by Doris Brett
The events of that evening are clearly etched in my mind, but I am not at liberty to give them words. It is one of those tricky conjunctions of rights—the writer’s right to explore his or her own life versus the individual’s right to privacy.
Yet because of its position as a turning point, this is one event that cannot simply be submerged into the unseen layers of the story. What do I do with it? Do I pretend it didn’t happen? Soften it? Change it? Shift the turning point to something else? No. All of these things belie my truths. I would be worse than voiceless; I would be inauthentic.
I don’t have the answers. All I can do is acknowledge the limitations.
I can recognise too, that these limitations are also part of a wider and enormously complex issue which each society, group and family responds to differently. How do we address the multiplicity of human experience? Should there be only one voice, one story? And if so, whose will it be? If not, how do we allow the others to be heard?
All of us have stories that for one reason or another remain as the lining, the invisible, yet inextricably joined underside, of the garments of our life. That evening in December must become, then, one of those.
And so I am like a traveller, stopped at the bank of a river, looking blankly for the stepping stones to help me cross, get to the other side. But they are not there.
All I can do is leap—cross that gap in a bound. And what I have learned on that crossing, during the events of that December evening, has changed me. Why that event and not those of two, four, six, pick a number, years earlier? Who knows? But that evening becomes what finally makes the bucket overspill.
I am eighteen years old and I have at last been made to see. And the conclusion is inescapable. I am forced to recognise what I have spent years twisting myself inside out to deny—the painful truth about my relationship with my sister. It is a harsh reality to face and yet with it comes an odd kind of relief. Because I know it is the truth. And the truth is freeing.
And to my surprise, I am free. It is the strangest of feelings; as if something I didn’t know I was carrying has dropped away. I am shaken, but there is also the sense of something oddly exhilarating—like waking up suddenly in a new land where the terrain is fresh and the future is before me.
Freedom, of course, is not that simple. It is a voyage, not just the raising of an anchor. But that is how it begins. I am changed from that day on, beginning the long journey towards myself. It is three more years before I can speak of my sister without crying.
In that third year, I am a postgraduate student in psychology, beginning my first clinical placement. We students are all very excited. It is the first time we will have contact with real live patients. I take to it like the proverbial duck to water. It’s absorbing, moving, fascinating. And I seem to be good at it.
The students are closely supervised. Each week, I have to meet with the senior psychologist who supervises my work with patients. Except that all of my patients are progressing perfectly smoothly. And when this happens, of course, there’s not much to talk about. I go through all my patients at the beginning of each session. It doesn’t take long. I’ve said or done the right things, picked out the right dynamics. There is a whole yawning gap of supervision time to fill.
To fill in the silence, I begin to gabble. Usually about me. Usually about everything I have decided I don’t want to talk about. I hate these sessions at first. The other students are experiencing all the usual beginner’s problems with their patients. They spend their supervision times talking about what to do. I spend my supervision time examining the things I never proposed to examine. This is not fair, I decide resentfully. How did I get into this? I’m going to keep my mouth shut. Comment on the weather. But my mouth has other ideas. The words keep spilling out.
It is three months before it suddenly dawns on me that I am changing. That what these sessions have been, this unexpected exploration of shadows—my family, my life—is therapeutic. I realise this with a sense of astonishment; the same astonishment with which I notice the old layers of shyness and self-deprecation beginning to fall away from me. The sessions continue. They are challenging, frightening, daunting, but I no longer resent them. I know I am being offered the keys.
In the next three years, I thrive. I feel like a plant that has been given a dose of Super-Grow. I am unfolding, blooming, meeting the sun. This impression of being the subject of a sped-up plant-life documentary is heightened when I meet an acquaintance whom I haven’t seen for some time while shopping in the city. She stops me as I pass by. ‘How are you?’ she says and we exchange a few pleasantries. Then she pauses and looks at me closely. ‘Something’s happened to you, hasn’t it?’ she says. ‘You’re looking …’ and she gropes for the word, ‘… you’ve blossomed.’ I step back, struck by how someone who barely knows me has picked up exactly what I am feeling inside.
It hasn’t escaped me either that this life-affirming spurt of renewal has come hot on the heels of—and indeed perhaps because of—the New England fiasco; the year I wept my way through, swearing that it was the worst, most useless year of my life.
If I hadn’t been so depleted by that year, would I have made the turnaround that December evening? I think perhaps I might not have. It was something about that rock-bottom year that actually enabled—no, forced—me to see what I had spent a lot of energy avoiding. Perhaps, quite simply, there was no more energy left for avoidance. Perhaps, after going through a year that felt like a bad dream, I was no longer frightened to open my eyes.
But New England hasn’t finished with me yet. Although I don’t know it, there is an afterword which comes many years later.
It is 1984 and I’m getting ready for the publication of my first book. Well, not truly my first book—my bread-baking book was published a couple of months before, but that’s another story. This is what I think of as my first real book. It’s my poetry book.
I have been clearing out some old papers in the garage when I come across a familiar insignia on a yellowing envelope. It’s dated 1968, the year I spent in New England. It’s the Jacaranda Press imprint, the publishers of my poetry book. I’m puzzled. I don’t recall any dealings with Jacaranda up till now.
