Addition (16 page)

12

I am quiet during the drive home. The strange place, strange food and seeing Larry and Seamus together have left me heady and exhausted. Perhaps I’m coming down with something. Seamus is quiet too, until he parks in front of my flat.

‘Did you have a good time?’ he says.

I lean back in the seat. ‘Amazing. The best thing I’ve done in ages.’

‘There’s a whole world out there, you know Grace. A school recital really shouldn’t be the best thing you’ve done in ages.’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘It’s really not. Prisoners in minimum security have more freedom than you. You deserve more from life than this.’

I open the car door, and lean across and kiss his cheek. ‘Thanks for the ride.’ I’d like to stay in the car and talk, but I need to go. I have to start preparing dinner in 16 minutes.

After dinner I sit on the edge of my bed and pick up Nikola’s photo—he’s right side up at the moment, but he’s spent a lot of time face down over the last 6 weeks and 1 day since I first met Seamus at the supermarket.

Nikola was sick several times. When he was twenty-five he became so hypersensitive that he could do nothing but take to his bed. A sound of a bee buzzing in the garden outside his room would explode inside his head—an enormous, cavernous sound. If someone walked in the house the vibrations would magnify up his body until he could hardly bear the shaking. A train travelling through the countryside miles away would rattle his teeth and the roots of each hair in his head. His parents installed rubber matting under the legs of his bed so he could sleep. I feel like this sometimes, like each time a number hits me my head recoils and if I were to squeeze one more number into my body they would seep out from my eyeballs and my nose and drizzle from my ears.

This wasn’t Nikola’s only strange symptom. Since childhood, whenever he became excited he would see bursts of light before his eyes that momentarily blinded him. Sometimes he actually believed the room in which he stood was on fire. Nikola also had visions, images of things he had seen that were unwilling to lie quietly in his memory. These flashes were often cued from conversations, so if, while chatting to him, you mentioned the word ‘hammer’, he would be confronted by the image of a hammer so vivid it blocked the rest of his sight and took him some time to decide if it was real. If he stretched his hand out in front, the image would close in around it and remain in place. He knew it was unusual. He was worried. He saw doctor after doctor, but none had any idea what made his mind so special.

It may have upset him at the time, but in typical Nikola style he made the most of it. Every invention he made throughout his life, he visualised first. He rarely made models because the images in his head were complete in every way. He could mentally switch on engines and generators and watch them run. He could manipulate them, turn them over and test them. This was one of the reasons he had no partners or colleagues—other engineers wanted blueprints and scale drawings. Nikola had no need.

The images themselves gave him the idea for another invention, one he never made. He believed that his visions were some kind of projection from the brain on to the retina, and, logically extending this, it should be possible to devise a machine to capture and project them on a screen. In the late 1800s, before the rise of the motion picture and decades before television, Nikola envisaged sharing the scenes from your life with another, like a holiday slide night without the camera.

Just as well Nikola wasn’t alive now. Imagine a child these days telling a doctor they saw pictures in front of their eyes, pictures so vivid they couldn’t differentiate them from reality. Not to mention the counting. It’s easy to see what would happen to that poor little boy. Psychiatrists. Behavioural therapists. Drugs. They’d probably say he was schizophrenic or psychotic or something. They would treat him, and all the strange workings of his brain would stop. He would no longer count or have visions. He would never grow up to become an inventor. All that matters to doctors now is that we humans become closer to being the same. Closer to average.

I know about this pressure to conform and have managed to withstand it. When I was in the hospital 25 months ago I was prescribed all kinds of medication. I told the doctors I took it, but I rarely did. Rarely enough for it to have no effect on my personality. Some of the nurses were conscientious and would watch me swallow, but I learned quickly how to tuck the tablets under my tongue. Others couldn’t be bothered checking. They had so much to think about—how many packets of hospital gloves they could slide into their handbag before anyone noticed, the whereabouts of their teenage daughters, the oozing of last night’s semen on to their already-stained underwear. It was easy to tip the pills down the sink in my privately insured room.

They told me back then that taking the pills could stop me counting. Perhaps it could have. But I didn’t take the pills because you can never tell—that’s the lesson. You never know what is meant to be, what is right, what will eventually save you. I remember sitting in my hospital bed thinking: What would the world have lost if some hospital had ‘cured’ Nikola? If I change myself, how will I be diminished?

But right now, sitting on my bed, I’m not thinking about what the world might have lost. I’m thinking about sitting in a car for as long as I like, going out to dinner, sleeping in on Sundays. I’m thinking about how much I have to gain.

It all happens very fast. In a little over two weeks I have appointments with a psychiatrist and a behavioural therapist. I meet the psychiatrist first. Professor Segrove’s office is the size of my whole flat but furnished only with a serious bookcase, an enormous oak desk with a green top, two bucket chesterfields and a chesterfield couch. There’s no way I’m lying on the couch. Seamus offered to come up with me, but there’s not a chance I’ll let him. Instead he waits in the car.

Professor Segrove is shiny bald with ferocious eyebrows and wears a red polka-dot bowtie and red braces over a white shirt. His grey trousers must be tailored because they are a snug fit around his spherical tummy yet taper down to his skinny ankles and rest atop his tiny handmade shoes. ‘So, Grace. What brings you here?’ He grins mercilessly and pulls on his bowtie. This is a disconcerting habit in a psychiatrist, especially since I’ve always considered bowties to be a sign of mental illness, a kind of subliminal desire to garrotte oneself.

‘Just wondered if you validate parking.’ 75 books on the top shelf.

He smiles. He nods. ‘Very good, very good. The referral from the GP says you think it’s time to address your counting.’ He gestures to a folder on his desk. An extraordinary number of stiff white hairs stick straight up out of his eyebrows—possibly redirected hairs that have abandoned his head. They move so erratically when he speaks that I lose count and have to start again. Almost impossible to be sure, but I think 15 left, 17 right.

