Madness (18 page)

Hot summer days. To improve general fitness I walk part of the way to and from work and ride my bike to the supermarket on weekends. The evenings are heavy with the day's heat and the nights hold the heat like they're breathing in but not out. I cold shower and reapply deodorant and still I sweat.

Climbing four flights of stairs to my office in the morning is grinding. My mind steps forward firmly but my body doesn't follow.

‘I'm fucking wobbling instead of walking,' I say to Deborah. We laugh and then sigh. So I try harder – extend walking routes, ride faster, but the muscle fibres in my limbs have forgotten how to contract. Occasionally my legs jerk under the desk for no reason. Then I vomit twice on the way home from work, and when I stand up afterwards the world is spinning fast. It spins. Every time I re-open my eyes, it spins.

At home I ring a friend who lives just around the corner, Sharon, for help.

‘Shaz, ish Kate. The leethum. Pees–'

‘Kate, what the hell, I can't understand you.'

‘If . . . to jive to the . . .'

‘Hospital? Do you need the hospital?'

‘Mmm.'

‘Stay there. I'll be there.'

I slide to the floor, shuffle to the door; skitter down the stairs on all fours like a crab.

At the hospital the triage nurse and an orderly haul me somehow onto a bed and wheel me to a cubicle. Sharon goes outside for a smoke.

‘What's been happening?' asks the registrar.

I hold out my hands, shaking, rattling hands. The registrar examines the muscle tone in my arms and legs, listens to my heartbeat, checks my eyes.

‘How's your vision?'

I close my eyes and shake my head.

She takes a tendon hammer off a shelf and lightly taps both my patellar tendons (knee reflexes) and my legs shoot up like she's shot a current through them. She taps my left tendon and even my right leg reacts.

‘Interesting,' she says. ‘You've sure got some neurological thing going on here. Good that you came in.'

Someone else inserts an IV and takes blood. Before they return with the biochemistry and haematology results, the world recedes into a tunnel whose circumference narrows first to white and then to nothing.

When I wake up there's a brick on my chest. I try to move it away but it's attached via a number of wires to my skin. I lie in a stupor for several days. Sometimes I open my eyes to find friends and family sitting by the bed. I smile to them. Open my mouth, close it. Close my eyes. Open them again. They are gone.

‘This is a portable ECG machine, linked up to a monitor in the clinical station,' says a nurse, checking the brick. ‘Your lithium levels were way too high. Your kidneys aren't coping so well. You're in Cardiology because your heart is going too slowly.'

‘Well. That sucks.' My glasses are on but everyone looks far away. Voices leer in, then suck up all the air and sigh into the corners of the room. Four days after admission one of the nurses helps me sit up, slide to the edge of the bed and with a four-wheel walking frame I take a step. Another. A ten centimetre by ten centimetre long march to the toilet. Once there I need help to pull down my knickers and then I fall sideways off the seat. W.H Auden said, Art is born of humiliation. I would be happy, right now, to be forever and ever bereft of artistic inclination.

Litres of saline are pumped into my vascular system via the intravenous line and as a consequence the overload of lithium is excreted through my kidneys. The heart returns to a normal rhythm and the nervous system quietens.

‘Don't forget to link up with a psychiatrist to re-start your lithium,' says the medical registrar as I'm discharged.

‘Thanks,' I say to him. ‘Fucking absurd drug,' I say to myself.

At home the books on the dark wood shelves seduce me – their secrets, the truths and lies. I love them for both the truths and the lies. I sit on the couch with a bottle of lithium tablets in my left hand and I sit for a long time and I don't know what to do.

The world is purer without the interference of such mind-altering substances. This particular mind-altering substance has made me very sick. On the other hand, without it there is the risk that I'll become very sick.

The next day I'm back at work, wobbling slightly and nauseated and I apologise to everyone and explain that I've been home with gastro. At lunchtime I go down to the medical library and pore over textbooks and journal articles on lithium – recommended doses, therapeutic concentrations, side effects, alternative treatments. A quarter of my previous daily dose is still within the recommended range. The lower the dose, the fewer adverse effects. This is worthy of a personal experiment.

Hypothesis: on the new dose of lithium I'll remain well, think and concentrate better and reduce the risk of toxicity. Perfect.

Weeks pass and I note only subtle tremor in my arms and legs, less extreme thirst, less nausea and no diarrhoea. I feel stronger, I have more energy and I'm more alive to the world.

Mog, the new foster kitten, is phytophilous. Succulents and cacti, previously in pots on the living room window-ledge, are this morning dug up, dismembered and scattered over the floorboards. Her cat toys – balls and furry mice – are untouched. From the courtyard she brings in leaves and twigs and purple ivy flowers and deposits them on my bed. Every day more foliage: bits of bark, grass, new shoots, tiny white flowers, long lines of creeper, green leaves, brown leaves, seedpods. When I open the front door, home from work, she trills like a bird. She is afraid of birds. There are no circumstances under which I can relinquish such an amazingly gorgeous and original feline, so I ring the animal shelter to arrange adoption.

The big fat cat (Her Royal Greyness) is not impressed with the new addition to our family. She glares at Mog every morning, grey tail fluffed, heavy-breathing. Then she growls, a low rumble that builds in volume and pitch as it moves through her body. She chew-growls, purr-growls, even snore-growls. Oh she glares.

At the next session with Winsome I sit on the couch next to a bright pink elephant called ‘No Longer Taking The Prescribed Dose Of Lithium'. The elephant is quiet and still throughout, his leathery pink skin just touching my thigh. The softest, finest touch. About which I say nothing.

Afterwards, back in the car, I lean on the steering wheel and turn the music up and write the justification out like a testament—

This is a private experiment.

It's my brain. It's my research into the neurochemistry of my brain.

