This Too Shall Pass (15 page)

Andy nodded. ‘And that's actually what happens. Catherine's family admit her to the unit and she slowly gets better under the hothouse treatment of the team. Monty, what's your surname? I don't have a surname written here.'

‘Montgomery,' I said, embarrassed now.

‘Monty Montgomery,' Andy smiled, his arm extending in a showy manner towards me as he turned to the audience, ‘completing our hypothetical tonight in good style.'

I had sat through excruciatingly dry details of AGM minutiae and silly responses to a rather straightforward diagnosis, then I had solved the case in three short minutes. I would have answered the same way if Andy had asked me before asking any of the other professionals on the panel. Despite my earlier talk about complexity in regard to the boy and his mother, psychiatry is often made more complicated than need be. If you treat the symptom rather than always concentrating on the cause, paths for recovery can be opened up. In other words, there's more than one way in, more than one way to clear the deepest of problems.

I made a beeline for the door, thinking I'd paid Eddy back in full and notched up some credits. That was until I clocked the psychiatrist from the other hospital, his neat face nodding solemnly at me.

‘Congratulations,' I heard him say as I swung past him, smiling amicably.

‘Thanks,' I slung the word belatedly, surprise and genuine gratitude spiking my response. I couldn't believe I found revenge so sweet. Why did I care what that man thought? But I did. And I couldn't help but say to myself:
Everything comes back, eventually! Life's one big circle and it's all a matter of hanging in there, backing up what you believe in.

I walked through the double doors, out through the large, blue-lit hospital foyer, its shopfronts closed for the night, one cafe still serving a few dour-faced parents of the infirmed. Outside, the night was all purple and gold, as if the yellow street lighting had bled into the blackness, mutating its colour. I waited for the tram, leaning against the steel rail, as cold to touch as the inside of a freezer. Already the good feelings were dissipating. “Full circles” was such a ridiculous notion – perhaps right for the small things, but
get off the grass,
I berated myself, your simple philosophy is threadbare; life is not a series of wins and losses, and nothing will come back full score. I clenched my jaw, searched hungrily for the tram. I was going to be late getting home to Renny once more.

THIRTY-THREE

S
ometimes when Marcus was staying in town he would come to Marlowe Downs with me. I knew that children in the workplace weren't "tolerated" in these modern days, but come on: it was a child facility, for pity's sake, and surely preventing mental health problems in employees' kids was important too. (For the most part, Marcus attended holiday programs that were run at the primary school around the corner from where Renny and I lived. He was always enthusiastic about going but I didn't want to send him there all the time. It would be like going to school all year round. Added to that was the reality of my annual leave, which didn't match the time put aside for school holidays, nor the fact that Renny wouldn't have tolerated me spending all my holidays with him, and rightly so.)

Anyway, when Marcus came to Marlowe Downs he loved to tidy my office. He would carefully set the toys out. The zoo animals made up one display, the dinosaurs another. Pencils, pens and paper would be neatly stacked, as would all the board games, playing cards and my desk paraphernalia. It was like employing someone to give my office a facelift. He had a gift for it. After this happened a few times though, I found it a little disturbing. He preferred, it seemed, to clean my office rather than play with the toys themselves. Thinking I was reading too much into it and not wanting to knock anything that had to do with tidiness, I didn't ask, and quelled any thoughts.

I brought films in for him to watch on the televisions around the place and he made some beautiful "trick books" for me. These would have mazes, quizzes, small crosswords and little poems in them. They were so cute. A lump of emotion would swell in my throat and tears would rise when he presented them to me.

On one particular day, the last day I took him to Marlowe Downs, he came to a team meeting and sat on the arm of my chair, his small, svelte body slinked around me, his keen eyes and ears taking everything in. The meeting was mostly business; only a few cases – all straightforward enough – were presented towards the end.

At the finish of the day we piled ourselves onto the tram.

‘I wish we were there already,' he said.

