Eating the Underworld (26 page)

My appetite slowly returns after the exams, but my mood doesn't. I have no idea how I went in my exams. (Brilliantly, as it turns out. Infuriatingly, I never manage to better those chart-topping peaks again.) I'm exhausted, I'm depressed and I'm back home in Melbourne.

I have the energy of a soggy bathmat and a temperament to match. I feel like the survivor of a train wreck who painfully emerges to discover that she is in the middle of the Mongolian desert. It is December. Mum and Dad are away on holiday. Lily is living in the house with me.

And it is in that setting, on the evening of the second-last day of the year, that I experience what becomes one of those small handful of days that mark borders in a life. There are usually signs at these borders inscribed
Here be dragons.
That is why we have been avoiding them so assiduously. We have usually been pushed, slipped or otherwise inadvertently entered this territory. There
are
dragons there. The sign is not lying. But that is exactly why we have to enter.

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 revolves 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.