The Full Catastrophe Read online

  My ex-husband and I bought this house when we got married and I was expecting my first baby, Marcus. He’s just turned fourteen, so that’s how long ago it was.

  The house was really run-down but it had huge rooms, and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the bush and the water. We painted the walls white and stained the floorboards very dark, almost black. The light just streamed in. It was like living in an art gallery.

  As soon as we moved in we noticed that it was quite a noisy house, especially at night. The floorboards in the central staircase creaked a lot. We’d listen to them as we sat downstairs watching TV. It sounded exactly like somebody was walking down them. We figured it was just the timber expanding and shrinking, and didn’t think any more of it. But other people were starting to be a little bit freaked out by our house.

  The night that Marcus was born, my mother was on her own there. She’d come down from Brisbane to help me when the baby arrived. We were at the hospital, an hour’s drive away in Randwick. She was staying in the guest room, which was one of the bedrooms running off the central staircase.

  At 3 am she was woken by a man’s footsteps walking down the staircase. They were slow and deliberate, and surprisingly loud – loud enough to wake her. She checked her watch – that’s how she knew what the time was – and immediately thought, Mario’s home from the hospital! She listened to the footsteps continue down the stairs towards the kitchen, and thought, I’ll get up and have a cup of tea with him and see how Juanita and the baby are.

  Anyone who knows my mother, Gaye, knows that you do not stand between her and a cup of tea, no matter what time of the day or night it is. But by the time she put on her dressing gown and slippers, and opened the door onto the staircase, the house was silent. And dark. There was no light coming from the kitchen. She realised there was no one there. The house was empty.

  She didn’t tell me about that night for a long time. But just a few weeks later, I had my own strange experience. My husband had driven into the city to work, and I was alone at home with the baby for the first time.

  Marcus was about three weeks old, and I’d put him in his blue bouncinette in the nursery while I went to have a shower. The nursery was off the staircase, opposite the guest room where my mother had stayed. And you know what a bouncinette is, right? One of the old-fashioned crocheted ones on a metal frame, with the sling that you put between the baby’s legs to secure them.

  Anyway, as I stepped out of the shower, I heard the unmistakeable sound of a man’s footsteps coming down the staircase. They were slow and deliberate and … loud. I could tell that whoever it was, they were wearing boots, like a workman’s boots.

  I knew immediately that there was an intruder in the house. In that instant, I believed with every fibre of my being, that I was going to be murdered. When you’re a woman, you go your entire life with that possibility sitting quietly in the background. I remember feeling very calm, but overwhelmed with sadness, and thinking, so this is how my life ends. The footsteps continued down the stairs and stopped outside the bathroom.

  Standing there in my towel with dripping wet hair, I made a decision that if I was going to die, I was not going to be found cowering in a corner. I wanted to see my killer. I threw open the door and stepped out onto the landing.

  There was nobody there.

  I took a second to absorb that, then flew up the stairs to the nursery where my son was. I looked in and got the shock of my life. The bouncinette was empty.

  By now, I really thought I was going mad. I stared at the empty bouncinette and felt – it’s hard to describe – I felt like I was living the reality of someone whose baby had been stolen. In the same way that just minutes earlier, I’d felt that I was living the experience of a woman who was about to be murdered. I walked over to the bouncinette and stared down at it. I was already grieving. My baby was gone. And then on an impulse, I lifted it up.

  Marcus was lying underneath it, looking up at me. He was on his back with his arms by his sides, completely straight, as though somebody had just laid him there. To this day, I cannot explain it. There is no way a three-week old baby can get themselves out of a bouncinette.

  Over the next few years, things like that kept happening. We went out on a rare date night and returned to find the babysitter distraught and terrified. She insisted somebody had been in the house because she’d heard them walking around. ‘Don’t ever ask me to babysit for you at night again,’ she said. ‘This place gives me the creeps.’

