‘I told you,’ I said finally, ‘I gave it up.’
But I was already in the stairwell, and nobody heard me except the walls.
THIRTY-THREE
I stopped drinking on Sunday, 3 December, 1989.
It was the day after a new government swept to power in Queensland for the first time in over three decades. The day after two years of Inquiry and scandal culminated in one great final public blood-letting. The day after Charlie tried to kill himself.
I woke to find myself in a motel room, fully dressed and on top of the bed covers. I had no idea where I was. I lay there, tasting dead alcohol on my breath, my head full of that pulsing thickness that only time or more drinks could clear. No thoughts came, no memories. It was a moment of waking unconsciousness, without a date or an hour. Finally I pulled myself upright, went to the window, and threw back the curtain. I was expecting the glare of a hot Brisbane day, some suburban car park by the highway, perhaps, but instead I looked out into a grey world of slowly curling fog and the dark shadows of trees. A silent, still world, dripping moisture. It wasn’t Brisbane. I stared, lost. And then it all came to me, a road sign glimpsed in the dark, headlights carving through the night, and back and back to the hospital, a rush of memory that had been just waiting there to unravel, and in moments I was reeling for the toilet and vomiting up sick yellow strands of bile.
It was my first look at Highwood.
I would never know how it happened—how it was that, in my deepest, most drunken moment of misery, I took the turn that led me to sobriety. All that had been in my mind that night was escape. Escape from that hospital room, from May, and from Charlie’s single, staring eye. I’d stumbled blindly down the hospital steps, thinking of nothing but running as fast and as far as I could. South. I’d go south. Get out of Brisbane and Queensland and the whole disaster it had all become. I had no reason to stay. I had no job, no friends. There had been Maybellene—and only Maybellene, really, for the last two years—but now even that was over, ended in the most dreadful fashion I could have imagined. South, I thought, south into oblivion.
It was the logic of alcohol. I was drunk and had been for days, for weeks, and there was a quality I’d finally learned about drunkenness. When I’d been younger I’d thought that drinking expanded the night, opened the horizons, but I knew better now. The more you drank the more the world shrank in on you. It was almost a visual thing. A blurring of distance. In the early stages that was welcoming. Bars became glowing, warm homes. Faces loomed large, time faded away. But as you drank more and the world wrapped around tighter, it became claustrophobic—people became distant, blurred figures, passing you by. Thoughts stayed trapped in your head. Talking turned into an effort, meanings impossible to convey. In the end your whole world could become no greater than your own skull, and by then you were trapped, a distorted, speechless mind, capable only of looking out upon reality in a way that was no better than hallucinating. It was hallucinating.
That’s the state I was in, and had been in for days, when I climbed into my car outside the hospital. South, drive south—it loomed like a vision, the only thing that seemed real. That and drinking, drinking still more. I had a bottle of wine in the car, and swallowed from it steadily as I drove back through the Valley to New Farm and to my flat, looking out upon a nightmare. The election had been lost and won. The streets were jammed with cars and crowded with revellers from the victory parties, from the nightclubs and bars, people running across the road, yelling incoherently. The sky flickered with fireworks. Thirty years’ repression was exploding outwards and the town had turned hideous before my eyes, a city of madmen, a whirl of destruction and revenge, and all of it at my expense. I was one of the downfallen and the city was howling its joy at the demise of my kind. Fists banged randomly on my windows. Then I was through it all and down into New Farm and into my flat.
I was there only moments. The rooms were dark and empty and smelled of misuse, and it no longer felt like any sort of home. I gathered clothes, two more bottles of wine, left my key in the door and was on my way again. Speed was all I could think about. South. Sydney. I could be there in twelve hours, and in Sydney I could lose myself completely, never be seen again. I wanted to vanish from the face of Queensland. I steered around the Valley and skirted the northern edge of the city centre, aiming for the western freeway. I caught one last glimpse of Parliament House and its annex glowing orange in the spotlights. It looked like a castle besieged, the last few fragments of the government trapped inside, the mob rioting outside with flames in their hands. It was the fall of an empire, the last battle was lost, and for a moment I didn’t feel alone. All over Brisbane there would be people like me, frantically packing bags, destroying documents, melting away into the night, beaten men, scattering to the winds. I didn’t care about any of them.
