WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES

One Man’s Journey Through the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 5

The Man in the Suit

My first suit had nothing to do with accounting, depression, stress or the construction of a professional identity. I bought it for the final school formal presentation because, at the time, that seemed like the sort of occasion for which a young bloke was supposed to own a suit. There was no great ceremony attached to the purchase and certainly no thought that this collection of matching cloth would eventually become such a significant part of the person I was expected to be. It was simply a suit, bought for an occasion, and once the occasion was over it went into the wardrobe awaiting whatever use might come next.

Then the word accountant entered the vocabulary and suddenly the suit had a purpose I had never contemplated when I bought it. When I interviewed with George Evans for what would become my first job in accounting, one of the questions he asked was whether I owned a suit, and I was rather proud to be able to tell him that I did. Apparently possession of one was among the unofficial qualifications necessary to begin the transformation from schoolboy into professional man, and I had at least managed to tick that particular box before I had earned my first dollar from the profession.

Naturally, having proudly confirmed that I owned the required equipment, I didn’t wear it on my first day. It was raining miserably and I had only one decent suit, so the perfectly logical conclusion of seventeen-year-old Jeff Banks was that wearing it would risk getting it dirty. Instead, I arrived for my first day in the accounting profession wearing brown jeans and a tobacco-coloured jumper, whereupon somebody took one look at the firm’s newest aspiring professional and found me an appropriate position inside a compactus doing filing. There I could spend the day learning something about the firm’s records while being safely removed from anywhere a client might see what the latest generation of accountants apparently looked like.

There was nothing particularly unusual about George’s expectation because, in those days, if you were an accountant you wore a suit. It marked you as a professional in much the same way that other occupations had uniforms, except ours came with a tie and the expectation that the person inside it probably knew what he was talking about. My aunt, who was a Salvation Army officer, managed to find a number of suits that fitted me, which meant I didn’t have to wear the same garment day after day through those first weeks, months and years of employment. Slowly, the sight of Jeff Banks in a suit stopped being unusual and the schoolboy who had bought one for a formal presentation began disappearing inside the professional he was becoming.

At Ruwald and Evans, the early years were principally about process. I learned accounting at a time when handwritten books still mattered, when manual labour was genuinely part of producing a set of accounts and when the movement towards computerised accounting happened slowly and cautiously rather than because somebody announced that everything we had been doing yesterday was suddenly obsolete. I grew into computer accounting at roughly the same speed as the firm did, carrying an understanding of the manual system with me as we ventured into the digital one. There was something valuable in knowing what the computer was replacing before being asked to believe that the computer knew how to replace it.

Both partners were generous in allowing younger staff to sit in the corner of the office while they interviewed clients. We weren’t expected to contribute much in those early encounters, but we were expected to watch, listen and learn how the relationship between accountant and client actually worked. Even on larger audit assignments we dealt with client staff from relatively early in our careers, so interacting with people gradually became part of the process rather than something reserved for the day when somebody decided we were sufficiently qualified. Accounting was teaching me numbers and taxation, but the office was quietly teaching me something else: eventually somebody had to sit across the desk from another human being and explain what all those numbers meant.

I discovered that I was good at the technical side. I progressed through the tax system, obtained my tax agent’s certificate and found myself doing things that university-qualified accountants were doing despite having arrived through a different door. By the time I was approaching twenty-five, I was effectively operating something resembling my own little practice within the larger firm, and the HSC result that had once appeared to define the limits of what might come next was becoming less relevant with every passing year. There was probably some danger in that growing confidence, because success has a habit of whispering that the last thing you did well is proof that you will know how to handle the next thing too.

