Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  Barbara Clarkson brought her two daughters to learn violin from me while I was still living at home. I taught them in Mum’s music studio under the house. Barbara remembers a father who was very involved with his children. Your father seemed to be really trying to inspire you all in a way that other fathers didn’t, she tells me. She speaks of the musical rope that surrounded the family and situates Dad on the outside of the chaos of sound and music, calling to us in the centre of the whirlpool with his poetry, his crosswords, his funny stories, his practical jokes, and his Latin declensions. Trying to bring order to the confusion around us, to balance up the music with language.

  Dad wasn’t interested in small talk and never went to the pub. According to Paul, social chitchat just passed him by. Rather than do small talk he would just do something pretty weird, he tells me. He never told jokes. He expressed himself very well in words but also in ways other than language.

  Cathie remembers a man who was not judgmental, who had seen a lot of ‘real life’. As headmaster of many schools throughout his religious tenure he had been subject to intimidation and violence as part of his job. He was threatened with guns and once even had his house set on fire. Dad never divulged by whom – disgruntled parents, families, former students? Cathie tells me:

  I can imagine in those days the Catholic schools would have had a lot of the socially disadvantaged, poverty, broken homes, all that sort of thing. So he was very slow to make judgments about people. He never once made a comment about the way I conducted my life. He just said quietly once or twice to let him know if I needed help. I think he was just beyond all that moral stuff. He was much too practical and subtle to think of things in black and white. I think our life at St Lucia would have seemed like plain sailing to him after what he’d been through.

  Dad didn’t have mainstream passions. He didn’t socialise much or have expensive hobbies. After he retired he liked crosswords in the morning, swimming in the afternoon and walking in the evening. According to Paul, Dad had a complexity to his way of thinking about things that allowed him, in the end, to appreciate simplicity. He was religious in the sense that he preferred to examine his own actions rather than point the finger at others; devout in his attention to the simple things around him; and human in the failings he saw in himself that he sometimes projected onto his children. But he was also a man with a poet’s heart and he knew the world was a difficult place. ‘Look after your brothers and sisters,’ he used to say to me. ‘Look after each other.’ He had a frugality to his life that just enabled him to be happy with what he had, Paul concludes. He came across as a father who didn’t really have anything – like golf or business or the job he had – that dragged him away from the family.

  In 1985, Dad wrote in another letter to Cathie:

  Tomorrow the Spring Hill baths close up for the winter. So I’ll have to find a warm spa somewhere, perhaps at Vichy. I’ve been swimming twice a day at Grammar where I’m constantly saluted by old friends who ask me to come back just to talk to them at morning teas. Paul and Stephen rarely come with me now. I recall a summer when they swam 100 lengths morning and evening for which they earned a cent per lap. They are playing their first rugby game of the season on Saturday – not so much enthusiasm for the game, I think, as in previous years. They are not beefy enough now. Though both are taller, especially Stephen, whose hand-me-down blazer from Paul is tight and inadequate now.

  I read in Dad’s writing a man who was an elderly father to teenage boys, who wanted – needed – to keep working. His enforced retirement hit him hard; he often spoke about being asked back to do relief teaching – offers that never materialised. But he was a man who was also well practised in the art of surrendering his ego. He was, after all, at an age when many men were playing golf and going on retirement cruises, while he was still putting five children through school on a modest teacher’s salary. He didn’t stint when things got hard; he drove us all to school and offered himself up on the weekends to ferry his sons to football and cricket games and his daughters to orchestra practice and music lessons. I shared more than daily drives with him, though; I also shared his embarrassment when, from the schoolyard, I watched him make the lonely walk up the hill to the principal’s office to ask for an extension for the payment of our school fees, because he couldn’t afford to pay them. Sometimes I ached, too, to be his daughter and to feel, when I visited the large, well-equipped houses of my school friends, our lack of status and material things.

