Chapter 11

Harry chose the chair over the couch. Tom, the counsellor, said most people did on their first visit. The reality though was that he wanted to choose the couch, just to get some rest. There’d been no let-up in the nightmares over the past week. If anything, they’d intensified. With Dave on his honeymoon, he had no-one to talk to. And he felt as though it was all building up. Building up to what? He had no idea. He was exhausted.

The office was small. There was a bookcase on one side of the room, under the window, with various self-help books and also a stack of DVDs, again some self-help, but others you’d find in the ‘Drama’ section of the video shop. Trees thrashed around outside the window, and rain spattered against it. Another storm.

On Tom’s desk was an old computer monitor, with Post-it notes tacked to the side. Behind the monitor, on the wall, there were drawings by a small child. A photo in a frame leant next to his keyboard.

‘So, what’s up?’ Tom asked. He leant back in his chair, notebook on his lap.

Harry took a deep breath, and repeated the story. Starting with the break-up, moving into the new place. The first tattoo. The nightmares. His visit to the tattoo parlour. The second tattoo. More nightmares. With each telling, it became more like a story. Less real.

‘Uh-huh. And how long were you with your girlfriend – Bec?’

‘Yeah. Bec. Six years. We met at a party, mutual friends. You know the deal. I probably wouldn’t have asked her out except I was half cut. God, sometimes I wonder what she saw in me that night. And why she kept going out with me when she realised I was nothing like that person.’

‘I think even when we’re drunk some of the good stuff shines through.’

‘Maybe. Anyway, we hit it off. Had similar tastes in music, movies. Not perfectly aligned or anything, but…’

‘Some common ground.’

‘Yeah. She was living out at Menzies then, so it was kind of a long-distance relationship.’

He had fond and not-so-fond memories of those weekends there. An hour-and-a-half west of Brisbane, at the foot of the range. When he could swing it, he’d take off early on Friday arvo to beat the traffic, then come home bleary-eyed but happy Monday morning, sometimes driving straight to work from her place.

‘She wanted to go overseas, do the London thing. To be honest, I’d never really thought about it. I didn’t have anything against it, just kind of thought it wasn’t my thing.

‘But, you know, when you’re with someone you see things in a new light. The thought of being there with her made it seem more manageable, more exciting.

‘We worked there for a couple of years – she managed to get sponsored so we were allowed to stay on longer than most people. We both worked casual so we could travel a bit. Did all the usual stuff. Paris, Amsterdam, Rome. A bit of Eastern Europe.’

Tom made a few notes.

‘How was travelling?’ he asked. ‘Some people say you never really know someone until you’ve travelled with them.’

‘It was great. I mean, it wasn’t perfect. We fought. There was one time, this disastrous camping holiday in France. I thought she was going to stab me with a butter knife…’

Cut or dig? Cut. Or dig?

‘…sorry, digressing a bit.’

Tom waved it away. ‘The digressions are often the good part.’

‘We came back and life just sort of carried on. I went back to the Chronicle. She got a PR job in the city. We moved in together. We didn’t even really discuss it. I mean, we’d been living together overseas. To me it meant: this is it, this is forever.’

‘But not for her?’

‘I broached the subject of tying the knot a couple of times. She always turned it into a joke or just changed the subject. I let it go. My parents separated when I was a kid. I don’t know, I think I wanted to prove that it could be done. That there was such a thing as a happy ending. But I figured if she didn’t want to marry, that was fine. Lots of couples don’t marry.

‘And then a couple of weeks ago I got home from work. She was sitting on the couch. She told me that she couldn’t imagine spending the rest of her life with me. We had a big talk. You could call it a fight, I guess. The mother of all fights.

‘I moved out. It was crazy. Wednesday morning I thought everything was okay. By Saturday I was moving my stuff into a new house.’

Tom made a few more notes, then put his book down.

‘Do you mind if I have a look at the tattoos?’

‘No, that’s fine.’

Harry swung around in his seat, put his chin against his chest. ‘This is the first one.’

‘Uh-huh.’

He felt Tom’s hand at the nape of his neck, fingers running over the ink, almost as though he were checking to see if it were real.

‘It looks Arabic,’ Tom said.

Then Harry pulled up his sleeve, showed him the drowning man.

‘Pretty full-on, hey?’ Harry said.

