All That I Remember About Dean Cola

by Tania Chandler

  The theme for the group today was: a special or safe place. At the long table, Reece was moulding a spaceship from purple and green playdough. Dad was concentrating — brow corrugating, tongue worming around in and out of his mouth — as he stuck stars, with his big awkward fingers, onto his painting of a black sky above a highway. A handful of other patients were painting or drawing.

  Sidney was painting her place by the river at dusk — a dark sandbank dappled with bruised shadows, water daubed with the last of the day’s sun. In the foreground, right of centre, a tall shadow-man stood at the river’s edge, his image reflected with the sunset. Behind him, in the sand, footsteps showed where he’d walked.

  With painful brushstrokes of yellow ochre, Prussian green, and scarlet lake, Sidney began erasing the shadow-man. Dad asked why she was painting over him.

  ‘Only the drowning can see him.’

  The scarlet lake overflowed its well in the paint palette. It ran towards her, spattering the table, the floor, the walls. She dropped her brush, closed her eyes, and was floating, floating away. Something broke through the sludge of her mind, a torch beam in the fog. Hold tight to the banister and keep going. Red everywhere. Aubrey? Somebody hurt Aubrey? Was it me? Oh, God. She gripped the edge of the table and a strange sound, like a rat screaming, escaped her throat.

  ‘It’s OK, Sidney.’

  She felt Hollyanne, the art therapist, sit beside her.

  ‘Why don’t you stop working on your painting for a while?’

  She opened her eyes. The red was gone. ‘I feel dizzy.’

  Hollyanne handed her a pillow to cuddle. ‘Let’s try some breathing.’ Hollyanne demonstrated diaphragmatic breathing and Sidney copied.

  ‘Are you happy to stay with the group?’

  She nodded while continuing to breathe and cuddle the cushion.

  ‘Have a look around the room,’ Hollyanne said. ‘Can you see something to settle your eyes on, something that makes you feel calm?’

  The colours of the flowers outside the art room window were so vivid they hurt. Achingly orange, pink, and green. Beauty almost too much to bear in this place for the lost, the damaged, and the broken.

  ‘Keep breathing, Sidney. You’re doing well.’

  Sun streamed through the trees. Reece passed his cap to her. The inner brim was sweat-stained, and it smelled like unwashed hair.

  ‘Thank you.’ She put it on, realising that it was not the light that made shadows, but the things it touched.

  ‘HELLO, SIDNEY. I’m Doctor Theo Clay,’ said a man standing in the doorway of her room, holding a clipboard.

  She sat up on her bed. She’d been in here for — she wasn’t sure how long, but this was the first time she could remember seeing a doctor.

  Doctor Theo balanced his clipboard on his knee and pulled up the chair beside her bed. He asked if they could have a chat. Her admission form was poking out of his clipboard; she could read it upside down.

  Appearance: Slim build, hair tied back, wears gloves to cover burn injuries to hands from house fire during psychotic episode in 1991

  Speech: OK

  Affect: Blunted

  Thought: Paranoid delusions, auditory and visual hallucinations

  Cognition:

  Theo turned the clipboard over. ‘Why do you think you’re in hospital?’

  ‘It says why in your report, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but I want you to tell me in your own words.’

  ‘I burned down my house?’ From the look on his face, she gathered that probably wasn’t right.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Do you remember anything about driving from your mother’s house?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘To your house, in Brunswick East?’

  Do you remember, don’t you remember.

  Theo wrote something in her file, and pulled out another document. ‘I’ve put you back on Olanzapine, but at a lower dose than Doctor Asada prescribed. There’s a new medication called Asenapine, fewer side effects. I think you should try it after …’

  ‘After what?’

  ‘Your blood-test results were pretty good. And,’ he smiled, ‘you’re pregnant.’ He paused, waiting for her reaction.

  He was playing a trick — to see if she still believed in the Devil’s semen. She tried to grip onto the bed sheet, but couldn’t get purchase. ‘Pregnant?’

