Ricochet Baby (17 page)

‘Yeah, I think about dying. I mean, as a general sort of topic.’

‘Do you want to be dead?’

‘That’s a pretty loaded question.’

‘Yup. But you brought the subject up.’

I have to think back over the conversation. I’m scared shitless because already I can’t remember what I said to bring on this line of questioning. But because I like this peachy nurse with her calm fingers resting on the cover beside me, I want to give her something back for her efforts. Nurse Peach, I mentally dub her.

‘Yeah, well. I want to be dead if it changes things.’

‘Have you thought what it would be like to be dead?’

‘Empty,’ I say.

‘Yup. It could be. Do you want that?’

I find I am thinking about an open grave. ‘Empty is as empty does.’ This is the kind of thing my aunts would have said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘I still want to be able to feel pins in my flesh.’

‘Okay.’ Am I imagining it, or does she approve of my answer? I scratch my fingernails hard along my arm, leaving a trail of
scarlet
welts. I don’t feel anything, though I’ve drawn blood. I look at the nurse, appalled.

‘I didn’t feel that,’ I say. This is the moment I decide I’m sick. I can’t even hurt myself.

‘Perhaps we could cut those nails,’ she says. She takes my hand in hers and holds it, and I begin to sob against her shoulder.

‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘It’ll be all right.’

‘How?’

‘We’re going to give you something to help bring you up. Lift your spirits.’

‘Medicine?’

‘The doctors are planning on giving you Prozac. It’s an
anti-depressant
.’

‘Will it make me sick?’

‘I can’t promise that it won’t. But it works for a lot of people. It’s the Princess Di drug.’

‘It hasn’t done her much good, has it?’

‘It depends on how she was before,’ says the nurse.

She leaves me, though I feel the watching eyes. While I am
sitting
there, a cheerful man bounds down the corridor. This is
something
I am not prepared for. I had not thought of men roaming around the place. He has blazing eyes and a shock of fair, spiky hair.

‘Hey sweetheart,’ he says. ‘What are you doing here? A pretty girl like you in a place like this?’

‘I’m sick,’ I say.

‘No, you’re not. Who’s been feeding you that line? Come on, tell me about it. A lovely kid like you should be out enjoying life, not moping around here. I’m Jedediah, by the way, bet you’ve never heard that one before, eh? Means friend of God. I’ll see you right, Roberta.’ His eyes have already travelled to my name printed above my bed.

‘Come on, out of here, Jed,’ says the nurse, materialising from the corridor.

‘What’s the matter with him?’

‘Nothing we can’t take care of.’ Soon I will learn to recognise the manic depressives for myself.

T
HE ANTI-CHOLINERGIC
effects of Prozac are a dry mouth and
consti pation
, not that there is much for me to get constipated on. I don’t
eat for the first five days in hospital. Within hours of beginning Prozac my head starts to feel as if it is bursting. I don’t tell anyone because I think that it is part of my illness and the medication will make it better. The headache persists, flaring and waning from time to time like a deflated balloon suddenly filling with air and
collapsing
. I begin to vomit, kneeling on the floor, hanging on to the edge of the bowl.

My mother and father find me like this, a few days after my admission. I look up and see my mother’s startled eyes above me.

When I have finished heaving, for the moment, I say, ‘Looks great doesn’t it, Ma? Good scene, wouldn’t you say?’

After that, they have to lock me up in a room which has bare walls and an uncovered mattress lying on the floor and a two-way mirror in the ceiling, up where I can’t reach it, can’t shut them out. I feel as if I am flying through fog on a very small, very noisy aero plane when you can see only a nimbus of light around the
propellers
and shapes that may be mountains. There is giggling outside the door which can be heard as mad laughter and I want to join in. The drug ebbs slowly from my system and I am back where I was at the beginning.

