Medea's Curse (2 page)

‘Disappeared two weeks ago.’

That was where she’d seen the girl’s photo before: in the newspaper. She hadn’t paid
much attention. Certainly hadn’t connected it to Amber. The article had been more
about the subculture of chaos and irresponsibility in their regional town than about
the child.

‘I’d love to hear your thoughts.’ Liam was watching her intently.

‘On?’

‘Could Travis have got Amber to take the rap for him?’ He added his heartbreaker
smile to the accent.

Natalie stared at him. ‘You think you got it wrong?’

‘I want to know the truth. Which could take a wee while—and I’ve already used my
five minutes. Can we do it over lunch?’

‘How about we leave it at coffee and you finish telling me now?’

‘We’re talking about a child here. She may still be alive. To say nothing of Amber.
You surely want to hear the full story?’ He paused. ‘Dinner?’

Natalie narrowed her eyes. He was using Amber as bait. ‘As in a date?’ She made a
point of looking hard at his wedding ring.

‘Call it what you like.’

‘Let me guess. She’s got cancer. She doesn’t understand you. You’ll leave as soon
as the kids are grown up.’

‘I’m thinking we’re as happy as most and my kids like things the way they are.’

She didn’t believe him but at least his position was clear. ‘Okay, tomorrow night
then. But I don’t discuss wives.’

‘That’d be just on first dates?’

‘Don’t expect to make it any further.’

She watched him leave. If Liam’s suspicions about Travis were right, there might
be a chance of getting Amber out of prison—a chance to rectify an injustice that
Natalie was partly responsible for. There were just three problems.

After the incident on the Supreme Court steps she had been forbidden by her supervisor
to see Amber and Travis. Permanently.

She’d just agreed to have dinner with someone who had an axe to grind with her and
whom she loathed. And wanted to sleep with.

And Bella-Kaye, Amber and Travis’s baby, was still dead.

Natalie’s first patient didn’t turn up. No surprise there. At least one patient a
day failed to show, without bothering to call, apologise or explain. Half the women
who saw Natalie existed in a permanent state of chaos.

Monday was the hardest day of the week. At times she felt like she was on a treadmill
for months with her psychotherapy patients, listening to similar stories of abuse
and its aftermath of anger, pain and despair
.
And each patient had to play out the
same scenarios many times before the endings changed. The process was slow, and it
was repetitive. She often wondered if she was doing any good at all.

Jessie Pryor, the new patient, arrived five minutes late. The one-line referral she
had brought was over a year old and said nothing about why she might need to see
a psychiatrist. Natalie didn’t know the referring GP, and there was nothing to indicate
why Jessie had decided to see her now.

Jessie was exactly twenty-two. ‘Happy Birthday to me,’ she said, rolling her eyes.
She was wearing a Misfits T-shirt, cut off at the shoulders to reveal heavily tattooed
rolls of flesh. The upper part of her left upper arm was a mess of anime cartoons
inked onto her skin, overlapping with other figures that had been partly removed.
Black roots were showing
in her short blonde hair. Her demeanour communicated a succinct
message: ‘I hate you and I hate the world, but I hate myself even more’. Natalie
had been in this space at sixteen, minus the weight and with piercings instead of
tatts. Probably with a lot less cause.

Grist for the treadmill.

‘What do you ride?’ asked Jessie as she threw herself into the corner armchair rather
than the upright one opposite Natalie.

Liam’s arrival had interrupted Natalie’s routine and she hadn’t had time to change
out of her leather trousers. An analyst would have said, ‘Why do you ask?’ Natalie
was happy just to have the connection.

‘Ducati 1200.’

‘Big bike.’

‘You ride too?’

‘Nah, my brother. Used to take me on the back.’ Her look suggested bike riders were
cool, but that she wasn’t sure what to make of a psychiatrist who rode to work.

Natalie smiled in response. ‘How old were you?’

‘Twelve. Me and Dad had just moved in with Jay and his mum. His real name’s Jesse,
can you believe? We had to call him Jay to stop the confusion.’ One of the more benign
problems of blended families.

