It was around this time that my crying situation went to the next level. I cried in bed, I cried in my sleep. I cried in the car on the way to uni; I cried at uni, in the toilets. Mum and I both cried a lot, in all the different and varied ways a person can cry. (The angry cry, full of recriminations. The ambush cry, which comes out of nowhere. The brushfire cry; just when you think you have it under control, it flares up again.) We went through lots of hankies. I kept mine in my pocket, but they were sodden, and left a wet patch on my thigh.
I began to lose patience with my own emotions, the flurries of tears, the dizzying grief. It was all so time-consuming and messy. I would swear and scream to stop myself crying; I would hit myself in the head with the heel of my hand, trying to shock myself out of it. Or I’d play the loudest, most un-sad music I could find – AC/DC or The Cult – and force myself to sing along.
Every death is a tragedy, but suicide is a tragedy and an insult. You can hang up the phone, you can slam the door, you can turn your back and walk away, but nothing says fuck you like swallowing two hundred and fifty sleeping pills and a bottle of gin. And Dad had said ‘fuck you’ to all of us. He had turned his back on us finally and irrevocably. He didn’t want to see what I did with my life, who I married; he didn’t want to see his grandkids. This was an insult to which he had denied us the right of reply. And that made me angry.
But who could I get angry at? Dad was gone. And so I got angry at myself. I swelled up with anger and disgust: disgust for who I was and what I did, disgust for the way I handled it. I saw myself in old photos and cringed; I cringed at my stupidity, my uselessness, my callowness. I cringed at the way I looked: that stupid blond hair, that stupid chubby face, that stupid smile; that flat-footed boyishness. What had Dad called me? Dopey. And then my self-hatred turned into a hatred for Dad: he made me feel useless, he made me feel dopey. And so I hated him, and I hated me. And that was how I felt.
*
I became expert at pursuing pointless lines of inquiry. It was my specialty. I thought about death a lot, the nature of death, where dead people go. Dad was here one minute, gone the next. So, what happened? Where did he go? Into outer space? Into the air? He was probably floating around, like a ghost, watching me, shaking his head. Or did he go down into the ground, percolating away into the soil, like a type of fertiliser?
I also wondered about Dad’s last thoughts. What had passed through his mind in those final moments, when he lay with his head on the kitchen table, drifting into narcosis? What impulses flickered and flittered at the very end, from synapse to synapse, what thoughts limped down his anguished old circuits, raddled by booze and grief? Did he think of us? Did he think of Mum? Did he have thoughts of redemption and love? Did he forgive us? Did he forgive himself? (I hope so.) Did he curse us for all time? Or did he think of nothing at all, and just slip silently away?
Gina and Cam had similar thoughts. Like me, they couldn’t help but go there, to all the dark places. But not Rob. He did not pursue the pointless. Cam would ask him how he was, but he didn’t engage. Talking about ‘how you feel’ was a waste of time, he told her. Other people didn’t want to know, and there was nothing they could do anyway. Rob regarded emotion as slippery and treacherous, like a kind of mud: one slip and you’d be down there, rolling around in it. He thought this was functional, that it was a sensible way to navigate the world, but I wasn’t so sure. Take his girlfriends: Jo, a nurse; Narelle, a nymphomaniac; and Effie, a feisty Greek girl who gave him a potted cactus as a parting gift – ‘because,’ she said, ‘they thrive on neglect.’
Rob became the father figure. He’d always assumed this role, but with Dad officially dead, he went into hyperdrive. He was moving house – maybe Effie threw him out? – so he came back home to live with me and Mum for a while, sleeping in his old bedroom. I loved him being around: we would stay up late, just me and him, drinking red wine and playing epically long games of backgammon. And yet he felt compelled to tell me how to do everything: how to drive, how to dress, how to wash up so the glasses didn’t get grease streaks. One weekend I brought my new girlfriend back to the house, and he berated me for not offering her a drink the moment we walked in. ‘You are unbelievable!’ he yelled at me, right there in front of her. At school, he used to be such a radical; he grew his hair long! But working in the city had turned him into a free market evangelist. At dinner, he talked endlessly about government waste and ineptitude, and how business was our saviour. The government should get out of everything, he said – health, education, roads. ‘Let the market take care of it.’
