Living As a Moon

by Owen Marshall

  Dr Austen talked to me about the aberrant behaviour induced by alcohol, and the physical damage of prolonged abuse. I could still pull out of it, he said, without irreparable harm. I must have met with him before, but that’s my first clear recollection of us together: sitting in the small room with the shadow of the building stretching towards the roses, and Raymond Austen moving side to side a little on his swivel chair as he talked. He had a benevolent face the colour of mild cheese, and a pronounced furrow below his nose on his upper lip, like a well-formed miniature roof tile. I wondered what I looked like to him, and assumed an expression that I hoped was as amiable as his own. ‘Are you feeling okay?’ he said.

  He told me he didn’t believe in being prescriptive, that he wanted to lay out the options available to me and let me take responsibility for a choice of treatment. ‘As in so many things,’ he said, ‘a lot of the success you achieve comes from the personal conviction that you will achieve success. But you know all that, I’m sure.’

  He was right, of course, both in the proposition and my acceptance of it, but one of the effects of alcoholism is inattention, and as he went on to discuss programmes, I was distracted by figures on the lawn, in a sunlit patch between the shadow and the rose plot. Two thin, middle-aged men, and the bald one was leaning forward, talking to the other, patting his upper arm for emphasis, and the other man was responding with bursts of laughter loud enough to be heard faintly in Raymond Austen’s office. Talk, pat, laugh, talk, pat, laugh, talk, pat, laugh: the pattern was duplicated so faithfully that for a moment I feared I had suffered some brain default that registered as repetition, but then I realised that, despite the counsellor’s similarly repeated swivelling, his speech had a normal progression. He was talking of the methods coming into vogue in America for treatment of what is termed competent alcoholics. Middle-class people, achievers, people with a stake in their societies.

  ‘There’s a recent Johns Hopkins paper on how the bar has been raised in terms of what we regard as achievement. It’s titled “Alcoholism and worthlessness in times of affluence”. Excellent, excellent,’ said Raymond. ‘I must remember to let you see it. Two generations ago, to be able to provide for one’s family was a sufficient source of self-respect and justification for existence. Food on the table and pride withal. The grace said before eating was an endorsement of that. Gone, you see. All gone. Now such basic provision is taken for granted by educated people in countries like ours, and so much more is expected. You’ve got to excel, be in advance of your peers, above all gain some celebrity status within your field at least. Competence is failure; the norm is failure; lack of distinction is failure.’

  Beside the roses the bald man still recounted his anecdotes, and his companion responded with laughter, but the touching had stopped, and they began to walk slowly over the green lawn. Soon they passed out of the view framed by the office window, and there was just the grass, the shadow line on it and the yellow blooms to be seen. Only when neither of them was visible did it occur to me that the laughing man reminded me of my father: very tall, and generous in response to the efforts of others to entertain him.

  Raymond Austen’s enthusiasm for his profession was admirable, and his familiarity with contemporary medical literature reassuring for a patient, but I had so often been on his side of the desk that I knew that his explanations were as much for his benefit as for mine. How many times in discussion of a thesis had I taken the opportunity to live again some visit to an antiquity, or lay out the ideas for a journal paper I was considering. And when the graduate students left, I would have little memory at all of their own views, but feel a spike of renewed interest for my own.

  How salutary to be a patient, an inmate, to be the recipient of treatment, to have the inferior role, when you aren’t accustomed to it. Once you pass beyond wounded vanity, there is such valuable understanding gained. To be kept waiting outside the official door, to have your own conversation brusquely interrupted, or patronised, to be reprimanded by the cleaning woman for stains on your locker, and by the under-gardener for picking a tulip, to be ignored by young women, and surpassed as a raconteur in the therapy group by an unemployed country and western singer of no education whatsoever. To realise how ordinary a person you are, once the trappings of a profession are removed: to undergo submission.

