He could be an axe murderer...

The night before I met Jim Murdoch in person, I dreamed about our meeting, only in my dream Jim Murdoch had morphed into Gerald Murnane, the Australian writer, once in contention for a Nobel prize in literature, with whom I’ve been corresponding for over ten years. 

Gerald Murnane and I have agreed it’s better to have a relationship through the written word than to engage in person, and until the time we met, Jim Murdoch and I had a similar relationship, one that existed on the page only, or should I say on the screen, an online relationship that many of us in the blogosphere share. 

In my dream, the entire Murnane family came to meet me, but there was some trouble over who might drive the family car, Murnane’s elderly father or me.  This dream speaks to me of all sorts of things, but for now, it’s enough to observe how much it hints at my anxiety in meeting Jim.

Nevertheless, I tried hard not to be nervous about our meeting.  I had only just arrived in Edinburgh two days earlier so I was still in that fog of newness that descends whenever you arrive in a foreign place and my nervousness was hard to shake. 

  

My Edinburgh-based daughter had shown me the day before how I might walk from our hotel room along St Mary’s Street to Waverly station in Edinburgh to take the train to Glasgow's Queen Street station where Jim and I had arranged on Facebook to meet. 

If only we’d agreed to meet alone.  I say this now because in our initial planning I had mentioned to Jim that my husband would also like to meet him and suggested that Jim’s wife, Carrie, whom I’ve also met online – my husband does not communicate online, he prefers to keep out of cyberspace – might like to join us too, and so we became a foursome. 

The extra invitations were a protective manoeuvre, I reckon now.  As one of my daughters said to me when I told her I’d be meeting the Jim Murdoch from my blog, ‘How do you know he is who he says he is? He could be an axe murderer.’

The thought had not crossed my mind that Jim could be anyone other than the man he claims to be on his blog. I had no doubt as to his actual existence, but to appease my children and my husband and maybe to appease that doubtful part of myself that I here deny, that just-in-case part of myself, I thought it would be better to include our spouses.

I can still see myself arrive at Glasgow station.  I look up in awe at the overarching ceilings on these amazing railway stations in Scotland.  It’s like being in the movies. You mind the gap as you step off the train under the glare of light; you walk the stretch of platform, jostling with other passengers; and then you take out your ticket, and slip it into the slot, not entirely confident that this machine will offer it back for the return journey nor lift the bar to let you through. 

This time it worked and almost before I had time to clear the exit, with my husband close behind, I saw Jim.  I recognised him instantly from his pictures and he recognised me.  Jim was, as his photos suggest, a man with a ginger/grey beard that almost hides his face and glasses. 

My impulse, my rehearsed greeting, was one of a slowly proffered hand, but Jim grabbed me in a hug that was so strong, heart felt and warm it caught me off guard.

I had imagined that Jim Murdoch, the man who tells me about his reclusive ways, would be less forthcoming.  More like me, physically shy and held back.  

I did not say anything of this to Jim at the time.  At the time, we walked briskly along one cold Glasgow Street around a corner past the Wellington Monument and we talked about the weather and the fact that Jim had chosen a nearby patisserie where we might stop to drink our coffee.  

The monument was decked out with a witches hat/traffic cone that some ‘naughty boys’ probably put up there years ago.

Carrie was already settled inside, Jim told us, as my husband trailed behind, all three of us caught up in the niceties of that first meeting.

The rest of our time together swims by in a haze of images.  The coffee lounge or patisserie was one of those large, efficient establishments in beige colours with dark wood flourishes.  I did not pay it too much attention caught up as I was in this first meeting. 

Jim had told me in his Facebook message that given Carrie’s presence we would not be lost for words.  He was right.  Carrie took hold of the conversation and the four of us talked together about the sort of trivia people share when they meet for the first time across countries.  How the weather in Australia compares to Glasgow.  

Together we roamed over all sorts of vague irrelevancies to clear a space for deeper conversation that never really happened.  

We two sat diagonally opposite and there were so many times when I would have liked to shut the other two up and talk to Jim about things that matter to me about writing, things that I imagine matter to Jim, too. 

I would have liked to cut across the friendly banter and dive deep into conversation that meant more, but it was not to happen.  And in the end, after we had finished our lattes and Jim had ordered a second cup of coffee for him and Carrie, and my husband and I had finished our glasses of water – we’d had breakfast on the way to Waverly station and could not tolerate the idea of a second cup of coffee, whereas Jim and Carrie were keen for more – we said our goodbyes.

I was torn between my husband’s needs and my own. My own wish to plunge into thoughts about writing and life in the online world, instead we talked about power companies and the cost of electricity. 

