Rose Boys, page 17
That year I discovered Carl Jung. Dutifully I began keeping a dream journal. Each morning I wrote one or two foolscap pages. I should have gone into analysis if only to justify my prolixity. I admired Jung’s theory of didactic dreams. I still dreamed about Robert. In one of them, haunted by a demon-lover, I became the cripple, inexpertly wheeling myself through a soulless government office in search of a bargain bookshop. Then I was standing beside Robert’s hospital bed when an old football idol arrived. The conversation was strained; I was self-conscious about being crippled. In another dream the whole family was together. Our kitchen was situated on an oval. My parents showed me a large oven in which Robert liked to sit. He said he enjoyed it more than anything. Fire began to infiltrate my dreams.
My mother, who has a fertile unconscious, told me that she had dreamed about a kitten with no back legs. She was desperate to feed it. I made the fairly obvious connection with Robert. She surprised me by saying that she had only dreamed about him once since the accident. In her dream Robert was sitting outside the MCG beneath a tree, after a football game. No one in the dispersing crowd went near him. They all shunned him.
Six months after moving to Yarra Me, Robert announced that he might go and live in Perth. He had just run into Terry and her new boyfriend at the Collingwood Social Club and was feeling low. Someone had told him about a new home for quadriplegics in Perth. It was said to be more progressive than Yarra Me. Other residents were thinking of moving there. The warmer climate also appealed to Robert. In retrospect it was a bold step for him to contemplate, given his reliance on my parents, especially my father.
Nothing came of it—I’m not sure why. Perhaps his failing health stopped him from going. A serious pressure sore formed on his ankle in October 1977, consigning him to bed. The knob of his ankle must have rubbed against the sheet one night. We had no idea the wound would become chronic. It’s difficult to credit that a sore on his foot could isolate him for so long. But Robert’s regenerative powers had begun to wane because of his immobility. His skin was becoming thin and discoloured. When we put him to bed at night his feet would be blue, frozen and swollen.
The pressure sore deepened and a new ulcer formed. Incredibly, it kept Robert in bed until August 1979. It was the most trying of his confinements, until his final illness. I used to wake up in the morning and think of him lying there. I tried to imagine what it must be like spending two years in bed, being turned every few hours, gulping down handfuls of pills, watching stupid quiz shows, wondering if the ulcer on your ankle was any better—betrayed by your body, by your own sluggish blood.
The effect on Robert’s morale was catastrophic. During our visits he usually managed to remain stoic, but now and then he became sullen and incommunicative. Sometimes it was more than he could do to look at people. My father saw the worst of it. Because they were so close, because Dad’s role was to rally him, Robert was frank with him and didn’t conceal his despair. His dark moods and outbursts distressed my father. He felt helpless when Robert lashed out or refused to converse. But he always went back. Not all parents do. Dad was always thinking of new tactics, new diversions, new outings.
The relationship between Robert and my parents was becoming one of intense mutual dependency. They began to live through and for one another. So great was my parents’ devotion that they too were greatly affected when Robert was miserable or debilitated. Activities that didn’t involve Robert engendered a kind of guilt or unease. The only thing that mattered was Robert’s equilibrium. When this was threatened, the effect was shattering. Mum, in particular, was devastated by new setbacks (another fortnight, another month, another year in bed), with deleterious consequences for her own health.
Latently I began to regret the burden my parents unconditionally bore. Watching them age, I worried about the toll it was having on them. Neither of them had had an easy life. They belonged to the generation that had grown up during fifteen years of Depression and world war. Just when they were reaching middle age and should have been able to relax, they had more worries and obligations than ever.
I knew there was nothing worse for parents than watching their child suffer. I also knew I would never feel such emotion, with its abjection and exaltation. They were going through a kind of mental torture of their own. Their compassion was instinctive and limitless. I never heard them complain about the cost. Somehow they had to keep Robert going. Their own health didn’t matter now. If they could have swapped places with him they would have. And I couldn’t help them.
Part of me—consciously, subconsciously—resented the demands Robert inevitably made on them. Part of me wanted it to end, I suppose. Sons fear for their parents as much as for their brothers. But I was sickened by my disloyalty.
Robert was allowed out from time to time, but he wasn’t well enough to go to the football. Dad would bring him home for a few hours, just to get him away from Yarra Me. Usually he had to go straight to bed to rest his ankle. Salli, now six, visited him one afternoon. She had grown leggy and independent. I noticed that she was very tender with Robert. ‘Daddy can’t do that,’ she would explain with an adult sigh, ‘because he’s in a wheelchair.’ Her insight wasn’t surprising given the series of muddles, tragedies and upheavals she had witnessed during her short life.
At the end of 1978 Robert was able to spend a couple of days at home. My journal records some of the tensions and pleasures of those occasions:
When Robert is able to get up he is quite jovial; there is so much cricket on the television I would be very surprised if he wasn’t; but when his bedsores, spots, marks and carbuncles ground him he becomes miserable and everyone becomes very desperate. This prompts in me uncontrollable sensations, ranging from anger to sympathy to universal revulsion, as though I cannot bear outlaying emotion on a situation so hopeless and pathetic. To see a grown man bundled up in his father’s arms, protesting all the way, scowling at the void, knowing his condition will never improve. But then…a flash of humour; Robert is allowed up; Lillee bowls someone; sitting in the backyard, reading a translation of Horace, I hear Dad shouting ‘Cyclone Peter is harassing Darwin’, and jokes are made. There is life in us yet.
