Chapter 2

Autumn congealed into a hard winter of barren psychotic mumblings. I’d only been there two weeks and each morning it became increasingly difficult to roll out of bed and drive thirty miles to face the tedium. I’d arrive bleary eyed but on time for the handover only to find it had already finished. In her haste to leave, Tracy had now taken to simply throwing the drug keys out the window of her car for Don to catch, often as their vehicles passed two or three miles down the road.
“All’s well,” she’d yell. “See you.”

It didn’t matter. There wasn’t much to say. There wasn’t anything to say. After you had read the patients’ notes cover to cover, then exhausted all the trashy five year old magazines in the place, nothing much could really surprise you. Even intricate delusional systems involving plans to repopulate the earth using Water Monkeys became de rigueur after awhile.

The turnover wasn’t very high in that place. It wasn’t like some acute facilities where patients are admitted, stabilized and quickly discharged into the great wild yonder . If you had a patient you didn’t like, you were basically stuck with them until they died or you resigned. You’d mutually work towards these aims until one party achieved something. Weapons of choice: cigarettes, medication, psychological torture.

There were good days and bad days. When I say good, I don’t mean the days possessed any intrinsically desirable or positive attributes. I don’t mean they were productive days. Not to be overly cynical, but even on a good day, the only thing the ward actually produced was a large volume of paperwork. Unless you want to count cigarette butts and flatus—and generally even the most absurdly obsessive statisticians don’t want to do that. No, ‘good’ in this case is a dependent variable that we measured in decibels. Good, in simple terms, meant quiet. You could have a ‘good’ day and be equally bored out of your mind.

I could have done something else, I suppose. But what? Like many young men, I lacked a sense of purpose. I felt some compulsion to show up to work and earn a decent income but other than that I had no unifying aim. After the pills were given out and the morning toilets and showers were all done, I would while away the day spinning around in an office chair, thinking about other careers for myself. I could travel to Italy and learn the secret art of espresso making. Being a barista is a respected profession there. I could invent something like the retractable twin group paper clip, stunning in its simplicity. I could put a patent on it and become a billionaire before I was thirty. Or I could run away and join the merchant navy.

I was just typing ‘merchant navy’ into a search engine when I heard Don approach.
“How big are your fingers?” he asked.
“Big enough,” I said. “I’ve never needed bigger.”
“Great,” he replied. “Then you can give Archie his suppositories.”
“I’d like to help you out there, Don. But technically speaking I’m still the most junior nurse on the unit. I think giving suppositories falls well outside my scope of practice.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll have plenty of supervision.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask—is Archie any relation to the comic book character of the same name?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s just funny to think of that fresh faced fifties cartoon guy ending up as a fat, constipated psych patient in an asylum in the middle of nowhere. Don’t you think that’s kind of funny?”
“Not really,” said Don. “Anyway, about these suppositories. Are you confident you can give them by yourself? I don’t really want to have to write down that you are incapable of carrying out simple nursing tasks on your own.”
“No need to get tetchy, Don,” I said. “I’m going.”
I popped the rocket shaped suppositories out of their blister pack and put them into a little cup. Then I poured a fresh glass of water and took it straight out to where Archie was staring at Days of Our Lives.
“Time for your medication, mate.”
He swallowed them without a second glance, chasing them back with some cold H20. I sauntered back into the office and signed that they’d been given.
“Done,” I said. “Anything else?”
Don had stolen my chair.
“You could make me a cup of tea.”

The feeling of intense ennui wasn’t leavened by Terry’s unselfconscious posturing, although it probably should have been. He took me aside one day for another private work chat.
“After much thought,” he announced pompously. “I’ve decided not to pursue any formal action over your meal cart escapades. No—” he said, raising a forestalling hand. “Don’t thank me. It was your first day after all. You did fuck up and it was entirely your fault, but I don’t see any need to ruin your career over it.”
I probably would have thanked him just to keep the peace, but he was so self congratulatory about the whole thing. Like he was doing me a big favour by not incriminating himself.
I looked at the carpet beneath his feet.
“Hey,” I said. “That stain came out pretty well. What did you use?”
He looked at me warily.
“Was it white vinegar?”
“All right, I can see I’m not going to get you to admit your mistake. But I hope you’ve at least got the good sense to keep quiet about it. At least as far as I’m concerned.”
“What am I going to do?” I replied. “Write a book?”
He laughed.
“I suppose not.”
“Oh, Sybil’s coming in later. So make sure the place is clean and tidy. And try to look professional, okay?”
He stuck his thumb in the pocket of his tight moleskin trousers, one knee out, grinning cockily. It was a striking pose and his managerial air was ruined only slightly by the ridiculous cowboy costume he was wearing. Featuring prominently were an open necked checked shirt and a pair of high gloss maroon elastic sided boots with pointed toes.
“Sybil who?”
“Sybil Crowthorn. The patient advocate. We’ve got some business to discuss. Management stuff. But we’re going out together. You might as well know.”
“I thought you were married.”
“I am. I’m having an affair. People do it, you know.”
“OK.”
“Yeah, it’s starting to get serious. She’s bugging me to take her on a holiday.”
“OK, great.”
“Don’t know how I’m going to hide it from the wife.”
“Me neither. Could you stop telling me this stuff?”
“All right. But when she comes, remember, two’s company, three’s a . . .”
“. . . Prime number? Factor of fifteen?”
“Crowd. Three’s a crowd. Don’t forget.”

