The Full Ridiculous

by Mark Lamprell

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We never intended to.’

  ‘So he’s safe?’

  ‘Of course he’s safe.’

  And so they leave.

  Wendy turns to the headmaster who grins. He’s too discreet to say anything but she can tell he thinks they were a bunch of tossers.

  ‘What do you think will happen to Constable Johnstone?’ she asks.

  ‘I imagine he’s being rigorously counselled this very minute,’ says the headmaster.

  There is a knock at the door. Elsie is standing there with an uh-oh look on her face, next to Matron Hitler. Wendy has lost a few kilos since their last interaction but the matron appears to have found them; her large bosom strains against the buttons of her crisp white uniform.

  ‘We think Mrs O’Dell may have parked in Matron’s spot,’ offers Elsie as Matron looks on in wordless disapproval.

  ‘Yes I have,’ says Wendy brightly, making no apology and no effort whatsoever to get up and right the wrong, ‘I have indeed!’

  Back at home you know none of this. You have no idea that the meeting is over or that Matron Hitler has exacted her revenge by parking Wendy in and vanishing into the maze of school buildings, leaving her stranded and ruing her decision to linger longer than necessary in the headmaster’s office.

  All you know is that your poor wife is up at the school, once again fighting your battles for you. You are in such a state of anxiety pacing around the house that you decide to pace outside in the garden to see if that will help.

  It doesn’t.

  You decide to go for a walk around the block and head back inside to ask Egg if he wants to come too, but he barely raises his head from the doggy bed so you go by yourself. The light is fading fast but instead of making a left turn at the end of the street, you head down a laneway between two wooden bungalows and into the untamed bushland behind them.

  Normally the bush soothes you, particularly at dusk, but right now your mind races, spiralling into disastrous scenarios: Wendy being arrested instead of you; Wendy escaping the cops but being run over by a car; Wendy escaping but shooting Lance Johnstone and being re-arrested; Wendy escaping but being shot by Lance Johnstone; you telling your children that their mother has been shot.

  As you stumble down the stony track, an idea forms and sets like concrete: Wendy and the kids would be better off without you.

  You have nothing to offer them. You are nothing but a drain on their resources. You remember your life insurance policy and realise that if you died, Wendy would be able to pay off the mortgage. Without the mortgage payments, Wendy and the kids could easily survive on her wage. There’s a clause that invalidates the policy in case of suicide but a fall out here in the bush could easily look like an accident.

  Wendy and the kids would be better off without you.

  You have left no suicide note. There would be nothing to indicate that a fall was anything but a horrible accident. A man with the flu, a little feverish and disoriented, goes wandering in the bush at the end of his street and falls off a cliff. Simple. You end the humiliating failure of your life and Wendy and the kids can live worry-free. It makes such sense.

  Wendy and the kids would be better off without you.

  You take the right fork in the track. A wattle branch whips you in the face but you hardly feel it. You know what to do now. Soon you reach a small sandstone cliff. You stand on the edge and look down. It’s not very high—only about ten metres—but if you land head-first on the rock platform below your neck should break.

  Wendy and the kids would be better off without you.

  Come on. You can do this. It’s like diving into a pool. Easy. You take a few steps back, as if you’re going for a dive. You don’t want to get up too much speed and leap out too far because it won’t look like an accident. And you must remember to keep your hands by your sides because they might break the fall. You don’t want to survive this and end up in a wheelchair, yet another burden for Wendy to deal with.

  Wendy and the kids would be better off without you.

  You’ve forgotten to count how many paces it is to the edge. You pace it out. One, two, three…and a half and you are looking over the edge again. Hmm. A half is no good. Better to pace backwards, counting so you know exactly when your foot will step into air. And which foot? Your left, you decide. You take a step back, beginning with your left foot, and start to count back from five.

