Proof is also about complicated love. There were times in my life when I cared about people I felt were close to me, but who didn’t believe in love. It was strange and confusing to love someone who did not believe that I loved them. I did not understand, at a young age, that this kind of mistrust really comes from self-doubt, from a feeling of being unlovable. How could they not feel that I loved them? How could they not trust me? It was a big impetus for me wanting to write Proof. I thought I could explore all these feelings, especially the notion that trust is ultimately a leap of faith. You can never find enough proof that someone loves you, that someone is trustworthy. You simply choose to believe. All these elements led to the emotional power play at the heart of the movie. It took me around four years to finish the final draft screenplay of Proof.
The only person I had ever met who was visually impaired was a little boy, Richard, who moved into our neighbourhood when I was a child. He was outgoing and friendly and comfortable in the world. So I thought, Dammit! I’m going to write Martin as Martin—his disability will not define him.
I decided that Martin had been kept at home by an overprotective mother. She was the only person in his life, until she died from cancer when Martin was ten. He believed that his mother had faked her own death, because the task of looking after him had been too much for her. Feeling unloved and abandoned, he had grown up unable to trust anyone, and had developed an extreme method of testing whether people were lying to him. He would take a photograph and get his housekeeper, Celia, to describe the photo to him in ten words or less. Then he would attach a stick-on braille label to the back of the photo and find someone else to describe the photo to him. He could test if the description was true by reading the braille label.
The camera and the photos took on an almost magical power for him. The click of the shutter meant that a piece of reality was being snipped for him to collect. Not understanding what light was, or what images were, Martin was haunted by the possibility that he was missing a sense. He was intent on finding out what it was like to experience that sense. He was intent on discovering the truth, whatever that might be.
I wrote the script without doing any research into blindness or vision impairment. But when it came time to shoot the film, I realised I needed to help my lead actor—and the little boy playing ten-year-old Martin—understand what it was like to live without sight. I contacted the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind. They were very generous in finding people I could talk to and observe.
When I visited a primary-school class for vision-impaired children, I was intrigued to see them all handling 3D cardboard landscapes. One picture had a small house in the front layer, behind which were some trees; behind the trees were some mountains. The kids were feeling the picture. Everything was perfectly in perspective, so the children could understand that when sighted people see mountains in the distance the mountains look small, even though we know that they are very high. The children were being taught how the sighted see the world. They were being taught what ‘in the distance’ meant. This lesson planted itself deep in my heart. It changed my way of thinking about disability.
A friend from Rusden, Cristina Pozzan, was going to produce Proof with me, but a few weeks after we got the great news that Film Victoria and the Film Finance Corporation had agreed to fund the movie, I discovered I was pregnant. PJ and I were pleased and a bit scared. We realised we had to postpone the production. Unfortunately, Cristina had to take on other work, so I needed to find a new producer for Proof. I had met Lynda House in 1988, when I attended a week-long writing workshop she had organised through Film Victoria. We soon became friends and I knew she would be perfect for Proof. After all, she had worked with Peter Weir on The Year of Living Dangerously, with Richard Lowenstein on Dogs in Space, and with Nadia Tass and David Parker on Malcolm.
Delaying Proof meant no income for a year. We quickly ran out of money. PJ managed to get work writing a treatment for a TV series that never got going, but it didn’t bring in enough for us to keep renting our flat. We broke our lease and piled our few belongings into Kathy’s spare bedroom in the tiny house she shared with Geoff and their toddler son, Julius. I loved living with my sister again, especially because Kathy advised me on everything to do with pregnancy. Before long she found out that she was pregnant with her second boy, Charlie. So there we were, preggers together.
The Australian Women’s Weekly was creating a series of romance novels. One the editors, who knew I was broke, kindly commissioned me to write a story. I came up with a tawdry tale of a young woman falling for a Mr Rochester type, a composer who has a bitchy ex-wife with intimacy issues. I gave it the title Night Music and it was published under a pen name, Amanda Moon. My fee of $5000 kept us going for a while.
I loved being pregnant. I felt I had joined a secret, exclusive club with only two members. I could feel every move my baby made, and knew that he or she could feel every move I made. I tried to do everything perfectly. I read the right books. I did prenatal yoga classes with my friend Mary Sdraulig, who was also pregnant. By December 1989, my belly was enormous. People in the supermarket joked about me having triplets. It was getting difficult to walk. My sister and mother kept reassuring me that big babies ran in our family. They had both had caesarean sections, but I was determined I would be the exception to the rule. Every morning I did my yoga and stretching exercises that would allow me to have an uncomplicated labour. Or so I thought.
About three days before our baby was due, I came down with terrible food poisoning. Every time I threw up, I would get severe contractions. PJ and I were supposed to be going out with his dad, Tom, for dinner, but I told PJ he would have to go without me. Over dinner, Tom introduced PJ to a woman (let’s call her Monica) and declared he was in love with her. He was leaving PJ’s mum. PJ was stunned when Monica said to him, ‘What happiness can your father have if he can’t have me?’ (Later, PJ wrote this into a scene in Muriel’s Wedding.)
