I’m heading down the highway for parent-teacher interviews – a 50 minute trip along the Murray Valley Highway, and I’m tuning in to Chapter 18 of the Erratics again. Laveau-Harvie is speaking of locking up a crazy mother and the vindication of a mother who knew all along that her children hated her. The urgency of finding a solution whilst the crazy lady is in respite is established. It’s ‘just a respite’ but the ‘focus’ must not be lost – her ‘mental state must be evaluated and she must be prevented from returning home.’ Rehab is set up as a ‘window of opportunity’, the battle lines are drawn. There is the reference to a doctor who tells the sisters to stop ‘agitating’ to have her committed which is accompanied by discussions of how to dispense with the elderly. And there is in the facetious commentary around the problem of the ageing and the problem of lunacy, and the expedient dumping of parents by children wanting to be free, not a callousness, but a deep conflicted sense of responsibility that I hear in the words of Laveau-Harvie. Added to the mix is a sister who sees things differently.
There’s talk of a parade of carers, beginning with ‘the slut’ and I am laughing so hard even though this is the third time I have read/listened to this. There’s a Mitsubishi ute in front of me, leaning to the right – he corrects himself every so often. Two semis, dull yellow in color and inscribed with the name Neal pass me before a Britz van appears in my peripheral vision to the left. Not recognising that he is merging onto the highway, thinking perhaps in his holiday frame of mind that the road he is on and the road he is merging onto, is the one road in a continuous circumnavigational route around this continent, he hits the highway oblivious to my presence. I brake to avoid certain death. A little further on and the story of the carers who are employed to attend to the ailing Mr Laveau-Harvie, in all of their guises transitions into another reflection on the adversarial encounters with the medical fraternity – as the mother waits for her hip replacement and the campagin to have her committed gathers momentum, there is the oppositional reaction of a doctor who disputes the accusation of craziness. I am mulling over the narrative Laveau-Harvie’s mother has spun about hiding escapee Jews in World War Two and the idea of crazy, of lunacy being a way of life, and the idea of not being believed. The anecdotal legacy of a mother’s craziness, the referencing of two stories that confirm the longevity of crazy, is a bizarre addition to a story that is a cumulative history of madness.
And now there are road works and the man who waves his go-slow sign has the glint of crazy about him, an Ivan Milat demeanor, not softened by the greyness of his long beard, and he waves me by and I am pleased, for this stretch goes on, untarred, for some ten kilometres and I am lost in the craziness of the anecdotes of a past where the world is the enemy and two children are fortressed inside their home, the stories of the dangers lurking outside a mother’s reminder to entreat no-one to open the door. And the word ‘hubris’ resonates deliciously following the recount of the memory of a seven-year-old, barricaded in a house where the outside enemy demands entry – it is a mother who arrives home without her husband – the reason unexplained, and the daughter, literal in her interpretation of the mother’s instructions, will not let the crazy lady in. There are all sorts of crazy out there I think as the gravel path that my Hilux now treads flicks up stones and preparatory materials that the council workers will use in their resurfacing. And now in spite of there being no delineation in the road, I am navigating my way along this stretch when a big roller, forked spikes extruding from its body, like some Mad Max dystopian aggressor, comes at me, the driver speeding backwards, towards me, lining me up it would seem, the letters Hammmm bolded black as I imagine the big hammm rolling over the Hilux and a two-dimensional flattened out shape left in its wake. At the end of the roadworks, a long train of vehicles wait for their turn, there are road trucks with sheep, dirty wool spilling from the sides of poorly ventilated trucks, Mazda hatchbacks, and work utes, and I speed back up to 100, onwards down the parent-teacher interview highway.
Back to chapter 18, and there’s a reference to a Greek chorus as Viki Laveau-Harvie once again draws the battleline; the face-off between a swathe of medicos firmly resistant to the protestations of two sisters who insist that their mother is not ‘competent’ and who can’t return home, and whose credibility is undermined by a mad mother capable of spinning tales. The greek chorus reference, as the younger of the two sisters, emphasises the words ‘not competent, see page three page three’, insisting that her mother cannot come home, is an appeal of sorts in this tragic family drama, for understanding. I remember teaching Medea a couple of years ago, and I remember the collective appeal of a chorus of women, the voices of reason and sanity, entreating, imploring Medea, incandescent with rage, to refrain from acting out her vindictive course of action. The simile communicates the gravity of a sister’s words, and the unhearing recipient’s unwillingness to believe, to listen.
And now I am here and The Erratics must go on hold for a while….
