Bright Burning Things(24)
Immediately another voice clamours for attention and fills the space. The meeting ends with another prayer: Serenity/Acceptance/Courage/Change/Wisdom. Words that land, though I try to bat them away, words that stir a part of me I did not know existed.
After, coffee is served, and Marietta biscuits waved under my nose.
‘No thanks. Coffee hurts my stomach and keeps me up all night.’
Miss No Thanks. Tommy is laughing at me, his teeny little finger poking me in my stomach. How I long to inhale him and pretend-gobble him up.
After tea and biscuits, we meditate. Breathing exercises. In, out, in, out, like a bellows. Empty, soften, fill. I am panicked, overtired, wired. I want to go home to my babies. I don’t belong I don’t belong I don’t belong.
Bedtime. Linda’s snores are rocking the walls, reverberating in the headboard, through the mattress and my body. My jaw is clamped shut, grinding back and forth, reminding me of that time when I turned thirteen and had to wear a mouth shield, otherwise, as the dentist said, ‘You’ll worry all your teeth away’ – which of course set up further worry in my overactive mind. I run my swollen tongue over my teeth and start to count, pushing against the top back, the top front, the bottom back, the bottom front. A tang of metallic fills my mouth. Brushing has been a kind of torture these last few months, so I’ve taken to rubbing my gums with a finger and paste. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus… Nod. Gas, that nod to the word ‘Jesus’. I try it out, try to remember the whole prayer, but end up back on Ophelia’s speech instead: … Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me, to have seen what I have seen, see what I see… I can taste the smack of acid and cold and citrus and sweet; my whole body can taste it.
The darkness and the expectation of sleep and the inability to sleep: eyes full of sand, heart hammering, body needing to run, muscles bunched, tensed against all possible threat, the greatest of which comes from my own mind. Herbie in a cage, Tommy in a narrow bed, sparrow chest rising and falling in rapid successive half-breaths, never catching enough air.
I open the window as far as it will go, which is really only a crack. The meeting, although it stirred something like compassion in me, had the effect of being profoundly alienating. Impostor syndrome – something I seem to have been born with, a sensation that became particularly pronounced during my days of being lauded in London, and now here, in this place, where others seem to find their ‘true selves’. Would I even know what that was if it slapped me in the face?
The thought of what I did to Herbie that night, and what I was on the verge of doing to Tommy… What? What was I trying to do? – no one spoke of impulses like that in the meeting. One man spoke of driving his car into a tree and almost killing his son, but it wasn’t because he wanted to stuff his son back inside himself, possess him.
These men, their lives seemed inevitable, their destinies charted from the moment they were born to their crackhead fathers, criminal mothers, junkies, alcos, selfish, stunted, addled parents. Like me. These men were born to mothers like me.
12
Work, prayer and crafts: a kind of therapy I’d have thought belonged to another era, but then everything about this place seems out of tune, out of step. The fact of me being a vegetarian is met with: ‘No one else in here eats only that stuff, love.’ I stick to desserts, a sugar overload building in my system.
One hundred and ninety-two hours (I keep count, obsessively) pass in a haze of rosary, meetings, woodwork, work assignments, rosary, meetings, woodwork, work assignments – and appalling headaches that affect my vision and my balance. My fingertips are needling, the skin on the soles of my feet prickling. I’m not allowed anything for these, not even a Panadol, nothing that will interfere with the natural detoxification process of the body, now I’m out of the detox unit. Seems kind of draconian and ridiculous, this puritanical abstinence after years of pouring God knows what chemical in.
My work duty is to feed the chickens and clean the coop, which is both brilliant and horrifying. Part of my job is to collect their eggs, which doesn’t seem to cause them too much consternation, and which means they are not killed for food, right? They really stink, but it’s better than being around people. The clucking cartoon chickens become my sanctuary.
Woodwork class is a revelation, another sort of balm. I find I enjoy the act of whittling, paring, honing. The teacher – a middle-aged woman with a shrunken, balled jumper, which presses her body into fleshy folds (her antidote to stirring any kind of arousal in all these sex-starved men; she does it very well, I think) – stands too close, breathes her tuna-and-onion breath on me and tells me I’m naturally talented. I am that, alright, that was never in question. It’s the other stuff that’s difficult.
The rain outside continues. It hasn’t stopped since the moment I arrived. The Man Above’s out to drown us all.
I wasn’t expecting to feel such guilt, but then I guess I didn’t exactly have any expectations, not having made the choice myself to be here. I was cajoled – no, coerced, no, let’s get real: threatened. Over and over in my mind – how is this the best for Tommy? How is he surviving without me?
I concoct a plan: submission, dedication to the cause, discipline. As soon as I’m allowed my first phone call I’ll convince my father that it’s in all our best interests for me to go home early and continue my recovery there. Mrs O’Malley is probably overwhelmed with the responsibility of a toddler and a dog. How much better for Tommy to have his mother around. Yes yes yes. Two weeks of this is all I can manage. Father wouldn’t last a night in here: all this emotion, all these people, with their smells, their vulnerability, their damage, their desire for connection, their stories, their pain, their sharing, their dissembling, their laughing, their crying, their dumping, their need, their need, their need.