  ‘We are learning all the time,’ Raymond said. ‘Certainly accusation has no place in modern treatment. I myself see social change as equally important to effective pharmaceutical intervention, but there’s no silver bullet, of course. Ah, no silver bullet.’ He was free of extravagant affectation, though he did have a small hourglass in a wooden frame on his desk, like an egg-timer, and would reverse it to begin an interview, and run a finger down the pronounced indentation in his lip. He began to explain to me what he had to offer in the absence of the silver bullet, while I imagined the jocund swirl of brandy in a globed glass.

  After lunch that same day there was a group therapy session. It was held in the far end of the dining hall because the carpet of the dayroom was being professionally cleaned, and the television lounge was being used for choir practice. Notice was given of choir practices many times, but during the weeks I was there I heard no singing, and no recitals were given. Maybe it was a euphemism for something more closely related to elusive health.

  Aromas of mince, pasta and washing detergent still drifted in the air of the dining room as we gathered some of the wooden chairs to form a circle. The clothes we wore, our body language, were deliberately casual, but there was nevertheless an air of mild anticipation. Personal revelations were sometimes made, aspirations and failures revealed that were of interest to others, skirmishes for personal ascendancy in the netherworld of our pitiful society.

  Eugene Dodd convened the session, and began as usual by asking new arrivals to briefly introduce themselves. One was a young man with very thin, tattooed arms and a vestigial goatee beard. Lloyd. ‘My search is for the redeemer,’ he said. ‘We’ll never be free of the drink until we have a greater salvation.’

  ‘This may be the place,’ said Eugene firmly.

  ‘Let it be so,’ said Lloyd. ‘Amen.’

  ‘There’s religious blokes, ministers, who’ll visit if you want them,’ said Roseanne. She wore slipper boots, and had a left cheek tic if other people talked too much.

  ‘Let’s put that on one side for just the moment,’ suggested Eugene. I heard that he’d originally been hired as office manager, but gradually moved into areas of treatment, where there were always shortages. ‘Also this afternoon we welcome Caroline,’ he said. Eugene wasn’t a highly intelligent person, but had authentic compassion for others that survived a flow of needy and recalcitrant personalities. It was humbling to realise my own inadequacies by comparison, and simultaneously irritating to suffer his trite commentary.

  ‘Nuffin would’ve stopped me if only I could’ve been able to learn another language,’ said Caroline. ‘I was going with a friend to teach in Korea if only I could’ve picked up the lingo quicker. She done very well for herself and I was left here with nuffin really.’

  ‘How often drink sabotages our ambitions. You’ll find all sorts of talents here, Carol.’

  ‘It’s Caroline.’

  ‘Sorry. Caroline. You’ll find all sorts of abilities here, Caroline,’ said Eugene. ‘Many of the brightest people fall into the arms of drink.’

  ‘It’s scientifically documented,’ said Roseanne. Sometimes her tic was like an exaggerated wink, more often just a fleeting tremor.

  ‘It’s an easy way out,’ said Bobby. ‘That’s what it is, whether you’re bright, thick as two planks or nutty as squirrel turd. And it always works, doesn’t it, more’s the pity.’

  ‘More’s the pity,’ echoed Roseanne.

  ‘Down, down you go,’ said Eugene.

  ‘The slippery slope,’ said Bobby, who always sat with his thighs splayed to accommodate a beer gut.

  ‘In the end I rung up the help line,’ said Caroline. ‘The
guy I was living with got shitty, but you know, don’t you, when you need to turn your life around.’

  ‘God reaches out,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘You’ve come to a turning point,’ affirmed Eugene.

  ‘There’s a hell of a smell of mince or something in here,’ said Roseanne.

  ‘I can’t smell nuffin like that,’ said Caroline. ‘I had my nose broken twice in domestics and now everyfing smells like milk gone off.’

  ‘We are in the dining room after all,’ I said.

  ‘Who pulled your chain?’ said Bobby.

  ‘Now, Bobby,’ said Eugene in a tone of both admonition and reasonableness. ‘You know the rules of group discussion.’