He swaggered out and Don swaggered in, a mug of hot tea in his hand. He swilled the contents around like a professional wine taster, then glanced in the bottom of the cup. He started with shock at what he saw.
“A grave omen indeed. Never have I seen a rodent and a ferret together in a cup of Dilmah.”
“I have,” I said. “Once in the community.”
“Right. Well, you can trust me to keep that to myself. I suppose you want to know about the new patient?”
He gestured out the window with a flourish. There, sitting in one of the cleaner microsuede chairs was a small, dense woman, garbed in a brown peasant skirt, bright red yak’s wool sweater and a pair of summery green plastic slip on shower shoes. Quilted mittens covered her hands and a nest of tangled black hair spilled from underneath the hot pink earflaps of a crocheted toboggan cap. She was dressed for a sudden glacial pitch in global climate or a drastic failure of the building’s thermostat.
“Ivona,” said Don.
“How did she get here?” I asked.
“Mail order.”
I think he was expecting more of a reaction. I just reached for the first of four tomelike manilla folders detailing her history with mental health services.

“She’s from Turkmenistan,” said Don. “You ever heard of that?”
“Next to Afghanistan, isn’t it? Central Asia?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Her family were cotton farmers. She was kidnapped and sold into slavery by some human trafficking pimp.”
“Jesus. That sounds like a pretty entrenched delusional system.”
“These aren’t delusions. They’re facts. Apparently. Nobody’s exactly sure how she got here because she’s a pretty unreliable historian.”
I flipped through the notes and found the report of the police Sergeant who first brought her in back in 1993.
“Says here she was listed on a mail order catalogue as a bride.”
“Yeah. It turns out the new husband wasn’t the sharpest blade in the Gillette range. They married and shortly afterwards, when he discovered she had full blown schizoaffective disorder, he dumped her and relocated under a new identity.”
“Some honeymoon. Then what happened?”
“She worked as a prostitute in King’s Cross for awhile, then travelled up and down the East coast of Australia.”
“Doing what?”
“I gather she was just showing up at camp sites and hanging around, bumming food, exchanging sex for accommodation. She couldn’t speak much English. She was accused of stealing, found running around naked at one of these holiday destinations and brought into hospital by the police. They were going to deport her but somehow they established her Australian citizenship. So she’s been in long term residential care ever since. Ten years at least.
“When did she get here?”
“Day before yesterday. She was acting up down in J ward since they took her off her lithium. She’s very paranoid. She’s convinced we’re trying to knock her out so we can steal her organs and sell them on the black market. Not entirely unreasonable given her history. Your mission, and you have to accept it, is to make her feel comfortable enough to take a Valium. Maybe then she will become less paranoid. I’d try it myself, but she doesn’t believe I’m a bona fide member of the nursing staff.

Today Don’s Hawaiian shirt was bright green and so loud it could make a lawnmower cry. It had to be either a running gag or a legitimate stratagem for avoiding patient contact. In any case, he sat there serenely, apparently oblivious to the horrific pall his luminous couture cast across his features. Slave trader? Drug runner? Absolutely. He could have been on the cover of Human Traffick Monthly. It was like a sartorial bumper sticker: If You Can Read This, You’re Too Close.
I took the hint.
“All right. Where’s the Valium?”
“You’ll take it to her?”
“No. This is for me. At least until you find a better second hand store.”

In a facility like that, you have patients you like and patients who don’t necessarily bring out your strengths. Although I may sound unprofessional at times with my casual comments about setting patients alight and pushing them down stairwells, then pissing on them to put them out, I do have a professional code of sorts. I try to suspend my personal prejudices and give them the benefit of the doubt, at least the first time I meet them. No matter how much it makes me grit my teeth. In fact, I’m such a great guy that if the patient is incredibly unwell and I’m convinced they have no control over their behaviour, I have quite a large amount of tolerance for being verbally abused, spat on, physically attacked or drenched with body fluids. I don’t like being unsubtly manipulated but I can cope with it. I do, however, draw the line at having shit thrown at me.

Ivona: I’ll simply describe her dispassionately and you can make up your own mind. She was short with a broad square chin. She had puffy suspicious eyes, flat Slavic features and was tanned to the colour of a stale medium roasted Ethiopian Harrar I drank once in Belgium. Her mouth when she spoke was a grim line and her voice was a warlike yell. On the rare occasions when she smiled, she revealed small brown teeth the colour of a railway toilet. She had black stringy hair, a wizened face, and protruding from her lurid green flip-flops were yellow horned toenails apparently last trimmed before the breakup of the USSR because they still had Turkmenistani soil embedded underneath them. You could tell, because it was green.

