After

by Nikki Gemmell

  *

  ‘Is it possible to succeed without any act of betrayal?’ Jean Renoir asked. With Elayn, I was always writing myself into a different narrative, far away from her world. I never expected our intertwined story to take the path it has now, to converge so traumatically. I thought I was free of her. I’m not good at walking this new path.

  *

  Five years ago I came home. The place the poet Les Murray said you return to to go mad.

  Five years ago I felt rescued by a looser, lighter life. Freshly returned to Australia after fifteen years away, to a little seaside pocket with kookaburras on the Hills Hoist and neighbourhood kids zooming through houses; to the whole blissful Aussie childhood I thought long lost. My pale little Londoners slipped into this new world like dirty mugs into a dishwasher. We gazed up at the stretched glory of the starry night then they’d tumble into bed exhausted from running about in all the sunshine – that was growing them tall, that was honey-ing them up. And I ruminated on why it had taken us so long to come back. London had stolen my optimism. Australia restored it. I felt like I was being immersed in a sense of belonging, something I fought tooth and nail against in the younger, wilder years. But I needed it as I aged. Had never had it in London no matter how long we were there.

  Returning was about the serenity and stillness that comes from being part of a deeply known world; the ease of it. Andrew and I had spent years being outsiders in foreign lands and revelling in that status; but my God, the relief, suddenly, of belonging. After so long. Of existing in a familiar world. It was hitting us like a long cool drink after a sweltering summer’s day. I celebrated the solace of familiarity; the thrumming, throat-swelling joy at being home. England, stimulating, yes – but my heart was held hostage by the Great Southern Land and the yearning had only increased as the years gathered pace.

  In exile I learnt one thing above all: that life is about wringing the most happiness we can out of our time on earth, and for me that meant family. And beauty – a muscular Australian beauty, not the soft, benign European one. Under a replenishing sun. I was a plant turning towards the light, drinking it up. I’d finally found my place in the world and was blazing contentment and revelling in the gift of belonging, and growing up. It was called home.

  *

  But now, severed from that sense of home. ‘I am always conscious of this secret disruption in me,’ Katherine Mansfield wrote. I feel as if my entire discourse with Elayn, from fifteen onwards, involved a secret disruption. Or perhaps not so secret. Perhaps she sensed it all along and could not control it. Which enraged her.

  Eyes come at me, into me, wherever I go now. I’m treading warily into the wider world, at odds with it, trembling and stunned and stopped. Like that small animal frozen in headlights, still, weeks and months beyond the morgue shock. The world of my growing up, that I ran away from aged thirty, is now rubbing up too close; judging, questioning, assessing. And I have failed at this great homecoming experiment. My lanterns are broken and so am I. No energy to fix them, no energy for anything. Shardy and wrong. What is needed: an armoury for living. And binocular eyes to see far into the future. To see if all this can be climbed away from.

  18

  A call out of the blue from Constable B.

  Several months beyond Mum’s death. We’d assumed that the entwined worlds of the police and ourselves were long over. But no. The wheels turn slowly with investigations like this. Constable B needs me to come to the police station for a statement about Elayn. I’ve never done such a thing before.

  Harrowing me back to those fraught, early days of Elayn’s death.

  *

  Was it an accident? The churn of the old question afresh. Head cram, all over again. Elayn had no makeup, no lipstick and was wearing old clothes at the time of death yet made a will and organised an alcohol delivery just before she died. All the conflicting signals. Calm has gone astray, all over again.

  *

  Constable B is from somewhere similar to where Elayn escaped from. It is in her voice, her rising inflections, the way she says ‘youse’ instead of ‘you’. In the way she needs her grammar corrected as she types up my statement and is grateful for it, as we sit side by side, trying to work this out. She is keen to know Mum’s drug past, in stark detail. She will be investigating Elayn’s doctor – doctors – and her medical history. She needs to know if there’s been negligence by anyone who dealt with Elayn.

