A Short History of Richard Kline Read online

  When I looked up, Des was writing out a prescription for antidepressants. ‘You just need something to tide you over a bad patch,’ he said.

  This was not what I had expected. Not that I had anything against antidepressants, but these, surely, were for the suicidal, or for the non-functioning: people who couldn’t get up out of their bed, or chair. I was neither. Okay, I had a few days when I had trouble getting out of bed, but I had no desire to end my life. I went to work every day and did more or less the right things. I had expected to be referred on to a psychiatrist. In those days psychotherapy was not the commonplace it would soon become, but I knew enough to know that you didn’t have to be mad to qualify. And there was a sense in which I was almost looking forward to the on-the-couch experience as an intellectual puzzle: a match of wits, an elaborate and redemptive game.

  But no, here I was standing outside a pharmacy in the Chatswood mall with a handful of pills in silver foil. ‘Take one tablet twice a day and come back in four weeks.’ What could I do? I drove to my office, downed the first lot with some lukewarm coffee, took another one at lunchtime just before a meeting and on the way home dropped the rest into a litter bin at the station. Then I had second thoughts, went back and retrieved them. Luckily, they were sitting just on top of a folded newspaper and I didn’t have to rummage like a vagrant, though the thought crossed my mind that I was a kind of vagrant. Here I am, rummaging in the bin of my psyche, hoping to pull something out of the lucky dip, some better than average prize.

  For the next two days I took the antidepressants as prescribed and then I threw them away again, this time for good. Yes, I was a moody bastard, but I had always been like this, and I just had to learn how to handle the bad days, days when I felt myself teetering on the edge of becoming bored even by my own ambition. And that scared me, because without ambition I was robbed of the future. Ambition was the cool wind that kept me airborne; it had carried me through my twenties; it was the one thing I confidently expected would never fail me.

  The following Monday I couldn’t get out of bed. I stayed there for the rest of the week, feigning flu. I would sleep until noon, lurch into the shower and spend the afternoons watching snatches of talk shows or the mindless perambulations of golf. Or raid my bookshelves for something that wasn’t stale or trivial and absurd. It occurred to me that I did nothing but work; that I had stopped buying books and that maybe I should start again; that my mental focus had narrowed in the way that an artery becomes thickened and clogged by plaque. It even occurred to me that I might be suffering from sensory deprivation; I rarely listened to music anymore; I never went for a walk in the bush; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a swim. I’ve got to do something, I thought. I have to act. I have to deal with this thing. I can will myself out of this.

  Meanwhile, I had stopped wearing my watch. It felt like a diver’s weight.

  In late April, out of the blue, I got a call from my cousin Julie. She and her husband, Kieran, had just been transferred back to Sydney from Auckland, where they had spent the past five years. She had got my number from Jane. Would I like to come over for dinner?

  Driving across to their house in Tamarama, I thought of the last time I had seen Julie, not long before I left for London. But my most vivid memory of her was from a holiday when our two families spent Christmas together at Terrigal. I remembered her then as a tomboy: a short, muscular girl with sun-streaked hair and a deep tan, a powerful swimmer who moved in the water with the slow, lazy focus of a fish.

  That first night she came out to meet me in the driveway and I was relieved to see that she had scarcely changed, apart from a slight thickening around the middle. The house was a nondescript brick bungalow, and she led me through a cool hallway and out onto a concrete terrace that looked out to the water. The ocean was calm and shimmered in the hazy evening light. In one corner of the terrace a thickset man with a beard was wiping down the metal plate of a primitive wood-fired barbecue. Below him, on the grass, two small boys in wet bathers chased a featureless brown mutt around the yard.

  Julie introduced me to Kieran as ‘my clever cousin’, and I thought this was not perhaps the best start. Kieran shook my hand a touch too firmly and went on with preparations for the barbecue, while Julie and I looked out over the rooftops and spoke the lingua franca of Sydney life: real estate. All the while I was alert to Kieran, his intense preoccupation with the barbecue, the way he sighed as he adjusted the firewood and poked at loose woodchips, and I wondered if he was not so much gruff as tired. He moved with the stolid weariness of a man who had worked all day in the sun.

