A Short History of Richard Kline Read online

  In London they resumed their lives as before. But then, in the last week of November, everything changed. Jim and Leni were driving home from the Midlands, where they had been visiting Leni’s children in boarding school. Their car skidded into the path of a bus on the M1 and Leni was flung out onto the road, dying within minutes.

  There was not, as Jim was to say over and over in the early weeks of his grief, a mark on her. It seemed characteristic of Leni that she should die with her beauty intact.

  Jim’s way of grieving was to work day and night, sleeping on a couch in the coffee bar and buttonholing anyone who was passing for a three-hour rave. It was exhausting. Furtively they began to tiptoe around him. Because they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, console him, Jim began to resent them, became sullen and withdrawn. For weeks he didn’t come into the office at all, and then one Friday afternoon he appeared with a sharply dressed guy in his late thirties – in a suit – and announced that he was taking indefinite leave of the company and installing McCarthy as his CEO.

  They were stunned.

  McCarthy was a Harvard MBA and the bottom line kicked in fast. No frills, no concerts, no coffee lounge.

  The place lost its heart.

  Mira took up an offer from a firm in Montreal and suggested, in her flip way, that Rick come with her. This surprised him. Maybe she cared more for him than she had revealed. Was he so insensitive that he didn’t know, couldn’t tell, when he was loved? Or could it be that she was apprehensive about going alone? Wanted him as a crutch? Although he was not in love with her, he was aware of how she might be a catalyst for him to lead some other kind of life; it was a time when scenarios began to scroll through his head like endless trailers from forthcoming movies, and it seemed, for a while, that he might go anywhere and be anyone he chose.

  One bitterly cold morning he drove Mira to Heathrow, enclosed her in a bear hug and said he might come and visit her at Christmas. ‘Sure you will,’ she said. Then he went up to the viewers’ deck and waved her off until the plane was out of sight. It was a sentimental gesture, and it was unlike him.

  Now, for the first time since arriving in London, he felt dislocated. On the day after Mira left, it entered his head that he might return to Sydney. For a day or two he thought about it, but idly, not with any real intent. The shameful fact was that he hadn’t once felt homesick. But then, as if something dormant had been activated in his brain, as if someone somewhere had flicked a switch, one Sunday afternoon asleep on the couch he had a dream. He was standing by a fence in a suburban backyard, and beside the fence a cluster of Cootamundra wattles floated in a haze of blue foliage, the grey-green, smoky blue of his childhood, a blue he had never seen in Europe … Beyond the fence he could see a beach, wide open and deserted, with steep white sand dunes that fell away to the edge of a sunstruck sea, and in a sudden rush he ran towards the water with an overwhelming desire to dive in, to break its glittering surface and be enveloped in its surf … He woke, flooded with nostalgia, and sat up abruptly, feeling dizzy, almost sick with a spasm of yearning.

  The next day, he got a call from his sister. Gareth had collapsed from a brain tumour and was on life support.

  ‘You must come, Rick,’ Jane said. ‘You must come.’

  He booked a flight for the evening of the following day.

  At Melbourne airport he stumbled out of the plane like a zombie. Jane was there to meet him, and before long he was in his brother’s house in Ivanhoe, which overlooked a leafy park. The living room was a cruel tableau: on the couch his mother sat, ashen, holding the hand of his sister-in-law, Allie. Through the glass doors he could see his father alone on the sundeck, smoking.

  Jane knocked on the glass and Ned turned, saw Rick was there and walked in through the open door. They shook hands, and when Rick looked into Ned’s eyes he knew then that his brother was going to die.

  For the first time in his life he wanted to embrace his father but instead they stood, face to face, two stone pillars, until Ned turned and said, ‘You’d better get yourself a drink.’

  That night he drove with Jane to the hospital. In silence they took the lift to the third floor, and when they entered through the grey doors of the ICU he felt an odd sensation of déjà vu. The ICU was a square room with six separate cubicles radiating off like the spokes of a wheel, and in the middle of this space was an elevated platform of waist-high benches inlaid with central monitoring computers, a corona of screens reflecting obscure patterns and emitting low-level beeps. The whole place looked like a circular flight deck. Beyond the platform, each body in its cubicle was wired up to the central consoles; it was like an assemblage of futuristic pods.

