Resistance, page 19
Erin slid the box of tissues across the table towards me, then stayed where she was, leaning forward, her eyes on my face. I realised I was crying.
‘I never once dreamed of him,’ I said to Erin. ‘He left me so completely that even his dream-self vanished, too. Sometimes it seems as if he never existed.’ Half of my DNA was bequeathed by a phantom. I could never be sure that someday half of me wouldn’t disappear, too.
Erin sighed sorrowfully. ‘Your mother never spoke of him?’
My mother had become entirely self-contained, I said. What existed for her now was what she could see in front of her. I was sure that, should I stop visiting her weekly, she would soon expunge my existence from the fabric of her life. It wouldn’t be out of bitterness, I said. It would be an act of survival.
Memory was a leaky proof of existence, I told Erin. I remembered his hands at the piano, his hands on the pages of a book, his hand on my forehead as he brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. For a moment my forehead was warmed by his touch and I could see clearly again.
‘That afternoon I last heard him play the Moonlight Sonata,’ I said, ‘he’d played it well.’ I hid in the kitchen, and it was as if the cupboards and the toaster belonged in another house, so foreign did I feel as I listened to my father’s music. Ignorant as I was, I could tell he was playing with passion, even love, but I was at a complete loss to know what the object of his ardour might be. ‘Why did he play like that when he was alone?’ I said to Erin, wiping my eyes. ‘Why could he only be his best when we weren’t with him?’
‘What do you want to hear?’ Claude said, the next time we met. ‘That we lost our minds?’
I’d asked him again about their trip inland. I’m trying to understand, I’d said. It sounds like you’re saying that…My language was covert: the children were drawing at the table on the other side of the room. Had he realised that in truth I was asking, Are you unhinged? Are both of you too unstable to care for your children?
It wasn’t some sort of Wake in Fright scenario, he went on, narrowing his eyes at me. There was an imperative, that was all. They went, and did what needed to be done, and afterwards they returned. Were they changed? Yes, for the better, he said.
They went into the desert with open hearts and good intentions, Lisa said, taking Claude’s hand. Not an exodus, or an exile; instead, a journey towards. First there was the coast, then the hinterland, then the undefined place where the desert begins; an incremental loss of some things and an incremental gain of others. They travelled inwards, away from the cities and the coast, leaving the familiar to find the unknown. Their journey wasn’t a crime; neither was it a punishment.
Melbourne to Mildura to Broken Hill to W, and every place in between, Claude continued. The cadence of his speech matched Lisa’s, and I heard in their voices something rhythmic and hypnotic. The names of some towns made you want to cry, he said. Their names on those green highway signs bore down on you and the pull of place dragged you forward in your seat. It was a longing for knowledge of country—the stupendous open-skied space of it, the need to feel the grit of every last road under your tyres, to have wedged firmly in your mind the overview of every mountain and valley and the networks of every last river, so that you knew the country in your bones. The desire for safety and shelter rose up in you like a lump in the throat, he said: a comfortable bed and a full belly stood in for achievement when you were on the road.
Between Broken Hill and W it rained like the end of the earth had come. Great gobs of water, Claude said, splattering on the dirt, running in rivulets down the windscreen while the dust sprang away, repelling the wetness. Around them the merciless skies, and lightning ahead: dancing, crackling filaments, not just a single vertical strike, instead many strikes simultaneously, spreading out across the width of the sky, a curtain of branching light. Stop the car, Poppy shouted, over the pounding of the rain on the roof. He did as she asked. She jumped out from the back seat and ran back up the road. The three of them followed, the rain in their eyes, their sandals slipping against their feet, the light from the car fading so that soon all they could see was the white line of the highway. A few metres on they found Poppy hunched over a dark shape on the side of the road. It’s an animal, she said. A dog. She’d seen it in the headlights. She’d already put her hand to its muzzle, and she knew it was dead. We have to take it with us, she said, her hand still on its pelt. Please, can we take it? We can’t leave it here on the road.
