Eating the Underworld (25 page)

I wake, feeling shaken. The dream has reminded me that behind all the understanding in the world, being abandoned by friends you cared for and trusted nevertheless hurts like hell. You can't rationalise it away, unless you're in training to be an android. But you can't let it be the whole of your experience either. Because then you truly are murdered—and you have taken part in the killing. Grown-Upness 202, here I come …

While going through some papers today, I come across a bundle of crinkled old letters. Curious, I unfold one. It's in my handwriting. ‘I can't stand this place!' I have written to a friend. ‘I will NEVER stay another year here! NEVER EVER! I HATE IT!' Smiling with nostalgia, I am immediately transported back twenty-nine years, to what my seventeen-year-old self is convinced is the worst year of her life.

It is the end of 1967 and I have to make a decision about where to do my first year of university. Adolescence has not been a highpoint. I am excruciatingly self-conscious. I feel ugly, awkward, ridiculous.

I have put on weight during my teenage years. I am fat. I am pimply. I am shy, with the fervour of someone who believes that imposing their presence on another is an act of cruelty comparable to forcing the appointed other to swallow several dozen toads, live.

On a one-to-one basis with a friend, I am different. I can be witty, entertaining, intelligent. But as soon as one other person appears I freeze, certain that I'm an imposition on group time.

I make efforts to change. I force myself to meet strangers, try to learn how other people do it. I challenge myself to switch schools for my senior year. A class full of people I've never met before.

A friend gives me instructions on how to fit in with groups. ‘You don't have to do much,' she says, ‘just smile, nod and agree with people.'

It sounds simple, but I can't do it. I feel like the big, clumsy gawker at the window, watching the real people pirouette. I apologise to store dummies when
I bump into them. Basically, I apologise to the world for daring to be in it.

It is a curious course I am charting. I am loved by my parents. I have close, good friendships. I'm bright; I have a string of scholarships to prove it. Why then do I feel so stupid, so useless, so insubstantial?

It's an odd conundrum. I have grown up sandwiched between parents who love me and a sister who I feel hates me. What happens when you feed in two such substances? Does the one cancel out the other, as an acid does an alkaline solution; a positive number does a negative? Do you end up with nothing?

As a child, I remember reading that the moon rotates in an orbit which keeps half of it continually lit by the sun while the other half remains permanently in shadow. The line which divides the shadow half from the bright half is called the terminator. I am fascinated by this image. My young self spends endless hours picturing that strange place where half of you is standing in light and the other in darkness. How wide would it be? How many inches would you have to move, to be fully on one side or the other? I never find the answers, but somewhere between childhood and adolescence, and without consciously knowing I have done it, I have crossed the terminator to live in the shadow.

By my final year of high school I am definitely not having a lot of fun. Added to this, my study technique, which consists of getting out my books on the day before the exam, is proving less and less successful. My marks are on a downward slide. I've been studying
science at school but want to do arts at university. That brings more problems; I've picked the wrong subjects, I don't have the faculty prerequisites.

As a result, I don't get into the course of my choice in Melbourne universities. There are a lot of other universities around Australia willing to have me. I have their brochures spread out around me. My mother has been trying to persuade me to study science at Melbourne University (I got into that one), but I don't want to. I'm determined to study the subjects I've set my heart on: psychology, English, sociology, philosophy. Much as it terrifies me, I'm going to go interstate.

But how do I decide which one? I read the description of courses and cities and campuses until my eyes spin. And then suddenly it happens. The one deciding sentence leaps out at me. In between a sober description of colleges and costs, there it is: ‘New England University is the only university in Australia completely surrounded by a rabbit-proof fence.' That's it, I decide. I know nothing about rabbits or their fences, but any university that's crazy enough to put that in their brochure has to be the one for me.

So, here I am. And it's Time Warp City. New England has perfected something much more impressive than cold fusion. It's worked out how to travel backwards in time. In Melbourne, the students are up in arms about Vietnam. When I mention Vietnam in conversation with a New Englander, she says curiously, ‘Where's that?'

‘It's a little country town in Victoria,' I reply.

‘Oh,' she says. And the conversation continues. It takes me a moment to process the fact that she actually believed me.

And so it goes on. A student peeks curiously at my trendy sixties wardrobe and says with genuine astonishment, ‘But we don't have fancy dress parties here.' In a chat to a neighbour, I casually mention that I prefer cities to the country. The next morning, I am called up to the college principal's office. There is a grim expression on her face. ‘I hear you don't like New England!' she greets me accusingly. Stalin, eat your heart out.

The year starts off badly. It is my first week on campus. I have contracted an ordinary, garden-variety cold. It is almost gone when the college doctor arrives for his check-up visit.

‘How are you feeling?' he asks.

‘Much better,' I reply enthusiastically. My cough, which has almost disappeared, gives its one little peeping appearance for the day.

The doctor straightens up. ‘Well, you can get dressed,' he says.

‘Great,' I respond.

‘You're going to hospital.'