The first significant indication came when Bruce handed me a difficult taxation matter involving a client who had made claims in a tax return that weren’t exactly spurious, but were close enough to the boundary that nobody was particularly optimistic about successfully objecting to the assessment issued by the Tax Office. The client wanted us to try, so an objection had to be prepared, and the task found its way to me. I prepared the objection, assembled the argument and sent it into the machinery with no great expectation that the machinery was going to agree with me. When we won, the result sent a few ripples around the office because suddenly there was evidence that young Jeff Banks might possess skills beyond the level expected of him at that point in his career.

From then on, anything particularly tricky involving correspondence with the Tax Office on matters of principle tended to find its way onto my desk. The process had produced a result, the result produced confidence and confidence encouraged the next difficult problem to be handed in my direction. My head probably swelled beyond the dimensions justified by my actual capabilities because technical expertise was developing much more rapidly than my ability to interact personally with people. None of that mattered terribly much when there was another problem waiting to be solved, because problems had one enormous advantage over emotions: they generally had processes.

You identified what was wrong, gathered the information, researched the position, prepared the argument and tried to win. If you didn’t win, you reconsidered the information, changed the argument or discovered what you had missed, but there was always movement and something tangible upon which the brain could work. A problem could be placed on the desk, pulled apart and attacked from different directions until something resembling an answer emerged. Somewhere along the way, that attraction to process became attached to another philosophy that would remain with me for far longer than it deserved.

There is no such thing as stress.

I don’t remember anybody handing me those words engraved on a plaque, nor do I remember conducting any deep philosophical examination of whether they were true. They simply became part of the way life was approached, sometimes spoken as a joke and sometimes apparently accepted as fact, until the difference between the two became difficult to identify. There was work, there were deadlines, there were clients, bills, responsibilities and problems, and there were things that needed to be done because nobody else was necessarily going to do them. Calling any of that stress seemed almost like inventing an unnecessary additional problem when the existing ones already required attention.

Looking backwards from the considerably safer distance of several decades, it would be easy to apply modern terminology to the young bloke in the suit and diagnose every difficult day as evidence of something that had not yet been recognised. I don’t want to do that because I don’t believe I was wandering around Ruwald and Evans secretly crippled by depression while putting on a brave face for everybody around me. I was young, progressing, succeeding and finding my feet, while beginning to understand that there might be considerably more available to me than the results of my HSC had suggested. If there were darker thoughts or pressures gathering somewhere underneath, the world in which I lived had provided neither the vocabulary nor the inclination to stop and conduct an audit of them.

The pathway through TAFE rather than directly through university had not closed the doors I might once have imagined it would close. The absence of financial backing simply meant that whatever was going to happen next would have to be built rather than given, and each achievement provided another piece of evidence that building it was possible. That mattered because the suit was not my version of Dad’s rock, despite the temptation to draw such a neat psychological line between father and son. If anything, the suit became a defiance of it.

Dad’s world had certainly taught me something about enduring whatever arrived because that was simply what you did. There were no lengthy examinations of feelings and certainly no family conferences convened to consider the emotional consequences of the latest difficulty, because something happened, you dealt with it and life moved on. The suit, however, represented what might happen if some of the ropes that had bound childhood could be loosened. It represented education acquired by a different route, professional standing earned rather than inherited, clients who increasingly listened when I spoke and a career developing according to what I could do rather than where I had started.

The boy wasn’t becoming another version of the Rock, even if some of the lessons learned from him were travelling along for the ride. He was discovering that competence could open doors and that knowledge could create authority, while the suit became the outward evidence that he belonged in the room once the door opened. It was less armour against the world than evidence of escape from some of the limitations that had once seemed to define it. The Man in the Suit was therefore not born as camouflage; he was born as an achievement.

Away from the office there were other ways of fitting into the world. I could play cricket with blokes whose ages often bore little relationship to mine, and humour became one of the easiest ways of bridging the gap. Playing the village idiot was considerably easier than trying to establish what everybody had in common, and making people laugh had the useful side effect of ensuring that nobody looked too closely at the bloke telling the joke. I doubt that I consciously understood humour as protection then, but it became another process that worked, and anything that worked tended to remain in the toolkit.

