The Crying Room, page 1
The Crying
Room
Gretchen Shirm
The Crying Room
Gretchen Shirm
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
www.transitlounge.com.au
First Published 2023
Transit Lounge Publishing
Copyright © 2023 Gretchen Shirm
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cover design: Peter Lo
Cover image: Ika Dam
Author photograph: Alexandra Molnar Kovacs
Typeset in 12.5/18pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Cannon Typesetting
A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia at www.nla.gov.au
ISBN: 978-1-9230231-0-9
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
The paper this book is printed on is certified against the Forest Stewardship Council® Standards. McPherson’s Printing Group holds FSC® chain of custody certification SA-COC-005379. FSC® promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests
To Julien Klettenberg
I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation on whose unceded land this book was written.
1. The Crying Room
SUSIE CRIED DURING the interview. Maybe it was why they gave her the job. She used to cry easily and couldn’t always explain what had caused it. It seemed to happen especially when she tried to resist it. Her eyes filled with stupid tears.
Something changed, though, after she started working at the crying room. She didn’t feel the need to shed her own tears; her sadness was felt for her, and other people’s sorrow became a mirror for her own. It was therapeutic, although her days there were long, and conversation was rare.
In December the crying room grew busy, so the organising committee extended the opening hours to cope with the demand. The week before Christmas was always the most hectic, when the queue went out of the front door and down the street.
From the outside it must have looked like people were waiting to be admitted to a bar, some fashionable place where patrons come in order to be seen.
The crying room was located near the Kings Cross train station, close to the city, which made it easier to access for the majority of its patrons, who were office workers. The busiest times of day were before and after business hours, but it was a different type of peak hour in the crying room. There were no clocks in the crying room; instead, time was measured by the flow of patrons, in and out of the room. People moved like water, arriving and leaving in swells. Movement seemed slower there, the days were measured in feelings, rather than by time. People spoke a secret language with their bodies, the slow, systematic language of grief, as though they were devices that had been left there to unwind.
That week, Susie had the early shift. The doors opened at seven. Although she wasn’t used to waking up early outside semester, she’d grown to like it. She woke up to starlight, but by the time she was out of the shower, the stars were dissolving slowly until no trace of them remained.
Each morning when she arrived, the crying room had a lemon scent, an artificial scent masquerading as the real thing. She found it comforting, that clean aroma, erasing all trace of the day before so that each one felt new. She filled the water cooler and made sure there was a box of tissues on each desk. They went through about a thousand tissues per week, a fact she had calculated once on a particularly slow day – and that wasn’t including the complimentary pocket packs available to patrons as they left.
The room was run mostly on donations and government grants, which was why the organising committee tended to employ university students. They were smart enough to follow the instructions, but the committee didn’t have to pay them as much as people who had qualified for their degrees. Most of the staff studied psychology or social work, though there were one or two medical students, like her.
At the back of the crying room there was an anonymous donation box with no minimum figure. On average people donated $7 per visit, but there were days when patrons surprised Susie. She once found a cheque for $5,000 in the box; she had to count the zeroes to make sure she wasn’t imagining the figure. She thought back over who the patron had been, figuring that in some small way, in some gesture or signal, whoever it was must have given themselves away. Everyone needed a witness to their good deeds; it was their shame people wanted to hide.
That day, there had been a man wearing a suit, finely cut and tapered to the waist, the fabric smooth and taupe like the fur of an arctic seal. He had made eye contact with her as he’d stood to leave. Even before she found the cheque, she thought there might have been a silent message coded into his gaze, but she checked after he had left, and the box was more than half full. Later, when she thought back on the look he had given her, she wondered if what he’d wanted was reassurance that in giving his money away he had done the right thing. With some experience, she could pick the first-timers from the crowd. They walked in slowly and blinked the room into view. Sometimes they looked frightened, as if they were unsure whether or not they’d come to the right place. What could be misleading was that nobody actually looked distraught: people just sat alone and cried to themselves. If you saw a picture of the patrons bent over the tables, you might have mistaken them for a study group, all diligently at work.
Some people needed things in order to cry: objects, photographs or letters. Others took a seat and got started right away. They had the focus of athletes, heads down, bodies taut, determined to outrun their grief.
People didn’t always believe her when she told them that as many men as women patronised the crying room. On the whole, though, men and women took different approaches to crying. It was a fact she had learnt since working there, that men cried louder than women. Some men cried in loud, bracing sobs, while women tended to take small sudden sips of air that sound stifled and polite, like a hiccup or a sneeze.
Nobody was supposed to speak in the crying room. Some first-timers smiled at other patrons or tried to converse. Some people had an urge to plug the silence with their words. It was her job to take those patrons aside and explain the rules.
