Missing Christopher

by Jayne Newling

  Once, when he heard voices coming out of the radio ordering him to kill me, he locked himself in his room and forbade me to enter.

  He told me about it that night and then said, ‘If something ever happens to me you’ll have to sell this house.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’d see me in every room and I know you couldn’t live with that.’

  Two months after Christopher died, Gordon admitted Nic into a psychiatric hospital. It was there, locked up in the acute wing, Nic sadly confessed that at 11:30 on the night Criddy died, he wanted to die too. We thought he was asleep but as Phil and I screamed out of the garage towards the headland, he had just hung up from Kids Helpline. At that exact same time, 11:30, Christopher’s body was flying through the air.

  chapter 4

  It took more than an hour each morning for the boys to get from Bilgola to their school, Sydney Church of England Grammar School—or Shore, as it is known—in North Sydney, and the same for the return journey. When Nic started high school we decided to move to Balgowlah, a twenty-minute bus ride to school. We didn’t have time to unpack and settle in before we knew Ben, who was sixteen, was in trouble. He was able to go to school but spent the rest of the time in his bedroom, coming out only to eat and shower. He was diagnosed with depression and it took several attempts to find the right medication.

  During that same period thirteen-year-old Nic, who had been awarded music and academic scholarships, heard voices in his head; bad voices, mean and murderous. He wouldn’t do his homework, was agitated and unable to concentrate. Phil and I were getting pressure from the school as he was not keeping up with the scholarship requirements.

  Ben was in his room and Christopher was surfing with Murgy when on a warm November afternoon in 1999, Nic asked me to lie down next to him on his bed. He held my hand; his was clammy and trembling.

  ‘What’s up, Nic?’

  ‘Something’s wrong with me, Mum.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t feel right—I don’t feel like me. The walls are moving in.

  I see purple shapes in front of my eyes all the time and when I walk down the road, sometimes I want to kill people. I hear voices. Lots of them. They’re in my head.’

  I kissed him and reassured him we’d get help before stumbling out of the room. What was happening to my sons, my family? Ben was desperately unhappy, self-harming and locked away in his room.

  He didn’t want to sail, see his friends or play music. His alto and tenor saxophones remained in their cases under his bed. So did Christopher’s trumpet but only because it was not cool, as none of his rugby and surfing mates played instruments. Nic, who had shared the dux award the year before, couldn’t even read a book. He tried to play his violin but the sweep of his bow was discordant and grating, even to his confused ears.

  I didn’t understand his confession. Was it his creative and overactive imagination or a verbalisation of some dreamlike state? Was it real? And if so, how did the voices get inside his brain? It frightened Phil and me. We knew about depression and OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, but nothing about psychosis. This was something we couldn’t deal with on our own.

  Phil’s sister Jane recommended Bill, a psychologist who lived next door to her. Over several months he tried to help Nic but couldn’t diagnose him. Bill recommended that Nic see a psychiatrist who could diagnose and medicate him. One was recommended and we were able to get an appointment the following week.

  We were given an extended session of thirty minutes on our first visit. The others, the psychiatrist told us, would be fifteen minutes in duration. I wondered how anyone could possibly work out the mind’s demons in such short increments. After spending twenty minutes establishing he had a higher IQ than Nic, the psychiatrist, with a smug delighted air, diagnosed OCD and medicated him accordingly. Nic dramatically deteriorated with each fifteen-minute session. He refused to go to school, spending most of the day in bed.

  Without admitting he could be wrong, the psychiatrist suggested we send Nic to Rivendell, an historic child and adolescent mental health facility in the Sydney suburb of Concord on the Parramatta River. Rivendell is a twenty-bed inpatient and outpatient hospital. Its founding director was Professor Marie Bashir, a revered psychiatrist and later governor of New South Wales. Down the road the 2000 Sydney Olympics had just begun. While we waited for a consultation and possible acceptance into Rivendell, another psychologist, Adam, was recommended by Nic’s school counsellor.

