Nick
Joy, the office manager, is a formidable woman. Nick’s been a GP long enough to understand that a practice cannot run without an efficient front desk but he’s never encountered anyone like her. Of a certain age and substantial girth, she organises the office according to her own established rules, immune, it seems, to his charms (but then the same might be said of him regarding her, this being one of the things Nick has never quite grasped about other people). They have inherited each other and make the best of things, but there is little warmth in their interactions, he knows nothing of her life outside the office, a failing which he recognises is part of the problem, but hardly knows how to rectify. A question about the photo of the young man on the desk at this late stage would only emphasise his previous disinterest. Regardless of her age she is no slouch with technology, updating the system, the calendars, patients’ records, referrals, requisition orders for supplies, all without fault or apparent difficulty, while at the same time managing appointments, payments, accounts, the many different health-fund and government requirements, and, even more extraordinarily, getting these things to appear on his computer at will. She can even get a network to speak to a printer.
He does not presume to enter her space; handing patient folders through the door or over the counter, from where they are sorted into various trays, the very obvious In and Out, but also Pending, a series of open-top drawers each one further labelled with her name, as if to distinguish them from someone else’s trays, so that there is Joy In, Joy Out, Joy Pending, the latter bringing him up short each of the twenty times a day he encounters it, as if the phrase sums up some central aspect of his life. He had thought, during those few days when he was seeing Eugenie, that joy had, in fact, arrived, that this last year had indeed been a kind of pending, a preparation for the actual moment. Now she refuses to communicate with him. No explanation given. It is possible the husband, David, returned unannounced from the mines. He imagines a thick-set individual, broad-shouldered, receding jet black hair cut very short, dark eyebrows and a three-day growth, tattoos on bicep and shoulder, dressed, of course, in hi-viz yellow and dark blue; clothes that she, Eugenie, will wash for him and hang on the Hills Hoist in the garden while, according to the little he does actually know about the man, David watches sport in a lounge room that he, Nick, hasn’t ever seen and now, apparently, never will.
The difficulty – coming into the surgery an hour early, finding he is even ahead of Joy, and that she must have cleaned up before going home the previous night even though it was a late session, the prep room immaculate, the magazines in neat stacks on the waiting-room table, her Far Side Page-a-Day Cartoon Calendar turned over to the new day – the trouble is that he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t think straight outside of a consultation and only within one because the process is so deeply ingrained that the protocols initiate themselves automatically. Gnawing at the possibilities, fighting away the awful intuition that she had somehow found out about Nina and wasn’t interested in hearing his explanation, should an opportunity to provide one occur; they weren’t, after all, in a relationship, there’d never been any discussion about not sleeping with anyone else, and yet, even at the time, he’d known it as a kind of betrayal. If she was just another woman, another in the long series he’d engaged with over the previous twenty years, it wouldn’t matter, but Eugenie had never once fallen into that category. Now, he fears, he has become an object of her scorn.
He goes into his office, which is the same one he took on arrival, several months before, puts the laptop on his desk, plugs the various leads into their ports. Nick has always worked for someone else, a medical centre or a private practice, never as his own man. He needs to come to a decision soon about what is happening in Winderran. Miles’s rooms, down the end of the corridor, much nicer than his own, remain unoccupied, just as they were when he died, like a rebuke.
His former employer had no heirs and the ownership of the practice is caught in a legal limbo, but it seems possible Nick might be able to take it over as a going concern, with a locum of his own, or, who knows, another partner. He is tempted. Other than his children there is little enough back in Canberra. If he could figure out a way to negotiate with Abie so that he could see Josh and Danielle on a semi-regular basis the prospect of living in Winderran has a certain appeal; although that could just as easily be a result of his feelings for Eugenie. His connection to place always tenuous at best, bound up with the women in his life rather than any sense of country.
His brother bringing to this topic a more venal point of view than Eugenie. He thinks taking on the practice would be a good investment. Nick went down to visit on the weekend in a misguided attempt to distract himself. Matt, sitting on a sun-lounge on his tiled patio, his belly proudly before him, explained, between sips of imported beer, that the market was depressed. ‘Down thirty per cent if it’s an inch,’ he said. ‘But it’ll come back and when it does, Winderran’s the sort of place you want to be. It won’t stop where it was before the crash, it’ll double again. As I live and breathe.’ Rattling off percentages like a psychotic calculator. His older brother, the one their father had thought useless, destined to end up sweeping the streets, now beyond simply rich, delighted to instruct his little brother on how to follow him on his path to infinite wealth. The motorboat at its mooring in the canal. As if it was as simple as that.
