She’d worked systemically for so long that she sometimes wondered if she’d be a different person now had she never done so, Erin said, tucking the tissue into the sleeve of her shirt. There was a lot of talk about brain plasticity these days, she continued, so much so that she’d begun to wonder if her own brain had been moulded over her many years of work so that it now automatically framed the world in relational terms. Her own children, for example, no longer seemed to her to be discrete individuals. Of course, she understood that in their own daily lives, they functioned as autonomous and separate beings—cooking their own meals, socialising with friends, discussing work projects with colleagues—but as soon as she laid eyes on them again, or heard their voices on the phone, they again became relational. ‘And not just relational to anyone and everyone,’ Erin said, ‘but relational to one another and to me.’

  When they were born, she knew everything about them. Every square centimetre of their bodies. Every blemish, every roll of flesh. She’d stare at them for hours and they didn’t know how or why to turn away. She laughed at the expressions that passed like weather across their faces, yet they took no offence. She read their every thought: hunger, discomfort, tiredness, satiation, contentment, pleasure. Their crying was a private language of which she was the sole living interpreter; not even her husband could properly understand. She knew her babies better than they knew themselves, Erin said, and everything she knew, she loved. But her omniscience was short-lived. By the time they were eighteen months they resisted her knowing. Their tantrums were a communication: Don’t think you know best because you don’t! Erin sighed. Every parent grieved that loss of omniscience, she said sadly. The less we knew, the less relevant we were. That was our true grief, our loss of relevance.

  She visited her daughter a few months ago, in Darwin, where her daughter had lived for the past two years. It was Erin’s first time in that city, and the whole week she felt disconnected from reality, mainly because of the humidity, which drained brain and body alike, but also by the sense of being a foreigner in the country of her birth. Life in Melbourne, a large coastal city with a temperate climate, had more in common with life in, say, Vancouver or Cape Town than with life in Darwin, she said. The daily existence of our northern compatriots was moulded by extremes of temperature and rainfall and a somewhat iconoclastic isolation. Southerners—that is, anyone who lived south of Katherine—were objects of scornful pity, and perhaps rightly so, Erin said. ‘We are soft down here, don’t you think? This city’s been built on the dream of England’s green and pleasant land. The Darwinians have never been taken in by that dream.’

  On her second evening there, Erin continued, her daughter took her to a beachside open-air market, famous, so her daughter said, for its authentic South-East Asian food cooked onsite. It was light when they parked the car but by the time they reached the stalls, some few minutes later, she could barely see her feet. Night falls very quickly in the tropics, Erin said; it falls and then it blankets you. They wandered among the busy stalls, surrounded by the smells of lemongrass, ginger and garlic, the sizzle of the woks, the stallholders calling to each other in Indonesian and Vietnamese—Erin’s voice trailed away. ‘I’m sketching the scene only roughly, but I suppose what I’m trying to describe is my profound sense of dislocation. I heard myself huffing and puffing in the heat, and I slapped at my arm where I felt something biting. My face flushed as I swallowed the spicy prawns I’d unwisely chosen, and I had a vision of it beginning to swell; first my tingling lips, then my tongue growing fat, and my cheeks and throat and the skin around my eyes swelling and tightening. I imagined my body following suit, the allergic reaction commencing at the point on my arm where I’d been bitten and spreading throughout my limbs and torso, bloating and ballooning outwards from the combination of chilli, prawn, stinging insects, heat, and thick, oppressive air.’ We both laughed at this overblown description. I said I had an image of her becoming airborne and floating out to sea. Erin chuckled. ‘I told you I was soft,’ she said. ‘A bit of chilli and I’m as sooky as a baby.’

  While she sweated and itched, Erin went on, her daughter sat cross-legged next to her on the grass, eating her prawns without the slightest discomfort. She wore a batik skirt and a white cotton blouse, and she’d pulled her thick wavy hair into a chignon. ‘I thought she looked more beautiful than she’d ever been,’ Erin said. ‘It seemed the place suited her, or the work, or perhaps she was in love and I didn’t know with whom. I realised that my sense of dislocation wasn’t just about the tropical air. I was dislocated from my daughter too, removed from her in every way possible.

