by Mark Winkler
Doctor Petrakis draws another blue circle around Madge. “We were saying,” she says. “Do you know why you’re here?”
It’s difficult to talk, even after the water. My mouth feels like somebody else’s.
“She asked me to,” I say.
Doctor Petrakis drops the marker. I know straight away that I’ve given the wrong answer. Even though it was correct. I should have said, “Because Madge’s death made me sad.” And let her take it from there. Doctor Petrakis goes down on her haunches to pick up the marker. She keeps her knees together and pointed away from me. Ladylike. She wobbles a little once she’s up. As if she stood up too quickly.
“I see,” she says. She goes to her desk. September comes back with the jug. Doctor Petrakis pours herself a glass of water. She has a real glass, not a paper cup. She sits at her desk and drinks. Then she looks at me and raises her eyebrows.
I tell her about Madge. I can’t stop. I don’t leave anything out. She’s taking notes. There’s no stabbing and tearing at the paper now. Just speed. I wonder if she knows shorthand like Dino. I decide she does. Any notion of stealing her notepad is completely pointless. When I get to the evening of granting Madge’s wish I break off. My tongue is sticking to my palate. I stand up and go over to the desk. Doctor Petrakis reaches under it. “No need for that,” I say. “I’m not going to do anything to you.” I pour myself some water. I think she blushes. I drink all the water in the cup and fill it up again. I go back to my chair.
I’ve just finished the part about the funeral when she looks at her watch.
“It’s time, Nathan,” she says. Her voice has gone soft and so has her face. “We can carry on next time.”
“Can I ask you something before I go?” I say.
“Of course.”
“You didn’t know about me and Madge?” I can see she doesn’t want to answer. She doesn’t want to look at me either. “You said I could ask,” I remind her.
She breathes in and out. She looks at me. “No,” she says. “I didn’t.” She crosses her arms.
I feel a smile on my face. I shake my head. “Stupid,” I say.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m not talking about you,” I say.
“A little bird tells me you’ve begun to speak,” Mr. Naicker says. A big brown bird, more like. I wish September had kept his fucking mouth shut. I shrug. We’re sitting at the window watching the rain. Mr. Naicker has crossed an ankle over a knee. The anklebone has thick black veins in relief. They burrow away from the bone and up towards his calf. It’s cold in here. I wonder why Mr. Naicker isn’t wearing pyjamas under his gown.
“Ah. So the words are only for in there.” he says. “No matter, then. Perhaps there will come a time when you’ll deign to speak to me too.” He sounds peeved. I don’t care. I’m not really listening to him anyway. I’m trying to think. I’m trying to imagine why Doctor Petrakis would have a picture of Sonia on the same flipchart page as Madge.
I’m becoming irritated
I’m becoming irritated at having to wait for Doctor Petrakis all the time. I have things to say. Her tardiness makes the fifty-minute hour even shorter. She is late again today. When she arrives she is holding a mug of tea. It’s a kind of chai or herbal something. It steams. The steam releases the fragrance of citrus. Doctor Petrakis’s eyes are watery. I wonder if she’s been crying. I can’t imagine it. She takes a wad of tissues from her bag. She peels off two and blows her nose. I think I remember reading something about the Japanese never blowing their noses in public. They think it’s disgusting. I agree. Even if what I read wasn’t true. Or I remembered wrong. Blowing your nose should be done behind closed doors. You wouldn’t take your dick out and relieve yourself under the dinner table. Why is it okay to expel snot? Doctor Petrakis finishes blowing. She balls up the tissue. Then she dabs at her nose with the ball. Drops the ball in her bin.
“Apologies, Nathan. Midwinter sniffles,” she says. She sniffs as if to prove it. Midwinter means late June. That means I’ve been here three months. How time flies when you’re full of drugs. June makes sense. It’s raining again. Straight down.