  ‘Do unto others, Christian charity, people in glasshouses, Jesus is always listening,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘Well, those things may well apply as well,’ agreed Eugene.

  ‘I just seem to make bad choices in my men,’ said Caroline. ‘I mean you don’t like to be lonely, do you, but it’s no fun getting biffed all the time either. I won’t fucking put up with it.’

  ‘Now, Caroline. Rules of discussion re language,’ said Eugene, and Roseanne gave a dramatic twitch because she had been out of the conversation for so long. She started to speak, but Caroline overrode her.

  ‘If only I could’ve got to Korea with a language with my friend Amber, everyfing would’ve been okay,’ she said.

  ‘Today,’ said Eugene firmly, wanting to bring the group ‘on task,’ as he termed it, ‘I thought we would talk about our parents. Share some of the influences of conditioning — causal links, prejudice, respect and so on.’

  So we embarked upon our topic. I contributed nods and brief phatic noises; I inhaled the persistent and sad odours of the dining room, while keeping my thoughts to myself.

  My mother and father were both similar and yet distinct. I realise now that both of them were studies in disappointment, but dealt with that quite differently.

  Brian had wanted to be a doctor, but couldn’t maintain his grades and finally became an industrial chemist in the paint manufacturing business. He was a considerable success there. So much so that that he outgrew practical science and ascended into administration. He was offered promotions to Australia, but turned them down and became a keen mobile home traveller. He started with a Volkswagen campervan and ended, after successively larger vehicles, with a house truck so big that the driveway had to be enlarged to provide parking space. He christened it Eden, and the name was scrolled professionally in gold metallic paint on both front doors. At the rear end of Eden was a special rack for a 50cc moped.

  Dad provided the height in the family. He was six foot three and thin with it. He tended to stoop towards people in conversation, which gave an erroneous impression of condescension. Travel and drink were means of assuaging his professional disappointment, and he was happiest when the two combined to give him a double hit.

  My mother was called Eve, and was undisturbed by the references that this provoked. When in a light humour, she sometimes called my father Adam, and he would call her the apple of his eye. Eve liked to tell of her first meeting with my father at a disco party in Lower Hutt. They had gone with other partners who became besotted with each other and disappeared together quite early in the night. Brian and Eve were the rejects who attempted to maintain their self-esteem by dancing with great animation and finding favour with each other. She said he was a temporary convenience who became a habit; he said that, apart from the besotted girl, she had the loveliest hair in the world.

  Eve was a geography and history teacher, but saw her true calling as poetry. She did university extension classes, attended festival readings and published in small booklets co-operatively funded by their authors. She said that teaching prevented her from achieving literary success, that it drew from the same emotional and intellectual wells as her writing, but my father’s income was enough to support the family if she’d wished to give up teaching. My mother had a very pleasant face, but steadily put on weight until she became one of those stately women who seem to glide on castors like theatrical scenery.

  My father was a jovial man, skilled at superficial acquaintanceship. He could hold up his end in conversation with anybody, and told me that often on their travels he would strike up transient friendships while my mother remained inside the mobile home reading Elizabeth Bishop or Lauris Edmond. Like most school teachers, Eve had for so long confronted resentful ignorance that she assumed it universal. ‘Dear God,’ she would say, ‘just to have some time to oneself.’

  Maybe that’s why she, as well as Brian, seemed happy to spend an increasing amount of life in the mobile homes, despite their differences. Movement and change gave my parents the illusion of progress, I think, and shielded them from the disappointments of not being a doctor, or a poet. Life on the road may well have protected them a little too, from the burden of an alcoholic son.

  I rarely saw them during their retirement. My visits then were almost always to their empty house, where I would air the rooms, check appliances, collect the mail and carry out perfunctory tasks in the section. It was unusual to find my parents at home. Rather I’d receive the odd text, or phone call, from Blueskin Bay, Motueka, or Rawene in the Hokianga. And when they were in residence they seemed to be incessantly unloading their lives from the mobile home, or stocking it again. Finally they expanded their peripatetic lifestyle overseas and would fly to Vancouver, Cairns or Helsinki and hire mobile homes there for extended wanderings.