My husband had also mentioned how keen he was to visit Mackintosh House, which he had read about.  A house of remarkable design, whose original owners had introduced a new style of architecture in the early 1900s.  We never got there because the house turned out to be further into town at the university and the rain was pelting down.

By the time we left Jim and Carrie, the first thing we did, in order to get out of the rain and for warmth, we went to GOMA, the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art.  Up and down stairs, the bright lights and colours of paintings on walls by some of Glasgow’s finest artists, left me hankering for the cosy warmth of the patisserie. 

In retrospect, my visit with Jim Murdoch became an opportunity lost.  How could it be otherwise in the circumstances?

There are times when the written word can be more enticing than the flesh, the face to face, the ordinary defensiveness of real life contact. 

In writing we can be more honest, however much we might construct our stories.  In person, we are polite and hide behind our smiles.  

In writing we can tell the truth about lies

Without memory or desire

Remember the words to the song: We’re having a heat wave?  The weather at its extreme affects everything and when it’s hot day after day it’s hard to keep on thinking let alone writing.  It’s hard to sleep.  A sheet is too much.  The fan whirrs its way through the night and interferes with my dreams but the mornings at least are cool, at least for a few hours before the sun forgets we’re in autumn and bears down on us as though we are mid summer. 

On the other side of the world folks will be preparing for spring and normally I feel sad at the last of the summer but not this year.  This year there is a general plea across the sound waves, let it end.

Yesterday I received a letter in the post, a short letter typed and tacked onto a plain white card with a photo as its frontispiece.  I recognised the handwriting on the envelope as coming from my correspondent and friend, Gerald Murnane.  He and I have been writing to one another for several years no, almost ten years by my reckoning, mostly long letters but this time Gerald has told me that he wants me to know that his letters will be reduced for the next several weeks/months because he is in the  middle of writing yet another book, his eleventh I think. 

I have mixed feelings when I read this note. Fair enough I think, he’s busy but then the internal carping begins.  For one thing I’m jealous of Gerald’s ability and opportunity to tackle yet another book – at the ripe old age of 74 – and for another, even if I were totally immersed in a book, which I sometimes am though never quite as thoroughly as GM, I would not dismiss my regular friends with a fob off until their book is finished. 

I know this is unreasonable.  GM’s position is the more appropriate.  Why should he not consider his own needs?  At least he has written to let me know as much.  He writes further that the photo included features 'the sky at evening' near Goroke 'when smoke from the Grampians covered western Victoria'. 

This weekend, a long weekend in Melbourne for Labour day my husband is making tomato chutney.  Despite the heat.  His sister dropped off ten kilos of ripe old fashioned tomatoes. By old fashioned I mean tomatoes grown in the soil of her garden without all the added gizmos that commercially cropped tomatoes include.  They taste better as a consequence. 

Last weekend my husband made Italian sausages, the week before German bacon.  He’s on a home cooked produce burst which pleases him greatly.  

The only thing I can do is write, but when the writing goes badly I can feel jealous of those people who appear to be productive, like Gerald and my husband.  My desire to be productive can bring me unstuck.  

There’s this notion in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, care of Wilfred Bion, that a therapist enter each session ‘without memory or desire’.  It’s a tough one.  To my mind almost impossible but the spirit of it is sound.  The idea is that you enter each session afresh, ready to see what comes up and to approach it with an open mind. 

I try to take the same approach whenever I settle down to write.  To see what comes up for me, and hold no concern for the outcome.  It encourages a certain freedom of thought, especially the idea that I have no expectations of how the writing will go, of what I might produce, of whether it will be worthwhile or whether it will disappear along with so much of my writing into the wastepaper basket of time. 

I’ve spent years at writing school.  I’ve spent years at therapy school and there are always rules about how to proceed, theories about how to relate to the person who comes to see you, how to put pen to paper, your fingers on the keyboard.  Everyone has a slightly different take.

I have this urge now to write about a video I watched yesterday of a certain Eric Wolterstorff  who teaches a bunch of students on transference and trauma.   It comes in the form of a YouTube demonstration.  

I enjoy the way the man presents his ideas and I enjoy his ideas.  They derive in part from Freud’s thinking but they branch off into ideas from systems theory.  One idea being that in each group, beginning with the family constellation, people tend to take on one of a series of roles at different times.

These roles ideally are fluid.  In other words a person can have a preferred mode of operating most of the time but there will be times when the person will slip into other roles.  And that is best, according to Wolterstorff.  The roles each have their advantages and their disadvantages. 

