by Robert Drewe
The reason for my phantasmic attendance? You’d have to ask Simon, but I doubt he’d respond. He sees no paradox in his ‘not having a brain’ and his sudden heightened perception brought on, I’m guessing, by such a concentration of blood, of genes, of family. By the huge number of relatives present.
Brought on – and this is probably what fascinates Sly – by all the generations of genetically connected dead folk who’ve gone before him. And my arrival, of course.
Well, I’ve had a good look around now. Got my bearings. Yes, I’m touched by all the fuss. Gratified. Why not? They’re celebrating me.
3
How great it was to hear her father make a joke, Willow Cleary thought. God knows, it had been a long time. Not in the two years he’d believed he was dead.
But just now when he was standing beside her at the edge of the festivities, staring vacantly at the noisy unfolding scene, holding an unsipped glass of red wine and attracting curious looks and fake-hearty waves from relatives before they quickly skirted around him, so waxy-ashen and Halloween-gaunt and Ho Chi Minh bearded he’d become, the rocker’s black dye long faded from his hair and the grown-out mullet now wispy and receding halfway back on his skull, looking for all the world like a homeless person in op-shop clothes, he’d discovered the cigarettes she’d planted in his overcoat pocket and read aloud the health warning on the pack, Smoking – A Leading Cause of Death.
‘I’d say this is redundant,’ he said. Then he lit up.
A joke! Blackly humorous, but still a quip. Willow hoped – fingers crossed – that the small flippancy was a sign the psychotherapy and drugs might finally be working and that the Cotard’s was ebbing. The smoking itself was another good sign.
Imagine that, she thought. Saved by smoking!
Even though he took only a couple of puffs, peered at the cigarette in his hand as if wondering how it got there, and tossed it away, at least his smoking would indicate a faint sort of enthusiasm, the doctors had told her; a nostalgic return to old habits, however dubious, and a hint that his sense of taste and smell were coming back. And, above all, a relish for things.
Relish was a word the brain-people used a lot. After Simon’s last two desolate years of existence denial, everyone hung on the word relish. It was shorthand for a zest for life, a suggestion that you no longer believed you were actually a cadaver and therefore everything was meaningless, which sufferers of Cotard’s Delusion, or Walking Corpse Syndrome, bizarrely believed was the case.
Along those lines, and made aware of his colourful personal history as Spider Flower’s keyboard man, the neurologists had told Willow to let them know if and when he ever wanted whiskey or cannabis. Moreover, she should encourage any desire for a Jameson’s and a joint, these old habits of her father’s apparently being further indications of possible recovery from the condition.
So as his dutiful main carer, Willow ensured both vices were readily on hand back home in the foothills of the Nightcap Range. In any case, by the end of any given week of caring for a ‘dead’ man, and of ensuring that he didn’t become a deceased ‘dead’ man, she could definitely be driven to either or both of them herself.
Lulu and Otis were of little help these days, her older sister and brother having eventually run out of patience and empathy. Anyway, they were in recovery mode themselves, having simultaneously gone more or less mainstream.
Lulu was riding the Northern Rivers tree-change boom and had taken her psychic talents to Coastal Collectables in Mullumbimby (‘Trust me. I know exactly what you’re looking for!’ she’d say to customers: newcomers who always desired either ‘country’ furniture or Buddha statues), while Otis, after the coast’s second great-white fatality in two months, this time a Balinese goofy-footer with whom he’d often surfed and sunk many an Asahi draught at O-Sushi, had abruptly decided to leave full-time surfing and the dole for a flatwater, shark-free career, and knuckled down to a pool-operations training course to equip him to manage municipal swimming pools. Aquatic centres, they were called nowadays.
Despite Lulu’s pragmatic change of occupation, in her private psychic moments away from the rusty cutlery, rickety china cabinets, Coolgardie safes, concrete Buddhas and ancient church pews of Coastal Collectables (its cheeky signs declaring ‘Dead People’s Stuff’ and ‘We Buy Junk – We Sell Antiques’), she regarded her father’s condition as part of the Revenge of Mount Warning. She believed there was something seriously amiss lately in the North Coast’s energy field.