Claude relinquished Lisa’s hand and ran both his own through his thick, dark hair, lifting it momentarily from his forehead. ‘I told them to wait there. I ran back to the car and found a torch in the glovebox and a tarp in the boot.’ Through the driving rain, in the scattered beam of torchlight, he returned to his family. They saw then the creature was indeed a dog, lean and long-muzzled, the white hair of its abdomen matted with dried blood. ‘Why would we pick up a dead dog from the side of a desert highway? It didn’t occur to me not to. None of us argued for or against. We knew it had to be done.’
The four of them wrapped the animal in the tarp and carried it to the car. They were pallbearers, solemn and careful, Claude said. Poppy cradled its head as they walked and Theo lifted its long sodden tail. They laid it down in the boot, climbed back into the car and drove on. Tomorrow will we bury it? Theo asked Poppy. Yes, she replied, in a place where a dog would want to be buried. Lisa turned to watch the children, her hand on Claude’s shoulder. This is who we are, she said, while the rain beat down on the roof and the steam rose from their wet clothes and condensed on the windows.
Claude fell silent. I waited, then Lisa began to speak. ‘There are maps all over this country on which people have circled the town of W and written, Don’t stop here. The locals will tell you that nine out of ten tourists who break their journey in the town will say they were given the same advice—don’t stop here—but chose to ignore it. And aren’t we glad we did, they exclaim. The coffee’s good!’ Almost two-thirds of the town’s population were Indigenous, she continued. Around forty per cent were illiterate. Did these statistics have any bearing on the other she’d mentioned; that of the ninety per cent of visitors who reported stopping contrary to advice?
The town was a homage to the ghosts of its colonial past—the river boats that were the main form of transport for close to a hundred years, the gold and opal mining that swelled its population and poured money into the municipal coffers. Fine old sandstone buildings—theatres, banks and courthouses—were now refashioned as history museums and art galleries, where the tourists strolled about between lunch at the cafe and dinner at the pub.
The Darling River was changeable, some years grand and expansive, and some years bone dry. ‘It’s no surprise the dry years are more common these days,’ Lisa said. Her expression grew sad. ‘We hear about the drying of the river, the story sits with us for a while, and then it passes out of consciousness. We soon go on with things same as before, although the drying of the river—its cause and its consequences—are in reality the most important things in our lives. Yet we don’t pay attention, not in the way that we should.’
In W they sat on the riverbank, under the shade of a large river gum, Lisa continued. A group of men and women, perhaps ten in all, were already there, sitting in a circle as if around an imaginary campfire. The tree that shaded them was tall and broad, its trunk twisted and humped, so it seemed that instead of growing vertically it had spiralled around itself, year after year, squeezing the green juice from its wood until it was dry and dense and set into shape. And the people who sat beneath it? Lisa asked. They wore beanies and thick woollen jumpers and their feet were bare. Around them were supermarket bags and boxes of food, a folded blanket, a few spare clothes, a couple of eskies. A boombox, set down in the middle of the circle, played at low volume. Lisa regarded me with what I read to be pity. ‘Do you have a picture?’ she asked. ‘Do you see what I saw, even though you didn’t witness these things yourself? I’m not accusing you of anything,’ she said. ‘I told you the story. I chose which parts to tell, so if anyone should take responsibility it’s me.’
What she saw—people sitting near a dry riverbed—and what she heard—music, laughter, shouting, talking in an Indigenous language—spoke of her experience, Lisa said, and not those people’s. If asked, they would tell of other things. What she didn’t see or hear made all the difference, but she was incapable of bridging this divide, given who she was. Lisa paused. She glanced at Claude, who nodded gently.
