This I Would Kill For

by Anne Buist

  Beverley found her in the coffee room.

  ‘You haven’t started tweeting have you? Or got one of your friends to?’ Beverley was looking disapproving, but rather like a favourite schoolteacher. Even Natalie had had one of those. In primary school, anyway.

  ‘No.’ But as soon as she said it she wondered. Her sleep was so disturbed and more often than she liked she was getting her phone out while she waited for an extra quetiapine to take effect. The meds did make her drowsy; maybe she had tweeted and couldn’t remember.

  ‘Did you ever reply to those #PsychBitch trolls?’ Natalie asked.

  Beverley gave her a studied look. ‘And say what?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Natalie. ‘How about psych-bitch will certify you and throw away the key? Or your wife is better off without you? Or remember the symptoms you take the pills for?’

  ‘One of us got out of the wrong side of bed I see.’ Beverley eased out of her stilettos and rubbed a bunion. ‘I am not going to last for a whole wedding in these. Maybe just the bridal waltz. As it happened,’ said Beverley without drawing breath, ‘I did. Reply.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I told them they were inflammatory, unfair and ridiculously childish and no wonder their wives left them. Oh, and I said if the side effects included impotence then the women of the world would sigh in relief.’

  Natalie had to credit Beverley for her flair. ‘And their response?’

  The smile disappeared. ‘A few hundred replies.’

  ‘Let me guess, they weren’t giving you the thumbs up.’

  ‘There were some anti-male sentiments,’ said Beverley, ‘but from the remainder there were five suggesting I became a nun, three that I have body parts sewed up, eight that I have them removed and two death threats. One said he knew where I lived.’

  ‘Oh my god.’ Natalie wondered at how composed Beverley looked in the face of this onslaught. ‘You need to go to the police.’

  ‘No, you do. I did it under the handle of @nataliek.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  It took Natalie a moment to register what she meant.

  ‘What do you take me for?’ Beverley sounded mildly irritable. ‘However, had I made any replies, which I did not, under any name, that is exactly what would have happened. People have lost jobs and relationships and killed themselves over social media campaigns.’

  Natalie quickly checked her account. Still zero tweets from @bobnotdylan82.

  ‘Someone, however, has been quite active.’ Beverley fished out her phone, opened the app and did a search. When she handed it to Natalie it was apparent the search had been for a particular user: @KidsReallyMatter.

  Kids Really Matter @KidsReallyMatter: drk should look herself in the mirror. Madder than patients

  Natalie tried not to react. She was just being overly sensitive, seeing things that weren’t there. Wasn’t she? But Beverley had seen it too. drk meant Doctor King. Maybe. And if it did…who the hell were they and what did they know about her?

  ‘It might be coincidence,’ said Beverley. ‘Though someone has leapt to…well…someone’s defence.’ She grimaced as she pulled up another profile and Natalie recognised this one: @JoolieGG. ‘Unfortunately,’ Beverley added.

  Julie G @JoolieGG: Who of us doesn’t have some bad moments?

  Kids Really Matter @KidsReallyMatter: @JoolieGG I don’t have to see a shrink.

  Julie G @JoolieGG: @KidsReallyMatter maybe you should.

  Kids Really Matter @KidsReallyMatter: @JoolieGG And maybe u r one of her patients.

  Natalie was very careful to keep her mask up. ‘Whatever. But rest assured, Julie G isn’t me or anyone I put up to it.’ And hopefully not a patient, at least as far as she knew.

  ‘Good. Stay well clear.’ Beverley put her phone away. ‘It probably isn’t…well…don’t worry about it. Not like there aren’t lots of Doctor Ks. I just worry because I’ve been watching it since the court case. Most other people won’t have been.’

  Which was probably true and Natalie tried to reassure herself of this. But there was the uncomfortable problem that if drk was referring to her…who knew about her history? Her last stalker had been an IT geek who had managed to access her psych records. But he could hardly be tweeting from jail, though she supposed he could be getting someone else to do it for him. Natalie was still seeing his sister—she was doing well, and had cut all contact with him.