‘Mmm. I’ve seen more confronting tattoos. But yeah, it’s not exactly rainbows and unicorns.’

Tom made a few more notes. ‘Do you mind if I take photos?’

Harry shook his head. Tom opened the middle drawer of his desk, rummaged among old computer cables, notebooks and random pieces of paper, and pulled out a camera. He took a couple of photos of the arm, then the back of the neck.

‘Thanks.’

He placed the camera down on the desk.

‘So, am I crazy?’ Harry said.

‘We’re all a little bit crazy. Sorry, that must sound trite. The break-up has shaken you up a bit?’

Harry looked out the window, watched the raindrops flow down the glass. He could feel the tears coming, tried to hold them back.

‘Harry. If you need to cry, cry. Let it out.’

Harry thought he was going to, but then something clamped down. The tears dried up. The lump in his throat disappeared.

‘No, I’m okay.’

Tom shrugged. ‘You’re upset. Anyone would be, right? Anyone with feelings. It’s good that you’re upset.’

Harry nodded.

‘Harry, sometimes when people are under a lot of stress – and I mean a lot of stress – their mind kind of rebels. It shuts down to some extent.

‘It’s called a fugue state. Dissociative fugue. What happens is, on one level you keep operating, doing stuff. But when you become fully aware again, you can’t remember what you did.

‘The condition can be exacerbated by alcohol or other drugs. Like, maybe, having drinks at a buck’s night.’

Harry nodded.

‘You know Agatha Christie, the writer?’ Tom asked. ‘She once went missing for eleven days. Couldn’t remember a thing about what had happened. Must’ve been a hell of a hen’s night, right?

‘There have been cases where people have wandered off, caught a train to a new city, started new lives – only to regain their memories years later.

‘Sorry – not trying to freak you out. Most cases are short. Hours or days.’

Harry thought about just upping and leaving, starting afresh somewhere new. It almost appealed. But then a part of him, this new part of him, knew he had unfinished business here in Brisbane.

‘I feel like I’m splitting in two,’ Harry blurted. ‘I feel like there’s someone…I don’t know. I feel like I’m – losing myself.’

Tom nodded. ‘In a way, you are. You’ve just hit a major crossroads in your life. You have to find yourself again. Maybe the tattoos are part of that?’

He shrugged. He hadn’t really come to counselling for maybes. He was expecting more answers.

‘You said that a friend of yours told you the first tattoo was Persian? From Afghanistan?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And then the second tattoo. You said you got that one…’

‘It appeared…’

‘Yeah, you said it appeared after talking to Fred. So, in your mind you’d made the Afghanistan connection.’

Harry shook his head. ‘There were so many details in that nightmare, though. I mean, I’d heard about those asylum seekers, but I didn’t know the SAS were involved.’

‘You’d be surprised what your memory retains. Everything that happens to you – everything, right from birth – is stored in there somewhere. Even the stuff you can’t remember. Accessing it is the problem. Getting those tattoos. If we work on it, they’ll come back.’

Harry pictured the man, grinning in the darkness, all white teeth and bloodshot eyes.

‘I don’t know if I want the memories back,’ he said. ‘I’m just worried about what else I might do while I’m out of it.’

‘Understandably. There’s a range of things we can do to help. We can talk, like we have been. Do you know about cognitive therapy?’

‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘It’s basically rewiring your brain. Changing dysfunctional brain patterns into more positive ones.

‘You can do creative therapy – using art and music to express your feelings. Hypnosis, so we can go deep and get to those memories.’

Harry felt a weird excitement at the thought of tapping into his memories. Part of him pushed away the idea, but a deeper part of him wanted to get it all out, like lancing a boil.

‘The other thing to remember is that, in many cases, people have one or two episodes and even without treatment, resume their normal lives,’ Tom said. ‘And maybe those memories never come back, but maybe that’s no biggie.’

Harry didn’t feel comfortable telling Tom, but he had a feeling this wouldn’t be the case with him. That unless he did something drastic, this was going to get worse and worse.

***

Harry sat at his desk staring at the screen while Christine tapped away productively next to him. Another edition had come out with a front-page story about a dangerous intersection. Harry had written the story, but he barely remembered it.

At the news conference with their editor, Christine did most of the talking, while Harry zoned out, drawing doodles on his notebook. Eyes, teeth, the line of a neck and long hair, face in shadow, a drowning man, another one holding a tattoo machine, the line dripping and turning to blood.

