AFFIDAVIT

I never in thirty years realised quite how angry I was. It usually moves in identifiable stages: a pulse in the calf, then the biceps and shoulder; next, if the stimulus continues, an all over tremor as adrenaline storms the body; in the red-line final stage evolution ceases to matter as the top lip twitches violently then peels back to show the canines.

            Saturday, watching the investigative news program unfold the stages didn’t occur. When the journalist stood in front of Parramatta courthouse unable to say the priest’s name I went straight to the lip twitch. Father (initial)...Father (initial)...Father (initial – see I can’t use it either). By the time they showed his blurry face walking the streets of Armidale I didn’t know whether to chew someone’s throat out or climb inside myself.

            And then it’s the text messages, my desperately catholic mother watching the same program: his name was (......) wasn’t it? And weren’t you lucky, trying to persuade herself against what’s been there to see for so long, seeing the stories of boys whose trajectories mirror my own: the bright kid who ceased to be interested in school; the inability to hold down a job; the succession of troubled, abused, abusive women. The heroin. There’s no denial like religious denial; unless it’s maternal denial.

            In the end you crawl inside yourself and hope you’ll eventually find something worth saving. I’ve managed to make and hold on to a handful of healthy friendships; people as or more screwed up than I am, but with a sense of perspective and the desire to be better. I’ve managed, as yet, not to destroy myself; I’ve ceased actively trying.

The rage that jumped up and smacked me Saturday at last has a shape, a face, a name. You get into the habit of burying things, and sometimes they go so deep you don’t recognise them when they re-emerge. I recognise this. I can now capture and hold on to it, examine it like a nineteenth century naturalist, describe and classify it, and hopefully skewer it to the page of a volume I can consign to my library of read books: unable to be discarded, but understood, and rendered useful.

The friends who’ve helped prepare me to do this know who they are, know I’d die for them, and don’t need to be named. Some of them are reading this now.

These are my last words on this.