I had faith in people. I was a sucker for weaklings and losers, the broken and bereft, mainly because I felt I was one of them. People deserved the benefit of the doubt, that was my thinking. It was Mum’s thinking, too. But Rob thought most people were stupid arseholes who only got in the way. The world would be a beautiful place if it weren’t for all these morons fucking it up all the time. He said the weak and the stupid should be culled out of existence, to save the gene pool for the rest of us. It was eugenics, basically. Sometimes he used the words ‘bad stock’. It hurt me to hear him say this; it was as if he’d given up. We fought about it all the time. Rob was angrier than the rest of us put together.
*
You cunt.
You absolute cunt.
I was in my room, sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a photo of Dad. It was the one of him standing on the beach at Hawks Nest. He was smiling, still wet from the surf. He had a silver chain around his neck. I looked hard at the photo from different angles, hoping I might spot something new. Then I started crying, which felt entirely pointless but unavoidable. I was furious, so furious that if Dad were by some miracle to have suddenly come back I’d have grabbed his face and rammed it into the corner of my desk.
But he didn’t come back, and wasn’t about to any time soon. I couldn’t decide if this was good or bad. Then, for some reason, I felt a compulsion to get onto the floor, get close to a solid surface, low down, where things wouldn’t move, where they’d be rock solid. So I slipped off the bed and onto the carpet, and lay there, curled up, moaning.
*
Once a person dies, you assume they are gone. But in fact they become more present than ever, because they have moved from the physical realm, where you can at least avoid them – by, say, moving suburbs or crossing the street – to the mental realm, to the level of the subconscious, where they are with you day in, day out. When Dad died, he moved out of our home and into my head, where he strolled about, doing as he pleased, putting his feet on my furniture, offering his opinions, unsolicited. It wasn’t just in my dreams but in my ears. I heard him all the time, or different versions of him; a white noise, a ceaseless chatter, a low murmuring at my shoulder, occasionally shouting but mostly whispering, saying the same thing over and over. ‘You are an idiot.’ Or: ‘You are no good.’ Or: ‘Who do you think you are?’ After a time, the voices wear you down. They exhaust you. They are a besieging army, always at the gate, chipping away until one day they break through and reduce everything to ashes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
As a child, I’d experienced periods of sadness. I felt confusion and anger, all the normal things. But it was around my twenty-third birthday that I suffered my first depressive episode. I was working for a company that published surfing magazines and Australian Playboy. I had started as a copyboy and subeditor the year before, even though I was manifestly unqualified. I only had an arts degree. I knew nothing. Worse, all the other guys in the office surfed way better than me. One of the editors was semi-professional. They all went off surfing at lunch and on surfing trips together; they invited me at first, but I declined often enough for them to give up asking, which was fine, because I’d only have embarrassed myself.
It was good that I was earning some money, but the job still felt like a failure. Shouldn’t I have been working for a newspaper, or writing a book? I tried to compensate for my ra
mpant underachievement by staying up late, at home, after work, writing freelance pieces for The Sydney Morning Herald, some of which were published. (Mum collected them in a manila folder.) Still. By my age, Dad knew how the human body worked, how the lungs functioned. If you had a heart attack, Dad could’ve have saved your life. All I could save was a poorly structured sentence.
One afternoon I was staring out the office window, over the back end of Kings Cross. I had stared at this view hundreds of times in the past year: the buckled iron roof of the mechanic’s next door, the dank, furtive alleys, the skinny terraces and their neglected gardens. Only now something had changed – not outside, but inside my head, in the way I was seeing it. There had been a rupture of some sort in my brain, so that the world was just . . . different. I didn’t feel instantly desperate or instantly sad or instantly afraid. But I did feel instantly strange and uncomfortably self-aware. The roofs of the buildings, the street below, the parked cars, all of it vibrated with the knowledge of my strangeness. It was as if all the nagging voices, all the white noise, had coalesced into a tumorous black lump in the middle of my head and that lump had now burst and was oozing something vile that I could taste with my mind.