  ‘My daughter is a civil engineer,’ Erin said, a hint of wonderment—or disbelief—in her voice. ‘She works for the Chinese company that’s currently developing the port up there. The following day I went to work with her, so she could guide me around the proposed expansion: the new piers and marina, and the hotel to be built at the water’s edge. We stood on the site of the hotel and gazed out onto the water of the Timor Sea, which was that shade of turquoise-blue that one always associates with the tropics. It looked calm and beguiling, and I was so goddamn hot. I told my daughter I wanted to strip down to my underwear and swim, but she warned me it was the season for stingers, and that saltwater crocodiles—although, statistically speaking, unlikely to kill me—were sometimes seen close to shore. When I asked her what it was like to work for an overseas company she said, “People are people. Some are nice to deal with, others aren’t. It’s the same in every workplace.”

  ‘She’s always had the knack of breaking things down to their simplest components. As a child she sat on the floor for hours, building Lego models, bent over the instructions. Her brother, two years younger, would try to join in, not so much for the activity but for the companionship, but she was impatient with him, and complained to me that he was getting in the way.’ Erin would try to find her son a role in the construction that would suit both children—suggesting that he arrange the blocks according to size or colour—but he grew tired of these menial tasks, and fed up with being denied, again and again, the right to contribute even one Lego piece to the model that grew elaborately in front of him. Inevitably he would explode and lash out at his sister’s creation, Erin said, and the windmill or bridge would topple on its side and blocks would break away and scatter across the floor. Her daughter, in turn, retaliated with an avenging slap: never a crier or a screamer, she had an effective way of hitting, and her slaps always landed right on target—on his upper arm, or thigh, in the middle of his chest if he was without a shirt—with a sharp, ringing sound and force enough to leave a red mark on his skin. ‘My son would run to me and sob in my arms, doubly hurt, while my daughter picked up the scattered Lego pieces and silently got back to work.’ Erin paused. ‘We systemic therapists are always going on about the interactional cycle. Well, there, in those Lego fights, was the cycle that best explained my children: the self-sufficient, task-driven nature of my daughter, and my son’s sense of exclusion and inadequacy leading to anger.

  ‘You’re probably wondering, where was I?’ Erin said, readjusting her glasses on her nose. ‘If I saw this cycle so often repeated, why didn’t I intervene? Oh, I did, up to a point. I talked and talked to each of them, I empathised and problem-solved, I appealed to their better natures, I devised shared activities they both would like. I counted to ten, often. Sometimes I counted to twenty.’ She leaned forward in her chair and lowered her voice. ‘But secretly, let me tell you, I wanted my daughter to build those models alone. I wanted her to be as focused, assertive and ruthless as any male would be.’ Erin’s face grew suddenly slack, and she appeared to age ten years in front of me. ‘When I hear my son complaining about difficult patients—those women who are simply assertive, just as his sister is—I wonder if he’s paid an unfair price for my aspirations for my daughter. In the battle for gender equality,’ Erin whispered, ‘do we mothers have to sacrifice our sons?’

  She shook her head vigorously, as if waking from a dream. ‘You shouldn’t let me go on like that! At this rate, I’ll be paying you!’ She glanced at the clock on the mantle. ‘Oh, hell,’ she exclaimed. ‘Come on, your turn.’

  I was struggling, I began, with my mandated family. Especially the father. He’d walked away when I’d asked him about his mother, and I believed him to be very angry, not only with me but the system that had landed him with me.

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ Erin said. ‘He’s probably angry with his mother, most of all.’ She reached down to her boots, grimacing, and pulled at each zipper. Wasn’t the capacity for change a wonderful thing? she went on. Our feelings about a particular relationship could seem petrified at the time we experienced them, so strongly we held them. So strong, so powerful—how could they ever diminish or change? And yet they did, all the time. She lowered her head and regarded me over the rims of her glasses with an undisguised curiosity, as if trying to categorise me. Of course, she continued, the feelings we had for our parents were the strongest of all, having developed when we were no more than a bundle of overwhelming sensations. But they, too, could change. She paused. It was time to hear more of my family history, she said.

  ‘Now?’ I asked.

  ‘You must have known I’d ask for it at some point. Better now than later, don’t you agree? Otherwise I’ll be stumbling around in the dark, breaking things.’ She chuckled. ‘That reminds me of my husband,’ she said. She would tell me some time what she meant.

  I said she could tell me now.

