Sally began to hyperventilate. She felt total panic, as if the walls were collapsing around her. She tried to fight it off, tried to remain professional, but all she could think of were the blows that Karl Johanssen used to rain down upon her. He used to spit when he yelled, too. “I’m ... so sorry.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, you can bet you’ll be sorry. You’ll pay for this, you bitch!” Amanda Richardson threw open the consulting room door and stormed out into the waiting room.
Sally slumped against the consulting room wall.
Amanda Richardson yelled at the other people in the waiting room, as she made her way to the front door. The other clients had already heard everything she had said, through the thin consulting room door, but her parting comment made things even worse. “Don’t go in to see that fucking vet. She just killed my dog. She just fucking killed my Cleo ...”
With that, the grief-stricken owner was gone, out of the front door of the practice, leaving a waiting room full of astonished people who didn’t know what might have happened, only that someone’s dog was dead and that apparently it must have been the vet’s fault.
Sally knew she would have to see every one of those people, one by one, and face them and their animals, before the day was over. She ran out of the consulting room, made it only halfway to the toilet, and vomited on the hallway floor.
The rest of the day was just a blur, just a nightmare, but Sally would never forget that incident. It would always stay with her.
Chapter 11
Michael dipped his fine brush in the burgundy paint-well on his cheap watercolour palette and touched up the roses on the portrait he was working on. It was a picture of Ruth, in a straw hat and a big white shirt and khaki slacks, tending to her beloved rose bushes. The roses were red and green slashes, Ruth’s face was a pinkish blur, and the sky overhead was a clear blue panorama.
Michael painted Ruth from memory, since she had gone out for the afternoon without saying where she was going. It was meltingly hot. Michael was glad of the shade of the big jacaranda tree he sheltered under, even if the bees did buzz dangerously around his feet, feasting on the nectar from the many fallen flowers, little mauve trumpets that littered the lawn around the tree. This was late January in Perth. The city was immersed in the desperately dry heat. A brilliant sun burned a hole in the endless sky.
Michael was troubled by the diary he had been reading every night for the past three weeks. There were questions to which he wanted answers. Sally had written of being beaten, as a child, by a man she called Karl, only Karl, nothing more. Who was he? She had written of the stress she had been under in veterinary practice. She had written of how she thought sometimes that she could barely take it any more. And, the last thing in the diary Ruth had given him, Sally had written of an anaesthetic death which had shattered her heart. Had Sally told Ruth about any of this? Michael wondered. She had been such an innocent, young woman, barely more than a girl just left home for the first time, and she had her whole life ahead of her, yet Michael knew, although the diary did not take him that far, that she had taken her own life. Why had she done that? He wanted to understand.
Michael knew why his own life must soon end. He was guilty. He was responsible. He had failed. And there was nothing left for him, now. But Sally was innocent. She had failed nothing. And there was everything ahead of her, a whole, long life of unexplored possibilities. Why did she end it?
When evening came, Michael wanted to talk. Normally, he would eat alone, but for the first time he asked if Ruth would mind if he joined her for dinner. Ruth was a little surprised by the request, but she agreed. They ate cold chicken and fresh salad, and Michael talked.
“Your granddaughter, are you sure she would have wanted me to read her diary? It’s pretty private stuff.”
“Sally loved animals, and she cared about people. She was a good girl, she was always a good girl, a good woman. She would have wanted you to read it. She would have wanted you to know.”
“But, I’m just a stranger.”
Ruth looked calmly at Michael. “Maybe you’re someone who can understand what she was feeling, more than most people could. Maybe there’s something you and Sally have in common, which makes you more than just a stranger. Don’t you think so?”
Michael was evasive. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Are you feeling any better, Michael?”
“I’m all right,” Michael lied.
Ruth said nothing, and ate her dinner.
“Did she talk to you about it? What she was going through, did she talk to you about it? Did you know what was happening to her?”
