Jackie and Jill were bi-polar lesbians who’d mastered the knack of hiding their medication under their tongues at line up and spitting it out later. By 4.00pm, they’d crescendo in a manic high and drag patients in to their room to partake in hardcore sex. Men or women. They were ecumenical. I’d pass by their bedroom door on the way to group therapy and watch as Jackie did things with Jill, which the designers of the Schwarzkopf shampoo bottle hadn’t considered.

How I ended up in the Melbourne Clinic for Bonkers Men and Women on that beautiful spring morning at the tender age of 40, is the story. It’s not the only story but this one is mine.

It starts when I’d found Ingrid Bergmann’s stolen Gretsch drum kit. She looked like a young Bergmann in Casablanca, so I’ll call her Ingrid. She’d separated from her Irish husband six months before the drums walked from her garage.

I’d been in love with Ingrid for two years. Not a desperate, pining love. Not an obsessive love – that came later. More a petal picking, ‘she loves me, she loves me not’, love. Using my research skills as a former journalist, I tracked down her drum kit to a small second-hand music store not far from her flat. The smackheads were caught flogging it on the store camera and busted. She was ever so thankful. Good boy.

I assailed her with flowers, chocolates and invitations to plays and parties. She kept the flowers and chocolates and knocked everything else back. I bought her a small Daphne plant, with a rich and complex scent. She said it reminded her of her mother’s funeral. Surely, the Australian diplomatic core could have used Ingrid’s skills.

Six weeks later, she invited me to a party at a famous rock musician’s house. I was amazed so many stupid people with large egos could fit in to a two-bedroom house. We danced and drank too much. When I awoke, she was asleep next to me in my Fitzroy apartment. Naked. She opened one eye, smiled, and headed to the bathroom.

That was it. I wouldn’t call us boyfriend and girlfriend. While Ingrid may have been footloose and fancy free, a product of a Presbyterian Girls School education and a sizeable inheritance, she was wracked by a guilt only Catholic schoolboys could understand. That’s the leitmotif. Guilt. As she walked out the front door, she said, “Don’t let it get weird.” That’s another.

My parents split when I was one year old. Mum and me lived with my grandparents in a small, two-bedroom house in a migrant area in a city, which was the sexual assault capital of the world. Grandpa was an alcoholic with a temper. He’d come home pissed and hit the women and me. Back then communism got the headlines, not domestic violence.

The women wised up, armed themselves with knives and rolling pins and waited for him to come home. They were like the Viet Cong, hiding behind couches and settees. When the old bastard opened the front gate – which always squeaked – I’d wake up, and wait as bait in the lounge dressed in my pyjamas. Sure enough, he’d see me, ‘come ere you little fucker’, he’d say and then the women would pounce and give him five minutes of some serious ultra-violence. I got in a few well-aimed kicks to the balls too. I chose not to carve V-for Victim on my forehead.

Sure, thirty-five years later, I needed some psychiatric help but I’ll get to that. Do you want to know what stuck with me? That squeaky gate. To this day, more than 40 years later in the dead of night, if I’m fast asleep, if I hear a gate or door open within 50 metres of my bed, I’m wide awake.

I’d known Martin for 20 years. Gone to university together; heard the bells at midnight, etc. I’d got him his first proper job working in politics as a spin doctor. Over time, Martin’s politics had moved from the cuddly left to the right of the National Party. The friendship was on life support. We had a friend in common. Alfie, who had a major breakdown in the mid 1980s. He looked like Sydney Greenstreet. I called his ‘The Fat Man’ behind his back, which was cruel. I’m like that.

Alfie was also in love with Ingrid. When he found out that we were ‘close’, he started a brilliant smear campaign. He told Ingrid that I hated female drummers. I had a festering host of transmittable sexual diseases. I forced my female students (I was a university lecturer) to have sex with me and more.

When Martin said Alfie had got himself a heroin habit, I was underwhelmed.

“Why can’t you help him?”

“I’ve got issues at home with Bertha. She thinks Alfie is a basket case.”

Bertha was Martin’s girlfriend. In a take from Dune, I called her Baroness Vladimir Harkonnen behind her back – which was broad and armadillo-like. She used any gossip about the affair to slander me. Her girth was an outward reflection of inner untapped bitterness.

Martin said I should throw a dinner party for Alfie. Invite a lot of women, he said. Spoil him, he said. He couldn’t make it because of Bertha’s ball-busting ways but – and I will quote Martin here – “If Alfie knows he is loved, he won’t throw his life away in a spoon.”

