The Looking Glass

He made up the person he wanted to be

and changed into a new personality.

Even the greatest stars

change themselves in the looking glass.

Kraftwerk

The song lifts up from the speaker bouncing around in the basket of our bike. Electronic trills fly up around our heads like a flock of birds lifting off from a tree and flapping into a sky that is deep blue and without a cloud. And we’re flying ourselves, approaching the small gully that runs across our path at the end of the parkway we’re on, the one that leads to the back of a Woolworths car park, our cut through on the way to school.

First term, grade four.

You bounce on your seat when we hit a crack in the path where an obstinate tree has pushed up through the concrete, and then we’re swooping down into the culvert that occasionally floods when it rains, something it has failed to do much this summer. The grass is brilliantly green nonetheless and we free fall into the heart of it, powering down the slope so we can use our momentum to lift up to the other side, where we cross over the street to Woollies. We’re at the point where we’d lift our legs if we were still in a La Nina version of summer, riding through the water, splashing our calves.

Today the concrete is dry. I hear your voice, singing quietly.

Even the greatest stars…

This was the first song you ever sang unbidden. Singing was never your thing. At the local library, when you were still in nappies, you shook your head and refused to join the song circle at baby rhyme time. Maybe it felt too much like a cult to you. I don’t know, I’m projecting obviously, but I was stupidly proud of your refusal to join all that happy clapping.

That’s because you come from a family of non-joiners…

Your Grandfather, Poppy G, my Dad, retired and moved to south New South Wales, near Merimbulah, ostensibly because there was a golf course and he loved golf. He bought a house that backed onto a golf course. He bought a golf buggy that he kept plugged into a power socket under the house, so he could just jump straight in it and drive out to the fairway, which swept down the hill in front of his house, descending towards the beach. In the evening, kangaroos hopped out of the bush onto the fairways and helped themselves to whatever it is that kangaroos like about eating grass.

It was bucolic, idyllic. Ridiculously so. Dad had spent a lot of time deciding to move there. Within a year or two, though, he quit playing golf. “It’s all anybody talks about”, was his complaint.

Sometimes we worried about your reluctance to join in. We even heard the word autism in reference to you when you took you to kindy for the first time. We knew that wasn’t right though, you were just suspicious, biding your time because we travelled so much in your early years, and you missed out on the norms of kindy behaviour.

But it marked the beginning of a storm of scary words. Spectrum, autism, attention, and other words like deficit, disorder, deficiency, and the first of many acronyms, the ADHD’s and ADD’s finally moving into the dys’s. Dyslexia, dispraxia, dysgraphia. Words to label your difference.

Or indifference perhaps.

Even the greatest stars

find their face in the looking glass.

The first time you sang that song, you were four, and we were staying in Brunswick Heads for the night. It was the summer holidays and the local park had been transformed into a sideshow. That was before we were entertaining dietary words like gluten and intolerance, so we’d just left the park and were walking to the local pizza joint, bare feet slapping the pavement, hands linked and swinging. You quietly started singing to yourself.

Even the greatest stars…

That song hypnotises you. Even now I use it as your morning meditation on the way to school. You stop talking and I feel your body press against my back when you stand in the saddle, rocking slightly as we hit the bottom of the incline, wind slicing through us, music trailing ribbons behind us.

The world passing and your voice singing quietly to yourself.

live their lives in the looking glass.

Recently I’ve changed myself. Willfully. Deliberately.

At the end of last year, I had long covid. Or I had exhaustion. Or I had bronchitis and the flu mixed together into something new, a word I’m yet to find. In short, though, I wasn’t well.

We went to Singapore and Malaysia for holidays and I was determined to keep ignoring my condition because I thought a holiday filled with laksas and poh pias and teh tariks, dosas, rotis and sambals, was going to be the perfect way to get better. I ignored any feeling of being rundown so we could hunt for foodcourts and take you into giant glass domes of cloud forests and orchids, 8 hours bus rides to world heritage cities, theme parks, interactive science museums, 5 star hotels, 4 star hotels, 3 star hotels, no star hotels and guesthouses. For two weeks we pushed through everything and in the middle of it all, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a Malaysian guesthouse with no windows, in the middle of a double bed under a ceiling fan, in the middle of a dream about losing my passport, my heart started pumping erratically.

I eased off on the teh tarik and waited to see if it would get better. On the morning of the World Cup Final, back in Singapore, I got out of bed early to exercise as you and your Mum headed to the hotel pool. In the middle of a down dog, my heart went into full palpitations and I couldn’t stand up without feeling faint.

I saw a doctor the same day and took anti-biotics, which had an almost immediate effect. That night I watched Lionel Messi win the World Cup (it’s important to have your priorities straight) and even had a glass of bad wine in celebration, but every time I thought I was in the clear, it kept coming back. For the next couple of weeks I lay down a lot and tried to rest, but that didn’t help either, it kept returning. When we got back to Australia I saw another doctor and had an EKG but that settled nothing, least of all the heavy feeling in my chest, or the anxiety that seemed to blossom out of that feeling. Like I had a bird in my sternum, trapped in a cage, and it was beating hard against the bars, unable to find a way out.

