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MARCUS had half an hour before the arrival of his first-ever patient in his new practice. He could smell the nose-hair stripping aroma of paint, built up to near toxic levels from the offices being shut up all night, and he quickly opened all the windows and lit an incense stick placing it on the front counter to help disperse the chemical odour.
He wandered into his office and approved of how it looked. It was tranquil, the neutral wall colour had the slightest hint of green and natural light filled the room from the skylight he’d had installed in the ceiling. On two walls he had a sequential series of framed paintings. The scenes depicted a rainforest at different times of the day. Marcus loved their restful quality.
On the wall where his desk was positioned he had his framed qualifications because, more often than not in his line of work, people demanded to see them. He smiled, thinking about it — no one ever asked their GPs for their qualifications! On the fourth wall there was a variety of different charts. One was a map of the iris for iridology purposes, another the foot for reflexology, and the last one mapped the human chakras.
Many of his conventional medical colleagues who grudgingly accepted his homeopathic beliefs balked at the mention of chakras or zones of energy within the body. As a university-trained medical doctor he knew that such ideas didn’t have any foundation in Western medicine. But he also knew that illness was multi-factorial and that everything needed to be taken into account, including the metaphysical.
He sat at his desk in his swivel chair and turned it until he was facing the shut cupboard behind him. He opened the doors and pulled out one of three wide shallow sliding drawers and looked with great pleasure at the rows and rows of little brown remedy bottles. He picked up a couple and ran his fingers over the labels before replacing them and shutting the doors.
Pushing away from the desk he moved to the next room, which he had set aside for massage therapy. He was a fully qualified masseur with certificates in remedial, deep tissue and sports massage, as well as specialising in Bowen therapy.
The massage table was in the centre of the room. An old-fashioned dresser that he had bought at an antique store was at the far end and held all his towels and equipment such as essential oils, CD player and CDs. The walls were the same soothing colour and the ceiling had a rainforest mural painted on it, the central skylight representing the sun and its life-sustaining energy.
He was pleased. It felt much more like his own place than his office in Melbourne ever had. He had inherited that, along with the client list from a retiring colleague, and because it had been part of an office complex with strict limitations on alterations and was already a really successful practice, Marcus hadn’t felt able to put his own personal stamp on it.
But here — it was all his and pride glowed in his chest as he walked out to the reception area. It looked like any other doctor’s reception with one exception — no secretary. Unless he became exceptionally busy, Marcus planned on doing the reception stuff himself.
Consultations were usually lengthy so it wasn’t as if he had to juggle a hundred patients a day. In fact, ten patients a day was his upper limit. And, in between clients, he could use the state-of-the-art computer system on the desk to update client information and note their progress.
A few fat squishy leather lounges, sourced from op-shops, gave it a retro feel and the wall art was modern but restful. There was a variety of magazines, from alternative health glossies through to the tabloid press. And a large wooden toy box full of things to occupy little hands.
On one of the walls there was a wire rack that boasted a variety of informative pamphlets concerning common illnesses and homeopathic remedies. These were put out by various natural therapy bodies and held lots of good common-sense advice.
Marcus was just switching on his Sounds of the Rainforest CD as Connie opened his sliding door.
‘Ah, my first customer. Good morning, Mrs Fullbright. These are for you,’ he said, presenting her with a bunch of flowers he had bought from the florist on his way in.
‘Oh, my,’ said Connie, placing her hand against her chest and beaming at Marcus. ‘What on earth for?’
‘My first ever client in my new practice,’ he said, grinning at Connie as she turned a lovely shade of pink. ‘These things should be celebrated.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Dr Hunt,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you should wait until after the consultation. See, I’m a bit of a conundrum. I’m afraid I can be a bit of a bother.’
He saw the joy the flowers had given her slowly disappear from her face. She looked at him with the air of someone eager to be liked but certain she wouldn’t be.