It had been a turning point, after two years alone with her father. Jessie denied
he was abusive, just said that ‘he drank too much’ after her mother died. But she
had all the hallmarks of abuse: poor sense of self, inner emptiness, suspicion about
people’s motives and instability in her relationships. The marks of self-harm on
her arms, half-hidden by the tattoos, were testimony to the times these things had
overwhelmed her. Textbook borderline personality disorder.

The fifty minutes were nearly up before they got to why she was there. Jessie’s life
was spinning out of control and she was having thoughts of self-harm. Again.

‘What’s changed?’

Jessie shrugged.

Natalie began to outline the rules of therapy. Turn up on time, no suicide attempts,
use the crisis line…

Jessie was grinning. There was the hint of a twinkle in her eye and dimples that
negated the tattoo artillery as Natalie walked her out to the waiting room and watched
her leave.

‘Did you forget your change of clothes?’ Beverley scanned Natalie’s attire with a
what were you thinking?
expression.

Natalie let the comment go. Since her divorce, Beverley’s mission had been to find
a man. Her latest outfit was a canary coloured skirt and jacket that screamed out
a refusal to disappear at forty-five.

Beverley handed Natalie a red envelope. Her name was printed in neat capitals, but
there was no address or sender’s details. ‘Someone gave this to one of Dr Miller’s
patients as she came in and told her to give it to you,’ she said. Her tone made
it clear that this was both weird and interesting.

Natalie opened the envelope. A plain white filing card with a handwritten message:
Breaking the rules has consequences.
It sounded like something Declan would say but
he was hardly going to send an anonymous note to remind her. He was her supervisor;
he got to tell her in person on a weekly basis. What rule was the note referring
to? Some perceived breach of ethics? The duties of patient confidentiality and mandatory
reporting of risk were sometimes in conflict.

Confidentiality? She didn’t discuss patients with anyone
except Declan so it was
unlikely to be anything she had said.

Risk? She flipped mentally through her current patients. No apparent danger to any
of their children. The two in domestically violent relationships were already well
known to police and Natalie had done nothing to incur either partner’s anger. Maybe
it was something she had yet to be told or figure out. Apart from child abuse, the
only thing that mandatory reporting covered was the risk of serious harm to someone.
As far as she knew, none of her patients was planning a murder any time soon.

Shit,
this had to happen to forensic shrinks all the time. In any event, the note
was just stating the obvious. It wasn’t like there was any real threat. She’d better
get used to it. She turned the card in her hand, considering her options, but in
the end dropped it in the paper shredder pile as she headed out the door.

Chapter 3

‘Could have been the star!’

Natalie hit the punching bag again, harder.

Bob danced from foot to foot on his perch, screeching periodically. When Natalie
continued to punch, ignoring his butchered version of Dylan’s ode to Rubin Carter,
he raised his yellow crest and screeched at the top of his voice, ‘You’re a complete
unknown!’

Natalie paused for breath and wiped the sweat trickling down her face. ‘Bob, you
really know how to make a girl feel good.’

Bob strutted, looking pleased with himself. He flew after her, up the stairs from
the makeshift gym in the garage below her warehouse apartment, where she let him
fly free. He regaled her from the curtain rail.

‘Shit there and you’re parrot au vin,’ Natalie warned him. She filled his seed container
to give him time to reconsider.

A patient had asked her to care for Bob while he was incarcerated. The patient had
a well-demarcated delusional system that revolved around a belief that Bob Dylan
had stolen and changed his lyrics; the cockatoo had picked up a
few lines from his
owner’s versions of ‘Hurricane’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.

‘You’re a complete unknown,’ Bob reiterated before flying to his stand. Natalie clipped
his chain on and went to get showered and changed for work.

From her warehouse, Natalie cycled between the Housing Commission towers. The grounds
were empty apart from a tall Sudanese woman and a dog scurrying to get out of her
way. Zigzagging through the back streets of Abbotsford, she joined the bike path
that ran past Yarra Bend, the forensic psychiatric hospital where she worked Tuesdays
and Thursdays. Clouds of mist rose in patches from the river, and she ducked as she
passed trees wet with the previous night’s rain. A few cyclists were headed into
town in the opposite direction. The winding route made for a longer trip but she
was convinced that the physical regime kept her well, at least as much as the medication
did.