The first role - to me the obvious one - the one into which I reckon I most readily slip is that of the caretaker.  This is the person who says to herself.  I don't have a problem – she may have one, but she tells herself she’s okay, namely not in profound need - I’m okay, but I'm responsible for everyone else here.  

The second role is that of the identified patient, in the family, in the group, the one who is seen to be most in need of help.  The IP as Wolterstorff refers to him/her is the person who assumes, without words more often than not, but through his behaviour, I have a problem and I’m not responsible for fixing it.  

In  Wolterstorff's words, ‘I serve you in the relationship by holding the anxiety for both of us.  Your job is to take care of the problems.’  I put myself in this vulnerable position in which I am helpless and it’s your job, therapist or other members of the family to fix things for me.

The third category is that of the distancer.  The one who says, ‘I don’t have a problem and I’m not responsible for fixing it.’  You lot can fight it out among yourselves, I’m off.  And the distancer takes herself into the next room to watch television while the rest of the family war on. 

The forth and final category in this somewhat over simplified schemata is that of the outcast.  The outcast says in a somewhat aggressive manner, again not so much in words as in behaviour: ‘I have a problem.  I am the problem and not responsible for any effects on anyone else.  Got a problem with that?’  It’s not my responsibility this problem so if you want me to change it you’re going to have to set to work to fix it.

Wolterstorff  refers to these roles as a function of what he calls 'procedural memory'. 

Are you with me here?  or have you switched off? 

On paper it might seem boring but coming as it does from this man whose delivery is comforting, thoughtful but simple enough to understand, I found myself watching all four of these presentations and wondering how they might apply. 

Wolterstorff also talked about 'event memory' where he described the way in which a group of people whom researchers interviewed ten years after the Space shuttle Challenger disaster recalled the event.  The people interviewed were about ten years old at the time of the tragedy. 

Apparently, the subjects remember the core significance of the event after the trauma but they tend to forget the peripheral details, the things surrounding the event tend and tend to distort or alter them in oder to fill the gaps.    

This is typical for all of us when we try to remember.  We lose contact with the surrounding details and so begin to construct bits and pieces of memories from other events and times.

Memoir writers do it all the time.  Therefore memory is unreliable, though Wolterstorff argues and I’d agree, the core memory of the traumatic event itself tends to stay and be remembered with some degree of accuracy. 

Which brings me to another aspect of this talk which I found fascinating in relation to 'event memory', namely the notion that part of our memory of the event is built around those who were there, and the roles they might play. 

The questions are:  who was watching, who did it, who helped and who was hurt?  Wolterstorff divides these roles into the observer, the perpetrator, the saviour and the victim,.  Again he reckons it's important that we can be fluid within these roles.  

It’s not helpful to get stuck in any one role for good, though it seems some people do.

Hence I’d argue the value of empathy.  Empathy enables us to see things from other people’s perspectives, including the uncomfortable ones of being the perpetrator.  Who wants to see themselves as a bully?

 If we get stuck in a role or lose the ability to combine roles, we cannot move forward fluidly throughout our lives. 

If you think on it, you too might see that at times you take on one or another of these roles.  I become a bully because I am bullied.  I stand by and watched as another person is bullied because I cannot bear to be the victim.  Let someone else take on that role.  All four positions move over time. 

Comrades in broken bones.

I keep my URL tag from the hospital on my wrist by way of superstition. My fantasy is in keeping it there I reduce my chances of a return to hospital. When I am no longer fearful that the bone might move, only then will I remove it. What a great day that will be. Like cutting off the dried placenta cord from a newborn’s navel.

This morning my husband removed the brace while I kept my leg steady on the bed and he washed it down in warm water with a face washer. The bliss of having my increasingly itchy leg rubbed down is without words. My husband then dried my leg and rubbed it with moisturiser. My leg glowed. I could see the yellowish bruise as it curled around my knee cap down my calf on the left side, faded now but still tender to touch.

This brace that has replaced the original plaster cast, is a wonderful invention, however ugly, though the orthotics fellow says it is not a new invention. The materials may have been ungraded but the device and its design have been around for aeons.

The brace consists of a skin covered section covered in air holes that the orthotics fellow, whose name is Damian, first heated to soften and then molded to my leg. When it had cooled and hardened, Damian snapped the mold down the centre and peeled it off. Later he cut it in half at the area of my knee. He has since fitted hinges there on either side. The hinges are fixed at the moment with the option of opening them to allow my knee to move incrementally at fifteen degree angles over time.

