Читать книгу Pilgrim Souls - Jan Murray - Страница 1

The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is, are the ones who have gone over.

Hunter S. Thompson.

It is often the little things we do that make the biggest difference.

I stopped once at a roundabout in Byron Bay to pick up a hitchhiker and that simple act would change my life forever, change it in a way I could never have imagined.

If a ‘junction’ is how the dictionary describes a roundabout, then the one I tangled with on that sunny North Coast afternoon in September 1997 was just that; a junction. Metaphorically speaking.

Earlier in the day, something else happened that would also have life-changing consequences. I purchased a property in Suffolk Park, a beachside suburb five kilometres south of the village of Byron Bay. It was a capricious act. I hadn’t woken up that morning planning to buy a piece of real estate. Not in Byron Bay or anywhere else.

My spur-of-the-moment decision was done in the manic phase of the bi-polar illness that had plagued my life since childhood, but had only, a couple of years before, been diagnosed, due to a near-fatal psychotic episode.

Life felt large this day. Manic highs leave you no time for quiet contemplation. You feel indomitable. Unstoppable. In the manic phase, you are financially and sexually promiscuous. There is something wildly intoxicating about skimming the high peaks of mania. It’s as if the universe is with you all the way. As if you’re up there on Mount Olympus partying with the gods. Marian Faithful sang about it. The urge to fly through Paris with the warm wind in her hair––and then in one suicidal leap from a tall building, her wish is fulfilled.

It’s no wonder the rise to Olympian heights is exhilarating. And precarious. The fall to earth can be profound.

The painful collapse of my thirty-two-year marriage was the trigger for the psychotic meltdown. What followed was a nightmare, including a serious suicide attempt––the paramedics defibrillating me three times on the way to Emergency; being scheduled twice under the NSW and then the Queensland Mental Health Acts; being locked up in psychiatric wards in both States; experiencing manic episodes that threatened mine and other people’s lives; extended periods in and out of clinics; an inability to get even a continuous hour’s sleep for nights on end; and the soul-wearying, debilitating effects of living with a malignant depression.

All this, out of the blue, happening to a person used to being on top of her game, in charge of her life, useful to her children and grandchildren, able to run her busy PR consultancy, support her political spouse, and generally cope with life’s ups and downs with equanimity.

Then came April 11th, 1995, and boom!

My family was suddenly presented with a wife and parent in free-fall, and with no net to catch her. It was a time before the plethora of memoirs recounting the serious nature of depression had hit the bookshelves, before bi-polar entered the common lexicon, before Beyond Blue, before the Black Dog Institute, before anyone was disseminating professional information and well before politicians were campaigning on funding for mental health issues. In other words, it was a time before the stigma surrounding mental illness had lifted and light was allowed to shine in to illuminate the darkness. And it was a frightening time for all of us.

Had I been hit by a car instead of a psychotic tsunami my children would have called an ambulance. But when suddenly confronted with a mother so ‘gone in the head’, acting so irrationally, my bewildered and panicking offspring were caught floundering. Unfortunately, what they did next, with all the best intentions, proved disastrous.

Good friends recommended a particular psychiatrist, and my children were able to secure an immediate consultation with him in his Macquarie Street rooms. It soon became evident, however, that the doctor was the problem, not the solution. Without asking if I were taking medication for any existing ailments––and after an interview that seemed uncomfortably fixated on my spouse, the Honourable John Brown, who had been the high-profile Minister for Arts, Sport, Environment and Tourism in the Hawke Government––the Macquarie Street man took out his pad and blithely proceeded to write out a prescription for Prozac.

And so, it began, the nightmare. The medical profession––but obviously not this doctor––had become aware by now that the combination of steroids and SSRIs, in particular, Prozac, was a highly clinically significant one, and such a combination was to be avoided at all cost. The contra-indications were too dangerous, the risks considered not worth the benefits.

On this day of my sudden collapse, the prescription ordered for me, and diligently administered by my adult children, would be a disastrous combo, initiating the phenomenon tagged ‘roid rage. Had the man taken the trouble to enquire, he would have learned I’d been taking steroids for the past week, prescribed by a GP for a highly aggravating allergy rash covering my entire body. For days, I had been laying on my bed under a ceiling fan covered in cold wet towels to ease the pain and itch.

The rash was apparent when I presented, and yet the specialist never enquired, but ordered my children to take his prescription for Prozac, get it filled immediately and start dosing me up. Oh, and see the receptionist on the way out.

