Bloodletting (12 page)

The house was a terrace, built in around 1880, and renovated badly in the early 1970s.The walls were scuffed, the paint peeling and, in the bedrooms, the carpet was stained. It was also five minutes from cinemas, supermarkets and cafés, and a ten-minute walk to work. And it was warm.

To me, it was perfect.

I put everything I’d been through over the last few years—including Mike—out of my mind, and threw myself into my new life.

Work kept me busy, and in addition to coffee-making I took responsibility for advertising and marketing. It was a small operation after all. It wasn’t that I was ambitious, more that I was happy. I wanted to learn as much as I could about how it all worked. I wanted to do well. Eva took seriously my suggestions about how things could be reorganised. She took
me
seriously. I wasn’t just the work experience girl on contract for six months: I was someone who had opinions, someone worth listening to.Whatever I did, she praised.

At first, I held my breath, waiting for the outburst, the fury, the moment she discovered I wasn’t perfect. But it didn’t ever happen— and the phrase ‘constructive criticism’ wasn’t in her vocabulary.

But as the days went by, I became increasingly nervous about something else:what would happen at the end of six months? The magazine clearly couldn’t afford to take me on without the government grant and I was terrified of being unemployed again. I’d discovered what it was like to get up in the morning and want to go to work.And I didn’t want to be like Mike. I didn’t want to reach my mid-forties without a vocation. I didn’t want to be lost, or searching. So I put in an application to do a diploma of education. At least then I’d have something, as they say, ‘to fall back on’. The idea of standing up in front of a class wasn’t the least bit appealing but I didn’t know what else I could do.

But it wasn’t just the job that I was enjoying. It was more than that.

People had begun to respond to me in a different way. I wasn’t someone to be wary of, or nervous about. My housemates must have noticed my scars but didn’t ever comment. Instead they seemed to take me at face value. Or rather, perhaps, at my own value. I didn’t feel ashamed of myself any longer, or think that I was a failure. In fact, I didn’t really even think about how I felt at all, which was a big change. I went to work, to the movies, cooked dinner, gossiped. Life, for once, was about what was going on outside my head, not inside.

Then the editorial assistant resigned and Eva offered me her job. Finally now, when my parents’ friends asked sensitively, ‘So how is Victoria?’ they could reply that I was very well. That I’d got through my difficult period, my difficult phase. Everything now was back on track: I just need to find a nice man.

And that was where Christian came in. He was exactly what my parents had in mind.A good-looking, clean-cut, well-spoken corporate lawyer, he was introduced to me by a friend at a ball. I’d turned up in a dinner suit, rather than a strapless dress, as I had too many memories of university balls to want to appear as something I wasn’t. If someone was to be interested in me, then it was not going to be for what I was wearing.

As I arrived I didn’t think anyone would be interested: there were a lot of very beautiful women around, in very beautiful, very expensive dresses. But I did feel very comfortable, and oddly relaxed. I didn’t know these people—only Lilly, the friend who had organised the table—so what did it matter?

Christian was on my left-hand side and even as I sat down I decided I didn’t like him. He had the look of a man who is very, very pleased with himself. He was too attractive, too smooth. His teeth were too white. The only way to deal with him was not to take him seriously. So I teased him mercilessly all evening. I wasn’t interested in him, after all. It didn’t matter how I treated him.

I had a great night, and went home alone.

The following week, our table met again.We’d won the door prize, afree meal at a local Thai restaurant. I arrived early and Christian sat next to me. I was delighted—it was another opportunity to bait someone who so obviously deserved it. He flirted shamelessly, but it wasn’t serious. How could it be?

He was funny and clever, as well as good-looking and successful. We were not in the same league.

On Monday night Lilly called. Christian wanted to see me but wasn’t sure whether I was available, or even interested. I’d confused him apparently, and he wasn’t used to that.

The date started badly, with rain and a film adaption of a Thomas Hardy novel. It was depressing and distressing, involving child suicide and poverty.Things did improve over dinner—at another Thai restaurant we’d agreed on after discovering we’d both spent time in Thailand. He’d gone with a girlfriend, and I’d gone for a holiday between degrees. We bonded by swapping horror stories of stomach upsets. By the end of the evening I’d decided that he was human after all.

Soon we started seeing each other a few times a week, and doing very normal couple-like things: going to restaurants, pubs, galleries, bands and watching videos. The only thing we didn’t do was sleep together, which suited me fine. It was refreshing to find a bloke who liked me, was happy to be seen with me, and liked doing things that involved actually leaving the house.

One crisp Saturday morning, a little while after we’d first met, we drove up to the mountains for lunch, as he knew a restaurant up there he wanted to take me to. I was still amazed that he was interested in me, but pretended otherwise. I sensed that letting him see that I wasn’t confident would put him off. So I pretended, and, when I was with him my past seemed a very, very long way away. I was a different person.

Christian was going to have to be told at some stage about at least a little of my history as I didn’t want him seeing my scars and jumping to his own conclusions. It seemed like a good day to do it.

After lunch, as we strolled along a nearby path in the bush, bonding over the discovery that our parents had used riding crops on us both as children, I casually asked him if he knew anything about mental illness. Nothing much, he said. Ignoring this, I dived in. I kept to the most digestible bits, the depression and the hospitals. I skipped quickly over the cutting.

‘I’m fine now though,’I said.‘Things are great.’And I told him about Tegretol, the mood stabiliser. It felt much better now that it was out in the open. Not telling him had been difficult, a burden. I had felt as though I were hiding something. I had been hiding something.