  Your foot slips in a spray of sandy pebbles. Your leg slides from under you and you lurch forward to right yourself. You lurch over the cliff. And then, because you are running purely on instinct, you pull back, arms outstretched, regaining your balance just in time to stop yourself toppling off the edge. It makes no difference whether you go over now or in a few moments. In fact, it’s better to go now when it actually is an accident. But it’s too late; you’ve saved yourself. You’re going to have to do it with intent.

  Shit. You feel the adrenaline pumping through your body. You can do this.

  You are doing this.

  And as soon as you have surrendered to the certainty of this idea, a flood of relief washes over you. You have a plan. You are going to enact the plan.

  You are doing this.

  To make sure that you don’t slip again, you crouch and brush away the sand and pebbles in your path. Under the pebbles, someone has scratched some letters into the rock. It’s almost dark now so it’s hard to read but you see the word, ZORBA.

  Nothing else, just ZORBA.

  That’s pretty weird because Zorba is your man and Zorba the Greek is your touchstone book. Maybe the universe is trying to tell you something…

  Oh God, here you go again! Stop with the childlike yearning. Stop apportioning meaning to events that have none. The universe is not trying to communicate with you or anyone else! It just IS, for fuck’s sake.

  It’s a small riff of irritation but it breaks the spell.

  It suddenly strikes you that killing yourself is a really stupid idea. And now it’s not Zorba but Anna Karenina who comes to you. As she hurls herself under the wheels of the train, Anna wonders what on earth she is doing. She feels silly. And that’s what you feel. Silly. Nothing grand or profound—just your ordinary old garden-variety silly.

  You sit on your bum and look around you. A full moon rises and the bush comes alive. Ringtail possums wake in the eucalypts towering above. A riot of kookaburras chortle their last hurrah for the evening. Crickets and frogs chirp and croak and bonk an almost deafening symphony. You get to your feet, brush the sand from your jeans, and head back down the track.

  In ten minutes you emerge from the laneway between the two wooden bungalows and are in your street with the lights buzzing over your head. You walk up over the rise and see your house in the dip beyond, peeking though the greenery of your rambling garden. The lights are on, which means someone is home.

  26

  Doctor Maurice O’Connell wears a red shirt with yellow stripes. There is something perkily optimistic about those bright stripes that shames you into silence. You can’t bring yourself to tell him about your recent escapades in the bush. You feel you’ve let him down and you don’t want to let him down today. Especially when he is wearing his happy shirt.

  No, tell him, you doofus, that’s what he’s there for.

  But you can’t.

  Your pathetic brush with suicide is too ridiculous to confess to another person, even if he is a professional trying to salvage your mental health. You couldn’t tell Wendy either, after she came home from Mount Karver. Brimming with good news, she looked so relieved that you couldn’t bear to dish up more shit when she had just cleared her plate. Maybe it wasn’t honest but sometimes honesty is overrated.

  You’re weighing up the ethics of your decision when the good doctor zeros in on your inner turmoil and starts prodding. You don’t give him much so he goes to that reliable place where he knows he can get a rise out of you: your adoption. Or rather, his take on your adoption.

  Here we go
again.

  Only this time it is different. This time he connects the dots. He leads you back through your accident and your notion that the universe had abandoned your contract with it. From there he takes you back to your mother’s death; a kind of abandonment. Declan’s birth during which he almost dies, almost abandoning you. Your best friend from university, Dazza, dies in your arms after a car accident; another kind of abandonment. A teacher doesn’t believe your pain and abandons you in the locker room where you almost die of a ruptured appendix. Non-malignant tumours on both your ears grow so large that your hearing abandons you for six weeks before they are removed. Your father’s death: just when you are on the threshold of manhood, you experience another kind of abandonment.

  Is it not possible that you have been unable to process what happened to you with the car accident because you have not acknowledged the full effect of these previous traumas? And is it not possible that you have not processed these previous traumas because you have not processed the original trauma—your adoption?

  ‘I really think you need to acknowledge that you were abandoned as a baby. Don’t attach to it, don’t get stuck to it, just walk around it and say, “That happened”.’