‘Excellent.’ He rubbed his hands together and smiled at her reassuringly. ‘I love a good puzzle. This way,’ he said, gesturing for her to precede him.
They entered his office and he indicated the chair opposite his for her to sit in. ‘May I call you Connie?’ he asked. She nodded her head and he continued, ‘OK, tell me what’s been bothering you, Connie.’
‘I’m just so tired all the time. Some mornings it’s such an effort to get out of bed. I swear if I didn’t have lunches to make and kids to get off to school, I just wouldn’t bother getting up at all.’
Marcus nodded sympathetically, his mind already ticking over. ‘And how long has this been going on for?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Seems like for ever. Dr Harrington seems to think I’m just going through the change...maybe she’s right. I don’t want to waste your time.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Marcus. ‘In all likelihood it’s probably a combination of things. Why don’t we start right back at the beginning? Tell me about yourself.’
Connie looked at him, slightly surprised. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Everything,’ he smiled.
‘OK...’
Marcus laughed at her hesitation. Most clients, particularly those who’d been on the rush and hurry merry-go-round of general practice, found his consultations hard to get their heads around. He really had to convince them it was OK to hear their life stories. ‘Really, Connie, it’s OK. Start at the beginning.’
‘What? From the time I first started feeling tired?’
He reached across the desk and covered her hand with his. ‘No, from your birth,’ he said.
Tear shone in Connie’s eyes for a second before she blinked them away and started talking but still, Marcus had to really encourage her to start with. She kept stopping. Self-editing. She’d start to say something and then think better of it.
He would make a joke or say, ‘Hey, Connie, don’t hold out on me’ and eventually her monologue flowed and she forgot about leaving anything out and unburdened completely.
A client’s first consultation could take up to two hours and it was a counselling session more than anything. They were so used to having ten minutes tops with their doctors that being able to vent and unburden was a unique experience. But Marcus wasn’t there to just treat symptoms. He treated the whole person.
And to do that he needed a very thorough history.
Except for acute cases, his clients and their illnesses were usually the sum of many factors. Add to that the problem of his services too often being sought as a last resort after myriad Western medicine interventions had been tried, and he usually had a very complex puzzle indeed.
The key to unravelling the puzzle was information. As much as he could gather. And remembering that physical symptoms couldn’t be treated in isolation. That people’s emotional issues were an integral part of the complaint and directly connected to their illnesses.
And that’s what he loved about his job. Looking at the person as a whole. Looking at someone like Connie and knowing that somewhere among all the information he was gathering was the key to her treatment.
He made notes as she talked and he could see a really good picture of her as a person in his head. Connie talked about how awful she felt most of the time — depressed and tired. How her joints ached from time to time and she so often felt that there was no hope for her.
Her relationship with her husband was strained. He sounded very demanding of her and wanted everything to be neat and clean and ordered all the time. She spoke about how stressful this was as she could barely drag herself out of bed most days, but she worried he’d be cranky if she didn’t so she forced herself to do it. Housework that used to take an hour would take all day as she kept having to stop for a rest.
Marcus was thinking that Connie had classic chronic fatigue syndrome but she’d not spoken about a viral history. ‘Have you ever been laid really low by a virus, Connie? Has Dr Harrington ever mentioned glandular or Ross River fever or cytomegaly virus?’
Connie shook her head emphatically. ‘No. Never. I’ve never had a dramatic illness, just lots of little niggling things.’
They talked some more. ‘You know the worse part of all this? I took up a floristry course a couple of years ago, through TAFE, you know? I just wanted to do something for me for a change. And I had to quit a month later. I just couldn’t concentrate. It hurt to think. It was like my brain was exhausted.’
‘Brain exhaustion’, Marcus wrote in his notes and ringed it with his black pen. ‘Had you been ill around that time with anything?’
She thought for a long moment and then shook her head again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Only flu.’
‘Flu?’ Alarm bells ran in Marcus’s head. Flu? Influenza? Virus.
