It’s pretty new for general hospitals to have psychiatric wards. Only the big teaching hospitals do, and the inmates are not the poor sad chronic epileptics, tertiary syphilitics, senile and other dementias of places like Callan Park and Gladesville. They’re all patients whose symptoms are not so firmly based in organic brain damage—schizophrenics and manic depressives in the main, though I’m not very up on psychiatry. When I was doing routine chests I’d get an occasional girl with anorexia nervosa, but that was about it.
So the Psych Pavilion is a new building, the only one not clad in glass with aluminium framing. It’s very solid red brick with few windows, and what windows there are have bars. There’s a huge steel double door around the back for servicing, but apart from it, the place has just one door, another steel affair with an inch-thick glass panel in it, reinforced with steel webbing. When I got to it just after four o’clock, I saw that it had two separate locks with the insides on the outside. So I had no trouble getting in, all I had to do was turn both knobs simultaneously, but the moment the door closed after me, I saw that in order to get out, I’d need two different keys. A bit like a jail, I suppose.
It’s air-conditioned and very nicely decorated. How on earth had they prevailed upon Matron to let them run riot with brilliant colours and fabrics? That’s easy to answer. The whole world, even Matron, retreats before Mania. All our defences cannot cope with those who suffer disorders of reason because you can’t reason with them. It’s a very frightening thought. The four floors are neatly split. Labs and offices on the ground, male patients on one, female patients on two, and child patients up the top on three. The receptionist buzzed Dr. John Prendergast and told me to take the lift all the way up to the third floor, where he’d meet me.
A big teddy bear of a man, curly brown hair, grey eyes, the build of a Rugby player. He ushered me into his office, seated me and went behind his desk, which always disadvantages the visitor. Even as we went through the pleasantries, I realised that he’s a cunning bastard. Deceptively mild and dopey. Well, you don’t fool me, I thought. I’m not only sane, I’m smart. You’ll get no ammo from me that might explode in my face.
“So to Florence—Flo, you call her?” he asked.
“Flo is what her mother called her. As far as I know, Flo is her proper name. Florence is a Child Welfare presumption.”
“You don’t like Child Welfare,” he said, not a question.
“I have no reason to like Child Welfare, sir.”
“The reports say the child was neglected. Was she abused too?”
“Flo was neither neglected nor abused!” I snapped. “She was her mother’s angel and the recipient of enormous love. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz may not have been an orthodox mother, but she was a very caring one. Flo isn’t your average child, either.”
After that outburst I forced myself to be calm, self-possessed, alert. I told Prendergast what kind of life Flo had led, about the lack of interest in material comforts, about her mother’s brain tumour and odd physical appearance, about Flo’s arrival on the dunny floor during a tummy ache, about the doctor who had prescribed the hormone which had resulted in Flo.
“Why has Flo been admitted to Queens?” I asked.
“Suspicion of derangement.”
“You surely don’t believe that!” I gasped.
“I’m not making any judgements of any kind, Miss Purcell. I think it’s going to be weeks before we have the slightest idea what Flo’s problems are—how much of her present state is due to what she witnessed, how much of it has always been there. Does she talk?”
“Never, sir, in anyone’s hearing, though her mother insisted that she does talk. I’ve discovered that the reading centres in her brain are either badly impaired or simply not there.”
“What kind of child is she?” he asked curiously.
“Hypersensitive to emotion in others, extremely intelligent, very sweet and gentle. She was so afraid of her mother’s murderer that she’d bolt under the couch even before he appeared, though no one else except me considered him dangerous.”
And so it went, on and on and on, a bit like a fencing match. He knew I wasn’t telling him everything, I knew he was trying to trap me. Impasse.
“The police and Child Welfare files say that Flo was present in the room when her mother was murdered. After both parties were dead, she remained in that room without attempting to summon help. And she used the blood to finger-paint on the walls,” he said, frowning and shifting in his seat as he stared at me. “You don’t seem at all surprised that Flo defaced the room—why?”
I gazed at him blankly. “Because Flo scribbled,” I said.
“Scribbled?”
Well, well! No doubt because they regarded both house and child as shockingly neglected, Child Welfare hadn’t mentioned the scribbling! They’d missed its significance.
“Flo,” I said, “scribbled all over her mother’s walls. She was allowed to scribble, it was her favourite—almost only—occupation. That’s why Flo and the blood came as no surprise.”
He huffed and got up. “Would you like to see Flo?”
“Would I!”
As we walked down the corridor he deplored the locks on the door to the outside world, the bars on the windows. The new drugs were making such a difference to patient behaviour that security measures weren’t necessary. “But,” he said with a sigh, “general hospital wheels turn very slowly. R.P.A. has abolished its locks, so it’s only a matter of time before Queens does.”
