Back in the capital, Kuwait Towers attracts long queues of people, mostly families, buying tickets for the observation deck. I will never know whom to thank, but the ticket-seller waves me through, insisting my admission has already been paid for.
Having been up towers from Sydney to Tashkent, it would sound jaded to say there is nothing special about the view from here. But it is, to tell the truth, a familiar fairyland of bright lights, albeit glorified by a full moon rising. What is different, it strikes me, is the thought that must be inspired in a Kuwaiti surveying the scene, namely, âThis is all we have.' As virtually the whole of this small country beyond what lies below us is sand, Kuwait Towers gives viewers an opportunity usually vouchsafed only to astronauts: to take in a country at a glance. Look at it that way, and you can understand the passionate will to defend the home, the uneasy readiness to make allies of alien Western powers, and the never-diminishing throng of Kuwaitis longing to scale this landmark.
DAY 219 (17 DECEMBER): BACK TO BAHRAIN
Packing, in my room at the Carlton Hotel, I catch a BBC bulletin that includes the following priceless line: âNew York is usually a mecca for Christmas shoppers.'
The dream was to take a passenger ship halfway down the Gulf to Bahrain, but no such service operates, and I have been warned that cargo-ship owners in these edgy times will be wary as hell about taking me on board. So flying is the only way into Bahrain. In the departure lounge at Kuwait International Airport I fidget, unable to concentrate on my magazine, but by the time we are airborne the rites of passageâ safety demo, food service, temperature and time announcements from the captainâhave steadied me.
It is 11 minutes after the 11th hour when the plane taxis to a stop at Bahrainâand 11 years since everything came to a head for me in this teardrop-shaped island state. Other passengers rise to their feet, haul their hand luggage from the overhead lockers and proceed to the front. Let them go forward. My papers are in order but I will be entering the tunnel marked âpast'. For me, Bahrain must always be different. 1990 made it so.
Chapter 13
FALLING FROM THE EDGE
His thoughts, more incoherent, dragged him more unmercifully after themâas if a wretch, condemned to such expiation, were drawn at the heels of wild horses. No oblivion, and no rest
.
CHARLES DICKENS, CHAPTER LV
D
OMBEY AND
S
ON
AUGUST 1990-MARCH 1991
Contrary to conventional wisdom, one of the great lessons of our new age, typified by the âwar on terror', has to be that there is no great security in numbers. It is a lesson that should be taken to heart from September 11. A terrorist attack on civilians is likely to kill the huddled masses and leave the loner unscathed. This is not a reason to stay home; it's yet another reason not to entertain exaggerated fears about your fate when setting forth into unknown lands.
But if the âwar on terror' is being waged in your head and nerves, as mine was in 1990â91, being alone can develop into a definite disadvantage. Sullen, unwholesome brooding drives away the world and alienates you from your best allies, your friends. As one who lost that battle, I know that now.
I was 36 when this crisis struck. Elsewhere it might have happened sooner or, more likely, years later. Undoubtedly, though, the collapse of confidence that spun me out of control in Bahrain was triggered by a real-world event, the invasion of Kuwait. This rolled the first boulders down my mental mountainside and, once that process had begun, it precipitated a landslide that was scarcely perceptible at first but gathered unstoppable force as it went.
One other factor primed me for disaster. It had been my good luck earlier in life to suffer no great calamities, apart from the setbacks and challenges that are our common lot. Sheltered from the first, and from the worst, I lacked all prior acquaintance with what a nervous breakdown entails.
The battle was entirely mental and, after what happened to me in Bahrain, my defences were down. My enemies ranged themselves in dispersed formations, ready to attack from unexpected angles. As the months dragged on I would come to know them intimately, from fighting at close quarters.
But all that lay ahead of me the day I was released from the Bahrain Psychiatric Hospital and flew away from the Gulf bound for Hong Kong. I was confident I had escaped the worst and planned to rest and recuperate before collecting my scattered wits. The lithium carried deep in my bags was secreted where I could find it if I had to, but I had made a silent resolution to throw away the pharmacological crutch and stride away from my demons.
When the plane touched down in Hong Kong at the end of that horrible month of August, I would have described my nerves as frazzled rather than shot.
Little time was wasted in getting from Kai Tak airport to the Hong Kong Island terminus for ferries to Lantau. Two hours after touchdown I was in a taxi skirting the coast of that delightful outer island in the South China Sea. It had been six years since I'd stayed there but memory is a remarkable thing and, after taking one wrong turn-off, my mental route map directed me unerringly to the Cheung Sha restaurant-hotel.