  Silently he followed Jane to the bedside of their brother. And there was Gareth, looking really quite well, as if he had just that moment fallen asleep. Not a mark on him, Rick thought. It was three years since he had seen Gareth, at a family wedding, and he saw that his hair was much greyer, and that it suited him; it was as if he had only now, on the point of death, come into his looks.

  Jane sat in the chair by the bed and held Gareth’s hand. On the drive over she had explained that Allie spent most of the day beside him, squeezing his hand in the hope that somehow this might prevent him from slipping away; might keep him anchored to his life, to the earth, to her. But now she was exhausted, so they had set up a roster and Jane would be taking over for tonight. Ned would come in at midnight and Rick could come in when he had recovered from his jet lag.

  Over the next four days he spent the mornings with Gareth. He suggested to Ned that, as a younger man, he should take the midnight shift, but Ned wanted to be there through the night; Rick suspected that this was when Ned feared Gareth would die, and that he wanted to be with him when he did. So Rick would get up at six, shower, eat a large breakfast (for some reason he was extremely hungry) and buy all the papers in the hospital kiosk downstairs. Then he would take the lift to the third floor and sit by Gareth’s bed and read aloud to his brother, sotto voce, omitting any violent or depressing news but dwelling in detail on the financial and sports pages. Gareth had been an enthusiastic small investor, and it seemed logical that if anything could reach his brain, could bring him back from whatever blind or chaotic landscape he inhabited in his coma, it would be the rise and fall of his money.

  It was a ritual, and like any ritual it had the power to console. There were whole hours when Rick felt absurdly cheerful until, without warning, the newspaper would turn to ashes in his hands. Then he would sit and brood on the nature of the body, its hidden malignancy, its death wish. He had taken his older brother’s life for granted, even more than he took his own. Gareth was always the cheerful one, gregarious and with lots of friends. In his youth Gareth had played First Grade cricket, and later he had become a scratch golfer. But here was his body, that magnificent machine, hooked up helplessly to other machines.

  When Allie relieved him, Rick would walk to the coffee shops down the road and eat out on the pavement in the sun. One cafe opened out onto a pleasant terrace, and it was as good a place as any to just sit. One morning, after he had collected his coffee from the counter, he becalmed himself in a corner of the terrace and gazed out at the trees in the park opposite.

  Something odd had happened to him that morning. He had awoken from a dream in a state of inexpressible homesickness, a kind of sweet sadness that flooded his body like an ache. And, of all things, he had dreamed that he was back in Leni’s villa, wandering its corridors for what seemed a very long time, until, at last, he passed through a narrow door behind a trompe l’oeil hunting scene and found himself in the Intensive Care Unit. At first he thought there was no-one there – the beds were all empty – but when he looked again he saw Leni lying unconscious in her pristine cubicle, and in the cubicle beside her was Gareth. Gazing ahead at the planes and angles of the ICU, he saw also the planes and angles of the villa, and how the one led into the other, and with this thought came an unexpected pang of consolation, as if there were some fearful symmetry
at work here that might one day endow all their lives with meaning.

  At two-thirty on a grey afternoon they assembled at St Stephen’s. The church was modern and built in red brick and glass, with pale blue panels at either side of the main door. It was one of those dull, humid days when it seemed as if the flinty Melbourne sky was suspended only an arm’s reach above the red suburban rooflines.

  His brother had been an active man and the church was crowded. In the eulogy, Gareth’s friend Neil referred to the optimism of their generation, how they had grown up with the feeling that they could do anything. The priest was a young man with a barrel chest who said and did surprisingly little. The hymns were a series of dirges so solemn and dreary that they mounted no challenge to the heart. It was not until the very end, when they switched on a tape of Van Morrison, croaking out the true anthems of Gareth’s generation, that sobs became audible in the church. A shiver went through the mourners, the first shiver of collective grief, as if they were mourning for themselves, the outrageousness of one of their own dying young. The words, Rick reflected, made no sense at all, but the voice was full of a sweet if rueful surrender.