  He must have mistaken for a smile her mouth twisting in horror. ‘Yes. Congratulations. Your husband says you’ve been trying for a long time.’

  ‘Dean?’

  Theo frowned. ‘Christos.’

  She shook her head. ‘Christos is a liar, a rapist, and a murderer.’ She must have said it aloud because Theo glanced at the emergency button.

  ‘Why do you think Christos is all those things?’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you people? Christos is the Devil. Only one thing can absolve Him.’

  Theo’s mobile rang in his pocket.

  Moss.

  ‘Sorry.’ He checked the screen and dismissed the call. ‘Sidney, what year is it?’

  She looked at his iPhone, unsure now. ‘Nineteen ninety-one?’ Too late for Dean Cola, but Aubrey hadn’t been born yet. She had plenty of time to save her, and to stop Dad from killing himself and all those people in Collins Street.

  LINED UP in the grey cupboard: my comfy clothes, slippers, cotton gloves, Angel cream, and the new novels Christos had bought for me, which I hadn’t opened. I took the cream and massaged some into my hands. It smelled more like chemicals than heaven. And it should have been celestial blue, but the meds had taken away my colours. I held my hands up to the light. No pus or blood. They were misshapen with ugly forever-scars, but I knew they’d healed long, long ago.

  Bronte, my nurse for the day, entered my room. Bronte was aptly named — I thought of her as the ‘literary nurse’ because she sometimes read old novels to the patients out in the day room.

  She asked if I’d been hearing voices.

  ‘No.’

  She smiled. ‘And is your father here in hospital with you?’

  I wasn’t sure; I hadn’t seen him for a while. I shook my head.

  ‘Anybody else from the past?’

  I guessed what she wanted me to say. ‘No.’

  ‘How about Dean Cola? Do you still think you killed him?’

  ‘No. I was at home that night. I burned down my house and hurt my hands. It was a long time ago. Nineteen ninety-one.’

  ‘And Aubrey’s safe?’

  ‘Yes. Nobody hurt Aubrey.’

  Bronte nodded; I’d passed the test. ‘Aubrey’s looking forward to seeing you. The doctors say you’ll be able to go home soon.’

  Soon meant nothing in here — time was not linear; it seemed to have been on a loop, layers of past and present confused.

  ‘You’ll be OK,’ Bronte said. ‘You’ll have the little one, and a great support network.’

  I nodded, and felt, or imagined, a flutter in my belly.

  ‘There’s always setbacks, for everybody. That’s just life. We all break sometimes, but that just makes us stronger.’ She smiled. ‘Ernest Hemingway said: You’re always stronger in the broken places.’

  I wondered if Bronte quoted that to all the patients, or if she’d been saving it for someone she thought would appreciate it. She meant well, so I didn’t mention that he’d also said — in A Farewell to Arms? — that if the world doesn’t break you, it will kill you; it kills everybody. Or something like that — I’d never cared much for Hemingway.

  Bronte had been standing in front of my river painting that Avril had helped me hang on the wall, and, when she left, I noticed it had been taken down.

  SOON I was home in my townhouse — with an enormous ladybi
rd-shaped belly — sorting out, cleaning up. ‘Nesting’, I thought they called it. Pregnancy felt somewhat like The Heaviness — the expanding, inflating, filling of my body — but imbued with joy and expectation instead of dread. What will she look like? I was teetering between the names Esther and Jordan. Esther could be shortened to Essie, Jordan to Jordy. Interesting how I pictured the diminutive suffix ‘ie’ for the former, and ‘y’ for the latter. Also interesting, and hard to believe, how you could fall so deeply in love with somebody you had not seen or held.

  I packed Nan’s white, yellow, blue, and red canisters in a box with assorted kitchen items for the op shop.