After the shocking dinner, Tom and Monica dropped PJ home and came in to check on me. I was still vomiting, so PJ asked his dad and Monica to drive me to the hospital. I took my bucket with me and threw up all the way. By the time we got to see a doctor, PJ was throwing up too. What a night! The next morning, once the vomiting and contractions had eased, they sent me home.
Mary Sdraulig went into labour the following weekend. She meditated and breathed through her contractions and delivered her baby in about three hours. I was so jealous! By now I was a week overdue and the size of a whale. On the evening of 17 December, I began to feel more contractions. I thought they might be fake contractions again, and tried to ignore the pain. In the last months of my pregnancy, PJ had been working on a spec treatment for what would eventually become his movie script for Muriel’s Wedding. Somehow PJ had finished his film treatment on the same day my contractions began, and we decided to show it to Lynda House right away, hoping she might be interested in helping produce it.
We walked the few kilometres to her house on Elm Street in Richmond and dropped the treatment in her letterbox. On the walk back, my contractions grew stronger. I tried to stay at Kathy’s for as long as I could—I even made some raspberry jam for Christmas presents. But soon the pain was intense, and I told PJ it was time. Out the front of Saint George’s Hospital in Kew there was a large statue of a dragon being speared through the stomach. I was the dragon.
In the maternity ward, the contractions were the worst pain I had ever felt, like a giant steel belt being tightened around my guts. I started to withdraw from the room in my mind. I was a tiny person treading water in a stormy grey ocean. A mighty swell was churning all around, threatening to drown me. I was alone, no one to help me. With each successive wave, I was growing more exhausted and afraid. I remember thinking: This is torture, and if I was being interrogated I would make a false confession to stop the pain. Finally, I was granted relief in the form of an epidural anaesthetic. All the pain receded. The ocean drained away, and I swear it was as if the string s
ection of an orchestra was playing heavenly music.
I looked at my anaesthetist and said, ‘You’re an angel.’
The epidural bliss did not last very long. My blood pressure suddenly dropped. The baby was in distress.
‘We’re going to take you into surgery now,’ a nurse told me, her face grave. ‘We have to get your baby out in the next three minutes.’
They wheeled me into a cold, bright room. My arms were tied like I was being crucified. A drip was inserted and the medical team started prepping my belly. A cloth screen was erected to prevent me from witnessing my belly being slit open. Someone in scrubs and a mask sat on a stool next to my head and started stroking my hair. Who is that? I looked across and saw my favourite pair of blue eyes. It was PJ.
‘It won’t be long,’ he said softly. ‘Soon we’ll get to meet our baby.’
I was terrified the baby would die. I had memories of Mum telling me she had lost her first child in a still birth, and I suddenly realised it could happen to me. I didn’t feel the surgeon’s incision, although I could feel some forceful tugging on my belly. Then I heard a funny squawk.
The surgeon held our slimy green baby above the screen for a couple of seconds. PJ and I laughed in relief.
‘Why is he green?’ asked PJ.
One of the nurses explained that he had pooed himself in the womb. PJ said the green poo was appropriate, because the baby sounded like a frog. I argued that he sounded more like a duck. We laughed, then I passed out.
The next thing I remember was being handed a clean, pink and very cute baby. He had a lot of black hair and an extraordinarily serene expression. We called him Dowie, an Irish Gaelic name that means ‘boy with blue eyes and black hair’.
It took a long time for the doctor to sew my uterus and abdomen back together. PJ accompanied Dowie to the nursery, where he watched, awestruck, as the nurse showed him how to give his son his first bath. Then he held Dowie. As he gazed at him, the nursery radio played Tina Turner’s ‘Simply the Best’. Overwhelmed, PJ started crying over his little frog-duck. I wish I had a picture of twenty-seven-year-old PJ crying over his firstborn son.
Five days after Dowie was born, I was still in hospital, but feeling shaky and sad. I had heard of the baby blues…Mine kicked in when PJ was late getting back to see us. Dowie was asleep in my arms. I felt so alone. Tears slipped out.
PJ arrived to see me weeping. He was alarmed. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘What’s the matter, Joss?’ He held my hand.
I explained that I was being silly—I just had an emotional moment, that’s all. I told PJ I wanted to go and stay at the farm, to be close to Mum and Dad. I needed Mum. I didn’t have a clue how to be a good mother and I needed her to teach me. PJ put sleeping Dowie in his crib and ran off to call my parents on the public phone in the hospital lobby.
Half an hour later, he returned, his face pale. ‘Well, I just told your father to fuck off,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ I said, shocked. No one told my father to fuck off.
PJ explained that he had asked Mum and Dad to take me to the farm because I needed them—emotionally. Mum had resisted, worried about my leaving the hospital before the recommended seven days were up. As I was going to be in hospital on Christmas Day, the family were all planning to come in and spend it with me. PJ, in protective husband mode, demanded they change their plans: I wanted to be discharged immediately. Dad got on the line and told PJ that he was not thinking things through. PJ then accused them both of being terrible parents and not caring about me at all. Mum got back on the line and he told her that I had been crying because I thought she didn’t love me. Mum started crying. Dad took the phone and started yelling at PJ. That was when PJ told him to fuck off, and hung up.