Some people stayed and cried for hours, and if they were still there at closing time, they had to be asked to leave. That was why she preferred not to work the later shifts: it felt rude to interrupt people who were midway through their tears.
The morning crowds were more businesslike and focused in their approach. Susie admired their discipline. They came in, cried hard in the time they had, then made their way to wherever they needed to be. The afternoon crowds tended to linger; they took longer to get started and remained after dark. Susie had the feeling with some of them that they preferred it there to wherever else they had to be.
Today Susie’s manager Louise was working at the office. Louise was responsible for setting the rosters and keeping track of inventory. Susie liked it better when she was not there, peering into the crying room through her office door; somehow Susie felt more comfortable when she wasn’t being observed.
Even when Louise said, ‘Hi, Susie’, she spoke with an upward inflection, as though every statement was a question and every answer Susie gave her was submitted to her to be vetted, and approved.
Susie couldn’t explain why, but Louise reminded her of her older sister, Allison. Sometimes they seemed like the same person crafted into two different shapes. Louise had the same way of seeing Susie that her sister did – the way Allison didn’t look at her so much as appraised her, trying to make up her mind about whether or not Susie would embarrass her one day.
It had been Allison’s birthday two weeks earlier. She didn’t live in Sydney anymore. Susie only saw her occasionally, when she could take the train down to the coast.
After work one day she had bought a birthday card from the bookshop near the crying room; it had an owl on the front, with large, surprised eyes and small alert ears. She went into the post office and wrote on it with the ballpoint biro attached to a string. She had to press the pen firmly into the cardboard to make it work. Dear Allison, she wrote. Happy Birthday! I hope you had a great day! She couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she wrote, Sorry I couldn’t be there! and signed her name. When she read the card back to herself, she saw she’d used too many exclamation marks. She pictured Allison reading it and knew exactly what she’d think; she’d think Susie’s message sounded fake. So, Susie didn’t send her sister the card. She took it home and left it in her bedside drawer.
The day she told Allison about her job at the crying room, her sister said it sounded ‘depressing’ to sit around all day watching people shed tears. Allison asked Susie why she couldn’t find work at a café or a bar. ‘There must be something,’ she said, ‘closer to where you live.’ Sometimes Susie thought that was Allison’s way of showing her she cared. When Susie told her something about herself, she took it and dissected it and handed it back in a way that revealed all its faults.
The truth was, Susie didn’t find her job sad at all. It would have been sadder to know these people had nowhere to go where they could openly express how they felt.
Susie lived in a shared apartment in Dulwich Hill. One of her flatmates was a student from China who had introduced herself as ‘Cathy’, although the mail that came for her was addr
The other girl came from Norway and her hair was a colourless shade of blonde, and whenever she talked to Susie, there was a delay between when Susie heard the sounds and when they made sense as words. Since summer holidays had started, the Norwegian had stayed out every night past twelve. Susie admired her ability to make friends. Sometimes Susie watched her and wondered what it was about her, how she was able to slide so easily in and out of other people’s lives.
For Susie it was much harder. There was Harriet, but she wasn’t sure she could really describe her as a friend. Harriet took pity on Susie one day between classes, when she was eating her homemade sandwich in the hall, and asked Susie to join her with two of her friends at the university café.
Since then, Susie had been to see a movie with Harriet and they’d had coffee a few times after class. When she was with Harriet, she sometimes wished she wasn’t always looking behind her to gain some sense of who she was. She’d told Harriet all sorts of strange facts about her life; she wasn’t sure where they had come from, these things she was in such a rush to disclose. Once she told Harriet she used to play oboe in the high school band. Susie sometimes took her oboe out of its case in her bedroom and held her lips to the dry reed. She let the air blow softly through it, so that she could hear the shape of the notes but not their sound.
Harriet had long brown hair cut at such sharp angles that it swished around her shoulders but never touched them. Her smiles were frequent but limited, like perfect curves dispensed from a machine. Susie hadn’t called Harriet, not since semester ended three weeks earlier. Harriet had lots of friends anyway; she talked about them as though they were shiny objects she had taken out from a drawer.
Sometimes Susie thought about calling her and suggesting that they go out to a movie or meet for brunch, or something else casual like that. But she knew how it was with Harriet: she didn’t mind Susie, but when Susie was with her, she couldn’t escape the feeling that there was somewhere else Harriet would rather be.
There was a woman who had come to the crying room for three consecutive days. Susie noticed her because of the way she held her hands to the edges of her face when she cried as if it might break down the middle.
