A New Door

A New Door

Mornings at Clifton Beach are alive with birdsong and sounds of the Coral Sea. A kaleidoscope of sunrise reds glitter hopefully on gentle waves with the promise of another day in paradise. Perched in the mottled light of a leafy melaleuca, two kookaburras cackle raucously. It’s a private joke that they don’t share with Ella before winging inland in search of breakfast and something else to laugh at. Sitting on the slatted park bench she glances down at the journal on her lap, that indefatigable witness and keeper of her most private secrets. Every morning she writes a list of what she calls her “gratitudes” for the gifts of the previous twenty-four hours. Not just conceptual, Ella’s expressions of gratitude are a courageous ongoing practice of discipline central to maintaining a balanced mind and spirit. Today, hers is a life of abundance born of the courage to open and walk through a new more healthy door, closing it firmly on a chaotic past. Ella has learned the hard way that if she wants to be the noun, she has to do the verb.

Smiling, she looks down at her journal and adds the laughing Kookaburras to today’s list of gratitudes.

28th February 2021

I am grateful for the sound of the sea; last night’s lamb curry; a great meditation this morning; my beach walk; Kaye’s beautiful spirit; Lithium; Ritalin; the sun on my face; solitude; a good night’s sleep; Kookas at Clifton

There is no full stop. She isn’t finished yet. Closing her eyes she draws in a lungful of fresh salty goodness, her heartbeat resting safely in the certainty of the waves. Slowly she opens her eyes and adds “peace, balance and Aunty Elsie” to her list. She thinks of her Aunt’s unsuspected generosity, a $20,000 inheritance that means she only has to work part-time, for a while at least. Ella fingers the heavily tattooed masks of The Girls, Thalia and Melpomene, on the inside of her right forearm. Comedy and tragedy, bipolar’s mascots, gaze up at Ella in silent reproach. They offer no explanation or solution, just a stark reminder of that much darker time in her life that could easily return if they were ever left unattended.

****

Ella 17 March 2017 9.08 am

IM GOING TO FUCKING KILL HIM

Kaye glanced up at her husband Dave as she handed him her phone and the text from Ella. He saw concern and love for Ella written all over his wife’s tired face and knew that she was again caught up in her best friend’s relentless drama. Kaye’s value of loyalty collided with a yearning for peace and self-care. She had done everything she could to help Ella live with her bipolar disorder and navigate the shards of her shattered marriage. Kaye thought things had settled down again, and that Ella was beginning to accept the reality of her mental illness and how best to treat it. Clearly not. This time, triggered by months of open warfare against her ex-husband, Ella’s mental health had quickly warped into a circus of manic offensives and delusional plots for revenge.

There was little sign of the generous spirit and laser sharp intelligence that was Ella on a good day. That Ella was missing in action, hijacked by an illness that subsumed her. Exhausted, Kaye picked up the phone and speed-dialled her best friend. Voicemail. She hit redial. She had only spoken to Ella the day before, pouring another futile gallon of oil on the troubled water of Ella’s ramping mood. Finally Ella answered, all frenzied speech and jagged breathing. Distorted by her own frantic disturbance, she was incomprehensible to Kaye.

‘Hey, hey, Ella? Ella stop. Stop, I can’t understand you.’ Kaye closed her eyes, fearing her voice betrayed the tired and impatient helplessness she felt. Punctuated by serrated gulps of air, the only discernible words in Ella’s otherwise unintelligible rant were ‘fucking bastard.’

‘Ella, breathe. I can’t understand you honey. Take a minute and breathe so you can talk to me. What happened?’ Kaye waited, for what she didn’t know.

‘He fucking left me!’

‘Ella, you left him, you filed for divorce,’ muttered Kaye, filled with foreboding. The crumbling of Ella’s marriage was subtle at first, camouflaged by seemingly petty arguments. Once amicable differences drew themselves with razor-sharp edges playing out with passive aggression behind closed doors, and discomforting humour in public. Theirs was a relationship burdened by untreated mental illness; that her illness was a contributing factor to the disintegration of her marriage savaged Ella no less than peeling the flesh from her bones.

‘It’s his fault,’ she screamed at Kaye. ‘I wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t made me. He’s such an arsehole. He’s having an affair, the fucking liar! He’s having an affair with …. that stupid bitch’. He’s not good enough for me!’ Kaye recognised Ella’s crazed energy, irritated mood, machinegun-fire speech as all too familiar symptoms of escalating mania. She doubted that Ella had slept at all in the previous few days. ‘Hang on Ella,’ Kaye groaned under the weight of reasoning with the unreasonable. The definition of insanity, she knew, was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, yet here she was. Again.

