Manura touched his heart, then put his hand back on the wheel. He seemed pleased with what he had said and, more importantly, the way he’d said it. So this is all charity now? asked Beth. And completely outside the system? This road, said Manura, two years ago it wasn’t here. From now on, he said, without looking at her, everything’s outside. Outside and far away. He seemed suddenly to grow sullen. Beth let it go. What did it matter? From the first morning and her first referral she seemed always to have been going where others told her to go: she’d lost the will to go where she wanted because she no longer knew where that was. To work? Out walking with Georgia? Eating dinner with David and the kids? Lying in a spa tub in a resort town with Trent? There was an invisible thread drawing her on; sometimes it tugged her forward in jerks, sometimes its pull was so subtle that she would find herself afterwards having been moved, changed, without knowing how. Go with it, she said to herself, but so strongly that the words almost escaped from her mouth. Manura glanced sideways at her. I’ll go with it, she said, turning to him: tell me where and I’ll go. Manura nodded, gravely. We are running to the edge of things, he said: don’t worry, you will see! He pushed a button on the stereo and turned the music up.
Beth clutched her bag. She’d forgotten her morning pills. She took out the sandwich from Mrs Rosetti’s lunchbox—it was cheese, salami and lettuce. I haven’t had my morning tablets, she said to Manura, over the music, and I was supposed to take this one two hours before food. What time do we get there? Your appointment is for twelve-thirty, said Manura. Beth took a bite of the sandwich, swallowed the three morning tablets and drank some cordial to wash them down.
DR PANCHAL’S
They got there at twenty-five-to. On a straight stretch of road Beth saw a milk-churn letterbox with Panchal painted on it; Manura pulled into the driveway and turned the motor off. The engine ticked and cooled. There was the mooing of cows, the cawing of crows and, somewhere far off, a high-pitched scream. Do I take my things? she asked. Just your bag, said Manura; I’ll keep the suitcase for now. Don’t worry, he said, looking after her as she got out, I will be here. He waved two fingers at a cream-brick house on an acre block surrounded on three sides by paddocks. The front yard was dry and overgrown; the tips of the agapanthus leaves had turned brown. Beth mounted the five steps to the front verandah. There was an old swing chair and beside it a wooden fruit box with a pair of gumboots inside. She couldn’t find the bell and instead rapped hard on the frame. Faintly at first, then more clearly, she heard footsteps in the hall.
The door opened and a short, dark woman in a bright-pink sari glanced past Beth towards the car. Then she gestured for her to come in. Come in, come in, she said; you are welcome, very welcome. My name is Indra. Have you eaten? She led Beth down the darkened hall; there was the smell inside of curry and incense, the carpet was worn and on the walls were bright patches where a painting or print had been. My uncle’s rooms are out the back, Indra was saying; you must excuse the front, we have not yet done much with it. The hallway opened onto a sunroom with big windows that looked out to the country behind. The backyard was strewn with junk: old diesel drums, a washing machine, even a rusted car up on blocks. Against the back fence was an old-fashioned grey-brick incinerator and to Beth’s right an entirely new wing jutting out from the main house, with rendered walls and raw window frames and a stepping-stone path alongside. The blinds in there were drawn but in the sunroom it was bright; there was a row of chairs along one wall and a low table in the middle. As with most other waiting rooms she’d been in, there was also a TV in the corner with the volume down.
Indra gestured for her to sit. My uncle will be with you shortly, she said. Can I get you anything? She had a calm, gentle manner, her voice was mellow but clear. Beth thanked her and said no. Indra walked to a door at the far end of the sunroom, on the opposite side to the new wing, and knocked. Uncle, Beth Own! she said. She smiled and walked back into the main part of the house. Beth heard a tap go on in there and the sound of dishes being rinsed. She looked out through the windows.
The sun was on the paddock behind, bare but for a small grove of trees with a few sheep gathered beneath. It is nice to be out of the suburbs, she thought. On the TV was an infomercial with a tall woman smiling while a man in impeccably pressed blue overalls bent under a sink to show the viewer how easy it was to fit the water purifier they were selling. You just have to tighten the plastic flange. Should I have brought in my envelope? she thought. It was still in the front pocket of the suitcase. A wasp was buzzing at one of the windows—it sounded like a faulty wire—and along the sill at the bottom was a row of other wasps, all dead. Indra appeared. You can go in, she said. She was pointing and nodding at the door. Uncle! she said. Beth Own! The door half-opened. Come in, said a voice.
In contrast to the airy sunroom Dr Panchal’s consulting room was ludicrously small. But then, so was he. He was sitting in front of a computer screen, fingers resting on the keyboard. The chair was one of those high-backed managerial types, many sizes too big for the sitter; his shoulders were hunched so high that his neck and even the lower half of his head had disappeared into them. A hunchback, thought Beth, or virtually so: his head too big for his torso, his hands too big for his head. The only light in the room was from a single window behind him; it looked out onto the corner of the yard where the incinerator stood. Please sit, he said. He wore huge tortoiseshell-framed glasses; his voice was soft, like his niece’s, each word enunciated in crisp, upper-class English. I will be with you very shortly, he said. Beth took the seat beside him. He smelled faintly of tea. A hunchbacked dwarf, she thought. She coughed. I regret to say, doctor, she said, trying to affect an upper-class English of her own, that I have left my file in my suitcase, which is in the car with my driver—but I can go and get it if you like. Dr Panchal let out a fruity laugh. No, no, he said. Beth went quiet, and placed her bag in her lap.