Flo was in her own little room, attended by a nurse who wore not only the badge of her general training, but a psychiatric one as well. My angel was sitting quietly in her cot, so thin and small in her skimpy little hospital gown that I wanted to weep. My horrified eyes took in the heavy canvas bodice buckled over her shoulders and across her back with leather straps. From the bodice to the underside of the cot, stout ropes held her so that she could sit up or lie down easily, but couldn’t get to her feet.
I stood stunned. “Heavy duty restriction harness on Flo?”
Prendergast ignored me, went to the cot and let down its side railing. “Hello, Flo,” he smiled at her. “I have a very special visitor for you.”
The enormous sad eyes stared at me in wonder, then the rosebud mouth broke into a huge smile, and Flo held out both arms to me. I sank onto the mattress, enfolded her in a hug and patted kisses all over her weeny face. Angel, my angel! And she kissed me, stroked me, snuggled against me and looked into my face. Put this in your pipe and smoke it, Dr. Bloody John Bloody Prendergast! No one watching could mistake Flo’s delight in seeing me.
For a long time I was conscious of nothing except the joy of holding her. Then, looking at her properly, I saw the bruises. Flo’s arms and legs were mottled with great blue-black patches.
“She’s been beaten!” I yelled. “Who? Who dared? I’ll have the whole of Child Welfare pilloried!”
“Calm down, Harriet, calm down,” Prendergast said. “Flo did this to herself, here as well as at the child shelter. That’s why she’s tied down. You may not believe it, but this shrimpy little creature tore the calico restriction harness to shreds—not once, but half a dozen times. We had no choice other than to resort to leather and rope.”
“Why?” I asked, still doubting.
“Trying to escape, we think. The moment she’s free, Flo takes off, literally throws herself at the nearest object. I’ve seen her myself, cannoning into the wall time and time again. She doesn’t care how badly she hurts herself. At the child shelter she went through a plate glass window one floor up. That’s why they sent her here. How she didn’t kill herself or break anything, we’ll never know, but she was badly lacerated.” His big, well-shaped hand slid her short gown up a trifle to let me see the neat rows of stitches on the inside of both thighs. “It was either heavy restriction harness or heavy sedation, and we don’t like sedation in here. It’s convenient for the staff, but it masks symptoms and delays diagnosis.”
“Her pubes?” I whispered.
“Stitched too, I’m afraid. We called the plastic surgeons in for a consultation, but they think she’ll be fine as is. Whoever sutured her up in R.P.A. Cas did a brilliant job.”
“R.P.A. Cas, eh? Then Flo was in Yasmar,” I said.
“I didn’t say that, nor will I.”
“Why wasn’t Flo admitted to R.P.A. psych?”
“No bed,” he said simply. “Besides, we’re the premier unit for small children.”
“Anyway,” I said triumphantly, “it all proves one thing. This is Flo’s way of getting what she wants, and she wants me. She was willing to run the risk of dying to find me. That says a lot.”
He eyed me speculatively. “Yes, she certainly wants you. Um, would you persuade her to be less frantic?” he asked.
My lip curled. “Not in a fit, ace!”
“Why, for God’s sake?” he demanded.
“Because I do not choose to. Why should I help you lot soften her up until she’s malleable enough to be sent back to Yasmar? Flo is mine. If her mother could speak, I know she’d say so. That’s why I’m applying for custody,” I said.
“You’re young and single, Miss Purcell. You’ll never get her.”
“So everybody says, but ask me if I care what everybody says. I’ll get Flo.” I smiled at her. “Won’t I, angel?”
Flo closed her eyes, stuck her thumb in her mouth and began to hum her tune through it.
They let me stay with her for half an hour, though Prendergast never let up on me, tried every way he knew to find out what I was hiding. Crafty bugger, he knows there’s a lot more to it than I’ll admit. Fish away, ace, fish away! You won’t crack me. I’m a big old gum tree, her mother said so.
When the secretary emerged from her cubbyhole to unlock the door for me, she handed me a sealed envelope. “Dr. Forsythe asked me to give you this,” she said with total lack of curiosity. Like a patient on chlorpromazine. Well, maybe she is.
The note asked if I’d meet him in the coffee lounge underneath the railway station at Circular Quay at six o’clock. An hour hence. I decided to walk, just dream the miles away in a happy haze. No, I don’t have Flo yet, but at least I know where she is. After this, Child Welfare will know that I’m a force to be reckoned with, hur-hur-hur. Little Florence Schwartz wants me! Even if she’s sent back to a shelter, they won’t be able to keep me away from her. Dr. John Prendergast may be a nosy bastard, but his report is going to say unequivocally that Florence Schwartz is emotionally dependent on a twenty-two-year-old spinster who has to work for a living. Let the grey ghosts wrestle with that one! Ripper-ace.