And for the next week, there I stay in a ward sandwiched between two elderly women who chat about me over my body. No-one will tell me why I am there. I am feeling perfectly well—apart from the sense that I have stumbled onto the set of a Kafka-esque movie.

At the end of the week, when I am finally released from hospital, I discover the reason for my urgent
incarceration. My cough hadn't gone away on the day the doctor predicted. It was a day late.

The year goes downhill from there.

I've come expecting intellectual debate, excitement, creativity, fun. Instead, I find myself in a place where even John and Betty, those hell-raisers from my ancient primary school reader, would have gone insane from lack of stimulation. The calendar of cultural, social and intellectual events for the entire year fits into approximately one hour of an off-day at Melbourne University. I miss my friends, family, theatre, pictures, dances. I miss my life.

It's also the first time I've come across discrimination. In the township, I see Aboriginal people shunned, despised, sworn at. I can't believe it. It upsets me so much that I stop going into town. One student tells me that he won't be inviting his best friend to his wedding because he's not from the right social class.

I have come expecting the best of small town living. Instead I am seeing the worst—small-mindedness, bigotry, narrowness; qualities that are not exclusive to any one group of course, but that somehow seem to be all I see around me that year.

In Sociology 1, I learn the meaning of the word
anomie
—the state of being unable to find a psychological home in one's society—and I have the ‘aha' experience. I am trapped in an alien sociology experiment.

My parents beg me to come home; they know how miserable I am. But I hang on. If I can get good marks at the end of the year, I'll be able to get into what I want at Melbourne University. I am determined to
see the year out, even if I spend each day wandering around campus like a cloud looking for something to rain on.

The one thing I am enjoying is the teaching. New England, it turns out, has a high academic standard. Situated as it is in Armidale, New South Wales, it used to be the country branch of Sydney University and is, at the time, one of the very few universities whose academic standards are unconditionally accepted by Melbourne University. The fact that this coincides with its possession of a rabbit-proof fence is pure serendipity for me.

In keeping with my practice, I have been saving all my study and slog for third term. Third term, however, has been saving something for me. A week into term, I come down with what at first appears to be shingles. It's a swollen, rash-like inflammation that appears to have set out on a ‘Let's follow Doris's nerve trunks and see where it takes us' holiday. The pain is acute, constant and debilitating.

The assorted Armidale medical fraternity spends many happy hours ruminating over its current camping site. My visits take on the animation and function of an old-fashioned sewing circle—a get-together over my body for anyone interested in unusual disease and congenial conversation. I keep insisting that it must be caused by stress. They keep insisting that it isn't. Eventually, they rule out shingles, but they still haven't worked out what it is. Reluctantly, they give up their regular morning's entertainment and refer me to the local skin specialist in nearby Tamworth.

My friend and I decide to make a day's outing of it and tell people that I'm going to Tamworth to see a specialist. People promptly stop speaking to us. It is not until many years later that I find out why.

Tamworth, metropolis that it is, turns out to be the home of several medical specialists. The only one that concerns the New Englanders, however, is the psychiatrist. Going to see the specialist in Tamworth is the euphemism for going crazy. And just to put the final New England seal on it, my informant tells me the psychiatrist's name. It's Dr Moriarty.

The Tamworth dermatologist can't come up with any answers either, but I certainly brighten up his day. He muses excitedly about various exotic possibilities before finally admitting that he really doesn't know and that I'll just have to put up with it.

‘Putting up with it' involves unremitting pain, occasionally enlivened by the shock of cold calamine lotion. The constant intense pain of my mystery illness also prevents me from sleeping and the inbuilt heater in my room has decided that I am of Venusian origin and need a constant temperature of approximately 462 degrees centigrade. All this, in addition to the ongoing New England gloom, doesn't help my study techniques. I am panicking. I have to get honours in order to get back to Melbourne University. And get back, I have to. There is no way I could last another year here.

So I panic more. Panic as a career path, however, doesn't lead very far. I choose despair instead. For the first time in my life, I actually lose my appetite. It's a bizarre experience. Food tastes like foreign matter.
My body has no interest in it. I am beyond weepy. I am into waiting for doom.

Suddenly, two days before my exams, my mystery rash—although to call it a rash is to describe T. Rex as simply a large lizard—disappears. I don't have the energy to celebrate. By this time, I haven't had a night's sleep for months, have a brain addled by pain and a body that has only grouchily accepted the one item of food that I've managed to push down its throat in two days: an orange.

Oddly enough, this alarming combination seems to do wonders for my academic prowess. I finish each of my six exams an hour before everyone else. At first, I uneasily watch the other students at work and wonder which page I've missed out on. After the third exam, I give up wondering and simply exit the room an hour early. This inevitably leads to the exam supervisor running anxiously after me. He knows I have been ill. The university has bent over backwards to accommodate this and given me an extra half hour for each exam; a concession on time. (The news, delivered with grandiose gestures a few weeks previous, was not the highlight of my day. I didn't want a concession on time, I wanted a concession on brainpower.) The announcement has been made gravely at the commencement of each exam. ‘Please don't disturb the poor, sick student in row six as you walk out; she has been granted extra time for her exam.'