  At the same time, Phil and I finally admitted to each other that we hated living in Balgowlah. I secretly called it the madhouse, blaming it for the destruction of our happy family unit. We’d only lived there for six months but I couldn’t wait to pack up and move. Phil found a house in Avalon with hundred-year-old cabbage palms and a shed for the chooks. It was only a kilometre from the beach. On the night we moved in, Adam called me after his weekly session with Nic.

  ‘Nic needs urgent help,’ he said. ‘He’s suicidal. He has to see a psychiatrist immediately.’

  Phil and I panicked. I spoke to Elizabeth, a psychiatrist at Rivendell the next morning. She could hear my fear and hysteria and said I could bring him in the following day.

  I sat by Nic’s bed throughout the night without sleep. I watched and wept as his body twitched and I held my ears as the voices made him scream out deranged gobbledegook into the dark.

  As the sun rose, I quickly showered while Phil kept watch over Nic. We told Ben and Christopher that Nic was seeing a new doctor.

  They had no idea then how sick he was. We dropped them at the bus stop and were on the road with Nic by seven.

  Nic was assessed in the morning and by early afternoon he was given a place at Rivendell. I hoped he would stay as an inpatient so he would receive around-the-clock care but he said he’d be lonely without us. After several months, Elizabeth, unable to definitively diagnose him, asked for Nic to see another Rivendell psychiatrist for a second opinion. After another month he, too, was unsure but diagnosed Nic as having a prodrome, or psychosis risk syndrome, an early symptom or set of symptoms that might indicate the start of a disease, in Nic’s case, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

  There was a school located in the grounds of Rivendell and once patients were established they were expected to attend classes. Nic struggled with the Year 7 math curriculum. He pretended he was proud of himself when he solved a simple equation but we saw his veiled disillusion and I tried not to cry or rip up the fucking grid paper.

  Nic made some friends at Rivendell, even though they were mostly inpatients. One had a deep and musical tenor voice, another would one day work for a major confectionary company; and then there was Simon. He loved rocks. Every day when I picked up Nic, Simon would run to me with a ‘special’ rock he’d found in the large grounds of Rivendell. The next day when he asked me what I did with it, I told him I was building a frog pond. I ended up with more than a hundred rocks. We filled the pond with water and when we heard the first croak, we named the pond after Simon. He was delighted when we told him.

  One day Christopher came with me to pick up Nic and as I talked to the doctor, my sons wandered off to the riverbank and sat together on a rock. Their heads were together in deep conversation. When we arrived home, Christopher whispered to me that he had the same illness as Nic.

  Shocked and scared, I asked him, ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Everything he is feeling, I’m feeling too. Everything.’

  The next day I asked Nic’s psychiatrist to see Christopher and after several sessions she diagnosed severe anxiety and depression. He, too, was medicated.

  Three sons—all of them inflicted with mental illness. I didn’t know how Phil and I were going to cope. Everything we ever hoped for our children had ended. I knew Nic’s dream of becoming a vet was over. I knew he wouldn’t even finish high school. I knew Christopher would hide his illness from his friends and the strain of that would cripple him. And Ben, who had survived his
shorter fight with depressive illness, would stand quietly by, powerless as he witnessed the mental disintegration of the brothers he always protected. Phil and I would love and protect them but our marriage would be under constant strain as we had no time for each other. We would silently blame each other. Too tough, too weak, bad genes. My mother and Phil’s brother had depression, I had had postpartum depression and there was OCD on both sides. What chance did they have?

  Christopher became increasingly wary of Nic’s moods. One moment Nic was raging, speaking fast and not sleeping, and the next we were unable to get him out of bed. Due to the cocktail of drugs, Nic would go from a thin 50 kilos to more than 100 kilos in just over a year, and his mental state was deteriorating daily. He wrote in his diary that he had to clear his ‘unclean mind’ by ritualistic killing. He was too young to understand what that meant.