Then I was on the western freeway, Brisbane was falling behind and it was just me and the wine and the road. I drank and stared into the arc of the headlights and from time to time an image of May or of Charlie would knife through the stupor and I’d find myself reaching for the bottle. I drank great mouthfuls, felt it sweep over me in waves, and every wave took me a little further away from the pain. The freeway became the Cunningham Highway. It would take me past Ipswich and through the hills and then up over the Dividing Range and across, finally, into New South Wales. Cars and trucks streamed towards me, lights blazing in my face as they passed. My own car swerved from side to side, straying at times into the oncoming lanes, and it occurred to me that I could die this way and that death wouldn’t be so bad. But it didn’t seem important either way. Speed was the thing. I couldn’t stop for anything.
Maybe that was part of it. Maybe I realised that, drunk as I was, I might crash, or be pulled over by the police and detained. The thought was unbearable—not injury, not death, but delay. The idea of being trapped in Queensland a moment longer. And then I saw the sign to Highwood, left off the highway. A minor road, a back road. It ran, I knew, through a few small towns and then up into the mountains. I’d never driven it before, but it was another way into New South Wales, I knew that much. A slower way, but a quieter one too. No other cars. No crashes. No police. At least, later I assumed that’s what I was thinking. I didn’t remember next morning and never would remember. But the road sign remained in my mind, a second of perfectly clear focus, and I remembered nodding to myself as I slowed and turned off. Yes, I was saying, yes. And swilling from the wine bottle.
From there it all became vague. Back roads, narrow, fringed by tall grass or overhanging trees. Small towns flashing by in a blur of darkened houses and isolated streetlights. No one was on the footpaths, no one was still awake, no one was celebrating or mourning out here; the election might never have been fought. I seemed to be the only person on the road, the only person in the night. I faded in and out of awareness. The car was driving itself. Odd-shaped hills loomed up in the night. Then the forest closed in, the trees making fantastic shadows in my headlights, and the road turned and began to wind and climb. And it started to rain.
Good, I remembered thinking, good. Wash my tracks from the road, wash the dust of this state from my heels. Tears of self-pity. But the border couldn’t be far . . .
And from there I remembered almost nothing. Driving rain. The car slipping on muddy turns, the wipers beating, the bottle rising to my lips and falling, rising and falling, trees, darkness and a noise that seemed to grow louder and louder in my head. And then one last clear moment of recollection—the car stopped, askew on the road, the rain hammering on its roof, and through the streaming windscreen a shining neon sign that I stared at, spellbound. And after that nothing at all.
Later I would be told that at two-thirty in the morning I woke the motel manager by hammering and yelling at his door. He couldn’t understand a word I was saying, but he saw the state I was in, so he opened a room for me and threw me on the bed.
I was five kilometres from the border.
And the name of the estab
lishment, illuminated in great golden letters that the manager later admitted he’d simply forgotten to turn off that night, was The Last Chance Motel.
Not that I knew any of this that first morning. Indeed, I knew nothing for most of the next twenty-four hours. After that initial awakening, I undressed and collapsed back into bed, still drunk, and slept feverishly for the rest of the day. Down in Brisbane the new premier was making victory speeches and the new era had begun, but I was oblivious. Sometime in the evening the manager woke me by knocking on my door; in the kindness of his heart he had even brought me a meal. I thanked him, paid him finally for the room, and booked it for another night. It was an automatic thing. I had no plans. My head was still full of noise. After he’d gone I ate a little, but vomited it up again immediately. I went back to bed. Another night passed, nightmare ridden, my head and my arms and legs all aching madly, my skin crawling with insects. Rain drummed on the window. Voices talked to me, May, Charlie, haunting half dreams. I cried, doubled up in a ball, utterly wretched, until somewhere in the depths of the night I fell unconscious again, and dreamed of nothing.
