Emails from the Edge (16 page)
Read Emails from the Edge Online
Authors: Ken Haley
Perhaps it was because I symbolised a living link with his sister who had lived overseas for many years that Greg welcomed me as if I were his brother, though of course we'd never met. He was living in a communal flat on the fashionable-arty South Side, and a sofa was set aside without fuss for me to doss on.
My nervous restlessness, though, was at such a pitch by now that, even without the slightest pressure for me to move out, I had become a virtual social isolate. Surrounded by new peopleâupbeat student types, fun characters getting on with life and ploughing furrows through those bleak economic timesâI should have found their company stimulating and just the morale booster I needed. Instead, apart from one boisterous feast at a downtown
yum cha
restaurant to celebrate Chinese New Year, my time in drop-dead beautiful Vancouver was spent avoiding company, riding the ferry across to North Side and back, perhaps twice a day, ambling around aimlessly and observing the city's drawcards.
This avoidance of company and social gatheringsâpainful to me now that my thoughts were enmeshed in deepening mental tortureâ was another symptom of my constant stress. Sleep still came so rarely that I swear there could not have been more than two hours a night when oblivion claimed me, and still I would awaken unrefreshed. And now there were two new symptoms, closely allied to my rising unsociability. My overriding qualities, I may have said earlier, were an insatiable curiosity (which is why I became a journalist, after all) and an appreciation of the absurd that those of a friendly disposition have been careless enough to mistake for a sense of humour. Now I inquired after nothing, stopped reading newspapers, couldn't have told you how the Gulf War was proceeding.
I abandoned all interest in those events that had triggered my panic attack, persuading myself that since whatever was going to happen would happen I must not worry myself about it (the only glimmer of good sense to pierce the veil of my deepening detachment from the world). That sense of humour, too, had sunk without trace. Nothing amused me. It was as if the light had gone out of my soul. To crack a smile would have been deception on a grand scale. Laughter was for the truly insane, those who thought they were sane and didn't see what was all too obvious to me: Fear had gained the upper hand and Hope was on the ropes.
It was at the Chinese hotel in Vancouver's historic Gastown district, to which I moved with some excuse about living more centrally even though it was only a kilometre or so from Greg's pad, that I first saw where all this was tending. The two-storey hotel, its late-Victorian heritage fully restored, featured bright red banisters on which I placed my hands for balance as I ascended the staircase after saying goodnight to the family owners who were playing mah-jong in the downstairs parlour. The click-clack of tiles echoed up to the second floor where I stood, both hands now clenching the wooden stair rail that skirted an open rectangle of empty space. I was peering vacantly over the railing, down to the linoleum foyer two floors below, when the thought first occurred to me.
It would be so easy â¦
A couple of seconds and no more of this pain would exist. Even now, there were no voices in my head but my own thoughts, for crying out loud or suppressing as long as I could. With difficulty, I suppressed them. Low as I was, late in this bout with my demons as I found myself, there remained a residue of resistance in my fast-emptying soul.
Back in my room I spent the next few hours lying on the bed, unable to move a muscle, as if paralysed. Next day I didn't leave the room, couldn't see the point. Trapped within myself, trapped within the hotel, I didn't go down for breakfast and no one came up to inquire about me.
About four the following afternoon Vancouver was struck by a moderate earthquake (four on the Richter scale, I later heard). The jug of water on the period dressing-table teetered and toppled, crashing to the floor. Overhead, the light-globe swung like a corpse from a gibbet. Anarchy let loose in the political and now the physical world, coinciding with personal fragmentation, left me prey to the worst of forebodings.
Weird
, I thought.
Nothing in the world is the way it was
. My defences crumpled. The next blow would bring me crashing down. Where did I want to be when the worst came to the worst? I clutched my last ticket in the world. Home.