Doctor Petrakis sips at her tea. She takes the mug over to the flipchart. My pictures aren’t there. She flips through a whole lot of sheets. Most have writing on them. I try to read some of it. Some sheets have diagrams. She’s flipping too quickly. I can’t decipher anything. The scribbles must be about other patients. I’m not sure I like that. I realise I’ve had this notion about her. That she only exists when I’m around. Springs into life purely for our sessions together. Like some kind of automaton. I don’t very much like that she has a life outside of this. It’s unpleasant to think about it, actually. I’ve always known that she’s married. The ring could be some kind of shrewd automaton disguise, though. I suppose it makes sense that she leaves the building at the end of the day. Gets into her car and drives home. To one of those big old Rondebosch houses. Not too far from here. Just far enough to forget about her daytime job. I’m guessing that she lives there with her husband. Let’s say he’s in asset management. They discuss household budgets and the leaves that clogged the swimming pool all through autumn. By now the leaves will be gone. The trees will be bare. The water in the pool probably tending to green. Perhaps she has children. I look at her standing at the flipchart. I try to imagine children emerging from those wide hips. From the confluence of those slightly bandy legs. It’s disgusting. Perhaps those same children have trouble with homework. Or get tonsillitis from time to time. When she’s with them she’s probably not thinking about me. She puts them to bed and then she fucks her husband. She might even have a lover on the side. “Working late, darling, the lunatics are trying today.” It can’t be Humboldt. Nobody could be with Humboldt. Except maybe a dugong. She might have hobbies. She looks like she reads. She might play golf. Or be a watercolour painter. She knows so much about me. I know nothing about her. The only thing I now know is that she doesn’t switch off and die at the end of our sessions.
Doctor Petrakis flips over a page and there they are. Madge and Sonia. She looks at the pictures. She’s thinking. Her cold has probably slowed her brain down a bit.
The first time I was here it was different. There was no Ricky or Mr. Naicker or Johnson or September. I don’t remember Humboldt being around. Who would? Only Old Man Jakes was here. And Doctor Petrakis. She was younger then. Obviously. Not as broad across the hips. Didn’t need glasses. I think she is more beautiful now than she was back then. She had a different room. It was smaller. Painted the standard institutional beige. The oak desk was scuffed and scarred. Like an old shoe. An ugly metal filing cabinet to one side. Chairs like the ones Ricky Chan likes to throw around the ward. Only the Persian has survived. Doctor Petrakis has moved up the food chain since then.
I was different too. I answered Doctor Petrakis when she asked me things. Sometimes she didn’t even have to ask. I just told her. I chatted to the nurses. I didn’t stab anyone in the face with a bishop from the chess set. They tailed off my meds. After four weeks, Doctor Petrakis and her colleagues decided I was good to go. They’d keep me one more week for observation, and that would be that. Just to make sure their decision was the correct one. I managed to keep all my faces handy back then. It kept them happy. Halfway through our last session, Doctor Petrakis called someone into the room. The someone was a young woman with wild blonde hair and little blue eyes. She sat in the chair furthest from me. As though I’d bite her or something.
“This is Sonia McFarlane,” Doctor Petrakis said. “She’s a friend of mine.” Doctor Petrakis raised her eyebrows at me. As if to say, What do you think? As if this made the reason for the girl’s presence clear. It didn’t. Sonia McFarlane in a corner of the grey linoleum room. She fidgeted with her fingers. She was a lot younger than Doctor Petrakis. I wondered if she’d been a patient at some point.
“Hi, Sonia,” I said.
Sh
e mumbled something and tried to smile.
“Sonia has agreed to do me a favour,” Doctor Petrakis said. “She has created a position for you at the newspaper where she works. If you take it, you’ll be on probation for three months. Just like any other employee. If everything goes well, it could turn into a permanent post. You’ll have routine. Something to do. An income. Independence. You could even finish your architectural studies by correspondence. What do you think?”
Sonia looked up at me and tried to smile again. She was a little more successful than before.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said to Doctor Petrakis.
“Though it’s not my place to put words into your mouth,” Doctor Petrakis said, “my suggestion would be that you say ‘yes.’”
Doctor Petrakis stops staring at the chart. She flips Madge and Sonia away. “We’ll come back to those,” she says. “Now, what can you tell me about these?”