‘That’s a big step,’ he continues. ‘How old were you when you started to count?’

I nearly say I was three years old, like everyone, but I’ve come all this way. Seamus has taken a half day off work to drive me. I cross my legs. Then I uncross them and cross them the other way.

‘To varying degrees, since I was eight.’

Professor Segrove leans forward and grins, hands on his chin. He is enthusiastic, like a spotty boy at McDonald’s who beams because, yes, you would like fries with that. It’s frightening to see someone who so loves his work.

He looks at the folder again. ‘I see here you’ve been hospitalised once before. Was this when the counting began to interfere with your life?’

‘Yes. 25 months ago.’ Only 45 books on the second shelf. Fatter ones.

‘Twenty-five months ago.’ He’s taking notes now, writing on a fat wad of plain paper, and still grinning. Why on earth is he grinning like that? This can’t be that much fun. Does he imagine I will become fodder for an academic paper in
New Shrink Monthly
? ‘The baffling case of Grace V’?

‘Grace, you’ve done very well. Often the most difficult part for people with obsessive compulsive disorder is actually beginning treatment, because it’s such a change to their normal routine. Often people cancel their first appointments.’

Often people are smarter than I am.

‘It was a difficult night last night. I…’ I dig my fingers into the leather of the chair. ‘I measured all the dimensions…the walls…of my apartment. Then I wrote the numbers on the walls. Seamus, my boyfriend…he came over to help at 2.00 a.m. Actually 2.09 a.m.’ I don’t mention how soothing it was to see those numbers on the walls this morning. Whatever happens, I’m keeping them.

He writes this down. The poor thing is probably stuck in a loveless marriage, living in a cold, empty house in Kew or Canterbury paying private school fees for a child he doesn’t realise isn’t his. If a woman who writes numbers on her walls is so exciting—well, this can be my good deed for the week. He stands up, walks to the bookcase (can’t count the bottom shelf from here), then sits down again.

I try not to think about how many other perfectly well people have sat in this handsome chesterfield with 19 dimples on the backrest. About how many other innocent little quirks Professor Segrove—no first name on the door, not even an initial, though he looks like a Julius—is working so hard to expel. Fussy eater? Can’t stand chicken? ‘Come, my chicken-loathing friend. I will cure you!’ Cry at old movies or phone company ads where the handsome Italian son calls Mamma back in the village? Arise, and walk! Soon you shall cast aside your obvious depressive illness with possible borderline personality tendencies and become as hard-hearted as the rest of us, able to watch the six o’clock news every day without so much as a twinge of compassion! In the hands of Professor Segrove we will all become normal.

‘How do you feel if you can’t count things?’

Like I’ve got every disease known to man and a few that haven’t been discovered yet. ‘Anxious, I suppose. Sometimes.’

As if no one else in the world ever worries. Nikola had enormous challenges, things that seemed impossible at the time, dreams even bigger than electricity. Today, with TV, radio, mobile phone and Bluetooth signals zipping around us continually, it’s easy to underestimate the genius behind the vision. But imagine the world in 1900, with none of those things. Queen Victoria is still on the throne. Australia isn’t even a country. Women don’t have the vote.

Professor Segrove grins again, takes a clean piece of paper and draws a smiley face. He holds it up, facing me. If Mr Smiley had eyebrows it would look exactly like him. ‘Together we will build a staircase to a healthier future, Grace.’ He scribbles again and hands me a prescription.

My first meeting with the behavioural therapist is straight after my appointment with Professor Segrove. In the waiting room are 15 chairs. I sit and wait. I hope Seamus has found a coffee shop somewhere. ‘It’s no trouble,’ he said, when I told him about the appointments. ‘I’d be delighted to take you.’

What Nikola imagined was a radio communications tower capable of reaching most of the United States and across the Atlantic. He imagined news bulletins, stock market updates, telephone networks—everything we have today. He was more than one hundred years ahead of his time. One small problem: to build his tower he needed money. Westinghouse couldn’t help, so Nikola turned to the one man who had the cash. The billionaire industrialist J. Pierpont Morgan.

When Morgan heard what Nikola had to offer, even he was astounded. Imagine, Mr Capitalist, a worldwide monopoly on radio stations. I have already successfully transmitted over seven hundred miles, Nikola told him. It will only cost you $350,000 all up: $100,000 for the first transmitter to cover the Atlantic and another $250,000 to cover the Pacific. Morgan advanced Nikola $150,000; plenty to get started. Nikola was thrilled and promised a hundredfold return on the investment. To start to build his dream, Nikola now needed land.

‘Grace Vandenburg? Yes?’ A woman appears from behind the counter. She is tall and thin with black hair so lank it looks damp, reminiscent of an oil spill slicked down her cheeks. Her clothes are 1920s retro: a grey dropped-waist shift over a white shirt, shiny black shoes with a buckle at the ankle.

No. Nope. Never heard of her. I’m just here to service the photocopier.

‘I’m Francine. Please follow me.’

Francine leads me, shiny black shoes clopping with every step, to a meeting room that is empty except for a circle of plastic chairs. I cross my arms and my legs. Then I think perhaps this looks like a defensive posture, so I uncross them. I look for a window to jump out of but there’s none.

‘Welcome, welcome. I’ll be leading both your group sessions, and your individual therapy sessions. I know it’s a little awkward now but believe me, we’ll be the best of friends in no time.’ Her forehead is permanently creased in a frown of caring and concern.

Actually my friends register is full. I could fit you in but someone else would have to die first.

‘Now, first I want to ask about your personal support network.’

Huh?