Fronting the sandy beach of a picturesque cove, the Cheung Sha was one of those inns where you're instantly put at your ease, no matter the absence of any language in common. So, returning to the restaurant-hotel held no fears for me, and indeed promised an easing of those that had so unsettled my recent life. The plump, squat grandmother who ruled the roost there received a hearty hug and her ascetic, ever-smiling husband an equally hearty handshake. That they remembered me at all, given that we had âknown' one another for just a few days back in 1984, was gratifying. Grandma showed her remembrance with a simple homespun gesture, placing a basket of fresh apples on the table outside my door. All in all, I couldn't imagine a more likely place in which to regain my equilibrium, and this thought dominated all others that first evening as I sat overlooking the beach and listening to the timeless reassurance of the soughing waves.
Fatigued from a potent mix of the long air journey and jet lag coming on top of my recent ordeal, I drew deep sighs and looked forward to a long and restful night. The first hint that healing would be neither swift nor steady came when, with every reason to sleep through and greet the new day refreshed, I lapsed into two or three hours of troubled unconsciousness, only to awaken just after 9.30 pm. I remained awake until dawn.
What to do? Whatever I was reading at the time would have been in my backpack, beside the bed, but so great was my weariness that I couldn't even summon the concentration necessary for that pursuit. What could require less effort than that? Watching TV. There was one at the end of the bed. I reached over and turned it on. Delighted at first to discover that, even in this remote part of a remote island, satellite TV was available, I tuned in to CNN. Now there was no dozing off. The news was the same here as it had been in the psychiatric hospital, all talk of human shields, the rape of Kuwait, the gathering of a coalition determined to confront Saddam and, if necessary, retake his vanquished neighbour by force. In the fullness of time, this would come to be known as Operation Desert Storm.
Delight soon turned to fascination. That I couldn't avert my eyes, or staunch the stream of disturbing information, was understandable enough in someone who had been a self-confessed news junkie since childhood. But, to one newly arrived from the danger zone where the talons of fear had gripped him with fierce intensity, the continued infusion of alarming scenarios both thrilling and chilling could not help but make my waking hoursâof which there were many more to comeâones of high anxiety.
Of a morning I would head downstairs to that quiet table by the beach, and try to concentrate on a book over my breakfast noodles. But the shockwaves proved as remorseless as the more visible tide. One morning I noticed my hand was trembling like that of an old man. Any dexterity I had achieved with Chinese eating utensils was immediately lost (although anyone looking in my direction would probably have mistaken me for just another Westerner unable to master chopstick technique).
Reading the same sentence in a book ten times over without taking any of it in, I soon abandoned the effort to lift my mind out of its rut that way. In other circumstances Cheung Sha is an ideal place to chase away your cares, but this time I found them hounding me. A daily walk, up along the coast road skirting the sea and back, perhaps 8 kilometres in all, certainly beguiled the hours, but then the night closed in.
Having attained a promising level of physical exhaustion, I would return to my room and turn on the TV. My inability to screen out the horrors for very long, day or night, ensured I was continually confronted by the cataclysm that had befallen my life.
Although sensing myself at the sharp end of this change, other people's perspective on those times reminds me that, objectively speaking, there was a seismic shift in the world order between mid-1990 and the end of the year. The invasion of Kuwait, with its accompanying and calculated spike in the price of oil, triggered the worst recession of the late 20th century. The 1980s wave of confidence dumped all who surfed it with a concussive thud on the desolate beach of a new decade. For many, this new world disorder fed people's worst forebodings. Having always been cursed with a lively imagination, I was a prime candidate for dislocation in a time of worldwide uncertainty.
Prior hopes that this would be a week of recuperation, even triggering a resurgence of confidence and mental agility that would prime me to turn that last leg of the flight ticket round and spend more time in England, faltered at the hurdle of every new day. The hopes had been founded on the fact that the last place I had been gainfully employed and happy in, before personal disaster struck, was England. Now, towards the end of the week in which these hopes fled, I concluded that the mental effort required to turn my life round once more was beyond me. I would go home to Australia instead.
My body was in a quiet holiday retreat, but my mind was all over the place: mostly accusing me of cowardice, of personal failure. As the week drew on, I was frightened at the prospect of reconnecting with family and friends, all six years older than when we last saw one another. Fear lobbed taunts at my febrile brain:
Will they see I've fallen apart? Will they think I've been hiding this lassitude and mental confusion for years? Will I end up in another psychiatric ward, drugged orâeven worse this timeâgiven electroconvulsive shock therapy?
Pummelling me like a bare-knuckle boxer being slugged by his opponent, each question was a well-aimed blow.