This page also has two pictures stuck to it. They aren’t the originals. They’re bigger. The one on the left is an Edwardian woman in profile. She has the jaw of a boxer. She’s smiling. Laughing, even. Candidly. You didn’t do that in the early 1900s. You scowled. Or at least tried to put your nothing face on as you sat rigid for the camera and waited long minutes for your face to stick to the film. To her right is a young woman in a red dress. There’s the ghost of a plane behind her.
The copies aren’t very good. They’re pretty poor, actually. They look as if they’ve been lying under a hedge for a month. The Edwardian woman has a black eye. Fungus or mildew or something. There are brown and green stains. It’s not a colour photograph.
The woman in red has suffered her own tribulations. Some of the pigment has been washed off. Seeing my photographs like that makes me want to throttle Doctor Petrakis. My photographs. Mine. Copied by a retard who managed to get his lunch all over Jaw Woman. His tea all over Woman in Red. All he has managed to do properly is increase their size. I can feel myself rising out of the chair. Doctor Petrakis has her back to me. She’s holding a marker. Probably deciding which of the pictures to circle. I can be on her before she knows what’s happened. Drive that marker through her neck. At the soft bit behind the jawbone and below the ear. I wonder if her husband would appreciate the enhancement.
I’m almost out of the chair when Mr. Naicker’s judo sermon comes back to me. This must be what he was talking about. When they attack you. When you need to use their momentum against them. When you step aside and trip up the assailant. When you flash the cape at the bull. Doctor Petrakis circles Jaw Woman once. She hears the leather creak as I sit down again. She whips around.
“Are you all right, Nathan?” she asks. A frown flickers. I’m not sure which face I have on. She is about to sneeze. She suppresses it. She squeaks with the effort. “Excuse me,” she says. Goes to her desk and takes a wad of tissues from her handbag. Peels off two. Blows. Balls them up. Wipes the end of her nose. Sniffs. It’s not only revolting. It’s boring. She leans against the desk and crosses her ankles. “Who is the woman in the black-and-white photograph?” she asks.
I shrug. Nobody. Somebody. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.
“Come, Nathan,” she says. Sniffs. “We were doing so well.”
I breathe in deeply, breathe out again. Unless I talk, I’ll just sit here for the next half an hour. Then Johnson or September will be summoned to fetch me. Doctor Petrakis will make more tea and see her next patient. Or she’ll go home to discuss the weather with her husband. And next time we’ll be in the same place again.
“My great-great aunt,” I say. “I didn’t like her very much.”
Doctor Petrakis frowns. The inside bits of her nostrils are wet. “This photograph must be a hundred years old,” she says. What she’s really saying is that I couldn’t possibly have known the woman in the picture.
“I never liked her jaw. A jaw like that is ugly on a woman.”
“I see,” Doctor Petrakis says. I don’t know what she sees.
“And she’s laughing. It’s not appropriate to the period. Photography wasn’t snappy Instagram stuff back then. It was an occasion. You posed. You had to pose for, like, minutes at a time without moving. That’s how film worked in those days. She would have had to hold that grin for a long time. It creeps me out.”
“Why is that?” Doctor Petrakis asks. She dabs at her nostrils with a ball of tissues. The tissues are pink. I wonder if her house is all terracotta like the walls of her office. Or if it’s all pink like her tissues.
“Because.” I don’t have the energy to explain. I take a deep breath. I throw her a reason. “Because she is going to so much effort to tell the world that she’s a happy smiley person,” I say.
“And you don’t like that?”
“No. It makes me not believe her.”
Doctor Petrakis sips at her tea. It’s no longer steaming. It has no milk in it. It must still be warm. She draws a circle around Woman in Red. The circle overlaps the one around Jaw Woman. Like a Venn diagram that shows they share something.
“And who is this?”
I can’t believe I’ve walked into this. She obviously knows who my mother is. My mother is an ageing nymphomaniac with her hair dyed the colour of honey. With her thinning lips painted a harlot’s red. My mother is a liar and a thief. She lied to me. For me. About me. And stole just as much from me as Aunty Mike did. More, actually. I can’t tell Doctor Petrakis that Woman in Red is my mother.
“I don’t know,” I say. I don’t shrug. It’s true. I don’t know who she is. The truth can be a greased pig when you want it to be.