With reservations, I threw a party in my apartment for him and invited a bevy of women, including Ingrid and some of Alfie’s skin deep, male friends.

I had also told Patty, who was Ingrid’s best friend, that she could move in downstairs. That was a major mistake. She had clinical depression and mood swings, which made the Foucault pendulum look like a fob watch. If me and Ingrid went pear-shaped, I’d be left with sad Patty and her cat. I was allergic to cats. I was allergic to Patty too. I still said ‘no worries’ because I wanted Ingrid.

I went further. I enrolled Ingrid’s husband in one of my writing courses at university. This wasn’t an entirely dick-led decision. He could write. It would make a pleasant change from the 500 young creative writing students who wrote overly workshopped prose about PC transgressors, transsexuals, domestic violence, sexual assault and the pending environmental apocalypse.

The women laughed at Alfie’s jokes, they sat on his lap, and his mealy-mouthed mates poured vodka down his throat. By 2.00 am he was hammered. Much of the night he watched Ingrid dance around in a fetching black dress, showing off her long legs. I said nothing. What umbrage can a man take when the love of his life is still more or less married to a belligerent Irishman? Hypocrisy beats jealousy every time, unless guns are involved.

It was around 3.00am and I was heavy drunk when Alfie said, “where’s the fuckin drugs?” It sounded more like, wheezedafukindugs? I went to my bedroom, opened the top draw and threw my stash of drugs on the table. It was a potpourri of hash, speed, Valium and god knows what. I told him I was going to bed. He looked up at me, muttered ‘fukin idiot’ and I left him to set sail further in to that good night.

About 15 minutes later, I was roused from sleep by the front gate opening. I got up, looked in the lounge and Alfie had gone. Maybe for a piss? I threw a rug and a pillow on the couch and went back to bed for my last solid sleep in 22 months. I awoke about 9.15am, walked in to the lounge and Alfie was dead on the floor. Rigour mortis has set in. He looked like a wombat with his arms and legs tucked beneath him.

Across the dining table a snow field of white powder covered a mirror. I panicked and with good reason. I remembered in the hard light of a hangover that in my drug cache, was a small quantity of heroin. An old girlfriend had bought it, snorted most of it, and left it behind, saying that if she kills herself, it will be all my fault. I called her Lady Malaise.

The emergency call centre operator said an ambulance would be there in five minutes. Just enough time to throw the evidence in the kitchen tidy bin. I walked down stairs, opened the front door and let in the paramedics, two plains clothes detectives and two members of the forensic crime squad.

The paramedics laid Alfie on a stretcher and carried him down the stairs. The senior detective introduced himself as David Collins and his offsider, who was standing with the forensic squad, going through the kitchen tidy bin, was detective Ray Fines or something like that.

“Big party last night?” Detective Collins said.

“Yeah, in honour of the guy the ambos carried out”

He looked at me for a moment and then put a hand on my right shoulder. I was wearing a black t-shirt and a pair of undies. I looked in the mirror and saw a monster. This was the end of happiness, of love, of my career. I threw on a pair of jeans and splashed water on my face.

I gave Detective Collins the pertinent details which he wrote down in a little black book. Alfie had just split up from his girlfriend of ten years. He was banging a work colleague’s wife and he was depressed.

“Do you reckon he might have killed himself?” he asked.

I had no idea. I’d have to tell his family, Ingrid and then his fucked-up friends. I was going to eat a double decker shit sandwich. Detective Ray got Alfie’s car keys and the forensic guys went through his car.

As the ambulance drove off, a neighbour came over and said I was a fucking inconsiderate prick for playing music so loud at 2.00am. She said she would make an official complaint to the cops.

xxxxxx

Months passed and I told a few close friends that I might have been the hand that rocked the cradle. That was another mistake. They told a few of their friends that I was dead-set responsible for Alfie’s death. That I had tied Alfie down and injected heroin in to his eyeballs. The phone stopped ringing and invitations to parties stopped arriving. Call me ostracised. Call me outcast. The Amish call it ‘Wetdung’, which was fitting.

When I told Ingrid, her mouth dropped open and she wished me dead. I was a stupid fucking idiot and she didn’t want to see me again. But she did. She said I should make a public confession and then we fell in to bed. By telling people in confidence, I’d done much the same thing.

Martin didn’t roll up to Alfie’s funeral. He was busy. Three months after the funeral, he sat on the same blue couch where Alfie died and said, “let’s go out and score some drugs.” That did it for me. You could hear the thud as the dirt hit the top of the friendship coffin.