  ‘I’ll spare you the details of my sick thoughts,’ he wrote. ‘It’s not something you want to hear or I want to tell you but the thing I do in my head to make up for it is a murder.

  ‘I have two of those corn cutting things the Grim Reaper uses and basically I slash some unknown guy to pieces. It is violent, frequent and very, very symmetrical. One slash from each weapon from the sides to the middle and through. Step one is then done again. This wipes the slate clean but doesn’t always get rid of the thought. Sometimes I have to keep on doing it harder and faster until it goes away. When the bad thought is about a family member, I have to do the ritual with more power.’

  This is what madness looked like. This was how Nic saw his small world, this was what he woke to each day. This was why he, too, would want to die.

  The purple dots swimming constantly in his vision were geometric, which he said made him able to see into the future, one in which he feared he had no place. He told me reality wasn’t real and that his waking hours were like a dream. Movies, television, video games and other stimuli became real to him.

  ‘There are two of me,’ he said as we sat on the couch together one night during this time. ‘I don’t mind sitting with myself because one of me entertains the other me. But sometimes one of me scares me. I don’t know what’s on the outside or what’s on the inside of me anymore. I am confused about who I am. My mind frightens me.’

  Then he told me he didn’t want to live anymore but he felt stuck because it would be unfair to his family and that I’d never get over his loss.

  Christopher no longer wanted to be at home and used any excuse to leave. He begged us to allow him to board at school. We knew he was becoming increasingly distressed watching his suicidal brother sink into the depths of madness. He was frightened for him and because he was sick himself, he knew he couldn’t help Nic.

  Christopher continued to surf, play rugby and socialise with his mates and girlfriend Annabel; only Ally and Jack, the two friends with him at the headland that night, knew he had depression, but even they were unaware of the serious extent of it.

  He started to binge-drink and smoke marijuana. We begged him not to, as research was starting to show that dope made depression worse and increased suicide ideation in adolescents. But he ignored us, taking more and more risks with his life. We found out after the funeral that he had crashed his car while drunk several times. He was self-medicating and, like so many other seventeen-year-olds, believed he was bulletproof. The slide from a happy and healthy teenager into the dark hole was swift and covert, mentally and physically.

  Playing for his school’s First Fifteen rugby team had always been Christopher’s dream. If he had a bad game and was dropped to the Seconds, it devastated him. Phil and I knew it was the one area in his life which made him feel confident. When the team was first selected, he wasn’t chosen. The following season he made it, playing half-back then breakaway. Several weeks into the season he became ill with ear and throat infections and had to have his tonsils removed. A few weeks after that he had to have a lower leg operation to lengthen the muscles which weren’t growing at the same rate as his bones, causing excruciating pain when he walked or ran. Then, several months later, the other leg had to be operated on. He was told to exercise both legs constantly to stretch the muscles but then he contracted glandular fever and was bedridden for several months. Since he was unable to exercise, the operations were a waste of time. When he finally recovered, he fought to get back into the team and when he finally did, he played in constant pain. He took painkillers and anti-inflammatories just to get through a match.

  The autopsy found both of these substances in his system.

  I think he knew he only had a few games left to play because of his injuries. He didn’t tell us this. He didn’t tell us anything and we were so frightened of losing Nic we didn’t realise how seriously troubled Christopher was.

  While he was boarding, he was caught smoking dope, an instantly expellable offence. The school’s hierarchy met to discuss what to do with Christopher, and Phil and I waited by the phone for hours. Eventually the deputy principal, Graham Robertson, rang to say that due to our family’s circumstances, the school had decided to give Christopher another chance. He was ‘gated’ which meant he was not allowed out on weekends.

  Several weeks later he was caught smoking cigarettes. After a distressed call from Christopher, the headmaster Bob Grant called Phil to attend an urgent meeting with him, Graham Robertson, Reverend Matthew Pickering and Antony Weiss, the House Master.

