Learning how to Breathe Read online

  Linda Neil is a musician, writer and radio producer. Her documentaries have won awards at the New York Radio Festival and have been short-listed for the United Nations Media Peace Prize. She has a PhD in creative writing and a degree in music from the University of Queensland, where she has taught creative and professional writing and media and cultural studies. She is currently working on My Year of Singing Love Songs, a music documentary for ABC Radio National. Learning How to Breathe is her first book.

  First published 2009 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  www.uqp.com.au

  © 2009 Linda Neil

  This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Text design and typeset in 11.75/15.25pt Adobe Jenson Pro by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

  Author photograph by Amelia Schmid

  This project has been assisted by the

  Commonwealth Government through

  the Australia Council, its arts

  funding and advisory body.

  Sponsored by the Queensland Office of

  Arts and Cultural Development

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  National Library of Australia

  Neil, Linda

  Learning how to breathe

  ISBN 978 0 7022 3734 8 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 0 7022 6142 8 (pdf)

  ISBN 978 0 7022 6143 5 (epub)

  ISBN 978 0 7022 6144 2 (kindle)

  Neil, Linda. Neil, Joan. Mothers and daughters – Biography. Caregivers – Biography. Parkinson’s disease – Patients – Biography. Musicians – Biography.

  362.0425

  As this is a work of memory and not of journalism, all care has been taken to protect the privacy of those involved. Except for family names, all names, including those of institutions, have been changed. Some dates, timelines and physical descriptions have also been altered for reasons of privacy. As well, some characters appear as amalgams of several people.

  to joan ben chris

  cat stets pa

  paul kym finn kel

  hannah lily and rose

  Contents

  Book One – THE POLITICS OF SADNESS

  Book Two – LEARNING HOW TO BREATHE

  Book Three – HOUSE OF LOVE

  Epilogue – JOY TO THE WORLD

  Acknowledgments

  Two things happen today. My mother falls and I foresee my own death. These two things may or may not be connected. My mother’s falling precipitates a moment of clarity in which I know that through her falling I will be changed forever. I know as I watch her fall that, contrary to the habit of a lifetime, I will not walk away. I will not disengage myself from her falling and by engaging in her fall I will fall myself.

  I watch her fall from where I am standing at the kitchen sink. She falls at the clothes line and as she stumbles she grabs hold of one of her favourite old tea towels, one she’d had when Dad was still alive, and slowly rips it in two as she tries to steady herself.

  It’s a strange thing to watch your mother fall. The only way I can describe it is by saying that, as I watch her temporarily frail body hit the ground and hear the oddly resigned whoosh of air escape her as bone scraped against the concrete path – the one that Dad put in for her so that her bare feet wouldn’t feel the prickles as she walked from the laundry to the line – I can feel my heart break a little. This breaking is also a falling, a shedding and perhaps a death.

  Book One

  THE POLITICS OF SADNESS

  RETURN

  My mother sometimes told her singing students that they must make singing look easy. They should stand before their audience with a calm relaxed posture, and a serene face and manner, and sing with clear natural diction to enable the audience to feel they could do the same with a couple of lessons. Introducing the song was also an important part of the performance, she stressed. It is best never to mumble or feel embarrassed in any way. Being in control, or appearing to be, was one of the tools of a competent singer. ‘Maintain the appearance of serenity, even if you are dying inside,’ she wrote in an article for the Music Teachers’ Association of Queensland. ‘A performer should never worry an audience; they should give the impression they are doing something completely natural. Mechanical matters such as resonance, articulation, breathing, and all the difficulties which we know are part of the process must disappear from our minds – and theirs – as we begin to sing.’

  ‘But is it really possible to make it look that easy?’ she concluded. ‘And, if so, does this bear out the old adage: Art begins where effort ends?’

  Mum used to refer to the years after my father died as ‘my time’. The time before what she referred to as ‘my time’ was, I imagine, the time to care for my invalid father, and, after he died, the time to grieve. Then, one year after my eighty-year-old father was buried in a cemetery in Brisbane after a church service at their local parish of St Lucia, my mother, seventeen years his junior, celebrated the season of ‘her time’ by embarking on her first overseas adventure, a trip through Europe with her friend Miriam, followed by a visit to her two sons, Paul and Stephen, living in London at that time. The following years, she told me later, were rich with such travels and adventures. Released from a life of duty and work during which she had seen all her children travel the world while she stayed at home in the house her mother had once owned, she enjoyed the surprising and fruitful freedom of these years. ‘Her time’ stretched from the year 1993 until 1998, the year she returned from a trip overseas – the last she would ever make – with my sister Cathie, who accompanied her on this last grand adventure through Canada and America where they attended singing and choral workshops and music and theatre festivals, including the Shaw Festival at Niagara Falls.