“Ivona,” I said, approaching slowly. “Hi. I brought you some sandwiches.”
She sat up stiffly, narrowed her eyes and scratched at her underarm all in the same ungainly movement. She looked at the sandwiches with naked hostility, then back at me without any change in her expression.
“Who are you?”
“Matt. I’m a nurse.”
“Nurse, eh? Hmph. In my country, nurse is woman. You are woman?”
“No. I’m just a regular guy. With some sandwiches for you. Regular old sandwiches.”
I handed them to her. She pulled the plastic triangle apart, peeled the top slice of bread from the sandwich and sniffed the ham cautiously, measuring it for either gamma rays or Rohypnol, I’m not sure which. Her suspicions obviously confirmed, she threw the sandwiches on the floor.
“Hmph,” she said glaring balefully at me. “Hmph.”

Ever tried starting a conversation with somebody who obviously hated your guts? Maybe offer to buy them a drink, see if they’ll soften up a little? Multiply that by a thousand and you’ll have some idea of how difficult it is to establish rapport with a paranoid schizophrenic who believes you’re trying to poison them. Every gambit you try is regarded with suspicion. Your slightest changes of facial expression are viewed as hostile intent. You can’t use humour. Any jokes you make fall absolutely flat and are generally greeted as mockery. It can take a quarter of an hour just to get the patient to speak and the wrong comment at the wrong time can spoil it all.

So I launched into a torrent of innocuous banter, lighthearted conversation about the weather, local sport, her favourite fast food joint (it turned out she didn’t have one), movies and how she liked her tea. I avoided all geopolitical debate and totally ignored the imminent threat of global terrorism. Her suspicious frown gradually eased into something approaching a smile. I was winning her trust, inch by inch.
After much to-ing and fro-ing I decided to close.
“I’ve got some medication I’d like you to take, Ivona. Just something to take the edge off and make things more comfortable for you here.”
I knelt down and handed her a small cup of liquid Valium. Although she was still very guarded, her gaze was a little less hostile now and she took the cup and held it in her hand, considering it seriously for the first time.

Jean-Francois and Anita were watching me from the other armchairs, eyes full of mirth. They whispered to each other. Jean-Francois glanced at Anita meaningfully, but there was no need to cue her.
“Where’s Michael?” she said, looking about, mock furtively.
“In his room, I suppose,” I said without turning around. Fuck. The two stooges. This spelled trouble with a double o.
Ivona bristled.
“He lies, of course,” said Jean-Francois. “Michael is dead. Didn’t you know zat? Ze nurses, zey kill us, with zis poisoned medication and zey bury us in ze flower beds. It’s ze gouvernement’s plan for us.”
Ivona squinted.
“That’s not true,” said Anita. She bit her lip, but her eyes were shining.
“Isn’t it? Tell me, the last time you went into the gardens, were ze flowers not bright? Was ze soil not freshly turned? Ze beds smelling rich and mulchy? Zey are killing us, one by one. Mark my words. Oh, how I hate zem for what zey have done to me.”
He looked despairingly out the window, running a finger under his eye.
Ivona took aim and threw the valium.
The fruity smelling liquid splashed against my face, clinging to my eyelashes. I got to my feet and wiped the syrup from my cheeks, trying to salvage some dignity from the situation. Anita squealed with merry laughter.
“Well then,” I said. “Perhaps another time.”

I didn’t know it then, but the last thing I could have possibly wanted was to get Ivona to relax her inhibitions. There was something of the Mongol in her. I don’t mean she was developmentally disabled , although there was probably an element of that, too. More Mongol in the sense that she had a fierce mercurial temper, a shrill, bloodcurling war cry and an unfortunate habit of whipping off her top and running screaming around the unit and beating on her withered chest with her balled fists. She could have equally been a mail order warlord but the market wasn’t ready. No-one was ready for Ivona. Not her ex-husband, not mental health services, not the community. Certainly not Anita as she leapt out of her chair and fastened both hands around the younger woman’s throat.
“WHO DO YOU WORK FOR?!” she screamed. “WHO?!”
Anita was looking genuinely alarmed now.
“Get off!” she shrieked.
Ivona slapped her across the face, a mean glint in her eye.
“GIVE ME YOUR MONEY!”
“What?” Anita asked, gibbering.
“GIVE ME YOUR FUCKING MONEY, BITCH!”
I grabbed Ivona’s sweater and pulled her back. Things were going swimmingly.
“Any more out of you and it’s straight to seclusion. And you—Anita—well really, you asked for it, so pipe down.”
They both mooched off, hating me quietly.