  ‘Look. Maurice. I really appreciate that you are trying to help me. But I have to tell you this problem with my adoption is yours, not mine. I really don’t feel like I was…’

  And, precisely at that moment, your body hijacks you. You want to say the word abandoned. You want to say I really don’t feel like I was abandoned but you can’t. You physically can’t. Your voice box shuts down. A vacuum forms in your windpipe and you can’t get a breath. Your diaphragm contracts and you gasp in air then immediately expel it as a huge sob.

  A great, shuddering sob.

  The sob sits there in the room between you and Doctor Maurice. He smiles compassionately and says gently, ‘There we go,’ although you know what he really wants to say is, ‘At last.’

  You sit in the reverberating shock waves of your single sob. You had no warning it was coming or any idea that you felt this way. It begins to sink in: you do feel abandoned. Or did. Whether you have any right to or not, you do feel like this. Your mind refused to acknowledge it so your body took control and insisted that you make your feelings known to yourself. It seems an astonishing physical feat.

  ‘Does that happen often?’ you ask Doctor Maurice.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not often.’

  27

  I’m four and a half years old and playing in front of my house with my neighbours, Molly and Davie, and the boy across the road who is older and has a two-wheel bike that he can ride all by himself. This morning it was so hot that Mr Taylor said you could fry an egg on the road so we tried it with an egg from the Hendricks’ chook shed and guess what? You could! Except the yellow doesn’t go very hard. Molly and Davie’s dog, Robbie, ate most of it even though it was stuck to the road. Anyway right now we’re playing under the sprinkler with our clothes on and they’re all wet but that’s okay because our mums said we could.

  The boy across the road with the two-wheeler asks Molly if she knows where babies come from and she says she does and I say that I came from somewhere different because I’m adopted. Davie says, ‘You are not,’ and I say, ‘I am too.’ And he says, ‘You are not,’ and Molly says I’m making it up to show off and I say, ‘I am not. Ask Mum.’

  So we’re going inside to ask Mum.

  Mum is cross because we’re dripping on the carpet and bringing dirt in so we go out onto the porch.

  Molly says, ‘Mrs O’Dell, Michael says he’s adopted.’

  Mum looks at me and then she looks at Molly and says, ‘Michael makes things up.’

  And then Davie says, ‘Told ya!’ and they all go back to the sprinkler.

  I stay on the porch with Mum and I’m very angry because I didn’t make it up; it’s true. Mum says quietly, ‘Come inside,’ and we go inside to the kitchen even though I leave wet marks on the carpet.

  I’m very angry so I kind of shout and cry all at the same time. ‘Why did you say that? Why did you say that?’ And Mum says, ‘I’m sorry my darling,’ and gets down on her knees and hugs me so tight I have to squeeze my face free to get a breath and I can tell by the noises she is making that she is crying. And then she looks at me with tears in her eyes and she holds me by the shoulders and says, ‘You mustn’t tell anyone about that. You must not tell anyone that you’re adopted.’

  I don’t understand why she is so upset so I ask why I can’t tell anyone and she says it’s because they won’t understand. She says that I belong to Dad and her and Tess and Ingrid. She says we all belong together and it doesn’t matter who’s adopted and who’s not. But people won’t understand if I tell them I’m adopted. They’ll treat me like I’m different and I’m not different.

  I don’t really understand what she is saying but I do understand I must not tell anyone I’m adopted. Mum asks me to promise so I promise. Molly and Davie knock on the door and ask if I’m coming back out to play and Mum smiles and pretends she hasn’t been crying and says, ‘Yes, he’ll be out in a minute.’ And then she gets ice-blocks out of the freezer and I choose a red one and take the rest out to the other kids and we all play in the sprinkler again.

  I’m twenty years old, in the second year of university, and life is pretty damn fine. I’ve just broken up with my second long-term girlfriend and I’ve decided to play the field for a while. I’ve made a decision not to settle down until I’m about thirty. That gives me ten good years of partying, after which I’ll need a rest anyway. That’s my life plan. I like my plan. It’s a good plan.