I decided I needed to do something so I enrolled in an Ayurvedic detox program, an Indian medical system that posits you as your own doctor, believes in food as medicine, has incredible detox programs and great massages (it’s important to have your priorities straight). I became gluten free, dairy free, meat free, sugar free, caffeine free, and nightshade vegetable free. I was so free that I felt like I was floating away.

For weeks I ate mostly dhal and had great massages.

And there were a lot of enemas.

Now I’m not sure when you’re going to read this letter but I assume you will read it. It’s the reason I’m writing them after all, so you’re kind of obligated. I have read a couple of the funny ones to you, which you seemed to enjoy. Most of the time when I’m writing, I’m imagining you reading as an adult, maybe sitting by a fire with a cup of warm cocoa in your hand, but for the purposes of this next bit, I’m just going to assume you’re at the age you are now, 9 years old, on the back of our electric bike, on your way to school…

An enema (as I now understand it) is a process where a doctor (who may or may not have a white coat on) sticks a tube into your bum and squirts a packet of warm fluid up there. You’re required from the moment of squirting to pull up your pants and to hold the enema inside you for a period of up to 30 minutes, before releasing it into the nearest, easily accessible toilet cubicle. At the time I was staying in an Airbnb in Brisbane because we were making a show which was (fortuitously) just up the street and round the corner from the clinic. You were with your grandparents.

That 30 minutes of enema holding is pretty much up to you how you spend it. You can waddle around the waiting room and let go in the toilet there (if you like) or perhaps (like me) waddle home and hope (pray) your flatmates have remembered to leave the key out. That way you can let go peacefully in an empty Airbnb because you have carefully timed the experience to coincide with warm up at the theatre (a warm up you won’t be attending, nor will you need to, considering you’ll be feeling pretty warm already).

It’s a highly intimate procedure. Often it was the same person who massaged me, stuck me into the steamer (a small box that fills with steam while your head juts out free and cool), and then applied the enema. Because I was well raised as a child (a set of values I hope we’re instilling in you), I would usually chat to my doctor and, due to my general affability, attempt to look them in the eye as I did so, rotating my head and looking over my shoulder as they bent to their task.

I don’t really know how this was for them, or if there exists a better enema etiquette. They didn’t seem particularly flustered by my attempt to catch their eye but they also didn’t seem to really notice my efforts much either. They were far too focussed on where to stick the tube with one hand while holding a bag of warm fluid with the other, pinching it tightly shut to avoid early deployment.

All of these photos are from our trip to Singapore and Malaysia. The one above is from the Hell Museum in Singapore, one of our first stops when we arrived, when Teh Tarik was still very much my drink of choice and enemas were still an unrealised health option.

Over the two weeks of the detox, I lost a lot of weight but something else happened, I became lighter. I don’t mean this in only a physical sense. It was a weight coming off me, one I hadn’t even realised I was carrying.

One of the massage treatments involved two therapists rubbing a herbal paste into my body for over an hour. At the end of the massage they used large jugs of warm water to wash the paste off. They lifted and cradled my legs and my head in their hands while warm water poured over me. I was moved around and manipulated, the paste running off and draining away efficiently (even miraculously it seemed to me) into the gutters of the wooden massage table, my body yielding to their touch. I felt both like a baby and an old man, two life vectors coming into collision as the dross of me was rinsed away into large buckets I couldn’t see through my half opened eyes.

I sat in the wooden steamer box afterwards, my head poking out into the cool air while my body ran rivulets of sweat into towels, and realised I was scared. This could be anything, I was telling myself, and I thought of you. Of you and your Mum. Of leaving you too early, causing you to face your life without my help. Perhaps only leaving behind the dusting of these few words, words that might be of no help at all to the life you want to live.

Just to be clear, the detox worked and I’m feeling better, but it’s made me think about what I take for granted.

Which is everything I suppose.

Even the greatest stars

live their lives in the looking glass.

On the bike we fly down the culvert and I feel my stomach drop. I realise you aren’t hanging onto me. Your hands are stretched outwards like birdwings and you’re bouncing around on your seat. I feel the wind pass me by, speed blurring everything. I worry about you for a moment but then I let go in my own way, the weight of fear soaring away, rising up into the sky like a burst of birds.

We’re sharing this moment together, the drop of gravity as the path falls out under us, the wind shaping itself in our ears, the green of the grass and the height of the trees we ride beneath. The trills of electronic music made at the end of the 1970’s, when I was your age, rising out of the basket of our electric bike and soaring upwards, lifting our lives with them, carrying our dreams and our fears into a blue sky, devoid of clouds.

Love, Ragnar.