This Too Shall Pass (6 page)

Apart from Antwerp being way too slick and smarmy, shallow and dictatorial, and apart from the whole hideous notion of the dollar deciding health outcomes for people, the effect his presence had on the service meant that clinicians had to look at the way they worked. Everything had to be overhauled, streamlined and pared down. Things like waiting lists and throughput indicators needed, in the case of the former, to be reduced, and, in the latter, to be increased. The reality was that clinicians needed to find new ways to be responsive without lowering the quality of service. That was the theory, at any rate. The antidote, or so it had been posed, was to become accessible. Now that sent a shiver down everyone's vertebrae. Child psychiatry had kept inaccessibility in high regard and would have clearly marked it on a coat of arms if there had been such a thing.

Along with the state's other child and adolescent mental health services, at Marlowe Downs thorough examinations, laborious assessments and encumbered processes were the cult of the day. And, now, the board of directors was stamping the hard cold fact of the dollar value onto previously untouchable public programming. The corridors were abuzz. Everyone was loading their carts with suspicions and theories of Big Brother cost cuts and the effects of a government's leverage that was finally taking hold.

A newcomer, I sat somewhere in the middle – not on the fence but gladly jumping from side to side. I wanted to soak up as much educational experience as I could from the thickly cushioned brains of the long-term, deeply immersed, analytical practitioners, while at the same time – having come from a position in the country in which I'd been everything to everyone – be as accessible and responsive as I could. I had a great belief in help for all.

At night, when I got on the tram to head home, I'd almost collapse with the head-spin of this convergence. The day would strike like a hot mix turning to cold hard bitumen. I'd struggle through the crowds in the city and, if I was lucky, find a seat on the number 96 to St Kilda. There, squashed in, I'd feel as if my head had shifted to Angola while my body had stayed on the tram. That's when the loneliness and regret of a failed marriage would return. Any failed marriage, even the most horrendous, has a lingering sadness. Difficult to account for or not, there's a malaise. And, sometimes, I felt so submerged and alone without Marcus, that the weight of things seemed suffocating. I missed him especially before and immediately after my weekends with him, which were still occurring at a rate of two out of three.

At the end of the agreed weeks, Renny and I would travel back to have him. We had negotiated to pay my friend Ange a reduced amount of rent for the use of two rooms and a bathroom at the back of her large house. As things went, while not ideal, we managed to create some sense of normality for Marcus and maintain some privacy for ourselves. It couldn't go on forever but until Dave and I could sort out a settlement, it would have to do. ‘These things take time,' I told Renny, who would have preferred we had our own place. ‘These things take time.'

Returning from these weekends, the memory of his spindly clinging monkey body, his smiling requests and his gurgling laugh planted in me, there would begin a process of tearing away, as, in painfully slow increments, the images and sensations dissolved.

It wasn't that I didn't love Renny. I've never
not
loved her. But in those early days of work, coming home amidst a flock of people rushing to their own piece of privacy, I felt like a displaced person. The crowd, its uncaring throb, only increased the feeling. Renny, who worked much closer to home, would be waiting for me at the tram stop or sitting at a bar we used to drink in regularly. She was always so positive and I would arrive like a scared cat, misery and wretchedness rising in me. I wanted to be better for her, but something else always emerged. I would well up with tears of sadness and exhaustion. I particularly cried if she made me laugh. I was prone to anguish and an act of tenderness from her was enough to open all sorts of cathartic outpourings. Alcohol was the good oil for this and we'd often walk home, her carrying my satchel over one shoulder and me under the other, a pain the size of a small country for Marcus lodged in my heart.

I was waiting, without knowing how long it would take, to feel better.

FOURTEEN

I
‘ve come to think there's a protective mechanism in humans that – excluding traumatic events – causes us to remember things in a more positive light than was actually the case. In some instances we completely erase sourness from our recall. In keeping with this, certain incidents that occurred prior to our moving to the city seemed to have passed out of my consciousness. These were things I needed to remember when I was blaming myself for deserting Marcus.

