Bloodletting (13 page)

I liked—trusted—my housemates, and could have confided in them. I could have rung Emily or Peter. Or even Josh.The thing was, I felt that it was my secret as well, so I kept it at home and at work. Also, I didn’t want to shatter the illusion that my life was going well. If I admitted that Eva was burning herself, it would draw attention to my own past. It was easier to say nothing. If someone asked about work I was always positive, upbeat.Things were great. Busy, but great. I loved it.

The trouble was, I still loved it but things weren’t great.The combination of dealing with Eva’s health and the general stress of putting together a magazine on a tight budget began to get to me. I noticed that I had a stomach-ache pretty much all the time. It was tense muscles, nothing more dramatic. Of course you’re tense, I told myself, you’re in a stressful situation.This is a normal reaction.What you need to do is manage things sensibly: exercise more, eat properly, get enough sleep. This is enough, I told myself.You can keep in control this way.Things will get better soon.

You just need to hold on.

After months of forcing myself to cope, I found that it wasn’t becoming easier.The strain wasn’t the workload.What was really getting to me was Eva’s problem, and pretending it didn’t exist. Pretending that she was fine. Pretending that it didn’t affect me.

There was an Italian restaurant downstairs from the office. Each month, after the magazine had been put to bed, we’d all go there for a drink. The restaurant staff knew us well, and our chardonnay, nuts and ashtray would arrive automatically.As Eva and I sat there one afternoon, after everyone else had headed off, it seemed a good time to give her some advice. I’d agonised before doing it, as I didn’t want to say anything that would alter our relationship, but in the end I thought it would be wrong not to.

As casually as I could, I told her that self-harm was habit-forming. There, I’d said it. I didn’t want to see her get caught in that cycle. If she knew of the mental dangers involved perhaps that would help stop her doing it. It had only been six months. Perhaps it wasn’t too late?

‘I know,’ she said. ‘This isn’t the first time. I used to do it a long time ago, before I got married.’ But she appreciated that I’d said something, and she appreciated that I treated her normally at work. It did make things easier, she said.

And she was seeing someone about it. She also took something when things were bad, she said. A drug called Largactil: this was why she sometimes slurred her words. It said something about her stamina; I couldn’t even stay upright after taking a child size amount of this drug.

It worried me that the urge to hurt yourself didn’t necessarily vanish, but might just lie dormant for years.Would I find myself in twenty years’ time unwrapping razor blades again? It was an awful thought. Did it mean that I too would never really be cured?

The truth was—no matter how much I tried to hide it—I knew I wasn’t even close to cured: the urge to cut myself had come back.

While I was at work I was safe. My mind was occupied with editing, advertising strategies, marketing plans, making lists of which articles weren’t yet in, which ones I had to chase and what images we needed to use.There were phones and emails to answer, proofreaders to organise, and the post to go through.

Like Eva, increasingly I was finding work a place of refuge.

I used to enjoy the short solitary walk to the office in the mornings. The air was fresh, there was little traffic, and it was the perfect time to work out what I needed to do for the day. Now I could be ambushed at any point along the way by images of knives and razors and my own arms, seeping blood.

At home I began shutting out my flatmates and friends. I’d turn down invitations and I wasn’t interested in chatting idly on the back steps with the rest of the household. It was as though withholding the information about what was happening at work meant I couldn’t talk about anything at all.

Small things began to annoy me, and I became uncharacteristically short-tempered.

We’d all moved house en masse to a larger terrace nearby. Along with Rachael and Alison, who’d been in the previous place, we’d found two new tenants for the extra rooms. I became increasingly intolerant of both. One, I felt, watched too much television. He was Scottish, and perfectly pleasant, but had just this one hobby.The other, a musician, played his cello, and spoke too loudly. He just laughed when I asked him to keep the noise down. His room was next to mine, and I’d lie in bed at night gritting my teeth, hating him.The radio, which was always on in the kitchen in the mornings,began to bother me too.As the other four people in the household liked it, I couldn’t turn it off.

I tried to tell myself I was being irrational. These things hadn’t worried me before,and they didn’t worry anyone else.As I became less interested in food, and more interested in sleeping, it became obvious that I wasn’t well. I ignored the symptoms although I knew what they meant.What I couldn’t ignore, but could at least try to hide, was a new, embarrassing habit. I developed a need to check that the doors were locked. Sometimes, I’d return to the house five or more times before finally being satisfied that the front door was closed. It meant getting ready at least half an hour earlier than I needed to.

Rather than seeing a doctor, or talking to someone, I decided to move. It had made me feel better before.

I convinced everyone that this latest move was about growing up. In my late twenties now, with a permanent job, it was time to have my own place. I wanted my own furniture, my own bathroom. I’d cook, I’d have dinner parties and people to stay. I sounded so convincing that I almost believed my own story.

It didn’t take long for the views, the space and the privacy to lose their importance.

I had a nasty bout of the flu, and, nearly deaf with infections in both ears, visited the local doctor. His surgery was in the front room of his house, and the walls were covered in signed photographs of football players.This immediately made me doubt that he was the right person for me, but along with needing antibiotics, I knew that it was time to find myself a new psychiatrist. I’d not seen one since leaving Adelaide, and hated to admit that I needed to. But it was clear that I did.