  When Marcus was learning to talk, he woke up one night and called for his father. It was just after three o’clock. When Mario walked into the nursery, Marcus was sitting up in his bed, pointing to the corner. ‘Dadda, who’s that lady sitting over there?’ he asked.

  Over time, we became accustomed to the strange goings-on, especially the footsteps. They stopped bothering us. But then, one Christmas Eve, when my daughter was just a few months old, my Croatian mother-in-law, Marija (also known as Baba), came to stay the night. We put her in the guest room, off the central staircase.

  The next morning, I heard her rattling around in the kitchen at six o’clock, and I went down to see why she was up so early. She said, ‘I want you to take me to church as soon as you can. I’ve had a terrible experience. I need to go to Mass.’

  Marija told me that around 3 am she was woken by the sound of two people rushing and clattering down the stairs. There was a sense of urgency and panic about their movements. She immediately thought that something was wrong with the baby, and that Mario and I were rushing to attend to her. She tried to get out of bed to help us but she couldn’t move. She felt a huge weight on her chest, as if somebody were sitting on it. ‘And I smelt damp earth,’ she said, ‘as if my nostrils were full of soil. I felt like I was suffocating.’

  She was absolutely petrified. The next time she came to visit, she brought an enormous and very ugly crucifix, which she insisted on hanging in the living room to drive away any evil spirits. But she never again stayed the night.

  Now, anyone who’s had kids knows what a disaster that was – a grandmother who stays overnight occasionally is essential to a parent’s mental health. So I figured that we actually needed to sort out the ghost problem and get Baba back in the babysitting loop. I rang the most sensible person I know – my friend Lisa, who at the time was a senior manager at the ABC. Technically, she was my boss. And I was about to have the weirdest conversation with a boss in my career.

  ‘Look, I need your advice on something,’ I said. ‘You’ll probably think I’m crazy, but I think we have ghosts in our house, and I don’t know what to do.’

  Lisa responded very matter-of-factly, as if I’d just asked her to sign my annual leave form. ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘I lived in a haunted house myself a few years back. You need to ring the Enmore Spiritualist Church. Ask for Pat. She’s great at getting rid of ghosts.’

  Who would have thought that haunted houses were so common? And that there was a lady called Pat who could sort them out for you?

  I rang the church and got through straightaway. Pat turned out to be the Reverend Patricia Cleary. She was the president and treasurer of a group of clairvoyants who met every week at a house in Enmore and spoke to dead people. Pat told me she was eighty-four and she’d been busting ghosts for thirty years. She didn’t put it quite like that. She described ghosts as trapped souls who didn’t realise their human bodies had died. They sensed something wasn’t quite right, but they didn’t know what it was. As a result, they were confused and angry, and that energy could cause disturbances of the sort we were experiencing. They needed to be gently persuaded by other spirits that it was time to move to the next level.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘So, you have a seance here and give the ghosts their marching orders?’

  ‘Not so fast,’ said Pat. First, she had to ask me a couple of questions. Was anyone in the house suffering from mental illness? Or taking illicit drugs?

  I was a bit taken aback by that.
But Pat explained that about 90 per cent of the ghost reports received by the Spiritualist Church turned out to be psychotic episodes, not paranormal activity. Apart from wasting everybody’s time, it was also a matter of personal safety. So the church clairvoyants no longer did house calls. The process was done remotely. And it wasn’t called a seance, she said. It was called a circle, and during the circle, which was usually held on a Friday night, the church people would make contact with their helpful spirit guides, who would then be dispatched to help the trapped souls transition out of this plane to the next.

  After I convinced Pat I wasn’t mentally ill or on ice, I booked us in for the following Friday. Pat asked for our address, so she could pass it on to the spirit guides.

  ‘We need the postcode too,’ she said.

  ‘Spirits need postcodes?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course!’ said Pat. ‘We don’t want them going to the wrong suburb.’ I had an image of a couple of ghosts zooming up the Wakehurst Parkway, saying, ‘Do we go right or left at the lights?’