“Sally was afraid to tell me, Mike. She never said a thing. It was her dream to be a vet, it was her one way out of her unhappy childhood. She didn’t want to tell me that her dream was falling apart, that it wasn’t what she had hoped. I suppose she even thought it was her own fault.”
“What do you mean, her way out?”
“My granddaughter had the worst luck in the world, but she was too young to realise that it was just bad luck and not her fault. She had a father who beat her, a father that she couldn’t even bear to call a father. She called him by his first name.”
“Karl?”
“Karl. Miserable bastard. They should have locked him up. He ruined my granddaughter. He ruined her for life.”
Michael didn’t know what to say.
“He was a drunk. He bashed my Sally. He used to go to her room, lock the door behind him, and beat her. He used to tell her that she was no good, that she hadn’t been good. She was just a little child.” Ruth lost herself for a moment, in angry thoughts, in sad thoughts. “When she came to live with me, after that son of a bitch died, and after her mother moved to Canada, it was the first time in her life she had a safe home. And when she enrolled in the veterinary college, it was the first time she had a chance to reach for a dream. It was her way out.”
Michael nodded.
“But Sally had the worst luck in the world, the worst luck. And that luck lead to her death, Michael. That bad luck killed her. She thought that was just the way life was, that there was no other way, that there was no better life. She didn’t know it was just bad luck.”
“The anaesthetic death, you mean?”
“All of it, Michael. Not just that. All of it.”
Michael felt uneasy. He said nothing.
“Have you finished reading it?”
“Yes. I finished it last night.”
Ruth rose from the table, without a word. She returned a couple of minutes later. Michael was just sitting there, thinking.
“You’ll want the next one, then,” Ruth said unceremoniously, as she slid another diary across the table to him. “I think you’ll want to read this, Michael. I think you’ll see what I mean, about luck.”
Michael put his hand on the diary, considering this for a moment. Then he looked at Ruth. “I’ll read it.”
Thursday, 21 December, 1995
Dear Diary,
I can hardly write. Tonight, I might have been raped. I don’t know what to do. I only know I don’t want to give up ...
It was after midnight on a warm December night, and Sally was deathly tired from another horrifically busy day at the clinic. When the after-hours phone had rung, fifteen minutes ago, she had felt a sense of dread. This intuition was to be confirmed in more ways than she would ever have imagined. At first, she was simply disappointed that it was not another inconsequential call but a genuine emergency – this meant that she would have to get out of bed. The man’s voice on the telephone was deep, and he had said, without emotion, that he had a dog that had been hit by a car. Now, Sally had let herself out of the front door of the clinic and was standing waiting for the client to arrive in the dark of the car park. She had pulled on a pair of jeans over her short pyjama bottoms, and wore a light jacket, partially unzipped, and a yellow, satin pyjama singlet. It was a hot night, and she didn’t see the point in getting fully dressed, since she hoped she
could treat the dog and get back to sleep in twenty minutes. Her long, blonde hair was pulled untidily back into a pigtail and her face was scrubbed clean of make-up. She looked tired. Where was the damn client? she thought. How could people ring up, say they had an emergency, then take so long to arrive? She hated that.
A old, dark blue Holden panel van cornered noisily into the parking lot, the tires on its enlarged mag wheels squealing as it pulled off the street.
Here they are, at last! Sally thought impatiently.
A man jumped out of the car and walked over to Sally. There was another man, the driver, waiting in the car, and the loud engine was running. The headlights still burned, something Sally would later remember in her nightmares about that terrible night.
“Hello,” said Sally. “Your dog’s been hit by a car?”
“Yeah,” said the man. He was wore a denim jacket and jeans, pointed snakeskin boots with polished silver toes, and his face was covered in thick stubble. He was a big man, about six feet tall.
“Where’s the dog?” said Sally.
“He’s in the car, doc. Can I call you doc?”
Sally had no time for nonsense. Whatever the man was up to, she wasn’t interested. She just wanted to treat the injured dog and get back to sleep. She ignored the question. “Is he badly hurt?”