On the other hand, I seemed to be making a friend of Michael. At least I think he was making friendly overtures, but his mood was so volatile it was hard to tell. He was always pleasant initially but it didn’t take long for the luster to wear off.
“How are you?” he’d greet me warmly. “You keyholding cunt.”
“Fine, thanks.”
“You should be fine on your fucking salary, sitting in there drinking coffee with your arsehole mates. See the footy on the weekend?”
“Missed it.”
“It was a fucking priceless game. Two goals scored in the last two minutes. You would have loved it. If you weren’t such a prize wanker.”
He looked at me expectantly, maybe waiting for a retort, or at the very least a denial. I couldn’t think of anything.
“These are the highlights,” he explained, gesturing at the TV set which was enclosed in a bulletproof cabinet, just in case somebody decided to spray it with an Uzi.
“Hmm,” I said. “Looks like a nice shiny ball.”
“You really have no clue, do you? I’ll try to explain. That’s the—hey!”
Ivona had stepped in front of the TV screen. She wore a gap toothed smile and very little else.
“Hey!” shouted Michael. “What about the footy? I was watching that! Are you insane or something?”
I thought she probably was, but refrained from comment as I had noticed a small, brown, apparently innocuous lump of stuff in Ivona’s hand. I was hoping she didn’t have any immediate plans for it. But she did.
Her smile widening, she threw the object straight at me. I ducked instinctively and it struck Michael smack in his indignant face. The small, brown, apparently innocuous lump of stuff was actually a small brown turd. It left a smeary mark on his cheek, then fell in his lap. He stared at it for a second then—well, let’s just say I’ve never seen anybody get out of a chair that fast.

Needless to say Ivona went straight to seclusion, shrieking at the top of her lungs. Don was grinning all the way, having watched the whole scene from the comfort of the office. We gave her a nice cheesecloth nightdress to preserve any dignity that she may by some small chance have still possessed and shut the door.
Throughout the week her behaviour worsened, if that was even possible. She finally took some Valium but far from settling her, it only seemed to relax the few inhibitions she had left. She went from throwing faeces to stealing her copatients’ clothes and lighting them. Her room was a hebephrenic mélange of stolen items and soiled linen—cleaning staff were refusing to go in there. At dinner she was in a frenzy. She forced as much food in her mouth as she possibly could, to the point where she made a hacking sound and vomited it splat back onto the plate. When he complained about this behaviour, she threw a plate of rice and chicken chow mein at Jean Francois and then leapt up on the table and peed in his pea and ham soup . She was in and out of the seclusion room seven or eight times a day for attacking her copatients or soliciting sex from Archie and as well as being absolutely primevally gross, she was so incredibly loud. Don sent me into the day room once to see if there was anything I could do to get her to shut up but I refused point blank. There was way too much gratuitous retard sex going on in there.
“I can’t go in there, Don,” I said obstinately. “I just can’t.”
“Why not?” he asked, irritated.
“Because I want to be able to keep making love to my girlfriend.”

He didn’t make me do it. He knew where I was coming from. We decided to call a case conference. Patients were often bounced from service to service when they were acting out this badly, but this was the last stop. There wasn’t anybody else who would have her. Don rang up to enquire about it, but the detention centres wouldn’t even take Ivona. Since therapeutic measures seemed to be completely unworkable, the only way we could keep her here was to drug her until she was so ataxic she couldn’t walk without falling over. Then introduce her to the blissful regularity of the Bold and the Beautiful. Like Archie, another of our success stories.

Just prior to the case conference, Sybil, the patient advocate finally heaved her vast pinstriped bulk into the office, puffing slightly. Her hair was big and silky blonde, layered and fortified with product until it was more machine than man now. It looked like the work of a hundred-dollar-an-hour stylist, or possibly our groundsman with a lawnmower and a bottle of Roundup. Twin can openers dangled from her ears, swinging dangerously close to her jugular. Every toss of her head put her in mortal peril and she didn’t even know it. Her eyes were pebbles.
“Well, he-looo,” said Terry, his voice suddenly low and sensuous. He smoothed back his hair with the palm of his hand.
“I have no time for that today,” said Sybil primly. “I’m here to report a serious infraction of the rules. A rape.”
“Anita?” said Don from the computer.
“So, you know all about that case then? Hardly surprising. No. I don’t mean a physical rape. I’m talking about an attack on the spirit. A violation of this woman’s civil rights by the insensitive custodians of this patriarchal hegemony.”
“May I say,” said Terry. “That you are looking absolutely beautiful today.”
“I have received,” she said. “An anonymous phone call informing me that one of your patients is right now languishing in the seclusion room. That is, she has been unfairly secluded against her will.”
“All of them have at one time or another,” said Terry. “Who is it?”
“Ivona,” I said.
“Who made the anonymous call?” asked Don. An old trick, but a good one. Sybil wasn’t going to fall for it though.
“I refuse to reveal my sources,” she snapped. “But I want something done about it. Now.”
“What would you like done?” asked Terry.
For fuck’s sake Terry. Make the leap.
“She wants you to take her on an outback tour,” I said lightly.
“She wants you to let Ivona out of seclusion,” said Don at exactly the same moment. He was right of course. I don’t know why I didn’t see it straight away.
“That’s correct,” said Sybil. “In this day and age, there is no need for barbaric backwoods interventions like seclusion. The patient should be allowed to roam freely as she pleases. Especially since it’s pure bigotry that got her in there. Isn’t that right, Mr Black?”
She turned her thickly made up, but nevertheless beady eyes on me.
“Discriminating against a patient on the basis of her gender? Decided to punish her because she refused to watch the country’s favourite male dominated sport?”
“I decided to seclude her because she threw a turd at one of her co-patients, Ms—I didn’t catch your name.”
“Really?” she said. “I have it on good authority that you dragged her naked and screaming into a seclusion room an hour ago. It’s Crowthorn, by the way. Sybil Crowthorn. Public trustee. Patient advocate.”
Don and I exchanged glances. This wasn’t good.
Terry was useless of course. He had been playing Solitaire in his office again and probaly had no idea of the hell Ivona had put us through that morning. He fixed me with a punitive stare. Was that a spark of satisfaction dancing drunkenly behind his stupid, stupid eyes?
“I’ll deal with this immediately, Sybil,” he said. “My oath, I will.”
“Of course you will, Terry,” she smarmed. “So, do you have anything to say for yourself, Mr Black? Or would you prefer that I just throw the book at you?”
I let out a bored sigh.
“Those are very serious earrings, Ms Crowthorn. I hope you can back them up.”