Unless there are events on the mental horizon that open up some prospect of achievement, or even good luck coming our way, there is no basis for hope. As an old proverb has it, humans can live three months without food, three weeks without fluids and three minutes without hope.
Hope and fear contended yet again, as I mentally previewed my return to Australia. Far from the way I had ever envisaged this odyssey ending, I saw my aspirations turned to ashes. In the mirror of my mind I gazed on myself and beheld a failure. Not only out of touch with Australians after such a long absence, but remote from the attitudes of even my own family, I was a poor prospect for reintegration into society.
On 5 September 1990 I set foot on Australian soil for the first time in a little over six years. The first night I spent with my younger brother and his wife, and this was as good a homecoming as I could have dreamt of, in the circumstances, since a few years earlier they had bought the home we grew up in. Yet that night I lay wide awake, attributing my sleeplessness to jet lag and the excitement of being home. What I couldn't explain so easily was the loud thumping of my heart, and the cold sweat on my chest.
This was a long way from the Middle East and, as if I needed reminding, back in a place where the concerns of the great world, however momentous, were kept in proper proportion. Switching on the radio next morning, I shook my head in amazement at the news bulletin leading with the latest on a footballer's strained ligament and only then turning to Saddam's human shields.
Later that day my parents greeted me with the effusive demonstrations of welcome any prodigal son might reasonably expect. Living on a large block in semi-rural Corinella, down on Western Port Bay, they did everything but kill the fatted calf. But behind my brave face was an overstrained mind contorted by carefully camouflaged private dread:
They mustn't see how I really feel. Can they or can't they? Who can tell? Who can I tell? I can't impose this terror on them. Terror is contagious. This is driving me mad. It'll drive them mad. I've got to stay long enough to let them know everything's all right, but not long enough for them to see it's not
.
My interior world was evicting reality, closing the window of my perceptions while opening the front door to chilly blasts of fear. I was losing hope, with no structure to cling to. My closest friend from childhood, to whom I could have disclosed everything, had drifted apart from me during my long absence. I would sometimes find myself on the freeway passing the turn-off to his family's home, but I resolved not to visit, thinking that in my current state of mind I would be sparing him the burden of seeing me as I now knew myself to be: a mental and emotional wreck. This foolish thinking was based on a desire to be self-denying, to appear (to myself) more heroic than I truly was.
In retrospect I regard the self-denial, being too hard on myself, as one of the cankers eating away at my very instinct for self-preservation. I should have given myself a holiday. Physically arrived home, I was still trapped in the tentacles of trauma, unable to escape without assistance. As the brief bursts of euphoria at being back in my homeland subsided, I soon found myself thinking that the longer I spent by the bay the more surely my mental vegetation would become apparent to that small family circle around me. The restlessness that had fired me with so much positive energy that I had ranged far and wide across the world for most of the 1980s was about to drive me from home after a mere matter of weeks.
Fortunately my severance pay from Bahrain, and accumulated savings from previous work, had left me with enough money to tide me over a few more months. But getting that sum from the bank in Bahrain to the nearest Commonwealth Bank branch, in Wonthaggi, required an effort that seemed to me a gargantuan drain on my overworked mental resources. No doubt the paperwork was normal for one who, long absent from the country, had to establish a credit rating when that was not a straightforward processâbut moving a mountain might have felt easier.
This all took time, and time was something I had far too much of. It dragged; it weighed me down; my feeling of failure was now compounded by one of uselessness. My uncle and aunt visited me; I visited my brothers. Sometime in early October, sensing my uncontrollable restlessness (now I can see that's why he made the suggestion), Dad proposed a car trip all the way up to my great aunt's, on the Darling River in Wentworth. She, too, must have noticed my unsettled state but, as someone who had taken me in when I âwent bush' as a youth, Auntie Ivy had a bluff acceptance of who I was. She did her best to reassure me that, at least somewhere in the world, all was well and normal. What she couldn't know was that, by now, my cast of mind was keenly attuned to any signs of abnormality or negativity. If she mentioned that her neighbour had been taken ill, or had been the victim of a robbery, my mind added that to all the great disasters of the day, until the whole world appeared to be painted a dark and threatening hue.
My parents lived opposite a bowls club, a sort of divine dispensation granted to Dad, who could combine sport and socialising. Dad took me over one day and, although not likely to be converted to his enthusiasm for the game, I spent some time in the bar chatting to these people who knew him. I remember a 90-year-old bowler sitting in the corner nursing a beer. One of the regulars told me the old geezer had been diagnosed with cancer and how everyone admired him for pitching up. Instead of being inspired by this intelligence, it merely reminded me how everything, and everyone, was on a one-way road to decay.