Dr Panchal was scrolling through something on the screen. He then slid briefly across the carpet in his chair (like a clown in a circus, she thought) and from a pile on the floor near a filing cabinet he took up a fat parcel and skated back. It was a yellow envelope, A3-sized or bigger, at least ten centimetres thick and cross-sealed with clear tape. A white sheet of paper had been sticky-taped to the front with Dr Panchal’s name and address. One end of the parcel was already cut open; Dr Panchal cleared a space on his desk and let the contents slide out.
It’s ironic, isn’t it, he was saying—again, in his perfect English—that in a hi-tech world we still rely on a motorbike courier and an old-fashioned parcel to get us up to speed? He scraped a line of road dust from the envelope and rubbed it between finger and thumb. But I’m afraid, Beth, he continued, computer breaches have become so common now that we cannot trust our data to them. There are people out there who would undermine us, smart people on the payroll of vested interests not happy with alternative methods such as ours. We must be careful! Dr Panchal raised the finger he’d wiped the dust with and for the first time looked Beth in the eye.
A young man on a motorbike delivered this to me this morning, he said, so that I might familiarise myself with your history. As I have done. He laid the contents of the envelope out into three paper-clipped piles: referrals, images, results. Beth recognised the letterheads, and even the handwriting: doctors Yi, Twoomey, Kolm and Forster. All were there. So he had copies of his own? Indra came in with another envelope and placed it on the desk. The latest bloods, she said, and she went out again. Through the window behind Dr Panchal’s head Beth could see a crow sitting on the incinerator, ruffling its wings.
So, Beth, said Dr Panchal, it has been a big few days. And now, here we are. Do you have any questions? (Do I have any questions?) No, she said—at least, not for the moment. Dr Panchal nodded. I asked some at Dr Forster’s, she said. Ah, good, said Dr Panchal. And no more since then? She shook her head. He shuffled through one of the piles and put the relevant paper aside. Well, he continued, as the documentation here attests, B
eth, you have so far had a number of tests, some more conclusive than others, and as I’m sure you’re aware there could be many more ahead of you yet, should you so choose. The tests available these days are infinite and it is reasonable to expect that a person in your situation—can I say it tends more to be men whose brains have difficulty acknowledging the faults of their bodies—will take up our offer of more, clinging perhaps to the hope that the next will provide the answers. I had one just the other day. But there is, Beth, you understand, a gamble. If no comfort is found in the next test, or the one after, how far do we go? To infinity?
It reminds me of the story, Dr Panchal continued, I often tell it to my patients, of the young woman gifted a car no longer used by her aunt. The car wasn’t old, but it wasn’t new either: it had just over a hundred and fifty thousand on the clock. The young woman was overjoyed with the gift. But, as the story goes, she had been driving it only a short while when things started to go wrong. A cough under the hood, a squeak in the brakes. She took it to her father’s mechanic. Well, he says, it actually looks to me to be a very sound car with some good life in it yet—let me put it up on the hoist and see. So the mechanic puts the car up on the hoist and finds about five hundred dollars’ worth of work. Good. The young woman pays. But then something else goes wrong: there’s an imbalance in the steering. Let’s fix that, says the mechanic, then we’ll see. Three hundred dollars. Next it’s the transmission. Mmm, says the mechanic, I won’t lie to you, there does come a point with cars this age where we have to ask is it worth repairing. But let’s get it up on the hoist and see. Six hundred dollars. All right. Good. The car breaks down again. Well, says the mechanic, now you really do have a dilemma—but let’s get it up on the hoist and see. This time the mechanic’s list of things to fix comes to twice the car’s market value, and that’s not including the fourteen hundred dollars already spent. What should I do? says the young woman. Take it to the wreckers, says the mechanic, otherwise you’re just throwing good money after bad.
So you see? said Dr Panchal. Beth looked at him. How far do we go? When do we stop? The more faults we look for, the more we find. Deciding whether to have one more test and hold to the slim possibility of an answer—this is a problem that has grown exponentially with the many tests now available to us. And this is where I come in.
The journey from denial to acceptance, Beth, said Dr Panchal, is often the most fraught we can take, and the brain—and by extension, the mind—in this particular dilemma is my particular speciality. But all agency has not yet been taken from you. Think. Even though you have been swept up in a river of referrals, feeling disenfranchised, strapped to the wheel, you’ve nonetheless still been making certain decisions for yourself. Is this not true? You chose, for example, to take your first test—I believe I am right in saying this—and then, freely, each test after that. The pathway laid down, in other words, was one you could have chosen not to follow. But you did. After Dr Yi’s you chose to catch the bus to Dr Twoomey’s and after Dr Twoomey’s to Dr Kolm’s. You chose to follow young Thomas to Dr Forster’s, too, and to accept a lift from Jason and Trent. You chose to spend last night at the Rosettis’, and in the manner that you have. You have chosen, too, I note—he shuffled the papers and found one—to refuse in that house the Christian consolation offered. (You may have refused other consolations, but I have no record of them here.)