Spiritual repercussions were occurring all over the region. First, Noeline Fosse, a leading local equestrienne who was practising showjumping at the Mullumbimby showground, was lucky to escape a snapping, leaping pack of small feral domestic dogs: demonic-looking part-schnauzers and slavering silky terriers leaping at her horse’s fetlocks. Then the McCauslands, an elderly and conservative farming couple known for their prize-winning traditional Murray Grey cattle and resistance to the Johnny-come-lately Australian Grey breed, reported sighting a thylacine – supposedly extinct on the Australian mainland for 3000 years – from their verandah during afternoon tea, and produced a fuzzy photograph of an elongated stripey dog as evidence.
According to Gordon McCausland, ‘It was definitely a thylacine. You could tell by its stripes and slender hips. We hadn’t even opened the evening bottle yet. Gwen saw it too, and she’s a churchgoer.’
And then the countryside’s biggest-ever biker methamphetamine bust had sparked off an unusually gung-ho local law-enforcement atmosphere, a sudden surly policing mood that had enveloped the Sly Cleary household as well.
Willow had been picking chives, shallots and Thai basil in the garden, optimistically persevering with tasty food in an attempt to kickstart her father’s appetite, when a roaring racket burst out of the camphor laurels and a helicopter clattered overhead, its downdraft shaking her mango and avocado trees, upsetting the colony of sleeping fruit bats in the melaleucas near the house and showering her with leaves and bat-vandalised nuggets of fruit.
As the chopper swooped over the property, four police all-terrain vehicles bounced down the lane to the house. Cops in overalls jumped out. So did two sniffer labradors.
‘Is this the Cleary rock’n’roll residence?’ one cop demanded.‘Cannabis cottage?’ he smirked.
These cops had to be too young to recall Spider Flower’s heyday, but clearly her father’s wild rocker reputation still lingered in the regional records. Two officers stayed behind at the house while the others, following directions from a police cameraman harnessed in the open door of the helicopter, jogged off, cursing conversationally, into the rainforest.
A marijuana raid. Apparently these pot purges were regular events in Queensland back in the ’70s. But nowadays? In the Northern Rivers? Where the old, pre-hydroponic growers had made the area what it was, who had moved gracefully into macadamias and real estate and surf shops and become the wealthy local establishment? Where off-duty cops had always enjoyed a spliff after a surf?
For the next hour, as the helicopter juddered above the camphor-laurel canopy in a search for cannabis crops, and the wakened fruit bats shrieked and chattered, the police trudged back and forth, tramping red volcanic mud into the house and frowning suspiciously at tomato plants and bags of potting mix.
They combed the house, the car and Sly’s old studio. They lifted the lid and fallboard on the two pianos, shook dusty speakers and poked into the bell end of a saxophone. The sniffer dogs perked up at two ancient keyboards, ran their noses over them, sneezed at the mould, but found nothing.
Every so often, their messages increasingly curt, the ground police and the cops in the hovering helicopter radioed each other. Eventually the bush searchers returned, empty-handed, covered in prickles and mud and grumbling, ‘Only fucking milkweed, lantana and brown snakes.’
And throughout the unsuccessful search, as the disturbed fruit bats ranted and testily regrouped in the branches above him, Sly sat silently on the verandah in his saggy grey jocks, skelet
on-ribbed, immobile, his skin like tallow, staring into the dense screen of camphor laurels and occasionally fingering his beard.
A frustrated young cop put on a gruff official voice. ‘Let’s save everyone’s time. Any marijuana on the premises?’
Beyond raising his eyes skyward, Sly didn’t respond. On the electricity wires from the main road, like folded brown umbrellas, five dead bats had hung for weeks now. Once the first one mistakenly roosted there, the others had followed, one by one, and fried as well. Their stink had almost gone. Only a whiff from the most recent one remained.
‘Any cannabis here?’ the cop repeated. ‘We’ve had reports. What about ice? Coke? Heroin?’
Sly’s eyes stayed on the electrocuted bats. Their leathery wings rustled in the breeze. His mouth barely opened. ‘Why would I use? I have no senses. My organs are all atrophied.’
‘Jesus, is he supposed to be the famous rocker?’ the cop muttered to a sergeant. ‘That weird old bastard?’