  And there were all the staff who had looked after her only eight months earlier when she’d been an inpatient, being treated for depression. Of course, none of them were allowed to say anything…but under the cover of online anonymity? What if they spelled out her name, in full? And the College found out, or her patients?

  Natalie allowed herself a moment of self-pity and then thought fuck it. This was what her patients had to deal with all the time. Stigma. It stopped people getting help, stopped them getting insurance; in one case it had caused her patient to be dumped by her partner.

  It didn’t stop Liam she thought, even though she had worried it would. She had underestimated him.

  But she didn’t want to think about him. Instead she told herself: ‘Suck it up.’

  That night in bed, though, it flooded back. All the cognitive rational feedback in the world wasn’t going to work while Natalie slept. Her nightmares woke her, and she sat up gasping, her sheets wet with sweat.

  There was something new in this nightmare—the eye took form. Though she could remember nothing else, there was a vivid picture of a teddy bear with a missing eye lying on the floor. She could hear a distant echo of a nursery rhyme round and round the garden and a churning feeling, a certainty, that she had done something wrong and that life would never be the same again.

  33

  It wasn’t a good idea. Declan would certainly have told her not to, if she’d asked.

  Natalie didn’t even know she had it in her head until she was at the edge of the Fitzroy Gardens, about to cycle through the avenues of aging elms bursting with spring growth. Instead she looked over to the city and thought she could make out the cream brick tower where she knew Wadhwa had his rooms.

  She had turned left before she had thought it through. Perhaps she was hoping that Wadhwa would be out, or too busy, and she could say she had tried. She needed to do something. Something to help her understand if she had got Malik so wrong. It wouldn’t hurt if she could get him off her back either—though she had to admit that with their history she was more likely to inflame the situation.

  Wadhwa’s office was on the eleventh floor of a twelvestorey building that was dwarfed by the other towers at the top end of Collins Street. An eighties building, it was probably slated for redevelopment, but the interior was neat and modern enough. There was no secretary at the desk, nor people in the waiting room. Natalie pushed the buzzer and opened the door, then stood wondering what to do next. After a minute, a door at the end of the corridor opened. Wadhwa looked out and frowned when he saw her.

  ‘Professor Wadhwa? Do you have a moment?’

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  Obviously, no. ‘I only need a few minutes.’

  ‘Oh, very well then, come along. I am nearly finished here anyway.’

  Wadhwa’s office looked clinically austere, apart from a photo of a woman in a sari holding a baby, with a boy of about two beside her.

  ‘So what is it you are wanting?’

  ‘To talk about the Essa case.’

  Wadhwa looked at her blankly.

  ‘Malik Essa. You thought…you diagnosed him with an antisocial personality disorder.’

  ‘Yes. This is correct.’

  No point saying that he didn’t have enough information. It wasn’t what she wanted to talk about anyway. ‘Did you…’ Natalie stopped. ‘We’ve both worked in the forensic system,’ she finally said. ‘We’ve both seen psychopaths. So tell me—what did I miss? I mean on mental state. Did he feel like a psychopath, that he was l
ying? What did you sense?’

  Wadhwa frowned, linked his hands together and regarded her over the tips of his extended index fingers. ‘In Yarra Bend, I see many people, people with mental illness who have done terrible things. Sometimes, mostly even, because they have a chemical imbalance, their mind does not work well, they hear their own thoughts as voices, reality for them, it is not so clear.’

  Natalie stifled her irritation at the lecture. She knew psychosis from the inside—she knew how it worked, how it felt, how it looked and the trouble it could get you into. Her bipolar had only ever taken her to the edge, where lights and colours had taken on new meanings…but it had been close enough.

  The inmates at Yarra Bend mostly had a severe form of schizophrenia, often untreated and sometimes undiagnosed before they ended up in custody. Not only did it jumble their thoughts and tangle their beliefs in a way only they understood, if left to run its course untreated the disease often led to cognitive decline as well.

  At least Natalie’s bipolar responded to treatment without affecting her ability to think and work when she was well; many of the world’s creative heroes who had suffered bipolar had been largely untreated and continued working. At least until they killed themselves: Woolf, Hemingway, countless others. Her own bipolar hero was treated—and still working as a psychiatrist.