‘Sure. Actually...it was quite a bad one. Does that count?’
‘Most definitely,’ he said.
Too often people didn’t think of flu as an illness. People just accepted that every few years they’d get it, feel awful for a couple of days and get over it. They often never even thought to mention it to their doctors.
‘Yes,’ she said, sitting up higher in her chair and leaning forward. ‘I was really sick. Never had flu like it. Lay in bed for three days with huge temps and violent shaking.’
Bingo, thought Marcus. He’d just demonstrated perfectly the need for a thorough consultation.
‘You know...I don’t think I’ve been the same since.’
Marcus smiled at her triumphantly and she returned it shyly. ‘Do you know what’s wrong with me?’
‘Yes, I believe I do,’ he said.
‘Really? Can you fix me?’
‘I think everything you’ve described is classic chronic fatigue syndrome.’
Connie gasped and looked horrified. ‘Oh, no. You mean I’m going to be like this for ever?’
‘No, absolutely not,’ he said, and smiled at her reassuringly. ‘I have a very good success rate with CFS.’
‘So did flu cause it?’
‘We’re not sure what causes it but it does seem to be triggered by viruses that leave your immune system weak. I think your case is also complicated by impending menopause, but that’s OK. We can treat both.’
‘You can?’ said Connie.
He squeezed her hand because she looked so hopeful but was trying hard to control it in case he was offering her false hope. ‘I can,’ he said, and swivelled in his chair to his remedy drawers. ‘A dose of influenzinium first then some kali phos,’ he said, searching through the alphabetically sorted bottles.
The influenzinium would treat the initial flu complaint and then the kali phos, made from potassium, helped nerves recover, relax and regain power and thus strengthen Connie’s immune system. He talked to her about diet and exercise to help with her menopause symptoms as he dispensed the remedy.
Another part he enjoyed about his job. He was the also the pharmacist. Of course, being a qualified medical doctor, he could write scripts as he saw fit and there would always be certain situations where he would prescribe Western drugs. That was the beauty of being both a doctor and a homeopath.
He filled two fifteen-mil empty brown glass bottles almost to the top with a purified alcohol solution. Into one he dropped in a low-potency dose of the pure kali phos remedy. And then mixed the influenzinum into the other. He kept the dosage down as people could have reactions to homeopathic remedies as well, and it wasn’t uncommon to experience a worsening of symptoms before noting an improvement.
He screwed on the eyedropper lids and banged the bottles a few times against the table and then the palm of his hand. This was called succussing and was vital to mix the remedy and disperse the energy. Next he added labels to the bottles with the name of the drug, directions for use, the date and Connie’s name.
‘Take this,’ he told her as he passed her the bottle of kali phos. ‘I want you to have dose of the influenzinium now,’ he said, unscrewing the lid. Connie opened her mouth and he dropped some of the remedy onto her tongue.
‘You may have a reappearance of the flu symptoms again,’ he said. ‘If that happens, take another dose of the influenzinium but only once. Tomorrow take the kali phos as directed on the bottle. You should start to feel an improvement quite quickly. Ring me if not. And come and see me again next week so we can monitor how you’re going. OK?’
‘Oh, Dr Hunt,’ Connie said as she gripped the little brown bottles for dear life. ‘Thank you, thank you. I feel better already just knowing that I’m not going mad. Dr Harrington assured me I wasn’t but it still felt like it at times.’
He laughed. ‘I aim to please.’
Marcus opened the sliding door and waved Connie goodbye. An ambulance was pulled up outside Madeline’s practice and she was talking to two paramedics who had an elderly man on their trolley. He strolled over as they were loading the patient.
‘Maddy,’ he said.
She squinted at him in the harsh morning sunlight and had to remind herself that although he looked dressed for the beach in his hibiscus boardies, he was actually practising medicine. Of sorts, anyway. ‘Marcus,’ she acknowledged with a tight smile.
