Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  But what about the positive influence of friendship, camaraderie and survivor alliances? In another study that explored the protective role of friendship on the effects of childhood abuse and depression, psychologist Abigail Powers and her colleagues noted the ‘importance of understanding the effects that emotional abuse and neglect have on adult depression and how perceived friendship support may provide a buffer for women with a history of early life stress who are at risk to develop adult depression’. Emma and I were too young to ‘support’ each other in the adult ways I now benefit from, but our shared pop cacoethes was a life-sustaining buffer against stresses and feelings that lurked deeper than my conscious child mind could fathom.

  Our fondness for Sherbet reached peak hysteria one summer while we were holidaying at my grandparents’ council flat in Maroubra. Somewhere between excursions to the beach to flirt with surfers several years our senior, lusty binges on lollies and junk food, and night-time break-and-enters into my grandmother’s miniature-liqueurs cabinet, we got serious about Sherbet. Emma had already declared Daryl Braithwaite her one true love and another friend, Allison, had laid claim to Garth Porter. It was time for me to choose from the remaining three. Alan Sandow, the drummer, was too thickset and bare-chested for my pubescent liking while the dark curls of Tony Mitchell, the bassist, weren’t to my fledgling taste. I settled on Harvey, the replacement for founding member Clive Shakespeare. He was tall and lean, with blue eyes, feathery honey-brown hair and an impish grin, so I set my sights on him as we launched our Project Pop Paradise.

  We enlisted my grandmother to sew satin bomber jackets for us, the kind the band sported, with Daryl and Harvey embroidered on the back. We wore the jackets constantly and, in the time-honoured tradition of fandom, we pasted posters all over our bedroom walls, listening to Sherbet songs on repeat. When school resumed we spent every weekend together daydreaming, strategising and pining. It wasn’t just about the music, though we did like the songs. It wasn’t so much about Harvey himself, though he was, it turns out, a good musician and a good man. It was the instigation of adult desire, a ritual in girls’ tribal life: the teen celebrity crush. Sherbet offered a thrilling diversion.

  Conversations with Emma over recent years have revealed conflicting perceptions of who was the leader and who was the follower in our friendship. I maintain I followed her lead and she is convinced she followed mine. Even so, I am certain it was Emma who instituted two key rites of passage: smoking and Sherbet. Emma’s influence on me is irrefutably captured in mimesis; in the Flashez clip I copy her manner of speech, which is so notable that Chris James, Harvey’s girlfriend back in the day, and later his wife and the mother of his children, asked on Facebook if I still had ‘that unique accent’. I replied no, I didn’t, because it had never been mine.

  The year after we started high school – suburbs apart – Emma and I ramped up our campaign. It was no longer enough to listen to records and gaze on Sherbet’s backlit, big-haired, semi-nude form in glossy pictures. We had to meet them, to demonstrate our devotion. ‘The amorous gift is a solemn one,’ writes Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse, ‘swept away by the devouring metonymy which governs the life of the imagination, I transfer myself inside it altogether.’ We swooned, delirious, enraptured, held by the force of our symbiotic projections. It was not about sex. I experienced the inevitable sensual stirrings and sexual curiosities of adolescence but those stirrings and curiosities hadn’t yet matured into a full-bodied physical desire for another. My desire was about romance fused to the fetishisation of absence, the man-sized space left by my father supercharged with an unruly mix of need and void in which I could only want what wasn’t possible to have, a man who wasn’t there.

  At the start of our die-hard pursuit, Sherbet was the biggest band in the country and you couldn’t get near them. But Emma and I were not your average fans. We not only crossed the line to obsession, we raced right over it, screaming to a faint. When Mike Meade interviewed us that day at Victoria Park we were at the threshold of stalker status:

  Do you go to all their concerts?

  Me: Yeah, most of them.

  Emma: All that we can.

  Do you follow them around?

  Me: If we know where they’re going we do.

  In what way do you try and catch up with them?