Renny, a memory like an elephant, would tell me in soft tones what some of those things were. One rose in my mind with clarity. It had made our leaving undeniably necessary.

The precursor to the actual event had occurred when Renny and I went to a pub one evening in what was, for the town, quite a big night. A friend had organised a band from the city to play. I even remember the band's name: the Jaynes. They were an energetic band, fun, but the atmosphere lacked a little depth charge and consequently Renny and I started to have our own depth charges at the bar. The atmosphere improved and so did our mood. We kissed. I don't think it was too much of a kiss, but then I was on the inside of it, not the outside.

However, when I'd gone to pick Marcus up from gymnastics at the end of the week, Dave met me outside, prickly with the news of it.

‘I want to talk to you about last Saturday night.' His lips were drawn back as if he was a father about to deliver an unpleasant but necessary communique with a wayward child. Cars were pulling into the car park and sneakers were twisting noisily on the concrete path around us. I, not wanting to get too close, had my head perched forward in an exaggerated act of paying attention. I was balanced in the stance of sarcastic listener, perhaps thinking that if he
wanted
to talk, looking at me may have quelled the inclination. But – like many other things – I was wrong.

‘You were seen at the pub, Renny's tongue stuck down your throat.'

‘Who said that?' Deflection, Margaret Thatcher style.

‘It's not important who said it.'

‘Yes it is.'

‘Well, I'm not saying.'

‘I bet they wouldn't have commented if we'd been heterosexual.'

‘That's not the point.'

‘It's certainly my point.'

‘You've got to understand,' Dave said, ‘this is Marcus's and my town. We live here.'

‘I live here too!'

‘Everybody saw it!'

‘We're adults. We were in a pub, for God's sake.'

‘Have some consideration.'

‘For what? The fact you've just told me this is
your
town, as if all lesbians should be moved on so you can walk around without fear of bumping into one?' (I'm prone to ebullient speeches if I'm stressed. My mother has the same tendency, and, although I haven't consciously followed in her footsteps, I'm not exempt, unfortunately, from doing just that.)

‘I'm just relaying what they said. That it was gross, over the top.'

I shrugged challengingly, looking at him nonplussed. ‘I don't know what you want me to do about that. What do you want me to do?'

In the time he took to construct an answer, I'd already stepped around him, my eyes burning with upset. I strode towards the hall to collect Marcus, where his little legs were taking him over an obstacle course of equipment. While he was finishing, my blood pressure rose in direct correlation to the effort required in pushing my umbrage down. My sharp call gave him a message of urgency. We shunted out of the hall, my hand sternly gripped around his, his little legs running to keep up.

On hearing this story, Renny, as I'd predicted, was furious. With Marcus tucked up in bed, she'd paced.

‘Hippies. More bigoted than a bunch of conservatives. Backward, pathetic men with long hair in pony-tails. This town! I can't stand it.'

The escape to Melbourne had been made six weeks later. Renny and my relationship would never have lasted if we'd stayed. It wasn't just in Dave's mind anymore, it had been put in mine: the town had become
his
.

FIFTEEN

R
enny's memories weren't all in regard to excusing me. Some were told as a way to point out my flaws – in particular, my inability to get on with things. She wanted me to be realistic about life, to take responsibility for my tendency to want to hold on. She reminded me of something that had occurred six weeks or so after Dave and I had separated, and of which I'm deeply ashamed.

In an amalgam of horror and depression in the early hours of a long and feverish night, I'd rung Dave. He informed me I'd woken him from the first restful sleep he'd had since I'd gone. I apologised for this amongst flurries of tears and recriminations, blathering on about how I thought I'd made a mistake. He was calm, cut off. He told me to call him the next day if I still felt the same way.

In the morning, under the steely light of a cloud-ridden sky, I knew that madness had gripped me in those dark hours. I was struck by my stupidity and lack of strength. Regret swarmed in me like locusts on a wheat field. There was no way I could go back to Dave.