  ‘Kieran’s been working on his boat all day,’ Julie said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘He bought this old whaling dinghy off a friend and now he’s restoring it.’

  Kieran looked up through a waft of smoke. ‘Huon pine, beautiful timber.’

  ‘Why don’t you show Rick the boat?’

  Kieran poked at the fire again. ‘Like to have a look?’ he asked, and his asking was a courtesy, as if to say: I don’t want to bore you with this.

  ‘Sure.’

  The boat, covered by a tarpaulin, sat in the side lane. Kieran became more animated as he removed the tarpaulin and ran his palm along the polished surface of the wood. Now he was at ease and happy to deliver a laconic discourse on glues and varnishes. Every now and then he would pat the side of the boat, as if it were an old friend, and nod his head in confirmation of its worth, while I did my best to ask the right questions. I thought the shape of the boat ugly, too wide in relation to its length, which gave it a squat appearance, but the wood was ravishing, a golden honey hue with the softness of a subtle grain. I saw that you could have a relationship with this wood and was about to ask where it came from when Julie leaned over the terrace and said, ‘Let’s eat. The kids are getting ratty.’

  ‘Such beautiful wood,’ I said, looking up.

  ‘Well, enjoy it,’ she said tartly, ‘because by the time they finish logging old-growth forests there’ll be none of it left. They’ll have to put boats like that in a museum.’

  ‘Now then, Jules, you’re winding up into a rant,’ said Kieran, quietly, looking ahead. His eyes were hooded and his weathered lips set firmly against causes.

  With this, I felt a prick of annoyance; I did not like to hear my cousin rebuked. But Julie seemed oblivious. She had moved away to the other side of the terrace, where she was calling to the boys. Her husband had thrown out the net of his words but she was not caught.

  Up on the terrace, bread and salads were laid out. Kieran set about the serious business of searing the meat while the boys, Ryan and Matthew, whooped around the garden. Conversation over dinner was broken but accommodating. The boys, though shyly deferential to the visitor, were ragged with fatigue from a blustery afternoon on the beach with their mother. After they had tired of tormenting the dog, they whined and fought over who would ride the bike around the lawn and show off for the visitor. At last, Julie rose with deliberate calm and bundled them into a bath.

  Despite the way they had interrupted my every sentence, I was sorry to see them go. Watching them reminded me of the hours I had spent with Gareth, in that same enchanted hour of dusk, our subliminal sense of the light of the day falling away behind us, our innocent faith in its renewal.

  With the boys in bed, we settled into recliners on the deck and sniffed at the smell of meat and barbecue smoke, still wafting tantalisingly in the air. Kieran wasn’t much of a talker and the wine soon sent him into a soporific slump. The small talk trailed off into a companionable silence, and for a while we just sat and gazed out at the horizon. After a while I turned to Julie and said, ‘Do you get much swimming in these days?’

  ‘Not much. If it’s hot, I go for a swim at night, when the kids are in bed, and if Kieran’s home. That’s the best time. The wind’s dropped, there’s no-one on the beach.’

  Swimming in the dark? This struck me as foolhardy. ‘Can you see what you’re doing?’

  When she look
ed at me there was a gleam of the old mischief in her dark brown eyes. ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘That’s the point.’

  I remembered how she used to wade into the surf at Terrigal, swimming beyond the breakers like a sleek porpoise, so evenly, so smoothly, as if she were in her element, as if she might never come back. It seemed to me then that there was a mystery in her, something unfathomable.

  A warm breeze wafted up from the water and the sky glowed pink at the edge of the roofline. I saw that at night a trance came over these beach suburbs, a subtropical stupor in which all fear, all resistance was dissolved in the warm penumbra of dusk. Nature giveth, and Nature taketh away.

  Beside us, Kieran snored gently on his recliner.