The brace is held in place with thick black Velcro straps that run up and down my leg from ankle to thigh. The whole lot is then further held in place with two hard plastic strips, velcroed on either side of my ankle. These then fit into a cup into which my heel fits. This last piece is finally kept in place with a shoe. Underneath the brace I wear an elasticised white ‘sock’, a long tube of towelling type stretchy material that covers the length of my leg to protect it against rubbing from the plastic and metal of the brace, which itself is padded.

The sock is tight fitting and snug. It keeps me warm but it does not allow my skin to breathe.
‘It’s the dead skin’ Damian said. 'Once you wash your leg and rub it down with moisturiser, you’ll feel better.' He was right.

The world of orthotics is a whole new world to me. The shop in Prahran is located at the grungy end of High Street near Punt Road. I do not imagine they need a high-class show room to demonstrate their wares. They have a captive and regular market. Their goods are in constant supply.

On the two days I was there, on the first to be measured and on the second to be fitted with my brace, Damian told me about at least three other broken legs that were on their way to him, including a woman who had broken both her legs. Two broken legs. Imagine that. She had broken them down near her ankles, Damian said. She will be wheel chair bound.

I find I am getting into a broken leg rhythm. After two weeks my strength on crutches increases daily and I can now hop on my right leg with confidence. The broken leg itself causes little pain most of the time, though occasionally it gives me a twinge. But every twinge passes as soon as I change position.

Once a day now my husband helps me to take off the brace and he washes down my leg. My leg looks strange, like a beached creature from the sea. The bruise is now the palest mustard yellow. It has a sallow look like jaundiced skin.

My husband rubs my leg vigorously with the face washer and although it is blissful for my neglected skin to be rubbed in this way, I am also terrified to keep my leg still. Damian had suggested I do this in the shower while seated on the shower chair, but I am not yet confident enough to let my leg hang down unbraced.

In my imagination the bone could pop out of place at the slightest jar when exposed like this and I am so fearful that I will only undergo the procedure on top of my bed with my leg stretched out in front of me, unable to drop or fall or slip out of its moorings.

I have an odd relationship with my leg, my left leg, as if it is a withered appendage that I despise and at the same time a beloved and fragile infant of whom I must take particular care. These opposing impulses give rise to the odd flash of indignation, the odd impulse to dash my leg onto the ground, to bear all my weight on this one broken leg and go racing up the corridor.

I have this perverse impulse at times when I feel most helpless or when I feel angry, like last night with my husband for leaving the light on in our bedroom when I had been trying to sleep.

In the past I would have gone to turn the light off myself but in my helplessness, it is such an effort to get up, to get the crutches, to hobble to the door, to turn off the light. I have become the dependent one who waits for others to do these things and I was angry with my husband for his lack of consideration, or his temporary failure to recognise my needs.

I can be cranky in my new found immobilised state, far more impatient than I have ever known myself to be. It is hard being waited upon. It is hard when others have control over when you eat, when you can enjoy a cup of tea, when you can wash. The list is endless.

I have learned to ask more clearly. My husband and children resent it when I do not, when I throw hints.
‘A Cup of tea would be lovely’ is not the way to ask for a cup of tea.
‘Would it?’ my husband says. ‘That’s nice.’
No, I must say, ‘Could you please get me a cup of tea?’ A clear and direct request.

Have I developed this tendency to hint at my needs or requests from my mother? She is a master manipulator. She rarely asks directly for anything. As a child I was amazed at the way it worked.

On Sunday mornings we walked to Mass in Cheltenham. The church was a good half hour walk from where we lived on Warrigal Road. We straggled in a bunch up and down side streets, our mother in our midst. She liked to point out to us the houses and gardens that she most admired.

After Mass, the thought of a repeat walk home was always daunting. My mother never asked anyone, not as far as I could see, but invariably she managed to get a lift home, while we children wandered back through the same side streets, this time unaccompanied by our mother who reached home at least twenty thirty minutes before us and was already sitting with her cup of tea in front of the fire and reading her copy of The Advocate.

Women of my mother’s generation, I have been told, women who grew up believing their place was in the kitchen attending to the needs of husband and children, needed to develop new ways of getting their needs met that did not include direct approaches for assistance.

I have a touch of this. I can sense it. I do not like to ask directly,
‘Can I please have a cup of tea?’ It seems too demanding, however clear it might be. And yes, I would rather someone offer me a cup of tea.

That way I do not have to ask. That way I do not run the risk of their annoyed expressions if they feel inconvenienced or if they should say 'no'. My family never say 'no', but sometimes they say ‘in a minute’, and the minute can extend into an hour, as I sit waiting as patiently as I can, not wanting to nag.

Don’t get me wrong. I have progressed now to the point where I could make my own cup of tea, but it is the task of getting the tea from stove top to my place on the couch that is such a challenge.