‘I’ve just had the pleasure of meeting Connie Fullbright,’ he said.
She smiled broadly this time. ‘Character, isn’t she?’
‘CFS,’ he said, and watched as her face displayed the usual scepticism shown by a lot of general practitioners.
‘So is it to be eye of newt or wing of bat?’ she asked sweetly.
He laughed. ‘Neither. Just wait and see.’
She stared after him as he walked away, still chuckling.
––––––––
The next afternoon, Madeline was just finishing off some charts for the day and about to head home when there was a knock on her office door.
‘Come in,’ she said, not bothering to look up from her chart, figuring it would probably be Veronica with some lab results.
‘Hello, Madeline.’
Madeline almost drew a line down the page at the sound of Simon’s voice.
‘Simon,’ she said, pen poised in mid-air, not quite believing he was there.
He looked embarrassed, shuffling his feet nervously and Madeline waited for the joy to come. For the triumph. For the rush of love. Or at least a rush of lust. But it didn’t.
She didn’t feel anything.
‘Can we talk?’ he asked.
She nodded and indicated that he sit in the chair on the other side of the desk. She watched him as he positioned himself and fiddled with his tie. He cleared his throat and Madeline braced herself.
‘I made a mistake,’ he said. ‘I miss you, Madeline. I’d like to try again.’
A whoosh of air left her lungs. This was the moment. The one she’d been waiting for the last two months. Where he would go down on bended knee and ask her back.
The reason she still had her ring on.
Except, now that the moment had arrived, she knew with horrible certainty that going back to Simon was not an option.
Sitting here facing him, a mere metre away, she realised she didn’t feel anything for him anymore. Probably hadn’t really for years. He was a nice guy and she liked him, he was a good friend, but where was the zing? There was no leap of her pulse or a delicious squirming feeling down low.
She thought back to the massage Marcus had given her and felt like a thousand worms had been released inside her, a really inappropriate surge of heat in her belly. If Marcus had been sitting a metre from her, her system would be in a complete dither.
‘Why?’ she asked finally.
‘I was stupid. I think we’d been together so long that I needed a break to make me realise just what I had. I love you...we love each other.’
No. They didn’t. Just hearing the words come out of his mouth brought an immediate rejection to her lips.
God, why had it taken her so long to see?
‘No, Simon, we don’t,’ she said gently. ‘We’ve been together for ever. We like each other. We’re best friends. We’ve been through some tough times together. But we’re a habit. That’s not love. Not love as it should be when you’re thinking of entering into a marriage.’
‘And yet you’re still wearing your ring,’ he said, reaching across the desk, taking her hand and rubbing the diamond with his thumb.
‘That’s because until this moment I really believed we would reconcile. I’ve been counting on it since you called it off. Waiting for it. But now it’s here I realise that I don’t want it. You did us a favour, Simon. And I think you know that, too, deep down. I think you walked two months ago because we weren’t fulfilling you either.’
She watched him digest her statement. She couldn’t believe the words coming from her mouth or that saying them didn’t leave her devastated in the least. His dear face and his nice smile were so familiar to her and she’d never imagined it would end like this or that she would feel so disconnected from him. She’d just always assumed that they’d be together for ever.
He’s an idiot.
She remembered Marcus’s words and found herself yet again comparing the two men. Similar looks but complete opposites! Skater boy engendered none of the things that she so admired in her fiancé. Ex-fiancé. In fact, her feelings for Simon seemed bland when she compared them to the storm of emotions that Marcus evoked.
Simon stirred her loyalty, Marcus stirred her hormones.
Sure, it was purely physical — his smell and his blue eyes and his dimples and his laugh and the way his leg muscles bunched and relaxed as he walked and the fascinating strip of chest hair that disappeared behind his waistband. The way he never seemed dressed. They were fascinating but not a basis for a relationship.
Yet, they couldn’t be ignored, either.
She didn’t think Simon had ever worn a shirt unbuttoned in his whole life.