  Sitting next to me in the Linguistics 235 tutorial is my mate Dazza. He likes my plan too. He likes it so much that he’s decided to use it as his life plan as well.

  The tutor asks a question and a voice answers. I can’t explain this but the voice is incredibly familiar even though I haven’t heard it before. It belongs to a girl I haven’t even seen but I know instantly that she is important. A voice within me says Oh, so there she is. I can’t see her because we are both sitting on the same side of the long tutorial table with about five or six people between us. I lean forward with no small amount of trepidation and look down the table. I still can’t see her because Dazza’s big boofy head is in the way so I whisper, ‘Hey Dazza, what does she look like?’ Dazza has a really long gawp and turns back and says, ‘Good.’

  Her name is Wendy Weinstein. She is Jewish. Or Jewishlite as she likes to say. She’s the second Jewish person I have encountered. The first was a guy I went to school with but he was kind of annoying so I avoided him.

  Within a week of hearing her voice, I tell Wendy I am adopted. She is the only person I have told since I was four and a half years old. I tell Wendy because I sense that we are going down a long road together and it’s important not to start off with any secrets.

  I am thirty-five years old, standing at the letterbox, flicking through the mail. Electricity bill. Yay. Gas bill. Yippee. Letter from the hospital where our kids were born. Addressed to me, not me and Wendy. Odd. I rip it open and scan. It’s not about the kids. It’s about me.

  The hospital has something called a ‘post-adoption agency’ and they’ve recently been contacted by my birth mother. My birth mother.

  I have a birth mother and she is alive.

  I go inside and read the letter with Wendy. My birth mother wants to contact me. She wants to write me a letter. The agency wants to know if I will accept the letter. It’s up to me. I just have to say no and the matter will be dropped and I won’t be contacted again.

  Wendy tells me I’ve gone white. I suddenly feel incredibly tired, overwhelmingly exhausted. It’s only four o’clock in the afternoon but I lie down on the bed and fall instantly asleep. I stay asleep until three o’clock the next afternoon, unconscious for twenty-three hours while the known universe shifts slightly to the left.

  I tell my mother about the letter from my birth mother and her eyes well with t
ears. She tells me that she feels like she entered an unspoken contract with my birth mother to raise me as her son and that my birth mother has come back and broken the contract. I put my arms around her while she cries quietly into my shoulder.

  I tell her if it’s going to cause her so much pain, I won’t proceed. The tears dry up and she tells me not to be ridiculous. Just because she doesn’t want it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t want it. She tells me she’s always been amazed by my lack of curiosity. I tell her that I am curious but I’ve never felt the need to go looking for my birth parents. This must be because I have such great parents. Her eyes well with tears again but this time she gets that look like she might crow.

  I’m twenty-six years old, holding my day-old son. Light pours through the old Georgian windows of Wendy’s hospital room in the neo-natal unit. I look up and see my mother studying me from a chair in the corner.

  ‘What?’ I say, smiling.

  ‘That’s your own flesh and blood,’ she says. ‘That’s the first time you’ve held your own flesh and blood.’

  I look back in wonder at my boy. She’s right. He is the only person I have ever met who comes from the same gene pool. And what is remarkable to me about that fact is that it’s not important. He’s here. He’s himself. That’s the important bit. He is here to be loved and I love him. I glimpse for a moment how my own parents embraced me instantly and completely even though I am not their biological child.

  I am thirty-six years old, meeting my birth mother for the first time. We’ve corresponded for eighteen months and now we are face to face. We sit in the modest kitchen of her home, a four-hour flight north of mine. She speaks softly, a quiet, self-contained sort of person.

  There is something incredibly dear about her.

  As she lifts her teacup to her mouth, we are simultaneously conscious that her hand is trembling. I feel an immense gratitude for the gift of life she has given me. She tries to master the tremble but her hand shakes harder and she is forced to put her cup back in the saucer.