Two things stuck in my craw. The first was the squeaky gate. What was Alfie doing on the street? The second was Lady Malaise wasn’t the kind of girl to leave any quantity of heroin behind. Her nose was an industrial Hoover which you put $100 notes in to. I called her six months after the funeral. She wanted to know if we could get back together. She said she was floundering without me and could I lend her $500 for food and rent? She apologised for throwing a pan of boiling hot water at me and said it wouldn’t happen again if I took her back.

“Do you remember last year, there was some smack left in your stash of drugs”

“Do you mean when you deserted me while I lived hand-to-mouth? There was a crumb about the size of a match head,” she said. “Not worth shit. If you weren’t such a tight arse, we could have lived like royalty. I would’ve got better if you’d paid for my therapy. What’s it to you anyway?”

Best not to let Lady Malaise know there was trouble at mill.

“When are you going to come and visit me?”

“Soon,” I said

“Better make it soon. Life is short”

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I escaped my idyllic childhood at the age of seven by winning a boarding school scholarship to a ritzy private school. As I lay in my single bed made with hospital corners, in a dormitory full of homesick kids, crying for their Mums, I listened to rock and roll from the UK on my small, white Sanyo transistor radio. The deepest comfort – call it evangelical joy – was listening to The Beatles. Their melodies transported me over the locked, steel gates of the boarding school and in to swinging London. My imagination roamed with John, Paul, George and Ringo. They’re with me now.

When I told Ingrid of my childhood passion, she looked at a spot just above my left ear, as if staring at a cranial defect. She smiled weakly and said, “The Beatles were boring. Get over it.”

David Foster Wallace wrote, “What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

I was goo-prone and generally pathetic. Ingrid was hip and cynical.

She stuck by me for a couple of months. Then her phone calls and emails slowed to a trickle. Every now and then, we’d fall in to bed. While I was hungry for her company, she thought her husband was watching the house. She also thought sleeping with the man who had killed Alfie was ‘problematic.’

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The psychic toil started to show, thirteen months after Alfie’s death. My university lectures lacked passion. My blood pressure went up. I went off food and lost three stone. My cheeks had that hollow look which fashion models die for. I bombed myself with sleeping pills and Valium. My mind raced over the affair, Alfie’s death, the ostracisation and the pressure of work. I was going mad. I also had Patty downstairs doing her Janus impersonation: one minute friendly, the next hissing at me like an angry cat.

Then the nightmares started. I was a small boy floating in the darkness. Just below my feet, huge waves were rolling past. Fear iced my heart. I’d awake in horror as the tip of the wave touched my toes.

My head of school, a noble man, hated the place as much as me. So much so, he appointed me acting head of school and took off to Germany for six months. I was now in charge of 3000 students and 150 staff. My workload tripled over night. I worked from 7.00 in the morning to 7.00 at night. I washed my sleeping pills down with vodka and prayed for calm seas in my dreams. My prayers weren’t answered.

xxxxxxx

The Coroner’s report arrived. Alfie had snorted a shit load of high-grade heroin, which, when combined with the alcohol reading of .22 and his obesity, killed him stone dead. There was a little blood left in his drug stream. But Lady Malaise said there was less than a match head of heroin left. What was going on?

I noticed my handwriting started to crumble. Since I was 15, I had depressive turns every five or six years. These minor quakes came out of the blue and passed. But my journal now showed something different. It was more than the sum of a broken heart, guilt and a high workload. Something off the Richter scale was brewing.

Thursday, October 25^th was a beautiful spring day. The blossom was out. I was awake for most of the night. The sleeping pills had no effect. I got out of bed and fear shook me like a rag doll. I rang work and said I was ill and I wouldn’t be coming in. I packed clothes, my journal, a couple of books and rang a taxi.

I must have appeared presentable because the middle-aged taxi driver wasn’t fazed when I mumbled that I wanted to be taken to the Melbourne Clinic.

I walked carefully across a busy main road, passed through the hissing electronic sliding doors, put my private healthcare and Mastercard on the counter and collapsed.

When I awoke, I was strapped to a single bed. An Indian-Australian doctor and a nurse stood over me. He had the clipped accent of a man used to giving orders. The nurse had a lazy left eye. I didn’t like that. The evening sky was purpling up like a bruise.

“I’m Doctor Khan and this is Nurse Milestone. Looks like you’ve got some issues. We had you in the public ward but you started thrashing around, so we put you in here.”