Even after Robert’s bedsore healed, enabling him to return to his wheelchair, the situation remained uncertain because of his delicate skin. (The wound itself would have to be dressed for the next twenty years.) Six months later, in early 1980, he was back in hospital:
Robert was taken to the Austin Hospital yesterday with another bout of bedsores. It was only last August that he was allowed up after two years in bed. Mum thinks he may have a complete breakdown if his general health doesn’t improve, and I must say when I visited him on Monday he was almost catatonic with despair. But I can’t help thinking that he’s incapable of breaking down further. Even that is impossible. He can’t run away from it—he can’t beat his brow. All he can do is sit there, lie there, thinking, always thinking, becoming more and more depressed. Thought is all that is available to him—suffering petrified by virtual incorporeality. And it is terrible.
And meanwhile the rest of us go on criticising each other and bemoaning our lot because our job doesn’t pay enough or our lover forgets to telephone us.
Terrible not even to be able to destroy oneself.
Dr Burke told me recently that it was around this time that a psychiatrist reported that psychotherapy would be of no use to Robert. His depression was entirely due to his disability and to the necessity for him to live in what amounted to a nursing home. Medication—or rather, more medication—would also be futile.
Medicine often begs a few questions.
‘I remember that time too,’ Dr Burke said, before continuing in his understated way. ‘Robert was really quite depressed for a while. That’s when I would have been worried about his long-term expectations. A depressed person—particularly with a severe physical disability—can just about will himself to die. But that’s when your father stepped in—well, your family stepped in too, not just your father, but your father particularly was just such a wonderful influence for him.’
I asked Dr Burke if he was surprised by Robert’s longevity.
‘Well, yes, in a way,’ he replied, ‘because he didn’t enjoy being a quadriplegic. Nobody does. But Robert perhaps less so than most.’
7
YARRA ME
In the middle of 1980 there was a welcome, if unexpected, development. Robert became involved with another woman.
Jenny Anderson was twenty-one at the time, seven years younger than Robert. Jenny had known my family for several years. She lived next door with her parents. She was bright, talkative and gregarious. Not always happy at home, she was fond of Mum and Dad. She understood that the best way to cope with Dad’s cheek was to tease him right back. She was good at it, better than most. She had also visited the bunker when Robert and Terry were living there. She adored Salli and regarded Terry as the kind of older sister she didn’t have. Terry was fun and never short of a word. Terry, for her part, had visited Jenny’s mother when she needed a break or when things were tense in the bunker.
Jenny hardly spoke to Robert at that time. She went to a girls’ school and wasn’t used to men. Nevertheless, she intuited that Robert appreciated her visits; they helped to break the ice. She must have remembered this a few years later when she got her licence and began visiting friends who lived near Yarra Me. She called on Robert and generally talked the leg off a chair. Sensing his appetite for news about other people’s lives, she told him about the primary school where she was now teaching. One day Robert invited her to a party. When Jenny accepted he nearly fell out of his chair, she told me recently. ‘He was really stunned,’ she recalled. They had a good time, as Hemingway once wrote with admirable economy. ‘I just thought, I like this guy, he’s really good fun. And it sort of went from there.’
Robert and Jenny fell in love. This was not without repercussions in Crosby Drive, and beyond. Things were rarely uncomplicated in Robert’s life, and this was no exception. My parents were overseas at the time. I had seen Robert several times while they were away. Oddly, we always got along much better when Mum and Dad were absent. I once wrote that our relationship was much saner at such times. We were more relaxed, and a greater warmth seemed possible.
Matters came to a head on my parents’ return. Jenny’s mother, aware of the situation, became agitated. I was present when the four parents discussed the ‘predicament’. The fact that Jenny was an adult seemed to be overlooked. It became clear that parental fears could unnerve even those who had previously shown sympathy towards Robert. Someone said that a serious relationship between Robert and Jenny would be a tragedy and that Jenny had no idea what she was letting herself in for. Here I rather spoilt my copybook by saying that Jenny must have known what it was all about. After all, she had seen enough of Robert and Terry when they were living next door.
This helped not at all.
It was left to Jenny’s father, normally rather inscrutable, to remind people that there was no point in leaping to conclusions, that he had great faith in Jenny’s intelligence and decency, and that he wouldn’t allow anything to come between himself and his daughter. It was a simple and rather eloquent speech. Dad said much the same thing later as he drove me home. He told me that even when Robert was behaving outrageously in his teens he had tolerated his excesses because, as with me, he would never do anything to jeopardise their relationship. I listened to this in silence. Although I had always known it to be the case, his affirmation filled me with a warm and reassuring light.