I stared at PJ. I went cold inside. I couldn’t speak. PJ told me he had spoken to the doctor, who had agreed to sign the discharge papers in the next hour. He had also asked Barbara Bishop if we could stay at her place, because he was sure no one in my family would ever speak to us again. We were on our own now, and PJ was going to look after his little family.
An hour later, Barbara Bishop picked us up at the hospital. She was going away for Christmas and said PJ and I could stay at her house for a few weeks until she got back. I spent the following days shell-shocked. Why had Kathy and my parents not come to see me? I felt abandoned. It did not occur to me that they had no idea where PJ and I had gone.
On Christmas Day, Lynda House and her husband, Tony Mahood, came over and we had a small celebration with cake and cups of tea. Later in the afternoon Tom and Monica came over. Monica gave us some shortbreads, along with the bucket I had left in her car the night she had driven me to the hospital. There was still vomit in the bucket, but a tea towel had been discreetly placed over the top.
Finally, a friend of Mum’s tracked me down and came to visit. She told me that my whole family was worried about me: they wanted to come and see me but felt PJ would not make them welcome; they wanted me to know how loved I was, and that this was all a terrible misunderstanding.
My friend Heather Mitchell and her boyfriend Martin McGrath, who was to be the cinematographer for Proof, also came to visit. They said they had found a place for us to live—a crooked cottage tucked behind a car yard in a back lane in Richmond. The rent was cheap. The carpet was orange. The toilet and bathroom were in a shed outside.
We loved our new home. The owners, Theresa and Mark, lived next door. They had a little girl and a one-year-old boy. Theresa took me under her wing. She could tell I knew almost nothing about babies. PJ continued to bathe Dowie until my caesarean scar wasn’t hurting anymore, then he had to teach me how to do it.
I remember lying on the couch while Dowie slept in his bouncy chair. My shirt was still unbuttoned from breastfeeding him. I looked down at my belly, a deflated balloon. I gazed at the linea nigra that ran from my herniated navel down to my pelvic bone, like someone had drawn a line on me in brown crayon. I contemplated the bag of wrinkled skin that had been my baby’s home for the past nine months. I felt like I was my baby’s discarded outer skin, a redundant cocoon. My C-section scar was a thin red smile, reminding me that, in another time or place, I might have died.
I was haunted for months by what I felt was the violence of my emergency C-section. I read parenting magazines and tried without success to find accounts of women who were freaked out by their caesareans. All I could find were glowing accounts of perfect natural births. I was afraid to let PJ touch me. Only Dowie could touch me. I was crying a lot, not sleeping, waking up afraid. I became obsessed with the fear that something terrible might happen to Dowie. Someone might steal him, or try to hurt him. One night I got a hammer and started nailing the window shut in his room. I was convinced someone might open his window and pour petrol through, then set his room alight.
I told my doctor about my fears at one of Dowie’s check-ups. Worried I might be suffering from postnatal depression, he recommended I express some milk during the day and have PJ do some of the night feeds so I could get some proper sleep. PJ was happy to help, and eventually, with more sleep, my sanity returned.
At Easter, we reconciled with my estranged family. Mum and Dad came to see us in our wonky little house with its slanting floors. Mum sat down on the couch next to me, while I held Dowie. After telling me how much she loved me, with tears in her eyes, she recounted the whole terrible story of her stillborn first child, a little boy she called Michael. She had fallen ill with appendicitis in her second trimester and undergone an emergency appendectomy. A week later her baby died in the womb. At twenty-seven weeks, Mum still had to go through the contractions and the pain of labour to deliver the baby. She never got to see her little boy, or to hold him. They whisked him away immediately after the birth, as if he had never existed. But for as long as Mum had felt him moving around inside her, she had known this little boy. It took two more miscarriages before Mum finally gave birth to Greg, six years into her marriage.
Now she began to cr
y, in despair that I might think she didn’t love me. I told her that of course I knew she loved me. I explained what had happened: PJ had seen me weeping and become distressed. He wanted to fix things, but when Mum and Dad argued against me leaving the hospital, he thought they were rejecting me. PJ apologised. I apologised. Mum and Dad forgave us, but the trauma of Dowie’s birth, and the rift it caused in my family, hung over us for many years.
11
Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write War and Peace in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
STANLEY KUBRICK
The last thing on my mind in the weeks and months after giving birth was the idea of making a movie. But Lynda House was patient. She came around every day and sat with me while I nursed Dowie. She asked me about budgets, schedules and shooting locations. In the spring of 1990, when Dowie was around eight months old, Lynda, PJ and I, along with our casting director Greg Apps, started thinking about who could play my characters.
At first, we did not test anyone for the blind character, Martin, because there was one actor I was convinced I wanted to cast. I refused to look at anyone else. I had seen Nicholas Eadie in Celia, a movie directed by my friend Ann Turner. Lynda told me I really should let some other actors test for the part, but I kept resisting her advice.
Unconditional Love Page 10