  I have to tell her everything I know. It runs to several pages over several hours. It is a Friday night. Constable B assures me she has the time, ‘Outside hasn’t hotted up yet.’ I can’t tell her much about Elayn’s doctor shopping. I don’t know, and am ashamed of this. Except I do know that Elayn was high on drugs after the foot operation and it evened her, there was a quietening. Within her, and with her relationships. Drugs = a good thing when it came to Elayn. For a while. With all the rest, the details, I didn’t examine the situation closely enough. Constable B’s questions are an indictment.

  All the torment, back. Just when I’m possibly finding a way out of it.

  *

  Constable B wants to know about the missing $2,000. That Elayn withdrew on my watch, several days before her death. It’s a mystery. I’m a cliché of adult-caregiver to a parent in the Western world: too busy, too caught up in my own life, drowning, not doing anything quite right. Constable B remarks that there are a lot of people on her beat in similar circumstances to my own.

  I tell her that when my brothers and I went into the flat for another clean-up we found vials of a mysterious clear liquid, with a pinkish tinge, in plastic tubes in Elayn’s freezer. We had no idea what it was. We threw it out. Didn’t think to retain it as evidence. Of what? Could it have been Nembutal, the illegal animal tranquilliser, which is sometimes stained pink for safety reasons? We don’t know. Constable B shrugs.

  *

  Her job is distressing at times. ‘I get emotional. I had to leave twice as you were identifying your mother.’ I had no idea of this at the time. ‘No one knows that side of the job, how hard it can be,’ she adds. Constable B says that Elayn’s actions are surprisingly common in this leafy, middle-class area. ‘No one talks about it.’ She says there was one difference between my mother’s death and the many other suicide situations involving elderly people that she’s attended. ‘They were all suffering from depression.’ I tell her that Elayn possibly had undiagnosed depression. That it had blighted her life. Constable B nods. Types.

  *

  This is the last of it for me, for the official situation. Constable B now has a lot of digging to do. As I depart I ask her again if she thinks it was deliberate. With infinite sadness in her eyes this woman in her mid-twenties – who’s seen all manner of life, too young – nods. ‘Yes.’ Later, at home, I feel like I’ve run a marathon. I fall into bed, drained.

  *

  And then, and then. The day after I give the police statement Ticky goes through the glass doors at the back of the house. Four fifteen-year-old boys are at home with the younger kids while Andrew is overseas and I’m around the corner at a dinner party. Two of the teenage lads are mucking about, one pushing a glass door one way, one the other. The glass breaks, of course it breaks. Boh calls, barely able to push talk out, in a voice I’ve never heard from him before. ‘Blood. E-e-everywhere.’ A call no parent wants to get.

  *

  Running around the corner, blind, having grabbed someone else’s glasses from the dinner table. But I can see well enough to discern my eldest covered in blood from neck to ankles as I race into the house. His right arm is ribboned. A glass fragment has sliced through his neck. An ex-doctor neighbour, also at the dinner party, runs in right behind me. Sits my boy down, clamps his fingers to his neck, feels a pulse. Oh God, oh God, too much of everything here. The man turns to me. Tells me he will live but he needs stitches. Tells me later that the cut was an inch from the carotid artery and if it had been severed my son would have bled out in ten minutes and there would have been n
othing he could have done to save him.

  Please. Relief. From this year. This life.

  *

  So. The inner workings of an ambulance now, straight after the inner workings of a police station. Stroking my boy’s head. He’s covered in blood and Snapchatting and Instagramming his war wounds and tallying the likes. Of course. A social media opportunity. The printed sign at the foot of the stretcher, for every patient to note: ‘Please treat your ambulance officer like you would your grandmother.’ They don’t say ‘mother’, of course. That one doesn’t work anymore, the emotional resonance is no longer as tugging. But ‘grandmother’, well, that’s different.