  ‘But at Port Phillip’—Wadhwa was referring to the men’s prison, where Natalie had only briefly worked when she was training—‘there, I am asked to assess many men whose thoughts are perfectly clear. They try to fool people, but they do not fool me. These are the men that Mr Essa reminded me of.’

  ‘I agree he doesn’t have a psychosis,’ said Natalie. ‘But I thought he was genuine. He loves his kids, they seem to love him.’ She thought of Chris building a railway with his father, their mutual delight. Of Chelsea’s smile when Malik had sung ‘Go Chelsea Go’, and how she had run into his arms.

  ‘Love?’ Wadhwa let out a snort. ‘Of course the abuser loves his victim—when she makes him feel good, powerful, omnipotent.’ He leaned forward. ‘Particularly if he gets away with it.’

  ‘But I didn’t get any sense…’ Natalie stopped herself. From Wadhwa’s expression it was clear he thought she was not only mistaken, but wilfully so. ‘I want to understand. Chelsea is being abused. But I need to know…how I missed it, so it doesn’t happen again. After all, don’t ninety per cent of women make false claims?’

  Wadhwa waved his hand, but gave no indication that he’d picked up the sarcastic reference to his assertion. ‘This is a matter of record. Spurious claims that can easily be disproven.’

  Yeah? How? In Natalie’s experience, most people weren’t great liars but in Family Court battles there was a lot of bitterness to wade through, beliefs about children that had too much to do with ownership—and often money at stake. She wondered how many cases he had actually seen.

  ‘So why did you believe this one?’ Natalie asked.

  Natalie caught Wadhwa’s involuntary glimpse at the photo on his desk.

  ‘Is that your children with your wife?’ Natalie asked.

  ‘Yes, my daughter Jiya and son Jayesh.’

  ‘It makes you more protective, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Always, Doctor King, children must be protected.’ Wadhwa sat back, and looked at Natalie with a serious expression. ‘Your Mr Essa. You wish to know what it was that had my nose twitching, is this right?’

  For her it was hairs raised on the back of her neck, a tingling from head to foot in the presence of psychopaths—a feeling she hadn’t experienced with Malik. She nodded.

  ‘I have much experience Doctor King. You, too, will have in time.’

  Providing he didn’t get her disbarred.

  ‘I think, though…’ Wadhwa rubbed his temples, then pulled out a file from his drawer, flicked through it. ‘What made me feel Mr Essa was a psychopath? I will tell you.’ He put the file down. ‘Your Mr Essa was impatient, believed I was stupid and that the process was nonsense. This is not so strange. But embedded in his narcissism was also a self-justification. He alternated between being my friend—the idea that I as a man would understand him—and being my rival. Bulls in the same pen. This, Doctor King, is a sign that he is unsure of himself as a man, and I have seen it before. With this man.’

  Wadhwa pulled out a newspaper cutting from his top drawer. There was a photo of one of the teachers that the Royal Commission had determined should face charges—the one Liam was helping Tania prosecute.

  Shit. Had it taken a man—or at least the man-to-man dynamics—to see what was hidden behind Malik’s exterior? If so, she had let herself be conned.

  Cycling home, she stopped in the Fitzroy Gardens by the fairy tree and model Tudor village, and found a bench near the café. At this time of day people were not lingering; she watched commuters listening to podcasts and talking on iPhones, immersed in their own worlds. She wondered if her own world would ever take a more certain shape.

  Natalie thought about Jenna’s ferocious need to protect Chelsea. Not so different from Wadhwa. And if they were right—it meant that her own determination to be fair and impartial, to leave the law to the lawyers as Liam had insisted, meant she had delivered Chelsea back to an abuser. She thought of how in the past she had taken the law into her own hands—or rather, kept back information—for one of her patients and their child. She wished she’d done the same this time.

  It was a black mark against her as a psychiatrist. And this time, as a potential mother.

  Poor bean.