Curious, I open the envelope and discover a rejection slip. Sometime during my stay in New England, I must have sent in some poems for an anthology. And been roundly rejected. The letter reads, ‘The future may prove us wrong, but …’
I sit back in amazement, winded for a moment by that strange sense of the past coming full circle. And then I laugh. I must send it to John, I think, the managing director of Jacaranda; he’ll enjoy it. Then, suddenly apprehensive (what if it makes him regret his decision?) I decide I’ll wait until after it’s published. After it’s published, I’m still hesitant. I’ll wait for the reviews, I think. The reviews come in and they’re good. I am finally getting ready to send it, when the book wins its first literary award. Now I can definitely send it, I think. The letter is a hit in the Jacaranda offices. John tells me he has framed it.
A couple of months after this, the phone rings. It’s someone from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, to tell me that my book has won their inaugural Mary Gilmore Prize for poetry. They tell me that they rotate their annual meetings through Australia’s various university campuses. They’d like to fly me up to this year’s meeting so that they can present me with the award. I acquiesce happily and am just about to hang up when I realise I don’t know which campus I’ll be flown up to. I enquire.
‘It’s the New England campus,’ comes the answer.
‘Wow!’ I say, my voice at excited squeak level. ‘New England! That’s fantastic!’
There’s a pause. ‘You know, we’ve never had anyone respond quite that way to the New England campus,’ the voice says slowly and cautiously.
And so, a few weeks later I find myself on a plane to New England. I start chatting to the man sitting next to me, regaling him with a few of my New England tales. One of them rev
olves around what I have come to think of as ‘the night’.
It is the night one of the college students goes mad and starts hallucinating men climbing in at her third floor window. Going mad is, of itself, not an unusual occupation in New England. But repeatedly waking Miss Stevens, the formidable college principal, on the basis of delusions of imminent rape by mountaineering types, is.
It is also the night a student climbs into the bulldozer parked in the neighbouring grounds of soon-to-be-constructed Drummond College. With the sophisticated sense of humour typical of New England students of that time, he gets the bulldozer running and then jumps out.
And finally, it is also the night that my friend and I wander along, slightly furtively, to the small college library. It is close to midnight and inspired by a parapsychology lecture the previous week, we are carrying scribbled letters and a cheap wine glass. We are planning a seance.
Just as we are about to open the door, I glance up at the curtains and see them move.
‘Someone’s in there!’ I hiss.
‘Nonsense,’ says my friend. ‘Who could possibly be in there?’
I direct her gaze to the curtains. On cue, they move again.
And then, before our horrified eyes, they move even more. And a bull’s head appears.
We beat all known records for speed, back to the safety of our rooms. The next day, we discover that there was indeed a bull in the library. A student had ‘borrowed’ another student’s PhD bull and put it there as a joke. The bull was on a special diet. Clearly sick of the same old, same old, it had welcomed the chance for some junk food—the college curtains. Bye-bye PhD.
My fellow traveller’s jaw is dropping as I relate this story. I congratulate myself on my engaging narrative style. But it is more than that.
‘My wife works at the college,’ he says, when he has regained speech. ‘People still talk about that night. But everyone thinks it’s just an urban myth.’
And so, a few hours later, I find myself back on the college grounds that I last saw seventeen years ago. After the awards ceremony, I slip out quietly and wander around the dark campus. Lighting is low wattage and infrequent; most of the colleges are uninhabited in this in-between time. My feet crunch with the rich microphone-effect of country night. I turn corner after corner, thinking I must be lost, and then suddenly there it is. Duval College. I move forward more surely now. Another two turns and I am in the courtyard. A few more steps and I am standing before the window of my old room.
The curtains are drawn. The window is blank and the room unlighted, but I have the insane feeling that somehow I am in there. That if I could just reach my hand through the dark glass, push aside the curtains and see, I would see me there. Seventeen, with the odd, choppy hairstyle that never quite fitted; sitting at my desk, swollen with misery and bad college food; shy, clumsy as an ox, knowing that I’m never going to make it; knowing that nothing is ever going to go right again.
And suddenly I feel like weeping. Not with sadness—although that is there too, for the despairing, unhappy child in that room—but with an emotion I can’t fully delineate. Sadness, joy, but mostly a sheer strange wonder.
I want to cross through that wall, all the way into 1968; to take that girl into my arms and say, ‘See. This is how it happens. This is the future. It’s me. I am the future. I’m telling you: It all works out.’
And I stand there, transported, lost in the power of that moment. The sense of the circles, ever-present, opening and closing in our lives; taking us to where we don’t know we want to go; returning us to what we can only now see.
It’s over! I’ve finished my last chemo! I’ve gone through all the chemo sessions in three-week intervals—the fastest you can do them. It feels like doing a hat-trick or winning a trifecta! I’m really excited. I’m also incredibly tired; even walking the few metres to the carpark feels like a marathon; but it’s over! In a month, I get a Ca125 and a CT scan done and then make an appointment to see Jim and Greg. I’m back on track!