I confessed the phone call to Renny. She was hurt, furiously hurt. I was making the ground heave for all of us. I crawled under my doona to nurse my guilt. It didn't help. My face ruined, I surfaced with my hands, if not covered in blood, then certainly sticky from all my snuffling. It took me two weeks to convince her I hadn't meant it, that making the phone call to him had been a mistake. Renny, ever practical and learning a harsh lesson about me – a tendency towards doubt that kind people call self-reflection – said we should live together so that this wouldn't happen again. It was the beginning of autumn and we'd known each other for four months. Since I was living in Ange's house full-time then I had to ask her if she'd mind if Renny moved in. Renny would have to travel back and forth for work, but between us, we'd been travelling up and down the highway almost every day anyway. As for Ange, she was happy to have the company and the extra cash.

Renny shifted on a cold morning when the wind was lashing about. Despite her mattress having been secured on the back of her load, somehow it flew off. We laughed with a kind of fatal bemusement, hoping it hadn't landed on the windscreen of another car.

Even though we looked for that mattress every time we drove along the highway, we never saw it. It had disappeared into the murky, fetid, whipped-up air and remains a mystery to this very day.

SIXTEEN

T
o find a friend at Marlowe Downs was more than a stroke of luck, it was a celestial experience. When I first saw him, James was standing in the courtyard just outside the staff kitchen window where I stood making a coffee. His round Phil Collins features nodded at Elliot who towered over him, swamping him with his excited, jagged speech. Watching them with half an eye as I pushed on the coffee plunger, I could tell I was going to like this guy. He was dressed in plaid pants and an olive green shirt that changed colours when he twisted or laughed, showing a tinge of magenta, then shades of steel blue. His hair was cropped closely to his scalp and he wore jewellery, chunky silver rings and leather bands around his wrists. To be truthful, I think it was his teeth – straight, gaps between each, stains from black coffee and cigarettes marking them – that convinced me about him. Those stains were a suggestion of rebelliousness in a land of conformity. Even eccentricity was a kind of tradition at Marlowe Downs, but a jewelled man with stained teeth? That definitely was not a typical occurrence.

‘Hi!' I said, walking through the open door, squinting into an ill-defined sun.

‘Oh, Monty.' (Elliot, doing his bit.) ‘This is James. New psychologist. This is Monty, full-of-guts-and-knowledge Monty from the country.'

‘Hi,' I repeated as we shook hands, Elliot's reference to the country, and the “full of guts” thing, resonating in me with mild irritation.

‘Congratulations,' I said. ‘Welcome to MeadowLea.' (This was actually Renny's joke, and technically a steal.)

James laughed.

‘Thank goodness for polyunsaturates,' Elliot chipped in, his hands deep in his college professor pants as if he really might have a couple of six-shooters hidden there.

‘Which team are you in?' James asked, a generous grin still hugging his face.

‘Same as yours,' I widened my eyes. (News of his arrival had already been announced.)

‘Feel like a school kid,' he said.

We both laughed.

James's office was on the opposite side of the building to mine, past an internal courtyard where a fernery was home to two tortoises and many goldfish. I enjoyed walking through the place to visit him. It was like going on a small trip, especially when I had a new destination – somewhere other than the kitchen – to go. Depending on my mood, I'd either wing along the corridors or slink around them clandestinely trying to avoid the long breath that would be needed to supply answers of this and that – requests, which invariably meant more work in an already busy schedule. It, the slinking, always reminded me of TS Eliot.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the streets

Rubbing its back along the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

Those words. I'd repeat them endlessly. Always in those corridors. I wasn't even sure what they were about but to me they seemed about breathing. I guess they kept drawing me along, helped to protect me.

See? Even I was becoming eccentric.

James was fastidious, his room so tidy it was a mirage of itself. His files were to envy. While mine were piled in nasty towers outside my filing cabinet, his sat beautifully, well behaved and up-to-date, in the sleeves allotted to them.