The forensic hospital facility was on prime real estate. The tree-lined river path
opened out onto lush parklands and a back road to the hospital gates. It was all
the same to the inmates. They couldn’t see out from behind the red-brick walls topped
with wire any more than passers-by could see in.

Natalie greeted the security team, eyeballed the iris scanner and was let into the
main yard. On the way to her ward, she stuck her head into the administrative section.
The hospital manager had, as usual, arrived before the office staff. Only the top
of her grey hair, pulled back into a bun, was visible as she checked her emails.
She looked up over half-rim glasses. ‘Good morning, Natalie.’

‘Do you have a moment, Corinne?’

Corinne hesitated, then indicated the vacant chair opposite.

‘Wadhwa is being unreasonable,’ said Natalie.

‘Professor Wadhwa has considerable experience.’

‘
Associate
Professor Wadhwa’—she leaned a little on the title, awarded by some minor
university without a medical faculty—‘is being sucked in.’

‘Because?’

‘Georgia is attractive, and doesn’t wear tracksuits. She’s a very good liar.’ Georgia
Latimer had been transferred to Yarra Bend from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre for
an assessment. It was nearly complete, and she was due to return to prison to await
the bail hearing at the end of next week. Natalie and Wadhwa were no closer to agreement
about her than when she arrived.

‘This case, it is Dissociative Identity Disorder,’ he had pronounced after their
joint assessment a week earlier.

‘On what evidence?’

‘We are not lawyers, Dr King. Not evidence—
history
and
mental state examination.
’

‘All right then, on what history and mental state findings?’

‘Her postings on Facebook. This is most certainly dissociation. The vagueness and
memory lapses, these, they are classical.’

‘Maybe. I don’t see two or more distinct personalities.’

Wadhwa waved his hand dismissively. ‘We have the middle-class wife and mother and
the regressed child. The details will come out over time. When you have seen as many
as I have, Dr King, you will know the signs.’

Natalie had gritted her teeth then and remained unconvinced now.

‘I’m not saying Georgia doesn’t dissociate,’ she told Corinne. ‘But if you’re asking
me to make a call, then she’s putting on an act. It’s a gift for Wadhwa’s research
project. If he didn’t need the numbers, he’d be saying she had a personality disorder.
Which is what she has.’

‘I know what you think of his research but the project has been good for the hospital.
The board of directors like us to be on the leading edge and Professor Wadhwa is
helping us meet our KPIs.’

Natalie raised an eyebrow.

‘Look,’ said Corinne, leaning forward on her desk. ‘Hear me clearly: you have to
find a way of working with him. It won’t look good in court if you contradict each
other and you know how much media coverage he gets.’ She rested her chin on her hand.
‘Natalie, he’s in here complaining to me as often as you are. In the end if I have
to choose between an Associate Professor and a junior consultant…’ she shrugged.
‘And I’m not just talking about this specific case. Am I being clear enough?’

Natalie was still fuming when she squeezed into the ward office for handover.

‘Most kind of you to join us, Dr King.’

Jesus, she was only five minutes late. ‘Always a privilege,
Associate
Professor Wadhwa.’

Kirsty, the unit manager, winked as she handed Natalie the patient summary sheet.
They had shared more than one drink reviewing Wadhwa’s esoteric diagnoses, treatment
disasters and lack of bedside manner. Any time anyone criticised him he would whip
out a pre-written resignation from his leather compendium and storm into Corinne’s
office, confident she would never accept it.

‘For those who have come in late,’ said Wadhwa, ‘we had just heard that Celeste has
deteriorated.’

‘Did anything happen over the weekend?’ said Natalie.

‘Just her brother visiting as usual,’ said Kirsty.

Wadhwa looked at his list. ‘She is married. Why did her husband not visit?’

Natalie tried not to smirk. ‘He’s probably still upset about her cutting his dick
off.’

In the absence of any response, Kirsty continued handover. ‘Susie has been slashing
up again.’

‘How?’ said Wadhwa.

‘Her own toenails,’ Kirsty said.