  Emma: Find out where they live.

  Do you know where they live?

  Me: Yeah. We know where Harvey lives. We know where Garth lives. We know half of Garth’s phone number.

  So, you know where they live. Have you been around there?

  Me: No, not yet.

  Towards the end of the interview, when asked how we hoped to meet them, I reply with a determined, ‘Any way we can. I’ve just got a feeling we’re going to meet them.’ Mike Meade replies wryly, ‘I still feel that way about the Beatles.’ Emma nudges me and whispers for me to tell him what Harvey said. I respond obediently: ‘Harvey says in this little book we’ve got – Sherbet or Harvey, I don’t know – your dreams can always come true if you believe your mind.’ ‘And we believe our minds,’ Emma declares.

  We were painfully earnest open books, spilling over with affect; or rather we were conduits for a complex current of affect that whipped around the park that day. Affect: to be affected, to affect another. The philosopher Brian Massumi uses the word ‘intensity’ for affect, defining emotion as ‘intensity owned and recognized’ and affect as ‘intensity unqualified, not ownable or recognizable’. Feelings, says Teresa Brennan, in her exploration of the transmission of affect, are ‘sensations that have found the right match in words’.

  Brennan puts forth a swath of suggestions about how affect moves between us, stressing that her understanding of affective transmission is of a ‘process that is social in origin but biological and physical in effect’, meaning that our experience of affect is, from the start and throughout our lives, relational, fluid and contagious, even if our experience of it is felt as distinctly bodily and subjective. If the idea of affective transmission rubs liberal ideology up the wrong way, we need only to view footage of a Beatles concert circa 1964 or consult the history books for examples of wildfire contagions. The Dancing Plague of 1518 began with a lone woman dancing on a Strasbourg street. By the end of the first week there were thirty-five dancers, and by the end of the first month their numbers had grown to around four hundred. The plague proved fatal: some died from heart attack, stroke or exhaustion. Physicians at the time said the plague was caused by ‘hot blood’, a rather poetic evocation of affect. Another example, centuries later in 1962: the journal American Scientist reported an outbreak of contagious laughter in a small town in Tanzania. What began as an isolated fit of laughter (and sometimes crying) in a group of twelve- to eighteen-year-old schoolgirls rapidly rose to epidemic proportions, eventually infecting nearby communities, closing schools and continuing for six months. These epidemics are rare extremes, but they demonstrate the way in which ‘bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear – in short, communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable kind of passion’, as writer and theorist Anna Gibbs so eloquently puts it.

  Emma and I were caught up in a collective hysteria, one to which young girls are particularly, and culturally, susceptible. It was a gendered performance of heteronormative desire. Gender, Judith Butler maintains, involves a social performance in which ‘individual bodies’ enact a repetition of meanings already socially established, and thus gender is ‘real only to the extent that it is performed’. Significantly, she stresses the importance of the collective dimension and the public nature of this performance. There we were, performing het-femininity on the brink of burgeoning womanhood, being interviewed as ‘Sherbet fans’. As I look back now, what seems most real, most true, of that scene of two girls on the grass, in the wind, on th
at cloudy grey day, answering questions from one man about other men who literally took centre stage that day, is the profound love between Emma and me.

  ‘Love,’ says Brennan, ‘directs positive feelings toward the other by attending to the specificity of the other (rather than seeing the other through idealizing or demonizing projections).’ Our fandom was a heady idealising shape-shifting projection, but our bond was made of heart-glue and grounded in the lived reality of incalculable hours of shared time and space.

  Decades ago, when we were children, I gave Emma a toy duck. She kept it into adulthood, even through the many years in which we’d lost contact. In my mid-twenties, I tracked her down and she invited me to dinner. My boyfriend at the time and I were sitting around talking to her and her husband when she disappeared into her bedroom and emerged with the duck. The white of the fur had greyed and it was missing clumps of hair. I hardly knew where to look, certain I would not have kept such an ugly object whatever the sentimental value. These days she remembers my birthday every year before I do: a card turns up in the mail, despite the fact that we rarely see each other. This bond is strong and deeply rooted.

