by C D Major
Declan turned the page of notes again, deciding to change topic. Children could confuse things. ‘Tell me about your siblings.’
Edith’s face looked pained. ‘I had a brother. A baby brother, Peter. Things got worse when he was born; they didn’t want me to . . .’
‘A younger brother?’ Declan turned over the statement in front of him.
‘A baby brother, yes. He slept in a big basket in the room next to mine and I wore my new shoes with the blue buckle when we went to church with him in a long white dress.’
Declan felt the frustration bubble within him, the written notes in front of him and Edith’s statements not making sense. ‘But when you arrived at Seacliff I have a statement you made talking about your older brother.’
Edith looked up sharply, her eyes widening in panic. ‘No. Peter was a baby,’ she repeated, her words quickening. ‘I used to hold him when he was first born. Mother didn’t mind at first, but then Father told me I wasn’t allowed in case I hurt him. But I would never have hurt him, Doctor. I never saw him again after I came here,’ she added, her voice dropping to a whisper.
Declan traced a sentence with his finger, trying to get Edith back on familiar ground, glad she had raised the topic of her father. ‘You told Doctor Malone something happened to you as a child. That you were hit.’ Declan softened his voice. ‘Was that your father? Did he ever hit you?’
Edith’s face screwed up. ‘No, Father would never hit me. He could get angry but he wouldn’t hit. He often quoted from the Bible.’
Declan remembered reading the fact he was a pastor on the first page of Edith’s file, had suspected that all the talk of possession had stemmed from her father’s religious beliefs. In fact, it strengthened his own belief that Edith had been misdiagnosed in those early days.
‘But you did tell Doctor Malone someone hit you as a child.’ Declan looked up from the notes, the sentence in black and white, his voice a little harsher than he had meant.
‘Not my father. He never hit me. I was hit but that wasn’t when I was with my parents from Dunedin. That was when I was here before.’
Declan slumped a little as she spoke. ‘What do you mean, “before”?’
Two furrows appeared in the middle of Edith’s forehead. ‘I . . . I don’t know . . . I, please, forget I said anything. I don’t remember now anyway. I started to forget it all years ago, I told them that and it was the truth . . .’ She was appealing to Declan, palms up, an urgency in her voice.
‘Please, Edith, don’t become excited, I want to know what you have to say.’ Declan tried to reassure her, felt he was on the cusp of something that might make all this make more sense. ‘It’s all very helpful.’
Edith sat back, her eyes darting from the notes in front of him to Declan, her mouth parting slightly. ‘Will you punish me if I talk about before?’
‘Edith, I would never punish you. Whatever we discuss here is private, between you and me.’
She leant forward, her brown eyes intense. ‘Do you promise?’
Declan nodded. ‘I promise.’
‘If I spoke about before when I was young, they got angry, they said I was lying, then they said I had something evil inside me, another me . . . The old man and Father tried to take it out.’ She started to scratch at her chest and Declan flinched, watching her grow more uneasy.
‘Edith.’ He tried to inject a soothing tone in his voice. ‘Please, you don’t need to explain, you are free to talk about anything you remember. We are just talking.’
She squeezed her hands together again, clearly still unsure whether she should continue. ‘The doctors didn’t believe me either. I . . . a lot of it has faded now. I don’t remember much,’ she added.
‘Tell me what you do remember,’ Declan said, leaning forward, searching her face.
Edith inhaled slowly. ‘It wasn’t my father that hit me, it was my stepbrother, when I was the other girl.’
‘The other girl?’ Declan felt his eyebrows knit together. Another person? His confidence in her misdiagnosis started to crumble. Had Doctor Malone been right all along and Declan had just wanted to see something else?
‘Yes, in the house by the sea. In Oamaru. I was a big girl.’ Edith’s hand tapped at her teeth again. ‘I died. Then I came back.’
Declan tried to clear his head, to follow her thought process. If Edith believed herself to be two people this would suggest she was someone who believed herself to have multiple personalities; he had read about a few cases like that. He felt a heavy weight in his stomach: schizophrenia started to make some sense.