  So the house was usually forlorn when I went there as an adult, and filled more readily by memories of childhood. The living room had an expensive suite in white leather to replace the black one I had defaced as a boy, nestled there picking at the leather surface absently as I watched television programmes of aliens, sophomores and hard-bitten cops, until at the very end of the sofa armrests the skin had been worn away to expose the softer, grey nap.

  An electric heater had been installed in the fireplace, with the false flicker of moulded logs, but there was still the faint smell of pine resin, and small burns on the rimu hearth surround. ‘Put a decent shovelful of coal on, for God’s sake,’ my father would say, but Eve never did because she wanted to use the wood ashes on the garden. ‘Can’t we put ourselves before the garden?’ he’d say.

  ‘Only to view it,’ mother would reply. Yet I never read a poem of hers to do with Wordsworthian nature. Rather they were resolutely domestic and she favoured the twee device of shape replicating subject. She won second prize in a local competition with a nostalgic poem on the theme of old dresses in her wardrobe. On the page the words formed the shape of a clotheshanger.

  My bedroom became Eve’s study and sewing room, but the transition was incomplete. Her computer surmounted my desk, but my single bed was still beneath the window in case of overflow guests, and closely populated with soft toys in pastel colours. Most belonged to my sister, Rachel, though I recognised as mine one worn, ginger bear who could still be forced to emit a slight, terminal groan. A few of my own textbooks stood with Eve’s more contemporary collection on the wall shelves, and the squat, greenstone trophy I won in inter-school debating still did duty as a bookend. The walls were repainted, but there was a minor blemish between the door and the corner where I’d put in an uncouth nail to hang a portrait of Pope Benedict XV as a typical student irreverence. I bought it at a garage sale together with a broken metronome housed in walnut, and a brass artillery shell cut down for an ashtray. All had parted company with me at some forgotten time over the years of student flats.

  Even the laundry had its memories, although the appliances had been updated several times. There was no winking computer display when I was eleven and saw, through the almost closed door, Alby Wigram humping his sister on the sheets and pillowcases strewn on the floor. The two of them had stayed for a weekend while their parents looked at a grocery business in Hokitika. They can’t have thought it a worthwhile proposition, for both Alby and his sister remained in Wellington. After seeing
them in the laundry I was surprised to find that they continued to look like all the other kids ahead of me at school. It was a lesson to me in the ambiguity of the ordinary.

  Despite my father’s love of travel, he was ritualistic, as if the repetitions could hold back even time itself. He whistled the same tunes for forty years — have you noticed how few people whistle now? He sat in the same kitchen chair and the same lounge chair; each night he took the change from his pocket and arranged it as a small pyramid on his bedside table; the car bonnet was inevitably the last panel he washed; he always cut and drew out the string holding the corned beef before carving it; whenever it started to rain he would lift his face to the sky and say, ‘Send her down, Huey.’

  He knew the experience of epiphany, and sometimes I would see him struck dumb for a moment, and with an expression of blank absorption. Only once did he attempt to communicate anything of that to me. We were walking by the rocky point of Abbey Bay when a great seal broke through the swirling kelp and surf only a few metres away, reared, gaped soundlessly, then subsided utterly. ‘I feel as if God has just taken a photograph,’ he said quietly. When a small boy I would hear him walk past my bedroom at night on his way to urinate and blow his nose on lavatory paper.

  Children have difficulty sometimes in distinguishing between fact and fiction, and I find myself increasingly in the same predicament. In the midst of conversation I hesitate, struck with the suspicion that what I’m about to propose as having happened, is a recollection of a dream. Undoubted experience has become almost unbelievable at such remove, and places and incidents from reading, or imagination, have overwhelming persuasion.