It was a decision taken with just enough willpower to carry it out. With my mind distracted by woes I missed the boarding call, couldn't remember the right departure gate, lost my boarding card and caused a whole lot of people (at the wrong airline counter, too, as it emerged) a few minutes of unholy panic while the transoceanic flight was kept waiting for its late late passenger. I think it fair to say that everyone in the plane was red-faced as I was shown to my seat, even if my facial colour was produced by shame and theirs by impatience.
Across the Pacific I flew on the last leg of my spin around the world, with a brief night-time stopover in Hawaii. February was almost over when the jet touched down in Sydney, where I decided to spend the night before taking a train south to Melbourne the next day.
For the second time in five months I had arrived home, but this time more close-mouthed, less brave-faced, than before. However, I still tried not to burden my parents with my black-cloud gloom, the hopelessly negative mindset that now made me feel physically as if I were carrying a ten-tonne weight on my back. I strove not to share with them the one certainty I had become convinced of in our ever-changing world: that I had come home to die.
Now, approaching the end of my fraying mental tether, I was absolutely convinced nobody and nothing could retrieve my sanity. Despair had knocked me to the canvas and all the noise of the world was a dull roar in my ears. I was down for the count.
One thing that must be said of the suicidal urge is this: the human being without hope is someone in chronic pain, and it is completely natural for any creature in torment to adopt the least painful course. I didn't choose to die. Choice implies a free rational decision when faced with two or more courses of action. Dying is a painful course, but if every minute of the day is torture, and there's every indication of this continuing remorselessly into eternity, then dying becomes the least painful course.
How my strengths had become weaknesses, and my mental resources had failed, made me embarrassingly aware that I was not the person I had been, and that my once sharp intellect was now a broken reed. The mind cowers in a corner of its old palatial mansion and mourns its loss, its forcible ejection from the throne of reason.
The constant motion of my body, and the motion in my battered brain, would not permit me to stay long at my parents' house. Not only were there no means of ending the torment at handâand it was my wish not to be found by themâbut the way I must go was not yet clear to me, and this I must find when the opportunity presented itself.
Running away from my intolerable life, I found precious few bolt-holes left. One was to go and stay with Anne, an elderly friend of my mother's who lived in the inner Melbourne suburb of East St Kilda. I barely knew her, but she welcomed me in. Plying me with food and sympathy, she seemed an understanding soul. Anne even had a piano there: it had been years since I had played, and that evening the little concert I gave her would have done David Helfgott proud, if feeling counted for more than virtuosity.
But my oppressive spirits pushed me ever closer to the precipice, and it required maximum restraint for me to give attention to what she was trying to tell me. Anne had family photos out on the settee and was leafing through them. A Holocaust survivor, she was pointing out her Ukrainian relatives, one by one, cherishing them in lamentations, losing them all over again. Losing me, too: at one point, politely but plaintively changing the subject, I refused to take aboard any more emotional ballast. I couldn't stay there another night.
The first weekend of March 1991 found me a temporary guestâno one set a limit, I myself didn't raise the matterâin Sydenham House, a tall neo-Gothic mansion situated in Hotham Street, East Melbourne, about 500 metres north of the MCG. It was accommodation that in better times I would have felt right at home in, shared as it was by a gaggle of journalists, most of whom were known to me. The one among them who was a particularly good friend of mine, Stephanie Bunbury, had been a colleague when we were both reporters for the
Age
a decade before. It was she who answered my obviously desperate call for somewhere to stay a few days. One of the communards was away for the weekend. I could have his room, Stephanie told me. I'd find it on the third floor. He wouldn't mind. This turned out to be good or bad luck, depending on how you view these things.
Of my first full day in residence I remember only three things. First is wandering down to the MCG and, incredible as this may sound, circumnavigating it. So central a place does the Melbourne Cricket Ground hold in Australian sporting memory that walking around its circumference could easily be a religious ritual. Perhaps that is why I did it.