The man smiled a crooked smile. “Oh, yeah. Bad, bad.”
Sally’s heart sank. She came across a lot of weird people in practice, and she was well and truly used to people saying strange things and wasting her time. She wasn’t afraid of the man, just annoyed. “Well, let’s bring him into the clinic, then, and take a look at him.”
The man turned to the car and shouted to the driver. “She wants me to bring the dog in.” Then he laughed.
The driver leaned out of the car window, gunned the motor for a moment, and laughed back.
They’re drunk, Sally thought. She was really beginning to get annoyed now. It was the middle of the night. Even the streetlights had gone out, on the quiet little suburban street. Anyone with any sense was at home, asleep. And she was out here, with two drunks, wasting her time. “Where’s the dog?”
The man looked at Sally, feigning puzzlement. “You want to know where the dog is, doc? You want to know where he is?”
Sally felt afraid, for the first time. The man looked mean.
“Hey, Mickey – she wants to know where the dog is!”
The driver yelled back. “She looks like a dog, to me. She looks like a fine bitch to me, don’t you reckon?”
Before Sally could react, the man put a hand up to her cheek, and briefly touched her face. He looked at her partially open jacket, seeing the satin singlet underneath, and then smiled a repulsive smile. “Now, we don’t need no dog, doc, do we?”
Sally was frozen for a moment in sheer terror, in the sudden realisation that there was no sick dog, that there never had been, and that these men were here to rape her, to break into the clinic, maybe to find drugs. In a split second, her options for escape ran through her mind. The man’s speech had been a little blurred, like he was drunk, or stoned – his reflexes might be slow.
The man stood there, looking at Sally for a couple of seconds.
His driver called urgently from the car. “Come on, mate. What are you doing? Stop wasting time.”
The man turned, slowly, to look at the driver. “Keep your fuckin’ pants on, Mickey. I’m talking to a lady ...”
Sally stepped quickly backwards.
By the time the man had turned back towards her and lunged out with his hand, all he caught was the edge of her jacket.
As Sally spun around and ran away as fast as she could, the jacket was ripped off her back. She disappeared down the dark alley at the side of the clinic, frantically trying to get to the door of her little flat at the rear, which she could lock behind her. It did not connect directly to the rest of the clinic, the front door of which was still open.
The man didn’t chase her, not at first. He just laughed loudly as he saw Sally running frantically away, as he appreciated her yellow pyjama singlet reflecting the harsh moonlight. “Oh, look what you did! You frightened the bitch away, Mickey. Now we’ll just have to go find her.”
The driver was getting impatient. “For fuck’s sake, get the bloody drugs and let’s get going. She’ll have the cops here in a minute. Stop fucking around.”
Sally had already let herself into her flat, slammed the door behind her, and was fumbling desperately at the telephone. She punched 000 into its keypad and waited for emergency services to answer. “Hello. Yes. Thank God. This is the Parkdale Waters Veterinary Centre. We’re being robbed. I mean, there are two men here. For God’s sake, help me, I think they’re going to rape me ...”
Sally screamed as she heard the doorknob turn and then someone pushing heavily on the door, trying to get in.
Not knowing what else to do, she yelled through the door. “I’ve called the police, you bastards, and they’ll be here in a minute. Do you hear me?!”
The operator spoke calmly. “It’s okay, we’ve got a car on the way to you now. Just hang on for a couple of minutes.”
The horn of the panel van sounded loudly, twice.
“Ah, fuck you, bitch. I’d like to,” said the man’s voice. He kicked on the door as hard as he could, but it was deadlocked and it didn’t come open. At last, the man heeded his driver’s call and left.
Four minutes later, a time that seemed like an hour to Sally, as she sat hyperventilating on the floor by her bed, there was another knock on the door. It was a different voice, another man.
“It’s the police. Are you all right in there?”
Sally was too terrified to open the door.
Then there was a second man’s voice. “It’s the police, Sally. It’s Sally, isn’t it? That’s your name? You’re okay now. You’re safe.”
