by S. J. Finn
He did. When the day came and I was sitting at the allotted spot waiting and waiting, that’s all I could think about, the fact he’d read it out to me. I used my phone and couldn’t raise anyone. Finally, after an hour had passed, I reached a mutual friend. She had no idea where he could be, of course, and I hung up delirious with what I should do. Our plane left at eight the next morning. If I didn’t have Marcus with me, what was the point of going: fares, accommodation, an Adventure Tour would all amount to nothing at very great cost to me. Stockpiling behind my annoyance was the energy it had taken to organise the trip, not to mention the insult at not going to Bali.
I sat, a demented agitation flowering in me. I couldn’t ring Renny; it was too much to hear her fury at him from a place where she couldn’t assist. When finally he turned up, distrust had pushed infuriation to boiling point in me. He, his new partner, Sue, and Marcus, strolled up the footpath as if they were on their way to a Sunday market. Leaping from my car, I probably became my most pitiful, my own worst nightmare. I was about to fulfil every stereotypical picture of a bitch.
‘You’ve done this on purpose,’ I accused him.
‘We’re only twenty minutes late,’ he said, unperturbed at my upset.
‘You’re an hour and a half late. I’ve been sitting here thinking you weren’t coming. What would I have done then?’
His girlfriend had the gall to laugh at me.
‘Don’t you fucking laugh at me,’ I said to her, mean-eyed. ‘How dare you.’
I took Marcus by the hand, ripped the small bag Dave had packed for him from Dave’s hand, and turned on my heels. I can still feel the spleen I felt that day, like the uptake of a lethal injection.
I tried to calm down, for Marcus’s sake. We were off on a holiday – which was, I might add, a very memorable one.
When we got back to St Kilda and he was tucked up in bed, I felt the unmistakeable severity of the incident. Miffed, I tried to work out what Dave wanted from me. But the more I looked into it the less I could decipher. Perhaps, I thought, I should ask myself what I want from him. But whether it was because I didn’t have the energy or the intelligence, I never got further with my questions. I did realise that all I cared about was how everything fitted for Marcus and from that point onwards, I promised myself, things would change. I would only be concerned about him.
Still, promises aside, contemplation doesn’t ride away easily. Over the next few months I found myself shaking my head, signalling that I’d arrived at a spot that delivered no joy. Ugly frustration brooded in me. I wondered if the semblance of my life was ever going to coalesce to a point in which I could be, if not proud, then satisfied. A slow-setting despondency lowered itself around me. I felt that the mould had been made, the dye cast, and this was going to be the way of the future. Disillusionment was in construction mode, building me into a corner. I thought I’d asked all the big questions by now, but they only seemed to be coming more thickly towards me. No matter how much people change, I told myself, how much they move on in life, they should be able to keep certain things composed, and in this I had failed.
I wondered a lot about meaning – what is there if not family? – and to be left with hate – even worse, to harbour a lack of respect – was only going to eat into me. There seemed no way to find a medium, no way to strike a halfway point. To wait for an epiphany in oneself is absurd, to wait for an epiphany in others and to hope that it will occur at the same time, is verging on the impossible. I would have to be satisfied, for the moment – and perhaps forever – that there would never be anything better for Dave and I. Things, after all, seemed to have solidified.
NINETEEN
There were, however, things that took me away from my personal quandaries. I found Elliot one morning hovering outside my door. It was six months or so after I’d started at Marlowe Downs. He looked unusually unburdened, while I carried a variety of accessories including two bags, the contents of my pigeonhole and the last of a coffee, all of which I was juggling in an attempt to extract keys from my jacket pocket.
‘Here, let me.’ Elliot came towards me, his arms outstretched with the offer.
‘Oh, it’s all a bit disorganised,’ I said, smiling, beginning to shed my baggage onto the carpet while kneeling over my satchel to rummage through it.
‘Don’t know why I’ve got so much stuff,’ I said. ‘An ox in the Chinese horoscope. Must be that.’