There were also cars, including a Datsun 1000 fastback in which I somehow managed to get airborne one afternoon with thirteen people inside it, which probably tells you more about youth than it does about either accounting or depression. Then there was the Datsun 240Z with wheels so wide that parking the bloody thing could become an engineering exercise in its own right, and both cars had excellent sound systems that tended to be played very loudly. Cars became places where I could disappear without actually going anywhere, whether on long drives from Sydney to Mount Buffalo or travelling across the city to audit assignments. The suit was generally still being worn, but the accountant inside it could temporarily retreat behind a steering wheel, an engine and enough volume from the speakers to occupy whatever space remained.

One afternoon a highway patrol officer pulled me over after I crossed double yellow lines, and I got out of the car as he approached dressed in a three-piece suit. Something about his reaction suggested that he thought he might be dealing with a detective or somebody else sufficiently important to make the encounter inconvenient, and whether that interpretation was entirely accurate hardly matters now. What mattered was what the incident said to me about the transformation already taking place. People saw something when you wore the suit, and increasingly I was beginning to see something too.

The process continued through marriage, fatherhood, business and eventually the transition from working for somebody else to becoming one of the people responsible for everything. Clare was part of those earlier years, as were Justin and Julian, and with those relationships came another proposition that required no philosophical analysis whatsoever: I had to provide. There wasn’t a family financial reservoir sitting behind me waiting to catch everything if I got it wrong, nor was there a path already prepared along which I merely needed to walk. The HSC result had sent me towards TAFE rather than immediately towards university, and from there the lesson had been reinforced repeatedly that whatever was going to happen would happen because I made it happen.

Providing therefore became another process. If the work became difficult, you worked harder; if something went wrong, you fixed it; and if somebody required an answer, you found one. There was no particular virtue attached to this in my mind because it was simply what was required, the same way getting up in the morning was required and paying the bills was required. If all of that became stressful, the answer remained conveniently available because there was no such thing as stress.

The beauty of that philosophy was that it required absolutely no treatment. You cannot suffer from something that doesn’t exist, and you certainly don’t have to examine the consequences of something you have already dismissed as an invention. The problem is that the body and mind are under no obligation to accept the philosophies we construct for them. Difficult thoughts don’t evaporate merely because we refuse to give them names, and pressures don’t cease to accumulate simply because the person carrying them has decided they are an ordinary part of life.

Instead, they can simply be pushed aside and allowed to sit there while attention is directed somewhere more useful. There was always another client, another tax problem, another set of accounts, another deadline, another argument to prepare or another business issue requiring somebody to decide what happened next. Process became both the fuel and the remedy because losing myself inside a problem allowed everything outside that problem to temporarily cease demanding attention. Work could therefore contribute to the pressure while simultaneously providing somewhere to hide from it.

That distinction matters because I don’t believe work was simply the villain in this story. There was satisfaction in moving from uncertainty towards an answer, and process allowed me to win in a way that emotions never promised to do. Numbers could be reconciled, tax legislation could be researched, arguments could be constructed, clients could be advised and decisions could be made. Even mistakes, and I have made a few, existed within a framework where something could usually be done next.

Yet behind the growing professional confidence there was another question that never disappeared completely, and it was a question considerably harder to process than a tax objection. The question was whether I was a fraud, because accounting operates in a world where today’s advice can sometimes return years later carrying a solicitor’s letter and mistakes don’t always have the courtesy to announce themselves immediately. Knowledge itself carries the uncomfortable requirement of understanding how much remains unknown, while professional confidence sometimes requires you to proceed despite knowing precisely that. For the boy who had once wondered whether he measured up, that uncertainty probably found particularly fertile soil.

