‘See you soon?’ I said to Fran, hoping he might take that to mean later that night, a trip over the fence to my bedroom window so we could debrief the unsettling events of the evening.
He did not come round that night, I do not think. He stopped coming out with us, and I cut back my nights out with the girls to only those that involved remaining in one location. When I saw them at school the next week, I was relieved Mara and Poppy were okay. Poppy’s boyfriend did dump her for not ‘being cool’ about the whole friend trying to commit vehicular homicide thing. Luckily, this was not a big deal for her.
13
Iam drunk and up a tree. Neither is a new experience for me, obviously, but together they have merged on this glorious evening to become so much more than a sum of their parts. A melding of past and present, old and new. A monumental and symbolic expression of exactly where I am at this point in my life. Here I am, in a tree, trying to figure it all out. A child must become an adult, at the ripe young age of twenty-one. A light flicks on back at the house, and I wonder who is up. I did wait until all was quiet to make my great escape. I have chosen this trip down memory field and up memory branch to avoid making a similar choice to last night, because now I have hope that Fran does not despise me after all, or, if he does despise me, he is at least conflicted about it.Drinkingin a tree would be a ridiculous thing, but the act of being drunk and in a tree is entirely correct. Perhaps my climbing the tree was a flight response – fleeing from Fran and his sensible thoughts and reasonable feelings and strange admission of mistruth, but now that I am here, I am actually totally fine with the fact that he no longer wishes to kiss me.
That he thinks I am ‘not in a good place’. That he has moved on, whether or not another person is involved. All I need is air to breathe and a comfortable bed and a tree to climb. The mosquito situation could be better, sure, but it is a fair trade-off for all that I am getting from this moment, because the stars are everywhere and not a single person is around. Now, if I am being completely honest, I do at least somewhat wish I had broached these topics with him before now, and perhaps even tried the whole ‘having an open conversation’ route somewhere along the way these past few years. That would have been best practice, of course, but I am not operating from a place of best practice and as such, harm minimisation is what I must focus on. Having already, potentially, caused quite a bit of harm, it is best if I hold back on trying to kiss a person who maybe chose to stop speaking to me out of a desire to never kiss me again. That seems to be the right course of action. I may not have earnt any points in the ‘good’ column for quite a while now, but I can understand this.
Daydreaming is one of my favourite pastimes, and it works so much better when I have had a few drinks. It was quite rude of Dr Montague to label my life’s greatest work maladaptive, when what I actually create is perfect. Taking tonight as an example, what if before all of this, I had called Fran to talk to him about my burnout and diagnosis. Now, that is a lovely path to wander down.
I call him and he soothes my worries, he flies down to Melbourne and helps me pack up my things, and mend things with Cleo, and move back home, and we talk for two weeks straight, and we come up with a plan; a plan where he is my boyfriend, but I am not his girlfriend, and somehow that makes sense.
And then this week would not be the particular kind of nightmare that it is. That is not to say nothing would go wrong, because it is Christmas, and what kind of family has a Christmas where nothing goes wrong? But it could have been bearable. And really, what would Dr Montague know about appropriate adjustments to the environment or situation at hand? I think these little personalised movies I make for myself inside my head are entirely appropriate, given the circumstances. Anyway, I just like how they make me feel. The problem with being drunk up a tree while refraining from drinking up a tree, is that eventually the headache sets in. This one is particularly cruel, and I do not like my chances of being rescued by Dad. Even though I know there is nothing much that could hurt me, as long as I stomp loud enough to keep the snakes away, I still have to psych myself up for the journey back to the house. The air is as warm as it was before the sun set, and I jump down to avoid having to figure out which branches I used on my way up. Best practice might be to wander mindfully back, to let the low hum of cicadas prepare me to fall into a restful sleep. It really is a most beautiful night. I sprint like I am partaking in a Little Athletics dash, or perhaps some kind ofHunger Gamesscenario, all the way back to my door. My heart is racing and my face feels red hot. There is nothing worse than a hot face. Well, perhaps nose-diving the most important relationship in my life is worse, but lucky me because I get both.
When I open the patio door to my room, the bedside light flicks on and I let out a scream.
‘Keep it down,’ Olivia says, sitting on the side of my bed, her face shiny with her night-time potions.
‘You scared the shit out of me,’ I reply, closing the door behind me as quietly as I can.
‘I came down to see you before and you weren’t here. I was worried.’
‘I’m a big girl, I can handle myself.’
Olivia looks at me with some confusion on her face.
‘Are you drunk?’
‘You were the one handing me all those Proseccos, and I don’t think I need to explain to you what happens when alcohol crosses the blood–brain barrier,’ I reply.
‘Don’t be sassy with me, I’m not judging you. Come here.’
She takes my hand and sits me on the bed, helping me to undress and then pulling my nightdress over my head, threading my arms through the sleeves like she would with Maeve.
After filling up my glass of water, she places some painkillers beside it on the bedside table and hands me a makeup wipe.
‘Why are you doing this for me?’ I ask, lying down and letting her tuck me in.
‘We all need to be cared for sometimes,’ she says. ‘And I can see you are in pain.’
‘What about you? Are you in pain, too?’ I whisper, closing my eyes.
‘Of course. Everyone in this house is in pain. We just can’t admit it to one another,’ she replies.
‘Mmm,’ I agree, sinking into the coolness of my pillow and the softness of sleep.
Somewhere in the early hours of the morning, head throbbing, I wake enough to mull over Olivia’s observations. Pinpointing pain in my other family members is hard for me to do. I had thought of mine as so separate, so singular and special. Retracing my steps, I find myself searching for clues. By the time I was in that teenage space of binge-drinking and making bad choices, I had completely separated my family from my ‘real life’, as though a real thing could ever exist without considering its origins, without looking to its ecosystem. The only person who knew who I was when I was around my family was Fran, and even then, I worked hard to keep them apart. With Dad it was easy, as his level of involvement with home life was limited to morning greetings, small talk at dinner, and a goodnight kiss on the cheek. He did not want to know any more, and the only acceptable response to his ‘How are you?’ was ‘Fine’. Or maybe ‘Yeah, pretty good,’ if things were going very well, but things were never going very well for me, so I stuck with ‘Fine’. He was busy running his accounting firm, where he did the books for wealthy cattle farmers and local businesses, and playing golf, and when he was home he was working on the garden, or using his iPad in bed. Olivia and Luke never seemed to require anything else from him, nor thought it was strange that he did not know their friends or their interests all that well, so it felt like something wrong with me to long for more. The closest I ever got to glimpsing his pain was one night I was in his ensuite, searching for painkillers for yet another headache, and I came across a bottle of SSRIs with his name printed on them.
‘What are these?’ I asked, holding them up to him from the doorway.
He looked up from his iPad, lowered his glasses and said, ‘They’re mine. You don’t have to worry about those.’
‘Are they for depression?’ I asked, because I was clueless and mental health was never an acceptable topic of conversation in our house.
‘Anxiety,’ he replied, not explaining any further.
‘Are you anxious?’