  Around the grave, the mourners stood patiently and waited for the signal to cast their clods of sticky earth into the hole. At that moment it came to him, as if it were some sudden unexpected piece of news, that he would never see his brother again. He felt his knees give, and in a dizzy funk he stumbled, then righted himself, awkwardly, with a feeling of shame.

  As he walked back to the car park, across the manicured lawns of the cemetery which were such an unnatural shade of green, he observed his father put his arm around his mother. Both were crying. He began to think of how he had never cared for Van Morrison, of how Gareth’s taste in music had always been a bit retro. There was no way that he could respond to the vague, pseudo-mysticism that infected every phrase, that rumbling, hazy lyricism of dope-smokers. Although, come to think of it, there was that one song, ‘Moondance’, that Jo and he had liked to dance to … The image of Jo dancing with abandon brought him up with a jolt. He was only metres away from his brother’s grave, and for several minutes he had been thinking about why he didn’t like Van Morrison.

  The next day, at Gareth’s house, he saw that Ned looked much older than he had a week ago. He saw through the window his brother’s children, playing on the lawn with their fat old beagle as if nothing had happened. Out on the deck, the deck that Gareth built, they sat down to a solemn lunch. They were remnants of something that once had been larger, a broken family gathered together under an indifferent sun. Someone handed him a beer but he let it sit while he looked out across the backyard and began an inventory of his brother’s garden. What trace of him remained?

  In the eastern corner a tyre hung from the sturdy branch of a big red-gum; along the back fence a line of Cootamundra wattles merged into a grey-green blur; beside the deck a firewheel banksia sprouted candle-shaped orange cobs, a study of upright stillness, while beneath it a trio of starlings pecked at the lawn. Starlings, such dull birds, nesting and shitting beneath the eaves.

  the raft

  I did not return to London. If asked then why I had stayed, I could have – would have – given several clear reasons that, looking back, I recognise as mere rationalisations, transient structures of thought that cleared a space for some deeper instinct or intuition to do its work. I didn’t go back because it felt right not to; because some inchoate resistance, some feeling that didn’t need a name and would never acquire one, welled up in my chest and said stay.

  Sometimes you just did things. You surprised even yourself.

  Within weeks of returning to Australia I was working for a corporation with headquarters in North Sydney. Just a few kilometres away in Kirribilli, walking distance from the office, I rented a shoebox apartment overlooking a small park and began to settle in to my new life. Compared to what I had been doing with Panoptica, the work was dull – devising programs for the setting up of new accounting systems – but I intended within the year to break out into my own consultancy. When I had settled in. When I had found my line and length.

  At night I thought of Gareth and for the first time in my life I began to suffer from insomnia. Almost every night I would wake around three in the morning. Sometimes, if I couldn’t get back to sleep, I would turn on my clock radio and listen to the BBC World Service. News from remote borders, of warring factions of the Mujahideen, rendered in civilised English tones, seemed calibrated to run exactly the right kind of interference on my zealous mind: sometimes I would be dozing within minutes. But other data was less reliable. The English football results made me think of pleasurable hours on the West Ham terraces.

  Then I would wonder what Mira was up to. Had I allowed a good thing to slip through my fingers? Perhaps I should call her. What time was it in Montreal?

  Time passed. Occasionally I would have a drink with a friend. There were company social nights when I would turn up and play my role (and these were not unpleasant), and there was a regular game of squash with three old schoolfriends. They invited me to dinners and barbecues, but these were the lowest level of distraction and, if I were not in the mood, would only aggravate my condition of restless grief.

  One night he ambushed me. Gareth. Came to me in a bittersweet dream. He was standing below my window and calling to me to come out into the street. Though he was four years older, he had often given in to my pestering and agreed to batting practice in the lane beside our house after school. The lane was steep and he would order me to the bottom end so that I had to do all the running to retrieve a missed ball, and I would enter the house for dinner in a state of sweaty exhaustion. It was a dream that could not have been more potent: the smell of scuffed leather and damp grass, the sound of car horns honking, the melodic whistle of a neighbour as he walked home from the station, the way the cool evening gloom began to close in around us until we could barely see the ball.