He held up a hand. ‘What do you mean, you died?’
Edith swallowed. ‘I lived in a house in Oamaru, called Kara . . . Kara something, when I was the other girl. My mother, Nina, had me and Mary. My stepbrother lived with us. He . . . he did things. One day he hit me and I died.’
‘Do you mean,’ Declan said, his forehead creased, ‘there is another girl somewhere inside you?’
‘No, I was her, when I was here before.’ Edith’s voice moved up a register as she tried to explain herself. ‘I told them. They didn’t believe me.’ The words were louder now, her face flushed. ‘They said I was lying but I wasn’t. I wasn’t lying.’ Her arms flew out, big and expressive. ‘I told them, Doctor Harris, I told them everything and they didn’t believe me and so I had to stay here.’
Declan’s hopes faded as she continued to talk to him in half-sentences. She was indeed mentally unwell. He let her continue, trying to keep his face neutral as she spoke. ‘They punished me, they took me to the white room . . . It’s not as clear now. I used to wake at night remembering what he did – he did bad things, Doctor, and I told them it all, and I told them where he left me when I was the other girl . . . when I was Primrose.’
Declan tried to nod in encouragement but found his body unwilling, felt his face fall, disappointment etched on it.
‘He left me there in the dark.’ She looked up at him, eyes rounded, and then stopped suddenly. ‘You don’t believe me,’ she said in a tiny voice.
‘I . . .’ Declan cast about for something to say, not wanting to encourage her delusions but not wanting to destroy the confidence they had built together.
Tears now filmed her eyes; her bottom lip quivered. He watched a teardrop make an unsteady path down her cheek.
‘Edith.’ He didn’t want to lie to her. It was impossible; what she was saying was impossible. ‘Edith,’ he repeated, ‘it’s not that I don’t believe you. I do believe you think these things happened.’ He was careful, his words slow. ‘But,’ he added gently, ‘what you’re saying. Well, it is impossible. You know that, don’t you?’
He had engaged in lucid conversations with her; she had intelligence. She had to realise what she was saying simply didn’t make sense. He had been so sure, so sure Doctor Malone had got it wrong. She couldn’t really think these things?
She gave him a sad smile. ‘I understand, Doctor.’ She scraped back her chair. ‘I think I’d better go now.’ She straightened, brushed at her face. ‘I thought maybe, maybe you would believe me, but no matter.’ Her voice was light, as if they were discussing something inconsequential.
Declan found himself rooted to his seat, unable to take control, to say anything.
She didn’t give him more time to react. She turned and walked across to the door, a half-wave as she looked back. ‘Thank you for talking with me.’
He muttered a reply, his head clogged with the information she had given him, his thoughts jumbled. By the time he stood to call her back she had left his office.
The file was still open in front of him, the notes and her words all clashing and merging in his head. He looked back at the door; it had shut with a gentle click. He sat, picked up the first page, reread it, looking desperately at it for another angle. Then a shot of anger fired through him and he threw his pen down on the desk, ink spattering over the top page.
Chapter 21
BEFORE
Mother always dr
esses differently when we go to this part of town: her lips and cheeks paler, a house dress that has a tear at the collar that she’s darned. We are visiting the street near the mill, the big chimney puffing, puffing, making everything seem fuzzy and grey.
We always take bread baked by Mrs Clark and knock on the doors of the houses all squeezed tight together, no hedges or gates, doors so close to the pavement you can take one giant step into the road. My neck prickles as I recall flashes of another house with smeared windows, a roof patchy with red.
We visit a mother of three young children who has a gap where a tooth should be, right at the front. Mother has told me not to stare at it. The woman is wearing the same torn singlet as last time, her hair thin and stuck to her forehead. The youngest child is only a baby, all angry round mouth, tiny fists beating the air. Mother doesn’t like holding the baby, I can tell. Mary had screamed in the same way when she’d been hungry.