‘I’m the year of the horse. Does that mean I’ve got the cavalry on my back?’
I found my keys in the front pocket of my bag. I smiled belatedly, huffed a laugh. ‘Please, come in.’
My office, which just yesterday I had fortuitously made neat, was alive with colour and display. As Elliot was a man with even more paper piles than me he was exceedingly impressed and, taking in the children’s drawings, the little city a client had built from blocks, the array of puppets sitting up open-faced and ready for a day’s work of hard play, he complimented me on its fullness and inviting feel.
‘Thanks,’ I said, not showing how chuffed I was.
‘I’m on a mission.’ He rubbed his big hands together. Elliot loved dramatics, and, now, he looked as if he was about to seal a business deal. ‘Decay is upon us.’
‘Oh? How do you mean?’ I took a last sip of my coffee and threw the cup into the bin. I had to draw my eyes away from my wad of phone messages that often meant the difference between a hectic day and a decent one, to show interest.
‘The northwest team are sinking, on a road to obliteration, to major collapse. Anton (Elliot wasn’t in the know about using the name Antwerp) has asked me to do a patch and repair job.’
Elliot’s way of talking was so convoluted I couldn’t always be sure what he was getting at.
‘A deployment,’ I said, catching what he meant in the last second and willing to play along.
‘Yes, although secondment sounds better.’
Elliot liked to crack jokes himself, but, if someone else did, he would, more likely than not, butt them out.
‘So, you’re happy to go?’ I asked, aware of Elliot’s suspicions of Antwerp, based on their opposing political views. Elliot was a leftwing radical compared to Anton, whose glowing view of global economics and blatant adherence to capitalism put him into a category so far to the right that, metaphorically speaking, his desk was sitting somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
‘I am if you’ll be team leader while I’m gone.’
You could have sideswiped me and I wouldn’t have noticed, such was the state of my astonishment at this.
‘I haven’t been here very long.’
‘Anton’s got this thing about you.’
I frowned, probably too intently.
‘Nothing untoward.’
‘No, I know,’ I said tacitly, ‘I’m just amazed.’
‘You stand out. You’re not afraid to try things differently, to get out of the building, create working relationships with schools, to network. What do you think?’
I leant back on my desk, propped there for a minute, trying to run through the possible catches. When I came up with nothing, I shrugged.
‘Yeah, sure, why not? Get to see from a closer range how the wheel of the mighty machine turns.’
‘I’ll get Carmen to draw up a contract.’ Carmen was the team’s secretary.
‘It’s as easy as that?’
‘Because you’re only acting. It’s not permanent.’
I nodded.
‘You’re still accountable,’ he said.
I laughed. ‘Oh, well, in that case I can’t possibly—’
‘Come on, it’s a branch stacking operation, the vital shaking up of the organisation. It’s going to be fun.’
‘I was joking. I know I’ll be accountable.’
Relieved, he smiled and shook my hand as if he’d delivered a major change for the wellbeing of children all over the world. I was left wondering what this new path of power would bring. Had I been too hasty to agree to it?
That night when I told Renny, her strength folding around me in congratulations, she said she wasn’t surprised at all. There were, however, things to consider. Was I over-committing myself?
‘With the weekends we have Marcus,’ she said, ‘and our fulltime jobs, where’s the time for us? My lot is the thin end of the wedge. In fact, it’s past that, I get only the very tip of you.’
This was not a joke. I bowed my head, feeling heavy, caught between responsibility and… responsibility. Work, in some ways, compared to the maze, was far more straightforward. But then, as I’ve found out, complexity isn’t a set proposition of intersecting derivatives. It’s more like a life form that can be working perfectly well one day and after a simple change in its environment, descend into an array of unworkable parts the next.
There was no room for not taking note. I had to be careful.
TWENTY
In any organisation climbing the ladder is not always the best way to learn about core business. Besides, snakes are attracted to those ladders.