  There was one thing I was still curious about. Our house had been built in 1967. There seemed to be several trapped souls rattling around in it. As far as I knew, there hadn’t been a mass murder there, at least not in the past forty years. So where had all these ghosts come from?

  Pat said it was possible they were residents from previous dwellings that had been pulled down. Or they could be homeless people who’d camped on vacant land around Sydney during the Great Depression. Or this might go even further back, to the time of the white invasion. That was interesting, I thought, because not long before, while we were landscaping, we had discovered a lead cannonball buried deep in the earth. And we knew from researching local history that both Captain Cook and Arthur Phillip had sailed up this waterway.

  Anyway, who knows? Maybe it was all a figment of our imagination. But what I can say is that after the Enmore psychics held their circle, we never heard the footsteps again.

  I was so curious to find out what had happened, that over the following months, I tried to call the church numerous times. I tried at all times of the day and night. Nobody ever picked up. It was as if the Enmore Spiritualist Church and its band of psychics had just disappeared.

  I later found out why. Not long after our ghosts were persuaded to move on, the church was embroiled in a shocking financial scandal. Reverend Pat was removed as treasurer and accused of embezzlement. There were allegations that bikies had infiltrated the church. People were literally locked out of the church. The matter went all the way to the Supreme Court, and eventually the church closed, ninety-eight years after it had opened.

  All the psychics said they hadn’t seen it coming!

  In 2008, we sold the house and moved closer to the city. I was happy to leave it. Even though the ghosts had gone, I always felt a sadness about it. I’ve lived in two other houses since then and, I’m happy to say, neither of them has been haunted. But there’s something about our old house that I can’t quite let go. I still dream about it.

  And every so often, I google the address. I’ve noticed that every couple of years it’s up for sale again.

  Nobody stays for long.

  Bridget Jones’s Crime Scene

  Rick Morton

  THIS IS HOW I discovered my brother, Toby, was a drug addict.

  He became an artist. He started calling himself Shroomy, and painting mushrooms on any available surface in psychedelic colours. He told me he wanted to sell them, which was great news for any interior designers who’d ever considered the wares at a weekend market and thought, no, not shit enough.

  Psychosis, among other things, ensures the dramatic lowering of the bar for artistic merit, and my brother, Shroomy, was its newest wunderkind. The few people who bought them, he thought, were intelligent, free agents of the marketplace. But it turns out they were in psychosis, too, and psychosis had done to art criticism what it had also done to merit. I was torn between my instinct to support the creative streak in him and the knowledge that if he found out that there was a streak of anything, he would attempt to crystallise it and smoke it.

  ‘He’s drawn a fucking mushroom on my shoe. I’m not kidding, Rick. On my good work shoe. Who does that?’ Mum told me once.

  Toby was a meth addict, an ice junkie. He lived in his own fortress of squalitude underneath my mum’s house, against her will.

  Over the summer of 2016, Mum set about her usual festive handiwork, stitching reindeer to send to her children as Christmas decorations. At the same time, she discovered Toby was working on a little craft project of his own, blowing glass ice pipes around a drum under her Queenslander house. It reminded me of some of the more diverse episodes of Better Homes and Gardens, where the gardener builds an outdoor planter box while Noni Hazelhurst sets up a safe injecting room. Mum was both furious and what I would describe as angry-proud.

  ‘How the hell did he learn glassblowing, Rick? That’s what I want to know,’ she said to me down the phone. There was a pause before she added resolutely, ‘It’s a skill!’

  I love my brother, don’t get me wrong, but his addiction to drugs had become dangerous for my mum. His friends would visit at all hours and in all states of dysfunction. Her home was like a Noah’s Ark but for shit people.

  During a third attempt to get a domestic violence order placed against him, Mum went directly to the local country coppers, and they explained they were powerless to help unless he was literally in the act of trying to kill her.