I do not need permission – I'm not five years old.

No-one has the right to dictate what I put in my body or when or

how much. Enough damage done.

There is potential for discovery. A leap. A passage through.

There's something about the evening sky tonight. It is speaking . . . no, it is singing. Each second the light changes, bleeding out colour. A painter would need to work fast, melding rose and orange with dream and perfume and infinitesimal shifts in hue. How is it that this transition from bright to dark retains its beauty with every tick and blink?

I inhale it and it fills me and I weep.

Oh god, am I effectively cured?

At night I walk. At night I read about Ötzi the Iceman, who lived in the Austrian Alps 5000 years ago. At night Ötzi enters my room, my bed, my head.

He is great – this Shaman, masked with the head of a bison. He is strung with copper amulets, stone and marble, and chants his prayers before an altar with the residue of gold on his brow. While the rest harvest the dance – though they move in a trance the sacrifice is real – women sit and sway with the chanting, their breaths are hums engraved with teeth.

Four chiefs in an arc frame the fires, and on the altar table carved grooves gather the edges like garlands around a feast of horned beasts—those that drew granite and onyx, those that drew breath white in the night, whose eyes held quicksilver when the fires burned orange and bloody in the black sky.

And a river of ice: gray, surreal, crawls from behind the alpine arc, gnaws at the feet of the Ötztal Alps, and carves anew the valley floor. Mountain bogs strung with ice-pollen enclose a death in this pale space. Men with dagger and plaited scabbard wait, as the Shaman chants his prayers; whorls of stone blur in their heads.

Where the sun-symbols, radiant even in stone, meet and meld, there the crucible is set down on the altar. Boar husks, the severed antlers of a stag covered with birch fungus and blue-bloomed berries, are given over to a Neolithic death. All is covered with fire and prayer, till the echoes sing of fire and prayer, and the residue of seven thousand human skulls rattle their jaws over the walls of Val Venosta.

This is the time for studying music theory and astronomy. I love the words of music: portamento, glissando, richochet, spiccato – a kind of onomatopeic poem. I buy textbooks and notebooks and workbooks and star charts. My parents buy me a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope for Christmas. It has eight inches of light-gathering aperture for viewing the carnival of deep space and the surface of Jupiter and Saturn's rings.

We take it outside, polar-align and set it to the celestial co-ordinates of the moon.The moon has a long association with insanity. The words lunacy and lunatic and loony are derived from the Roman goddess of the moon, Luna. There is no scientific evidence to support the belief that admissions to psychiatric hospitals, crimes or suicides increase during a full moon. Still, observing the moon through the telescope in its first quarter, with the low sun casting shadows that define lava plains and craters and white mountain ranges, I'm expanded and gripped and flung apart and I feel infinitely small and finite.

Oh god, I am effectively cured.

On my bedroom wall I pin a poster of the Hebrew aleph-bet. It's a colourful list of the Hebrew letters ( . . . א ˛ב ˛ג) and their Latin transliteration (aleph, bet, gimel . . .). Here in my room is the sacred language of The Torah, The Holy Bible, of Jerusalem. Like all Semitic languages, Hebrew is written from right to left, without vowels. My brain takes a few days to adjust, a few weeks to recognise the letters automatically and begin to interpret words. It's glorious.

At work, right earphone plugged into Schubert's String Quintet in C major opus 163, I read from Hebrew language textbooks piled on my lap under the desk.

‘Ani rotsah levaker beYerushalayim (בירךשלים) bevakasha,' I whisper to myself. ‘Ani rotsah lalekhet la'ir haatika.'

I book a flight to Tel Aviv via Paris, departure date in three months. To prepare for travelling in Israel, I answer my work colleagues' questions in half-Hebrew, half-English, which they seem to find irritating, and oddly, none of them is interested in either my translations or explanations of pronunciation and nuance.

Showering two or three times a day is for the sound of water on my skin and the gossamer feel of a layer of cleanser between my hands and breasts. The scents of orange oil and frankincense baptise the steam and rise. It occurs to me that the connection between Scent and Essence is consummated in Essential, expanding into Elixir and Substance, contracting into Core and Heart.

So I trawl through pharmacies and skin care shops, studying ingredient lists and lingering over advertised efficacies: cleansing and peeling and refining and soothing and smoothing and hydrating and moisturising. I buy six kinds of facial scrub, which I mix together into a strange green-brown paste. I buy enzyme peels, tonics and toners and serums, mineral masques, night gels with moonflower and grapefruit extract. Some particularly exotic products are, via the internet, sent direct from Paris and the Dead Sea. I line tubes and bottles in rows on the bathroom floor and apply them to my face in a riot of layers. Over time my skin reddens and flakes, and then weeps.

At work I divide the day into ten minute segments: ten minutes of work, ten minutes of Hebrew, ten minutes grappling with the physics of neutron stars, ten minutes listening to a recording of
Under Milkwood
through one ear bud so I can still hear the phone. Given that my nutritional status is poor, I buy a bottle of multivitamins and take thirty tablets one day, thirty the next. Done. Oranges, derivates of the sun, provide sustenance while I crystallise a new theory of evolution.

At the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda, it's live percussion and rap. Five young men on a variety of drums and one young woman rapping about hell and the devil and jesus and shit. The music gets right into my heart and veins and runs like blood all through me. I have to dance so I dance with the beat of the surdo and the sunset, with the sun – which is flirting with the clouds and sea, teasing and then leaving.

Once home I jog down to the local park and throw my shoes into a maple tree and dance in the dark. The grass is breathing, breathing under my bare feet.

‘Kate, what the hell are you doing out here?' Naava is standing in the middle of the park, hands on hips, the top of her head halo-like where it's caught by the moon.