The irony was that the evidence increasingly suggested I wasn’t a fraud at all. Clients came, difficult work arrived, problems were solved and my ability to attract clients eventually exceeded what some of my peers might have expected, yet success never entirely eliminated the possibility of being found wanting next time. There was no reason to sit around examining that contradiction because sitting around examining yourself wasn’t part of the process. There was work to do, and there was no such thing as stress.

Eventually the Man in the Suit acquired another stage when public speaking became part of my professional life. I would get nervous before speaking, but once unleashed the nervous bloke disappeared into something I have since described as the monster in the suit. Anybody unfortunate enough to be controlling my slides discovered very quickly that the presentation we had prepared beforehand bore only a passing relationship to the presentation I was now delivering. I would move forwards and backwards through the material according to whatever progression seemed logical inside my head at that particular moment, leaving the poor person controlling the slides desperately trying to locate whichever piece of information I had unexpectedly decided belonged next.

Sitting at the desk beforehand, the presentation had possessed order, and standing on the stage I was equally convinced that what I was doing possessed order as well. The problem was that the two forms of order were not necessarily related, and I sometimes wonder now whether there was something else trying to escape during those performances. I don’t know, and I am wary of manufacturing psychological explanations merely because hindsight makes them available. What I do know is that once the monster in the suit was released, he could perform, and performance became another environment in which process overpowered whatever else might have been happening underneath.

Humour performed much the same function because the bloke making the joke didn’t need to stop being whatever else he might have been underneath. It created another way of fitting into a group and another method of redirecting attention, while even the ordinary question How are you? could be handled without really answering it. I became adept at turning the conversation around because I often found that somebody asking about me was perfectly happy to talk about whatever was happening inside their own microcosm that day. Give them the opportunity and the spotlight moved away without anybody noticing that the original question had disappeared.

Nobody ever came to me during those years and announced that they had seen through the performance, but I now wonder whether performance is even the correct word. Performance suggests that I possessed something clearly identified and consciously decided to hide it, whereas I don’t remember a little voice saying that I was depressed and must make sure nobody discovered it. There was simply life, and within that life there was process, responsibility, humour, work and an assumption that whatever arrived would be dealt with. Concealment becomes remarkably easy when the person doing the concealing doesn’t fully recognise what he is supposed to be hiding.

That is where the phrase there is no such thing as stress becomes more important than the suit itself. The suit might have been visible, but the philosophy underneath it meant there was no requirement to distinguish between ordinary pressure, exhaustion, anxiety, anger and whatever darker elements might occasionally have been moving around beneath them. Everything could be fed into the same machine and the machine had only one setting: keep going. If the machine continued producing results, there appeared to be little reason to dismantle it simply to discover why it was beginning to make strange noises.

The transition into business ownership tested that machine considerably more severely. Working for somebody and being the boss are entirely different experiences because the problems no longer stop at the edge of your desk. Staff bring their problems, clients bring theirs, cash flow contributes another collection, government brings compliance and families require provision while businesses require leadership. Eventually somebody has to make the decision, and when your name is attached to the business there are fewer places available to pass that decision elsewhere.

Before bankruptcy there was Waller and Co., then Waller Banks and Co., while after bankruptcy came the long movement towards what would eventually become Banks Consultancy. Those are different periods and deserve to remain different periods, but the bloke moving through them possessed one remarkably consistent characteristic: he kept finding the next process and doing whatever that process required. Good times did not change that behaviour and bad times did not change it either, because the same machinery that created pressure could often provide the means of escaping from it. Another problem was not necessarily an additional burden if solving that problem allowed me to stop thinking about all the others.

By the time Robyn and I were together, the contradictions had become much harder to ignore. Banks Consultancy could do what an accounting practice was supposed to do, while as consultants we could become involved in clients’ businesses at a level that went far beyond preparing accounts and tax returns. Robyn once suggested that we weren’t running an accounting practice at all but a marriage counselling service, and there was considerable truth hidden inside the joke. We could sit with other people, listen to their problems, pull apart the financial and commercial issues surrounding them and help find a pathway forward while our own firm was beginning to fall apart from the inside.