  The next morning I found it hard to get out of bed. Once again the program had failed and I had to lie prone, inert, and run the instructions through my head. ‘Now get up, have a shower, have some breakfast … just take it one step at a time …’ I hadn’t been in this kind of funk for years. After an hour of lying there, rehearsing the moves in my head, finally I threw off the covers and sat up, only to sink back into bed. And this went on for a week.

  One humid Sunday afternoon, lounging on the balcony of my small apartment and basking in the last of the autumn sun, I read my way absentmindedly through a feature article in the Saturday paper entitled ‘The Emotional Male’. It was a shallow article of the kind that pretended to a seriousness it was too lazy to pursue, but in it I came across this sentence: ‘A feeling of being jaded is often a mask for depression.’ I looked up and out over the rail of the deck to a flock of currawongs on the wire.

  Boredom is often a mask for depression? Were they talking about me?

  Depression. I had heard of it, had read about it. I knew that everyone, at some time or another, felt depressed; knew that as an occasional affliction it was common, one of the prices you paid for being alive. But beyond this was a biochemical condition, some taint of being that never went away, that rose and fell like the tides but was always there. Perhaps, all along, this had been my problem, some chemical imbalance.

  The obvious thing was to consult a doctor. I knew a GP, the father of a friend. I had met him at a wedding and liked him, so I booked myself in. And as I sat there in Des’s surgery early one Thursday morning, I didn’t beat around the bush. I said I thought I might be suffering from depression. It was an embarrassing admission, difficult to put into words – but after all, it was an illness, wasn’t it? Still, how should I have framed it? ‘I’ve been feeling a bit down, lately?’ In my case, the ‘lately’ part wasn’t true. Obviously the death of my brother hadn’t helped things, but the problem of my discontent had been with me for most of my life.

  For much of the night before I had lain awake, rehearsing the ways in which
I might get this confession out so that it sounded manly and credible, not whining and self-indulgent. I thought too of the shape I would give my account of why I thought I had this – my ‘depression’ – and what in my life might have contributed to it. After what seemed a long time of lying in the dark, I had glanced at the luminous clock dial: it was just after four in the morning, and I was still rambling through the fractured narrative of my life like some insomniac Sherlock Holmes of the psyche, looking for what vital clues might be there in key incidents: recent events that had caused me pain (Gareth), recent events that ought to have caused me pain and hadn’t (Mira) and the more general problem of why it was that I was always the first to spot the worm in the apple. Was I more perceptive than other people? Was the worm even there?

  To my surprise, Des didn’t want to hear any of this. ‘Not unusual,’ he said briskly. ‘Especially at your age.’

  Age? What did age have to do with it?

  ‘Yours can be a difficult age,’ Des was saying. ‘You’re in the runup to forty. It’s all been a bit like playschool up until now.’

  But I was still, I protested inwardly, a young man. Hardly a midlife crisis.

  ‘Don’t underestimate the role of hormones,’ Des continued. ‘Your testosterone levels are starting to drop sharply around now, and medical science is only just beginning to look at the effect this has on the brain. We know a lot about women’s hormones but a lot less about the male of the species. Your hormones start leaking in when you’re around seven or so, not just in your teenage years but earlier than you think, and then at around thirty the levels start to wane …’

  I didn’t quite hear the rest, distracted by the thought that, come to think of it, it had been around the age of seven that I had first apprehended that the universe might be a magnificent but meaningless spiral of matter, behind which lay a terrifying void, and beside which any small human gesture was ultimately pointless … but it was also the time when I began to experience that feeling of homesickness, of primeval exile and loss, like a prisoner yearning for freedom. It was as if I had brought this yearning into the world with me, that it was latent in every cell of my being and it had nothing to do with grief. But what was I yearning for?