Trapped In The Trees

"Sometimes I still felt that I had fetched up on the edge of the world. The wintry light slanting on to the flat, colourless landscape; the moan of the wind, the shriek of sea-birds and the melancholy boom of the foghorn far out at sea all sent a shiver through me...it was all horizon: the level land, the mudflats, the miles of marshes, the saltings, the grey, wrinkled sea."
Nicci French.

It was all planned. The spot had been picked out; the canal that was the Cooks River, the city's most polluted waterway. The mudflats, the garbage strewn along its edges, the busy public toilets of alternate lives; the whites of the school sports teams playing in the afternoon, the aching loneliness that was imprinted in the trees along the bank. A long time ago, when we were all young couples making progress in our lives, steps into adulthood, buying our first homes, struggling and loving our first children, suddenly parents after a lifetime of ease. Bruce and Lindsay held birthday parties for their children just near there; and their backyard ran almost down to the water's edge. Desperate for human contact, what would happen if he knocked on that door, tried to explain that he had once known the house, had been to several parties there. Bruce and Lindsay. They would never have heard of them. There would have been half a dozen owners since; but he always wanted to knock on some stranger's door; seek help as if from the village priest. These dreadful psychic moments haunted him; it was all planned, a couple of grams of smack, the bottle of Black Douglass, the beers, the big fat joint, he would sit under the tree as the children played; and his end would come.

That was where he had got to. If it wasn't going to happen by accident, he would do it on purpose. The last overdose, they had to go next door to call the ambulance because the phone had been cut off. The children were crying in the lounge room, the ambulance officer slapping him around as he lay on the floor, he looking blearily up, the bloke saying: mate, you've got to get yourself together, you've got children. And he replied: they'd be better off with the life insurance. And then the ambulance officer said: ask your kids whether they want the money or their dad. And that heart breaking moment cut through to him in a way that nothing else had. He went back to meetings and his life slowly turned around; his sweat laden clothes stopped smelling of addiction sweat; and out of all the diseased chaos of his mind, things started to recover.

He had thought everything was his fault, if only he got things together then everything in their lives, their relationship, their children, the finances, everything would fall back together. But that wasn't the case. Getting clean was garlic to the vampire; the nest of entities that was her evil force reacted as if it had been scalded. And the disaster that was the core of his life shifted gear in every possible sense.

Years later he flew over that exact same spot where he had planned to kill himself; a light aircraft, yet another assignment, and he looked down at the rich patterning of the Sydney suburbs; and he couldn't imagine, only a few years before, how desperately bad things had got, how desperately sad he had become, how the trains that featured at the end of their long slide in accommodation standards echoed so lonely through the giant nights, his spirit trapped in the trees and the end too close, his sick self. The waves had entered in his childhood, when all was adventure and discovery; but now, he had failed utterly in everything he touched and it was time to go. Born defective, there was nothing that could be done to fix his ailing psyche. He knew it was time, that ailing little thing couldn't last any longer; the sacred past had abandoned him long ago. But instead of death by the side of the canal, slumping as the smack took effect, another life altogether emerged from the ashes. And he could be grateful for one thing: in one form or another, he had survived the most vicious despair life had to offer. Not just survived, he had built a whole new life; and began once again to know success; and in recent times a frothing hysteria he suspected might actually be happiness.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1707857,00.html?imw=Y

Even as Kenya's President and main opposition leader launched negotiations aimed breaking their violent political impasse, the crisis reached a troubling new low with news that a recently elected member of parliament had been gunned down outside his home. At the same time, a new wave of ethnic violence has broken out across the country.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/kennedy-endorses-obama/2008/01/29/1201369072661.html

Senator Edward Kennedy has endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination as a "man with extraordinary gifts of leadership and character" and a worthy heir to his assassinated brother, John F Kennedy, who is still revered among Democrats.

"I feel change in the air," Kennedy said in prepared remarks salted with scarcely veiled criticism of Obama's chief rival for the nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as her husband, the former president.

The support of Kennedy pits two influential Democratic families - the Kennedys and the Clintons - against each other. It increases pressure on Clinton, building on Obama's decisive win over the former first lady in the South Carolina primary Saturday.