Over the following weeks, things got worse. The breakage I felt in the office took on a sour edge, an all-consuming, debilitating melancholy. I became weepy; I cried all the time and for no reason. I couldn’t concentrate. I jumped at the slightest sound: a car backfired and I’d hit the roof; someone would shout across the office and I’d be a wreck, quivering with adrenaline. I was terrified of going into the office. I was terrified of staying home. I was terrified of everything. And the voices in my head, that running commentary of self-hate, became louder and bolder. They spoke clearly now; they were no longer on my shoulder but in my face. The only time I experienced anything even remotely close to relief was when I was lying in bed, because I knew then I would soon be unconscious and feeling nothing.
I talked to Mum about it.
‘Oh dear,’ she murmured. ‘Oh no.’
I had always told Mum everything, but now I suddenly realised that this might be too much.
‘Don’t worry,’ I added. ‘I’m not going to kill myself or anything.’
Mum said I should go and see someone, immediately. She even offered to pay for it, but I refused: the least I could do was fund my own psychiatric treatment. I ended up seeing a man in the same clinic where Dad had been admitted. My cousin Sandy, who was a GP, referred me to him, saying he was very good.
The clinic hadn’t changed a bit in the years since I’d been there with Dad. There were the same pink blossoms on the pathway, the same carefully policed calm, like a kindergarten at quiet time. My doctor, Dr Lehman, was an elderly man, maybe in his seventies, his bald gleaming pate encircled by a ruff of cottony white hair. He wore a dark blue suit and had in his top pocket a shiny gold fountain pen. It reminded me of the one Dad used to use. He had reading glasses and pouches under his eyes, and exuded an air of experience and empathy. If you had just suffered some terrible accident and were lying injured on the ground, missing a limb and in agony – which was pretty much how I felt – this was the man you’d want coming to your aid.
Dr Lehman asked me what I did for work. I said I was a journalist and that I wrote articles. He then asked me how I felt. I said pretty lousy. He smiled gently and nodded in a way that put me in mind of a turtle. He asked for details – when had it started, how long had it been going on and so on. As I started talking he took out his fountain pen, unscrewed the lid, and began writing. Just the fact that he was writing down what I said made me feel better, as if I’d been validated, taken seriously. Until now, I’d been inclined to think it was all in my mind, that I was making it up, that it was all my fault and I deserved it. But Dr Lehman made me feel as if what was happening was not my fault, which was a huge relief. When I got to the part about Dad, I cried.
After a while, Dr Lehman stopped writing and looked at me. He said he thought I had clinical depression. But he had some good news, which was that there was this wonderful new drug called Prozac, which he intended to put me on immediately. It would take about two to three weeks to kick in. I physically recoiled at this. He may as well have said three years.
‘But when it does, you will feel much better, I can assure you of that.’
‘How much better?’ I asked. I wanted a quantity, something tangible I could hang onto: six hundred kilowatts of happy, nine kilograms of contentment, thirteen pounds of surgical-grade wellbeing.
Instead, he laughed, as if I were joking. ‘Well, put it this way: those articles you write? You’ll be writing a lot more of them. You’ll become a real powerhouse.’
Then he handed me my script.
*
People in movies are always visiting the graves of their loved ones. I’m not sure this happens so much in reality. It certainly didn’t happen with our family. Only rarely did we visit Dad, whose ashes were in a granite plinth the size of a brick in a shady corner of the crematorium. Part of this was due to his funeral, which had exceeded all expectations in regard to its extraordinary level of horrendousness and despair. But also, I just didn’t feel the need to visit. Dad knew where we were; we knew where he was. It’s not like we were going to talk. I was sentimental, but not that sentimental. And, like I say, Dad was in my head 24/7. He never went away. Short of getting cremated myself, then, there was no way I was going back to that crematorium in a hurry.