Madeline focussed on him again, sitting before her, looking genuinely contrite, and knew even a week ago she would have taken him back in a flash.
But that had been then.
Now Marcus had awoken her sexuality and it felt like she was a whole new woman. No way could she ever just settle for going through the motions again.
‘Have you...have you met someone else?’
Madeline started guiltily at his question. ‘No,’ she denied a little too quickly, and swallowed as images of Marcus massaging her practically naked body sprang into her mind.
She hadn’t. And she refused to feel guilty when she’d done nothing wrong. Those erotic dreams came to mind. No, damn it. People were allowed their fantasies.
‘I wouldn’t blame you if you had,’ he said gloomily. ‘I can’t believe how badly I’ve stuffed this up. I do still love you, you know.’
‘Sure.’ Madeline nodded. ‘And I you. But we don’t love each other the way you’re talking about. I love you as a friend. As someone who helped me through some very bad times and knows me probably better than anyone. But that’s not enough, Simon. Not anymore. And if you were really honest with yourself, you’d know that, too.’
‘But maybe if we gave it another try...’
She sighed. ‘OK, Simon, answer me this. What did you feel when you first walked through the door? When you saw me again, for the first time?’
He thought for a moment. ‘I felt home.’
‘Exactly,’ she said gently. ‘After two months apart all you felt was a sense of coming home? You should have felt love and passion and anticipation. You should have heard a symphony in your head. You should have felt like tearing all my clothes off.’
Unbidden, her mind formed an image of Marcus. Now, there was a man whose mere presence made her want to rip fabric.
‘And you didn’t because we just don’t have that type of relationship, Simon.’
‘That’s just lust, Maddy. That’s not important. Not as important as a deep, enduring love.’
‘It is important if you don’t have it, Simon.’ She felt for him. He looked miserable. ‘Don’t you want it, too? Don’t you think you deserve it, Simon? Because you do. You deserve to be with someone who can’t keep their hands off you.’
He smiled a weak smile. ‘That would be nice.’ A few moments passed and then he asked, ‘What did you feel when you saw me?’
‘Surprise,’ she said. ‘And then none of the things that I expected to feel. Like, yes, thank God he’s back. Or, God, he looks so good he’s making my eyes ache and if I don’t kiss him right now I’m going to die. I didn’t feel anything like that.’
He nodded slowly as he got to his feet. Madeline did, too.
‘I’m sorry, Simon.’ She shook her head and shrugged. ‘Are you going to be OK?’
‘Of course,’ he said, smiling sadly. ‘I know you’re right. I guess after a decade together I just...missed you when you weren’t around anymore. Hardly a good basis for a marriage, I suppose.’
Madeline smiled. ‘Look, there is someone out there for you,’ she said. ‘Someone who’s going to make you really happy. And you deserve that, Simon.’
A hot ball of emotion in her chest took her by surprise. It was really over. Ten years of her life and the reality could no longer be ignored. As much as she knew it was the right thing to do, it was still hard saying goodbye to someone who had been such a huge part of her life.
‘I hope we can still be friends,’ she said, ‘there’s too much history to stop being part of each other’s lives.’
‘Of course.’ He smiled. ‘I wouldn’t want it any other way.’ Madeline smiled back and removed his ring from her finger, holding it out to him.
Simon shook his head. ‘Keep it. It’s been on your finger for four years. It belongs to you.’
He held out his arms and she curled the ring into her palm and accepted his parting hug, holding him tight, grateful beyond words to have known him for a decade. But it was impossible to be held by him and not compare. His hands on her back were nice, comforting.
Marcus’s hands made her tremble. Made her hot. Made her needy.
Simon eventually turned and left and she stood staring after him for a long while, the claws of the ring cutting into her palm. To her horror she could feel tears in her eyes. ‘I am not going to cry,’ she muttered. ‘Absolutely not.’
And then promptly burst into tears.