Antwerp saw me in the corridor a few days after Elliot had talked to me. I was rushing to pick up keys for an office car to take me west of west, Werribee – the suburb which was the rather unenviable location of Melbourne’s sewerage treatment farms, a suburb, nonetheless, that now boasted the fastest growing housing boom in the city’s sprawl. I turned the corner around the wide dark corridor. It was approaching thirty-eight degrees outside and the blinds were drawn as an offensive against the heat. Our leader was coming towards me in a dark baggy suit that gave the impression he was floating, as if his angular body was a coathanger, the suit dangling from it. Beside him was Bernadette Granger, the principal of the Marlowe Downs special school.
‘Monty,’ he nodded, between playing niceties with tall, skirt-suited Bernadette.
‘Anton, Bern.’ I smiled.
‘Monty,’ Bernadette said warmly, smiling her huge teeth at me. She hadn’t been in the position long herself and, being at the beginning of her tenure, she was shining with the kind of happiness people have when they recognise someone from a large staff group.
‘Got the nod about you from Elliot,’ Antwerp said, more with the timing of an afterthought, the lilt of a subversive deal, than anything genuine. Antwerp was the sort of man who spoke in pleasantries unless he was unhappy and then you’d get some straightforward nasties from him, nothing softening. Unlike Elliot, his language was plain, but they shared the trait of being hard to follow. I was never quite sure what he was getting at, what he really meant.
‘Yes.’ (Since I’d already walked past them I had to turn around.) ‘Glad of the opportunity.’
‘We’re grafting some very good buds onto the tree.’
My eyes slid to take in Bernadette, who was smiling even more widely at him.
‘Formula one, we’re going for, formula one,’ she said.
I dipped my head probably for the second time. ‘I’ll see you then.’
‘In the think tank.’
I spun away on my heels, wondering if he hadn’t, in fact, been headhunted from one of the big car dealerships and not the hospital system at all. When I turned up at the managers’ meeting the following Wednesday morning I had to make sure I’d rid myself of the smile on my face. I needn’t have worried, it was so easily and deeply lost once I got there that I thought it might be totally irretrievable. The proceedings were nothing like fun.
Anton – I had to go back to calling him by his proper name because I feared I would slip up and call him Antwerp for real – began the meeting by announcing he had just had confirmation we’d failed the accreditation process and the panel (comprised of important public servants) would be back in six months to give us one last chance to prove ourselves.
‘Otherwise?’ someone asked. Everyone laughed mirthfully and then, faultlessly serious, they looked back at Anton to continue. I didn’t have the guts to ask the question again or to inquire as to what they were laughing at. He ran through the categories, calling out our results as if we were children. It was mind-boggling. The jargon of the categories was enough to ensure a fiasco. Things such as: State of safety net between differential diagnoses and direct treatment of an individual in the case of wrongful diagnosis due to lack of team consolidation and online management consultation. After each subheading he would read out our score, which seemed to be divided into four quarters but added up to a total of ten points. Anton only got through one tenth of one category, after which, clearly losing interest, he became tongue-tied and couldn’t read further for stumbling. He began to summarise in clipped precision.
Broadly speaking, the problems fell under three major headings. Firstly and most onerously: our files. Not just our filing system, although that was in need of some sorting, but our assessments, file notes, the order we kept the notes in, even the handwriting – it was all in need of improvement. Secondly and more serious for others because our team had the best results for this, were our waiting lists and throughput tallies. Some teams had wait times of up to six months and the number of people being seen in some teams was extremely low. (I could see Elliot from the corner of my eye, nodding at this. I could also tell by the way he sat up with a biting, alert look on his face that this must have pertained particularly to his team. I imagined that, under his expression, he was saying to himself: I’ll turn the wreck of a team I’ve inherited around, I’m really a hero under all the other personas I have?) And thirdly: our lack of oomph. This, without putting too fine a point on things – another tendency of Anton’s was to give you a feel for things and let the detail emerge – referred to our incapacity to engage with the outside world.