We haven’t been inside long when I need to go. I tug on Mother’s skirt, crossing my legs. Mother apologises as the woman shows me where the dunny is outside, not inside like our house. I don’t want to go to the dunny in the garden, there was a dunny in the garden of the other house.
Mother shoos me and I step outside. The grass tickles my ankles as I step towards the crooked wooden building, a twisted iron bed propped up in front of it, curled brown weeds twisting around the frame. I look back at the house, see the shape of Mother in the kitchen window talking to the woman. She lifts a hand, pats her hair. She always keeps her gloves on when she’s there.
I gulp as I tug at the wooden door, see a cracked seat, a dirty jug of water on the floor. I can’t go in. But I really do need to go; I bob from one foot to the other before taking a step inside.
The memory hits me the moment the stench is in my nose.
I’d only been wearing a vest that day, stretched tight now that I had grown lumps like Mother had. Mother had been washing my tunic and I’d been drawing things in the dust behind the tin bath.
He’d called to me from the bottom of the wooden steps and I’d stood, the wood scratchy under my bare feet.
‘Primrose’ – his voice was different now, lower since he’d grown so tall – ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
I hadn’t wanted to go. I could hear Mother talking to his father in the kitchen; I wanted to go to them.
‘Come on, you’ll like it,’ he said, nodding to the washhouse. ‘Or I suppose I could show Mary.’
I’d scrabbled after him then.
He’d disappeared inside and I’d followed him.
The darkness had been immediate and I’d fallen against the wall with a sharp, high cry as the lock slid shut.
Spinning, I felt my palms scrape against the wood as I’d tried to steady myself. I was so close to the dumpy hole I could hear the flies and the stink all around me, in my nose and hair; something scuttled across my neck in a whisper.
It was a moment before I realised he was saying my name.
‘Primrose,’ he sang, so that I span round in the darkness, stomach rolling at the smell.
‘Pack it in,’ I said, trying to sound bolder than I felt. He was two years older, but in that instant it felt like more.
‘Want to be let out, Primrose?’
Where was his voice coming from? It seemed as if it was all around me.
I nodded, not able to make out shapes, rooted in the tiny space.
‘What’s that?’ he laughed, enjoying my fear. He’d liked it when he’d crept up on me the week before in my bedroom, pushing me down on the bed, arms pinning me. He’d liked it when he’d followed me to the creek, springing up from a rock so that I’d toppled in with surprise, when he’d stepped towards me in the cave . . .
‘I’ll let you out, but I’ve got something I want you to do for me,’ he said, his voice close, my skin suddenly bumpy through the thin layer of my vest.
His hand grabbed at me and I moaned as he pushed me up against the wood, damp, cold. His body was pressed against me, his mouth suddenly on my neck as his fingers pulled at the vest, as they climbed up my stomach. Cigarettes and shit.
I have fallen in the doorway, my knees scratched and sore, my chest rising and falling. I twist and push against the wood, land on my hands on the soft mud outside with a cry. The daylight is shocking and I blink over and over, back outside the wooden outhouse.
The smell fades; the smoke of the mill curls in the sky. Mother is still in the kitchen with the lady with the missing tooth.
I am not back there; I am not with him; I am safe.
Chapter 22
NOW
Declan stamped along the sand, feeling the wind behind him, nudging him gently on. He had been wrong. The Edith he thought existed seemed to be a fabrication of his own hopes. He had read the statement of five-year-old Edith in Doctor Malone’s scrawled handwriting: hard to follow, a collection of claims about being hit, about living by the sea, about being left alone. He had dismissed them as the ramblings of a frightened child, not evidence of something medically relevant.
It did seem plausible that perhaps a traumatised child would break away part of herself to survive, become someone else, this other girl who knew swear words and smoked cigarettes and was the rebel that the young Edith wished she could be.
The things she said now, though – that this other girl had existed, not been part of her: that was impossible.