A couple of minutes later we were standing in front of the seclusion room, looking in the window. Ivona sat in the far corner, dressed in the modest cheesecloth night dress I had thoughtfully provided when I secluded her earlier.
“How are they treating you?” asked Sybil, in a syrupy voice full of concern.
“I want to go home!” said Ivona, tears beginning to well in her eyes. I probably would have fallen for it myself if I hadn’t remembered that forty five minutes before she had her hands wrapped around her co-patient’s throat, squeezing the breath out of her while probably wearing her underwear.
“Let her out,” ordered Sybil.
“Yes,” said Terry. “Open the door, Don.”
“Fine,” said Don. “She needs to see the doctor pretty soon anyway.
“Not out of seclusion,” said Sybil. “Out of hospital. The poor woman. After all she’s been through, locking her up in a place like this. It’s inhumane.”
“What makes you think tossing her out on the street while she’s actively psychotic is going to do her any favours?” I interjected, starting to get annoyed now. “Maybe you should talk to the psychiatrist about this before you make any hasty decisions. That’s why we have case conferences, so everybody can make sure it’s the psychiatrist’s decision that the coroner’s court will take issue with.
“Nonsense!” said Sybil. “It’s not up to him!”
“It’s not up to him,” echoed Terry. “It’s a management decision. I’m management, therefore I’ll make the decision. Let her out, Don. Get her things. She’s a free woman.”
“Put it in writing,” said Don.
Terry shrugged helplessly at Sybil, who sighed with disapproval.
“Pathetic,” she said. “I don’t know why you tolerate this kind of insubordination from your staff. I’ll talk to Dr Vaidya. Get him on the phone.”
“No need,” came a resonant baritone voice from behind. “I’m already here.”

We arranged our chairs in a four pronged circle . Don sat by the office window to watch the patients. Dr Vaidya got himself comfortable in the office and Terry handed him a cup of tea which he received gratefully. He glanced through the patient’s notes and glanced back at me.
“You’ve had your hands full I see, Matt. Just as well. It would be a shame to waste that brain of yours by not using it.”

Dr Vaidya was a small graying man in his fifties, always immaculately dressed in starched shirt, tie and tweed jacket, no matter what the weather was doing. His voice was rich and mellifluous, bringing to mind clay jars of blackstrap molasses left on a sunny shelf in a warm country kitchen. It was a soothing voice, well suited to mouthing platitudes. Regardless of what it was actually saying, you always heard: “You can go about your business. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Move along.”

In the few weeks I’d been working with Vaidya he hadn’t really impressed me with his stellar abilities as a clinician. He was a likeable fellow, a good talker and a walking encyclopaedia of psychiatry, but he was too lenient and frequently didn’t take advantage of the available information before making clinical decisions. He didn’t seem to have any interest in long term patient management, which was fair enough I suppose. Neither did I, but he was in charge. Vaidya would almost never show up to scheduled multidisciplinary meetings but would blow in for the occasional spontaneous visit to let you know he wouldn’t be available for a whole week. After a brief interview with the patient he would make an arbitrary and often harmful decision, leaving us to clean up the mess.

Despite his calm and self possessed image, there were times when Vaidya’s veneer began to crack. There had been occasions where I had telephoned to get a phone prescription for a patient and heard the ching of slot machines in the background, and there was a rumor circulating that he had been part of an elite card counting clique that had been kicked out of every casino in the United States. One morning I had walked in to the bathroom to find him shaving frantically with a patient’s plastic razor before attending a meeting with the state manager. He made a small gesture with his hand, like a maestro signaling three eight time, and I walked out again, with only vague recollections of why I’d entered in the first place.
Regardless of all of this, he was a consultant psychiatrist and I respected him.