‘The dickhead thinks he’s dead, so the story goes. I thought the labs might be interested in a sniff of him but they’re keeping their distance. Don’t blame them. What about the classy undies? I always preferred Cold Chisel anyway. This job’s fucked.’
Lulu, who had psychically anticipated the raid and transferred the family stash to a ‘distressed’ Coolgardie safe at Coastal Collectables, put this negativity down to spiritual disturbances at the nearby holy mountain. Mount Warning, rearing scenically above the coast, was the first place in Australia to receive the sunlight each day. Named by James Cook on his northward journey from Botany Bay in the Endeavour in 1770, it was called Wollumbin by the Aborigines, who revered it as one of the country’s most significant religious sites.
Lulu’s theory was that the sacred mountain was being desecrated by sightseers. Clambering up this rocky, slippery, volcanic peak at night to view the sunrise had become so popular with hippies and tourists alike that the local Bundjalung people believed the climbers were eroding its spiritual significance. They’d begged the climbers to desist, but as Lulu said, ‘No one takes any notice, not with the chance of being the first dude in the whole country to see the morning sun.
‘I reckon there’s a psychic circuit or two out of whack around here,’ she told Willow. ‘Let’s face it, even though he’s broken just about every sacred law possible, it’s not only Dad that’s crazy.’
Willow laughed. ‘He hasn’t climbed a mountain in thirty years. Or walked more than fifty metres.’
Nor had he shown any inclination to partake of his former minor vices. Or to eat, speak, brush his teeth or dress. Or – this was the real test – to sit down at the keyboard again.
‘Seriously, what’s the point of music,’ he’d say to Willow, ‘when I no longer exist?’
Every day the irony struck Willow that her father looked increasingly like a desperate old junkie when he’d never been more drug-free in his adult life.
And now she wanted him to evince interest in the tobacco habit – his old Gauloises – and maybe in the company of family this weekend, to show some desire for wine, too. The relish of them being the point in his case rather than the effects of the substances themselves.
Even if their role in Sly’s three decades of serious drug use mightn’t exactly have lessened the schizophrenia or the severe depression, which perhaps had led to the long-term use of antidepressants, which the doctors, attempting to join the dots, had tentatively fingered as hastening the onset and onslaught of Cotard’s, in the musical career of Sly Cleary these other vices were a drop in the ocean.
The nail in the coffin, as it were.
But easy stages, said the brain fellows. One of them, Dr Ivan Brandreth, a visiting professor at the University of Sydney, with a clinic at St Vincent’s in Darlinghurst, tried a new tack.
Dr Brandreth kept a journal he entitled ‘Clinical Observations on the Link Between the Creative Personality and Insanity’. He also purchased difficult foreign novels favourably reviewed in the New York Review of Books, and collared visiting overseas authors at writers’ festivals for creative insights he believed were unique to writers of the northern hemisphere.
To see if the patient was still intellectually ‘alive’, he’d attempted to get Sly interested in the history of his condition.
Way back in 1880 the neurologist Jules Cotard had called it le délire des negations. Perhaps an eccentric musician type like Sly might be fascinated by the imaginative rarity, the flamboyant 19th-century artistic Frenchness of it. Maybe they could make it a scholarly project together. The Rocker and the Doctor: catchy but unfortunately too commercial for favourable peer review. A more acceptable title, he thought, would be The Delirium of Negation: A Celebrity Sufferer’s View, with a view to collaborative publication in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
‘It’d be pretty cool,’ said Brandreth, who wore loose Indian kurta shirts and frayed jeans and Central American footwear. ‘How about it?’
Cool? Any attempt to get on Sly’s unique wavelength was doomed from the start. ‘I don’t get you, man,’ Sly told him, shark-eyed. ‘Me being a dead person.’
Brandreth wasn’t discouraged. This wasn’t just an old rocker’s run-of-the-mill mental and physical disintegration after decades of overdoing it. Cotard’s was also likely to occur in patients who’d suffered stroke, bipolar disorder, brain injury, brain atrophy, tumours, migraine and delirium states.
‘This could be fin-de-siècle stuff,’ he theorised to his colleagues.‘Extreme pessimism, tick. Degeneration theory, tick. A pathological degree of self-absorption, tick. A focus on the morbid and macabre, tick. A perception of a world falling into decay, yep.’
