Medea's Curse

by Anne Buist

  She went to the safer topic of Jessie, but it was early days and there had been little progress. It would get tougher when their alliance was stronger. Patients like Jessie tended to create havoc; testing out authority and pushing boundaries had more serious consequences as an adult than as a child. Mostly they created more trouble for themselves than anyone else.

  Inevitably the conversation turned to Georgia.

  ‘I’m trying,’ said Natalie. ‘It isn’t easy. My gut feeling screams inauthentic; it’s hard to let go of.’

  ‘Have you given any thought to why?’

  ‘Of course. That’s all I try to do.’

  Declan shook his head. His brown eyes regarded her with fatherly concern. ‘You try hard,’ he said, ‘but you’re too close; step away for a moment.’ He offered her another glass of wine, which she declined.

  ‘Meaning?’ She was conscious of sounding tense.

  ‘Tell me why you don’t like her.’

  ‘She hardly invites warmth.’

  ‘Is it surprising? Didn’t you tell me her father killed her mother when she was two?’

  ‘It was the other way around. But probably only because her mother got to the knife first; I saw the list of prior injuries. Either way, she effectively lost both parents.’

  ‘I know you understand that would have affected her development.’

  ‘Of course. No stable base to form the foundations of sense of self, so she learned to manipulate in order to survive. A disorganised attachment style.’

  ‘As is the case for Jessie, yet you have empathy for her. Tell me more about Georgia’s attachment style and how it affected her personality.’

  ‘I guess she’s also avoidant. She learned to get what she wanted in part by being good.’

  ‘So the good child smiled and achieved and got some reward from…was it an aunt that cared for her?’

  Natalie nodded. ‘Yes, but by doing so, Georgia didn’t learn to deal with emotions.’

  ‘So she’s three years old, lost both her parents and a stranger is caring for her. How did she feel?’

  ‘Scared. Confused.’

  ‘So she could have developed an anxiety disorder but didn’t.’

  ‘No, she developed a personality disorder instead.’

  ‘As did Jessie.’

  ‘Jessie’s borderline—predominantly chaotic. Georgia is predominantly narcissistic.’

  ‘So again I ask, why the empathy for Jessie but not for Georgia?’ Declan picked up the bottle and poured another splash into his own glass, a deviation from his usual routine.

  Natalie shook her head. ‘Because she killed three children! Reason enough surely.’

  ‘Our job is to understand, not judge. Or at least to understand first.’

  ‘Then because she lies, because she’s entitled. Because she won’t damn well face reality.’

  ‘Natalie, you can do better than that.’

  ‘Okay, because her survival skills are to pretend and she believes her own story. Because she isn’t interested in changing, not really.’

  Declan sat back in the chair, contemplating her. ‘I asked what your issue was, not Georgia’s.’

  Natalie had to remind herself to breathe. It was maybe a minute before she trusted herself to answer. ‘She makes me feel powerless.’

  ‘And what’s that like?’ Declan’s tone was as gentle as she had ever heard.

  ‘I get it.’ She forced a smile. ‘Scary. And I like to be in control.’ Or at least have the illusion of it.

  Declan leaned forward. ‘Dismissing emotions comes at a cost. For you both.’ He watched her struggle, then patted her hand. ‘I know I’m not your therapist anymore,’ he said. ‘But it’s inevitable that your own issues come out in your work. You are very skilled with the chaos of the borderline because ultimately your foundations are not disorganised, however much your bipolar makes you seem so at times. But you have other answers to find, and it will take time.’

  Was he referring now to her sensitivity to Georgia? Her relationship with her mother? Her absent father? Or Liam?

  Declan watched her carefully. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to talk about? Better to talk it out with me than no one at all.’

  Liam then. She wasn’t sure there was anything to talk about, but he was right about there being no one else. She and Tom didn’t do personal discussion, mainly because in the past it had ended up in sex. Her two oldest friends from school were overseas and interstate, and she didn’t find other women easy to deal with. More to the point, most women didn’t like her much. Women her age were uneasy with a woman who enjoyed sex, liked being single—and thought a man’s marital status was his problem not hers.

  Natalie contemplated rolling up her sleeve to jolt Declan. There were bruises on her arms from Liam’s enthusiastic grip, and over most of the rest of her from banging into the furniture. Liam hadn’t escaped without damage either, including several long scratches down his back. God knew how he explained that to his wife. Presumably the lights stayed out.

  ‘Ever heard the expression “fuck your brains out”?’ Natalie said with a grin, knowing she was being badly behaved and only vaguely aware it was a push-back against Declan getting too close to her core vulnerability. She didn’t wait for a response. ‘I never really knew what it meant either until last Thursday night. Let’s just say we didn’t sleep much.’

  ‘So what does that mean to you?’ He was using his fatherly I-won’t-judge-you tone.

