This Too Shall Pass (19 page)

We travelled the rest of the trip in a dense kind of silence.

At Marlowe Downs the hallways were empty, the building pulsating a cavernous sensation that swelled and bellowed in its stillness. For the first time I felt the ghosts of all the sadness shrieking with a mute roar that pushed on my temples. In this state I couldn't work and I found myself wandering from usual haunt to usual haunt: outside in the courtyard on my own wishing I had a cigarette when I hardly ever smoked, staring upon the depleted library at the back of the staffroom reading the names on the spines of the books and forgetting them a moment later, or glued to the glass of the little garden where the tortoises lived, searching for them amongst the ferns. (I didn't have the presence of mind or the energy to go into the garden to search properly.) When I finally pulled back from that glass late one afternoon, leaving a huge patch of mist from my breath, which formed the shape of a butterfly – I stared at that also until it faded – I wandered back to my room, packed my satchel and drove home.

At the end of the holiday period, people returning refreshed and enthusiastic, I faced the reality of a nasty pile of files. James was sympathetic.

‘If there's anything I can do, Monty.'

‘I have to mark some time out, bugger the throughput for several weeks.'

I spent the next month getting my files up-to-date; meanwhile something in me was fermenting, an idea that had been thrown, and not even in my direction, by Celia. Having caught it, though, I allowed it to flower, could hear the beat of it interwoven in the throb of my heart: private practice, private practice, private practice, no files, no files, no files, no diagnoses, no diagnoses, no diagnoses. These were the words, like the beatings of a moth's wings against my rib cage, like the flutter of freedom at my temples, that amassed in me. I held onto them, knowing that without them, I could have discombobulated.

FORTY-ONE

I
don't know if this was such a good idea but I re ached for my copy of Sylvia Plath's
Ariel.
Renny had told me, tongue-in-cheek, her favourite lines from a poem, and I wanted to find them. Sure enough, in the last stanza of “Lady Lazarus”, there they were.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

I began an exodus from Marlowe Downs one grey afternoon some six months after the drowning accident had taken place. I had the address of some rooms to rent in the suburb next to the one Renny and I lived in. A friend of a friend, a psychologist, was interested in subletting her room to me. I'd picked up two clients: one was the teenager of a teacher whom I'd worked with over the years – a girl who had made several attempts to take her life – and the other was a child who was refusing to go to school, who I also heard of through a friend of a friend. The rooms were in an old pale blue house, the air inside dense but intoned with the right kind of poignancy. Going out on my own suddenly didn't seem so scary. It was a punt but something in me felt fatalistic and strong enough to think I could do it. Celia, infinitely more talented than I, was jealous.

‘I wish it was me,' she said, when we had coffee in a cafe not far from Marlowe Downs one afternoon.

‘Why don't you do it?'

‘I'd miss the public clientele.'

‘Yes, I have a feeling I will, too. But I won't miss the bullshit, the ducking and weaving, the head-in-the-sand stuff.'

‘I've stopped weaving,' she said. ‘I'm all duck these days.'

On my last day, the farewell, the kindly appreciation speeches over with, I waited until most people were gone and I packed up my personal belongings. I don't know if it was spite or revenge or a sense that my wage had never been enough for what I'd endured in the place, but I loaded up my car with possessions, many of which were not mine. Someone had told me once – it might have been Eddy, but could just as well have been Elliot – that it seemed to be a tradition for people to steal things from their office when they left Marlowe Downs and I should make sure I didn't do the same if I was ever to leave. Strangely, these words spurred me on, as if I was happy to meet the challenge they posed. But if I'm truthful, I was also contemplating the fact that I was going to be very poor and it would be a long time before I could afford some of those items. I took a fan, a printer, two reams of paper, and small office items such as staplers, rulers, paperclips and envelopes. I took some toys – the puppets, which were mostly mine anyway, but other things, board games, jigsaws. They would help in the setting up of my practice. I went to the library in the staff-room – my intention to deplete it even further – and took two books I'd remembered from the days after the drowning when I'd spent hours avoiding my files. Both books were works by Sigmund, the first entitled
Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
the second
Civilization and Its Discontents.
Somehow this was the sweetest theft of all.

I drove away, my face red and silent from thinking suddenly that someone was watching me and letting me go with a blind eye. Perhaps it was old George Marlowe staring from his spot on the wall, unable to move to stop me.

‘Your time's nearly up too, George,' I said, as I pulled out through the gate. And it was true. The be queathed period was going to run out in a matter of years. The state government would likely seize the land and relocate many of the services to the grounds of the large hospital. The adolescent inpatient unit had already been earmarked for a hospital in the west. The ivory tower would be disassembled, slowly but surely.

FORTY-TWO

I
‘d like to say I saw people from Marlowe Downs again, but the only person I kept in contact with was James. We'd meet in the city, usually at one of the small bars crouched in the side streets or downstairs from the pavement, hidden in underground nooks. The last time I saw him he made me laugh till my cheeks ached, with a story about Nigel that defied all reason. I'd been asking whether the good doctor ever got his book published, the one about kinesiology.