  34

  Mickie and Stephen Radford, Jenna’s parents, brought Chelsea in for her next appointment. After cancelling it twice. In the end Natalie had had Beverley threaten to tell Protective Services. Not that they would have done anything, but the Radfords wouldn’t know that.

  When they eventually fronted, Natalie took the opportunity to speak to them, leaving Chelsea in the waiting room. Beverley smiled sweetly and mouthed ‘wedding songs’ at Natalie. She seemed to think Natalie singing at the wedding was appropriate payment for childminding, which was not in Beverley’s job description.

  ‘We’re worried about Jenna and the children,’ said Jenna’s father.

  ‘Jenna can’t miss any more time off work,’ Mickie said. ‘Particularly now she’s paying all her own bills.’ Mickie’s expression suggested disapproval, but Natalie was unsure of what. Maybe it was just the inconvenience to her. There was something birdlike about the woman, her skin taut under foundation makeup, lines clustered around the corners of her mouth and eyes as she watched Natalie. Jenna’s bone structure was recognisable there, but in Mickie the years had turned the brightness in the eyes to a dulled wariness.

  ‘She’s doing it tough financially?’ Natalie remembered the whole issue about maintenance—whether Jenna might have to pay Malik if he had access—and how he managed to hide his income. And Chelsea, in her play, had mentioned having to move.

  ‘This whole business has been very tough on all of us,’ said Stephen. ‘We’re happy to help her out any way we can.’ Natalie paused. ‘You’re helping out with the children more?’

  ‘Someone has to.’

  Natalie turned to Mickie, who was letting her husband do the talking.

  ‘I understand you haven’t been well.’

  ‘I have a number of health issues.’

  Natalie smiled, confident Mickie would elaborate, and didn’t have to wait long.

  ‘I’ve had migraines since Jenna was a child. Can’t do anything but lie down in the dark. I was on morphine back then.’

  ‘Poor Michaela was very distraught, not being able to care for the children as well as she’d have liked,’ Stephen said.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Not as bad.’ Mickie avoided eye contact. ‘But I’m picking up Chelsea most days, and Chris had a cough and couldn’t go to childcare, so I had him. My son was nothing like as active; Chris is exhausting. I had him overnight as well and he got his finger stuck in the bathplug hole an
d I had to get the fire brigade. Chris thought it was all wonderful because he got to wear their hat and sit in the fire truck, but I couldn’t move the next day.’

  ‘How do you find Chelsea?’

  ‘Chelsea’s fine. Always been easy, much easier than her mother was.’

  ‘What was Jenna like as a child?’

  Stephen took over again. ‘Active, could do just about anything she set her mind to, and had a real mind of her own.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like she wanted to go to Little Athletics, demanded to go. Then out of the blue decides she doesn’t like it anymore and nothing can persuade her to go back, even though we were rostered on for the rest of the year to help out.’

  ‘Steve had to keep going without her,’ Mickie added. ‘It was ridiculous, but she just wouldn’t budge.’

  ‘It’s been tough—then and now. Michaela’s beside herself with worry. She had to see a doctor, her nerves have got so bad.’

  Natalie started to get an idea of what living in this household had been like—everything had to be about Mickie; the children’s emotional needs were secondary.

  ‘You had four children, I understand,’ said Natalie to Mickie. ‘Including twins. Must have been hard.’

  ‘I just did what a mother needs to do,’ said Mickie, ‘then, and now.’

  Anything: that’s what Jenna had said she would do. Natalie had the sense Mickie’s anything would have fallen short of Jenna’s criteria. Different circumstances…and different personalities. Jenna had the capacity to see the world from her children’s point of view, and often did. In Mickie’s case, now at least, she had tunnel vision.

  ‘Can I ask…I’m wondering how you got on with Malik?’

  ‘He was Jenna’s choice,’ said Stephen. ‘We just wanted her to be happy.’

  Natalie looked hard at them both. ‘Do you think he’s abusing Chelsea?’

  Stephen’s expression was indecipherable—not the sort of thing his generation talked about. Mickie’s lips tightened. ‘That’s what you said.’

  ‘No. I said it appears she’s being abused. It isn’t the same thing.’