The Fighter (8 page)

She has known the Nissens since the day she reunited with her husband who had preceded her from Italy, sixty years ago. Perhaps to the day, come to think of it. He was at the port on a winter's day waiting for her. He whisked her from Station Pier to this house and the streets that would become far more familiar than those of her childhood.

The kitchen is as kitchens were before the gentrification: a small space lined with timber cupboards, the table in the centre. The window looks out on the back garden. Pot plants line the windowsill. There have been some changes: the floor is tiled now and an electric stove has replaced the old gas cooker.

The house is well kept, yet somewhat forlorn and solitary. Mrs G's husband has passed away, and her two children have made lives of their own. A once-lively household has been reduced to a single woman moving about quiet rooms.

All that remains are traces. They issue from the photographs on the walls, the dressers and tables. They are implicit in the homely ambience and in a stillness that appears to deepen, mid-afternoon, once the time of her school children's homecoming.

Mrs G recalls Ugo Ceresoli, the button accordion maestro, and his weekly visits to give lessons to her children; and Henry singles out the memory of her front door opening, and he and Leon being welcomed inside, a respite from the chaos raging in the house diagonally opposite.

Mrs G walks Henry to the front door. She is reluctant to see him leave. He promises to return soon. She remains at the door and waves until she can no longer see him.

There is little sign of street life. All is still. Henry's circuit is almost completed. The house at 212 is cast in afternoon sunlight. The west-facing bay window glints, and the tiles glow orange. Patches of moss shade the bricks with jade and silver. The breeze has dropped. The clouds are motionless. Time is temporarily halted. The past slips in like a sidling huntsman.

13

Two hundred and twelve is a house of phantoms. They can appear at any time. Figures step from the walls, calling to her. She answers the call. She converses with them.

‘Can't you hear them?' she asks. ‘Can't you see them?'

They accuse her husband. They tell her he is complicit. They compel her to attack him in order to defend herself. She heeds their warnings. The voices pursue her. They are everywhere: in the lounge and kitchen, the laundry, in the narrow passage and the three rooms that run off it.

In her eyes, the walls are naked and gleaming. The linoleum floors are cracked and worn, and the under-cloth is exposed in brown blotches. No matter how many times she dusts and cleans,
the gloom keeps returning. She is losing control. All appears distorted: the house trembles on its foundations, the furniture strains at its moorings. All is stretched to the point of snapping.

The children are petrified. Weeping.

She looks at them, dazed. She wants to protect them. She would fight to the death to defend them. Can't they see this? But she cannot hear their pleas above the voices. She cannot comprehend their terror.

She rushes at her husband. She hits out with her fists, with her entire being. He is a placid man; he does not anger quickly, but he is wilting. He raises his arms to ward off the blows. He is being drawn into battle. His equanimity is vanishing. Finally he retaliates: draws blood, and shrinks back, shamed by his reaction.

‘Poor Dad,' says Henry, forever balancing the scales of compassion. He will not judge. He will not condemn. He stands on the footpath in front of the house, closes his eyes and cleaves to his mantras: ‘Poor Dad. He'd say something, and she'd be at him.'

The fights increase in ferocity. Rage engulfs the house. The voices grow louder. They are at her, and she is at them.

Father wakes up in the early hours. The bed space beside him is empty. He makes his way to the door and peers into the passage. A light is on in the kitchen. He walks past the children's bedrooms and through the darkened living room. A ray of lamplight strokes the linoleum.

He stops in the doorway. She is hitting herself in the head with a meat cleaver. She is unravelling. Fending off phantoms. The walls are collapsing. The stove, the icebox, and the table
and cupboard are tilting.

At first she does not see him. She is looking through him. He moves forward to restrain her. She is in a trance. When he appears in her field of vision she parries with the cleaver and keeps him at a distance.

He rushes to the phone and calls an ambulance. The children are woken by the commotion. They creep from their beds. The ambulance and police vehicles are drawing up to the footpath. The house is strobed with lights. Neighbours peer from their front doors and windows. The street is brooding with hushed voices and whispers.

