I was home with my beautiful new baby, and because Gary wasn’t working full-time, he would come around quite frequently and visit. We talked in depth about his problems, but nothing prepared me for the time he showed me his scarred wrist. My brother had failed at a suicide attempt a year previously, and nobody knew.
He told me that the night he slashed his wrist he was alone in the house; his flatmate was away. All he knew was that he cut his wrist and the next morning woke up in his bed with it bandaged, and on the bed was an outline of his body, as if the bed was wet, but it was dry. He never knew how his wrist became bandaged. His flatmate couldn’t have done it because she hadn’t come home that night at all.
Other strange things began happening to Gary. As the comic strip I included in this book attests, he was a very gifted, amazing artist. The painting on the front of this book is also his work. If you look very closely at the front, you see the tunnel of light, and the angel helping the little boy -- a painting of himself. Now, look at the back of the boy, and you will see the dark demon chasing him.
The dark demon, I soon found out, was Father Len, back from our days in New Zealand.
Gary made up his own colours from the three primary colours, plus black and white. He told me he used to astrally travel to beautiful places that were not of this world, and he would see the colours there. As a student of all things spiritual, I had learned very early on that astral travel occurs when the soul leaves the body, usually during sleep or a deep meditative state, and travels to another dimension.
He soon told me another story. One night his bed rose from the floor and was violently shaken. Strange things went on in Gary’s world indeed, but none of it really surprised me, because strange, similar things went on in my world, too, such as the light that came to me in the church.
Gary later told me he had also tried to take his life on a trip to the United States. He had consumed a packet of aspirin but felt so sick and was suffering so much pain that he had to take himself to hospital. He was ordered to stay for psychiatric help, but he snuck out when then nurses were not looking.
While still in the U.S., he was riding his motorbike on the San Francisco Bridge when a major earthquake occurred. Almost miraculously, he was not hurt, despite substantial damage to the bridge. My family and I were desperate at the time to make sure Gary was safe; we watched the news on television, showing the graphic images of the devastation the earthquake caused. Only when we discovered that Gary was alive and well were any of us able to relax.
I believe my brother is the only person who ever lived that was actually ordered to leave a religious cult. Gary became involved in a weird cult while he was in San Francisco, but he couldn’t be brainwashed and he asked too many probing questions, so they kicked him out after four months.
After he told me about the slashed wrist incident, he also confided to me that he had been seeing a psychiatrist. He told me that he had asked Dr R if he could have possibly been molested. Dr R said yes, because Gary had marked a tick next to every point on the checklist that indicates childhood sexual abuse. Dr R had never brought up the subject of abuse to Gary; he waited until Gary mentioned it to him.
When Gary told me about the abuse, I cried so much, and for the first time in his life, my brother held me tightly and cried along with me, on my shoulder. Together we cried, holding each other in my lounge room in my new home in Hazelbrook as my baby Emma happily played, oblivious to the pain we were feeling. I couldn’t believe he had been through so much. I couldn’t believe he could have been molested. But he had. Thoughts of Father Len came rushing back to me. I used to think I imagined the white arm pulling me out from under the bed, but even today I cannot erase that memory and feeling from my mind.
Gary took me to see Dr R one day. I realized that without a doubt, Dr R believed Gary had repressed most of his memories of an assault, but he had only one memory of it. Gary remembered it this way, in similar words, describing himself as the objective, third-person “he,” as many adult children of abuse often refer to themselves:
“He is in our bathroom in 1972. He is in the bath. He watched as the man took off his priest collar. He watched the man undress to his white Y-fronts. Now the man is in the bath with him. The man says, “If two men can’t take a bath together, something is wrong.”
I asked Gary to draw a picture of Father Len. He illustrated a perfect impression of the Father Len, and I looked in horror as I saw for the first time in over 20 years the face of the man that pulled me out from under the bed. Shivers ran up my spine and I can recall, as I write this now, the horrible laugh of the priest who looked after us and scared me. Gary drew him so well, it was as if I were looking at a photo. Such was the talent of my brother.
As the years passed on, Gaz and I became closer and continued our talks about the Universe and the meaning of life. I tried to help him when I felt he needed it, though I didn’t want to intervene too heavily. I had a distinct, sinking feeling inside me that my brother would not make it to 40, that he would most probably take his life one day.
