by Debra Oswald
Her theory was that it would be possible to keep working as a doctor as long as she moved around in temporary roles. That way she wouldn’t become invested in patients’ lives and wouldn’t feel too responsible for what happened to them. She had no clue how long she could do this. Her capacity to think about the future had atrophied, her imaginative range only extending a day or two ahead.
The first gig down south required Paula to work Tuesday to Saturday in the general practice surgery and to be on call for the tiny local hospital on Sundays.
The town had absurdly beautiful beaches and a golf course draped between two dramatic headlands, but Paula’s accommodation was on the low-lying, river side, facing the massive dark escarpment at the back of the town.
The one-bedroom serviced apartment came with job-lot chipboard furniture, a two-seater sofa covered in prickly grey fabric, angled towards the small TV sitting on a wood-grain laminate unit, and on the walls a couple of framed prints of lovely coastal views you couldn’t see from the apartment. The place was good enough.
She needed to buy food—she hadn’t eaten on the drive down south and it was now seven thirty in the evening.
By the time she drove to the main street, the IGA supermarket was twenty minutes from closing, so she hurried down the aisles with a basket in hand, grabbing tea, milk, eggs, bread, chocolate and the best she could find in the limp selection of fruit and vegetables. Because it was so late, there were only a few other customers in the place, which was a relief.
Unpacking her groceries onto the checkout counter, Paula exchanged a smile with the young woman on the till. Since the night she killed John Santino, she’d developed a way of smiling at strangers, conducting the unavoidable conversations with people, speaking to patients, all without truly connecting. It was a trick: she would aim her gaze at an object slightly to one side so the person’s face remained out of focus. That way she never felt she made direct eye contact with anyone. She couldn’t bear the idea that people would properly look at her, see who she was, see what she’d done.
Paula looked like a regular human to the young woman on the checkout, presumably, but she could no longer be a regular person. She imagined herself as one of those plastinated cadavers sometimes used to teach anatomy—once-living bodies with muscles, ligaments, circulatory systems, internal organs from which all the fluids had been extracted and replaced with silicone and polymers. They looked astonishingly normal and alive even though they were dehydrated, preserved in plastic.
While the checkout woman rang up the groceries, Paula half closed her eyes against the caustic glare of the fluorescent lights, but then a flash of colour, something red, caught her attention.
A small boy in a red T-shirt was darting back and forth between the drinks fridge and the confectionery display. He was five years old or thereabouts, grinning and cavorting like a naughty elf while a teenage girl tried to scoop him in with her free hand. In her other hand, she was holding a basket with a loaf of white bread and two cartons of UHT milk.
‘No way you’re getting fizzy drink, mister,’ the girl said to him. ‘We talked about that.’
The little boy dropped his head back and let out a groan of despair so tragic it made Paula smile to herself. But then, undaunted, he spun away from the fridge back to the rack of chocolate bars near the till, so fast that Paula had to duck sideways.
The girl turned to Paula. ‘My brother’s being a pain-in-the-arse little worm. Sorry.’
There was something defiant about the way this girl said ‘sorry’. Not that she wasn’t sorry, but she certainly didn’t want anyone to mistake that limited ‘sorry’ for her being generally sorry about who she was and her right to exist in the world.
‘You can pick one, Jye. A small one,’ the girl instructed.
‘Are you Ruby?’ the checkout woman asked.
‘What? Yeah. Why?’ the girl shot back. There was that defiance again, a prideful and combative edge, always expecting a fight, always ready to fight.
‘My little sister’s in year eight with you.’
‘Oh right.’
So Ruby must be about fourteen. Paula often found it hard to tell with teenage girls—some still looked like kids, while others seemed to have jumped straight to their mid-twenties. This girl was hard to pick because, even though she appeared small and young, she had the self-reliant edge of a much older person. With a wiry body, a pointy face and huge brown eyes, she looked like a pretty whippet.