I sit with my knees drawn up under my chin, feeling sorry for myself. I sing, erratically, in a small depressed voice:

They feed me Clonazepam, which brings me back down to earth. Weeks pass that I don’t remember. There is no room for memory, fabrication, books, although I try to read them but cannot recall what they are about when I put them down; no room for the
elaboration
of an idea, or for imagination. For this I am grateful. They ask me, can Paul come to see you today? He has asked us to ask you. I say, no, no thank you with a chirrup and what I hope is a bright and pleasing smile. Do you want to see Nathan? Nurse Peach asks me on other days. No, I say, scowling, so that she will not
pursue
the matter.

Then there is a day when my spirits lift, just a fraction, like light fanning over the hills at daybreak. Walking down the corridor, I aim to avoid Jed, dispensing haphazard words like pearls before him, but as usual it is impossible.

‘I want to pray for you,’ says Jed. ‘Why don’t we just get down on our knees together?’

‘In your face, Jed,’ I say, and laugh at his expression, the
sudden
respect.

D
R
Q’
S ROOM
is across a courtyard. Dr Q is not his name, it’s another name I’ve invented. The doctor from Hell, I thought of him, before we met, although he turns out not to be like that. He can disarm me, as Nurse Peach does. He has glinting, merry eyes behind half-spectacles, and wears a gaily coloured cravat. All the same, I am careful. Behind every Dr Q there lurks a Tina and Ulric, I tell myself. He has the same motives as the rest of them, I am sure. In the end I must return to being Roberta Cooksley, wife and mother.

I have told him this. The first time I saw him, ‘I said, ‘I can see what you’re up to.’

‘Well, it’s your choice whether you want to be a wife or not; it’s more difficult to stop being a mother. It’s a status that giving birth bestows on you, like it or not.’ I notice that his bright brown eyes fade at the edge of the pupil so that there is a pale milky line within the
circle
before it shifts to a different shade of white. ‘Perhaps it’s the way you deal with motherhood that’s the issue here,’ says Dr Q.

I am impressed with the way he opens up an option to me right away. What he says does make sense. But he wants me to talk to him, rather than the other way round, and, so far, and for the most part, this is too much effort. Sometimes I ask questions in a desultory kind of way.

‘This is post-natal depression?’ I say one day, part question, part statement.

‘I hesitate to put labels on things,’ he says. ‘Why do you think that?’

‘They told me in hospital, when I had Nathan, that my
hormones
had probably gone wrong.’

‘Did they tell you that PND is rarely isolated to hormonal
dysfunction
on its own?’

‘No, they didn’t. Is that why I’m here?’

‘I don’t know why you’re here,’ he says. ‘You need to help me on that one.’

‘So what’s another reason for this whatever you call it?’

‘Syndrome? Well, a lot of women who suffer from one form or another of PND are what you might call high achievers.’

‘That’s not me,’ I say, relieved.

‘Or they have very high expectations of themselves.’

‘So I may not have managed this disaster all on my own?’

He looks at me keenly. ‘Possible.’

‘You want me to talk about my family,’ I say, turning away.

As I am leaving, he says mildly, ‘You know about ripples in a pond?’

‘Of course. Doesn’t everybody?’

‘Sometimes circles go on replicating themselves inside a group. Or a family. That’s another way of looking at it.’

At other sessions, we often just sit for a long time. Once, he said, ‘Can you explain why this is so difficult for you?’

But I can’t. I sense I am losing him, patient though he is. It’s just a small thing that tells me this. One day there is a new aide in his department. We are near the end of another hour of my silences, time for morning tea. ‘How do you take your tea, doctor?’ the aide asks.

‘In a cup,’ he snaps. Then he corrects himself and apologises. But I know, I can tell how he feels.

When the aide leaves the room, he says, ‘You don’t have to go on with this.’

‘It’s all right,’ I say, suddenly afraid that I am going to lose him altogether. I will have to settle for his imperfections.

S
O THIS MORNING
we must find a way to please each other. I dawdle across the yard, stopping to look at flowers. They are mostly tough, ragged old wallflowers with a sharp, lingering perfume.

‘Well then, how have things been going since the last time I saw you?’ he asks, when I am seated.

‘Okay.’

‘Been passing the time all right?’

‘Bit like watching paint dry,’ I tell him.