He asked Sly whether he’d ever read Max Nordau or Arthur Schopenhauer. ‘Surely you’re familiar with Edgar Allan Poe?’
‘The Raven guy?’
‘Yes!’
‘Not really,’ said Sly.
‘What about your music?’ Dr Brandreth persevered. ‘Was it what I think they call “death metal” or “black metal”?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Are you familiar with the bands Mayhem and Morbid?’
‘Nuh.’
‘What about Bedlam or Havoc? Did your music resemble theirs?’
Hardly. If he recalled Spider Flower’s heyday, Sly didn’t let on. Anyway the band had scored their four platinums in a very different genre, pop rock, for ‘Friday Night Girls’, ‘You Want It So Bad’, ‘Face First’ and ‘Tight, Tight Jeans’.
If he did retain a memory of these hits, of individual gigs, of supporting the Australian leg of the Stones’ Voodoo Lounge tour in 1995, of all the pubs and drugs and booze and girls, the stoned appearances on Countdown, the drunken fistfights (bitch slaps, more accurately), the traditional TV-set tosses out the window, the 2 a.m. hotel-pool near-drownings and CPRs administered by desk clerks, the binges and arrests; above all, the calamitous American experiment, he didn’t mention any of them. He stared blankly out over the renovated roofs, BMWs and former night-cart lanes of Paddington and made soft popping sounds like a goldfish.
Next, Brandreth read him other Cotard’s cases from medical literature, including those of three German Frauen who’d presented with the condition over the years, including one Frau Langer (he purposely stressed Frau Langer), who denied the existence of all her vital organs, including her stomach, and consequently insisted she had no need for food.
‘Boy, was she wrong,’ the doctor said, with heavy significance. ‘Eventually Frau Langer died of starvation.’
‘Huh?’ Sly said.
‘Take it from me. You dead people still need to eat,’ Brandreth said.
There was also a Filipino, a Hungarian and, the most widely recorded case, an English religious fundamentalist named Clifford Button. They’d variously complained that their hearts were missing, their brains were dead, their muscles had atrophied and their spleens, lungs, livers and kidneys were putrefying. Some of them preferred to dress in burial shrouds. Clifford Button, especi
ally, became a public nuisance, hanging around the Slough cemetery, gatecrashing funerals and demanding to be admitted to morgues and undertakers’ parlours.
Sly said, ‘Without a brain I can’t think about all that crap.’
Electroconvulsive therapy was the next step. But Willow didn’t want that yet. It made her think of the dead bats hanging on the electricity wire. She was still persevering with the suggestion that a desire for booze, nicotine and pot, while arguably part of a death wish in a ‘normal’ self-destructive schizophrenic person, in a Cotard’s sufferer might be a reasonable indication of a former notoriously rambunctious keyboard player’s renewed wish to live.
To have the old Sly Cleary desiring a hit was the doctors’ aim. Getting him to want the old flash.
No luck. What condition? He wouldn’t accept anything other than that he’d carked it. Dead as a doornail. Organs non-functional and decomposing. No brain, no heart. So, next step: a combination of antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs to keep him more or less stable. Quiet and unruffled, though, alas, still ‘dead’.
Ridding Sly of his negative deliriums that he wasn’t alive was paramount. It was the whole point and had been ever since the afternoon two years before when he’d woken up at his usual 3 p.m. in his room in the Squatters’ Retreat Inn in Toowoomba alongside Rhonda, the motel’s assistant bar manager, in the middle of Spider Flower’s ‘Return of the Legends’ tour, in which the band, with replacements for their original lead vocalist, lead guitarist and drummer, sought to attract nostalgic Queensland ’70s fans, and discovered he was dead.
‘I’m dead,’ he announced to her.
Rhonda squinted at him. He’d looked much younger last night. ‘I’ve felt better myself,’ she said.
In Willow’s opinion the best sign for ages was his attendance here at Whipbird this weekend. Even if the only reason he’d allowed her to pack him into the car and drive him to Ballarat was her insisting that the event was celebrating deceased Clearys: the generations of dead people led by Conor Cleary, who’d come and gone before him, in the days before he’d joined them and become dead, too. There was a symmetry to it that she thought might be helpful for his disease.