By now, the boy was bouncing from foot to foot in front of the chocolate bars, moaning about the difficulty of choosing. Paula half expected his big sister to be irritated by this, but she just laughed indulgently at her brother and rested her hand on his shoulder, unobtrusively easing him from his bouncing into stillness. She made a little performance of joining him in the decision-making process, frowning, gasping and groaning along with him.
‘Yeah, I know. Hard to pick one. If it was up to me, I’d—nuh, shouldn’t say. It’s your choice, mate.’
‘Say! Say!’
‘I’d go a Curly Wurly.’
Jye plucked a Curly Wurly bar from the display as if he’d won some glorious prize. Paula snuck her head around to exchange a smile with the boy, but then she realised that Ruby was glaring at her, suspicious, verging on hostile. Why are you gawking at my brother, lady?
Paula turned away, kept her head down. She didn’t want any trouble. She didn’t want to pry into anyone’s life or have them scrutinise hers. Anyway, this was about as much human contact as she could handle in one go in her current state. She paid quickly and headed outside to her car.
Sliding into the driver’s seat, Paula looked through the windscreen—the interior of the supermarket was bright against the dark street. Paula saw Jye come dancing out the door, with half the Curly Wurly already in his mouth and the rest of it making a chocolatey mess of his hand. Ruby hustled him forward while she put the bread and milk into a backpack.
As Paula drove out of the car park, she noticed Ruby and Jye climb onto a dirt bike parked around the corner from the supermarket. The boy hopped on the front, tucked in front of his sister, who reached her arms around him to grasp the handlebars. They puttered off on the little motorbike down an unlit side street, heading towards the escarpment.
Back in the serviced apartment, Paula unpacked her food supplies into the bar fridge and cooked eggs on toast. Once she’d hoisted the suitcase onto the bed and unpacked her small pile of new clothing, she felt profoundly tired—today had been a long drive—but she knew sleep was far out of reach without chemical aid. She took a temazepam, washing it down with a not-inconsiderable slug of vodka.
Anita and Paula had survived minor fallings-out in the past. Usually it would be because Anita had overreacted to something, with Paula being slightly condescending and infuriatingly reasonable in a way that only provoked Anita to behave more unreasonably. But very quickly, the two of them would make up and their friendship would be as strong as ever. They could both trust in that pattern.
In any past conflicts, Anita had been quick to admit she was an idiot and offer apologies. She was always quick to go to guilt.
And she was remorseful now, no question—guilty of a monumental failure of imagination not to have understood what was happening to Paula. Anita had been distracted by her own suffering and keen to recruit Paula into their exclusive club of Stacey’s Grieving Best Friends. She hadn’t stopped to think about the fact that it was different—much worse—for Paula.
Paula was already dealing with the death of her beautiful husband. Paula was the one who had been living with those kids for months. She was the one who’d walked into the house and found their bodies. She’d seen Matt shoot himself in the head. Anita berated herself for not fully weighing the trauma of that on any human being.
She’d been too quick to assume Dr Kaczmarek could handle everything as she always did. Arguably—and she could see this now—it had been harder on Paula than on a regular person. Paula had always accepted
the obligation and responsibility to take care of other people, so the tragedy in that house would have been even more crushing.
Anita felt foolish for ever indulging in ridiculous hyperbolic talk about killing dangerous men. She’d only been venting, but still, it was a dangerous way to talk, given the raw emotional state Paula had been in.
She felt guilty for insisting that Paula follow the John Santino trial as a chance to see justice done, a chance for them to barrack together for the female victim. All Anita had managed to do was rub Paula’s face in the terrible facts of Kendra Bartlett’s death and then tear her apart with that verdict. Anita was culpable for relaying information about John Santino’s life and what was happening to Brooke Lester. And now she was morally implicated in how Paula had used that information.