Jenny and I reminisced about this domestic crisis when I called on her recently. We had arranged to meet at the primary school where she is now deputy principal. Situated in one of Melbourne’s outer working-class suburbs, it was a long way from Paul Sheahan’s bluestone principality on St Kilda Road. It took an eternity to get there, but, determined not to be late for school, I arrived as the morning bell was ringing. Jenny, with her busy gait and cheerful sense of chaos, led me down a festooned corridor and showed me into a small conference room. We hadn’t seen each other for many years, apart from a brief conversation after Robert’s funeral, which neither of us remembers well. She still looked wiry and energetic, but for the first time she reminded me of her mother.
An emergency had arisen at the school. Knowing that we didn’t have long, we dispensed with pleasantries. Jenny spoke contemptuously about some people’s reactions to the affair. ‘I used to get so angry,’ she told me. ‘People would say, “How could you?” and I would be thinking, What’s the difference? I think your boyfriend’s ugly. Robert’s good-looking. And he’s funny.’
I asked Jenny if she was surprised by the source of such opposition. ‘Oh, Peter, I lost so many friends. And yet it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because they were the people who, when the chips were down, where would they have been? I am a very loyal person …’ She paused. ‘As it turned out, I probably wasn’t as loyal as I should have been—but I was very defensive.’
Jenny told me about one of her closest friends. ‘When she had her twenty-first she said, “Jenny, here’s an invitation for you, but I’ve left Robert off. I think my friends would be embarrassed by him.” That was it. From then on I had nothing to do with her. I just thought, What a shallow person.’
Other people, though well meaning, were condescending. When Jenny danced with Robert at a party, a bloke went up to her and told her he really admired her for what she had done. ‘I thought to myself, How wet!’ Others were fabulous—‘once they’d got over the shock of an unusual coupling’. Jenny remembers the Canobie brothers with great affection. Colleagues of Jenny’s welcomed Robert into their circle and went to great lengths to ensure that he was able to get into restaurants and cinemas. The problem of access to venues or houses was more exasperating. ‘It drove us both mad and could be very restrictive,’ said Jenny. She realised that some of her male friends liked the situation because of Robert’s connections. ‘Things came out of the blue. You saw the best side of people, and you saw the worst.’
After a while Robert and Jenny became good at avoiding those who weren’t simpatico. ‘Obstacles tended to be more physical than attitudinal because we gradually weeded out those who had difficulty coping with an atypical couple. We discovered some wonderful new friends in the process.’
Gradually even the doubters calmed down and accepted the relationship as a fait accompli. Jenny, though young, was every bit as single-minded as Robert. Nothing was going to separate them. Indeed, it seems to have been a serene relationship. Jenny can recall only two arguments: the first when Robert, rather drunk, woke up people in the house where Jenny was boarding (she had thought it prudent to move out of her parents’ home); the second when Jenny danced with another man and left Robert stranded at a party. Both times Dad acted as mediator. As in so many other ways, there was little privacy for Robert, which troubled Jenny. Otherwise the relationship was surprisingly calm.
Jenny attributes this smooth passage to the fact that she didn’t know Robert before the accident. ‘I never viewed him as being really handicapped because I only knew him when he was like that. I never knew him when he was fully able. This was important in our relationship. There was no “He used to be this” or “I feel so sorry for him”. I knew what I was getting. It was a fairly even, equal-based relationship on the spiritual side—if you want to talk about it like that. Obviously it wasn’t a really physical relationship—although, you know, you always find ways and get out of it what you need, I suppose, to a certain degree.’
During the week, Robert and Jenny spoke daily and saw each other as often as possible. They spent the entire weekend together. Jenny, a keen athlete herself, enjoyed watching cricket and football, which was fortunate. She took Robert to matches and got to know his friends. She was conscious of the flustered affection of some of his old team-mates, who didn’t know what to say to Robert and whose only way of coping was to buy him another beer. As a consequence, he often got drunk at these functions. The combination of lager and Valium was potent.
By then my parents had acquired a minuscule Morris van. Dad had the roof raised so that Robert could sit in the rear compartment without having to be lifted from his wheelchair. We wheeled him up a ramp and bolted him into a steel frame. The Yellow Peril, as it became known, was good for our backs, hard on our aesthetics. A bulbous air-conditioning unit on the roof completed the space-age effect. Driving the Yellow Peril was bizarre. Pedestrians and motorists gaped as it went past. It became famous throughout Melbourne.
‘Did you ever feel like an idiot driving that thing?’ Jenny asked me. ‘I used to wish it was painted unobtrusive white every time we pulled up at traffic lights and became the focus of everyone’s attention.’
But the Yellow Peril had its uses. After school Jenny often went to Yarra Me in her own car and took Robert out for a drink or a meal. ‘I always had to go into the public bar and ask a roomful of strange men if they would help me lift Robert out of the car. Without exception people were always great, but it used to freak me out having to do it. That was the main reason I kept moving back home—I was close to the yellow van.’
They often went to the drive-in, one form of entertainment that allowed them to stay in the car. ‘God, we saw some garbage films during those years,’ Jenny groaned. We laughed about Robert’s appetite. ‘We were forever stopping at Chinese restaurants to feed him up. He must have been Ringwood’s biggest consumer of fried rice.’