It was on Monday morning that I woke finally, ill and sore, but sober again, the noises gone. In its way, though, this was even worse. I lay there, stark and aware, without even the filter of alcohol to protect me, and studied the ruin of my life. If immediate suicide ever swung close, it was then. But it’s the nature of the body to crave life, and in the end it was my body that could lie in bed no longer. I rose and showered and, without hope but with the need for simple motion, I left my room and went out into the day. Had it been a bright and sunny sky I might have made it no further than the door, but Highwood, too, seemed bent on saving me. It was another cool, foggy morning.
Feeling invisible I slipped from the motel car park out onto the main street of the town. It was almost nine o’clock, but the streetlights were still on, haloes in the mist, and windows glowed orange. I walked. People moved here and there, but it was all muted by the fog, and no one noticed me. Shops were opening their doors, setting out displays, the first customers chatting quietly. Breakfasters dined in a cafe. Outside a newsagent the Brisbane papers were thumping down in bundles from a truck. Those papers bore headlines of the weekend’s events, but for all the convulsions that had gripped the state, up here on the border and in the clouds it was too far away to matter.
I walked on, past the park and the courthouse precinct. I wasn’t going anywhere. I thought of breakfast, but my body seemed ethereal, not in need of food. I walked, limbs moving but my mind vacant, all decision held in suspension. The fog swirled in thicker and I passed by a school. A few cars were paused there under the trees, headlights gleaming, parents dropping off children. A teacher waited by the gate, ushering kids through and talking with mothers and fathers. Laughter rang out and I faltered. Unhappiness swirled up immensely. The whole town . . . it all seemed so secure, so warm, so safe. It was something I would never have, somewhere I would never belong, but the wanting was there, sudden and overpowering. To be whole, to know what the future would bring, day to day, without the excesses and degradation and the hangovers. To live a measured life, a proper life. To stop drinking, stop failing, stop hurting. Why wasn’t that possible?
I turned, almost went back. I’d passed two pubs down the street, and if it had been opening time I would have marched right down to one of them and drowned myself again, just to blot out the question. But it was an hour before alcohol would be available anywhere. I turned again, tortured, not knowing what to do. The teacher by the gate was watching me now. It was a woman. Later I would wonder if it was Emily I saw that day, and if even then she played a part in my salvation, but in truth I was aware only of a female figure, no face, no age, it could have been anyone. But she was watching me, suspicious, and I couldn’t stay. I kicked myself back into motion and headed up along the street, away from town, away from the shops and the bars. Instead I was heading up into the mountains, and towards the New South Wales border once again.
I didn’t feel invisible any more. I felt like a monster come creeping into town, acutely visible to anyone who might see me, the disease in my head as obvious as if it was of my skin. I walked on. At the top of the street there was another park, and on the further side of it the forest closed in on the town, blanketing the hills that rose all about, looming dimly in the fog. There was a sign announcing the boundaries of the Highwood National Park, with maps showing the walking tracks that threaded their way through the bush to waterholes and lookouts. I paused at the sign. I saw that there were miles of trails and that, between the mist and the forest, I could disappear in there forever. Furthest of all, I saw, eleven kilometres from town, was a site called Redemption Falls. It would suffice, I thought. Then I plunged into the wilderness.
Redemption Falls. Last Chance Motel. Omens so banal even a fool like me couldn’t ignore them.
I walked, hour after hour. Eleven kilometres. Up and down, through gullies and streams and over ridges, all of it on muddy, slippery tracks. I became soaked and streaked with mud. Blisters rose on my feet, burst and bled. Cramps speared up and down my legs. I drank cold mountain water and retched it up again. Chills swept through me, followed by sweat. I was a man who hadn’t walked a single mile by intent for years, a man who hadn’t eaten in two days, a man coming off months, years, of solid, body-leaching drinking. But somehow it seemed impossible to stop. The motion and the pain in my feet and legs kept thought at bay, kept the craving at bay, and that was all I wanted.