  *

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ The first question from the A & E doctor when she clocks the fact that four fifteen-year-old lads have been larking about. Ticky hasn’t, hasn’t begun with that world, but I can feel pressures closing in on me here from all sides, like a diver fighting the weight of deep, cold water. Need now to end.

  *

  Who knows? That you are cracking apart but soldiering on but not. Breakdown is voluminously lonely, and silent. One friend, J, notices. She has been through extreme grief and recognises it; she says I am like a car running on empty with a hole in its fuel tank, faulty, and unable to run right. She urges me to see a counsellor. It feels like failure. Too busy, no time. She says most women around me would have seen a therapist at some stage. Brain pain. Thought pain. Perhaps she’s right.

  19

  A letter from the coroner eventually arrives. ‘Following consideration of relevant advice from police officers and medical practitioners, and other appropriate persons, the Coroner is satisfied that the date, place, manner and cause of the death of Elayn GEMMELL have been sufficiently disclosed. Consequently, the coroner has dispensed with the holding of an inquest. The cause of death has been established as: Multi Drug Toxicity.’

  Three words. The answer to everything, and not even specific. Officially the case is closed. There will be no hearing, no one put under the spotlight. A story all too common in this day and age. What is needed: the lushness of absolutely knowing. A blanket of understanding to crawl under and sleep, finally sleep. To put it all to rest. Why? Endlessly the question, why?

  *

  In Elayn’s final week she was trapped in her flat, relying on a busy daughter and sons who lived several hours away as well as a small network of available friends, not many. She hated calling on any of us. Hated expressing need. Public transport was available but difficult, irregular and slow. From this point, it must have felt there was no way back into life.

  *

  Savage pain in her final months was affecting Elayn’s sleeping, moving, walking. It was hard for her to find a comfortable seat. The right bed. To shower for a long amount of time. It affected how she dressed – certain clothes became more difficult to put on and fashionable shoes impossible to wear. The shock, when searching for funeral clothes, to find the blunt, squat, rubber-soled shoes lined up like obedient schoolgirls; rows of drabness after a lifetime of fabulous foot glory. This is what fashion had done to my audacious mother; reduced her to this meekness; row upon hoarded row of it. All worn for nothing but comfort in the final years of her life.

  *

  With chronic pain, one of the most distressing things to relinquish can be care over dressing. Pain puts wrinkles on your face because of the tight set of your muscles. Affects your posture and teeth, brittles and breaks them. A bra becomes difficult to navigate, and underpants, and the zip up your back. You lose the ability to present your best self to the world. For Elayn, who had spent her life being noticed, this was all, utterly, devastating. Her final clothes in the morgue shout of the decline – the faded tracksuit pants, the ratty old t-shirt. Elayn was so rarely this. Pain had caused her to become someone else. Who she hated.

  *

  In her final weeks Elayn asked me to investigate physiotherapists who could come to her flat and help her. I sent her an email with links.

  Big thank you for the info Nikki. I have opened the first one and it looks wonderful. However, I’m feeling too frail to follow up just now, just need to rest my body.

  In hindsight, she’d given up. And despite all the doctors and specialists she was seeing, all the morphine patches and pills, her pain was inadequately managed. It’s a brutal truth.

  *

  The final doctor Elayn saw, an Indian man, was different. ‘I know what you’re doing with all your doctors. And if you don’t stop I’ll report you.’ Paul told me this; that Elayn had finally been found out. The system was onto her – her steady supply of painkillers would be reduced. The panic, the fear.

  *

  The first thing you do, as an addict, is start lying. My mother had lost her identity to that of a drug addict. You have to lie to doctors to get drugs. It involves shame. That was Elayn’s world towards the end. Dishonesty, fudging, pretending. How must it feel that you need drugs so much you’re lying to a doctor? And not just one, but several. In your seventies, after a lifetime of fine, upstanding living, when you’ve never been to a police station before. The loneliness of it. The humiliation.