‘And there lies the falseness of my life in this country,’ Lisa said. We’d written the narrative of Australia with our eyes and ears closed. We’d closed our hearts, too, she said, wiping a tear from her cheek, and scrawled our story across those already written in an attempt to obliterate them. She extended her arms and spread her fingers wide. Without a word the children came to her, one on either side. Theo rose on tiptoes and kissed her cheek.
‘And the dog?’ I asked, after a while. ‘What happened to it?’
No-one spoke at first, then Theo turned to his sister. ‘Can I tell her?’ he asked.
Poppy beckoned him to her and whispered in his ear, her hand cupped to her mouth. The boy nodded.
‘There was a garden,’ he began. ‘It had lemon trees and a vine that grew over the fence. We dug a hole in a garden bed because the ground was softer there. We had to pull out a bush to dig, but we put it back when the hole was covered over.’
I asked him where this garden was.
‘At the house we visited in W.’
I asked whose house that was.
Again he looked at his sister and she shook her head. ‘I can’t tell you that,’ he said.
I asked why that was so.
‘There are things you don’t need to know,’ Poppy said, ‘and there are things we can’t tell you.’ Some of these things overlapped, she went on, and some didn’t.
Had someone told her not to speak of certain things? I asked.
Yes, she said.
Could she tell me who that someone might be?
No, she replied, she could not.
‘My account is not written or oral, but visceral,’ I quoted Claude Agostino to Erin.
‘There’s some truth in that,’ Erin said. She tapped her pen against her chin. ‘The more we therapists go down the path of neurophysiology, the more we can say that the circumstances of our birth set the stage for what’s to come.’
‘He went to look for his mother,’ I told her. ‘The phone call was from someone telling him where she was. Perhaps it was his mother herself on the phone. Either way, the news was urgent.’
‘Then why doesn’t he just tell you that?’
‘He thinks it’s none of my business.’
‘Remember what you’re there for. Are the children safe? No need to follow every lead he gives you,’ Erin said. ‘What about the boy?’
He was seven, I said. It was hard to say. He deferred to his sister most of the time. He had his father’s green eyes. Here I paused. I had to confess that I hadn’t enough information about him.
Erin asked me why I thought that was so.
Perhaps I should have interviewed him on his own, I said.
Erin shook her head. ‘It’s highly likely you have enough information, as you put it, but you’re doubting yourself on that score. Do you know why that might be?’
I imagined she was referring to my brother.
‘You feel you’re missing something,’ she said. ‘You’re afraid that harm will come to him because of something you do or don’t do. But you can’t hold on to the family forever. You have to make a decision, or own up to the decision you’ve already made.’
I told Erin what Lisa had said about our colonial history, how she’d asked me how much of our work as family therapists had its roots in our collective shame.
‘And what did you say to that?’
‘I told her the truth. That I hadn’t considered it before but I found her idea very interesting.’
Erin shifted in her chair. She extended her legs, first one and then the other, landing each heel on the rug with deliberation. She crossed her ankles. She wore sky-blue lace-up espadrilles, embroidered with white and yellow daisies. ‘Sooner or later in therapy it all comes down to shame,’ she said. ‘You and I have been talking about it all along. But there’s no use in shame. We should trade it up for guilt. At least guilt directs us outward. It motivates us to do something different.’
Could she tell me something, she asked, lowering her voice. It seemed the right time to do so. ‘I’m an addict,’ she whispered. ‘An online shopping junkie.’ She scrutinised my face for a response. ‘Don’t laugh, Nina. I couldn’t bear it if you laughed.’ Nothing but clothes, she continued, mountains of them. ‘Oh, but I’m rehabilitated now,’ she said breathlessly, hands in the air and fingers spread, as if showing me there was nothing to hide, no credit card tucked away in her sleeve. ‘At the moment, I’m clean.’
She imagined I was wondering why on earth she had told me now. Well, it was the fifth anniversary of her abstinence, and she needed to mark the occasion by a hearty dose of confession with someone she trusted. Did I mind? she asked. It seemed so trivial and self-indulgent, given what we’d just been talking about.