‘You don't like the tram?'

‘It takes forever,' he complained, resting his head on my arm. I thought he might go to sleep but after a while he said, ‘What will happen to the boy who can't do his shoelaces up?'

Indeed, in the meeting we had discussed a child who had what we call "pervasive developmental delays", one of the few conditions that falls outside the mad, bad or sad categories that are said to cover all kids coming into Marlowe Downs and any other service like ours. These kids stand out in a school setting but it's a pity they don't come to our notice earlier. Pre-school intervention programs have done a good job at picking these kids up, an important thing because these delays, if untreated, cause other difficulties for kids socially and academically. We treat them, but sometimes it is hard to make up for earlier, lost opportunities.

‘He needs some extra help to learn,' I said lightly, ‘that's all. He'll be alright.'

‘Nathan in my class, he gets special help.'

I nodded.

‘He's naughty sometimes. Ms H gets so angry her eyes bulge like big bubbles.' He showed me. ‘But he's been twice as good lately.'

‘Twice as good?'

‘Ms H says because he's getting help he's not so naughty.'

‘Ms H is probably right.'

‘I never want to be a teacher.'

‘Really? What I do is kind of like being a teacher.'

‘No, Mum, you
help
people,' he said emphatically. ‘That's not being a teacher.'

‘I think teachers would have something to say about that. They're helping you by teaching you.'

But Marcus wouldn't have it.

‘They don't care what we think, they just tell us what to do.'

‘They have to keep the kids quiet so everyone can hear what they're saying.'

‘Yeah, but they don't have to be mean.' He said this with such a bite in his tone that I left it, patting his leg as he put his head back on my arm.

I'd noticed this righteousness before. He'd been voted onto the student council recently – a tiny eight-year-old in office – and had gone to his first meeting with several things to put up for discussion. He wanted the school to grow vines along the steel fences around the boundary of the school, for privacy and to dampen the noise from the highway. It would also make the school look nicer, he'd told me. The other idea he had was to collect five-cent coins because they were annoying to most people and didn't mean anything to their financial situation. This money could buy treats and fruit from the tuckshop so that kids who didn't get those things in their lunchbox could have them.

When he had been telling me all this, I asked him how he'd been chosen as a representative.

‘We voted,' he had said plainly.

‘Oh!' After a moment I'd asked: ‘Who did you vote for? Did you vote for yourself? You know you can do that.'

‘I voted for Steven Manse.'

‘Is he your friend?'

‘No.'

I was curious. ‘Can I ask why you voted for him?'

‘Ms H said we should vote for someone we thought would be good at feeling important. Like they'd be good at it and not become a big head or anything. Steven is very quiet. He'd never become bossy or a big head. He doesn't have many friends, I think ‘cos he's so serious.'

‘Do you feel sorry for him?'

‘No.' He had looked up at me, open-faced. ‘He's going to be something important one day, like the prime minister or something, I reckon.'

I nodded, thinking there was no accounting for what he thought or how he came to his conclusions.

When we were nearly home I turned to him – encouraged, perhaps, by our previous discussion.

‘Your dad and I haven't been able to get along very well since we've been apart. I feel bad about it and I'm sorry it's like it is.'

‘It's alright, Mum. But I think Dad is very mad at you.'

Given Dave hardly ever lost his temper, I wanted to know how Marcus knew this. But there was something about his face that brought me to my senses. I hadn't made the comment to elicit information from him, and wasn't I perpetuating what I'd just apologised for if I started to probe for an answer? We were back in St Kilda, the tram spinning along the old train track down Canterbury Road. I looked out of the tram's window at the verandahs of some double-fronted terrace houses across the road. One sported an Australian flag hanging limply, another had a mannequin with a pink wig and wearing a floral dress. I kissed Marcus's head and thought what a strange reality it is that he wouldn't remember much of anything that had happened in his life up until now – that none of us do. I mused that, whether they remember or not, it still matters what happens to children. Everything matters; the mind is in full swing, no matter what the memory is collecting in its seemingly random fashion. In the end, as the tram pulled up at the terminus, I was glad Marcus wouldn't remember Dave and I splitting up; then again, that meant he also wouldn't remember us being together. Reality bites. That's the truth. Reality totals, like a tsunami in full force, everything else.