She appeared to be about Susie’s age. She wore t-shirts and jeans, and she had that tentative look about her, as though she was yet to make up her mind about the type of person she wanted to be. Susie noticed her the first day she came in; she seemed kind and uncertain, like someone she might be able to befriend if only she knew how to try. It’s just, Susie didn’t know how people went from not knowing someone, to knowing them. What did people say to each other that moved them from being strangers to becoming friends? Maybe it was the type of exchange that happened without words.
When the young woman came in again that day, Susie had to ask her into the interview room. That was the rule in the crying room: if someone came in more than three days in a row, staff were obliged to administer the questionnaire. The rules were displayed quite clearly in a laminated poster on the wall, and some of their regulars had learnt to stay away for a day or two each week.
When Susie and her co-workers had their training, the instructors devoted an hour to the subject of ‘professional concern’. Their only job, the instructors told them, was to determine whether or not these recurrent visitors would benefit from counselling sessions. If so, the staff had to provide the list of recommended counsellors; their responsibility towards patrons, they were told, ended there.
Susie ushered the woman into the interview room. When Susie turned on the light, there was a moment when they stood together in darkness, before the room went suddenly bright. Susie saw that the woman’s cuticles were torn, as though she had spent her day sifting through a bowl of broken glass.
In moments like those, Susie wore a face that she had practised in the bathroom mirror at home, where the light was fluorescent and didn’t tell lies. It was the face of a person who looked as though they were ‘professionally concerned’.
Susie told the young woman she had seen her in the crying room for the past three days. The woman nodded and made no effort to disagree. Before Susie could say anything else, the woman started telling her why she had been in the crying room – not just in general, but the details of it, the things Susie wasn’t supposed to know. Her best friend died of leukaemia, the woman said, three months ago. Susie held her hands up between them like a barrier to block the words. Technically this was a breach of the rules.
‘I should have been more upset then,’ the woman said, ‘when it happened, instead of now when there’s nothing more I can do.’ She said that she should have paid more attention to her friend; she should have told her what their friendship meant to her. She had assumed her friend was too young to die. Now what she felt was a tremendous sense of guilt and a detachment from the things around her, as though her life belonged to a stranger.
‘She was just such a good friend,’ the woman said. ‘You know, one of those people in your life you could say anything to?’ And she looked up at Susie, and Susie could tell she wanted her to respond, to give some indication that she understood how she felt. But Susie had no words to offer her, even though she could tell that they were all she wanted: kind words to pass from Susie to her, a sentence carefully aligned like a row of buttons covered in silk.
Instead, Susie reverted to what she’d been taught in her training. And so, what Susie told her was that she thought she would benefit from counselling. Susie pushed the piece of paper across the desk, the one with the names of the psychologists printed alphabetically.
The woman took the paper and held it at the corners as though if she held it more firmly it might crumble, like ash. She nodded and extracted herself from her seat. She walked out of the interview room, and Susie followed. The woman moved carefully between the tables, turning her body sideways to navigate through the spaces so that she wouldn’t bump any desks.
Susie understood, as the young woman left, that she didn’t feel consoled so much as reprimanded, and Susie knew, then, she wouldn’t come back. She would walk around carrying that terrible sorrow, with no one to take it to and nowhere else to go.
Susie thought of her sister and the only time as an adult she had ever seen her cry. Her sister’s daughter Monica was three months old, and Allison hadn’t been getting much sleep. ‘I feel like I’m unravelling,’ she said when she arrived, holding her fingers to her eyes like she could press back the tears. Later she apologised and told Susie that she blamed the hormones for her ‘leaky eyes’.
What Susie wished she’d told her sister when they spoke about the crying room was that she didn’t pity these people for coming to this place; she admired their ability to go there and make something out of what they felt.
Through the windows, the sheer afternoon light caught on the wet faces of the patrons. They reminded Susie of miners in a cave, with a small circle of light above them to illuminate their features. She thought of the clink, clink, clink of sharp metal implements chipping away patiently at cold, dark stone.
2. Fox in the Coop
FROM THE BEACH, all that could be seen of her cigarette was the flare of its tip as she inhaled. Bernie sucked with vigour, drawing the smoke into her lungs as though with it she was reclaiming something she’d lost. By the shore two men were pulling their boat from the water, unloading lobster pots. At night they fished without a licence, thinking they were unobserved.
Their voices mutated on the breeze so what she heard was no longer a language but the call of creatures who had not yet learnt to speak.
She stubbed her cigarette out in the sand and deposited the butt into the pocket of her shorts. She stood too quickly and her head spun. Bernie had never been a serious smoker; she only enjoyed doing it alone and in secret.