‘I don’t have a lot to invest,’ Nick said, not prepared to admit what he was paying Abie towards the mortgage on the house in Canberra, or, for that matter, what she’d think about the idea. Speaking of women’s scorn.
‘You haven’t heard of borrowing?’ Matt said. ‘Interest’s at historic lows. Someone like you … you’re the darling of the banks. You can’t go wrong. Jesus, did you see the people in that town? Last time we were up there you couldn’t move for tourists. I’m thinking of buying into the main street myself.’
‘You’re not worried about the global markets?’
‘Nicky. Everyone’s worried about the global markets. That’s what brings the prices down. That’s what’s going to make us all rich. What did they teach you at those fancy schools of yours?’
‘Clearly nothing. So you’re not worried?’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying you take the opportunities you’re given. Eat, drink and be merry. For tomorrow we die.’
‘This,’ Nick said, ‘is your investment advice?’
The computer sounds a triumphant chord as the screen lights up, his email box automatically filling with missives, many of which call out for attention. Unable to approach them he flicks to a news site but the headlines are all international doom and gloom: India’s battle with China over water. Not his business.
He hears Joy come in, and, after giving her a moment to settle, goes out to say hello, only to find there’s already a patient in the waiting room, an alternate as they’re called locally, one of the latter-day hippies, but in this case female, young, barefoot, dressed in what looks like skins, as if she’s just wandered in from a teepee or a cave, none too clean, flicking through a woman’s magazine, brown unshaven legs stuck out in front of her.
Joy offers to make coffee. He follows her to the little kitchen, standing in the doorway while she boils the kettle. She inclines her head towards the girl in the waiting room. ‘No appointment,’ she says. ‘If you want you can squeeze her in before your 8.45, otherwise you’re booked through till lunchtime.’
‘I was hoping to catch up on email. But I could. It’s not like I want to do that.’
Joy gives him one of her looks, never keen to encourage skiving. ‘From the camp, I’d guess,’ she says.
‘Against the dam?’ he asks.
She nods.
‘And you, Joy? Do you have a position?’ A conversational gambit. He may as well try.
The kettle coming to the boil. She ladles several large spoonfuls of grounds into the plunger. If he does take over the practice he’ll get one of those things that makes coffee from capsules. They can afford it.
‘It’s a load of nonsense, if that’s what you’re asking,’ she says.
‘I thought you’d be for it.’
The wrong thing to say. She leans on the plunger with her great tuck-shop arms, applying even more force than usual as a result of his faux pas, so that he expects any second the thing will explode, spraying hot liquid across the room. He can hardly bear to look.
‘Why d’you say that?’
He doesn’t know why. Because she’s a local, he supposes, but that, too, would be the wrong thing to say. He shrugs. ‘Never pays to make assumptions, does it?’ he says.
‘Right enough. Anyone with half a brain can see the whole idea was made up on the back of a cocktail napkin. This town’s future’s in tourism, it’s in looking after the place, not putting a useless dam in the middle of it.’ The plunger has survived her ministrations. She pours a couple of mugs of the hefty brew.
‘It’s not for me to speak about patients,’ she says, glancing up at him, ‘but that man Lamprey should know better. He’s always thought he was too good for this town, now he’s hell bent on destroying it. No excuse his wife’s sick.’
‘What’s he been doing?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Well I haven’t got time for it now,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘Here’s your coffee. Shall I send the girl in?’
‘Give me five.’
‘Right you are. Mind, she could do with a bath.’
The girl slips into the room crabwise, stopping just inside, against the wall, waiting to be invited forward as if she were a schoolgirl in the headmaster’s office, her movements accompanied by the jingle of a small bell on a woven thread around her ankle, the sort of thing you’d put on a cat to keep it from birds. For she would have music. Small, dusky and dusty, dark-eyed, her hair in dreadlocks, carrying with her, for all her shyness, a wild uncouth assertiveness.