  I drove home around nine, the last glow of daylight rimming the horizon. I wondered if I, too, could live like this, in the suburbs, a father of small children with a sundeck and a barbecue, a double garage and a frangipani tree. These were the surfaces, and then there was the reality. Reality was the man polishing his boat on land and the woman swimming in the dark, but they were a riddle, one that I was not yet ready to unravel. Supposing I were to enter into this riddle? What would it make of me? Who would I be?

  My mind drifted again to surfaces, the form of the thing. I saw my weary commute home in the evening, backyard cricket with the kids at twilight, supper on the beach on hot summer nights, an enigmatic wife who would form the impenetrable substratum of my dreams. This was the core of it. Everything depended on this last figure in the landscape: the woman on the beach. Without her I was just a cog in the machine. And with her? With her, we were mysterious creatures at the edge of the tide: liminal, amphibious, entwined.

  I drove on, into the dark, and felt that I was some great, displaced sea creature, splayed on a vinyl seat behind the wheel of a car; a beached merman waiting dumbly for the next enveloping wave.

  For the next nine months I lived like a monk. I did nothing but work, and for all of that time I was celibate, the longest period in my life since I was seventeen.

  I began to frequent a Korean bathhouse near Taylor Square in a run-down building that looked out onto the grimy columns of the Supreme Court. That bathhouse became my refuge. You went up a seedy narrow staircase and into a foyer hung with paper scrolls; you rang a small brass bell and a chunky Korean who spoke no English appeared, nodded and indicated the change room. Once undressed, you entered naked into the bathing area. This was a dimly lit room with two circular pools in the centre, raised above a surrounding deck of white tiles. The smaller of these pools was a warm spa bath filled with an infusion of ginseng, its leaves floating on the surface, and as you stepped out and down onto the tiles some of the leaves clung to your skin, creating the brief illusion that you had just stepped out of a brackish lake.

  After this you slipped into the larger pool, which was cooler, and bathed until you were ready for the steam room at the far end. At any given time there might be seven or eight men in the pools, some in the water, others sitting at the edge, dangling their feet and waiting to be rubbed down on one of the futons spread along the deck. Once you were prostrate on a futon, another of the masseurs would come and kneel, and begin to scrub your body with a loofah, scouring the skin hard, almost to the threshold of pain, stopping every few minutes to sluice you down with warm water out of a long-handled bucket that attendants constantly refilled.

  This was the best moment of all, the sluice of clean water across your shoulders, your lower back, thighs and feet. The warm, willing cascade of it; the luxurious blur of expectation just before the next deluge; the grateful exhalation of relief as you lay there like a slippery fish foetus in the womb of the pool room, with its dim, steamy air and its becalmed bodies.

  And I would walk out of there, loose and light, and drive home, and often eat nothing that evening because I felt clean. Purified.

  One night after a session at the bathhouse, I had a dream. I was in the big circular pool, or a space that resembled the pool, only it was not. And there was no-one there but me, floating outstretched and naked on a raft at the centre of the water. And I dreamed that the raft was also my bed, so that it was not as if I were somewhere else; rather, it was a sense of being on my bed in a state that was half-awake, and the surface of the bed was the surface of the raft. And all the while the raft was bobbing idly on the surface of the pool … And every now and then I would wake …

  It was such a long, drifting dream, but even in the waking state a mirage of water persisted in my brain, like an hallucination, so that when I looked up in the dark I could see the water eddying across the ceiling, around the fan in a soundless swirl, rippling on and on across the blackness. And after a while it came to me. I can’t get off the raft. Any moment now I will fall and sink to the bottom of the pool, and there’s no-one here and they’ll never find me, and my body will be flushed away through one of the corner drains.

  That’s when I saw the woman. Standing at the end of the pool was a woman in a white dress, and in her arms she was holding a baby, an amorphous white bundle wrapped in swaddling clothes, wrapped so tight that all I could see was its eyes. And the woman? She was familiar to me; I had seen her before. But where? And as I stared at them, thinking – who are they? and what are they doing here? – slowly, the baby began to glow. At first it shone faintly but then it began to glow brighter, the white shimmer of the image growing more and more intense until at last it flared into a blinding cone of light. At that moment I felt a tight, nostalgic sweetness in my chest, a terrifying vertigo of joy, and I knew then that the light was coming to annihilate me …

  And I woke with a gasp. And lay in the dark, open-mouthed, holding my breath. That feeling … that feeling was indescribable. For a moment I had felt as if I were falling … falling into bliss.

