This Too Shall Pass (18 page)

Funnily, it wasn't his tricks or mocking that made me want to finish the conversation, it was his ridiculousness, his verbose and silly conversation, his unwanted sense of humour, his asides and unnecessary dissemination of information that was of no concern to me and which – at least to me – still reeked, albeit with humour, of control. The fight had seemed to release something in him. He'd always been a joker and had been talking in platitudes for some time, but now he began
announcing
those platitudes prior to delivering them, which seemed even more annoying than the bad jokes.
Well, you know what they say: if you can't dance the tango, get out of the way.
Did people really say that? Or,
Can't go without saying: up here for thinking, down there for dancing, in the middle for something else.
Really, I know I might have laughed at him during our relationship but he just wasn't funny anymore and without the other things – conversations, plans, achievements – it was getting harder to remember what I'd seen in him.

Gone, perhaps, was the indignation that had, up until then, pulsed in me, the fiery type of upset that lives near the surface. Sneaking into its place was a dull, more disturbing, disaffection. It was palpable. A quiet cold sort of disturbance that sinks stone-like to the bottom of a well; the kind of sensation that munches respect like a shredder chews paper; a disquiet that even elephantine might won't shift and is still there years and years and years later.

More and more, my heart was shifting towards never wanting to speak to Dave again. And, more and more, I couldn't shake this gouging, vacant feeling. It was now three years since I'd left, and this was possibly the lowest I'd felt. I took myself to work.

THIRTY-NINE

L
ife just keeps coming. My mother used to say that. It was the only thought I could hold for more than a few seconds while Mali was relaying an urgent message, a message that, because of its horror, I couldn't quite grasp. I fought my way through the fug in my head.

‘The hospital is trying to get hold of you.'

I watched my hand reach for my messages. It was the client Celia had asked me to see, the brother of her client. I was to go to intensive care. The whole family was there. There had been a terrible accident, a drowning. It wasn't just one death, there had been many in the family.

‘Does Celia know?'

‘I've been trying to contact her. Eddy got onto her after I got onto him. She's coming back from her holiday tonight.'

I nodded, my heart starting to rumble with the news. I didn't need this. How was I going to be strong enough for them when I wasn't strong enough for myself? And I'd suffered no tragedy, nothing. Even more selfishly, I realised that my quiet day was shot to pieces. In January, especially between Xmas and new year, Marlowe Downs ran with a skeleton staff, only open in case of an emergency. In past years, I had taken to working over this period because it meant I could get my files up-to-date, get myself in gear for the coming, more hectic months. My heart bent, almost keeled over with the extra weight of this news. Worry and sadness for the family swarmed. Before I reached my room - which I, a little dazed and with no plan, was walking towards – I turned around.

‘I'm going up to the hospital. Tell Eddy, Mali. I'll be in the ICU.'

I drove my car to the hospital, my whole being closing down so that whatever awaited me wouldn't bowl me over, so I would be ready for its battering, at least to some degree.

Taking only my photo ID and my phone, I made my way to the entrance and followed the signs down the cold corridors – cold despite mid-thirty degree temperatures outside – to the ICU. In the corridors outside the unit stood a group of people, their faces white except for the circles around their eyes, which were a colour similar to that of inflamed eczema. I saw Josh's (my client's) mum, Leanne, amongst the others. She didn't know me very well and I waited patiently for her to finish the conversation she was having before I greeted her. I could also see Josh's father, a man I'd seen even less over the months, but who recognised me and turned from the woman he was talking with and came towards me.

‘Brendan,' I said, as he held out his hands and I took them. ‘I'm so terribly sorry.'

‘Bonnie's gone.' Bonnie was Josh's four-year-old sister. Brendan's eyes balanced tears which, I had the impression, had been there for hours.

‘Josh's on life support. Two of his teenage cousins were taken, lost. There's no sign of them.'