And yet not long after my first visit to Dr Lehman, I felt that visiting Dad was something I ought to do. It was the right thing, the respectful thing. I also felt an urge to be close to him; a little voice in the corner of my mind told me that something might happen if I went out there – something meaningful. I would find some answers, maybe.
And so one humid afternoon in late February I drove out to North Ryde. The air was oppressively thick and spongey: it plugged up my nostrils and crowded my eyes; it made my cheeks sweat. In Bondi, most of the vegetation had long ago been cleared to make way for juice bars and kosher delis. Up here, on the scrubby fringes of the northern suburbs, it was the opposite: it was all bushland, but not the pretty kind. It was low, flat, dry and dreary. It felt foreign.
I arrived at the crematorium mid-afternoon. I parked, got out and began walking toward Dad’s plot, which was down behind the main chapel, in a sunken garden near some L-shaped hedges. I found the plot without much trouble, but I couldn’t find Dad. I read all the names on the plaques, then I read them again, just to make sure. Had they moved him? No. Not possible. Maybe I was in the wrong plot? I retraced my steps. Finally I realised, with a jolt of shame so abrupt I actually gasped, that I couldn’t remember where Dad was. I stood there for some time with my hand over my mouth, looking down, around me, at the ground, as if I’d dropped something. Then, with great reluctance, I went to the office and asked for help, explaining in a roundabout way that it had been so long since I’d visited my father’s grave that I’d forgotten where he was. The woman at the counter was nice about it. She smiled. Apparently this happened all the time. Hey, it’s a big place! There are lots of neglected dead people here! She gave me a map of the grounds marked with a grid reference – A56 – and a little ‘You Are Here’ squiggle, as if I were on a treasure hunt. And so it was that I eventually found Dad. (I wasn’t that far off the first time.)
His plaque was smaller than I remembered. I bent down on one knee and read his name. I ran my fingers over the engraving, which was machine-cut and way too neat: nothing about Dad had been neat. I found myself beset by several powerful emotions – shame, grief, anger, disappointment – each jostling for ascendancy. It was uncomfortable. I also felt a bit silly: I’d hoped for a special moment, something mystical; a voice, maybe, cooing in the trees, telling me that everything would be okay. But I couldn’t hear anything, only a gardener in the distance, clipping hedges.
I said, ‘Sorry, Dad,’ though whether this w
as for forgetting where he was buried or just for everything, I didn’t know. Then I stood up, walked back to the car and drove home.
*
I scheduled a second appointment with Dr Lehman. I wanted to talk to him about the crematorium incident, which was bothering me, and I also needed more Prozac. But when I got there, a rather dour-looking nurse said that Dr Lehman would not be able to see me. She then ushered me into a side room, for privacy, sat me down and explained that Dr Lehman had died. She clearly expected some adverse reaction from me, but I had only seen Dr Lehman once and didn’t really know him, so while I was shocked, I wasn’t sad. I felt she wanted me to be sad, because she was sad, and that I was disappointing her with my un-sadness. It was a bad situation for everyone – not least, of course, Dr Lehman.
It turned out that Gina was seeing someone, too. He was a counsellor, more a psychologist than a psychiatrist, meaning he couldn’t prescribe medications. His name was Louis de Borde. Oddly enough, Louis worked opposite Royal North Shore Hospital, in the very same building where Dad had had his rooms. I only realised this when, as I walked down the corridor to Louis’s office for my first appointment, I found myself suddenly assaulted by long-buried memories, childhood associations, very distant, as if from a past life; flashes of coming to visit Dad, of feeling like a boy again, of being in over my head, of being small, powerless, out of control. It wasn’t an ideal introduction.
Farewell to the Father Page 16