‘No, no one's heard anything about that for a long time. But, not to disappoint, he's been through a few fads since then, the latest, you'll love this, the latest is an experiment he ran testing the effect that prayer has on outcomes for clients.'

I was incredulous. ‘You'd want to be in the control group for that one,' I said.

‘The findings were published.'

‘No.'

‘And guess what?'

‘The people being prayed for got better?'

‘Not even God could bring about that, apparently.'

‘His hypothesis didn't hold up?'

‘Nigel claimed there needed to be more investigation into the topic, went on with stuff people always say when their hypotheses don't bring about the thing they hope.'

Incredulous as I was, I didn't really begin to laugh until James told me how the experiment was carried out. The congregation Nigel was part of had received numbers which corresponded to file numbers of clients and they prayed for the numbers – C34178 etc. - to be healed or forgiven or whatever it was they asked of God in their church.

‘Nothing ever changes,' I said to James, shaking my head. ‘Remember that afternoon we spent doing the pamphlet, remember that we chose the house with the crack in it? And you remember what happened, Antwerp said that despite the fact that we worked with kids with problems, he didn't want anything that looked sad or falling down advertising the place. Remember. They produced a thing with strict lines and headings in navy blue that were meant to look corporate but really just appeared unfriendly and uninteresting. It's the same thing with Nigel. He behaves appallingly and everyone's more concerned with how they're going to maintain the status quo for
him,
for his sake.'

‘The God thing is never mentioned.'

‘The silent partner in the room.'

‘The thirteenth team member.'

‘The undisputed adjudicator.'

Forget the human experience, we've got God here to tell us.
‘

‘Oh, except, I'm sorry, yes, he's just nicked out. We'll have to refer to the text which, although very old now, will do.'

James smiled. ‘People are scared to leave good and evil up to humans, scared there'll be chaos and mayhem on the planet if God's word, let alone his presence, is challenged.'

‘Maybe if humans,' I chipped in, ‘had to take responsibility instead of relying on God's word, they'd be more trustworthy. Would it have been bad if the hospital had expected more of the good doctor? Made him leave religion at the door. Reminds me of something Dave used to say:
God's word is fuelled by the blood of the disbeliever!
Can you believe it, out of all his bullshit platitudes, he came up with something of his own, something brilliant probably.'

I looked at James. ‘I'm raving.'

‘That's why I like to see you.'

‘You're excusing me.'

‘No. I agree with everything you've said.'

‘But you never seem to have these problems, you seem so much calmer with life.'

‘I just take a little longer to react. Believe me, as soon as I'm a little further along with my savings plan I'll be right behind you. Might even be renting a room from you in a couple of years.'

We parted company on the streets of the city but I was reluctant to leave for a minute, as if watching James go would remind me it hadn't all been in my mind, the good and the bad. His head twisted both ways as he checked for traffic and crossed the road, and I was left, unsure if I'd come any significant distance in life. There was always the possibility, after all, that I'd just walked around in a big circle, never having made it into the middle of the maze, just bumbling along in no particular direction. Certainly life was still a mystery, still a challenge, still fraught with the computation of being as good as I could be: for me, for Marcus, for Renny. The two of them were my new family. That much had changed, that much I knew for certain. And Dave? Well, he would have his own version of events, a version I couldn't worry about. My story had to part company from his, that's what splitting up means. I had to say goodbye, had to have a vision of myself as separate. And that takes a long time, time that had already led me into the middle of so much more.

I guess that's what had been revealed: that as one thing came to an end any gap it left had already been filled. As for broken promises and not being a "forever" person anymore, I decided – there on the busy street, wondering if I might spot James's disappearing form one more time – that holding onto prescriptions made under one set of circumstances was not always possible when those circumstances change. I had told myself already that while I would have loved to have stayed in a whole family for Marcus's sake, a part deep within me was smarter than any conscious thinking powers I had at my disposal and, ultimately, that self is a benign force, programmed for survival, emotional as well as physical. It's important that we listen, and not with our brains but with some level of faith in life – not God! – but life. Mind you, to keep my head up, to keep going when only walls of green hedge and the tiniest sliver of sky was showing, wasn't easy. Even telling myself that while the maze might be confusing it only covered a relatively small area, didn't help.

No. There was only the idea that wandering around – even when almost unable and sometimes unwilling to go on – was better than giving in, better than sitting. And the thought that the answer lay close at hand, or even within me, wasn't of much use either, but movement (backwards, forwards, sideways) was vital to some kind of explanation emerging eventually, even if it meant leaving a trail of scattered, unfinished business behind. That's what I've decided, at any rate, after this long and hand-throbbing day at the table in my lounge room, after all this scribbling and pontificating.

And that's what I'm going to cling to.

Acknowledgements

My unbound appreciation goes to Lou and Zoe.