He stopped, turning towards the slate-coloured sea, looking out to the horizon, watching a carrier move across the water. The war in the Pacific seemed a distant thing at that moment, lost as he was in the battle going on inside himself. What could he do to help her? The mind was complex and Declan knew there were things they still couldn’t explain; the consequences of undergoing a devastating trauma.
There was something in Edith’s manner that seemed so innocent, so guileless. She carried herself with a quiet dignity. He had been fooled into believing she might be sane. There was no other word for it. He had felt her mind connect with his in the times when they had spoken. He imagined her in another setting, a tea shop perhaps, licking her finger as she turned the page of a book, her curls tied back, an appraising gaze as he approached, a quiet confidence. He’d thought Edith had slipped through the cracks, tarred with an old, inaccurate diagnosis. He’d desperately wanted to prove Doctor Malone wrong, prove she did not need more treatment.
He kicked at the shingle underfoot, his shoes now soaked through. He needed to head back. All her talk of before and being another person were ravings he hadn’t expected. Perhaps she believed herself to have been that other girl; perhaps she really did believe herself to be more than one person. He paused on the shore as he realised she would likely spend the rest of her life at Seacliff. He recalled his first week working there, a nurse talking about Julia, a widow who never spoke, found lying dead in her bed. He imagined Edith the same age: hair thinned, white over time, lines deep on her face and neck, liver spots on her hand. She would know nothing apart from the experiences within the building. He shivered and wrapped his arms around himself.
He turned to leave the beach, trying to leave all thoughts of his meeting with her out on the sand, to be swept away on the breeze, broken up by the wind.
Some of what she said niggled at him as he walked all the way up through the fields to the driveway of Seacliff. Such specific details. Some would be easy to check, he thought, as he stamped his sandy feet on the steps outside, wiped his shoes along the boot scraper. If he could dismiss them completely as ravings, perhaps that would help him make peace with it all; he could be satisfied it was over.
There was barely a change in temperature as he moved quickly down the dark stone corridors, his steps quick as he thought of his destination. He arrived, nodded at a nurse he didn’t know who was sitting at a table, thick glasses, nose-deep in a book. Two patients browsed shelves behind her; one was sitting on a window seat. The nurse noticed him then, flushing pink, placing her book down, spine up, as he moved across the room.<
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He nodded at her and she tentatively reached for her book again. Moving across to the small corner section of the patients’ library, he scanned the shelves of the dusty geography bookcase, reaching for the atlas with both hands. It was enormous and impossibly heavy. He laid it down on a nearby table on its front, turning over the back cover to look at the index. Drawing a finger down to the correct letter he picked out the name, noting the page number and grid reference. Muttering them to himself he carefully flicked back until he reached the right spot.
Tracing his finger down the correct page he followed the line where land met sea and then he stopped. There it was. A district in Oamaru. The town itself was about a hundred kilometres north of Seacliff. The district Edith had mentioned all those years ago did exist. Yet her family had lived in Dunedin.
So how had she known? Had she heard the name somewhere? Did they have family there? He was about to close the atlas when he noticed a symbol, just off the coast near the place Edith had named. He looked up the symbol in the key at the front. He frowned, a small curiosity lit. He remembered a memory written in Edith’s admission statement about this landmark.
Impossible.
It was a coincidence. It had to be. He closed the book with a small thud and lifted it to place back on the shelf. A lucky guess, he thought, as he slid it into position, or something she had picked up from another patient? He couldn’t be fooled any more; he had been wrong about her.
He walked back across the library and down the corridor into his office. Her notes were still laid out on the desk in front of him and he stood over the scattered sheets for a moment. Then, with a decisive sigh, he piled them all back into the folder and stepped across to the filing cabinet to return them.
Chapter 23
NOW
Edith looked less tired today, arriving in his office with a small smile, her curly hair pinned back, her cheeks flushed from being outside.
She pulled out a small white flower from her cardigan pocket and held it up. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ She thrust it towards him and he found himself leaning towards her, half-closing his eyes to sniff at the petals before she pressed it to her own nose.