And yet, you would agree, somehow all of this still feels a little predetermined, doesn’t it? A little out of my control. How can that be? As a doctor of the brain, Beth, I cannot speak for the professors of faith in higher things. They cling to assumptions I do not. Before my eyes is an organ; ten thousand million nerve cells and the trillions of connections between them. More than this I cannot see. But when I stare, Beth, into that electrical soup, how different am I, really, from those professors of faith staring just as intently into the whirling non-matter that constitutes their idea of god? We are both looking into The Unknowable—as you are now, Beth, too.
Of course, continued Dr Panchal, lifting his enormous hands, it is somewhat heretical for a brain doctor such as myself to start chatting about—let alone believing in—anything other than the organ’s mechanics, but this is what I have come to. And this is why I am here, the fifth doctor on your way: your stop in Wildwood might be your most important so far. A thousand drugs can alter the brain’s function in a thousand different ways—we can make the sad happy, the manic calm—but somewhere in the centre is a pinpoint of light beyond the reach of our best intentions and it is this distant pinpoint that I have spent the latter part of my career looking into. As the world grows more phenomenal, Beth, all the more must we reconnect with the noumenal. We call it Sit and See. This place for sitting and seeing is called The Crossroads. It pays no mind to the false allure of religion—you have demonstrated, here, in the records, that for you it is false—but asks the thinking subject to stop and consider things for themselves. Will I listen to the mechanic? Take more tests? Pin my hope on future repairs? Or accept the signs as they have appeared?
Dr Panchal paused and looked out the window. For some time now he had been referring only cursorily to Beth, glancing instead as he spoke at some paper or scan in one of the piles or, as now, staring out at the bird on the incinerator and the paddock beyond.
There was a gentle knock and Beth watched, dreamily, as Indra entered, gave her uncle another envelope and left. Dr Panchal slid his finger under the seal, read the single sheet inside, smoothed it out and put it onto one of the piles. You can stay as long as you need, Beth, he said, everything has been fixed; my niece has prepared the Quiet Room for you. He pointed towards the door. Is Manura still waiting? asked Beth. He’s on call, said the doctor. But he has my things, she said. They have already been taken to the room, said Panchal: don’t worry, everything is fixed. But I didn’t actually understand much of what you said, said Beth; it’s not that I’m not interested, doctor, it’s just that I am so ridiculously tired. I understand, said Dr Panchal. He smiled. Beth relaxed. He did say quiet room, didn’t he? She stood up, one hand on the back of the chair. Dr Panchal seemed to shrink back into his. Thank you, she said. You are very welcome, said Dr Panchal.
Indra was in the sunroom with a blanket over her arm; she led Beth to the other side of the house. Two children stood in the hallway, flour on their hands. My kids, said Indra. She flicked her wrist to shoo them back and ushered Beth into another, shorter hallway that led to the new wing. Indra opened the door to the Quiet Room and put the blanket on the bed. The blinds were drawn, the walls were white, the floorboards polished; there was the faint smell of plaster and paint. In the centre of the room was a queen-sized bed with a varnished-pine bedhead, white pillows and sheets, and beside it a low chest of drawers with a lamp and a glass of water. On the other side of the bed was a wooden chair. Aside from a long mirror beside the door there was nothing on the walls and no objects filling the corners. A bare bulb hung low on a metre of white flex. We haven’t finished yet, said Indra, but it’s a nice room all the same. From the top drawer of the dresser she took out a small plastic call button and placed it on the pillow. If you need anything, press this, she said. She went out again.
It was quiet in the room; the windows must have been double-glazed. Beth could no longer hear the sounds from outside. There was no clock, but, judging from the angle of the sun on the blinds, it must have been close to mid-afternoon. No wonder she felt tired, with all that had gone on. She put the call button back in the drawer. Her socks and undies were already in there, neatly folded. She opened the ones below: the rest of her clothes had been put away too.
She looked under the bed where Manura or Indra had parked the empty suitcase and took the big envelope out of the pocket. It was nowhere near as thick as the package the courier had brought. Had other specialists, she thought, since weighed in with their opinions? She slid everything out on the bed and arranged them into piles as Dr Panchal had done. Somewhere in here, she thought, was the pattern that told
the experts what was wrong. But Beth could not see it. Am I sick? How sick? Dying? Dead? She shuffled them around like pieces of a puzzle but no big picture came. She slid everything back and put the envelope away. She took off her heels, lay on her back and looked up at the naked bulb. It was one of those spiral ones, money-saving. She traced the curl of it, around and around, up and down, over and over. That’s good, she said, it’s making me sleepy. She did that for a while.
When she opened her eyes her mother was standing at the end of the bed holding a biscuit tin. Mum? I’ve brought you shortbread, said her mother. She pulled the wooden chair out and sat; the sun-drenched blind behind set her face momentarily in shadow. Beth turned the lamp on and sat up.
Some Tests Page 13