It took a few minutes before he said anything.Why wasn’t he talking? The alternatives flashed through my head.Would he pity me? Would he, like Mike, suggest other ways that I could heal myself? Would he, like one of the many men I’d slept with, kiss my scars, say they were just a part of me, and then vanish the next morning, never to call again? Or would he, like Patrick, just accept it and move on to another subject?

The day I’d first cut myself a switch in my head had been flicked. Instead of feeling horror, I felt nothing, and although I no longer wanted to hurt myself, my episodes of self-harm still felt normal for me in a way. I’d sometimes forget it still shocked other people.

Christian was from a very stable, balanced family. He had three brothers, had gone to a private school, and was now a solicitor. He’d worked hard at university and still kept up with his various ex-girlfriends. He told me he’d never met anyone with a mental illness before. Or—he corrected himself—no-one that admitted it.

He then looked away from me. Since we were being honest, I should know that he already had a girlfriend. Only she was in Spain for six months. He wasn’t sure how he’d feel when she got back but spending time with me had made him realise that he still really cared about her.What he was looking for was a fling, someone to have a bit of fun with. Given my situation, I wasn’t the right person. He didn’t want to do that to me. I was a nice girl. He cared about me.

I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t me he cared about. It was himself. He didn’t want things to get messy and complicated. I wasn’t the easygoing person he’d assumed I was: I was a potential risk.

There was an arrogance—and pragmatism, if I was honest—about Christian’s attitude that I hadn’t been prepared for. Questions, yes, surprise yes, but rejection, no. I hadn’t calculated on that.

Several days later, I called him and he relented.We had dinner and then, for the first time, slept together. The following morning he flew to Sydney for a meeting.

He didn’t call and he didn’t call.

At the end of the week, I picked up the phone.

It had been a mistake he said, he was sorry. He then remembered to uninvite me to his New Year’s Eve party, and it was over.

I threw myself into work, into writing reviews and into exercising. I just needed to keep busy, I told myself.

But it wasn’t just the break-up with Christian that was bothering me. Eva’s husband had died.

She was devastated. They’d been married for over twenty years and were devoted to each other.

People said that it would just take time.We all had to give her time. This didn’t worry me, she could take as long as she needed to as far as I was concerned, and I was happy to pick up extra tasks.There was little else I could do—or that anyone else could do, for that matter.

As the months passed, it became apparent that Eva’s grief wasn’t abating, it was turning into something else. She had stopped eating, and was surviving, it seemed, on coffee. She was very thin and pale now, and had lost all her vitality. But work was all she had, and there was no question of her taking a break. She believed in what the magazine stood for, and it became the reason she got out of bed in the morning.

Eventually, she was unable to hide from her boss the fact she wasn’t well. He took me aside: was she turning up every day? Was her work suffering? What could be done to help?

Nothing. There was nothing that could be done, I told him. She was unhappy, but it wasn’t affecting her work. I promised to let him know if it did.

By letting me take care of the details, Eva was able to focus on commissioning. It was a situation that suited us both. I liked the extra responsibility, and could manage it, and she was able to do what she was best at—and what she liked doing.The main thing was to ensure that the magazine still came out on time once a month. She’d get through this period, and then things would be back to normal.

The day she came in with her hands in bandages wasn’t particularly memorable. She said she’d had an accident at a barbeque on Sunday. We were all horrified, and sympathetic.The burns must have hurt enormously. It wasn’t fair, to have that happen, on top of everything else.

The bandages eventually came off, revealing wounds not on her palms, or fingers, where you’d expect, but on the tops of her hands. It was odd but at the time I didn’t think too much about it.They looked like they were healing well, and she’d seemed better recently. Eva was known for her dry wit and outspoken opinions, and it had been reassuring to see glimpses of her old, lively self. It had changed the entire mood of the office. Perhaps the grey cloud was at last lifting?

It wasn’t until she came in the following week with a bandage back on that I realised what she was doing. She said that they needed to be dressed again, but was evasive about why. I wasn’t disturbed or disappointed, more than anything I was surprised. She was in her fifties after all.Wasn’t self-harm something people did as teenagers? Or in their twenties? Wasn’t it something people grew out of? I certainly hadn’t had any desire to do anything like that since I’d been in Melbourne, and now thought of myself as cured.The depression I knew might come back, because that was how it worked, but I thought the urge to self-harm had gone for good.

I decided not to say anything to her, as it was her business, no-one else’s. From my own experience, I knew that nothing anyone else said was going to help anyway. It became obvious, as the weeks turned into months, and the bandages came off and on, off and on, that she wasn’t coping. And everyone knew it. Not just the staff and her boss, but also the contributors. It was only willpower keeping her going, with the aid of alcohol, cigarettes and a lunchtime cappuccino.

People—friends, writers, editors—began to ring up, asking about her health. Was she all right? She was very thin and they’d heard about her hands.What had happened to them? What did I know?

They just wanted to help.

I was her assistant, not her nurse, so always said she was perfectly well. If they had any questions about her health, they could ask her. There often seemed to be a scurrilous edge to these calls. If they’d asked outright if she was hurting herself, I might have given them a straight answer. But it seemed no-one could utter the words.They could mention depression, melancholy, grief, but not ask if she was hurting herself.

The reason I didn’t talk about it with her was not that it was a taboo subject but because she didn’t discuss it with me. She knew that I had scars on my arm; she could have asked but chose not to.While she leant heavily on me at work, she obviously didn’t want me to take her problems home.

But I couldn’t help it.