  Was that Christos calling from the nursery (which we’d turned into his sick room)? The pulmonary sporotrichosis — attributed to inhalation of toxic plant matter at the Greenworld garden-centre fire — had disseminated as fast as wildfire through his joints and central nervous system. The plan was to move him up to the attic when the baby came. Save a lot of work if he wasn’t still here then. Stop it, Sid. I reminded myself that he was the father of my baby, and of all the times he’d cared for me. But I was just being realistic.

  In a month or so, I’d be listening for the baby crying. Jordy. I listened harder. Quiet.

  Through the window, I saw Sophia crossing the street, one hand waving, the other holding a string bag of tomatoes from her garden. She limped through the front gate. I closed the box, and met her at the door. It took a moment to realise what was different about her today: she’d swapped her black clothes for a floral dress.

  ‘You look nice,’ I said. We kissed cheeks.

  ‘How is Christo?’

  ‘Sleeping. Let’s have a coffee.’

  Sophia followed me into the kitchen. She scowled at the holes in the wall. ‘Where is that shelf?’

  ‘Aubrey helped me take it down yesterday.’

  ‘Good. It was ugh.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Not too early for a shandy?’ She opened the fridge door.

  ‘Out of lemonade,’ I said.

  She shrugged, and pulled the top off a can of beer. ‘Share with me?’

  I shook my head and patted my belly.

  Halfway up the stairs, a sharp pain shot down my left leg — the baby pressing on a nerve. I grasped the bannister and took deep breaths while I waited for the pain to subside. The spoon fell out of the bowl of mashed vegetables Sophia had prepared for Christos. I was too big to lean forward; I had to bend at the knees and reach sideways to pick up the spoon from the carpet. I stuck it back in the bowl and, groaning, continued my laborious ascent to the nursery.

  ‘You OK, Sid?’ Sophia poked her head around from the kitchen, where she was now making a salad.

  ‘All good.’

  The hospice-in-the-home nurses had taught me how to use the oxygen equipment to keep Christos’s lungs working. He winced as I removed the tubing from his nose so I could feed him. I squeezed my whale’s body into the chair beside the bed.

  ‘Do you know why I stayed with you all these years?’ Christos had asked that question a lot in the last couple of months. ‘Because you were my angel, Sid. My princess.’

  I loaded the spoon and aimed it at his mouth.

  ‘But you were so easily led,’ he went on with his mouth full, ‘so silly around boys, men. I had to look after you. Protect you.’

  I gritted my teeth. The baby kicked.

  ‘Protect you from your own behaviour.’

  I stuffed more mash — a little too much — into his mouth. He gagged and coughed. It would have been so easy to choke him.

  When he’d finished coughing, I wiped the dribble from his stubbly chin with the edge of the spoon. I remembered from childhood that cold, wet, scraping feeling; I would never do that to my baby.

  ‘And protect you from going to jail for what happened to Cola.’

  I froze with another spoonful of mash in midair. I had a flash of him saying something similar, but I couldn’t grasp where or when. A winter night. A country road. Headlights in the rear-view mirror.

  He said something in Greek.

  ‘What did you say?’

  He repeated the Greek words.

  ‘No, before that. About Dean Cola.’

  He shrugged.

  I tried to keep my voice low so Sophia wouldn’t hear. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Cola should have gone to jail for what happened to you at that party.’

  I shook my head. ‘I know that Dean didn’t hurt me.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have —’

  ‘And I don’t think I started the fire at Broken River Road.’ Grass, earth, screaming, broken glass. ‘How could I have just stood there and let my hands burn?’

  He glanced warily up at the spider’s web, which he’d asked me to sweep away but was still hanging grey in the corner. ‘You were insane.’

  Skyline and stars. Blood and flames.

  ‘You’ll never understand what I did for you.’

  ‘You mean what you did to me?’ I sniffed back tears — angry, not sad tears — and sat up straighter. ‘I should’ve tried harder to leave you. Never should have married you in the first place.’

  He said something else in Greek and smacked my hand away. He had no strength, but he caught me off guard; a glob of mash hit the custard-yellow wall. ‘Get your fucking repulsive hands away from me. God’s punishment for being a slut and cheating on me with Cola that night.’