  Natalie grinned. ‘Great sex. He’s married. I don’t want a relationship.’ She saw Declan’s expression and shrugged. ‘It’s true, okay? Maybe I’m testing types out but I can’t picture myself settled down with anyone right now, so having fun in the interim seems a win–win.’

  She could see Declan was sceptical. ‘I don’t care what you say,’ she added. ‘Eight years older does not make him a father figure. Now you—maybe.’

  ‘Have you considered that maybe you’re a little high? And your libido as well?’

  ‘Just running on all cylinders.’

  ‘It might be normal for most people to keep one cylinder in reserve.’ Declan frowned. ‘How much are you seeing him?’

  ‘Not sure yet.’ She wondered why she didn’t just tell him it was a one-off. Because she thought Liam might be there at the Welbury gig?

  ‘True, unless…’ Declan paused. ‘How are you sleeping generally?’

  ‘It was one night only. I’ve slept normally ever since.’

  ‘With medication?’

  ‘Yes.’ Which was sort of true. She’d missed on that one night with Liam, but most other nights she took her mood stabiliser like a good girl.

  Declan seemed satisfied.

  Chapter 11

  Outside Declan’s house, Natalie paused for a minute. Then she fired up her bike and headed towards the cemetery at the eastern edge of the suburban sprawl, a forty-five minute ride.

  She hadn’t been there in two years. She pulled into the usual side road and waited for the white Mazda travelling behind her to go by, lighting up the road as it did.
The routine of hiding the bike in the brush and scaling the wall at the back where the brickwork was crumbling was a familiar one. She hadn’t brought a torch but the sky was clear and the moon high enough for her to be able to find her way through the shadows.

  She had spent the night of her eighteenth birthday sleeping on the grave, celebrating her bike licence as well as the mobility she had worked hard to regain after the accident. It was a big deal that she was able to ride at all, and she’d come to promise Eoin that she would ride safely. She’d visited on the day of her thirtieth birthday, to show off her new Ducati. It was far too big for her, well deserving the label of monster. A reminder of the time she switched meds and went a bit manic, but she loved it anyway.

  He was there waiting for her. She could feel him as she closed her eyes and remembered. Half a lifetime ago.

  ‘I miss you still,’ she said. She ran her hand over the letters that were carved into the stone, unable to read them in the dark, but knowing what they said.

  Eoin Rearden 1980–1998

  Always in our hearts.

  ‘You don’t think I should settle down, do you?’ Natalie said to him. ‘If you were alive would we be married with a couple of kids? Would you have moved on from our pledge never to get old and boring?’ It was impossible to imagine Eoin, with his irreverent grin, as anything but a wild eighteen-year-old. If the accident hadn’t killed him something else would have.

  ‘I really don’t know what I want,’ Natalie said looking into the starless night sky. ‘I’ve got the band—still a rock chick like I promised. But sometimes I’m so restless. It’s like I’m waiting for you to come back and catch up with me.’ She listened for a while to the sounds of the night. The wind rustled the leaves in the nearby tree, and a car backfired in the distance.

  ‘You’d like Liam,’ she said. Then laughed and sat up. ‘Actually you’d hate him. Arrogant twat. Wears suits.’ Natalie smiled. ‘But there’s a bad boy in there.’

  It was after ten when she got home. She didn’t take any notice of the car parked outside her warehouse, faced the wrong way on a one way street, until he turned his headlights on, and blinded her.

  ‘Shit!’ she yelled. As she turned her bike into the cul-de-sac, she heard him rev the engine and take off. Standing in the empty street as the car turned the corner, she could see only that it was small and pale coloured. No chance of reading the number plate.

  A sound on the roof startled her as she came up the stairs into the kitchen. A cat most likely. She’d admitted to Tom that she might be in danger, but it wouldn’t be from any stalker who was seriously mentally ill. They were unlikely to be organised enough to be anything more than a nuisance, and from the rational thinking behind the delivery of the USBs she already knew that her stalker didn’t fit this category.

  She liked her own company. Now she found herself wishing for the buzz of the Halfpenny. Looking out across the rooftops she reassured herself that the driver could have been anyone and that she was up to tackling the large motley coloured tom cat that was there now.

  Natalie had taken to checking the Welbury Leader online. On Monday morning, Travis and Tiphanie were back on page one. The local journalists probably didn’t have anything else interesting to report; they interviewed Tiphanie and dragged a brief quote from Travis’s mother. The local maternal child health centre was reported as saying they would be running a parenting support group, as the young mothers had been ‘destabilised’. Senior Sergeant Damian McBride said there were ‘several lines of enquiry still being pursued’.

  Chloe was still missing. And Amber, not Travis, was in gaol.