Brendan had the look and demeanour of someone displaced in time and space, someone who didn't recognise anything and yet knew they should, someone who was suspended and couldn't get down from whatever was keeping them up high. I wanted to give him a hug but it was inappropriate. He was trying to keep a lid on his grief for fear it would consume him; it would not be right for me to be the one to break his membrane of composure.

‘Leanne is talking to the hospital social worker,' he said, vagueness like an illness in him. ‘The other kids are here for observation but they. are,' a big half-sob cranked up his chest and made him gulp, ‘alright.'

I put my arm out, touched his. What could I say? Nothing. He looked distractedly around as if he expected something to happen. Everyone was still, dour.

The hospital social worker came over and introduced herself.

‘Fiona Randall.'

‘Jen Montgomery,' I said. ‘People call me Monty. I've been seeing Josh at Marlowe Downs for a while. Celia Dawes, one of the other clinicians, has been seeing Aaron, his older brother.'

She nodded. ‘Aaron's fine. But Josh's not responding.'

‘If there's anything I can do to help.'

‘We've been preparing a statement for the press. Leanne's brother is here. He's going to read it.' She motioned to a man who stood beside Leanne.

‘Is that Leanne's sister beside her?'

Fiona nodded.

‘She's got two teenage girls, who are still missing.' I watched her. ‘Presumed deceased?' I asked, quietly.

She nodded.

Leanne approached me then and I mustered all my energy not to break down in front of her. Leanne was a stoic woman; she exuded a motherly strength and maturity that didn't appear to have abandoned her even in these dire circumstances. We nodded at one another and then hugged.

‘Josh's not good,' she said. ‘And Bonnie's left us.' Her eyes remained dry.

‘I know Celia would be here if she could.'

She nodded, not looking at me and said, ‘Do you want to see Josh?'

I followed her through the swinging doors into the ICU. The first large room was buzzing with hospital staff. We walked past this frenetic action and through further doors where the contrast was palpable. I'd never been into this part of the hospital and I wasn't sure what I expected but this wasn't it. Joshua was in a huge room. His lonely white body, dressed only in baggy underwear, lay on a very high bed. He was hooked up to all sorts of machines that ticked and huffed in the background. In contrast to the noise from just outside where the medicos had been darting to and fro, there was a calmness that was surreal. It was as if his vulnerable state was imbuing the atmosphere, as if everything was touched by his quietness. As we got closer to him I could see that his fine features had already turned to stone. Away from the upset of the family, my senses sobered. I could see that he had departed or, to put it more aptly, that he was absent.

We both stood for a long time, Leanne more closely than I. A nurse came in, gliding past with the same ephemeral quality everything seemed to be enshrouded by. My eyes followed her as she checked the machines. My body didn't move; it couldn't. I felt completely numb, incapable and unable to demand anything of myself.

Before she left, she came close to me and I got the impression she was going to say something. She leant in, it was almost a whisper. ‘The doctors are wondering if you'd be an independent observer for the brain testing that has to be done on Josh? This is the last one. They need someone to watch.'

I nearly asked,
The last one before what?
but stopped myself in time. I nodded my assent. She left the room. The doctors appeared not long after and spoke to Leanne in muted tones as if we were in a church, the funeral already taking place. She turned and left without looking at me, as if she'd forgotten I was there. I stepped further back to allow the medical staff to get closer. There were about five of them. No one spoke to me. I didn't know exactly what I was supposed to be watching for, but I guessed I was there to make sure they actually did carry out the tests, which, from what I could tell, they seemed to do. Mainly what I saw, or thought I saw, was them having no luck in getting him to respond, their eyes flipping up to screens as they held their probes against him. He'd gone; even with his little nine-year-old chest moving up and down, the skin shifting over his ribs every time the machine huffed, he was gone. The tests had taken ten minutes or so. I waited for the doctors to leave. Then, alone for a second, I said goodbye to Josh, realising that it was his parents' grief I found more upsetting than the sight of him or the thought that he was dead. With some other clients it might have been different, but with Josh, well, I guess we hadn't been as close as I'd been to other kids.