I gave the doctor a three-minute summary of my past and let him know about my new symptoms. In the past two months since I’d been living alone, I’d become increasingly obsessive. It wasn’t just door-checking anymore, or the urge to hurt myself. I’d stopped cooking, as I’d become paranoid about using the gas stove. Despite no evidence, Iwas sure it leaked. I’d also developed irrational fears about eating certain foods, including what had been staples, such as fish and chicken. It was difficult to work out what I could eat—what wouldn’t, to be honest, poison me. I was managing on toast, coffee, vegetables and soup.

In my spare time, I’d often sit in a chair near the phone, trying to control my breathing. And wondering at what point I should pick up the receiver and tell someone what was happening.The trouble was, none of these things made sense: what would I say?

The doctor suggested that my breathing problem was stress-related, and that I’d be okay if I concentrated on something else. I should mention it to the psychiatrist though, like everything else. Had I ever had a panic attack?

Great, I thought.Another thing to add to the list.‘No,’ I told him, ‘I don’t think so.’

By the time I showed up at the psychiatrist’s office for my consultation a month later, it was taking all my energy just to get to work. Apromotion meant that I was now assistant editor, and as far as everyone at the magazine knew, I was in great form. I appeared to be the same chirpy, efficient person that I’d always been. It was essential: Eva was now making suicide attempts on the weekends.

We couldn’t both be seen to be losing it.

My friends later admitted that they knew something was wrong, but as I refused to admit it, there was nothing they could do. Besides, they saw very little of me. I stopped going out, didn’t answer the phone, and my mail mounted up, unopened on top of the fridge.

My parents—my mother in particular—couldn’t understand why I wasn’t more upbeat. They were very proud of my progress at the magazine, subscribing to it and showing their friends my reviews. How could I tell them that something was wrong? They thought that after my last stint in hospital, and the change of medication, I’d been cured.

The new psychiatrist seemed pleasant enough initially, and I relaxed a little. I knew how this all worked. However, as I started talking, I noticed that he appeared to be nodding off. I stopped.

‘Are you listening?’ I asked.

‘Mmm. Go on,’ came the answer.

I tried to go on but found it difficult. Apparently what I had to say wasn’t quite interesting enough to keep him awake.Was I just another neurotic woman to him? Just another person for whom he’d prescribe antidepressants and a weekly visit?

If that’s what he thought, he was wrong on both counts: firstly, I’d developed a phobia about medications, and secondly, I wasn’t going to see him again. I decided that I’d have to come up with my own solution. My biggest fear now was hospital. If I could just keep out of there, then I was alright. I didn’t want to fall back into that pattern— or become the person that I had been.

Several years before, when I’d had very short hair, I’d been at a party. A bloke, a boyfriend of a friend, had come up to me. He’d asked if they’d had to cut off my hair when I was in hospital. For the shock treatment. It was a joke apparently, not that I found it funny.When I’d first been admitted to the clinic, there’d been a doctor in there suffering from depression.She was lovely, friendly and sad.The next time I saw her was at a train station. She recognised me immediately but apologised: she couldn’t remember who I was, just that she had a warm feeling toward me.The electro-convulsive therapy—shock treatment— had helped her depression, but temporarily screwed up her memory.

I didn’t want to go back to that world.

On the tram on the way home I decided that the only possible solution was to resign and move back to Sydney, before something happened. Much as I hated to leave my job, the alternative was much more frightening.

My plan was to say to Eva that Melbourne was too cold, and that I was missing my friends. It was weak but I didn’t want to tell the truth. I didn’t want to hurt her and admit that the pressure was too much.

My parents were devastated.What on earth was I doing? Leaving a job, for no good reason, what kind of person does that? What kind of daughter had they raised? My father had been at a dinner party recently and had been told about Eva’s ‘problem’.This was sad of course, but they couldn’t see how it affected me.

My mother told me that I was mad to leave the magazine. I didn’t bother to say I’d go mad if I stayed.What was the point?

Eva was shocked when I handed in my resignation, but understood that there was no point arguing. If she knew why I was going, she didn’t let on. Instead she wrote me a glowing reference. Eva’s boss knew more, and mentioned the possibility of another job, if I wanted to stay in Melbourne.

I would have liked to accept it, but it was too late. I couldn’t. I’d said I was leaving Melbourne so that’s what I had to do. If I’d said I just wanted a change of scenery, a new job in the same city, Eva wouldn’t have believed me.At least my chilblain-covered fingers were a testament to the fact that I really didn’t like the cold.

Once I was back in Sydney, my mother kept reminding me that it had been the scene of my first ‘breakdown’. Wasn’t it dangerous to be back there? There were government jobs where they were: perhaps I could come home?

There, I thought, was a retrograde step.

Her constant refrain didn’t help my own confidence about my decision,but I had learnt that a ‘breakdown’wasn’t about location.I could have one—whatever that was—anywhere.

By this stage,Archie had left his fiancé and moved to Sydney. He’d fallen for someone else in Melbourne so while distracted was much happier. He also had a spare room.

We hadn’t lived together since I was sixteen, when he left home. In those days he was moody, selfish and angry.When he wasn’t playing sport, he and my mother fought. I just tried to keep out of it; it was easier that way. Told he’d never make anything of himself without a university education,he’d been determined to do well.And he had.