  Her card arrived several days ago with a crayon-drawn heart on the envelope. It’s almost as if she can sense I’m writing about her and our Sherbet days, because in it she reminisces about the Flashez clip, and how cute we were, adding: ‘Thank you for being my childhood friend. I don’t know what I would have done without you.’ And I don’t know what I would have done without her. Though I am a lesser friend, remiss when it comes to birthday and Christmas cards, Emma is, as Barthes puts it, a friend in that she can ‘leave for a while’ without her ‘image crumbling’. When you live in a post-traumatic state you live with an absence of solidity. Those who help you keep form by recognising you and affirming your existence, and those who maintain their form, who most stay alive, within you, become precious.

  After the Flashez interview, we intensified our mission and ramped up our determination. We began hanging around EMI when we knew the band was recording. We got autographs, though Daryl managed to evade us. We started spending every weekend staking out their houses, but the weekends were crowded with other fans who, like us, had done their homework and had the moxie to loiter. Emma maintains we were friendly to the other fans and enjoyed a sense of camaraderie with them, but not without petty bitchiness and jealousies. I recall a sense of competition, a drive to prove ourselves the biggest Sherbet fans ever. Before long we were forging our mother’s signatures on sick notes and wagging school to stalk our idols without being fettered by our weekend rivals. We’d meet at Central Station, then catch buses or hitchhike around Sydney in chase. There were various getting-high experiments in the nooks and crannies of the station, the aspirin and Coke failure soon followed by the smoking-nutmeg disappointment. Eventually I managed to source a supply of joints from the women at Jim’s and we’d get stoned and giggle irrepressibly for hours at everything and anything, till our tummies hurt, up the back of buses, collapsing with laughter as we walked along the street, set off by minor oddities. There were times when our giggling was so extreme we were incapable of speaking. That special language, those unique signs and shorthands that every close friendship develops. The joke you tell each other over and over again (that no one else laughs at). The way you can read a chapter of mood from a glimpse of the face and hear a song of stress in the tone of a lone-voiced word, the way you both instantly know what’s fun and funny.

  So many names. So many hours held by others. So many stories told and heard. The cups of tea and cigarettes and meals and films and books and conversations and plans and moments of unbearable sanity and death-defying madness. Maggie: watching you cut up in beer gardens, playing games of pool doubles, decades later coming across a story, while waiting in a supermarket queue, that you sold to the tabloid That’s Life, detailing sexual abuse by your brother. Pauly: driving the coast at night listening to The Beach Boys. Astrid: that rainy day in New York, having haircuts side by side then running, laughing, up Fifth Avenue without umbrellas, our little failures, you loving me as I am, singing The B-52s’ ‘Give Me Back My Man’ at your family’s holiday house with my new lover, sitting with you as you lay dying, stroking your forehead, thanking you for thirty years of friendship and for keeping me company in those first crazy years of sobriety. Katie: you holding my hand in the oncologist’s office the night before the operation after that wrenching week when we didn’t know how bad it was, when they’d told me it was ‘rare and aggressive’, the squeeze of hands and our teary relief when she said the scan showed it hadn’t spread and a second opinion indicated it might not be ‘the worst kind’ after all, but a more merciful malignancy that promised, once treated, to let me live well and long. Mal: passing time with you in the waiting room ahead of enduring my prescribed ‘brachytherapy’ radioactive dildo. Kris: that time years ago when I was frightened of a dire outcome and you said, ‘we’ll deal with it’; the power of that ‘we’ and the way it settled me into a knowing of care and calm. Days of hours on the phone. Seasons, reasons, lifetimes. I carry these uncrumbled images there where nothing dies.