  The hospice nurses had prepared me for Christos’s disease hallucinations and delusions. In them, he was usually fighting some long-ago fire, or spiders. The nurses had told me to avoid engaging when he was delusional — at those times, he’d look straight through me, like I wasn’t there — but he was lucid now, useless tears glossing his dull eyes like rain on asphalt.

  ‘I know what you did,’ I hoisted myself up out of the chair, ‘and I know that what I know is true.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘I recorded everything.’

  He laughed and wheezed, but something far from amusement and disbelief flickered in his wet eyes. ‘No. Don’t go. Please. Sit. Stay with me.’

  I walked away.

  [DUSTY CRACKLE of rolling tape] It’s Friday, the sixth of December 1991. I’m sitting at my little table in my room at the psych hospital as I record this. A nurse brought in a cassette recorder because I wanted to write, but my hands hurt too much.

  The walls are pale yellow, the colour of the custard Nan makes. There are no windows. A skinny bed. A tall grey cupboard. At first, I thought it was a jail cell.

  Somewhere along the line, I lost my perspective on reality again. Ended up back here in the Cuckoo’s Nest. I’m recording all that I remember — in case what I’ve been told is not the truth. Before they make me forget again with their medicines and electric probes and heavy-handed therapies.

  [A sigh. A click. Another click]

  A social worker helped me get into a hospitality course at the start of the year, and, by winter, I’d landed a job as a barmaid at the pub that used to be Jay Jays. I was waiting for my manager, Vito, to finish his phone call so I could knock off from my shift. I was standing in the lift-up part of the front bar — the hatch? — with my coat on and my handbag over my shoulder, ready to go.

  The after-work rush was dwindling. A few couples and families floated past into the bistro for dinner. The mechanic from around the corner, with this black grease or something always under his fingernails and in the creases of his hands, he dropped a few dollars into the tips jar on his way out. When the door opened, I could see it was raining. I remember thinking I should have brought my umbrella. Vito replaced the receiver in the cradle and asked if I could stay till stumps — the new casual had called in sick.

  I complained that I was supposed to be having dinner with Christos, but I’d already started unbuttoning my coat. I didn’t really mind.

&nbs
p; Vito said he’d get Gina from the kitchen to help cover the bar so I could still have a dinner break with Fireman Adonis. [A small snort]

  Christos rocked up on the dot of seven thirty with my umbrella tucked under his arm. His big baby face looked fresh and shiny, like he’d just showered rather than been caught in the rain. His shirt was a shade similar to the uniform he wore every day. Didn’t he ever get sick of blue? He told me he had a surprise that he’d reveal over dinner. I poured him an orange juice. He frowned when I broke the news about my extended shift. I told him to go have an entree, and I’d join him in half an hour.

  He finished his OJ and leaned across the bar to kiss me. I couldn’t help it, I cringed — that cold-worms-in-dirt feeling. I don’t think he noticed, and he headed into the bistro to wait for me.

  When there was only a handful of regulars left holding up the bar, I helped Gina collect glasses in the bistro. Christos complained about how long I was taking.

  I can remember the Guinness clock on the wall, but not what time it was. Getting close to eight, I guess, because I told Christos to hurry up and order mains before the kitchen closed. I asked for the caesar salad with no anchovies. Christos pinched my bum as I headed back to the front bar.

  Old Cliff was leaning so close to old Jim in the corner he was about to topple off his stool. Beer and spittle were flying everywhere as they argued over the size of glasses. It was always the same argument with them at that time of night. Something like: A schooner is a middy, not a pint. And a pony is such-and-such mil. / No, that’s a small glass — a pony’s some other mil. I can’t remember the volumes now, and those two had probably talked in ounces. I poured them each another glass.

  Gina came up to the bistro-side of the bar smiling in an odd way, like she was constipated or something. I would understand later, over dinner, that it was conspiracy. She said Fireman Adonis had ordered a bottle of champagne.