This Too Shall Pass (4 page)

I'd see Wouter some mornings – Dutch Wouter from flat six. He'd be strapping on his roller blades in ready for a skate along the foreshore. Wouter, an osteopath, fit and bronzed, who swirled a gay flag every pride march even though, as far as I knew, he never declared his allegiance one way or the other. Dutch Wouter who always smiled and spoke his thick hel-los like chimes, who kept the garden and common areas of our building in an immaculate state. Other mornings I'd bump into old Luigi, his glasses like Mr Magoo's. Even at the age of ninety-three he gave the impression he could have walked to China if the inclination had taken hold.

‘Off to work then?' he'd say, his nose glowing, perhaps from the homemade grappa he'd told Renny he had a nip of every morning.

‘Someone has to keep the country running,' I'd reply, gurgling a laugh, my heart pounding because there had always been something about old people that made me feel a little lonely.

The tram left from the terminus in Acland Street and I'd float – such was the feeling of the ride -through St Kilda. The boulevard ran (still does) along the northern edge of the bay. Between huge date palms, winking a thousand sparkling eyes as it fluttered under a light breeze, the water of Port Phillip stretched away as if I was seeing it through a fisheye lens. Not long after that – contrasts abiding – the city would loom up and fill the view like a wolf spider warning off a foe. Commuters paid no heed to the sights. Work, newspapers, novels and headphones, occasionally a conversation, kept them occupied. It was all too familiar to them. I, however, was awestruck. The scene glided by as if thrown from a projector rather than life, until, in the middle of the city – where it always seemed as though the weather had changed for the worse – I'd alight from one tram to wait for another. It was from here that I saw the city waking.

In sudden freshets, marching like colonies of crabs, people would pour from Flinders Street Station, looking ahead, their eyes locked-in as if they were on some perverse personal quest. Everyone seemed reduced to robotic functionality, a little like Orson Welles had written a script and the city had agreed to participate in a real-to-life fiction.

If people weren't walking but waiting like me, their demeanour would flip between boredom and anxiety. Even students in torn jeans, studded belts, high Mohawks and earplugs, would look up under a worried brow, searching for an elusive tram they knew wasn't coming.

The second trip was shorter. Past the large hospital – my employer – past gardens full of native trees – gardens that housed the zoo, gardens that were flanked by high-rise flats – the tram would climb into a suburb where an array of fast food outlets stood unashamedly. Marlowe Downs was a short ascent from there. In the middle of prime real estate, amongst the aquiline trunks of gum trees – their skins smelted on seamlessly in piebald pinks and greys – the low-slung building looked back over the city. It was to be my second home. My workplace. The microwave for my freezer brain. A house, supposedly, of good things.

TEN

I
want to introduce my superior straight off. Tall, s pectacled Celia Dawes. Head-forward Celia, who walked as if her thoughts had amalgamated to cause a magnetic field, one that pulled her northwards or towards the moon. On the morning I started work she was giving a lecture, the details of which were in my pigeonhole. It was taking place at the hospital, back down tram-infested Gingham Road – the tracks connecting the two services like an umbilical cord between unknown species.

Already late, however, I took a hospital-issue car.

It should have been easy but wrangling with the car park attendant about my status as a new employee, travelling the grey concrete loops to park, traversing the bowels of the hospital along long underground corridors, and then climbing upwards to study tiny letters on doors in a wide dark foyer made arriving no small feat.

Finally, on opening the doors to L25, or the Milly Logan Lecture Hall, an unexpected diorama was revealed: a hundred or so people sat listening intensely to the tutelage of a thin angular woman. She was spouting forth in an erudite but, at times, confusing manner on obsessive-compulsive disorder in children.

Assuming that I was in the right place and this was Celia Dawes, I crept in and slid onto one of the only empty seats, a chair in the first row. Celia's busy style of speaking, combined with her robust gesticulation, was mesmerising. Following her, though, wasn't quite as easy. The uncharted course she took began to yaw about so that it was difficult to link her ideas. Some seemed to be just fragments, as if requiring the listener to gather the bits, take them home and, like pieces of an unmade garment, stitch them together. And there was Celia's long brown hair; it was a little Cousin Itt-ish, shaking the way Cousin Itt's had when, every so often, her head jerked, seemingly involuntarily, in a manner which was close to a nervous tic.