  I once saw Mum and Dad perform together in public. One afternoon in the auditorium of the private school where Dad taught English, history and Latin, he gave a lecture on The Great Gatsby. I was thirteen and hadn’t yet read the Fitzgerald classic, but I listened for over an hour as Dad read a carefully prepared lecture which consisted of extracts from the book interspersed with stories from the twenties – strange tales of speakeasies, flappers, goodtime gals and their dreamy beaus. Mum was part of the show too: during breaks in Dad’s commentary she played and sang songs from the Gatsby era, numbers with titles like ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’, ‘I’ll Be Loving You Always’ and ‘Ain’t We Got Fun’.

  In the morning

  In the evening

  Ain’t we got fun?

  Not much money

  Oh, but honey

  Ain’t we got fun?

  Mum and Dad were a good team. Mum’s showgirl qualities and beautiful voice gave just the right touch of entertainment to the serious tone of Dad’s words. I should have been embarrassed. Most teenage girls – even bookish, daggy, violin-playing teenage girls like me – would have been mortified by their parents making a spectacle of themselves, not just in public, but in front of that cruellest, most sceptical and hard-to-please crowd: a hall full of teenage boys who, under most circumstances, would have been itching to get out of the air-conditioned auditorium and onto the nearby football field or cricket pitch. But, as Mum commented truthfully afterwards, that day you really could ‘hardly hear a pin drop’.

  There was another quality to their performance, though, that I definitely would have been too embarrassed to pinpoint at the time, but which I can attempt to define now. My parents were what people might describe these days as ‘kind of sexy together’. This realisation only comes with hindsight and an adult understanding of what being ‘kind of sexy together’ might mean. Not the overt in-your-face kind of sexy, but the underneath-the-skin kind of sexy that comes from something that’s been worked at, from doing something creative together – from really playing together.

  Or does the sensuousness of my memory have something to do with my ripening body sitting in a room full of teenage boys? Perhaps it was the ache inside Fitzgerald’s language that aroused me. Or it could have been the slides my father used to illustrate his narratives: black and white stills of men and women staring loosely into the camera, lounging easily into each other with what I would later recognise as the casual physicality that comes from money, alcohol, sex and drugs. Whatever it was, it was there and it was palpable and I can honestly say I never saw them in that light before or after. I wonder, though, whether Dad was turned on and moved by the sound of things just like I was, whether he was more than just proud of my pretty blonde mother as she sang her parts in his carefully structured performance. Inside his robust body, did he feel the ache as well, the call of song and poetry, that divine whisper that would eventually call me too?

  GALOP INFERNAL

  I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath.

  Dante, The Divine Comedy

  Although there were hundreds of poems in the bookshelves of our home in St Lucia, I can’t remember ever seeing a copy of Rimbaud’s Season in Hell or The Inferno by Dante. I would discover these poems later, during a period of voracious reading after I left my parents’ house. In Dante’s poem, hell is a place where you are stuck forever, frozen by fear, madness or the suffering in your own mind. Rimbaud’s vision of hell is like a mad bark f
rom a howling wolf, poison seeping out from its wounds. It is a place of torment and of unfettered desire, yet it can also be a purifying prelude to the heaven of the ‘divine love’ that could bestow the keys to all knowledge.

  Though Dad was a churchgoing Catholic all his life, I don’t really know if he thought that the keys to knowledge were to be found in divine love. He had contemplated divine love for over thirty years in the solitude of his monastic life and in the end made the choice to walk out of the monastery’s door to search for the keys to knowledge in his love for a woman – my mother – and his children. Perhaps if he contemplated heaven – and hell – he might have thought that he had found heaven on earth with us, in the house at 34 Warren St, St Lucia, and that the keys to knowledge could only unlock the doors to a family home and all the tears, laughter, shadows and light that it enfolded within its four walls.