“So,” he said, after closing Ivona’s notes. What is at issue here?”
“Glad you could come,” I said. “We really need some medication for Ivona. She’s becoming unmanageable.”
“This patient needs to be discharged. She’s here against her will,” said Sybil.
“She can’t go,” I said. “She’s been here a week and she’s obviously rampantly psychotic. As it stands the hospital could be held liable if she hurt someone or injured herself. Bottom line is, it’s a bad outcome for her if you send her out in the community this unwell.
“She’s been oppressed all her life!” yelled Sybil. “Why punish her further by incarcerating her? Why drug her senseless to the point where she can’t enjoy her life?”
“We don’t drug them senseless, Sybil,” I said calmly. “We drug them sensible. It’s what we do.”
“You’ve got a smart mouth, Black.”
Dr Vaidya smiled his benevolent smile.
“I can see you two have very different opinions on this.”
“That’s right, Dr Vaidya. I just can’t see how discharging a woman who is that sick is responsible behaviour.”
“Then I propose a compromise. She will not be discharged. And I will prescribe her some medication.”
“Great,” said Don, from the far corner of the room. “What are you going to give her?”
“A test dose of Modecate. ”
Don stifled a laugh.
“A test dose of modecate,” continued Vaidya, looking slightly irritated. “And she will be given day leave until seven o’clock each night. She will then be given some of her money—I assume she is on a disability pension?”
“It’s not much,” said Sybil. “Actually it’s a pittance. Not even enough for a souvlaki.”
“Really?” said Dr Vaidya. “That’s a shame. Well, surely it’s enough at least to see a film from time to time. Something educational. Those Pixar movies are very good.” He chuckled richly, then wiped his eye. “Very funny.”
“Dr Vaidya,” I said. “I don’t think we’ll be doing any favours by sending Ivona out on her own, least of all her. She’s been fairly aggressive and stealing—“
“I understand your feelings, Matt,” he smiled. “But this is how I want it to be.”
“OK then.”
I wasn’t going to press the point. There was a time to talk and a time to act and a time for a coffee and I was buggered if I could ever tell the difference. As annoying as she could be, it was going to be a breath of fresh air to get some time away from Ivona. This was a win/win situation as far as I was concerned. Except for the community. They lost. Big time. But who kept score?
Sybil, obviously. She smirked.
I was rankled. I’d have one last shot at the prize.
“If it’s not too much trouble, Dr Vaidya,” I said. “Would you mind at least seeing Ivona first?”
“Saw her in the hall,” he said. “Anyway, I’ve got a plane to catch. Please forward my calls to Dr Saunders until Monday morning. Any problems, just let him know. Goodbye.”
He swept out, leaving me baffled and Sybil quietly jubilant.

Once out, Ivona lost no time in returning to her old ways. Despite her delusions, she was a competent hustler and had no trouble surviving on the street. Each morning she’d leave the ward with two dollars and come back with forty. She quickly found herself a sugar daddy, a slightly perplexed looking tweedy gent in his late forties with a good line of credit and a bad eye for character. She would spend the mornings at home with him, passing on most of the hepatitis alphabet and from about eleven onwards, after sorting through all the trash cans on High Street, she would go down to the local teller machine and stand adjacent to the queue. According to the police and some video surveillance footage she would then spend a couple of hours loudly harassing and verbally abusing customers until they gave her money or she was asked to move along. But that wasn’t her only source of entertainment.

Three days later, on Terry’s orders, I was taking some of the patients on a group outing. Terry’s ‘management decisions’ were lately Sybil’s decisions, as they had been having long boozy lunches and spending the afternoons together. After I had complained that the patients were understimulated on the ward, Sybil had conceived of a plan. All of the sickest patients would be accompanied by one nurse to the location where they could wreak the most havoc. Brilliant.
So against my better judgement, I was walking into a department store with Mathilda, whom you’ll remember from the last chapter as a sixty three year old lady with delusions of grandeur, and Jean-Francois, whom you’ll remember as a prick . Jean-Francois was picking his nose and wiping it on the Manchester, a bored expression on his face. By the time we reached the electrical department his loud snide comments had already irritated me so much I was seriously considering clobbering him to death with an iron. I probably would have plugged it in and turned it on first if it hadn’t been for Mathilda, who was emanating waves of childlike joy. Her face was lit up like a burning truck tire and she blazed with rapt contentment every time we walked past an appliance. She was unwrapping them with her eyes. Just being next to her was to share her joy.

Michael was also present, swearing loudly.
“Look at this fucking telly!” he enthused. “Fifty two inches. That’s bigger than my dick!”
I hid my face in my hand. The only positive thing about this trip was that Archie, Anita, Stephen and Bevan weren’t on it. They remained back at the ward, having an afternoon nap due to Don giving them twice the usual dose of midday medication. He had given them extra because he didn’t want to be disturbed during his afternoon crap, which he always took at work.
“It feels better when I’m getting paid for it,” he had said.
Try it. It does too.