It was the same treating psychiatrist who would admit me to the Sydney Clinic at Clovelly two weeks later, by which time my condition had deteriorated significantly, there having been serious psychotic episodes within days of commencing the Prozac; one involving my husband and a pair of scissors, the other an attempt to throw myself in front of a speeding car on Ocean Street, Woollahra. But the good doctor would eventually wake up to the problem he had helped create and begin prescribing new types of SSRIs, monitoring me closely as the mania subsided.

Unfortunately, the pendulum soon swung too far to the other extreme. I began sinking into a debilitating depression, compliant when the specialist arranged for my admission into the care of the professionals at Clovelly.

Mistakes would pile on however, and things would go from bad to worse. By the time a week in residence at the Sydney Clinic had passed, and I was almost comatose with drugs, the psychiatrist would be calling in the police and having me locked up and scheduled under Clause 10 of the NSW Mental Health Act. It was a brutal response to what was an insignificant act on the part of a very sick patient. I was in a darkly depressive state, harbouring suicidal thoughts, refusing food, my weight dropping dramatically, and the clinic people so concerned they were considering intravenous feeding.

It was late on the Sunday afternoon. Mothers’ Day. Although a special day, my eldest son, Jonathon, was the only one of my family allowed to visit me because I was in such a fragile state of health, physically and mentally. The idea was that this sensible––and sensitive––young man might be able to encourage his mother to eat something. A scone and a cup of coffee was the kindly nurse’s short-term goal that afternoon.

Mine was to be left alone. To lay in bed under the sheets and simply fade away.

Although our desires were incompatible, the nurse was always going to win because I was too weak to resist and my son was/is a good talker. The nurse turned me out of bed, tidied me up and congratulated me on my valiant effort to co-operate. I might even enjoy the afternoon tea I was about to have with my son, she said.

Nodding to her, Jon took my arm and helped me down the flight of stairs and in to the canteen.

Our timing was lousy. The canteen was empty and just closing up for the day. However, the woman behind the counter, another kindly soul, generously offered to make us coffees and to retrieve a couple of scones from out in the kitchen. We could sit here while she cleaned up. No worries, love, she said and Jon thanked her and led me to a table. It was then that a man’s head emerged from the kitchen, and the scone-maker abruptly ordered us out of his realm.

Meekly, I began to apologize and tried to explain the special circumstance, that it was not my idea but the order of the nurse upstairs.

I have had a significant hearing loss since childhood and did not hear his reply, but he snatched the plate of scones out of the woman’s hand and apparently berated her for offering to serve us at this time of day. He turned back to us then, and this time I did hear him. It was an uncompromising order to my son and me to leave the canteen.

His dammed scones had been the last thing I’d wanted, and having had to beg for them, and then been told off by the man? Well, suddenly it seemed to my sick brain that this was the ultimate indignity in what had been weeks of indignities. Despite being so ill, so zombie-like, thanks to the Largactil injections and whatever other drugs the Dispensary were dishing out to me upstairs every time the latch slid open and the little paper cup of pills was presented, I rallied from my torpor just long enough to arc up.

I’m a Scorpio. The sting in the tail, okay? Either that, or my inherently keen highland Scottish sense of injustice, call it as you will, but I snapped. And I still remember how good it felt to let those weeks of pent up, turbulent emotions loose with a heartfelt ‘Fuck you!’ as I hurled my coffee mug across the room, smashing it against the far wall. As fragile as I was, I ran outside and kept running, back up the stairs to my room. Back under the sheets. Back to the dark place.

But I would be punished. And I did not have long to wait. The temper tantrum would be the immediate trigger for what was to come next, so unexpected and frightening in its rapidity.

The psychiatrist did not appreciate the call he received from the young clinic nurse who had been at the top of the stairs when her patient made it up and collapsed in her arms. After putting me to bed, she rang him, expecting he would wish to visit his highly disturbed patient, talk to her, maybe alter her medication. But he had been somewhat under the weather on this Mothers’ Day Sunday afternoon, tired and emotional, according to a senior nurse who knew him well. Irish whiskey was his drink of choice. He had apparently berated the staff for the interruption to his post-prandial siesta.

It happened without warning; the heavy boots on the staircase. Police hurrying down the hall.

The nurse had hardly hung up from her conversation with him and checked my condition when two uniformed policemen burst in and ordered nurses to pack my bag and sign me over. I have no argument with the police. They were simply following orders from a man who wished not to be disturbed, but to be allowed to slip back into his boozy Sunday afternoon oblivion. These days, such a response to attending a mentally ill patient would not be tolerated. At least, I hope it wouldn’t. I believe there have been government enquiries into the way mentally ill patients should––and should not––be taken into custody.