But those buckets of remorse didn’t stop Anita from being horrified by what her friend had done. Not that she was sorry Ian Ferguson and John Santino were dead. Their deaths made the world better, no question, but that couldn’t justify murder. It was as if the malevolence from those men had oozed out of them, infecting the air, spreading until it turned a truly good person like Paula into a murderer.
Then again, Paula had let that happen. She had allowed her certainty that she knew what was best for people to lead her down the track to a criminal act. Even if Anita had voiced some wild ideas about killing men, she would never condone it in practice. If Paula had ever hinted at what she was contemplating, Anita would’ve talked her out of it. But she’d never had that chance because Paula always thought she knew better.
Anita was left with surges of anger towards her friend, feeling used by her, lied to, and now lumbered with this information she couldn’t offload, like a lump of radioactive material in her belly, contaminating everything. At the same time, she couldn’t switch off her concern, the worry that Paula might harm herself. If it weren’t for the risk of the crimes being discovered, Anita would’ve called the doctors in her practice, called in psychiatric help, something.
The day after Paula’s confession, Anita had sent a text.
Are you okay? A x
I’m okay. And very sorry for what I’ve done to you. P x
Two days later, Anita messaged again.
People keep asking me how you are. A x
I’m okay.
After that, Paula no longer replied to Anita’s messages. Well, if she didn’t want to be contacted, fuck her then.
Meanwhile, Rohan was sending Anita a text every two or three days. Nothing pushy. It was like a cop doing a welfare check on an individual he was concerned about.
I hope you’re alright. Call me anytime. Rohan
I’m fine. Thank you. Hope you’re in good form. Anita
Over the coming weeks, Anita would be covering a big defamation trial and a coronial inquest into deaths caused when a stage collapsed at a music festival, so there was little possibility that she would run into Rohan in court. Just as well. If she saw him, she couldn’t trust herself not to rush to him and blurt out everything.
In the past—before Paula started murdering people—Anita would have dissected the Rohan break-up with her friend, listened to her advice, soaked up her comfort, but that was no longer a possibility.
Anita begged off a couple of family events and avoided seeing any other friends. She didn’t know how to be with people while she was carrying this knowledge in her guts. So the days sank into more and more solitude.
When two weeks had gone by with no word from Paula, Anita’s anxiety began ratcheting up. She scrolled through the green column of texts on her phone: all the messages she’d sent to Paula with no response. She couldn’t stand it—the not knowing—so on impulse, she drove towards Marrickville Family Practice, ringing ahead from her car.
‘Hi. Could I make an appointment with Dr Kaczmarek, please?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry. Dr Kaczmarek is on indefinite leave at the moment,’ Jemma replied. ‘Would you like to see one of the other doctors?’
‘Uh … no. Thanks. Bye.’
Anita took the next turn to the left and drove on to the Earlwood house. She wanted to reassure herself that Paula was alive.
She parked a few houses down and walked along the footpath towards Paula’s place. There was no sign of her car and the low metal gates across the empty driveway were closed. The curtains were drawn across the front windows.
Most likely Paula had chosen to go away. That was the most likely thing. She was a profoundly sensible woman who would take herself away to some tranquil place to recuperate. Then again, Paula had now revealed herself as a woman capable of killing two people, so who the fuck knew? Anita was queasy with apprehension as she approached the front door, imagining terrible scenes inside that house, imagining Paula killing herself.
She rang the doorbell. No answer. She thumped on the door, but there was no sound from inside. They’d always had keys to each other’s homes and Anita was about to unlock the door herself when a voice behind her shouted, ‘Hey! Who’s that?’
Anita jerked with fright and spun around to see Mr Petrakis peering over the hedge from his front yard. The Petrakis family had lived in the house next door for forty years, having brought up their kids there, minded their grandkids there and grown grapes across the trellis in the backyard to make wine so putrid you could feel it corroding your stomach lining within seconds of ingestion. Paula had always had a great relationship with the family, scooting next door whenever one of the grandkids was sick or injured and graciously accepting homegrown vegetables and bottles of the corrosive wine over the fence. When Remy was sick, and in the weeks after Stacey and the kids were murdered, trays of food from the Petrakis kitchen would frequently appear on Paula’s front porch.
