two strikes

technically this isn't a class exercise: it's homework. And rushed homework at that, what with a flight to catch in a couple of days an all.

but two pieces: on a year in which all seemed uncertainty, change and anxiety. and a year in which it dragged - "terrible stasis and nothingness" was the brief, I think, which may be pushing it for the average Australian student. I mean, there's always sport. or is that the terrible stasis?

The first seems easier; for the second I might need to fudge and go for terrible stasis and nothingness in a particular aspect of my life.

The first, in fact, writes itself, or the year does: April 1986 to April 1987. in which I could list, in quick succession, a car crash in which I nearly died and someone else did die, the impending prosecution of my partner as being responsible for said death, a realisation that I had been doing bugger-all with my then 21-year-old life and that it could be cut off just like that girl's had been, my failed attempt to get into a uni course, my pigheaded decision to enrol in a different course and then nag the faculty to let me switch (it's called chancing your arm, I think - a jousting term?), my success in that, the subsequent need to move to Melbourne, thus endangering my relationship in Ballarat, and, around the same time, the sudden death for no particularly good reason but frail human physicality of one of my best friends.

But that's a list. To do it properly, I'll tell one story. It's about the dreams.

In 1986, they knew about post-traumatic stress disorder. It had been diagnosed in soldiers, police, victims of crime. And technically, as my boyfriend Bill had committed a crime in driving drunk the night we crashed into a ditch, I was a victim of crime.
You wouldn't know it though, the way the investigating officer spoke to me. He assumed I was lying from the start; that even though Sharon had broken her neck when she hit the swinging rear panel of the van on her way out, even though I could have died too, that I would lie because Bill was my boyfriend. I resented that assumption, but it didn't make any difference. I wanted to say: It's true. There was another car. They ran us off the road. But from the cop to the prosecutor in court, I was the "de facto", a woman whose word clearly meant nothing.
All I'd suffered, in a physical sense, was a few pieces of glass in my foot and the acquisition of a new aversion to the smell of petrol, the petrol that had seeped out into the damp ditch after we rolled - how many times? maybe only once or twice, but end over end like an hourglass spinning.
I didn't even have a hangover the next day, unlike poor Bill, who, yes, had had a few beers, but had also struck his head hard on the smashed-in roof of the white Holden panel van. Who slurred his words and staggered on the roadside even though minutes before he'd been 100 per cent in control of his acid wit and a car he'd driven thousands of ks. If he hadn't had those beers, who knows? Maybe it would have been all right. I never argued with the letter of the law, but I minded very much that no one, just Bill and Elise and I, the three people in the front seat of that van, will ever believe there was another car, a set of headlights straddling the white line, coming for us down a badly cambered slippery bend in a country road.
And no one wanted to know about the dreams. Now I know they were linked to the tears, the moments when I'd be walking down a street in Ballarat and stop dead, staring into space; to the short tempers in our house, to my urgent need, love Bill though I might, to get away, to start something new, to do, to be.
You don't have to be Freud to understand my dream: I would be on a carousel, or a carnival ride. Not having a good time, or a bad one, just on it. Then, without asking my permission, the world would go spinning, upside down and back to front, a washing machine, a whirlwind. I was tossed like Dorothy in the storm, thrown about, falling, rising, but never quite crashing. I'd wake up frightened, my body still remembering the wild motion of the dream.
Violence, for the most part, happens quickly. And there's nothing so violent as a car smashing up at 100 ks an hour. The person, the body, doesn't have time to watch it happen, just to note: this is how I die.
And coming out on the other side, life still being, the person has to ask: what is this thing?

Dreams insist: they repeat themselves like soap operas. And for me, the car has always been my life: I'm at the wheel, I'm in control, I've lost my car, my car has crashed, I've forgotten how to drive, my car car fly. Again, you get it. But for a real crash, for a white van with a pale green stripe down the side bouncing bonnet to bumper down a grassy slope under a brilliant April moon, some other device had to be found.

I got the message. I knew I had to take the wheel again; in the survivor's cliche, to make something of my life. And hence university, a move away, a move confirmed as right by the sudden death of Merilyn, who was only just turned 30. The world gave me a warning.

The next one came when I was 38.

...tbc