“Where’s here and what am I?”

“This is a private room. Your health policy covers it. No need to worry.”

“What’s next?”

“Your doctor faxed over your medical file. Most comprehensive. I was wondering if you’re up to talking?”

I looked at Nurse Milestone’s wandering eye and said ‘no’.

“I’ll give you a sedative to help you sleep. You’ll be out for a while. We’ll talk in the morning.”

He slid in needle in to the tender flesh of my left arm. Nurse Milestone pulled the blankets tight under the straps and tucked them in. The last thing I heard was an argument between two young women outside my room.

“Why don’t you pull your piss flaps over your head and make a red back spider out of yourself?”

“Come and make me, penis breath”

Then darkness fell and the sound of the surf washed over me.

In the dream, I was sitting naked on an old Malibu surfboard. The water was cold and it had a strange viscous quality, like a slurry. It was late afternoon. I was floating a kilometre or two offshore. There were no seabirds, no marine life, only an all-encompassing sense I was alone. Then I saw the first wave coming.

It stood 60 metres tall and building. It was monstrous. It had a sucking sound, like a man taking his dying breath and it was pulling me towards it. I looked in to the water and saw faces of dead people looking up at me. Their eyes had hollow sockets and their mouths wide, like Edvard Munch’s, ‘The Scream’. Their bony fingers pointed at the wave. My scream sounded like laughter. The wave rose like a skyscraper. I’d have to ride the wave. Those who fell, fell forever from earth and sun and love.

I paddled to the right and caught the wave’s shoulder. I popped up and was propelled forward and across the wave’s face at an incredible speed. I looked in the water and saw children’s toys scattered on my bedroom floor, I saw a man in a black car shot in the back of his head, I saw my mother’s face laughing at me. I saw The Beatles take a bow after playing a song, I heard Ingrid’s cries of love and then thunder as the wave crashed behind me. I flew over the lip of the wave and sat astride the board. My heart smashed against my rib cage. Then another wave larger than before, came over the horizon. I paddled with all my might and just broached the top before it broke. I could feel it suck me back.

It was eternally late afternoon. I was to ride the waves until I tired and fell. Until ‘I’ no longer existed and the remnants of my ego were given a name and a face in a mental institution somewhere. Where dinner was slopped on plastic plates and eaten with plastic knives and forks.

I knew one thing. The sedation was stopping me rising out of the nightmare. It kept me locked in, like some medieval torture chamber. Sounds occasionally travelled across the seascape. Doors opening and closing, a tray of medicines wheeled along a corridor, a laugh.

I surfed those waves for 24 hours. No respite. The more my ego dissolved, the greater their height and frequency. The more the yawning chasm of madness beckoned, the greater the number of apparitions. Yet even though I was trapped in a nightmare, I had some control over its form. I started singing:

In the town where I was born

Lived a man who sailed to sea

And he told us of his life

In the land of submarines

The louder I sang, the fewer the waves. If I was mad, who’s the ‘I’ singing ‘Yellow Submarine’? To know Yellow Submarine (never a favourite), I must know The Beatles and music. I wasn’t a prisoner of my past and the violence of my childhood. I had the power to choose. I fell asleep on the surfboard and awoke when a nurse released the straps and put a cup of tea and a plate of buttered toast in front of me.

I got to know Jackie and Jill. When off medication, they were a nightmare but on medication, they were erudite and funny. Jackie was a doctor researching viruses and Jill worked as a dental hygienist. I met others so heavily medicated, they fell asleep with their faces buried in the evening dessert.

Alfie’s death and the troubled affair with Ingrid, were catalysts which released the Furies. Standing with my little fists up waiting for Grandpa, to bear down on me, planted a bitter seed which grew as I grew. When I got home, I made changes. I gave Patty $600 to move out. Ingrid never talked to me again.

Just before Good Friday, two years after Alfie died, I walked in to the police station and spoke to Detective David Collins. We sat out the back of the station and drank coffee. He produced the black notebook he wrote in on the day Alfie died.

“What do you wanna know?” Collins asked.

“The heroin bit”

“We found two packets of heroin in the kitchen bin. The little cellophane bag containing the heroin, hash and speed was unopened. The other foil was opened and contained high-grade heroin. Your mate snorted about half a gram. He’d got it from the glovebox of his car. There was more in his fridge at home.”

A group of Aboriginal kids were laughing and playing basketball by the town hall. I got up, shook his hand and rode my pushbike down to the swimming pool. It was a hot morning and I was keen to do my laps.

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