As I reached the rather dirty gloom underneath the Circular Quay railway station, I realised that all of this had happened on or next to the day that I looked into the Glass. Is that what scrying consists of? Could it be that the scryer doesn’t actually see things, but that the act of focusing all that mental energy into an object with exquisitely arranged molecules has the ability to change events? What a thought!
So when I entered the deserted coffee shop, my mind wasn’t on Duncan. In fact, for a moment I wondered what I was doing there. Then he came around the bulk of the Gaggia machine, gave me a smile of delighted pleasure, and held out my chair for me. The moment I was seated, he picked up my hand and kissed it, gazed at me with so much love in his eyes that I melted. He can do that to me every time. Oh, why is he such a victim of convention?
“It’s a pity,” I said, still fizzing over Flo and the Glass, “that a man can’t cut himself in half. The half of you that the Missus wants, I definitely don’t want, and the half of you that I want, the Missus definitely doesn’t want. But I’ve decided that that is the whole problem with men as far as women are concerned. We only ever want about half a man.”
He wasn’t in the least offended. In fact, he grinned. “It’s wonderful to see you right back on form, my love,” he said tenderly. “If an eighth is all you want, then feel free to start dissecting immediately.”
I squeezed his hand. “You know I can’t. I have to keep my nose clean to get custody of Flo.”
Then we both realised that the waitress was standing patiently waiting to take our orders. Listening enthralled.
“I beg your pardon, my dear,” he said to her, and ordered two cappuccinos. The girl shuffled away looking as if the Pope had granted her a private audience. Duncan’s good manners have the most extraordinary effect on women. Just goes to show we’re not used to being treated like delicate flowers.
I told him all about Flo and Dr. John Prendergast, and he did listen as if it really mattered to him. It can’t, I know that, except that I know he feels a great deal for me, and I suppose, feeling a great deal, it can matter.
“You have an air,” he said at the end of my tale, “of having just completed a walk across hot coals.” He studied the palm of my hand as if it held the answer to a riddle. “I wonder why I looked at you and loved you? A millisecond on a ramp, and I was done for. Is it because you belong to the world of Kings Cross? A denizen of an awful old house seething with cockroaches, a walker rather than a driver, a drinker of cheap brandy, a devotee of the bizarre, the tawdry, the frankly undesirable.”
“Your tongue, ace,” I grinned, “is touched with honey.”
“No, it isn’t,” he said instantly, and bit my hand. “Let me come home with you and it’ll soon find the honey.”
The cappuccinos arrived. Duncan smiled at the waitress and thanked her—two audiences with the Pope!
“Why did you arrange this rendezvous?” I asked.
“Just to see you on your own,” he answered. “Mr. Toby Evans seems to have moved into my territory.”
“No, he’s got his own territory,” I said, licking the fluff off my spoon. My happiness flooded back. “Oh, Duncan, the joy of finding my angel!”
“How are you off for money?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“If you need it, you know where to come.”
But he knows I can’t accept money from him. Still, it’s nice of him to offer. I miss him, I’m never so conscious of it as when I’m with him again, even for a cappuccino at the Quay.
When I got up to go, I leaned across the table and kissed him hungrily, lips and tongue, and he kissed me back, one hand brushing a breast. The waitress was looking at us as if we were Heathcliff and Catherine.
“I’ll never be able to stay away from you,” he said.
“Good!” I walked out and left him to pay the bill.
They were all waiting to hear about Flo when I walked in. As probationers don’t go on the wards for the first three months, our Pappy is home in the evenings too. She’d made a whole heap of Chinese food, which we carried up to Toby’s attic because it’s the biggest room in the house and the views are marvellous. Funny, that. Toby used to be quite frantic at the very thought of people invading him in case someone left the mark of a rubber heel on his white floor, or chipped the table, or anything. But these days he’s more amenable, maybe because we’ve imposed a few rules of our own, like all shoes off before we go up the ladder, and don’t offer to wash the dishes. Truth is, I suspect, that even Toby is missing Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, though we hear her every night.