‘Finally, people,’ he said, ‘I’ve come up with a new name for the place. SKY-Hooks.’ He wrote the name on a large whiteboard behind him. SERVICES FOR KIDS AND YOUTH – HEALTH OUTLOOKS.
Could be worse, I thought, nodding as I considered the name. And then I became aware of the reaction of the others in the room who clearly weren’t going to be so generous. My eyes shifted. I wondered what the customary “get fucked” angle was around here and then immediately, I had the feeling I was about to find out.
‘I’m concerned about a few things, Anton.’ All heads swivelled to Deborah Armata, a woman who had an unsettling habit of clearing her throat every three minutes – more if she was speaking. After some rhetoric about accreditation and how careful we had to be of not letting the tail wag the dog, Deborah went on to say she was very concerned about the devolution of the powerful and resonating therapy we offered here at Marlowe Downs. She went on to point out that it could only be reached by the deep and laborious probing of analytical frameworks, and should not be forsaken for the sake of glossy widespread appeal. This dissertation went on and I began to realise the reality of what I’d put my hand up for. Deborah – along with some of the others I recognised from the hallways and the staff lounge – was the sort of person I’d probably avoid in normal circumstances.
Anton, however, was an expert at dealing with exactly this sort of person. Deborah’s verbose and didactic manner was Anton’s ticket to salvation. By being silent he allowed her to bore everyone into a petrified state and hang herself at the same time.
‘Marlowe Downs is in trouble,’ Deborah’s voice ground on, ‘that much is clear. What we have to do (chafing of throat like a saw to bitumen) is to make sure we don’t take the old growth trees from the wood while we’re simply trying to clear the undergrowth.’
My mouth dropped open, not only because of the terrible clichés she was using, but because I could suddenly see the road ahead, and it was paved with consternation. Deborah alone would drive me senseless.
Elliot weighed in on the argument. He at least had a suggestion: to create a rapid referral and response process that he would be happy to write up and bring to the meeting in a fortnight’s time. Then the clinical head of psychiatry, Dr Albert Musgrove, who had one office at Marlowe Downs and another at the hospital, spoke with authority about creating a new assessment pro-forma.<
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‘Also,’ he said, ‘we will be setting up mock audits on randomly chosen files from personal filing cabinets and from the file archives so we’re ready. And,’ he concluded, ‘I like the idea, Elliot.’ While they were scratching each other’s backs the rest of us were repeating to ourselves what we thought we’d heard. Random audits – now that was a bombshell, and the room had visibly stiffened. My mind went to James and the ease with which his files would pass muster. From the look on other people’s faces, he was not just unusual to me, he was a freak amongst many.
‘I want to instil amongst all of you,’ Anton squared up, ‘that enthusiasm is a necessary ingredient for success. Oomph is what’s required. Oomph and an eye for detail. No half-hackneyed processes will happen on my watch. We’re going forward at full steam.’
Deborah went to open her mouth, a sharp clearing of the throat punctuating the beginnings of her first word like an inverted comma. Anton put up his hand – halfway between a stop sign and a wave.
‘Thanks, that’s all folks.’
I had the strange sensation of having been in a propaganda session with a smiling despot. Damn the public system: services needed to be incorporated and privatised. They needed to be made viable. The words “bottom line” had finally jumped the chasm into the public domain. We were a business and as a business we were to tighten our belts, give more for less, cut corners without losing quality and promote our successes, not our failures. We were, in essence, to adopt a competitive edge.
TWENTY-ONE
I was determined to pay a visit to Marcus’s new school. Since Dave had moved from the country house we’d lived in and was now in town, Marcus’s small rural school had been too far away for him to keep going to. ‘The school in town is bigger,’ Dave had told me. ‘He’ll have more stimulation, greater choice. It’ll be good for him.’
Marcus hated the idea of changing schools but, understanding not to push against life too much, he accepted it with stoicism. It helped that he was going to be put in the same class as Mia, who he’d known for years, her mother and I having been good friends. I rang the school. Renny and I were to visit on a Friday morning.