THIRTY-FOUR

T
he front foyer was littered with kids, mothers, one dad, and toys that had been bought new for the visiting auditors and were now, some months on, already shabby from robust play. It was 8.45 a.m. and I didn't have an appointment until 10 a.m. Some time to do much-needed file work, to pursue closures.

I took the guff from my pigeonhole, two phone messages floating like shed feathers from the pile to the floor. The mother with the undiagnosed personality disorder had called – a moment's heaviness piled on me when I saw that message. I needed to talk to her anyway. I had done everything I could for the family. If I couldn't help them after over two years of involvement, maybe it was time for someone else to try.

‘Good morning,' I smiled, a little forced, at someone I didn't know sitting in for the receptionist (Patricia, the woman usually in the role, had been taking a lot of time off lately). Walking back past the ruckus down the wide hallway towards my room, I noticed Nigel's handwriting amongst my notices. Before I had arrived at my door, I'd brought the slip of paper to the top of the pile; the others were mainly academic and research papers that people deposited in all of our pigeonholes perfunctorily, and were less eye-catching. At my office, beginning to decipher his scrawl while simultaneously unlocking my door, I read it, my satchel still over my shoulder, one step into my room.

Dear Monty,

Thank you for this information. (What information? I don't remember giving him anything that required a response in writing or that would have stood out from the dozens of papers I shared with the team all the time.) I have problems coming to terms with homosexuality partly because of my belief system, which is Biblical and condemns homosexual behaviour as sinful. The gay community would proclaim that 10% of the population is gay. The truth probably is that only 1-2% is. The rest adopt homosexual behaviours. The 1-2% probably have a genetic basis to their condition. I can sympathise with people who are homosexual in their gender orientation but have problems in condoning homosexual behaviour, which I think is (“not normal” was crossed out) abnormal or sinful. I use the Bible as my standard – so this is more a faith position because I believe the Bible is the word of God and if God created us then what is Biblically condemned cannot be of God. However, man has marred His perfect creation and therefore sinful behaviours will be evidenced.

My position is therefore to love the homosexual as a person although I am not able to condone with his/ her behaviours like any other sinful behaviours like adultery, murder or stealing etc.

Hope this is helpful to you to know as a member of your team.

Nigel
(smiley face)

What? Was this a joke? The air left my head rather like I'd been twirled on my feet, a chuckle bouncing out of me. It couldn't be true. Surely no one could write this sort of tripe to their work colleague, let alone to their boss. I laughed, albeit hollowly, walking my body, which had become strangely light, to my desk. I lowered my messages, papers and my satchel, trying to read the letter again. ‘I can't believe this!' I muttered under my breath, turning in my office, propping up against my desk and looking at my open door, expecting him, Nigel, or someone, to come to see me, see how I was, given this outrageous intrusion, this condemnation of me.

When no one did appear I went to find James. He was having coffee and a cigarette with a newly arrived intern. I was all smiles and welcomes, the letter like a burning Judas in my fingers.

‘Can I talk to you?' I asked him and then turned to the intern, ‘I'm sorry Beth, would you mind?'

Of course she wouldn't.

‘I'll see you at the department meeting after lunch,' James said to her.

‘Yes, see you Monty.' She waved, smiling crookedly.

I beckoned to James to shift further away from the door of the staffroom.

‘I need to show you something.'

James read the letter, a frown niggling his forehead as the words peeled across his retinas.

‘This is out there. He's a bloody fanatic.'

‘Forget fanatic. He's homophobic.'

‘Fundamentalism at its worst.'