‘I want to show you footage of compulsions,' she said, taking a step away from the audience towards the front of the room.

‘Symptoms are common in well children, but at the point of interfering with—' Halfway through the sentence she reached up to pull a screen down over the blackboard and at the slightest touch, at almost the suggestion of her hand pulling on the string, the entire contraption, case and all, fell off the wall. It crashed fitfully against her head before clattering loudly and awkwardly onto the floor where it oscillated once before lying motionless. She gripped her head, hunching over. She was obviously in agony.

When no one got up to help her, I, self-consciously, walked the gauntlet between lecturer and audience, cowering to excuse myself.

‘Are you okay?' I ventured, my arm stretching out supportively although I wasn't actually touching her.

‘Prudence,' she said in a tetchy tone from under her thatch of hair, ‘would have paid if I'd have found where she was hiding out.'

Or, at least, I think that's what she said.

She kept hugging her head and I crept back to my seat, my feelings of showing off confirmed as I met the listeners' glutinous stares. Someone killed the lights a minute later, as if nothing had happened, and we began watching old footage – a film on something like sixteen-millimetre celluloid, the images grainy on the whiteboard that had been unsteadily rolled forward from the far left of the room by Celia.

The vision was of kids repeatedly sketching circles around a word in their school notebooks or fastidiously missing the cracks on a pavement. Then there were children more entrenched in their rituals, one unfortunate boy doggedly circling every tree he passed on the way to and from school. When a teacher tried to persuade the boy to detour from his course, he punched the man in the solar plexus. As the teacher moved off, injured, the viewer saw the boy return to his routine, unremorseful.

While I could concentrate for the main, a residual hum in my temples reminded me of Celia's self-injurious flub. I found myself – almost absurdly – wondering what would come out of her mouth when the rasp and hum of the projector stopped, which, of course, it was bound to do. Worse than this, having been told she was my supervisor, I thought, and depressingly so, that there was little chance of the scintillating hothouse experience I'd dreamed of. My heart raced. I became aware of the closed-in air and snuck a slow sly look around, eyeing the audience.

Confirming my doubts, the entire auditorium seemed intoned with boredom. Everyone's face was cast – as unyielding as bronze – in a stiff ashen mould.

Were they rejecting the serious dulcet tones of the narrator – clearly someone from a different era – or were they simply numbed by information they already knew? Whatever the case, apathy rang like the pitch of tinnitus.
My
mood, utterly out of sync, became a liquid infusion of distress. I'd come to child psychiatry mecca. I didn't want it to be dull. I wanted to be enthralled.

When the lights flickered on I pulled myself together.

Tnere were good reasons as to
why
I was so earnest. Having worked in a country town for so long, the prospect of the city job had been exciting. I'd told myself I'd be among those at the cutting edge, the frontline. But even on second inspection, there looked nothing frontline about Celia. She could have been the skinny one from Laurel and Hardy, or Gilligan from the sunk SS Minnow. She certainly didn't seem switched on enough to catch and hold the eye of wayward and troubled adolescents. Nor did she resonate with the glow of someone who engendered inspiration in others – or, at least,
me
. I had a lot to learn and I worried Celia might just be too much Celia for my liking.
Where were the modern city slickers?
I screamed silently.
One order of charisma with fries, please!

I tried to relax as I listened hard to the rest of her spiel. She spelt out the connection between anxiety and compulsive behaviour, the growth of neurological pathways from repetition, the release of feel-good chemicals like serotonin from repetitive activity, and the rise in discomfort when the compulsion was thwarted.
Yes, but how do you treat the disorder?
A thousand ways. Celia traced the general methods of psychotherapy, cognitive behavioural tasks, family therapy interventions.

‘I'm breaking the rules,' she said. ‘Talking about treatment when it's meant to be the topic of the next lecture. Always breaking the rules.'

I didn't believe her and resolved to think she was showing off. She finished with a nervous smile.