Second was trundling a shopping cart through a local grocery store, hardly the way one would choose to pass the time, you might think. A packet of crisps and a drink really don't amount to much, but I did pause for an unnaturally long time beside the carton of rat poison, before deciding that I'd read somewhere people who swallow toxins tend to regurgitate a lot of them without much guarantee of achieving their objective.
Third and last memory of the day is of sitting around a long table in the evening with half a dozen housemates waiting for, and then enjoying to the full, a dish of steaming pasta prepared by Stephanie with the help of one or two others. Italian cooking, Australian wine: even with my jaded appetite, this was a night to remember.
After dinner, one of the residents responded to my curiosity about the mansion next door. Of the same Victorian vintage, it appeared to be deserted. Gingerly we entered it, and found that indeed it was unoccupied. I trudged up several storeys, inspected the cobwebs at close quarters, and thought it would make an ideal set for a horror movie.
I might or might not be back here
, I thought, but left satisfied that the visit hadn't been an utter waste of my apportioned time.
After the convivial atmosphere of Saturday night, Sunday at Sydenham House was as quiet as the grave. Our coterie had dispersed to the four winds, to visit family, walk in parks, admire the first flush of autumn, recreate, re-create and, for all I know, procreateâanyway, to live.
Today, through the last keyhole of sanity, this wretched silhouette walked around the backyard of an empty mansion in the city of his birth with not a thought in his head but that this wasn't life, and therefore you couldn't call transforming it into something else or nothing the ending of a life. He looked to his own resources, and saw a void.
He had roamed widely through his homeland, Asia and Africa, and for most of his life never craved rest. He had known the highest of highs and the lowest of lows; his spirit had thrilled in exultation and grieved over the tragic loss of one who loved him freely. All that was behind him now. Nothing could be recaptured. Believing that we each of us live in order to find out the meaning of our own life he confessed to himself that the seven months and this desolate day since 2 August were a travesty of meaning, a negation of sense.
He tried to calm his soul to prepare for the coming trial. Everyone was away until tomorrow. He knew full well that others would say he wanted to die. He didn't. Afternoon sunshine filtered into the shaded room. He lay on the bed turning the world over in his mind.
My life as it is now is worthless. Throwing away what is worthless must be right. Discarding the worthless is good. Don't fight it, fight the weakness and fear that would hold you back. I don't want to die but I can't go on like this
.
The warming sun dipped below East Melbourne's leafy horizon as I looked to the west through the bedroom window. In the ordinary course of events I would have eaten about now, but the ordinary course of events had long ago stopped. My physical world was now dominated by an imaginary line of two metres separating the bed from the window. I paced that line to and fro, breathing deeply and slowly, thinking what it would be like not to breathe.
The time has come to act. A fall from the heights will be quick. Quick is good. But, even if I can summon the courage to go over the top, can I not decide in advance what I shall do and then, in my sleep perhaps, carry out my final order? But how to sleep, after months with scarcely any? There are pills in the room next doorâthe one I saw when being given a guided tour of the house upon my arrival here. Steal them, no one will notice a few missing, and then, so that no one alone will bear the guilt of âsupplying' me with these means, look for others
.
Between 9 and 10 pm I rushed from chamber to chamber gathering up tablets from bedside tables. Most of them were Vitamin C capsules, I noticed with a twinge of regret, but there were sleeping pills too. Not enough to do the job on their own but enough, taken together, to blank my mind into non-resistance.
The night was balmy, rich in stars. After initial resistance, my thumb snapped free the window clasp and my two strong arms pushed the pane up. The trees looked like a painting, their leaves still-lifes, stirred by no breath of wind. I sat myself on the windowsill, overlooking the backyard, and downed a dozen pills with two gulps of water.
My breath was annoyingly regular. I launched myself from the ledge, back into the room.
No, I can't do it. Don't have the guts. What's stopping you? You'll be doing everyone a favour
.
Back to the sill.
Get used to it, it won't be so hard, just one small push, that's all it will take. And you go to the next level
.