‘Hi, Theo,’ Anita said.
Theo Petrakis hollered towards his wife, ‘It’s okay. It’s just Anita.’ Then he turned back to her. ‘I didn’t see your car, so I didn’t know who it was.’
‘Sorry if I gave you a scare.’
Theo made a no-worries gesture. ‘She isn’t here.’
‘Do you know where she is?’ Anita asked.
He shook his head and Anita felt a little stab of being judged by Mr Petrakis for not knowing where her friend was, for not taking better care of her. Or maybe she only imagined he was judging her.
‘Dr K has been through a lot,’ said Theo.
‘Yes. That’s why I want to make sure she’s okay. Do you know when she’s coming back?’
‘No. She rang me, asked me to get my son-in-law to look after her yard once a fortnight. She sends the money to his bank account.’
‘So it sounds like she’s going to be away for a while,’ Anita said.
Theo shrugged and nodded. ‘We just want Dr K to be well and happy.’
Anita gave up any plan to check inside the house, figuring that would be too distressing, and she barely made it back to her car before the weeping overtook her. She wanted to ring Stacey and talk to her about what they should do for Paula. She wanted Stacey to be alive and Paula to be well and happy.
She thought about the day Stacey and the kids moved in to Paula’s house, unloading Stacey’s old red Subaru, carting their bags inside, the few belongings they’d brought with them when they fled the Maryvale property.
Mr and Mrs Petrakis had worked together to lift Poppy over the fence so she could feed their backyard chickens, while Cameron insisted on helping his mother unpack the bags.
Anita recalled the way Stacey looked at her kids—with such relief, amusement, pride, a staggering amount of love. When Stacey realised Anita was observing her, she had laughed, sending herself up for being such a pathetically besotted mother. She turned to Anita with that smile which could radiate joy through an entire room.
Anita suddenly felt the loss of Stacey so acutely, so freshly, it was like waves of pain through her body. And it struck her she’d never properly mourned her friend. Not the way you would normally miss someone and think about their splendid qualities and the amusing things th
ey used to say and feel their absence in your life and all that. The shock of the way Stacey died had drowned out regular grief, robbing her of being properly missed, robbing them all.
Anita picked through the papers, tubes of sunblock, pens, loose Minties and other rubbish in her glovebox to find a packet of tissues. She allowed herself to sit in the car and howl for a good long time.
TWENTY
A RIGID SCHEDULE WAS THE ADHESIVE HOLDING PAULA together, the structure that stopped her crumbling into useless scraps or spinning beyond all social norms into a psychotic break.
She woke every day at six a.m., drank tea, went for a long half run/half walk, took a shower, ate yoghurt with fruit, then went to work in the medical centre. At the end of the work day, she pushed herself through another long walk, listening to an audiobook (non-fiction on subjects unlikely to churn up emotion), then returned to the serviced apartment.
Paula would plonk herself down on one of the two dining chairs in the place and sometimes an hour would have passed and the room had grown dark around her. She had been sitting all that time not moving, as good as paralysed.
These episodes of profound inertia had been happening to her quite often, a state of physical and mental torpor in which her breathing slowed, her limbs became immobile, her brain numbed. She guessed it was a self-protective mechanism, a temporary system shutdown to give her mind a reprieve from the endless churn of questions and shame. Paula would eventually rouse herself to switch on one of the overhead lights and cook dinner. She would drink one glass of wine in front of the TV, then take one temazepam and go to sleep at eleven p.m.
She regarded the life she was leading as a psychological breakdown in slow motion. A breakdown but under controlled conditions.
Paula had been in this south coast town for almost two weeks now and she’d discovered beautiful options for her morning run—through forest that swept right up to the edge of a headland where the huge trees met the cliff edge and the ground fell away sharply to the ocean.