Sally stood up and went to the door. She leaned against it in exhaustion for a moment, then with a prayer she opened it. She saw two police constables, in their heavy leather jackets, with truncheons and revolvers hanging from their belts.
“Are you okay?” said the first constable.
“I am now,” said Sally. Then she cried.
The next day, when Sally told Kellerman what had happened, he didn’t give her the day off work. Sally didn’t ask for that, and Kellerman certainly wasn’t going to offer it. But he did say that he would take the after-hours phone for a week, so that Sally didn’t have to do any night-calls. Shortly, Kellerman took legal advice on the situation, and when his solicitor advised him that he might be liable, if one of his employees were put in an unsafe situation in the course of doing their job, he called a tradesman and had a metal security screen installed on the front door of the clinic, so that Sally could view any after-hours clients and their animals from behind the screen, before she unlocked it and let them in.
Heather Lorayne showed far more concern than Kellerman for what Sally had been through, but, even so, her offhand remark that the men were probably just junkies looking for some ‘Special K’ – the street name for ketamine, an injectable sedative – was hardly reassuring. Sally was terrified that the men might come back. When she telephoned Ruth, a couple of days after the incident, to discuss her fears, Ruth was horrified and even suggested that Sally should quit her job and look for something safer, because, she said, Sally should put herself first and take care of herself, and she was welcome to come and stay with Ruth for as long as she needed to find a new job. But Sally was never comfortable with giving up on anything she began, so she lied and said she wasn’t feeling too bad and that it would be okay. The truth was, the secret terror that she might be attacked again never left her, but she thought that if she left her job it would make her a quitter, and Sally didn’t want to be a quitter. Somehow she would keep going. It was important to her not be defeated, not even by Kellerman’s indifference.
Years later, Ruth would say that Sally might have saved her life by getting out of a situation that she
could not handle, rather than getting deeper and deeper entangled in it. Years later, Ruth would say that quitting her job would have been the best possible thing Sally could have done. Sally had lost her sense of perspective, had lost sight of the fact that life was full of choices, and that it would not be quitting, to take the pressure off herself and seek a better life. She could have taken a holiday to recover. She could have looked for a new practice to work at, one with a more caring boss. She could have worked part-time, instead of full-time. Or she could have changed careers altogether – there was no shame in admitting that she could not cope with the pressures of being a vet, and no shame in admitting that she simply felt overworked, miserably underpaid, desperately stressed, tired and alone, no shame in admitting that she felt at the end of her rope and didn’t know where to turn. But to Sally, to take time off work was quitting. To Sally, to leave and seek a better practice was quitting. To Sally, most of all, the unthinkable thought of changing her career, and giving up on everything she had dreamed of for all those years, was the worst kind of quitting. Sally somehow never felt, deep inside, that she was okay, that she was good enough, that she was a worthy person – she was always, in her own mind, not quite good enough, either as a vet or as a person. She always had to prove to herself that she was okay, that she had what it took, but ever since Karl Johanssen had first beaten her, she had never been able to completely respect herself. Sally was lost.
Four days after the incident, it was Christmas. Sally was not working in the afternoon, although Kellerman made her work the nine-to-one shift for which the practice was open on public holidays, since he and his wife had driven down to Margaret River for a long weekend. After work, Sally spent the evening having Christmas dinner with Ruth. Ruth was delighted to see her, since Sally did not visit as often as she used to, but immediately she could tell that Sally was looking deeply stressed. Sally didn’t want to talk about it because she knew it would only upset both of them. She just wanted to be with Ruth for a few hours and remember the good old times, when being a vet was just a distant dream not yet realised, and when it seemed like such a bright future. Now she didn’t know what to think, so she tried her best not to think at all. She gave Ruth a beautiful crystal vase for Christmas. Ruth gave Sally a hand-knitted jumper, and an elegant silver wristwatch, inscribed, ‘To Sally, with love, Ruth.’ Ruth hoped it might become an heirloom that Sally would keep for decades.
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