A real addiction, she said, her speech tight and pressured. It ticked all the boxes: craving, a pleasurable but guilty anticipation, reward—the squirt of dopamine as she hit the purchase button—inevitably followed by remorse and a desperate desire to stop the behaviour, a remorse that dogged and chastened her until, for whatever reason—boredom, vanity, the need to misbehave—the cycle started up again.
She began to buy second-hand clothes as a means of atonement, wearing them in the knowledge that she could dispose of them at any time. The low cost of these secondhand garments also thrilled her, and she came to realise that most of the dopamine hit from shopping was derived not from the actual clothes she bought but from the notion that she was getting something for a bargain. A pair of almost-new Ferragamo sandals, hers for a mere twenty dollars from the high-end op-shop not far from these rooms, gave her the same heady surge of good fortune as the purchase of a new designer dress that was selling online for an eighty per cent reduction. And how she trumpeted the provenance of her second-hand clothes while, week after week, her brand-new online purchases rolled up at the door, to be hidden at the back of the wardrobe in her daughter’s old bedroom until the memory of these guilty transactions had faded and she could pretend that this umpteenth shirt was something she had bought ages ago. The more new clothes she bought the fewer she wore, so that, like Dorian Gray, her external image was one of virtuous restraint while, inside the darkest reaches of the spare wardrobe, the new clothes accumulated, still wrapped in tissue, pristine and uncreased in their crisp cardboard boxes. The chasm between what she was prepared to wear and what she bought grew wider, Erin said, until she couldn’t breach it without eradicating what she felt to be the best part of herself: that hopeful, attuned and tender self who cared about the environment and abhorred all manner of waste and profligacy. Paradoxically it was this part of her that tainted the thrill of buying: if she could just manage to care more for her pleasure and less for the trees and the rivers then her buying might become one long unadulterated high.
At first she believed she was hiding her addiction from her husband, but after his departure she found herself still piling unopened boxes into the same wardrobe, more capacious now as her husband’s spare clothes were gone, packed off to an op-shop on the other side of town. One Sunday morning, as she entered her daughter’s bedroom, armed, so she told herself, with the intent of taking stock, she found herself toppling from firm self-chastisement to full-blown panic in the time it took her to open the bedroom door and cross the room to the wardrobe. Sitting on her daughter’s bed, eyes closed, counting out her exhalations, she finally understood that this wardrobe represented the receptacle of her shame, and that by closing the door on it she’d been trying to hide not from her husband but from herself.
Erin stared at me, her face flushed with effort. She was wearing rimless glasses, large clear discs through which her eyes were magnified, so much so that I could just make out the black spokes of her irises and the mascara clinging to each eyelash.
I told Erin that what I knew about the trajectory of addiction I’d learned through my work. It wasn’t a speciality of mine, I said; still, it was hard to avoid if you worked with families in crisis. My knowledge of addiction—or misuse or abuse, or whatever you wanted to call it—while not expert, had robbed me of any pretensions of naivety. There were times, I said, when I would rather not have known that there is never any comfort to be had in the escape into alcohol and drugs; no comfort in the long term, I meant. When your addiction dragged you to the bottom of the seabed—and it would drag you there, eventually—you had to decide, then and there, whether to come up for air; whether you would take the long painful journey back, noticing, as you propelled yourself up through the murk, the things lost or discarded along the way, some to be regained, some that would float out of reach forever. Every time I poured myself a glass of wine, I told myself that it would be one, or at the most two glasses that evening. I told myself that the idea of comfort in oblivion was a false one, and that the third glass would mark the beginning of an incremental descent, an incremental drowning, and always, every day, I needed to remind myself to keep my head above water. I sometimes wondered if the path to addiction was one of discovery. If so, would I be impregnable, having decided that I already knew what there was to discover? Or was that type of thinking enabling in itself?