He barks with sudden laughter. We look at each other, both with a sense of hope. I see that his thick grey hair has been cut into a boyish mop-top. It pleases me, oddly, as if his vanity, his
transformation
,
has been performed for me, although I know that’s not true. He will have done it for himself, for an image he perceives when he shaves in the morning, for facing the day and people like me, and
perhaps
to convince some other person in his life that he is unpredictable and charming and youthful. I realise his advantage; I will never ask him for whom he has his hair cut, but he will ask me everything.

‘You were looking at the flowers on the way over here,’ he comments.

‘Yep.’

‘You like flowers?’

‘My mother does.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘She would have pruned those wallflowers out there.’

‘She’s a pretty good gardener, huh?’

‘Brilliant. Her garden’s been in lots of magazines. She has walls of flowers.’

‘Wall flower. Walls of flowers.’

I flick him a glance to see whether he’s taking the piss, but he’s not.

‘Wall of flowers, flowers to the wall,’ I say.

‘Yeah?’

‘Flowers flowing.’

‘Ye-ess.’

‘Flow wolf.’

He slides a piece of paper towards me.

‘Can you remember what you’ve just said?’ I take the paper and write swiftly:

wall
of
flowers

         
flowers
to
the
wall

flowers
flowing

                 
flow

 
wolf

    
wolf
flower

lower
wolf

         
flow

  
flowers
re-wall

flowers
flowers
flowers

I hand it back, and he studies it for a long time, without saying anything.

‘What frightens you about your mother’s garden?’

‘I knew you’d say something like that,’ I shout.

‘Okay So, you’re not disappointed. Do you want to go now?’

‘No.’

‘All right then.’ He sits back with his eyes half-closed.

‘She gave up,’ I say.

‘Being a brilliant gardener doesn’t sound like giving up.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘Help me then. I could try.’

‘Everything she thought and felt, she put there in the garden. If she felt anything.’

‘Don’t you know?’

I try to contain my distress by shaking my head.

‘Your mother had secrets?’

‘Perhaps. It’s hard to tell.’

‘Or you’ve forgotten?’

I nod. In a way this knowledge is something else I don’t want happening to me, but it is better than wishing to die. I can tell that I am going to feel the pin in my flesh very soon.

A
T THE END
of the drive to the farm at Walnut, on that faraway night, I was hurried away to bed amid quiet voices and soft
footfalls
. All the next day I was told to go out and play in the garden. The weather was overcast and dull and I felt lost among the
green-grey
shapes of the rhododendrons. The garden was large, laid out in parterres and knot gardens containing lavender and sprinkles of late-flowering cosmos left over from the summer, like flecks of flesh in the cold foliage.

Towards the end of the afternoon I was called inside by my father’s sisters and told that my grandfather was about to leave for the funeral parlour. My father stood at the head of the casket, looking sombre and responsible. The casket was piled high with flowers. My brothers stood at attention beside him, dressed in white shirts and grey flannel trousers. The aunts and their
husbands
, except for Dorothy who had never married, were ranged along the room: Joan and Arch, Dorothy, Kaye and Jack. My mother stood behind her husband’s family so that she could avoid the envious glances her sisters-in-law were casting at her, whenever they could see her. Behind their backs, she crossed herself.

‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ one of the aunts said, and I guessed that my grandfather lay inside the casket, covered up with petals and vines. I remember wondering how he could breathe inside all that. The tall wardrobes reflected back images of myself, half the size of my awkward brothers. A day or so later my mother would sell the wardrobes for ten dollars each. My mother was different, once we moved house that last time.

What I didn’t know at the time was what she wanted to be different from. I thought, at first, from our old lives, but I can see now that she wanted to be different from the Walnut people. You could see why at the funeral, in the way they dressed their solid, bosomy frames. Joan wore a rust-coloured suit with padded
shoulders
and matching patent leather shoes; Dorothy had a shapeless three-quarter coat over a murky pink dress that might have come from a jumble sale; Kaye appeared in a cream mix and match angora outfit, decorated with paisley whorls.