  Erin smiled knowingly. ‘You’re trying to delay, and I’m almost undisciplined enough to let you. But not quite.’ She picked up her pen and paper. ‘Off you go. I’ll take notes, if that’s all right with you.’

  Over my six years of training—four in undergraduate psychology and two in family therapy—I’d told the story of my family on three separate occasions. It had been forced from me, an educational requirement, justified on what I thought of as New Testament grounds. Do unto others what you would have them do unto you, except in reverse: Do unto yourself what you would ask others to do. In order to ask our future clients to open up about their family of origin—with all the attendant pain and disappointment that opening up might bring—one needed first to experience the opening up of oneself, or so the theory went. (I imagined a cartoon head, tipped backwards on a scrawny neck, and a giant mouth, hinged open wide with words, words, words exploding from its cavity. And fat tears squirting from cartoon eyes.)

  I told Erin that, while I understood why she was asking me about my family tree, I’d often wondered how this ‘do unto yourself ’ logic might stand up in other spheres of work. Did an architect have to design her own home before putting set square to paper for someone else? Did a trainee surgeon need her own appendix removed before she could remove those of her patients?

  Erin looked puzzled. ‘I’m not asking you as a therapist, Nina. I’m asking you as a client.’

  I understood that, I replied, but the understanding didn’t wipe the slate clean. Just because I sat here as a client didn’t mean I’d forgotten how to be a therapist.

  ‘I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t treat you like any other client,’ Erin said. ‘No short cuts.’

  We sat in silence for a while. I heard her stomach rumble from the other side of the room, and soon mine answered, as if in sympathy. ‘Both our stomachs want to be somewhere else,’ Erin said, laughing. ‘Perhaps we should bring crackers and cheese next time.’

  I told Erin that my other reservation about this family-tree exercise was the arbitrary nature of what was told. Why, the first time I’d divulged—to a small group of my peers, in the second year of my psychology degree—I’d broken down in tears about something that now seemed laughably trivial.

  ‘And what was that?’ Erin asked.

  ‘I’d cried about the fact that my father never encouraged me to practise violin,’ I said. ‘He’d taken up the piano as an adult—around the time I started school—and from the moment he played his first scale, my father began complaining that his parents hadn’t paid for music lessons when he was young.’

  Our piano was a hand-me-down from my mother’s aunt: a plain, lumpish instrument, veneered in brown wood of such a dullness that it seemed to suck all the light from the corner in which it stood. It couldn’t be tuned to perfect pitch, so the piano tuner said, on his one and only visit. His words were lost on my father, although not on the rest of us: it seemed, despite my father’s ambition, he was the one with the tin ear.

  ‘In more ways than one, I’m guessing,’ Erin said drily.

  From the relative safety of the kitchen my mother and I winced whenever my father’s fingers ascended the keyboard, and we braced ourselves for the final shrill notes of his bravura. I always wished that the tuner had loosened off those top notes so that they played flat instead of sharp: a demi-semitone of flatness would have been far easier to bear than that upward brassy twang. I could say that my father’s playing brought tears to my eyes, but it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

  ‘Haha!’ Erin said, clapping her hands. ‘Well done, Nina.’

  We heard the thump of the piano lid as it closed, I continued, and seconds later my father glided into the kitchen, as if carried on the wings of his muse. There he hovered, lifting the lids of saucepans, sighing resignedly about the dinner to come. I’m getting the hang of ‘Clair de lune’ now, he’d say to the room. I’m beginning to understand Debussy’s intention. This was my father through and through, I said: not for him an ordinary improvement in sight-reading or dexterity; instead he communed directly with Beethoven and Brahms. Soon after would come the inevitable list of complaints: his talent, long neglected; his oafish father; his unimaginative mother, both of whom I’d never met, as he’d cut them off years before. ‘Piano music,’ I said, ‘has for a long time been linked in my mind with complaining and dissatisfaction, so that whenever I hear it I can’t help but feel that the piano itself is whining.’

  ‘That’s a hard thing to have to live with,’ Erin said, ‘when there’s so much beautiful music written for piano.’ Why, she was going to a piano recital that very evening! The pianist, a young prodigy—weren’t they all?—was performing a program of Chopin, including his Scherzo No. 3 in C-sharp minor, a particular favourite of hers.