  Dad’s preferred version of hell was contained, I think, in the poems of Milton, where hell is a loss, an absence of the paradise that is rightfully ours ‘until one Man … Restore us/and regain the blissful seat’. The blissful seat, the heaven on which we sit, can always be regained through hard work – the tasks of purgatory. Dad knew the value of hard work and austerity. It was not in his nature to have to purify himself through a complete dissembling of the senses, as Rimbaud did in his season in hell. He preferred his pain to be private and to treat his wounds with humour. If he was alive today he might shake his head in embarrassment to know that his second daughter became that ‘beggar girl, that monster child’ who, driven by her own will, made the journey into the underworld. He might also have thought that my youth had been idle, as Rimbaud thought his had been, and that, also like Rimbaud, I had allowed my sensitivity to waste my life. But he might have been pleased as well that the will which had driven me away also eventually brought me back to the house he had shared with my mother, her mother, and my brothers and sisters, driven me back to my mother so that I could walk beside her for a while as she passed through hell.

  I am not really surprised that Dad would not have favoured Rimbaud’s version of hell. If Beauty had sat on my father’s knee he would have honoured rather than reviled her and, unlike Rimbaud, I do not think Dad thought morality a weakness of the brain. He might have agreed with Rimbaud about the power of the mind and its perception of things. If he thought he was in hell then he probably was. If he believed he was in heaven then the blissful seat would be restored to him and Beauty – without bitterness – would perch again upon his knee. If we had ever had the chance to discuss such abstract things, I hope he might then have turned his smile towards me and relieved me a little of my shame – this shame I still carry of being the wilful, curious, passionate daughter of such an austere, complex and humble man.

  Mum’s favourite version of hell was probably also the most entertaining one. In Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, Eurydice is no passive beauty waiting to be rescued by Orpheus. At the end of Offenbach’s frolic, Eurydice decides to stay on in the underworld to pursue a life of pleasure, dancing and the fulfilment of her desires, perhaps because, as Cyndi Lauper sang over a hundred years later, ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’.

  This ‘opera bouffe’, a particularly French version of operetta written and performed in a burlesque style, is full of comedy, satire and farce – not to mention dancing girls. Serious music critics condemned it as a ‘profanation of holy and glorious antiquity’ and public decency was especially outraged at the galop infernal, the ‘infernal dance’, or ‘the can-can’, which was performed at the show’s climax by showgirls in skimpy costumes.

  Mum performed in Orpheus in the Underworld in the old Brisbane Opera Society when she was a young woman working in the typing pool at Queensland Railways. I don’t know if she played one of the shepherdesses in the rural idyll at the beginning of the operetta, one of Pluto’s consorts who shares his revels in hell, or one of the dancing girls who lift their skirts and twirl their legs at the end of Orpheus’s journey through the underworld. I doubt she would have consorted or danced; I think she was most suited to the part of the shepherdess tending to her little lambs in a field of flowers. Although Mum loved to sing she was never much of a dancer, and certainly would not have felt comfortable at all in skimpy costumes of any kind.

  After she married she threw herself into family life and tended to her own little lambs with the same commitment that she devoted herself to her studies and her teaching. She was always at heart a good girl – and raised me to be one too – and she grew to be, as her mother was, but unlike her tempestuous second daughter, a good, respectable woman. She was never beholden to the gatekeepers of serious music, though, and she disliked snobs of any kind. So I think that in her secret self she might have preferred a world filled with light classics, with the bubble of the opera bouffe, with songs of wit and romance, of passion and heartbreak that always seemed to find, despite their apparent ease, the perfect and delicate balance between words and music, between structure and emotion, between torment and delight.

  One night during a Brisbane thunderstorm, Mum’s doctor tries her out on a new Alzheimer’s medication even though she has not yet been diagnosed with the disease. The drug causes a psychotic episode during which Mum tries to escape from her hospital ward, thinking it is a hotel full of German soldiers. She asks a laundry van driver to take her to the police. Ninety minutes after taking the drug, she is found hiding under the van, screaming at imaginary assailants, begging for her life to be spared. I hear about these events the next day when I arrive for a visit.

