Adrian’s story

The Accident

My father, Gladstone Bell, died as the result of a road accident in 1962 when I was eight years old. I was an only child, and he, my mother and I were all in the car, with my father driving. I remember the crash vividly. Thereafter my mother and I called it ‘the accident’. It changed my life.

For seven weeks in three hospitals my father went on living. The doctors wanted to amputate his legs. He was an old man, born the same year as Pablo Picasso, the same year Fyodor Dostoevsky died: 1881. Even in 1962, 1881, the year Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid, was long ago. My father started life in a modest terrace house in Sunderland, England. As a boy, at weekends he pedalled his bicycle through green fields to visit Durham. He ended life by the side of a highway in northern New South Wales with his neck broken. Inside the upturned car, his son somehow located the ignition key and switched off the engine. Then he ran to the middle of the road and stopped a passing car. The fingers of his right hand were broken. Blood from a cut lip stained the back of his teddy bear’s head.

Australian Christmases are hot, but Christmas night 1962 we had the fire going, and I fell asleep on the carpet in front it. A neighbour carried me to bed. Over the next months, being trapped in that upturned car became a symbol for my upturned life. Our cat Peggy, who had cancer of the nose, had to be put to sleep. My mother sold our house at Avalon Beach. I went to boarding school. For my eighth birthday I had received a red bicycle. I can still see the red bicycle strapped inside the moving van, its tyres at rest on the worn varnish of the floorboards, and I still smell the dusty moving blankets folded inside that van.

In my late twenties I suffered a severe depression, reliving with awful clarity the day of the car accident and events that followed. I always considered myself mentally strong. Now I was forced to grant this wasn’t so. In fact, at school I was an outsider. I studied poorly, spending my time writing stories about invisibility and haunted islands, driving imaginary cars or double-decker buses, and obsessing over why people are isolated in discreet thought domains that prevent them experiencing directly the life-worlds of others. Early on I knew that death was intimately connected with this claustrophobic condition, that they were two sides to one truth.

 

While the Music Lasts

Had my father been a dad of average age, I would have been born around 1910. My mother missed him terribly after he died. They were not only married and made love, they made music together. My father played the cello and my mother the piano. They played life like they played music. It is natural for musicians to form an aural conception of how a piece of music will be, an overarching design that includes the end. My mother often told me later how, because of my father’s advanced age, they knew life together would be cut short. They planned things always with this in mind. It was a practical outlook and one that made life precious. They had no religious belief. When life ended, it ended. I think so too. ‘You are the music,’ wrote T. S. Eliot in The Dry Salvages, ‘while the music lasts.’

My parents hoped my father would live to see me grow up. It wasn’t to be. The morning of the accident, as he steered the little two-tone Triumph Herald along the road, his walking stick tucked beside the driver’s seat, I looked into his eyes, the eyes my mother described as cornflower blue. Perched on a cushion that covered the handbrake between the front seats, I remember watching through the curved glass of the windscreen the white bonnet and the round shapes of the headlights eat up the road. I watched the landscape roll by gently, the floating clouds, the road snake in and out among the hills of banana trees, the car cross the centre line, straighten and continue its journey on the wrong side. This was when I turned and looked into my father’s eyes. I remember them fixed steadily on the road. They said he had everything under control. Then the bonnet of the car ate up a fat white post, and we tumbled sideways into a ditch. The music was over. I’m sure it wasn’t the intended end of the piece. My father must have momentarily been driving in another world, in a microsleep or mini stroke.

 

Awake in the Dream

Private school was part of the plan my parents had for my future. It was preparation for a career in medicine or banking ― anything but music. An itinerant cellist all his life, my father still struggled to pay a mortgage at age eighty. He wanted an easier life for his son.

The doctor asked my mother for her assent to increase the morphine dose till my father no longer woke up. She agreed, and explained to me what that meant. I remember the morning she took the phone call telling her my father had died. Our phone, behind the glass front door of the house, was equipped with a special amplifying device to help my father’s deafness. On the veranda, listening to my mother’s voice, I felt the world shift. My mother was being matter-of-fact, thanking the doctor for all he’d done. The sun shone, the ants in the cracks of the paving stones motored round as usual, but everything was changed. Washed clean. The ants were like ants in a haiku, liberated ants. I and the ants were spontaneously improvised and lucid enough to know we were awake in the dream. The feeling was exhilarating, harrowing, empty of everything, terrifying, and inescapably free. It submerged my childhood. I ceased to be a child. I wore the shackles of new freedom. I began rehearsing straightaway on the veranda how I would tell people that my father was dead. The information made me feel like a hero. It seems an inappropriate reaction, but it’s how I coped. I was a fatherless only child, and I vowed to look after my mother always. I didn’t cry, nor did she. We didn’t cry together. In the last days my father told her to remarry. She never did.