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| Bzzzz Image by Genevieve Nolan |
More than 20 years ago I wrote a story in which a family goes on a four-wheel-drive trip. The family consisted of two kids (a boy and a girl), their mother and her new partner. They are inexperienced four-wheel-drivers and, after a long hot sandy drive into the desert, they get bogged. The weather is lethally hot and dry and there’s no shade, only sand, scrubby bushes and pale blue blinding sky. They’re under-prepared. They struggle to dig out the vehicle, without success. They climb a low rise, look at their map, and realise that they are too far from help to walk and too remote to expect that another vehicle will happen along to save them. They all struggle to come to terms with the situation. Someone accidentally spills most of their water. The new “dad” soon tries to rig up some shade and he digs out shallow ditches to put the kids in. Thinking that this might keep them cool he partially buries them in what, to the son, look like mini-graves. For the son, in particular, the idea that his new “dad” is burying them alive reflects the whole family’s situation. This intensifies the anger, fear and hopelessness he already feels.
Overheated and dehydrated, the son begins hallucinating. He believes that the ants crawling on his skin find an access point and start crawling inside him. He thinks he is hollow, like a cheese grater. The surfaces that separate his inner and outer worlds begin to disintegrate and movement of the ants, marching between the two as if they are identical, describes this mental breakdown.
My brother, Dave, who had just finished his psych rounds as part of his training to become a doctor, read the story and said to me, “That bit with the ants… The imagery is typical of someone with schizophrenia.”