The next level? In my tortured thinking I remember looking out, and down, and reckoning I might just survive a third-floor fall. The actual words? âIt mightn't work.'
My nervous restlessness, though, was at such a pitch by now that, even without the slightest pressure for me to move out, I had become a virtual social isolate. Surrounded by new peopleâupbeat student types, fun characters getting on with life and ploughing furrows through those bleak economic timesâI should have found their company stimulating and just the morale booster I needed. Instead, apart from one boisterous feast at a downtown
yum cha
restaurant to celebrate Chinese New Year, my time in drop-dead beautiful Vancouver was spent avoiding company, riding the ferry across to North Side and back, perhaps twice a day, ambling around aimlessly and observing the city's drawcards.
This avoidance of company and social gatheringsâpainful to me now that my thoughts were enmeshed in deepening mental tortureâ was another symptom of my constant stress. Sleep still came so rarely that I swear there could not have been more than two hours a night when oblivion claimed me, and still I would awaken unrefreshed. And now there were two new symptoms, closely allied to my rising unsociability. My overriding qualities, I may have said earlier, were an insatiable curiosity (which is why I became a journalist, after all) and an appreciation of the absurd that those of a friendly disposition have been careless enough to mistake for a sense of humour. Now I inquired after nothing, stopped reading newspapers, couldn't have told you how the Gulf War was proceeding.
I abandoned all interest in those events that had triggered my panic attack, persuading myself that since whatever was going to happen would happen I must not worry myself about it (the only glimmer of good sense to pierce the veil of my deepening detachment from the world). That sense of humour, too, had sunk without trace. Nothing amused me. It was as if the light had gone out of my soul. To crack a smile would have been deception on a grand scale. Laughter was for the truly insane, those who thought they were sane and didn't see what was all too obvious to me: Fear had gained the upper hand and Hope was on the ropes.
It was at the Chinese hotel in Vancouver's historic Gastown district, to which I moved with some excuse about living more centrally even though it was only a kilometre or so from Greg's pad, that I first saw where all this was tending. The two-storey hotel, its late-Victorian heritage fully restored, featured bright red banisters on which I placed my hands for balance as I ascended the staircase after saying goodnight to the family owners who were playing mah-jong in the downstairs parlour. The click-clack of tiles echoed up to the second floor where I stood, both hands now clenching the wooden stair rail that skirted an open rectangle of empty space. I was peering vacantly over the railing, down to the linoleum foyer two floors below, when the thought first occurred to me.
It would be so easy â¦
A couple of seconds and no more of this pain would exist. Even now, there were no voices in my head but my own thoughts, for crying out loud or suppressing as long as I could. With difficulty, I suppressed them. Low as I was, late in this bout with my demons as I found myself, there remained a residue of resistance in my fast-emptying soul.
Back in my room I spent the next few hours lying on the bed, unable to move a muscle, as if paralysed. Next day I didn't leave the room, couldn't see the point. Trapped within myself, trapped within the hotel, I didn't go down for breakfast and no one came up to inquire about me.
About four the following afternoon Vancouver was struck by a moderate earthquake (four on the Richter scale, I later heard). The jug of water on the period dressing-table teetered and toppled, crashing to the floor. Overhead, the light-globe swung like a corpse from a gibbet. Anarchy let loose in the political and now the physical world, coinciding with personal fragmentation, left me prey to the worst of forebodings.
Weird
, I thought.
Nothing in the world is the way it was
. My defences crumpled. The next blow would bring me crashing down. Where did I want to be when the worst came to the worst? I clutched my last ticket in the world. Home.
It was a decision taken with just enough willpower to carry it out. With my mind distracted by woes I missed the boarding call, couldn't remember the right departure gate, lost my boarding card and caused a whole lot of people (at the wrong airline counter, too, as it emerged) a few minutes of unholy panic while the transoceanic flight was kept waiting for its late late passenger. I think it fair to say that everyone in the plane was red-faced as I was shown to my seat, even if my facial colour was produced by shame and theirs by impatience.