  Two months after her return, for no apparent reason Mum began to feel sad. This sadness came upon her incrementally; she interpreted it at first as exhaustion and did what she had always done to combat exhaustion or weakness of any kind: she kept on working. A few days after landing back in Australia she flew north to Gladstone to adjudicate in the Central Queensland Eisteddfod. There she noticed a pain in her right hand and arm as she wrote her comments for the dozens of vocalists who sang for her over the three-day competition. These initial niggling irritations then developed into a sudden lack of mobility in her right shoulder and the habit of waking up in the morning crying. Crying is not something my mother did. Later I will joke with her that crying was something I did brilliantly; I’d been crying, in fact, for years. It was my area of endeavour and accomplishment. Hers, on the other hand, was singing and the teaching of music. The art of the voice and the breath. Of channelling feeling into song. The art of not crying.

  Her tears led to uncharacteristic phone calls to my brother Paul, her eldest son, whose wife Kym was expecting their first child. He suggested she go to a doctor to get something to help her. But exactly what sort of help she needed and exactly what was wrong with her was unclear. A visit to her GP of over thirty years resulted in a prescription for antidepressants. These helped neither her insomnia nor her sadness.

  My mother used to tell me that there was no perfect time to start anything. There would be no ideal moment when everything would be aligned and balanced in support of any new venture. No matter how much you believed in the stars, or the gods, or the fickle hand of fate, if you waited too long for the perfec
t moment you might well die before ever starting anything. I doubt whether my parents or my grandmother thought much about the significance of dates, or names, or numbers for that matter. They were too practical for such esoteric interests and would have told me never to rely on anything so intangible and unscientific to decide the course of my life. They would have told me to get down off my high horse, give up all that airy fairy stuff, and just get real. Sometimes you have to pluck up your courage, dive into the chaos, and be prepared to get your hands dirty. So I will begin this story not at the very beginning or at the end, but at some time after and also some time before what might be the perfect place to start. I’ll dive right into the mud of Bellingen in northern New South Wales, where I am wandering around ankle deep in slush at the Global Music Festival of Harmony in October 1998, embracing the chaos of a hippie festival that has brought me halfway to the border of Queensland, the Sunshine State.

  The first music festival I ever played at was a youth orchestra festival in Aberdeen, Scotland, where orchestras of mostly teenage musicians from all over the world gathered to play symphonies and concertos, overtures and suites. It was my first overseas trip – I remember we played Shostakovich, Sibelius and Holst – and my parents had sacrificed a lot to put the money aside for me to make the journey. I doubt they would have been thrilled to know that, after all their trouble, I would one day be tramping around in the mud at a music festival for peace-loving hippies rather than lovers of classical music.

  Bellingen is also a long way from the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London where I once played in a performance of Peter and the Wolf. Or the Roman Forum where I played Wagner and Mendelssohn. But Bellingen is where I have come to play with a band called the new music collective, a raggedy group of inner city musicians who play original songs with a fusion ensemble of instruments that include tabla, bass, bazouki, djembe, with me on fiddle. Original music – playing it, writing it, listening to it – has been my passion during most of the nineties in which my violin and I traversed a world a long way from the safe and secure musical life my parents would have wished for me. It wasn’t just new music that interested me though. It was the new life that went with it. During my time in the musical wilderness I played all over Sydney – on streets and footpaths, in tunnels and arcades, in malls and public squares – with many different types of musicians for as many different types of people, before hooking up to amplifiers and sound systems on stages of pubs, clubs and medium-sized arenas, in recording studios and sometimes even in television studios, improvising and composing what my grandmother might once have called ‘the devil’s music’.

  A freak storm interrupted the festival opening the night before. Some people credited the unseasonal rain to the Indigenous elder who had welcomed us, or to the didgeridoo player beside him who made our bones rumble – and perhaps the clouds too – with his pulsing rhythms. But none of us was prepared for the deluge when it came, not even my partner Raphael, who once spent two years living without electricity in a hut on the hills behind Byron Bay. After sharing with him our own little hut by the sea for most of the previous two years, I know he is usually prepared for most natural things – disasters or otherwise – and thanks to him we spent the night undercover, huddled in the tent he managed to hastily fashion out of an old tarpaulin from the back of our station wagon, with my violin tucked away beside us in a canvas bag that Raphael had stitched together especially to protect it from the elements.

  I am not good in natural emergencies, only, perhaps, musical ones. The day after the storm I am tired and grumpy as I wander around in the mud looking for the main stage where I’m supposed to play a gig that night. Raphael is away checking out organic garden stalls and catching up with other old hippies from the Northern Rivers. He always seems at home at events like these, but for me so far Bellingen has been a nightmare. A violinist especially dreads changeable weather because of how sudden climatic changes affect the tension of the instrument’s strings and the clarity of its tone. I am supposed to be singing at tonight’s gig and damp affects the voice too, along with the clouds of smoke I’m sick of walking through – tobacco, dope, and whatever other herbal concoctions the festival tribes are smoking this year. The chai tent seems like a safe haven to avoid the stoned line at the samosa van, but my head is already starting to spin from the thick smells of tea, patchouli and sandalwood as I stand in line. My phone rings. It is my brother Paul. He isn’t ringing about the imminent birth of his first child, though. He’s ringing to tell me there’s something wrong with Mum.

