The office of Harvey Greene, BPsych

Recently

Not that he would ever admit to it, but when Thomas lowered himself painfully onto that brown couch for the fourth time, he was beginning to feel something almost like comfort. Those colourful throw pillows? Today, not so perplexing. That box of tissues? Today, well, they seemed rather handy.

But he’d never get used to that damn security camera.

‘Thomas, I’ve got to be honest with you.’ Harvey took a cursory glance at his clipboard, hesitated, then discarded it. It clanked onto the table by his chair. ‘You’ve covered more in the last three sessions than some clients get through in a year.’

‘Two hundred bucks an hour,’ Thomas said. ‘I’m a dying man. Please don’t take offence, but I’d rather leave it behind for my wives and children.’

Harvey gave him a kind smile. ‘Feeling okay today?’

Apart from the dying thing, Thomas told him that he was feeling fine enough, thank you.

‘And you still haven’t told them?’

Thomas shook his head.

‘Haven’t told them about the cancer?’

‘No.’

‘But you want to.’

A slight thickening in his throat. ‘Yes.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘It’s interesting you say “wives”.’ The shrink sat back in his chair and laced his hands together. ‘Technically, only Elsie is your wife.’

‘Splitting hairs. What would you call it?’

‘How about lover?’ he suggested. ‘Mistress? Friend? Partner?’

Thomas wanted to know what the man was getting at.

‘You obviously consider your relationship with Aida the same as your relationship with Elsie. A wife. And everything that goes with that title.’

‘Of course I do.’

‘It wasn’t always like that, though. Not in the beginning.’

‘No,’ Thomas admitted. ‘It wasn’t.’

Harvey rested his elbows on the arms of the chair, waiting. Watching him like that camera on the ceiling.

‘Back in the early days, I guess Aida and I shared our love of Elsie. That was what bound us together: we both loved the same person. What an extraordinary thing to have in common.’ As Thomas cast his mind back he felt the stirrings of old, old emotion. ‘I was attracted to Aida – she was beautiful. Still is,’ he hastened to add, as though she were in the room with them, ‘but no, I didn’t think of her as a wife until it became clear that . . . that’s who she was. That I was as committed to her as I was to Elsie.’

‘When was that point, do you think?’

Thomas realised he didn’t have to think about it. ‘When she came back. After Millie was born, she went back to her parents for a while, then came back. When I bought the house from her father. We all knew it, then – that we just didn’t work without all three, and that we’d stick around. The three of us.’

Harvey let that sit in the air for a while. He watched Thomas as the emotions of it rose and fell on his face, allowing him to experience it all.

‘Thomas, if you could walk out of here today and tell them what you want to say, what you’ve been keeping to yourself – how would that happen?’

Thomas frowned; he didn’t entirely understand the question. ‘I’d walk in the door and say it.’

‘And how would they respond?’

‘They’d cry.’

‘Would they be angry?’

‘Probably. I’ve often made them cross.’

‘Because you kept it from them?’

Thomas nodded.

‘And you’ve thought that by not telling them, you are protecting them?’

Realising the full circle he’d traversed, Thomas looked down at his hands and called himself an old fool. They were right back where they began, only now at least the shrink knew the bones of it. But in spite of all his talking, Thomas still had no idea how to break open his heart to the women he loved. To break open their hearts.

The shrink added, ‘Let me ask you this: we’re not talking only about the cancer, are we?’

It punched him in the guts. Uncertain if he was going to throw up or cry, Thomas reached for the tissues.

‘What’s at stake if you were to tell the truth now? All of it?’

Thomas stuffed the tissue into his eye sockets and the room went quiet.

Harvey said, ‘You’re afraid that if you tell them about the cancer, you’ll also have to tell them everything else. And then they’ll think that if it weren’t for the cancer, perhaps you’d never have told them. At all.’

Thomas saw a tangent and decided to take it. ‘The last time I saw my brother he took me to the pub. Or – what I thought was the pub. Over the years I’d seen him less and less – he stopped coming up to Gawler, I stopped going into the city. But a year or so ago, I made an effort to visit him. He still wasn’t sleeping much and he hasn’t been able to hold down a job in, oh . . .’ he trailed off. ‘A long time,’ he finished softly.

Harvey said, ‘PTSD?’

‘Yeah.’ Thomas coughed, wincing as the movements sent pain through his hips. ‘We went for a drink but the place he picked wasn’t just a pub. It was a girly joint. You know, lasses who take their gear off.’

‘A strip club?’ the psych offered.

‘That’s the one. I’m sitting there with my schooner and this sheila in the nick and these tall shoes starts flinging her hair in my face, and I look over and David’s laughing. Actually, properly laughing, holding his belly and spilling his drink and everything. And I wanted to shoo this naked lass away but I wanted my brother to keep laughing. So I gave her fifty bucks and by the time we left I was covered in glitter. Looked like a bloomin’ unicorn shat all over me.’

Harvey laughed.

‘I didn’t tell Elsie and Aida, though,’ Thomas said. ‘It was the first time I washed my own clothes. Fifty years selling washing machines and I only used one of them once.’ He picked at the seams of his pants and finished, ‘If I couldn’t tell them that story – the time I took away my brother’s suffering, just for an hour – how could I tell them about . . . about . . . this?’

Thomas’s shoulders heaved. He dropped his head. After a while, he heard a shuffling sound and looked up. Harvey had come forward, out of his chair, and was sitting on the coffee table. The man’s rounded, pleasant face was two feet from Thomas’s.

‘You love her,’ he said. ‘You know what to do.’

‘I really don’t.’

Harvey added, with great gentleness, ‘Everything is much more open now. There’s a possibility of finding out more information.’

‘How?’

‘Start with the internet. I could help you.’

‘The Goggle again?’

Harvey smiled. ‘Think about what Aida would want. What Elsie would want.’ He tilted his head. ‘Your wives.’

Thomas looked up at the CCTV camera.

‘They will have each other,’ the psychologist said at length. ‘After you’re gone.’

Thomas met his eyes. ‘That’s a good thing.’

Wives.

The man was right. Perhaps Thomas did know what to do.