All the way down the stairs, Jon fought their attempt to take me away. He knew I was not only very ill, but that for all my life, I had suffered with a pathological claustrophobia. But despite his efforts, I found myself being bundled in to the back of a police paddy wagon. Even during my days of protest, marching in anti-Vietnam moratoria and other acts of subversion, I had squibbed at being carted off in a paddy wagon. And yet, on this Mothers’ Day, in my pathetic state of non-resistance, I was being driven off to God knows where in the back of one.

I still recall the terror. In panic, I beat on the doors, on the sides of the wagon and screamed for my son who had been made to sit up front in the cabin.

The police pulled out from the Sydney Clinic’s driveway and turned, ironically, onto Murray Street. Not that I knew where we were going––in my state of high anxiety, I was envisaging jail, but in reality, we were on our way to the Prince of Wales Hospital at Randwick where, after further claustrophobic procedures, including being strapped into a wheelchair by a straight-jacket and kept in an air-lock, I would eventually be admitted to the acute psychiatric ward with its high walls, padded cells and the threat of ECT machines. All for smashing a chipped coffee mug and cursing an irritable chef’s stale scones.

Happy Mothers’ Day.

After two weeks in lock-up, a period in my life in which I was subjected to great indignities, not least by the magistrate brought in to decide on my release or otherwise, I would be discharged and would continue to live another tumultuous year in Sydney, much of it in the loving care of my children and their partners.

There would be periods of sanity where I could almost carry on a normal life but mostly I would swing dramatically between the highs and lows of Bi-polar One, voluntarily admitting myself to clinics when I was down or alternatively, intent on harming people when I was riding high.

It was anannus horribilis for our family and one dawn morning, at the end of a volatile period of sleepless nights, I decided I had to escape in order to give my kids a chance to carry on their lives without the burden of dealing with a mother’s acute mental illness. I understood deep down in my foggy brain that I would need to find a new way of living my life, of organizing the second half of it, a way that was divorced from the one I had been living up till now. No looking back.

Given that I come from Celtic stock––Irish and Scottish––this was always going to be a stretch. For me, the past has always been a place I wallpaper prettily with sentimental images; a never-never land in which I spend far too much time. George Bernard Shaw wisely said, “Talk to me only of the future because that is where I intend to spend the rest of my life.” Shaw was not a real Irishman, not your true Celt. It was always going to be a heartache for me to say goodbye.

I rose at dawn and, leaving a note behind, I departed the Woollahra terrace my family had been renting for me the past few months and drove through the night to our family’s Mermaid Beach apartment on the Gold Coast.

It probably wasn’t a great idea. Poor darlings then had to handle my madness long-distance for the next couple of years, and I doubt the frequent flyer points they accrued did much to outweigh their distress.

~~~

On the day of the roundabout incident and the property purchase, I rose just as the Mermaid Beach sun was beginning to peak over the horizon. Feeling agitated, I understood this day would be more dramatic than usual. The days, weeks, months, the almost two years of my self-imposed exile on the Gold Coast were over.

It was time to move on. The endogenous depression I had been suffering for months had switched gears overnight, and the mind-revving mechanisms had kicked in, sending me soaring up through the universe. No way could I stay still, stay put.

With no idea where I was going or why on this Gold Coast purple and orange dawn, knowing only that I had to obey an imperative, I jammed everything important to me into the boot of my black turbo Golf and, after a moment’s deliberation spent wondering where to now, I decided to toss a coin.

Heads, I go up. Tails, I go down.

North or south?

I flicked the silver coin high, watching as it spun and circled in the air. And then it landed on the paving at my feet.

I let the token sit where it fell, fired up the Golf, and without so much as a glance in the rear-view mirror, left a year and a half of Mermaid Beach life behind me. Once again, I was on the move.

At the corner I made a left, turning south onto the Gold Coast Highway and hit the peddle.

My heartbeat was accelerating. My breath was putrid. My mind was flying off in shards, and the “Voices” had arrived. It would have been obvious to a sensitive onlooker that I was now in the manic phase of my bi-polar condition, but there were no onlookers to witness my madness.

It felt liberating to be free-wheeling down Life’s highway. No one could have put the brakes on me anyway.

~~~

A couple of hours later, with the sun still low on the horizon, on a sudden impulse, I would turn in off the Pacific Highway and head down Ewingsdale Road into Byron Bay, where, later in the morning––in thrall to yet another capricious impulse––I would purchase an ugly little run-down beach shack nestled in the dunes of a magnificently wild Byron surf beach.

And still acting on these manic impulses, by the late afternoon I would pull over and pick up a handsome stranger at a roundabout. They say a person’s fate can turn on a dime. What happened next would prove it.