“So you have a photo of someone, and you don’t know who it is,” Doctor Petrakis says with a sniff. The sniffing is driving me nuts. I wish she’d stop. She’s having one of her telepathic moments and blows her nose. Wipes it with the ball of tissues in her hand.
“I bought an old photo album from Madge, and that picture was in it. Loose between the pages. I liked it. I have no idea who she is.”
She scribbles a few notes. I look at the image. Looking at it blown up like that is weird. The woman is more Rubenesque than I’d thought. Curvy. If her dress was yellow, she’d have looked like Mrs. du Toit that day I had a flat white with her. Seems the cretin who enlarged the picture got his ratios all wrong. Stretched her sideways. Broadened her shoulders. Widened her hips.
Doctor Petrakis steeples her hands and looks up at me. “Do you want to tell me about the pictures up on your wall?” she asks.
“Not really,” I tell her.
My next session is cancelled. Doctor Petrakis is ill. Actually, the whole ward is sniffing and sneezing and carrying on. Suddenly blowing your nose in a public place doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
“H1N1,” Mr. Naicker says. “All it took was some Oriental fellow to sneeze on a plane and the whole world was in a panic. Did you know that the influenza pandemic of the twenties killed more people than the Great War?”
I did. I let him tell me anyway. He does, giving me the usual statistics. We’re playing chess. It’s taken us twenty minutes to advance a pawn each.
“And here we are,” Mr. Naicker says by way of wrapping up his influenza lecture. “Locked up like battery chickens, each one making the other sick. How demeaning it would be to die of something as pedestrian as the flu.”
As opposed to having your throat slit. Or being stabbed to death. Or being found dead behind your counter. Your tongue a thick white sausage between your lips. Contusions at your neck. Strands of pink silk clinging to it. Could Madge have survived the cancer? The question worries me, mostly at night when the rain blurs the moon at my window. I tell myself that she had no chance. She probably would have died by now anyway. Painfully. The cancer had infiltrated every organ of her body, she’d told me. After a while I believe myself. Then I can fall asleep.
Mr. Naicker has moved another pawn. He yawns. I can see his heart isn
’t in the game. He stops talking. I consider the board. I’d imagine a chessboard looks different each time to those who know what they’re doing. It always looks the same to me. Eight by eight. My pieces about to march off down their well-trodden routes. I move a pawn. I look at Mr. Naicker. He has fallen asleep. His chin is on his chest and his saggy eyelids have closed. I put away the pieces. The empty board reminds me of the Chinese rice story. Where the emperor offers a man any reward of his choosing. The man asks for nothing more than a grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard. Two on the second. Four on the third. And so on, doubling the grains with each square. I’ve never tried the calculation. I try it now. I’m not even half-way when I stumble at ten billion-and-something grains of rice. The numbers are too big for me to keep in my brain. I stop. Exponential growth. I think that’s what it’s called. Maths never was a strong point. Perhaps that’s why I don’t get Ricky’s sums. Seven and two and a half. Why he gets so excited about those figures. Maybe I should just ask. Now that I’m talking and all. I look around for him. He’s slumped in a chair, staring at the television. His eyes blank. It’s the wrong time to approach Ricky. I’m bored. I wonder if they’ve reduced my meds. I don’t get bored when I’m stoned on their pills. Time doesn’t matter then. I’d like to go for a run. And I’d kill for a beer.
I fight with the breakfast porridge. It has the consistency of phlegm. Usually I shovel it down to make it go away. I’m scheduled to see Doctor Petrakis at ten. I treat each sticky spoonful as a measure of time. When the bowl is empty I still have an hour of waiting. I kill it by watching The Simpsons with Socks. He laughs at all the wrong moments, as usual. Doctor Petrakis looks pale. Her nose is covered with base. It’s probably bright red underneath. The base looks almost like fur. She doesn’t take off her scarf. She goes to the flipchart. Finds my pictures. Looks at Jaw Woman and Woman in Red for a while. Flips a sheet. Back to the page with Madge and Sonia. She takes the marker and draws a blue circle around Sonia.