Oblivious to Kaye’s soothing, Ella continued her tirade, ‘Who does she think she is anyway? She’s not good enough for him, and I know what she’s up to, the slut. Everyone hates her. His workmates will hate her. He hasn’t been to work in three weeks. Lazy prick. He was always lazy. Remember what he was like on the boat? I’m going to buy a boat. A bigger boat. He’s not good enough for me, I tell you. I’m not putting up with this shit anymore. You wait, I’ll show him,’ she roared. Aggression and paranoia, the ugly housemates of Ella’s mania were reliable predictors of the messy and dangerous outcomes of these episodes. Kaye muttered helplessly, knowing she could not alter the upward trajectory of Ella’s mania or circumvent the inevitable catastrophe it would bring down on her dearest friend.

‘You don’t understand,’ Ella ranted. ‘It’s all his fault. Don’t you worry, I’ve got a plan. I’ve got a plan. I know people, and you know I’ve got connections. I’ve got a plan. You wait and see. I’ve gotta go.’ She cut the call.

‘Dave, I’m going to go check on her.’ As Kaye grabbed her keys and phone, Dave placed a worried hand on his wife’s shoulder. ‘You can’t fix this Kaye, it’s not your job. She needs psychiatric treatment, you know that, don’t you?’

Kaye slipped away from him, anguish etched on her face. ‘I know, I’m sorry. Honey, you know I can’t leave her like this. I’ll try to get her to the hospital. I’ll call you, I promise.’ Dave watched his wife go to Ella for the one hundredth time, not knowing if she would be back in ten minutes, an hour or sometime the next day. It would all depend on Ella’s condition.

Kaye returned to the house an hour later, wrestling with a groundhog-day despair. ‘She’s not there, and she’s not answering her phone’ she sighed abjectly. ‘I know there’s nothing I can do. I really know that, but it’s so hard,’ she burst into tears, leaning into Dave’s waiting arms. ‘Kaye, it’s not going to change until Ella accepts the reality of her mental illness and sticks to the treatment regimes. She’s pretty good when she’s on her meds, right?’ He held her tight. She nodded into his chest, knowing that all they could do now was wait. ‘Wine and Pizza?’ he coaxed, in the absence of a better idea. ‘Wine and Pizza’ Kaye sighed. Resigned but grateful, she kissed him before heading to the shower to wash away her fear and frustration.

Early the next morning Kaye answered her phone. She whispered at Dave, ‘It’s the Nut Shack. They’ve got Ella.’ Relieved, Kaye returned to the call, ‘Sorry, yes I’m here.’ She listened at length. ‘Yes. Ok. How long before … ? Of course, I understand. I’ll call and see how she is tomorrow. Thanks for letting me know,’ she sighed, ending the call.

The Nut Shack, as it was affectionately referred to by locals, was the Mental Health Unit at Cairns Base Hospital where Ella had again scored herself a bed for a few nights and some serious sedation. Kaye was Ella’s nominated next of kin at the hospital, and this call was one of countless others like it. Placing gentle hands on Kaye’s upper arms, Dave steered his wife carefully to the couch, returning moments later with two steaming mugs of coffee. He marvelled at the loyalty and patience of his beautiful wife and knew the toll it took on her.

Apparently, fall down drunk and long off the lithium that usually kept her stable, Ella had gone to Cairns Northern Tattoo on Shield Street in the nightclub precinct. The proprietor easily turned a blind eye to Ella’s obviously unbalanced state, and took four hundred dollars for one long session of tattooing the entirety of her inner right forearm with the masks of comedy and tragedy. Mentally deteriorating with each painful cut of the tattoo machine, Ella spun pitifully out of control quickly endangering herself and others. Her mad spree stopped at Shield Street Plaza where the cops tasered her so paramedics could bundle her into the back of a waiting ambulance. It didn’t stop before the gathering crowd captured the whole sordid mess and uploaded the footage to social media.

****

Dragging her gaze back to the present, Ella marvels at the fact that she has not experienced a bipolar episode since that fateful night in 2017, nearly four years ago. The gift of desperation sewed a determination in her to make certain that the chronic shame and humiliation of that night (and so many others like it) would be the last death of her old life. Rereading her list of gratitudes, Ella believes it to be so and she adds “freedom” to her list. She has finally and fully accepted that the power she found so enticing in Bipolar’s elevated moods also perpetuated the countless life threatening events that plagued her for so long. She understood at a visceral level that any life worth living was contingent on the death of that old life. She was grateful beyond measure for this more balanced new life via the acquisition of some personal insight, a great deal of therapy, and some carefully managed medication prescribed by a fully informed psychiatrist.

The first year of recovery was an agony of smaller deaths; removing the people, places and things that were obstacles to her progress, putting down the drink and mending traumatised relationships. She revised her medication plan three times in that first year with painfully slow but incrementally affective results. The second year was easier, as was each year after that. She looks again at Thalia and Melpomene. Knowing they have done their job - reminding her of what is important - she adds “The Girls” to the day’s gratitude list, closes the little black book and heads home.