I went back to the family, my head still in a fog of disbelief. The afternoon passed exhaustingly slowly. The media appearances were handled, the well children released to go home and, saddest of all, Josh's machines turned off. I went home at the end of that day with a massive headache and a cloud, not just hanging over me but lodged within. It was hard to concentrate on anything and whenever I closed my eyes I saw Josh's little body laid out on that table as if it wasn't meant to be there, as if it was waiting for a delivery of wings so it could fly into the heavens to flutter and float about forever.

FORTY

T
he rest of the week was almost as gruelling. Death, for the living, especially when it's the death of the young, is inexplicably draining. For me, exhausted enough already, it was as if I was wearing wet mud-soaked clothes everywhere.

Celia and I travelled to Leanne and Brendan's house a couple of times to see how the family was holding up. We had no clear agenda; Celia did most of the talking. It appeared to me that the family behaved in an out-of-body ordinariness. The bizarre nexus of the incident hovered over them, not yet real, as they pushed themselves to go on: Aaron, along with his two remaining sisters, eating cereal at the kitchen table; Leanne collecting a lettuce from the vegetable garden; Brendan on the phone to Josh's schoolteacher. It was the manner in which they moved, as if gravity had deserted them, rendering them all one or two degrees lighter. It had the effect of making them look like they were floating. Added to that, everyone's words seemed stuck somewhere between their brain synapses. I felt uncomfortable throughout, and wondered, a little like I had when I saw Josh for his sessions, if I was being of any assistance. During the second visit we discussed what was going to happen at the funerals, which were the day after next; and I remember organising the debriefing session, which, because of poor coordination, would now have to happen after the church services, after the cremations. I was the go-between, on my phone to the critical incident debriefer from the hospital, relaying messages from the family.

One funeral was held for all four children – Josh, Bonnie and their two teenage cousins. Celia and I sat in the back of the church. Nothing was expected of us so we remained stark-eyed, trying to take it in. Despite our attempts, though, I don't remember much except for the drawings Josh's classmates had done, which had been strung up behind the altar. They had the effect of weighting the air, causing sadness to steal into me, millimetre by millimetre. It was impossible to avoid it. I became mesmerised by people's strength, the stoicism everybody showed, especially Leanne. It was almost too much to bear witness to. I got the feeling that Celia held up a little better than me, although it was impossible to ask her – she just seemed less emotional, I guess, more equipped for the vagaries of life, the inconsistencies and discrepancies.

On the trip back to Marlowe Downs, Celia hunching over the steering wheel and driving erratically – which she always did and which would normally have rattled me – I couldn't find my voice and was unusually quiet.

‘You've lost weight,' she said.

I looked at her, a question hanging on my face.

‘Everything seems like a struggle,' I said at last, and turned away to look at the factories, the rows of workers' cars sitting obediently and neatly, waiting for their drivers, who toiled in the hanger-sized sheds doing, in the main, repetitive and brain-numbing work.

‘You know, I never really did anything for Josh,' I said. ‘I don't even think I knew why he was coming to see me.'

‘Joshua was having trouble engaging. You helped him do that.'

I contemplated this, wanted to hold the thought.

‘Anton plans to put a stop to all that,' I said finally, ‘to anything that takes us more than a moment.'

‘Then it'll be time to up and leave.'

I was surprised at this.

‘I didn't think you'd ever leave.'

‘Maybe I'll start a practice. Just need a place to rent, something reasonable. It's so damned expensive to find good rooms.'

‘If people like you leave, the whole face of the place'll change.'

‘People like you too, Monty.'

I laughed sharply, inexplicitly. An unscripted expulsion.

‘Don't laugh. We need people who can see across the spectrum, who are prepared to stand up for what's intelligent.'

My insides rumbled with emotion, partly from her confirmation and partly from tiredness. I was wrung out, even a little defeated, and Celia's endorsement resonated more fully because of it. I held back tears. In Celia's company – and it's strange our human capacity to know such things – crying just wouldn't have made sense.