Europe @ 2.4 km/h Read Free Page B

military threat just over the horizon?
    To understand that, he would need a power of imagination to sense what it might be like to feel trapped and alone in the workplace but find no refuge at home from the menace abroad.

    On the evening of August 19, the fuse to my suicide attempt was lit. Could Ivan, or anyone, appreciate why amid the disintegration of an entire society I snapped, and ran down the street yelling that this was the end of the world? Certainly he could understand why a police van would pick me up and its officers lock me up overnight — and even, perhaps with a shudder of horror, pity my reduced state, petrified and under near constant surveillance, in a Bahraini asylum for the next ten days where I was questioned, analysed and sedated, diagnosed ‘borderline manic depressive’, stabilised and at last released — not back to work but shipped home, a certified failure.
    My decision to discard the lithium once out of any obvious external danger was logical enough, but no one apart from ‘the wretched of the earth’ can truly know the humiliating shame and naked dread that crippled my being as the ensuing months brought not recovery but a dousing of all the lights of hope, one by one.

    You can’t say I didn’t put up a resistance. Whatever a ‘nervous wreck’ can do to restore himself to himself I did: seeking out psychiatric advice, the benefits of aromatherapy, relaxation and all manner of other cures for insomnia. When the fight had gone out of me, I turned to flight, quite literally. Year’s end found me again in London, where I had last tasted happiness before the crash. But now it was a capital of desolation, bereft of work and hope alike. That round-the-world ticket from Melbourne permitted me to go in only one direction, from the east towards the setting sun. I could only flee so far.
    Everywhere I travelled in thrall to my principal enemy, Despair. Could a friend have helped? No way I could think of. Some agonies are so private they cannot be shared, the loss of one’s sanity above all.
    Despair, to which Ivan does not see me surrendering now, had me comprehensively conquered then. I bowed my head to the counsel of Despair, ‘Don’t spread your Hell to others, you’ll only drag them down’. Yet not until I arrived back in Melbourne at the end of February 1991 — after a brief unavailing stopover in Vancouver — did I realise for a certainty that I’d come home to die.

    Exits there are aplenty. I might have found another had I not been staying with an old journalistic colleague and her friends in an East Melbourne mansion block and they not all gone out for the evening. I might have spied another road to extinction if so many of them, troubled souls, hadn’t left a pharmacopoeia’s worth of tablets on their various bedside tables.
    Even after the mind has surrendered to Despair, dear Ivan, let me assure you, every sinew of the body strains against oblivion. Nevertheless, I might have called off that deed if one of my fellow guests had come back early. But my animal need to stop this interminable pain found a path through these converging factors, and in a trice the only possible thing I must do was as obvious as the night that follows day. In the quietest spell of a warm March night, after hours of restless pacing, I sat imperturbably still on a window sill, four floors up, steadied myself featherlight against the frame, and gently let go …
    The thud as my body hit 15 metres below was heard by the friend whose hospitality I was grievously abusing, and who had arrived home just minutes before. Seven months in the world-class Austin Hospital set me back on the road to happiness, which for curious old me requires journeys such as the 2007 crossing of Europe that I have interrupted for your benefit — leaving Ivan at his revolving door.

    Today strangers who blurt out, ‘What happened to you?’ almost never get a straight answer, because these days I won’t waste my breath. But