Staff issues became increasingly poisonous and eventually Robyn was effectively ejected from the firm in a coup handled so appallingly by our HR consultants that an owner of the business found herself placed on a forced holiday because staff believed they were under threat. Some apparently believed they could judge Robyn’s mood from the sound of her heels clicking across the concrete as she entered the office, which would almost be funny if the consequences had not been so destructive. The episode exposed issues we had been having with staff for some time and heightened my own anxiety towards dealing with women in the workforce. Yet even as the business environment deteriorated, the ordinary work of the business did not politely agree to stop while we sorted ourselves out.

Clients still needed answers, tax returns still had to be completed and problems continued to arrive regardless of whether the people expected to solve them were travelling particularly well. That was when the philosophy that had once seemed almost amusing became increasingly dangerous, because anger was becoming harder to dismiss and irritation was becoming disproportionate to the events provoking it. Robyn was receiving far too much of whatever remained after the professional world had taken its share, while staff and clients could trigger reactions that would once have been easier to contain. The machine was still functioning, but functioning and functioning well were becoming very different propositions.

Eventually we went to the doctor, but even that did not cause the Man in the Suit to disappear. Medication arrived, treatment arrived and the work continued because the work had always continued. Later the practice was sold and an earnout period followed, providing yet another reason to remain inside the machinery for a while longer. By then some of the damage had already been done, but the instinctive response remained familiar because process had spent decades proving itself capable of carrying me through almost anything.

Perhaps that is why I now think the expression high-functioning depression only partly describes what happened to me. It makes the story sound too deliberate, as though there were a Depression Jeff hidden underneath while Professional Jeff was consciously dispatched each morning to fool the world. I don’t remember two men taking turns, nor do I remember making a daily decision to conceal one from everybody who encountered the other. There was one man moving through different environments and responding to each of them with whatever part of himself seemed necessary at the time.

There was the frightened boy who sometimes worried that somebody might eventually discover who he really was, but there was also the accountant who could solve technical problems and the adviser who attracted clients beyond expectations. There was the businessman who survived bankruptcy and started again, the husband and father who understood that providing wasn’t optional, the speaker who became a monster once somebody handed him a microphone and the idiot making the joke because laughter made almost every room easier to occupy. None of those men was false and none of them needs to be retrospectively exposed as an elaborate disguise for depression.

What connected them was the rock of process, although it was a very different rock from Dad’s. Mine was built around movement: find the problem, work out the answer, do the next thing, provide, survive and then repeat the process when tomorrow inevitably supplied another problem. For much of my life depression did not defeat that machinery, and perhaps that is precisely why it could travel alongside it for so long. The fact that the machine continued to operate became its own evidence that there was no compelling reason to look too closely at what was happening inside it.

Perhaps depression’s greatest disguise, then, isn’t sadness, and it may not even be happiness because happiness still suggests somebody deliberately smiling while hiding something darker underneath. Its greatest disguise may simply be functionality: the ability to answer the email, solve the tax problem, make the joke, advise the client, deliver the presentation, provide for the family and turn up again tomorrow. Every completed task becomes another piece of evidence that the machinery still works, while nobody asks what it is costing to keep the machinery running.

The suit helped because it gave the outside world something recognisable and gave me a role I understood. Humour helped because laughter made things easier, while work helped because work contained processes and processes offered answers. For a very long time those things were both the fuel and the remedy, and when darker thoughts or pressures appeared there was always another task available into which they could be pushed.

The philosophy holding all of it together had survived because the Man in the Suit had spent decades apparently proving it right. He had worked, provided, failed, recovered, advised, performed, rebuilt and continued moving whenever life shoved him sideways, and the process had repeatedly carried him through. Only much later did the flaw in the argument become impossible to avoid, because continuing to function had never actually proved the absence of stress.

It had merely proved how much stress a functioning man could carry.