2

It was, in fact, four years ago that Silas first went to Port Tremaine. He was, as he once tried to explain, a different person before that journey. He was like a tight coil that suddenly whipped up from the ground; a whirlwind that took leaves with it in a flurry; a wind that only died to start up again, picking up rubbish this time, a discarded piece of paper, cigarette butts, string, and dying down once more, only to appear seconds later, with no sense or purpose to its path.

He was twenty-four and had never had a job of any consequence. There was no need. He had a trust fund, and access to other sources of wealth that had been carefully secreted away from the authorities’ eyes for many years. He came from a family that I had heard of, that most people would have heard of, and although his surname was one that was associated with bankruptcy under dubious circumstances (and with considerable shame), he did not flinch as he spelt it out for the receptionist.

Silas was living in one of his family’s apartments at the time immediately preceding his departure, a huge place that had previously belonged to his grandmother. His parents were in Rome, a city his mother always found stifling in its conservatism, particularly after their years in Barcelona. She would ring late at night, often drunk from several afternoon Camparis, to complain about the expected tedium of that evening’s dinner party and to tell him how much she missed him.

If she found him at home, he had usually only just come in, invariably with a group of friends, all of them out of it, and he would put her on speaker phone, so that they could all talk; his enthusiasm for the dinner they’d had, the bar they’d been to, the conversations (or lack of) that had made up the evening, always out of proportion to the reality of the occasion.

She would ask him how Rachel was and he would say that she was fine, everyone laughing now because it had been several months since they had split up, and she would tell him that she was pleased; put her on, Silas, darling, and someone would start talking, start pretending to be Rachel, even if they had never met her in the first place.

In those days, he was rarely alone. With more money than he could possibly know how to spend, he found that people gathered around him, aware that he could, and would, provide food, drugs and entertainment for all. Silas knew this, and it never bothered him. He wanted the company, he needed people to affirm his existence; unless, of course, he was in one of those times.

What times? I asked him during one of our earlier sessions together, when we were still laying down the basis from which we could begin to work.

When I was shutting down, when I couldn’t bear to see anyone.

When the whirlwind died.

And it had a periodicity? I asked.

He did not know what I meant, and I explained. Did it come up regularly, this depression, did it occur at the same given times?

He thought for a moment and told me he wasn’t sure. In the case of his slump just prior to his departure, it was his mother’s death that had triggered the incident.

But I guess I was heading that way anyway, he said, looking out the window.

Throughout the time he had lived in a different country from his parents, Silas had only maintained contact with his mother. When he heard she had died, he felt, he told me, as though he was without anchor, completely adrift. He stopped answering the phone, he stayed at home by himself, he drank too much, and he took more drugs than usual (dope, cocaine, whatever, he explained). A friend of his father’s had booked him a ticket to go over to Italy, and although he had intentions of going, at the last minute he changed his mind.

Not consciously, he said. I just didn’t get on the plane.

When I asked him what eventually prompted him to go to Port Tremaine and make such a radical alteration to his life, Silas told me that he supposed it was a conversation he’d had with a friend of his, Jake.

Jake was a yoga teacher who lived in the apartment building opposite. He and Silas had sex, not often, just sometimes when they ran into each other walking home at night, or heading out on a Saturday morning.

Three weeks after he received the news of his mother’s heart attack, Silas saw Jake out on the street. There had been a storm. Hailstones, like oranges, had hurtled out of the sky, pummelling cars and shattering windows, bringing everyone out in its wake. The road was covered in debris, car alarms wailed and people wandered around like spectators at a carnival, amazed by the damage. In the sparkling stillness, Silas just observed the mayhem and breathed in the sweetness of frangipani and lemon-scented gum, flowers and leaves pulverised by the ice.

Jake told him that he looked terrible, which he did.

You could do with a retreat, he suggested and he stretched out on the parquetry floor of Silas’s bedroom, legs in the splits, as he reached for his big toe. This was the kind of thing he did after sex, and Silas smiled wryly as he told me that it was one of the reasons why their relationship had never gone any further than it had.

Why don’t you get away? His body bent in the other direction. Take some time out, find out what it’s like to be without all this, and he waved his hand around the room.

It was a throw-away suggestion, but it was one that stuck.