He introduces himself, indicates she should come forward, take the chair at the end of the desk. As she sits she shrugs off her jacket, a soft pretty thing of many colours, revealing a cross-tied garment beneath made of something that’s not suede but appears to be so, and also that she doesn’t shave beneath her arms either, a natural woman this. Giving off a curious salty smell. A silver ring on the longest toe of her left foot.
‘What seems to be the trouble?’
‘Well, see, I’ve been having sex with this guy,’ she says. ‘And now I’ve got this sharp pain when I, you know, pee. It’s come on real quick. I’m trying to figure out if it’s because we’re, you know, not simpatico, or if it’s just a natural thing, hey?’
‘A natural thing?’
‘Yeah, see,’ Ange says, ‘I’ve never had this before. With anybody. I live really pure, no drugs, only organic food, I focus my mind on good things, concentrate on my music.’
‘So you think he’s given you an infection?’
‘Well, maybe. But there’s other stuff. I’m worried it’s a sign.’
‘Of what?’
‘That we shouldn’t be together. You know, that we’re on a different level, vibrationally.’
Best, perhaps, to tackle the symptoms.
‘So, tell me about the pain. How would you describe it?’
‘Hot, you know. Like burning.’
He gives her a urine bottle and asks if she’d be able to produce a sample. She says okay and goes out to the toilet, coming back several minutes later looking slightly pale, a urinary tract infection clearly running rampant. No blood in the sample though. Sits down again.
He checks her temperature and blood pressure, that salty smell stronger when he’s up close, not unpleasant, just unusual, feral. Running through the standard questions: use of antibiotics; the pill; IUD; sexual partners; history of menstruation. Hoping to exclude alternatives – conscious of his time, the waiting room that will be filling even as Ange takes each enquiry as an opportunity to go off on tangents.
‘Will’s kind of cute,’ she says. ‘Buff, eh? Works out with his friends, goes running in the early mornings. He was in the army. Not the kind of guy I normally go with. I figure he’s come to me for healing. I’m kind of an empath, you know, I feel the illness inside people, the suppressed hurt at the base of disease. I have to be careful ’cos I take it on. I just don’t know if I’m strong enough to deal with his, I’m wondering if that’s why I’m getting sick.’
‘You mean he was injured? Fighting overseas?’
‘No, not hurt like that … inside. It might have happened before he joined up, but being in there hasn’t helped, you know, he thinks he has to be tough about everything, which is okay when you’re in bed, hey, it’s kind of refreshing to find someone like that. But not everywhere else.’
Unusually frank.
‘The thing is,’ she says, ‘I think Will needs me. It’s like he’s waiting to be rescued.’
‘And you’re the one to do it?’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant,’ Nick says. ‘I don’t know Will. I was just wondering if this was something you do, you know, rescue people, if that’s your nature?’
‘It goes with being an empath,’ she says. ‘When I was at school, hey, everyone used to come to me with their problems. Sometimes all a person needs is to be listened to.’
She gives more examples, and Nick attends, but only half-heartedly. Whatever else Ange might be, he thinks, unkindly, it isn’t generous with herself. This darkly tanned little girl with her curious smell is someone, he thinks, who puts her own interests first. Feeling sorry for the hapless Will.
‘I’m going to prescribe some antibiotics,’ he says. ‘We’ll send your sample off for testing. But you’ll need to keep your fluids up, too. I know it hurts to pee but the less you drink the worse it’s going to get. Cranberry juice helps.’
Writing her a script.
She keeps talking. ‘This crowd he hangs out with,’ she says. ‘There’s this guy, he’s like Will’s guru or something, has this big house out of town. Rules the roost. Ex-army, a whole bunch of guys, fawning at everything he says. Some sort of Christian thing. Real creepy, crucifixes tattooed on his arm.’
Nick stops writing.
‘Will lives with these guys?’ he says, as casual as possible.
‘Sure. I’ve been staying there. Listening while they sit round drinking and smoking. Scheming.’
‘I thought they were into exercise.’