Across the Pacific I flew on the last leg of my spin around the world, with a brief night-time stopover in Hawaii. February was almost over when the jet touched down in Sydney, where I decided to spend the night before taking a train south to Melbourne the next day.
For the second time in five months I had arrived home, but this time more close-mouthed, less brave-faced, than before. However, I still tried not to burden my parents with my black-cloud gloom, the hopelessly negative mindset that now made me feel physically as if I were carrying a ten-tonne weight on my back. I strove not to share with them the one certainty I had become convinced of in our ever-changing world: that I had come home to die.
Now, approaching the end of my fraying mental tether, I was absolutely convinced nobody and nothing could retrieve my sanity. Despair had knocked me to the canvas and all the noise of the world was a dull roar in my ears. I was down for the count.
One thing that must be said of the suicidal urge is this: the human being without hope is someone in chronic pain, and it is completely natural for any creature in torment to adopt the least painful course. I didn't choose to die. Choice implies a free rational decision when faced with two or more courses of action. Dying is a painful course, but if every minute of the day is torture, and there's every indication of this continuing remorselessly into eternity, then dying becomes the least painful course.
How my strengths had become weaknesses, and my mental resources had failed, made me embarrassingly aware that I was not the person I had been, and that my once sharp intellect was now a broken reed. The mind cowers in a corner of its old palatial mansion and mourns its loss, its forcible ejection from the throne of reason.
The constant motion of my body, and the motion in my battered brain, would not permit me to stay long at my parents' house. Not only were there no means of ending the torment at handâand it was my wish not to be found by themâbut the way I must go was not yet clear to me, and this I must find when the opportunity presented itself.
Running away from my intolerable life, I found precious few bolt-holes left. One was to go and stay with Anne, an elderly friend of my mother's who lived in the inner Melbourne suburb of East St Kilda. I barely knew her, but she welcomed me in. Plying me with food and sympathy, she seemed an understanding soul. Anne even had a piano there: it had been years since I had played, and that evening the little concert I gave her would have done David Helfgott proud, if feeling counted for more than virtuosity.
But my oppressive spirits pushed me ever closer to the precipice, and it required maximum restraint for me to give attention to what she was trying to tell me. Anne had family photos out on the settee and was leafing through them. A Holocaust survivor, she was pointing out her Ukrainian relatives, one by one, cherishing them in lamentations, losing them all over again. Losing me, too: at one point, politely but plaintively changing the subject, I refused to take aboard any more emotional ballast. I couldn't stay there another night.
The first weekend of March 1991 found me a temporary guestâno one set a limit, I myself didn't raise the matterâin Sydenham House, a tall neo-Gothic mansion situated in Hotham Street, East Melbourne, about 500 metres north of the MCG. It was accommodation that in better times I would have felt right at home in, shared as it was by a gaggle of journalists, most of whom were known to me. The one among them who was a particularly good friend of mine, Stephanie Bunbury, had been a colleague when we were both reporters for the
Age
a decade before. It was she who answered my obviously desperate call for somewhere to stay a few days. One of the communards was away for the weekend. I could have his room, Stephanie told me. I'd find it on the third floor. He wouldn't mind. This turned out to be good or bad luck, depending on how you view these things.
Of my first full day in residence I remember only three things. First is wandering down to the MCG and, incredible as this may sound, circumnavigating it. So central a place does the Melbourne Cricket Ground hold in Australian sporting memory that walking around its circumference could easily be a religious ritual. Perhaps that is why I did it.
Second was trundling a shopping cart through a local grocery store, hardly the way one would choose to pass the time, you might think. A packet of crisps and a drink really don't amount to much, but I did pause for an unnaturally long time beside the carton of rat poison, before deciding that I'd read somewhere people who swallow toxins tend to regurgitate a lot of them without much guarantee of achieving their objective.