  ‘He never once told me to practise violin,’ I said to Erin, while, outside, on the roof, the rain began to fall. ‘It’s up to Nina, he’d say, whenever my mother brought up the subject. She’ll play if she has talent and desire enough.’ I still could feel the heaviness of the instrument on my shoulder, and the clench of my chin on the rest. ‘The violin never opened itself up to me,’ I said.

  Erin smiled. ‘You’re blaming the instrument?’

  My face grew warm. It wasn’t a question of blame, I said.

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ said Erin. ‘Anyway, go on.’

  ‘What else do you want to hear?’

  ‘Whatever comes to mind.’

  I told her that, when I was eight, my father taught me to dismount a bike when it was still in motion. There’s no need to be scared. A monkey can do it! he shouted as I stood on the pedals, gathering speed. A monkey? Did he see that as encouragement, or was it a putdown? You can do it because it isn’t hard to do. I imagined myself a monkey, agile and uncomplicated—or less complicated than I was beginning to be—and swung a monkey leg high over the bar. My curled monkey foot found the opposite pedal and I jumped clear of the moving bike, which rolled further downhill before collapsing against a tree. My father loomed over me as I lay on the grass, gathering my breath. See? he said, his enormous head blocking the sun. Wasn’t I right? His eyes bulged as he bent towards me and the ends of his hair blazed in the light. I told you there was no need to be frightened. He looked at me and saw nothing but himself, I said to Erin. I was no more than a monkey, or I was only what he had done.

  I’d stood at the whiteboard, in that second-year tutorial room, and I’d cried about that stupid cheap violin. It was my lack of ambition I cried for, I told Erin. And my father’s inconsistency.

  She blinked. ‘That he complained about his parents not encouraging him, yet he didn’t encourage you? Or are you referring to something else?’

  I reached for the glass in front of me and took a mouthful of water. My tears didn’t matter, I said, lightly, as I put the glass down. They were expected and encouraged by my teachers, then forgotten in an instant. Crying was the point of the exercise in a way. If we cried, our teachers thought we had gone somewhere deep; we’d dredged the seabed and brought up the catch. Tears were an acceptable manifestation of our engagement with the exercise.

  Erin raised her hand as if to signal a stop. ‘So you’re saying that the sadness and anger you felt about your father didn’t and doesn’t matter? I don’t think that’s true, Nina.’

  The rain grew heavier on the roof. Erin reached across to the table lamp and switched it on.

  I told her that one afternoon I’d returned home early from school. As I entered the house, I heard the piano being played. My father should have been at work, I said: that, in itself, was probably another story. At the kitchen bench, where I’d so often stood with my mother, I heard my father playing the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. Sometimes, even now, I caught myself trying to walk in time with those rolling arpeggios but it was like trying to march to a waltz.

  ‘A metaphor, perhaps?’ Erin asked, winking at me.

  ‘I didn’t care about the violin,’ I said after a while. ‘I had no desire to play it. But don’t you think my father might have encouraged me, even a little?’

  ‘Of course he should have, if that was what you wanted,’ Erin said, more kindly. ‘It sounds to me that he was competing with you. Either that, or trying to impress.’

  I told her, then, about Paris, one of the students from my family therapy tutorial group. When called upon to present his family tree, he told us that his parents had sailed from Mykonos soon after the war’s end. His aunts and uncles had come later. Paris spoke of the usual migrant tropes—the struggle of adjustment, of cultural clash and bigotry, of hard work and family solidarity that forged success. The family had accumulated real estate and businesses: a shoe boutique, two popular Greek restaurants, and a cluster of houses in desirable inner-city suburbs. And here he was, a bloody social worker, Paris said with mock disgust, and the social-work graduates laughed, as they knew that sentiment well. His parents couldn’t understand why he’d turned his back on business, and family business at that. Whenever, at the dinner table, Paris tried to discuss the exploitation of casual workers, and the wider social consequences of tax evasion, his father shouted him down while his mother wept, which all amounted to the same thing: they were trying to beat him into submission. Why don’t you marry and have children? his mother wailed. They were trying to make him something he wasn’t. That was the point at which Paris’s real tears had begun. We tried to console him: he was a great guy, we said, with a keen sense of humour and a generosity of spirit—the usual stuff. He sniffed, smiled, bundled up his laptop and left the tute early. It wasn’t our approval he needed, I said.

 

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