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.
A PROPERTY FOR SALE
And I shall have some peace there,