The office of Harvey Greene, BPsych

Recently

Thomas Mullet wanted the shrink to turn off the CCTV camera.

He considered the possibility that the camera was a fake, mounted there only as a precaution, its dark eye sightless beneath its plastic dome in the corner of the ceiling. Still, it made him nervous. Not because Thomas had anything of particular malevolence to hide – no, not at all. The camera made him nervous because he wondered about the malevolence of others who had sat on this same brown corduroy couch in the psychologist’s office, in front of that same coffee table with its floral box of tissues. (The tissues made him uncomfortable, too. Tissues were for pansies.) CCTV cameras were everywhere these days, Thomas knew. Service stations, traffic lights – Christ, they even had them in taxis, lenses mounted by the rear-vision mirror to protect drivers from horrible things like assault and fare evasion. Cameras didn’t always deter people from doing the wrong thing, but the footage did make it easier to catch the bad guy after the wrong thing had already been done.

Which was precisely why the camera made Thomas nervous. Because it made the past inescapable. And Thomas had a lot of past. Decades upon decades of the stuff.

The shrink noticed Thomas’s gaze. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t record audio.’

Thomas was uncertain if that was a relief or not. Resisting the urge to cup his hand around the side of his face, he shifted on the brown couch. Piled at the other end of the couch was a heap of colourful throw pillows, and he wondered if he was he supposed to use them. Lay his head back, put his feet up, affect some kind of dream-analysing Freudian pose?

He sincerely hoped not.

The psychologist’s name was Harvey Greene. A short and balding lad, he was chubby in a welcoming, friendly kind of way. (Elsie would probably use the term ‘cuddly’, Thomas thought.) When Harvey had sat down in the armchair opposite Thomas, his shirt tightened across his middle and his trousers rode up, exposing a strip of naked skin at the top of his socks. If Thomas were a betting man, he’d estimate the psych wasn’t a day over forty. He wondered, with a sense of doubt, if that made him qualified enough.

‘So,’ the shrink began, lightly, ‘what can I do for you today?’

Thomas opened his mouth then shut it again. The only window in the room was behind him, a bay window covered in folds of sheer white fabric. Light was let in yet privacy was retained. From outside came the buzz of a whipper snipper in a nearby garden; galahs shrieked. Ordinary suburban sounds, in what felt like an ordinary suburban lounge room, to remind him that he was somewhere safe and ordinary. The plaque by the front door of what Thomas assumed must be Harvey Greene’s actual home read A place of sanctuary.

The shrink was still looking at him, without expectation.

‘I’ve got cancer,’ Thomas finally blurted.

‘I see,’ the shrink said.

‘You do?’

Harvey Greene didn’t reply, he merely kept looking at Thomas.

‘So the docs say it’s got me,’ Thomas went on. ‘Not much time left. They don’t know how long, exactly, just that there’s bugger-all they can do if I don’t want chemo – which I don’t, blow that for a joke – so my time’s now pretty limited.’

The psych glanced down at his clipboard. ‘You’re seventy-five?’

‘If you say so.’

Harvey maintained his benign gaze and Thomas panicked over what to say next. The silence elongated and fattened, like a sausage suspended over a smoking grill.

The psychologist must have decided to give Thomas an opening. Another brief glance at his clipboard and he said, ‘How long have you been married?’

‘A long time.’ Thomas answered. He hesitated, calculating. ‘More than fifty years. Missus isn’t here to tell me.’

Harvey chuckled. Went silent again.

Thomas sighed. ‘Look, doctor, to be honest I’m not exactly sure . . .’ he waved his hands, hoping the shrink would rightly infer that he was uncomfortable as hell.

Harvey set the clipboard aside and smiled suddenly. ‘Would it help if I reassured you that I’m not a doctor?’

Thomas considered it. ‘Probably would. Less pressure.’

‘Right. We’re just having a yarn. No pressure, no tests. You’ve had a lot of those already, I imagine. There’s no right or wrong here. So, what do you want to talk about?’

Thomas felt himself relax somewhat and for that he had to give credit to the shrink. Although his corporeal loosening could have been caused by the two codeine he’d swallowed before coming here, too.

‘The doctors say it started up the rear end,’ he said. ‘You know. The back-area business.’

The psychologist offered, ‘Cancer of the bowel?’

Thomas gave a brusque nod. ‘But then it spread.’ He gestured the length of his body, indicating the cancer’s domain.

Harvey made a sympathetic noise. ‘How is your wife coping with your illness?’

This was where Thomas felt himself clamming up again. With great reluctance he managed to get out, ‘She doesn’t know.’

The shrink waited. No judgement in his expression.

‘That’s kind of why I’m here. I looked it up on the internet bizzo. The Goggle, or whatever you people call it. The grandkids are always going on about it. I looked up what to do about . . . well, when you don’t really know what to do about things.’ Inwardly Thomas cursed himself. He sounded like a fool.

‘I completely understand,’ Harvey said, sounding to Thomas like he did, in fact, understand completely. ‘So you’ve been diagnosed with cancer, and you haven’t yet told your wife.’

‘Right.’

‘And the illness is . . . ?’

‘Terminal. Yep. I’m on borrowed time.’

‘Okay. So, I assume you’d like to tell your wife, but you don’t know how?’

Thomas hesitated. He’d gotten this far, but there was a truckload more the shrink didn’t know. If Elsie were here, she’d recommend the Band Aid approach. Rip it off quickly, get it over and done with. But how does one tear such an opening, with a camera in the corner of the room, to a baby-faced lad whose usual clientele was probably weepy, sleep-deprived new mothers and teenagers who just needed to get a job and a decent haircut?

‘It’s not only my wife I haven’t told. It’s my other . . .’ Christ, he was sweating. He wondered if he might be sick. ‘I sort of have . . .’

Rip it.

‘Well, you see, there’s my wife and also there’s . . .’

Rip it, you silly bastard.

‘I have two wives.’

The shrink said, ‘Okay, Mr Mullet. How about we start at the beginning?’