  During those days of carefree truancy, Emma and I passed many hours at Garth’s in Watsons Bay, perhaps because it was the nicest location in which to while away a day. There were huge glass windows at the back of his house, which conveniently faced onto a park. We’d take our position on the grass and stare up, watching Garth and his girlfriend, Mary, and sometimes the whole band, hoping they’d notice us – the biggest Sherbet fans ever – and reward us with a smile. Harvey lived in Paddington, and we made contact with him several times over our many stakeouts. He was the sweetest back then, the one who had the most time for us. Perhaps he was the least jaded, the least worn down by the pressures of fame and the constant presence of testy fans, having been the last to join (he had been with the band less than a year at the time we commenced Project Pop Paradise). He seemed to see beyond the fan-girl caricature to the tender young beings we were and to return a little of our love. The most celebrated of our meetings with him took place at Garth’s. We were out front and the sun was beginning to set after a slavish day of waiting. Harvey walked out, saw us, shook his head and said, ‘Are you girls still here?’ He asked where we were headed and we told him we had to get to the city. ‘Jump in, I’ll give you a lift,’ he said, opening the door of his Jaguar. ‘It was only because he knew us from the Flashez clip, and he liked us and we’d already met him,’ Emma says of the remarkable gesture. ‘That’s the only reason we got the lift. He wasn’t going to put just any Sherbet girls in his car.’ I distinctly remember that when ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ came on I said, ‘I hate this song,’ and Harvey said, ‘Me too,’ and I swooned. Emma insists Harvey said he loved the song. ‘Whenever I hear it I think of Harvey. I love that song now,’ she proclaims. Memory plays tricks on us.

  Emma’s quest was arduous, for Daryl was the hardest to pin down and took the longest to meet. In a photo – now battered and bent from decades in her wallet – of Emma and Daryl on the day we cornered him, she is crying and overwrought at finally meeting her hero. We’d come close before but he had always proved elusive. ‘There was another time he came down with his German Shepherd, Sebastian, and got in his car,’ remembers Emma. ‘You and I ran down the street, jumped in a taxi and said, “Quick, follow that car!” We followed for a while but the taxi lost him.’

  We laugh now about our shenanigans, the way we’d brazenly flag a cab and forage with increasing play-acting alarm among our belongings before confessing that we had no money to pay the fare. The way we coyly played dumb as we conned our way through the days with bubbly, cheeky charm. Emma says people let us get away with it because we were nice and made their day interesting. Then it comes back to me, the dark side to this rollicking. We recall sharp-edged encounters and close shaves, when we accepted food, money or favours from creepy benefactors before making speedy getaways, laughing with relief and bra
vado at the tragic potentials we had eluded. ‘We put ourselves in such danger, didn’t we?’ Emma says in hushed tones.

  Some order of risk-taking is necessary – and yet. Our unthinking determination to live on our own fledgling terms pleases me – and yet. In a 2012 study, researchers Mohsen Kianpoor and Nour Mohammad Bakhshani from the Zahedan University of Medical Sciences in Iran define ‘high-risk’ as ‘volitional behaviors with an uncertain outcome that entail negative consequences’. They note that though this behaviour can manifest at any age, adolescents, confronted with ‘the task of defining their own identities’, often express bodily and emotional discomfort by ‘enacting risky behaviors that function to release and express aversive emotional distress and tension’. They also point out that numerous researchers have highlighted an association between trauma and risk-taking as a ‘repetition of the actions, performed or imagined, that occurred during the traumatic event’. High-risk behaviour, then, can be ‘conceptualized as a way of remembering, or as an unconscious attempt to gain mastery over the trauma’. No surprises here: ‘a history of maltreatment or other forms of psychological trauma is a precursor to health-risk behaviors in both adolescence and adulthood’. That Emma and I moved about in the world as if it were safe for women and girls, as if we weren’t the fantasy stuff of men who would do harm in order to get off, impresses me – and yet. Some unlucky young women who take risks as an unwitting way of regulating painful emotions encounter an unthinkable world of pain and trauma. Others are simply going about their lives when they have horror visited upon them.