A gaggle of high school kids stood around some kind of demo model console game system. Ivona stood not far away from them, singing under her breath in a strange dialect, half Turkmenistani, half neologisms, apparently having a spirited conversation with herself. With her wild hair and op shop sarong, she looked rather like a disoriented latter day witch clutching a wicker basket. A store security attendant was eyeing her from a discreet distance. One wrong move and POW! He’d strike like an Uzbekistani gerbil (which are actually quite vicious if cornered and will thump their feet on the ground and whistle at snakes). Ivona must have been aware of his readiness to attack, but in her psychotic state she didn’t seem to care, just carried on, humming to herself.

Mathilda, meanwhile, had engaged a gawky, pimply faced sales assistant to help her with her purchases. He fell into the rhythm of his usual sales pitch speech, but she cut him off. The exchange quickly became distorted and amplified as they fed off each other’s enthusiasm. Mathilda’s speech was rapid fire and small, triangular puddles of spit had formed at the corners of her mouth.
“I’ll have fifty of these,” she said, giddily gesturing at a row of stainless steel dishwashers. “Gift wrapped in Polaroid glarefoil and sent to the psychiatric hospital by express courier. Today, thank you.”
Her jaw worked up and down, the muscles in her cheeks pumping rhythmically.
The young man raised his eyebrows excitedly.
“Great!” he enthused. “Anything else? We do a fantastic line of gas cooktops!”
“I’ll take the lot!” she gushed, holding on to the counter for balance.
“Fantastic! How about a food processor to go with that?”
“Give me a hundred and eighty!”
“Terrific! Anything else?”
“A dog, a cat, and a monkey!”
“Fabulous! And how would you like to pay for those?”
Fossicking in her handbag, Mathilda pulled out a half knitted beanie, a wad of Kleenex and a handful of presucked peppermints before she finally found what she was looking for. She took the small book of postage stamps and slapped them down on the counter.
“There you go,” she said, and then added as an afterthought: “They’re legal tender.”
His face fell. Reaching under the desk, he pulled out a calculator, punching in a few numbers.
“I don’t think that’s going to fly.”
“Why not?”
“You have twenty four dollars and thirty five cents worth of stamps there,” he said, trying not to show his disappointment at losing his commission. “Fifty Fisher and Paykel Nautilus dishwashers at six hundred and seventy nine dollars each is thirty three thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars. Plus twenty four cook tops, one hundred and eighty food processors, seven hundred and fifty metres of of gift wrap, fifty metres of cellotape and the lorry hire. Let’s just call it an even quarter million, shall we? Now, how did you say you wanted to pay?”
“Do you have hire purchase?” she asked, popping a peppermint into her mouth happily.
He rubbed his hands together.
“Now we’re talking! Let me get the paperwork for you!”
“Just hang on a second,” I said, but my attention was distracted. Poor, mad, Ivona had chosen just that moment to pull up her dress and flash her growler at the kids. She was greeted by a chorus of groans.
“Poke for a smoke!” she yelled in a thick accent. “Roll up!”

They scattered.
As she lifted the garment to her waist, she dropped her basket and an assortment of tagged clothing fell out. The security guard ran over and pounced, clamping his hand on her wrist. She uttered a stream of nonsense syllables and slapped him across the face hard.
“Do you know this woman?” he said, his red cheeks stinging as he struggled to keep Ivona in check.
“Never seen her, mate,” I said. “But I know who you might try. Sybil Crowthorn. Public trustee. Patient advocate. Here, I’ll write down her mobile number for you. I turned around to grab a pen, but Mathilda was already using it to put the finishing touches on the hire purchase agreement that would sign her disability pension away for the rest of her life. I bleated in protest, but to no avail.

For his part, Jean Francois had used the kerfuffle to start stuffing electrical appliances down the front of his jeans as if there were no tomorrow. He started with three or four mobile phones which fell straight down the leg of his trousers and onto the floor, before moving on to the Playstation controllers, now forgotten by the kids in their fascination with the scene that had unfolded.

Michael, of course, had vanished. He had absconded, this time for good. It was like he was never there. I didn’t see him again for another month, by which time I had changed rotations.

That afternoon Ivona was back in the psych hospital, raising hell. The staff were glum, the remaining patients were glum and somehow Terry had managed to turn around the whole department store fiasco as though it was my fault. Ivona didn’t sleep. Tracy called in sick all that week. Don lost it a couple of times and told Ivona to: “stick her head up her bum and fart.”

If it was hard to come to work before, it was even harder now. I’d sleep poorly, waking up at the crack of dawn and staring at myself in the condensation on the bathroom mirror, debating whether to even bother shaving or just follow Tracy’s example and call in sick. My reflection was a grim mask. All the softness in my face had gone, replaced by hard angular lines and a bleak thousand yard stare. Bags the size of suitcases hung under my eyes. This was intolerable. She had to go. I needed to come up with a plan.