  *

  Researchers have discovered that morphine can actually make chronic pain worse. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they concluded that rats given morphine were more sensitive to pain than those not given it. Rats on the drug took longer to recover, and it was accompanied by more severe pain. Elayn said the pain was getting worse six months beyond her operation; was spreading, taking over her life. Report co-author, neuroscientist Dr Peter Grace: ‘The treatment can actually be contributing to the problem.’ Well yes.

  *

  Addiction is not a liberation but a prison. It generates self-loathing. The pattern: short periods of release followed by long periods of despair. Self-hatred and secrecy are cleaved to it. Many of Elayn’s closest friends had no idea of her drug habit, of how she was getting through life.

  *

  With chronic pain, you become intolerant to the drugs. You can develop a different pain in a different area of your body. It has a domino effect. A foot problem causes a knee problem then a hip problem then a back problem. Elayn wouldn’t let me in, wouldn’t discuss pain management, in a pattern that had marked her life. We should have had the conversation.

  *

  Elayn wasn’t always a truthful person with me. I bought her a car more than a decade ago with book royalties; years later she denied this had ever happened despite the transfer to the car company appearing on my bank statement. ‘No you didn’t!’ she spat in my face at the height of some rage, point-blank denying it. It was in those moments I thought Elayn mad. My father told me he had sent her to a psychiatrist during their divorce; her mother spoke of her mental instability. We’d all experienced the bluntness of inconsistency; most of her friends, though, hadn’t. It’s hard to have a solid relationship with someone who’s not truthful, especially when it’s a family member. Dishonesty is a key to destroying any relationship.

  *

  Elayn was fascinating because she wasn’t quite right. It made her intriguing, glamorous. She was her own version of Kintsugi; her flaws added to the charisma. She was enigmatic, captivating, a little dangerous; and until the bleak final months all eyes around her had always been on her.

  Elayn’s non-married state gave her an edge because she was truly free. It was what she wanted. Free of a partner, and in the end free of her children. She wanted the comforting alone, where no one would judge. Elayn had mastered the art of the exquisitely damaging retreat.

  *

  Seeing a counsellor feels like weakness, embarrassment, as if there is some mental deficiency; I know this is ridiculous. I visit my GP and get a name, don’t want anyone I know. Steel myself. V has a leonine grey bob on a young face. Her only concession to beauty is a slash of red lipstick. She seems fearless.

  It is balming. She is on my side. V tells me I must not let this define me, must not let this destroy me. S
he is on Elayn’s side too. She says that suicide is sometimes a distorted altruism; not seen by the person who does it as a selfishness, but a selflessness. They can feel, misguidedly, that the world would be better off without them. I think of all the people I’ve known, the too-many people, who’ve taken their life. Most through a distorted sense of goodness. That this was the right thing to do for them, and for everyone else.

  Oh Mum.

  V tells me she spoke to a healer once, in her younger days, who said to think of the lost person with love, just that. Yes.

  *

  Depression is often anger turned in on itself. Elayn couldn’t articulate what her fury was about but she could show it; and with her most spectacular act of all, her death. This was payback, suggests V. ‘There was probably an underlying, undiagnosed depression there too.’

  *

  Boh finds the letter from the coroner. Reads the bald summary. ‘Cause of Death: Multi Drug Toxicity.’ Knows what that means because he’s sat through many personal development classes at school about drugs. The curt, official words sound shameful, reducing; a junkie’s world. Yet my son’s expensively groomed, cultured grandmother came across as anything but that. His face crumples. ‘So . . . Nonna committed suicide?’ He, like me, had been hoping it was some terrible mistake. The letter seems to refute this. Back into his shell of grief.

  *

  Multi Drug Toxicity means an overdose from different types of pills. Dependency and addiction are different things. Dependency means you are dependent on drugs; addiction means you crave them. My mother, in the end, was an addict. Her drug of choice, oxycodone, has another name: Hillbilly Heroin. It was a squalid, junkie’s death.

  My poor, reduced, despairing, alone mother.