She is being escorted from the house, a medic on either side. They hold her by the arms. She resists. They strengthen their grip. They tread a tightrope between gentleness and firmness. She looks about her, disoriented. The neighbours watch in uneasy silence.

Their faces gaze at her from a distance. They are ghostly presences. Their concern is distorted into grimaces and menace.

She has been injected. Her rage is draining away. She is helped up the steps and lowered onto an ambulance gurney. She is broken.

The children stand in the passage, watching, beyond comprehension.

The ambulance doors close behind her. An officer remains in the back, while the other settles behind the steering wheel. She is being taken to hospital. Put away, as the saying goes. Incarcerated.

The lights are turning off, and the street is returned to
silence. The children, back in their bedrooms, can hear their father pacing the passage and the living room. He is weeping. But the next morning he is back at work. He must work. He can only cope while he is working.

The children are fostered out to strangers. Henry and Leon are allowed to stay together. They learn the art of adaptation: to regulations and communal dining halls, bunk beds and dormitories; to the restless tossing and sighs of other children, and lights turned on and off at stipulated hours.

They adjust to temporary friendships. They chat with cooks and cleaners. They get used to the smell of bleach and formaldehyde, and of breakfasts prepared in industrial kitchens.

They await their father's Sunday visits. They stand by the gate and run to greet him when he appears in the driveway. They spend the afternoon together, and learn how to cast him from their mind as soon as he leaves them.

Mother is discharged. The children are returned, and the family is reunited. For a while all is well. It can be weeks. Months. Up to a year. The voices are dormant, but ever-present. They are embedded in the walls, lurking behind the plaster. They are in the mantelpieces and skirting boards, and in the cold grates of disused fireplaces. Waiting, with infinite patience.

The children learn to read the signs: the creases deepening at the corners of her eyes, her voice rising a pitch higher before slipping into silence. She is a quiet woman, but she becomes quieter still, like a breeze subsiding into an unnerving stillness. Her eyes become distant, glazed over. Her entire being is in freefall.

She moves in and out of her distress until, finally, she is fully
possessed. She lashes out. The children cower under the kitchen table. Their father and mother are locked in battle. Crockery smashes; slivers of glass skate across the linoleum and come to rest in dark corners.

Again, a police van and an ambulance draw up. She is being led out. Again, the children watch from the doorway. Again, their father stands in the passage, weeping. It is the one indulgence he allows himself. Then it is over. Again, he loses himself in work.

He works late into the night, rises before dawn and makes his way to the Lygon Street tram stop. He greets those he passes with feigned cheerfulness. The tram takes him twenty minutes south to the city. He alights at Flinders Lane, spends the day in the factory and returns at nightfall to the front bedroom that doubles as a tailor's workroom. He is tamed by the routine. His anguish is tempered by the familiar, and by weariness, a shield from unwanted memories.

Again, Leon and Henry are farmed out to homes for the troubled and orphaned. They are returned to the Frances Barkman House for Jewish children—a home run by Jewish Welfare. Months later, they are moved to the home of an Anglican priest who fosters children from distressed families. Leon and Henry attend church on Sundays and sit in the front pew with the priest's wife as he delivers sermons from the pulpit.

They have one advantage: the other's presence. The twins are a unit. Their mutual company tempers their sense of abandonment. They protect each other from isolation. Through the incessant shifts, and abrupt changes, their bond remains the one constant.

As they grow older there is no longer a need to send them to strangers. Leon and Henry, and their older brother Sol, are strong enough to prise apart their warring parents. They join their father in deciding when to call the police or an ambulance. When their mother is put away, the children cook and clean and keep the house in order.

They visit her on Sundays. They make their way by train and bus; the family does not own a car. Over the years they have come to know all the asylums—Royal Park, Larundel, Kew, and distant Sunbury, an hour by train from the city. These names evoke unease. They conjure up houses of the damned, brick-walled enclaves of misery and mystery, where people are spirited away, where the city's troubled are kept hidden.