“The way I see it,” I said to Don later as we sat in the office in front of the computer. “We’ve got two options.”
“I’m all ears,” he said.
“Number one: we could kill her.”
It was a testament to the seriousness of the situation that Don did not laugh.
“How?” he asked.
“Overdose. Hanging. Steak knife through the face. We’ll make it look like a suicide. It’s the right location for it.”
“But that would reflect badly on us,” said Don.
“True. Which leads me to our second option: get rid of her.”
“What do you mean by that? We can’t transfer her. I’ve tried. No other service will take her.”
“What about her family?”
“They’re in Turkmenistan!”
“Exactly my point. It’s the furthest possible place away from us. Don, look at this.” I opened up a browser window on the computer with a currency conversion applet on it. “She’s on an Australian disability pension. That’s three hundred and fifty dollars a week for the rest of her life. Three hundred and fifty dollars is—“ I typed in the figure. “One million, five hundred thousand, eight hundred and seven Turkmenistan manat! And one litre of gasoline in Turkmenistan costs only three hundred manat! That’s fifty thousand litres of gasoline a week of purchasing power! The whole extended family could live off that!”
“They can’t live off gasoline.”
“Who cares what they live off!” I said, getting excited now. “Fuck them! They’d be rich! And more to the point, she’d be gone. So, are you with me?”
Don looked enthusiastic in spite of himself.
“It sounds good in theory,” he said. “And it might just work. But it’s not me you need to convince. It’s Sybil. She’s the public trustee. She’s got access to the funds.”
“Leave that to me. Just pack Ivona’s bags and we’ll get her out of here.”

A few short minutes later I was on the phone to Sybil.
“As I see it,” I said. “It’s the only way to right the wrong that was committed ten years ago when Ivona was so heartlessly torn from her homeland. We’ll emancipate her from hospital, the whole hegemonic logocentric metanarrative or whatever and the tyranny of her past at the same time! And all through the healing power of song! Look, you’ve got to go for this. It’s hot, it’s fantastic, it’s the thing that’s on the tip of everybody’s tongues at the moment. The family love it, we love it, Ivona loves it. She’ll live like a queen over there, Sybil. Everything will be laid on. Stretch limos, gourmet trash cans, only the best yak’s wool sweaters and a llama shaped swimming pool! And that’s just for starters! Look, I know you and I have had our differences but Ivona wants this. She needs this reunion with her family to heal. So what do you say? Will you spring some of her money for the airfare?”
“Well . . . I’m not sure.”
“Someone would have to escort her. Maybe two people. It would be a business class return airfare to Turkmenistan and two night’s accommodation in one of the country’s most exclusive hotels. All expenses paid. The perfect romantic getaway for you and Terry.”
“That’s supposed to be a secret.”
“Whoops. Well, obviously you could take whomever you want. I just thought Terry might be a good choice.”
A fifteen hour flight across the Pacific in a confined space with a raving lunatic wasn’t my idea of a romantic getaway, but Sybil hadn’t had the same exposure to Ivona that I had. She still thought Ivona was hard-done-by but ultimately salvageable. She would take an unrealistically positive view of this trip, I was sure of it. But Terry knew the truth—it would be fifteen hours of hell. He would hate this when he found out. Sybil would make him go regardless and he wouldn’t even have the excuse that it would make his wife twig to their illicit affair. It was a perfectly legitimate business trip. It almost made me cackle with maniacal glee.
“Hmm,” said Sybil. “It would be good for Ivona’s mental state.”
“Wouldn’t it just?”

It was only a week later that Don and I were kicking back, enjoying the relative peace and quiet of an Ivona-free ward. We were just getting into a game of Grand Prix Challenge on the Playstation I had confiscated from Jean-Francois when the phone rang. It was Terry from Turkmenistan. He was ropable.
“You’ve got a fucking cheek, Black,” he said. “Did you call the family at all?”
“Well I did. But they didn’t seem to speak English. I assumed it was OK to send her because her father just kept saying ‘yes’ the whole time. Actually come to think of it, I’m not sure it was her father. It might have just been the operator.”
“Terrific,” he snarled. “Just terrific. This whole thing was a bust. Fifteen hours of hell and the family don’t want a bar of her. Who do you think arranged the kidnapping in the first place? They won’t touch Ivona with a ten foot pole and they’ve mortgaged their ancestral homelands to buy her a return ticket. As if that wasn’t enough, Sybil’s left me and now I’m stuck in Ashgabat Airport customs alone with Ivona, looking forward to another fun filled flight. We’d be airborne already but we’ve slowed down a bit as she seems to have cached a bottle of Valium tablets in her ass.”
“I thought she might have done that,” I said jovially. “So I took the liberty of calling Ashgabat customs in advance, to inform them of my suspicions.”
Terry was livid with fury. I could hear him spluttering on the other end of the phone.
“Well, bad news, Matt: She’s coming back. And so am I!”