Silas wanted to keep moving, he had to, it was the way in which he survived, and at that stage he would have clung to anything that seemed to hold any possibility of pulling him out of the state he was in.

In the days that followed, he began to toy with the idea. He had received a list of his mother’s assets from one of the family’s solicitors. It was the value of the house that he noticed first. The solicitor had scrawled a figure, $15 000, followed by a series of question marks next to the brief description, ‘four bedrooms, dilapidated’. Silas could not believe anything could be so cheap, and he searched maps for the name of the town.

It was three hours south of the country in which she had grown up, a station that is probably not far from the place where I am staying now. Silas had seen faded black and white photographs of her childhood home – bleached barren land, country that rolled for miles under flat, hard skies – and as he traced his finger around the coastline, he read names like Cape Disaster, Desperation Point and then, finally, the far more ordinary Port Tremaine.

He began to spread maps across the floor, splashing red wine across the terrain, conjuring up visions of who he would be, what he would do when he got there, convincing himself that this was a possible direction to take; but more than that, it was the answer to the stultifying emptiness that was threatening to crush him. And, if he hated it, if it was a wrong move, well, he could always just come back. There was nothing to hold him anywhere really.

As Silas told me the story, he glanced up at the clock. In those initial appointments, I could see his discomfort each time we began to discuss Port Tremaine, as well as his desire to talk, both at odds with each other.

I am not a therapist, I told him during our first session, that is something you should understand. If you feel it’s therapy you need, or if you just want to confess all your crimes and misdemeanours, I may not he the person for you.

He looked away as he shifted in his chair.

It’s just that I’m not equipped to guide you in the ways you might be expecting. I knew I needed to be gentle with him, because he was, like so many patients, uncertain as to why he had come and fearful as to what he would find himself revealing. The help I offer is remedies. Remedies that will hopefully alleviate not only the physical symptoms, but the mental and emotional as well, if that’s what you need. In order to choose the remedy, we may have to visit the past, but we will be doing so in a particular way.

Silas nodded, trying to look as though he understood, as though he had nothing to hide.

In those early days, I was never sure whether we would make any progress. I could see he did not have any faith in what I do (in fact, like most of my patients, he had close to no understanding of the process), but over the years since his return from Port Tremaine, he had found no help from traditional medicine, and he had become, as he admitted reluctantly, somewhat desperate.

As he sketched out his life for me prior to that trip, I was astounded at the hedonistic abandon that had clearly been an integral part of who he was. Not because it shocked me, but because the change that had occurred appeared to be so dramatic.

Even as a child he had never been able to keep still. The numerous nannies who were hired to look after him had usually quit after a couple of weeks. There was a brief period in which his mother had taken him to psychiatrists, all of whom had pronounced him to be precociously bright, somewhat difficult, but quite within the range of normal, and with no relief to be found in their verdicts, she had decided to just accept the way he was. If the nannies threatened to quit, she offered them a raise. When that didn’t work, there was always another who would take the job (particularly with its accompanying salary). If Silas had too much energy, well, there was no point fighting it, and she took to bringing him down from his room for dinner-party guests, his wild dancing to any music they chose to play always a sure source of entertainment, particularly after they’d had a few drinks. And as he got older, there were the boarding schools.

Eight by the time I was sixteen, he admitted.

Why? I asked.

He looked out the window as he listed his sins: selling drugs, sex in the dormitories, refusing to participate in sport; he was even an instigator in a Gay Pride rally despite having no clear sexual preference. Just the usual stuff, he told me.

His parents finally found an experimental school that was willing to take him.

The School Without Walls.

I smiled as he told me the name. I knew it. I had been there myself, three years earlier.

Similar sins, I told Silas, unable to hide the glimmer of amusement in my eyes as I remembered the way in which I, too, had rebelled, shortly after my mother was first hospitalised with depression, and how my father, an analyst, believed that the answer was more freedom, rather than less.

It was at that moment that Silas decided he would attempt to trust me, despite the misgivings he’d had on first entering the building and seeing the tenants listed at the entrance: aura readers, psychic healers and colour therapists.

As he shifted in his chair and looked around the consulting room, he told me he wanted this to work, he needed it to work, and I promised him I would do all I could to help.