  He isn’t any more specific, except to say, in his casual way, that she might need some help. This sounds all wrong: not just Mum needing help, but my family ringing to tell me about it. It has been a long time since I have done anything a good daughter or a good sister might do. Paul seems surprised when I say I’ll drive up to Brisbane to stay with Mum for a few days. My family are not really the kind of people who ask for help. Or – perhaps – not from me. They are the kind of people who get on with things as best they can. Paul saying that Mum might need some help, even casually, suddenly seems to be a significant thing.

  I bump up against another sweaty punter who, in return, spills a scalding mug of herbal tea all over me. Maybe Mum needs a break just like I do, I think. A break from my gypsy life feels like a good idea, along with a break from the rain, the mud, from camping, from Raphael, and even, for a while perhaps, from playing music.

  Mum had a dream of music too. I watched it flicker into life when I was a little girl crawling around her feet while she played the piano. I listened, trembling, as she sang dramatic Italian arias and cried out for love’s ruin while she cooked mince and potatoes in the kitchen of our suburban home. I had witnessed how it slowly flowered in our lounge room and in the lounge rooms and suburban music halls of Brisbane, where Mum worked, studied and taught singing and piano. I knew how hard she had struggled to attain her teaching diplomas, degrees and fellowships, and followed, albeit from a distance, how she built up her teaching practice so others could sing and flower too.

  The gig tonight is huge. We play to hundreds of beautiful boys and girls blissed out on love and life and what the emcee announces is ‘that shiva shakti energy’. For a moment I really feel I am shakti on the stage with my shiva in the crowd smiling up at me while I stand under a single spotlight and sing a song I’ve just written called ‘Solitude’. I think for only a moment how strange it is to be playing a song called ‘Solitude’ in front of such a large crowd because it is so special to hear some of the audience singing the chorus with me, while outside the performance tent a full moon glows bright orange in the black sky. Even while I sing, I still hear another voice whisper, as I have for so much of my life. The divine whisper, Raphael calls it in his cosmic way, the one I hear when I play music. Tonight I might even say that the whisper is calling me home – if I had ever really believed in such a place.

  Next day, I refuse Raphael’s offer to drive north with me to Brisbane to see Mum. He jokingly enfolds me in his muscled arms etched with tattoos, pretending not to let me go.

  You are coming back, aren’t you? he whispers close to my ear.

  Don’t be silly, I say, turning to him to return his embrace, but really only because I know it is what he needs to hear. Raphael is a sensitive man, though, and knows I have already left him, especially since my temporary move back to Sydney from Byron Bay – for supposed musical reasons – a few months before.

  I notice a woman look at him admiringly as she passes. I feel an ache and hate myself for being possessive.

  I’ve kept as far away from her as I could, I suddenly tell him. The last thing in the world I ever wanted to do is go home to my mother.

  Maybe that’s why you can’t settle, he says, not without sympathy.

  I’m afraid, I tell him, as honest as I’ve ever been with him. Being round my family always makes me feel like a freak. I mean, I know they’re good people. That’s why I feel so
guilty around them.

  I know you’re afraid. But always remember fear is only something that’s in your mind, he tells me.

  When I hear him say things like this to me, I understand why I wanted to be with him. He is a balm for my mind.

  And you’re brave, you know, he presses deep against me. Braver than you realise.

  I breathe him in. I wish I was a better girlfriend, I say, snuggling back into him.

  You’re not such a bad girlfriend, he teases me. It’s just that I can never really pin you down.

  He pretends to capture me; I try to wriggle free.

  What exactly are you afraid of? he asks, letting me go.

  I sigh deeply. My answer could take days, I think. A lifetime.

  That one day I’ll be so afraid I’ll stop breathing altogether.

  We all will eventually, he says, before laughing. At me, with me. At himself. Raphael always spreads his laughter around.

  I know. But you always said, didn’t you, that we should face the things we’re most afraid of?

  Ha, he says, ruefully. I never knew you took that much notice of what I say. He uncoils himself from me then, a tall bear of a man letting me go. Drop me a line sometime, he smiles.

  I’ll only be a few days, I tell him casually.

  Yes, of course, he echoes, a few days.

  Just for a final laugh, he holds out his hand for me to shake, a formal goodbye between the friends we are becoming, rather than the lovers we have been. But I have already begun to rev the engine of my station wagon to set off for the trip north. I don’t really know whether I am lying or not. Whether I will only be a few days or whether the divine whisper might be heading north as well.

  It takes me a whole day of driving, with stops at Byron Bay and the Gold Coast, as well as a sushi bar in Toowong, to finally make it to St Lucia by dusk. So it is early evening by the time I pull up outside the family home in Warren Street. The street has changed a lot since I last visited. More and more of the old wooden family homes which lined the footpath when I was a girl have been knocked down in favour of the townhouses and home units that accommodate the large numbers of international students who attend the University of Queensland two streets away.