  And the feeling stayed with me for the whole of the day, until late afternoon, when it began to fade. As it receded, I tried to hold on to it, to wilfully recapture glimpses of the dream – the tilt of the raft, the hem of the woman’s dress, the glow from the baby – but inevitably it grew more and more faint, like a silk fabric dissolving in the mind’s eye. It could not be hung on to, and by late evening I had ceased even to try. The yearning around my heart had evaporated, the painful joy in my chest was gone.

  I began to look forward to my visits to Tamarama. I grew fond of the boys, remembering on each occasion to bring them some small treat.

  One night, when Kieran was away on business, Julie packed some cooked sausages in buttered rolls smeared with tomato sauce and we walked to the beach. After a no-frills picnic on the sand the four of us played beach cricket until it began to grow dark. At one point Matt lobbed a ball into the water.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said.

  ‘No, I’ll go.’ And in one supple movement Julie had slipped out of her shorts and waded into the surf.

  Later, when the boys were in bed and we were sitting out on the deck, she asked me about Gareth. Oddly, we had never discussed it. I wondered if she had raised the subject before then and I had brushed it aside, or lapsed into mute resistance. But that night a rush of pain ambushed me behind the eyes, like the prickly, needling onset of a migraine. I faltered mid-sentence and it was clear to her that I had tripped an internal landmine.

  Julie was unfazed. She turned her gaze away from the sea and stared at me. ‘You should talk about it, Rick,’ she said. ‘And have a good cry. Just cry your eyes out for as long as it takes.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Can’t what?’

  ‘Can’t cry. I’ve never been able to cry.’

  ‘You must have cried as a child!’ She was looking at me in astonishment.

  ‘Not that I recall.’

  ‘You know, Rick, you should talk to someone.’

  ‘I’m talking to you.’

  ‘I mean a professional.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘A friend of mine has been going to a therapist, a woman. Sue thinks she’s really good. Do you want me to ring her and get the number?�
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  I shrugged.

  I thought Julie must have misinterpreted the shrug, because she made no effort to move, but a week later a business card arrived in the post with a note on the back in her handwriting. ‘Thought you might want to hang on to this for future reference.’

  I read the card.

  SARAH MASSON

  psychotherapist

  It gave an address near the Manly Corso.

  The next day I rang and made an appointment.

  The house was set well back from the road behind a high, cream brick wall. There was a Norfolk pine in the front garden, like the ones on the Corso but with more life in it, more density and spring. For a moment I was distracted by that tree; I was willing to be distracted by almost anything, since I had misgivings about being there.

  It was the realisation that I was becoming almost catatonically unable to speak to anyone much about anything that had finally driven me to this door.

  Julie had said: ‘You just need to talk to someone about the way you feel.’

  That sounded reasonable. Unthreatening. Or so I thought when I rang and made an appointment. But at the moment when I stood there, staring up into the radiating fronds of the Norfolk pine, it felt confronting.

  But I knew why I had come. I wanted to cry, and I couldn’t. Perhaps this Sarah Masson would teach me.

  I was a week off my thirty-fourth birthday.

  I stepped onto the verandah. Next to the stained-glass door was a brass plate inscribed ‘Holistic Therapy Centre’. Suddenly I felt nervous, like a child about to sit some kind of unorthodox examination. And I didn’t like that word ‘holistic’. It had a phoney ring to it. What’ll I say? I thought. I’ll just say that I have depression, that in the past year it’s gotten worse. I’ll just set out the facts, flatly. Describe the situation. Tell her about Gareth, and before that, Jo. And maybe about the dream, the one about the woman and the baby. Yes, definitely the dream. What could be difficult about that?