  To add to Natalie’s sense of disquiet from the previous night, she found an article in the mainstream paper on multiple personality disorder, quoting Wadhwa, his pudgy face beaming with insincerity. He couldn’t comment on the case of Georgia Latimer, he said, since it was ‘before the courts’ but managed to make his thoughts abundantly clear. Maybe someone would charge him with contempt and make Natalie’s day.

  Georgia was booked to see Natalie Wednesday, on the assumption that her bail appeal would be successful. When she turned up on time it was apparent the optimism had been warranted. She looked smug, and there was good enough reason, though the fear of returning to prison would be in the background. Yarra Bend was far removed from her normal life. Prison would be worse.

  Georgia made only the briefest reference to the court case, and instead told Natalie about the apartment she had found, and then: ‘I’ve been shopping. With friends.’

  Georgia’s demeanour was disconcerting and even with Declan’s insight, Natalie had to fight hard not to judge her. Emotional distancing was the hallmark of the avoidant-attached child as an adult. But the real issue for Natalie was whether Georgia was responsible for her actions. If Wadhwa was right, she was not. Her suppressed rage was expressed in one or more separate personalities that she had no control over. Natalie still thought it more likely that she had a personality disorder, which meant that when her rage was triggered Georgia had a choice about where to channel it.

  There was no simple direct way to answer the question; if Georgia had D.I.D. she couldn’t have told Natalie even if she had wanted to. If she had a personality disorder—and was criminally responsible for her children’s deaths—there was a good reason to conceal the truth. Either way what Natalie needed was to access Georgia’s subconscious.

  ‘I’ve been wondering about what you said at the end of the last session.’ A patient’s parting words were often significant; sometimes an attempt to prolong the interaction but at other times a way of throwing a lifeline to the therapist; this is what is important but I’m too scared to go there.

  ‘Oh, I can’t really remember,’ said Georgia, smile still fixed in place. ‘What did I say?’

  ‘That Paul could be difficult when he didn’t get his own way.’

  ‘Did I say that?’ She bit her lip. ‘He…liked…well you know.’

  ‘He liked what, exactly?’

  ‘The intimate side of marriage.’

  Oh come on. Sex might have been an issue, but Natalie didn’t buy the coyness.

  ‘I mean,’ Georgia continued, ‘he was my first, you know, serious boyfriend, and I was a bit of a prude. Virginia and Vernon, my aunt and uncle, were very uptight, didn’t really talk about sex. So Paul thought I was a bit reluctant. But it wasn’t a problem, not after we got married, at least…’

  ‘So how was sex for you?’

  ‘It really wasn’t a problem.’ Georgia smiled. ‘We had our lives very sorted, it worked. For three years it all went beautifully.’

  Until she had children.

  ‘It was harder because I was tired, after Genevieve was born,’ Georgia continued.

  ‘Did that create problems?’

  ‘Paul…well, I guess he helped with Genevieve. She was a very unsettled child, particularly around dinner time, so he’d walk her or give her a bath.’

  ‘Unsettled?’

  ‘Nothing serious, she just seemed to be prone to colds. I had asthma as a child and I worried she might have it too.’

  ‘Did she need to have tests?’

  ‘What? I don’t think anyone ever thought it was
that serious.’ Natalie jotted a reminder to chase up the GP’s notes. ‘Paul got…impatient.’

  Natalie let the silence stretch and become awkward. When Georgia filled it, she returned to the sexual relationship.

  ‘He made it hard to say no,’ said Georgia, eyes averted. ‘If I didn’t enjoy it, he didn’t like that either.’

  ‘Did he threaten you? Physically abuse you?’

  Georgia looked down. ‘Not really. I mean I just knew.’

  ‘Knew what, Georgia?’

  This time Georgia smiled into the silence, a smile that dug under Natalie’s skin. Ashamed and hiding something—or an act?

  ‘Have you spoken to Paul since your release?’ Natalie asked, remembering Georgia’s insistence that he still loved her.

  ‘No, I’m not allowed to,’ said Georgia. ‘He sent me a card.’

  ‘Really?’ Natalie found it hard to sound anything other than incredulous. ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Nothing, it was blank. But I knew it was from him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’ve been married for fifteen years. Anyway, who else could it be?’

  It was possible, just. Not committing anything to writing would suggest ambivalence, perhaps the inability to believe he’d been married to a monster. Or a way of still trying to control her, keeping her on a string. As for who else could have sent it—hate mail from the public wouldn’t have been surprising. But the sender surely wouldn’t have left it blank. Or was the whole thing in Georgia’s imagination? Who would have her new address anyway? Was this a fantasy, based on a need to bolster her self-esteem?

  Natalie was still making notes after Georgia had left, when a major inconsistency occurred to her. Georgia had stated that she was sexually naive, that Paul had been her first serious boyfriend. She flicked back through the case file and found it. Prior to meeting Paul she had been pregnant—and lost a thirty-eight-week foetus.