  Mum is sitting up in bed when I enter her room. Her hair is uncombed and her eyes are open wide like saucers. Despite her distressed state, I cannot hold back my sudden anger: I told them they couldn’t give you any more medication without asking our permission, I say, my voice strangled with frustration. Did you sign something? Did you give them your permission?

  She holds on to my hand, her eyes huge and dark in her stressed face.

  Linda, please, she begs me. Darling. Be gentle with me.

  I am furious at the hospital, at Mum’s doctor, at Mum herself. When the day nurse comes in, Mum takes her hand and holds out her cheek for a kiss from her, from anyone, probably, who would show her some tenderness. Anyone who isn’t me.

  This is Jenny. Jenny’s my friend. Unlike you, she could have added. Unlike you, my mean, angry daughter.

  I cannot mask the coldness in my voice as I address Jenny. Do you know what happened to Mum?

  It’s best that you talk to the doctor, Jenny begins. We’ve been trying to get hold of her all morning. Apparently she’s down in Sydney somewhere for a family wedding.

  I follow her out towards the nurses’ desk where two other nurses are noticeably scowling at me.

  Can you at least tell me what new drugs she’s been given? I ask.

  That’s all available on the chart, she tells me. You have access to that information here. She gestures towards the desk. I can get the head nurse to talk to you if you like.

  She is doing her best. I know she is doing her best. I will keep on telling myself she is doing her best.

  Back inside her room, Mum is gesticulating wildly for me to come back.

  She’s one of them too, you know, she tells me when I return to her room.

  One of who? I ask, unkindly. I thought she was your friend.

  She whispers, as if we are co-conspirators: They pretend once in a while, but that’s just so you drop your guard and then they get you. She continues breathlessly, holding on to my arm like a child: I heard one of the nurses say ‘We’ve got to get Linda. Get Linda. Get Linda.’ I thought they were going to get you. I mean really get you, she repeats as she digs her nails into my arm. And then I didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t recognise anybody and then I realised that everybody I knew had been replaced and that everyone – EVERYONE – was in on it.

  When Jenny comes in to say goodbye at the en
d of her shift, she tries to kiss Mum, but Mum shrinks back. Apologising on Mum’s behalf, I walk with Jenny to the lift.

  I wouldn’t normally say this, she tells me, offering me her serene face, which makes me feel calm just by looking at it, but I want to let you know that even if your mother’s doctor prescribes that tablet again for her tonight, we wouldn’t give it to her. She has never shown any symptoms of psychosis. You’ll never get the doctor to admit any of this. One thing most of them are scared of more than anything is legal liability.

  I know she is going out on a limb to tell me this. Even in the middle of all the craziness I can appreciate her kindness to me at this moment.

  That’s why they get the patients to give written permission. It covers them legally, she continues. As long as the doctors never admit their mistake, they’re covered. At this point in time your doctor would be most worried about the fact that you might sue her for incompetence or something. Anyway … she trails off, I’ve said enough.

  When I leave Jenny at the lifts, I am balanced perfectly at that moment between gratitude towards Jenny and bodily rage. My fury has nowhere to go, though; I know my family – and especially Mum – would not have the stomach for a protracted battle with the hospital. I feel like an utter failure, knowing I cannot speak the language of this strange territory to where we have been transported, and where we seem to have arrived clutching one-way tickets.

  I blame myself. I should have handled it better, should have seen what was coming. If it was up to me, I would walk out of the hospital and never come back. It is not so simple for Mum. The medical machine sometimes seems unstoppable, immune to any recourse from those whom it can injure the most – the old, the sick and the vulnerable. Battling her disease has drained all of her physical and emotional resources; now there seems to be nothing left for either fight or flight. Not even the psychosis driving like a whirlwind through her body can give her an exit strategy: there is simply nowhere for her to go.