  ‘I’ll kill him myself,’ Mum said in frustration.

  ‘Debbie, I don’t need to hear that,’ the police officer said.

  By way of defence, and I stress this is not and should never be used as a defence, Mum helpfully furnished the law man with some more detail. ‘I don’t have a gun, I don’t have a knife,’ she said, as if this was some kind of masterclass in poverty. Again, Mum had been foiled not by motivation or effort but by a lack of access to resources.

  Toby continued living under the house and his friends essentially moved in. Take Scotty, a career criminal who has plied his trade in the small country town we call home since he was in primary school. He was the first man who ever robbed us. Now, it’s just my opinion, but if you’re going to be a career criminal you should probably do it in a place where there are at least three other criminals, just to give yourself a chance. Like all good regional towns, ours had the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, and Scotty, the bicycle taker.

  Scotty was fingered so many times for his crimes that he has spent about half his short life in prison, where he has also been fingered.

  In July last year I was back home visiting Mum and we had embarked on that great version of bonding that mothers and their gay sons get into: watching Bridget Jones’s Baby. Before I came out, it used to be Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and Mum would always drop hints about how wonderful the drag queens were. I was terrified of being gay and fairly sour on buses, so I always found those sessions a little underwhelming.

  Halfway into the movie there was a loud commotion underneath the house and Mum went running down the stairs to investigate, which alarmed me. Although she is very short and as such has a very low centre of gravity, I am always worried about her getting hurt.

  ‘Fatboy, go home,’ she yelled.

  My brother had many friends with bad nicknames. Fatboy is an obvious one but then there is Beetle, who I like to think was named so because he once rolled onto his back and couldn’t get up. Fatboy ran off, quick as a flash, and all seemed right with the world until Scotty emerged from under the house, clutching his neck, just below the jaw.

  ‘Toby, I’ve been stabbed!’ Fatboy had broken a golf club in half and plunged the severed metal shaft into Scotty’s neck.

  He fell to his knees on the pavement and lay down, blood pooling under his head. ‘I can’t feel my face!’ A face is something you want to be able to feel at all times. Mum phoned the police while I phoned the ambulance.

  My brother’s dog, Ziggy,
was part pig mutt and part kangaroo, with a brain that seemed to have been switched off not long after she was born. She proceeded to spring through the blood and over Scotty while Toby left his bleeding friend and went to the fence to reassure some passers-by that everything was in order, which of course it wasn’t.

  The cockatiel was screeching, our dog Jack was barking, Ziggy was getting bloodier by the second and Mum’s cat, Charlie, had eyes the size of dinner plates. Scotty, of course, was crying out into the night. This is why the Comancheros and the Rebels never do business at the zoo.

  Toby decided to drive his friend to the local hospital instead of waiting for the ambulance. It didn’t occur to me that he would just dump him there. But at that point, as I was chaining the spring-loaded turbo dog to the Hills Hoist, I wouldn’t have been surprised if a herd of naked chickens turned up demanding the return of their feathers from my pillow.

  Toby was back in five minutes to clear out anything incriminating under the house and do a runner. He had a little backpack and looked a lot like Dora the Explorer, if Dora had done time for grievous bodily harm and subsequently binged on methamphetamines.

  ‘Why’d you have to call the cops for? They make everything worse,’ my brother yelled at me. Now, I realise this is a matter of perspective. If you are the one-time victim of police brutality who is getting married and has planned a strictly enforced fireman-themed strip-show only to have the hot cops turn up, my bad, that’s on me. If your fucken mate stabbed your other fucken mate in the fucken neck, I’m going to call the lawboys because I get incredibly turned on by the mere hint of public order and safety.

  The local police sergeant turned up. ‘Oh, g’day, Rick, I haven’t seen you in years,’ he said cheerfully through the screen door. He asked me to take him in detail through everything that happened.