The weekly visits fill the children with dread, but they ache to see her. They know the protocols. On arrival, doctors and nurses inform them about the progress of the treatment. On the way to the visitors' room they see patients wandering the corridors, muttering. Some gesticulate and enter into conversations with invisible beings. Through a partially open door they see a woman on a bed, rocking, lost in motion. When the talk subsides, the asylum slips into an unsettling silence.

The visitors' room is airy. The walls are painted white. The blinds are up and the curtains parted.

She walks slowly towards them. She is sedated. She has been treated with electric shock. She is pale. Unsteady on her feet. Each week she is more drawn, and thinner.

Who knows what battles take place in the rooms here, the oscillations between mania and withdrawal, what moments of
tenderness and unexpected friendships. There are doctors and nurses who heal, and others who admonish.

The children cannot know what she has endured in the seven days since they last saw her. She does not speak of it. She spends her weeks in a foreign country. As she moves closer, it seems she is viewing them from a great distance.

Henry steps forward. He breaches the force field around her. He raises his face. He meets her eyes and dares to look into them. He is doing all he can to draw her into the present. Her hazel eyes are dulled by medication. The passion and fire have been reduced to blankness.

He searches her face for recognition. He takes her hands, and grasps them firmly. He is not yet twelve, but knows he must do all he can to make contact. Otherwise he will remain friendless. Motherless. He is learning the art of the forward gesture.

He understands the workings of institutions. He knows the city is dotted with places for the disturbed and wounded, transient communities governed by hierarchies of doctors and matrons, nurses and attendants, served by cooks and cleaners. Where progress is tracked in reports filed in manila folders.

He is at home in clinical settings, and in wards and waiting rooms. He knows how to find his way through mazes of corridors and dormitories. He moves with confidence within the imposing buildings.

On previous visits he has sat with his mother on benches in tranquil gardens, and he has accompanied her back to her room in the late afternoon, with the asylum enveloped in a silence soft as cotton wool—save for a muffled cry of distress and an
ever-present sadness.

He is familiar with how the pendulum swings between a sense of loving care and imprisonment. He is at home with disturbance. He knows the flow of movement from the wards to and from the dining halls. He knows the cupboards bulging with bed linen, and the laundries piled with clothing. He knows the entrances where vans unload deliveries.

He knows what lies behind institutional walls. To him it is commonplace.

And he has long known what it means to wait between visits, counting down days that stretch like late afternoon shadows into long nights spent among strangers. He knows that once he leaves her, he must put it all behind him. Only as Sunday approaches again can he allow himself to look forward to being with her.

There are better times—when she is temporarily healed and restored to the family. The house is clean and tidy. The rooms are recently painted. Father and the boys have worked on it, in preparation for her arrival.

In the first days she is subdued. Slowly she returns to herself. She is calmer. She tends the house and looks after her children. She is there at breakfast, and when they come home from school. She mends and washes their clothes, and makes her way to the Nicholson and Rathdowne Street shops. She is regaining a sense of the familiar. When she tires, she rests on the sofa.

But the children are wary, always on the watch for subtle changes in mood. They lie in bed, attuned to the sounds of disturbance. They are alert to the build-up of pressure. Fraying tempers.

The rooms are closing in. The house is cramped and the voices are baying. Strangers are taking hold of her mind, and the children are withdrawing. Keeping a distance. When she finally succumbs, it can go either way: wrath or suicide attempts. She has overdosed several times.

Yet despite their acute attentiveness, she remains a mystery to them. Where does she come from? Who brought her up in those lands across the oceans? The children's questions are met by silence. History has been expelled. Of the past there is little talk and, it appears, few photos.

Now, a decade since her death, all that remains are fragments, gleaned through years of intermittent probing—a once-upon-a-time pieced together from the memories of the remaining four children—Leon, Henry, Paul and Sandra. Gathered from their efforts. In spite of her silence.