Come back to mine

‘We are all born with two sparks: the spark of divinity and the spark of madness. The world will try to take them away from you. Don’t let them. If one spark doesn’t work, try the other.’ Cherokee Healer, quoted by Sue Grand exploring the topic of hatred.

The divine and the crazy. How do we deal with them? Once I would have thought the divine to be its own form of madness. That the ordinary acceptance of an ordinary life was the way to go. There is a type of divinity in the ordinary. In the simple. The non-complicated. But now I’m not so sure.

A definition of divinity calls: ‘Of or like God,’ is one possibility. The other, ‘very pleasing or delightful’. How does one inform the other?

As you know, I have trouble with the notion of God, but no trouble with the notion of awe and the transcendent. The idea there are things beyond human reach. Things that inspire us. Things we cannot see or know or understand. Things we can glimpse through the periphery of our vision, but they are beyond our ability to set down in words.

It is this I seek. For madness is a whole other field. 

In my imagination I sit on a bench over the sea and watch the waves. I am in Mentone. The beach beyond the road where the boys Catholic College, St Bede’s, boasts its sprawling ovals and football fields. Across Beach Road from the school there are cliffs leading down to the water. Cliffs so steep, it is as if someone has taken a bite out of a crisp apple. And into these cliffs workers have dug out a neat gravel walkway that winds down in ever increasing and gentle slopes half spiralling to the sea. 

From my bench you cannot see the sand or the rocks immediately below, but you can see the waves as they break onto the shore, and you hurtle yourself back in time.

It is not an easy thing to cast your mind back into places long gone, experiences complete and covered over with the gravel of years. An excavation unsettles events below such that you can only pick them out piece meal. They do not adhere. 

In the newspapers today we read of the deaths of three young women, all of them nineteen years old. Two were in Laos, on the holiday of their lives. The backpackers’ hostel where they stayed offered free vodka shots one evening and the two partook of this hospitality. They wound up with severe methanol poisoning, and a few days after they were found in their rooms seriously ill, are now dead. Methanol is a by-product of cheap alcohol and lethal even in tiny doses. 

The third, a nineteen-year-old woman who had been missing for several weeks before the remains of her body were found in a rubbish tip. She had succumbed to deliberate foul play. As far as we know murdered by what the newspersons describe as her ‘sugar daddy’. More details will emerge over time, but it is enough to know that three bright lights are snuffled out at the peak of the lives. Nineteen years old.

Do you remember what it was like to be nineteen?

I ‘lost’ my virginity when I was nineteen years old. Just nineteen, and the end of my first year of university. I lost it to a young man I had met through my holiday job in a bookstore. A young man who seemed so much older than me at the time and who led me gently down the road of deflowering. 

Introduced to a world that had previously been alive only in my imagination, a world riddled with terror given my father’s behaviour throughout my childhood, my incessant fear that he might one day be the one to take away my innocence, the way he stole my sister’s. 

But two years later when I was not yet twenty-two, I broke up with the young man who kept me as his partner for the course of three to four years. He had lost his allure to me, and we parted.

Such a simple explanation for a gradual separation that took over a year to complete but left me in a state of mind in which believed I was invincible, rather as I imagine many young people in their late teens and early twenties feel. Invincible. 

As much as I was terrified of bad things happening to me and to others, I was also reckless with my life.

In my first year working within a hospital social work department at the Prince Henry’s hospital I befriended one of the occupational therapists there, Jan. She was a more sophisticated version of me. Older by two years she owned and drove her own VW Golf car and lived independently of her parents. She and I enjoyed visits on the town, for her the opportunity to socialise, for me to meet another man. One who might treasure me as once my previous boyfriend did. One whom I too could treasure, and we could live together in divine happiness.  

There was one time when Jan and I took ourselves off to a new bar close by the Royal Melbourne Hospital on the other end of town in the outskirts of Parkville.

The bar was crowded and noisy and when it came to closing time, Jan who had paced herself with drinking, offered to drive me home. 

‘I’m fine,’ I said in as dismissive and casual way as my drunken self could muster. ‘I’m going home with him.’

He was a man I had met in the cramp of bodies at the bar. I cannot describe him to you now from memory. I was drunk, but I can say he was tall, at least taller than me with a fresh face. I disliked beards. He would most likely have been in his early thirties. So sophisticated to my mind then and he held down a respectable job in the city though we did not talk work.

‘Come back to mine,’ he said as we pushed up against one another and the alcohol took effect, especially on my almost empty stomach. 

I could hold my grog or so I liked to believe and when Jan left with her parting words to take care, I was as free as a bird and excited to be off on an adventure.

The man and his friend who materialised at the end of the evening and with whom this man shared a flat, drove us through the city to the outskirts of South Yarra. A prestigious place to live I imagined in my drunken state, and it filled me with pleasure. 

At least this man was not poor. Not that any person in the bar that night could have been conventionally poor. To afford the drinks alone required a half decent income.

No, I figured I was safe to follow this man and his friend up a tall flight of rickety stairs leading from the back garden in a set of old-world apartments. The man warned me the dog might bark at a stranger, but he was harmless.

Hunger hit me once inside the four walls of an unprepossessing kitchen where we sat around a green Laminex topped table. 

‘Do you have some food,’ I asked with the offer of yet more alcohol. ‘I need to eat.’ And the man dragged out dry biscuits from a cupboard and cheese from his fridge. I fell on the food like a hungry waif and forgot to drink any more alcohol. I was past it by now and all I wanted was sleep.

Too much alcohol has a bad effect on a person. It leads to black outs and here I must offer another. Beyond a memory of lying on top of a bed between these two men, we three shared a bed but I do not remember sharing bodies. We all fell asleep and, in the morning, as I stood fully clothed and keen to get the hell out of there, I sensed they too had been as drunk as me and nothing awful had happened.

It is a naïve thought.

But the shame of that moment as the fog of alcohol hit my head stays with me,

‘I’d like to go home,’ I said, and the younger of the men, the one who asked me to join them said, ‘Sure.’

He led me to the stairs and followed me down, all the time urging the dog to leave us alone. The dog wandered over for a sniff but was soon uninterested and the man led me out a rear gate.

‘The tram stop is just around the corner. You should be fine from there.’

Our farewell was peremptory. I had no desire to see this man again, nor he me, it seemed. He did not ask for an exchange of details. Nor did I. 

I sat on the bench at the tram stop on Glenferrie Road and waited for my tram. The one that would ferry me to Caulfield and my then home. 

I did not experience any rush of relief I was safe. That the night had not turned into the disaster it might have, a disaster I recognised years later when I first saw the movie Looking for Mr Good Bar about another young woman who went in search of love and instead found her death at the hands of a crazed killer.

We are not safe at nineteen years of age and into our early twenties, we young women and many young men too, unsafe in our delusional invincibility.

As a doctor once told me, the first day of your life is the most dangerous and your days continue thus into adolescence and beyond. Dangerous days when our physical capabilities outweigh our intellectual abilities, and we can easily fall prey to the wishes of others who do not care for us even as we might well be looking for their love.