Third and last memory of the day is of sitting around a long table in the evening with half a dozen housemates waiting for, and then enjoying to the full, a dish of steaming pasta prepared by Stephanie with the help of one or two others. Italian cooking, Australian wine: even with my jaded appetite, this was a night to remember.
After dinner, one of the residents responded to my curiosity about the mansion next door. Of the same Victorian vintage, it appeared to be deserted. Gingerly we entered it, and found that indeed it was unoccupied. I trudged up several storeys, inspected the cobwebs at close quarters, and thought it would make an ideal set for a horror movie.
I might or might not be back here
, I thought, but left satisfied that the visit hadn't been an utter waste of my apportioned time.
After the convivial atmosphere of Saturday night, Sunday at Sydenham House was as quiet as the grave. Our coterie had dispersed to the four winds, to visit family, walk in parks, admire the first flush of autumn, recreate, re-create and, for all I know, procreateâanyway, to live.
Today, through the last keyhole of sanity, this wretched silhouette walked around the backyard of an empty mansion in the city of his birth with not a thought in his head but that this wasn't life, and therefore you couldn't call transforming it into something else or nothing the ending of a life. He looked to his own resources, and saw a void.
He had roamed widely through his homeland, Asia and Africa, and for most of his life never craved rest. He had known the highest of highs and the lowest of lows; his spirit had thrilled in exultation and grieved over the tragic loss of one who loved him freely. All that was behind him now. Nothing could be recaptured. Believing that we each of us live in order to find out the meaning of our own life he confessed to himself that the seven months and this desolate day since 2 August were a travesty of meaning, a negation of sense.
He tried to calm his soul to prepare for the coming trial. Everyone was away until tomorrow. He knew full well that others would say he wanted to die. He didn't. Afternoon sunshine filtered into the shaded room. He lay on the bed turning the world over in his mind.
My life as it is now is worthless. Throwing away what is worthless must be right. Discarding the worthless is good. Don't fight it, fight the weakness and fear that would hold you back. I don't want to die but I can't go on like this
.
The warming sun dipped below East Melbourne's leafy horizon as I looked to the west through the bedroom window. In the ordinary course of events I would have eaten about now, but the ordinary course of events had long ago stopped. My physical world was now dominated by an imaginary line of two metres separating the bed from the window. I paced that line to and fro, breathing deeply and slowly, thinking what it would be like not to breathe.
The time has come to act. A fall from the heights will be quick. Quick is good. But, even if I can summon the courage to go over the top, can I not decide in advance what I shall do and then, in my sleep perhaps, carry out my final order? But how to sleep, after months with scarcely any? There are pills in the room next doorâthe one I saw when being given a guided tour of the house upon my arrival here. Steal them, no one will notice a few missing, and then, so that no one alone will bear the guilt of âsupplying' me with these means, look for others
.
Between 9 and 10 pm I rushed from chamber to chamber gathering up tablets from bedside tables. Most of them were Vitamin C capsules, I noticed with a twinge of regret, but there were sleeping pills too. Not enough to do the job on their own but enough, taken together, to blank my mind into non-resistance.
The night was balmy, rich in stars. After initial resistance, my thumb snapped free the window clasp and my two strong arms pushed the pane up. The trees looked like a painting, their leaves still-lifes, stirred by no breath of wind. I sat myself on the windowsill, overlooking the backyard, and downed a dozen pills with two gulps of water.
My breath was annoyingly regular. I launched myself from the ledge, back into the room.
No, I can't do it. Don't have the guts. What's stopping you? You'll be doing everyone a favour
.
Back to the sill.
Get used to it, it won't be so hard, just one small push, that's all it will take. And you go to the next level
.
The next level? In my tortured thinking I remember looking out, and down, and reckoning I might just survive a third-floor fall. The actual words? âIt mightn't work.'
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