Kyla. She was a part of the puzzle. But what puzzle? Did she have something to do with the tattoos? Was he under her spell? Was she somehow conjuring these fugue states? Screams. Terrified screams from a dark ocean.

Screams. But not that kind. He looked over at the TV. Andrew Cardinal was visiting a primary school on Brisbane’s southside. The kids crowded around him, waving pieces of paper for him to sign. Ron Vessel stood in the background, getting pushed further away as the mob grew.

‘What is it about kids and politicians?’ Harry muttered.

He remembered when he was a kid, the then-premier was mobbed by kids as he strode towards Parliament House on George Street. Harry remembered his dad gripping his shoulder, holding him back. Around home Harry had heard nothing but bad things about the premier, so he didn’t plan on running for an autograph anyway.

Harry was getting the same vibe from watching Andrew Cardinal on the TV. The newsreader was talking about new opinion-poll figures, showing that if the election were called today, Labor would win in a landslide. Out in the middle of the oval, Cardinal picked up a girl and lifted her onto his shoulder. For a moment Harry thought he was going to grab another kid to balance himself out. Some sort of impromptu circus act. But he didn’t. He just turned slowly, girl on his shoulder, grinning. Harry thought the act was a little odd. These days, adults had to be careful how they were around kids, and Harry suspected this was partly the reason why politicians always looked slightly uncomfortable, slightly stiff, during these kind of visits. But Cardinal didn’t care. Neither did Vessel, who stood there grinning, applauding.

‘It’s all over, bar the shouting,’ Christine said, ‘Right?’

Harry shrugged.

‘Come on! This guy’s a war hero.’

He was, except no-one knew much about his military service, other than where he’d served, because he was part of military intelli­gence. It was all secret. But the list of deployments was impressive enough: Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq, East Timor, Afghanistan. Upon Cardinal’s retirement from the service, the chief of defence said that while much of what he’d done would remain classified for many years to come, there was no doubt that he had done a lot to make Australia a safer place. You couldn’t ask for a better endorsement than that. And he’d seen enough actual action – where bullets were flying and bombs exploding – to avoid the accusation that he’d merely flown a desk. Put him up against the PM and, yeah, he looked pretty good.

‘I guess the thing with election campaigns is that you never really know what’s going to happen,’ Harry said.

But he knew what he and Christine would be doing. Miles wanted pen-portraits of all the local candidates. Harry expected weeks of various candidates toeing the party line, pointing to improvements in local areas that were tied to government initiatives, or to problems in local areas that could be traced back to local inaction. And all the local lobby groups would be aiming to use the election to their advantage. He didn’t expect much access to Cardinal or the PM – local papers tended to get shafted – but the Labor Party launch was expected to be held in Brisbane, so there’d be that. The trick on a weekly newspaper was to try and find a different angle, rather than trotting out news that people had read three or four days earlier.

The picture on the TV changed to the PM addressing a group of supporters at a nursing home in Melbourne. The images couldn’t have highlighted the differences between the PM and Cardinal any better. The PM was playing it safe, going for the baby boomers who were worried about Labor squandering their retirement funds. It had worked for his predecessor for years, but it was becoming an increasingly shortsighted strategy.

Harry’s phone rang. He scooped it up.

‘Chermside Chronicle. Harry Hendrick speaking.’

‘Ah, hello. This is Bill. From Save the Tower.’

‘Hey, Bill. Have you been talking to Fred?’

‘Ha. Yeah, you could say that. You know, we’ve seen so much of Brisbane’s heritage just disappear over the last few years. It’s not like London or Paris, where so much of the architecture is more permanent…’

No, thought Harry, it’s certainly not like London or Paris.

‘…in Brisbane we’ve lost so much already just because our houses are wood. Easy to demolish, easy to ruin. Easy to raise them and add in an extra level below – great for families but not for the look and feel of Brisbane, so…anyway, Fred was saying you’ve moved in just down the road?’

‘Yep.’

‘Why don’t you pop round after work? We can go for a walk up there and I’ll show you exactly what I’m talking about.’

‘Sounds great. Thanks, Bill.’

Bill gave him the address and Harry jotted it down.

‘Oh, and thanks for that info on the Middle East stuff,’ Harry said.

‘My pleasure.’

