fisherman reached out and placed a palm on top of Milla’s head. ‘It’s okay, mate. He’s okay,’ he said softly.

  I shifted Luca onto my hip so I could pull Milla into my embrace. He fell into me, pressing his face into my sodden sundress. Squeezing him, I tried to stop crying. ‘It’s okay, baby—it’s not that bad,’ I whispered. ‘It just gave Mummy a fright.’

  ‘He put out his hand and grabbed the hook,’ the man said. ‘So quick I couldn’t stop him.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ I sniffed. ‘He doesn’t know about fishing. He wouldn’t have known there was a hook on the end.’