Of course they know as well as I do that I’m actually not a scrap closer to getting Flo than I was before I found out where she is, but it makes such a difference to know where she is, and to know that we can all visit her. I checked that with Prendergast, who of course will be present to hear what’s said and see what we all look like, etc. But he won’t get any further with a one of them than he did today with me. Crossites are used to keeping secrets from officialdom. No one was surprised that our angel had gone through a plate glass window and no one was surprised that she’d survived it, though Bob cried terribly when I described the lacerations. She has a tender heart. Klaus thought it would be nice to bring his violin to the hospital and play for her—I didn’t tell him that I thought there might be objections. Once they hear that bow drawn across the strings, they’ll change their minds. I suppose it was the War ruined any chance Klaus had to make music his career, but the world’s loss is our gain, and he’s such a sweet chap, in love with his budgies. They’re all so nice.
What we don’t talk about when we’re together is the future. The Public Trustee, a bit bolder now that almost two months have passed without a will turning up, sent a fellow to inspect The House when only Pappy was home. Oh, the waste! he clucked when he realised that two flats and a room were untenanted. And why were the rents so cheap? So we expect that in another couple of months, maybe sooner, strangers will move into the front ground floor flat, Harold’s room, and Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s quarters. How can you tell the Public Trustee about front ground floor flats at Kings Cross? There will be sailors everywhere again. Jim reported that she’d spoken to Joe the Q.C., whose considered opinion is that our rents can’t be increased without a lot of Fair Rent Board fuss, because the landlady herself had pegged them years ago. It’s more the thought of having people in The House who haven’t been hand-picked. I mean, the thing is that this is Kings Cross, so the flats aren’t really flats and the rooms are pretty awful. It’s under the lap! Now we’ve got the bloody Public Trustee peering up our skirts. Once they take full control, there’ll be a major earthquake, and they’re likely to spend a good part of Flo’s bank book inheritance turning The House into something that fits the full meaning of the Act, whichever Act they decide is applicable. They’ll probably ban scribbling on the walls.
When the rest departed, I lingered.
Toby hadn’t had a lot to say, just sat on the floor with his legs crossed and listened, his eyes going from face to face. They look redder than they ought to, a sure sign that something is on his mind or his temper’s ruffled. Some of it, I am convinced, is Flo. Oh, he was always kind to her, but she hasn’t the power over him that she has over the rest of us. Toby resists, which may be a part of that Australianness. Let a woman have power over him? Not on!
“Having second thoughts about keeping your room here?” I asked as he commenced to wash the dishes.
His back was to me. “No.”
“Then what is biting you?”
“Nothing.”
I went round the corner of the sink and leaned against the cupboard so I could see at least a profile. “Something is. Flo?”
He turned his head to look at me. “Flo’s none of my business.”
“And that’s the trouble. To the rest of us, she’s very much our business. Why isn’t she yours, an orphaned child?”
“Because she’s going to ruin your life,” he said to the sink.
“Flo could never do that, Toby,” I said gently.
“You don’t understand,” he said through his teeth.
“No, I don’t. So why don’t you tell me?” I asked.
“You’ll be tying yourself down to someone who isn’t even the full quid. There’s something wrong with Flo, and you’re just the sort who’s going to spend the next twenty years worrying about her, dragging her to doctors, spending money you don’t have.” He let the water out of the sink.
“What about the bank books?” I asked.
“That was then. This is now. There isn’t a will, Harriet, and governments being governments, the kid will never see a penny of what her mother had. She’s going to be a burden resting solidly on you, and you’re going to make yourself old before your time.”
I sat down in an easy chair, frowning. “So this is about me, not about Flo?”
“There’s only one person in this house I’d go to the wall for, Harriet, and that’s you. I can’t bear the thought of you turning into one of those drab, defeated women you see all over Sydney, with kids in tow and the old man at the pub,” he said, pacing.
“Ye gods!” I said feebly. “You mean its me you’re in love with? Is that why—”
“You’re as blind as a fucking bat, Harriet,” he interrupted. “I can understand why you fell for Forsythe the big important bone specialist, but I can’t understand why you fell for Flo.”
“Oh, this is awful!” I cried.
“Why, because you don’t love me?” he demanded. “I’m used to that, I can live with it.”
“No, that you’re telling me this with no love,” I tried to explain. “This ought to be said in a mood I can respond to, but instead you’re pounding my head about a kind of love which has nothing to do with any grown man! I can’t explain Flo, Toby, I looked at her and loved her, that’s all.”
“And I looked at you and loved you that day you whopped David a beauty on the verandah,” he said, grinning. “And no doubt the big important bone specialist looked at you and loved you the first time he saw you.”
“He says so. It was on a ramp at Queens. So we all looked and loved. But it hasn’t got us very far, has it? The only one of us prepared to make the total commitment is me, but not to you and not to Duncan.” I got up. “It’s very mysterious, don’t you think?” I walked over to him, kissed the tips of my fingers and put them on his forehead. “Maybe one day we’ll manage to sort it out, ace, hur-hur-hur.”