  I stayed at home with Nic.

  Phil reported back that Bob was well aware of our problems with Nic and the effect his illness had on Christopher and our family. The meeting allowed everyone to offer their perspective on what punishment should be allocated. It was very apparent to Phil how much these men liked and cared for our son. Phil said they each took turns to speak, pitching hard, attesting to Crick’s good nature and character.

  After about half an hour, Bob sighed deeply then said: ‘This requires the wisdom of Solomon.’ He asked them all to leave the room while he deliberated. They went back to Antony’s lounge room where Christopher was waiting.

  ‘I knew that Crick had backed Bob into a corner,’ Phil told me later.

  Headmaster Bob Grant had already made a brave decision to allow Christopher to stay at school. We feared that if he was expelled it would be a disaster for him as, ironically, he needed the structure and discipline the school offered. It would also mean he wouldn’t be able to play rugby and that would devastate him. ‘I believed Bob had no choice,’ Phil said. ‘Teachers, students and parents expected direct action.’

  During his deliberation, Bob called Professor Gordon Parker—a leading psychiatrist in mental health, his friend and a former student at Shore—to ask him to see Christopher, which he did at ten the following morning. At the time Phil said to me that asking Gordon to see Crick showed Bob’s immense wisdom and compassion.

  Professor Parker diagnosed severe depression and anxiety. Bob allowed Christopher to stay at school but on Gordon’s recommendation he was to live at home and attend as a day student. The school was now aware of his illness and, just as it did for Nic, went about providing the support and understanding necessary to help him through the days and weeks ahead.

  But Christopher wasn’t coping. He stopped attending classes, spending the day in a friend’s boarding room. After several weeks it was decided he had to leave school altogether. Headmaster Grant allowed him to continue playing rugby in the hope that connection to school would encourage him to want to return.

  He never did. He had nothing to fill in his days. For six months he lived with Ally in a cottage at the back of her mother’s house and, while she went to school, he lay in bed watching movies. Phil and I begged him to come home but except for quick visits, we hardly ever saw him. When we asked him why he couldn’t live with us, he said he was lonely at home. That was the beginning of the fast descent; we just didn’t realise it then. Despite many warning signs which were frightening in hindsight, I didn’t think for a second he was suicidal. I had taken my eye off the ball.


  On the night after the funeral I was sitting alone and in the dark by our pond in Avalon trying to get away from the crowds inside our home. The sliding door suddenly opened and two women, I couldn’t see who they were, sat down on the white stone bench near where I was hiding. They both lit up a cigarette, the glow two full-stops in the midnight sky. This was the same bench I had found Christopher sitting on a few months earlier at four in the morning. Phil and I had gone to bed early and at some point I heard his car come up the driveway and went back to sleep. Just before four I woke to check on him. His bed was empty. I searched the house and, unable to find him, frantically woke Phil. He, too, looked everywhere. We called his name, opened and shut every door. Then we circled the outside perimeter, finding him in the dark on the stone bench by the pond. He was agitated and high on some drug. He had his head in his hands, dazed and disorientated, and his body was shaking. I’d never seen him like this before.

  ‘What have you taken, Cricket?’ I yelled.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You have. You can hardly talk.’

  ‘One.’

  ‘One what?’

  ‘Ritalin.’

  Ritalin is a stimulant drug given mostly for ADHD, attention deficit hyperactive disorder.

  ‘Where did you get it from? Phil asked.

  ‘My friend’s little brother.’

  We lugged him to bed.

  At eight in the morning I called Gordon. He knew by Christopher’s described physical and emotional state that he had taken more than one Ritalin. Christopher finally admitted he took nine. Gordon told me to bring him in urgently. The dose, he said, could have been fatal. He talked to him privately and then organised for Christopher to see him and a clinical psychologist weekly. It was her notes and Christopher’s responses to her questions I would find in his rugby bag two weeks after his death.