It was late afternoon when I reached the falls. The track came to an end and a small stream plunged over a sheer escarpment. I stood on the edge. Part of my mind realised that I was standing on the very southern rim of the Border Ranges. I could see a sprawl of further mountain ranges, deep valleys and forests, all of it grey beneath shreds of cloud and rain and mist. It was New South Wales. Even as I watched, the water of the stream was tumbling from Queensland into a new state. A single leap and I could follow it. A hundred, a hundred and fifty metres to the rocks below, and I’d be rid of Queensland at last. The spasms racking my muscles were almost enough to pitch me over, but my mind was exhausted, empty of either guilt or despair. I stood staring dumbly out for a mere few minutes, then turned and headed back. Motion, I thought. That’s all that matters. Keep in motion.
Night fell early, and rain followed. The mountains closed in around me. I stumbled along in the darkness. I fell over rocks and roots, crawled in mud, groaning in something like terror. Awareness drifted off and all I knew was the placing of one foot in front of the other, and the searching out of the trail, an infinitesimally paler path that led through the surrounding blackness of water and forest. It stretched on forever, and I knew that I would die alone and lost and that, no, death wasn’t what I wanted.
When pinpoints of light finally appeared through the trees I started to cry. I lurched through the park and down the street, past the school and the courthouse. People stopped and stared at me, but they meant nothing. I had walked twenty-two kilometres. And I was alive.
I saw a small diner that was still open. I fell through the door and demanded food. There were no other customers, and the girl behind the counter was cleaning down the stove, but there was a heated bay which held the leftovers of the day—a meat pie, some wrinkled chips, a sausage dripping grease. I bought the lot. She showered it all with salt, wrapped it in paper, and I carried it like treasure back to the motel, limping and muttering to myself. Once inside my room I spread it all out on the bed and ate until it was gone. Then I brushed the paper and the crumbs aside, cast myself headlong on the bed, and slept.
And lost another day.
Not to a hangover but to a complete revolt of my body. When I woke again I could scarcely move. It felt like my muscles had been individually ripped from their bones. I lay there in suffering all day, blankly watching television and ordering room service. The manager looked at me strangely when he made the deliveries. Just what was I doing in his motel, what was I doing
in Highwood? In fact I was turning his room and his town and his mountains into my own personal detox ward, but I could hardly tell him that, I didn’t know it myself. All I knew was that as the aches eased through the day, the misery lurking at the back of my mind started to press forward again and my throat cried out for a drink. If I stood still it would all catch up with me. So the answer was still the same—motion. Motion and physical pain, to pre-empt the pain I feared far more.
Next day I rose at dawn, stiff and creaking, and set off for the falls again. My luck was holding and once again the day was overcast and grey. This time I took food with me, and water, and I bought a torch in case darkness caught me again, but it was still a death march. I supposed the terrain I was covering was beautiful. Mountain gums and stands of temperate rainforest, rocky gorges plunging away to noisy streams, wide placid waterholes, it was all there. I even passed several other parties of bushwalkers, staring up, taking photographs. But I had no eye for the scenery. I was focused on the path, step by step, and after the first few miles the protests from my legs and feet consumed me. By the time I reached the falls I was panting at the stabbing in my chest. It wasn’t long after midday. I glared out at the view.
I don’t need you, I said to New South Wales, not yet anyway. Not yet. And I turned and started home.
It was dark again by the time I arrived, stumbling along behind my torch beam. I saw the lights burning in the windows of the bars, thought longingly of one long, delicious glass of beer—but I knew where that would lead, and what lay at the bottom of that glass. I forced myself instead into a cafe and ordered scalding hot soup. It satisfied me on a different level, a deeper, earthier level, and the smile of the waitress, too, was a boon.
The next day—before I had a chance to recover or think or plan—I did it all again. I walked to the falls and stared down at New South Wales, and thought, I can survive.
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