***

Harry stood in the office kitchen, staring out the window towards the city. He couldn’t see the CBD from here – just a thin layer of smog, soiling the blue sky. Harry thought about what Christine said about his tattoo, about how she thought it suited him. He wondered what Bec would have thought of it. Thought of them, he reminded himself. Two tattoos now. She thought he couldn’t change. Well, he did. Just like that. Maybe she’d like the new, impulsive Harry.

He pulled out his phone, found Bec in his contacts. Stared at her photo. He missed her so much. He could do anything, right? He just got his second tattoo. Even if he didn’t remember it. He could call her. What’s the worst that could happen?

He dialled.

‘Hello?’

It was her. And even though he initiated contact, he was lost for words. His heart slammed in his chest, his brain went into vapour-lock.

There had been a moment of lucidity at some point, just before he dialled. He had to tell her what was going on. It wasn’t some random plea for attention, some vague hope that if she knew what was going on, she’d reach out to him (although that was in the back of his mind also). But as soon as she answered the phone, all of that slipped away.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi,’ Harry croaked. ‘It’s me.’ And then, when she didn’t say anything. ‘Harry.’

‘Hi, Harry.’ Guarded.

‘Hi.’

Harry could feel the sweat beading on his brow. A drop slid down the bridge of his nose and into his eye, stinging. He rubbed it away.

‘How’s things?’ Bec said.

Where did he even begin? There was nowhere. He could begin nowhere, and end in the same place. This was a big mistake. Bec was someone who once cared for him, loved him. She was someone who listened to whatever he had to tell her. She didn’t always tell Harry what he wanted to hear but she listened, and that was important.

Harry was conscious of how long he’d been standing there, phone to ear, not saying anything.

‘Yeah, okay,’ he finally squeezed out. ‘You?’

A pause. ‘Harry…’

‘I miss you, Bec. I miss you so much.’

And it was true. But he also missed life with Bec. The life where he wasn’t plagued with bizarre nightmares. The life where he wasn’t compelled to seek out tattoo artists while he was in some sort of dazed, not-really-there state. He was losing it. Fugue state or no, this was not normal behaviour. He was off the reservation.

‘Harry…this isn’t…I’m busy, okay. I’m sorry. I’ve gotta go.’

The line went dead. Harry said ‘Bye’ to the dial tone. He walked back to his desk, choking back tears. Slumped into his chair and stared at his screen. Community diary entries.

‘Are you okay?’ Christine asked. She pushed her glasses up onto her forehead. As much as Harry hated the glasses, the gesture was endearing.

‘Not really.’

He unbuttoned his shirt. Christine looked away, shuffled in her seat.

‘It’s okay,’ Harry said. ‘I haven’t lost it. Not totally, anyway.’

He pulled his shirt off his shoulder. Showed Christine the new tattoo.

‘Holy crap!’

‘Yeah, I know. I don’t remember getting it.’

He shrugged the shirt back on, did the buttons back up.

‘What? As in, you were wasted? Again?’

‘No,’ Harry said. Regretting getting into it now. ‘It’s like sleepwalking, except you’re awake.’

‘Are you…’

‘I’m seeing a counsellor. Yeah. He says most people get over it. Probably something to do with the break-up.’

‘Uh-huh. I’m sure it’ll be okay, Harry. You know. You’ll find someone.’

You’ll find someone.

Christine turned back to her computer. Tapped some keys. Then she asked him about the candidate profiles she was working on. Some bland, boring question. Something she clearly already knew the answer to. She wanted to change the subject, and Harry thanked her for it. He slid over beside her, watching as she typed.

‘Do you mind if I…’ he gestured at the keyboard.

She shook her head. He pulled the keyboard over and made a couple of corrections.

‘Hey, are you coming to the awards night?’ she asked him.

He usually avoided them if he could. But this year Christine was a finalist for a piece she’d done about bed shortages at the Prince Charles Hospital. Miles, bless him, had sought approval from head office to book a table.

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘You guess? Frightened I’ll show you up?’

Harry laughed. No, that was the least of his worries. In fact, he hoped she’d win the award. She was up against the big guns from the Brisbane Mail so, to be honest, she didn’t really have a hope in hell. The main reason he didn’t want to be there was because it was an opportunity for all the people he went to university with, and all those who came after and heard the story at uni, to lord it over him.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘If I win, I’ll buy you a drink.’

‘Yeah, okay. It’s a date.’