I have no hand free when I use the crutches and so I must support myself on one crutch and carefully pass the full cup from stove top to bench top and from bench top to table, from one flat surface to another, until I can get it to its destination at my table near the couch.

I hear and see broken legs everywhere. Yesterday I received a letter from my writer friend and correspondent, Gerald Murnane. I had written to tell him the saga of my leg and he sent back a copy of an article he wrote for The Metaphysical Review called ‘The Falling’ in which he describes how he too broke his leg on 14 October 1994.

Given that GM was born in 1939, as I recall, he would have been in his mid fifties when this happened, not far off my age now and it happened, it seems, for similar reasons.

GM writes, ‘Before last October, I had never been a patient in a hospital. The only surgery I had ever undergone was my circumcision as a baby (unless I was born without a foreskin) and two small operations for the removal of cysts from my scalp in 1955 and 1990. Neither of these required a stay in hospital. Before last October I could say that I had never broken or dislocated any bone in my body.

‘As of last October I had more than ten months of accumulated sick leave, so seldom had I been ill... So I was someone who needed to be reminded that he was not made of imperishable stuff; who needed to be brought low – literally as well as figuratively.’

The cause of his fall, as GM goes on to describe, is one of excessive busyness, working as he was, full time as ‘the Selection Officer for the [Creative Writing] course at Deakin [university] by day and trying to finish [his seventh novel] Emerald Blue by night and at weekends’.

But the real catalyst was the fact that in 1994 GM’s twin boys had finally left home for good. All year the boys had been looking for a place to rent and finally they found it three days before their father’s fall.

I resonate with GM’s comments here: ‘The crowdedness of our small house was becoming unbearable, not to mention the strain of finding dirty dishes on the sink at all hours and the feeling that we [GM and his wife, Catherine] were being used up. I say this without meaning to speak against my twin sons. However, a time comes when the parents of any animal turn away from it. I used to watch with interest many a mother cat boxing its half-grown kitten over the ears when it was time for the young one to stop trying to suckle and to get out and catch mice.’

After the boys finally moved out, GM and his wife were left with ‘these two empty rooms given back to us after we had lived like Japanese for so long, with our belongings piled up in cupboard...’

The accident happened three days after his sons had left, on a fateful Friday evening, when GM took to moving filing cabinets and their contents. He had ‘opened a six pack of Coopers Sparkling Ale and got to work...At about eleven thirty, I was standing on a chair and pushing a row of books along a shelf near the ceiling of what had been for so long my son Martin’s room and out of bounds to me but was now my new playground. Some of the books began to fall. Instinctively, I reached out to save the fuckers.

‘I do not know how I fell. I recall lying on the floor and knowing, as one knows these things in dreams, that something was wrong with me. I recall hearing the last of a stubby of beer pouring out onto the carpet from the ironing board nearby. As I had fallen, I must have clipped the corner of the ironing board and caused the stubby to fall onto its side and to pour out its contents. I recall reaching up and standing upright the now empty stubby.

‘I recall lying where I lay for a minute or two, knowing, as I just said, that this had been no ordinary fall. I recall using the chair to drag myself to my foot. I wrote foot because I had not as yet put any weight on my left leg, which, so I divined, was not quite right. I recall standing up with my hands on the chair and putting weight on my left leg.

'I recall – and I’ll never forget – my left leg buckling under me as though the bone from knee to ankle was a strap of licorice. I recall – let’s be frank – hopping out to the toilet with the chair as a walking frame and emptying my bowels for fear of what I had done to myself. I recall hopping to Catherine’s and my bedroom and waking her up to tell her that I had injured my leg. I do not recall any pain. God is merciful. Injuries such as mine seem to be painless. You can say I was in shock, if you like.’

And here GM’s story and mine diverge considerably. I was in pain after I broke my leg, the worst pain I can recall beyond childbirth. As my husband drove me in the back seat of his car to the hospital, every time he turned a corner the centrifugal force pulled the bone out in some way, even as I tried to hold my leg in place. The pain was like a hot sword through to the bone.

But if the pain I suffered then as opposed to the pain that GM does not recall suffering is any indicator so far, my progress has been more steady. GM also broke his tibia near the knee cap, but GM’s break required surgery, screws and plates inserted and a bone graft from his pelvis to replace the damaged bone.

So far no such treatment has befallen me. GM’s period of hospitalisation extended beyond two weeks and he was not fully recovered for another three months. I am confident, at this stage at least, that my recovery will not take as long. Touch wood.

I am cheered to be a kindred spirit of one of my literary heroes. We are comrades in broken bones.