On cue, as palpable as fog, a general rabble of conversation rose from the audience. Where was the applause? Despite my uncertainty, I couldn't help notice the lack of gratitude. It seemed as though no one appreciated her efforts, the fact that she could speak on the subject, any subject, for that long.

My gaze, having threaded through the observers, trailed back to Celia. I determined that she was either so brilliant she appeared nonsensical, or – and I had no way of knowing – the reverse. At the very least I was going to have to stalk through a jumble of information to obtain instruction.

I made my way back to Marlowe Downs subdued and more than a little startled. The reality of beginnings had loaded up in me heavily. My eyes traced dumbly down the plaques on the doors in my corridor. I was even more staggered when I realised Celia's office was across the hallway from mine. I don't know where I expected her to be located but it was a huge building full of the same long corridors and to think we would be crossing paths with regularity was a little daunting, perhaps because of her abrupt manner. Without making any certain plan – but, by the same token, not one for facing difficulties head-on – I, in a mixture of nervousness and awe, put off our introduction. Consequently, I began skulking along the passageways, opening and shutting my door with the stealth of a burglar. Marlowe Downs bred "the skulk", I was to learn, in many employees – in my case, in a matter of hours.

Surprisingly, when the meeting did take place at the end of that first week, I realised Celia was totally oblivious to me and to the fact that I was her underling, supposedly going to be helped by her to assume the role of clinician. It was late in the afternoon and we both happened to be locking up.

When she didn't speak, fidgeting at the keyhole to snib her door, I said, ‘Your head… I was there the other day, it must have hurt.'

She turned, her staccato movement bringing her indignant expression, almost a scowl, towards me. She was trying to make sense of what I was saying, sorting back through the recent past.

‘The lecture,' I added.

‘Oh! The blasted screen! World's worst day, my son rushed off in an ambulance. Suffers haemophilia, a count of two per cent for factor eight. Little mite fell at school. They panic, always call an ambulance. Both of us sitting up to be examined. He loved that, which was the only good thing. Utterly random. That screen…' she was shaking her head. ‘Did you enjoy the lecture?'

Her words had shuttled out of her and then stopped abruptly. ‘I did,' I said belatedly.

She was struggling to hold a bundle of papers and keep her bag from toppling out of her arms while jiggling the key. I resisted helping. Celia, I had detected even by then, wasn't at ease with the outstretch of a hand, the offer of assistance.

‘Wanted to ask more about treatment.'

‘Integrating, realigning. It's all about the frontal lobe. Getting the child involved with tasks that cause the system to think outside the framework. Refiguring, really. We can see the activity trail so we create a break in that cycle, give the brain other markers. Comfort, quietness, merit, good feelings to attach them to.'

I nodded as if I was completely with her, still wondering how the therapy was done.

She was jostling the door, making sure she'd locked it properly.

‘I've got Simon coming for a session at eleven on Thursday. We can have it in Family Therapy 3 so you can observe.'

I dutifully went to fish my diary from my bag.

‘Tell me tomorrow,' she responded tersely. ‘Leave a note under my door.'

She walked awkwardly away towards the centre of the building, her hair kicking up like a mane, the papers threatening to slide from her grip. Still not convinced about her – seeing her as curt, stern, socially inept and a little ditsy – something niggled. As I turned and went in the opposite direction towards an exit at the end of the corridor, I found myself trying to dismantle and, simultaneously, implant the content of what she'd said.

ELEVEN

M
arlowe Downs had once been a horse stud, after which a bloke named George Marlowe – reduced to ordinariness by his long beard and stalwart face, eyes forward into the camera lens like an early explorer – purchased it and set up an institution for handicapped kids.

The old house where the disabled kids lived – also portrayed in historic pictures – was eventually knocked down and the present building – a picture of the first brick being laid hung in one of the endless corridors too – had been purpose-built for child psychiatry, or, if you believe the sceptics, child hoodoo-foodoo. The place received this because of endless reports from the community that we performed a dangerous game of pathologising children, often dubbing them with erroneous and unhelpful labels and sending them back out of our castle walls worse off than when they'd arrived. Also – apparently – whenever we could, we were into apportioning blame. The blame, of course, was pinned on mothers.