It felt so good to know that this was the last time I’d be packing my little bag for hospital. Each chemo session involves an overnight stay and by now I have the routine down pat. I drink my four litres of water on the day before chemo and again on the day itself. I come in laden with water bottles, my tape-recorder, magazines and a small electric heating pad—encouragement for my veins. I also take a megadose of Senna in the afternoon, to head off constipation. I’m a traveller who’s finally figured out what to pack.
It was my birthday on the day before chemo. Celia took me out to an art exhibition for a birthday treat, with dinner at a Japanese restaurant in the evening. The dinner turned out to be a surprise party that she had arranged. My first ever. It was great. A bunch of friends was there and it was a real celebration.
Celia and I have been friends for twenty-plus years after bonding at a kindergarten mothers’ ice-breaker. She’s been terrific. Every three weeks during my chemo months, she’s swooped by and carried me off to the pictures or for an outing. We go on weeknights when there aren’t many people (I’ve been told to avoid crowds) and I feel like a pampered, delicate child, taken out for holiday treats.
It’s a couple of days after chemo and I’m still astonishingly fatigued. After I brush my teeth in the morning, I have to sit down to recuperate. It’s strange being so physically weak. I get up in the morning thinking I’m made out of hardwood, but within two minutes discover that I’m actually tissue paper.
It’s a week now since chemo and I’m still amazed by the level of exhaustion. Jim says that because I’ve been going through so fast, my body will be even more depleted than usual and that I’ll be more tired and take more time to recover than someone who’s gone through at a slower pace. But it’s wonderful to know it’s all over. I thought I’d feel exhilarated, but I’m actually too tired to do exhilaration. I do, however, have enough energy for very, very relieved.
I used to think I knew what ‘tired’ was. When one of my American publishers sent me on a sixteen-cities-in-three-weeks publicity tour with a different time-zone every day and an optimistic four hours’ sleep a night, I thought that was ‘tired’. On the last day of the tour, they outdid themselves and had me in three cities on the same day. I took the train from Philadelphia to my last stop, New York, dragged my luggage and myself halfway up the stairs of the station and felt my legs go. As I dropped to my knees on the steps of Penn. Station, I realised that was it—I just couldn’t get up. And that was where my publicist found me, half an hour later, when she came to investigate my absence—on my knees, on the steps of Penn. Station, resigned to staying there forever. I thought that was ‘tired’. It wasn’t.
It’s three weeks after chemo now. I read somewhere that cranberries have a unique test for freshness. You throw them on the floor. If they bounce back, they’re fresh and ready to eat. If they just lie there, they’re bruised or rotten. Well, I’ve failed the cranberry test.
This last fortnight has been terrible. So many things have gone wrong, one after another. Nothing on the cancer front, but in almost every other direction, unexpected obstacles and disasters have been flying at me. I’ve been trying to mop up the mess, but my energy is failing and I’m so frustrated and tired that I feel like a weepy heap. I feel as if I’ve climbed a really high and difficult mountain and that when I finally reached the top, instead of a rest, there was someone waiting with a hammer to hit me over the head. If I had the energy, I’d scream. All I can manage right now is an anguished squeak.
To try to fix one of the problems, I’ve had to ring an acquaintance for whom I did a huge and life-altering favour a couple of years ago. I was happy to do it at the time, with no thought of repayment. Now I need to ask for a small favour, which would take a minute of their time. I loathe asking people for favours; I never do it. But this time, I have no choice.
I phone and to my amazement my request is blandly refused. I’m almost speechless with shock. It brings me right back to the first days of my
recurrence and the experience I had with those friends who abandoned me. The universe is clearly shaking its head, inspecting its nails in a bored fashion and muttering, ‘Slow learner. Slow learner.’
And I have been. It’s a class I never wanted to take; have had to be dragged to. ‘Too trusting’ is the label my friends have always given to me. I’ve worked in departments with politics hotter than Vesuvius and haven’t been bothered by them, simply because I haven’t noticed them. I’ve been insulted and smiled amiably at the insulter, not recognising what has happened, because it just hasn’t occurred to me that someone would be that nasty. (This response, incidentally, comes highly recommended as a sure-fire method of driving the offender batty.)
Like a lot of people in the ‘helping professions’, I’ve always taken care of people. I’ve done it ever since I was a child, when my school friends told me their troubles and the stray dogs in the neighbourhood followed me home. Although it wasn’t my stated vocation back then, the inscription from my classmates in my seventh grade year-book reads, ‘To Doris, the Psychiatrist.’
Being the rescuer has been a role I’ve fallen into easily. In part, because I am good at rescuing. Also because I am not good at asking for things for myself. It is the persistent echo of that old self who needed to be good and take care of people in order to be worthy of a place in the world.
In many ways I have left her far behind. I have grown up to be a strong and resilient adult. From the sixteen-year-old who froze when put into a situation containing more than one person, I have become someone who can effortlessly address an audience of hundreds without the slightest flicker of nerves. I have dared things and succeeded, led a rich and productive life. So why is she dogging me now?