‘That’s in the morning. In the evenings it’s different. In the evenings it’s sex’n’drugs and rock’n’roll. In the evenings they sit around and talk about which guns they like. Sorry, weapons. They’re very serious about that shit. I guess if you lived with a gun next to you for years you might be, but it’s weird, hey. After a few drinks one of the guys got stuck into the camp. Said the hippies shouldn’t be there, telling locals what they can do. Jaz shut him down, told him to shut the fuck up. The thing is,’ Ange says, ‘Jaz wasn’t saying it to be nice to me or anything, he just didn’t want me to know what they were about.’
‘Which is?’
‘I don’t know. Something but. You can be sure of that.’
‘What do you think?’
‘My guess?’
‘Yes.’
She leans forward. Delighted to be asked. A girl who could be quite pretty if she wasn’t so determined not to be. Bra-less breasts curving beneath the ersatz suede, something a bit pugnacious around her wide mouth, a mouthy girl, is what she would have been called back in the day, not even so much for what she looked like as for having opinions, for talking too much. Not sure from where in him such prejudices arise. Wouldn’t have taken himself for a person who makes judgements because a girl enjoys rough sex.
‘Jaz has got himself in trouble, see. I know this, ’cos Will told me. He’s looking for a way to get back on his boss’s good side.’
‘Who’s the boss?’ he says, ‘God?’
Ange laughs. ‘No, his boss at the church. Jaz wants to fuck with the anti-dammers so as to make good. That’s why he didn’t want me to know.’
‘Because you’re against the dam?’
Dark-eyebrowed contradictory Ange looking at him with a bit more attention. ‘Yeah, ’cos I was at the camp before, see.’
Another of these people who believe in conspiracies. As if life isn’t interesting enough the way it is, there has to be another layer or two of intrigue beneath the surface. Which sometimes there is, of course, that’s the thing. Who really knows? But you’d be unwise, he thinks, to take advice on it from Ange.
He glances at his watch. It’s all gone on far too long. Joy will be fretting. He tells the girl what he’s done about her infection, what she needs to do, making sure she understands she needs to take the pills to the end, and to come back to see him if she’s not better in forty-eight hours.
‘So you don’t reckon it’s to do with Will?’ she says.
‘It’s caused by bad bacteria in your urethra,’ he says. ‘That can happen lots of ways, but most often through sex. Best thing to do is get up and have a pee as soon as you finish. Flush anything out that’s got in there by accident. That and give yourself a wash. It happens to a lot of women.’ Resisting the temptation to say that it’s unlikely God is micro-managing the bacterial communities of her vagina to communicate directions about love. Or that even thinking certain thoughts – never mind external forces – might cause bacterial overgrowth. But then these last few days he’s not been so immune to these diversions himself. Looking everywhere for guidance.
She gets up, dismissed, pulling on her jacket.
‘Thanks,’ she says.
‘You’re welcome. I enjoyed hearing about these guys.’
‘You did?’
‘Sure.’
‘I could tell you more.’
‘I bet you could, but I’m out of time.’
‘I think I know what they’re going to do,’ she says.
Intent on getting her out of there. Walking her to the door, prepared to escort her, if need be, all the way to Joy’s office. ‘Who’s going to do what?’ he says.
‘See, there’s a rare frog in the creek. I reckon they’re going to kill it.’ Stopping in the doorway.
‘How?’
‘Put chemicals in the creek.’
‘If you think that shouldn’t you tell someone?’
‘I just did.’
At around eleven he takes a break. He makes the coffee himself. Joy comes to check on him in the kitchen, see he’s doing it right. Taking up the whole door space with her frame, breathing heavily.
‘That girl,’ he says.
‘I know,’ Joy says, ‘she really could have done with that bath. And a haircut. But you can’t complain really, can you? Heart’s in the right place. Camping out there in all that dirt.’
‘I don’t think she’s at the camp anymore. She seems to be in a share house with some ex-army types now. Full of some story about messing with the anti-dam mob.’
Pushing down the plunger.
‘Here, let me at that,’ Joy says, coming into the small room. ‘Hurting them?’ she says.
‘Not the people. Something about a frog in the creek.’
‘How’d she know about that?’
‘You’ve heard of it, too?’ he says.
‘Of course I have. My brother’s place is in line of the dam. Marcus Barker. What did she say?’