The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution

by Lisa de Nikolits

  She sat the teapot down, filled a milk jug, and arranged some cookies on a plate. She pointed at a large bag of dog kibble in the corner. “Ninety dollars a bag,” she said pointedly.

  I opened my purse. “I’ve got $120,” I told her.

  Graham opened her purse. “And I’ve got $40,” she says. “$160. Not bad for a chat.”

  “Except that I didn’t have to talk to you at all,” Nancy said agreeably. She took the money and tucked it into her bra. Then she poured us each a mug of tea and put the sugar bowl next to the milk. “Help yourself,” she said.

  I took a cautious sip of my tea and then a generous gulp. “This is good tea,” I said, sounding surprised. Nancy beamed.

  “Tea leaves. That’s the trick. Never use tea bags. Try a biscuit too. Homemade.”

  Graham and I each bit into a biscuit, and they were excellent.

  “Shortbread is my favourite,” Graham said dreamily. I wondered if we were both being hypnotized by the giant flowers and the crazy colours inside the tiny room or if maybe there was something in the tea. The room began to melt, and the flowers curled and slid down the walls. I, too, slid off my chair, managing to put my mug on the table in the nick of time. I was lying on the wine-coloured floor, grateful that it was cool. I heard Graham and Nancy’s voices and then felt a wet cloth on my forehead.

  Mite licked my hand, which made me feel better. I started to come to. I struggled into a sitting position with Mite helping me along by licking my face.

  “I forgot your toast,” Nancy apologized to the dog, and she slathered the slices with Vegemite and gave them to the dog who turned away from me and gnawed at a slice.

  “Let’s try that again,” I said, and I returned to the tiny chair. I concentrated on my mug. I could feel Graham’s concern so I flashed her a quick look to tell her I was fine although I wasn’t. Not at all.

  “That would be Auntie Nan having a go at you,” Nancy told me, and she handed me the cool wet dishcloth. “Keep that pressed to your face. Bugger off Auntie Nan, or, if you’re going to stay, behave yourself.”

  The weird feeling behind my eyes began to drain away, and I could breathe again.

  “Thank you,” I said with relief. “Your aunt wants me to help her, but I don’t know how.”

  “She needs to apologize to all the souls she tortured,” Nancy said in a matter-of-fact tone, and the white figure of the enraged nurse flashed as she spun into the room, filling it like a whirlwind. I skittered off my chair and pressed myself up against the sink. Even Mite stopped chewing on his toast and looked quizzically in the direction of the light.

  “Doesn’t like it when I say that, does she?” Nancy commented. “I can’t see her, but I can feel her anger. Auntie Nan, I don’t know exactly where you’re stuck, but I know you don’t like it. If you want to move on, then you’ve got to say sorry, even if you don’t mean it.” The figure continued to spin, a crazy tornado of light in the tiny kitchen, and I turned away from her and peered into the sink instead.

  “She used to be the one to give shock treatments to the unconscious patients,” Nancy explained. “She was so in love with the doctor, Harry Bailey, and although his treatments were never approved, she thought they made sense. You went to sleep and got all the benefits of a good eight hours. Only, they added barbiturates in large quantities and when the patients woke—if they woke—suffered devastating consequences, like kidney damage, deep-vein thrombosis, bowel hemorrhages, and sometimes pneumonia. Many died.”

  “How did they get away with it?” I was horrified.

  “No one questioned doctors in those days,” Nancy said. “They were like God. I was a nurse too, but for kiddies. And I would never have done what Auntie Nan did. And she didn’t just do it because she was in love with Harry. She did it because she was cruel. She used to hit patients when they were tied up or when they were stuck in ice baths with sheets over them and they couldn’t move. She broke their fingers for fun when they were all drugged up, and she thought it was funny that they didn’t know what was happening. And those sleep patients didn’t even give their consent. It was just done to them.”

  “How do you know all this?” Graham asked, and Nancy went silent for a moment. I still had my head in the sink to avoid the spinning vortex that was Nancy Senior.

  “She told me,” she finally said. “She told me from when I was a very little kid. I told my mom and dad, but they said Nancy just liked to tell tall tales, that none of it was true. My dad said she was a bully to him, but that she’d never hurt the patients. So, no one did anything. I started nursing in 1957, and I went to live in Queensland. I didn’t want anything to do with Auntie Nan. I wanted to be a good nurse. My parents knew why I left. And then when she died, Auntie Nan left me this house. By then my second husband had taken all my money and run off with a waitress. So, I came back just like she wanted to me to.”

  “Do you have any pictures of her?” Graham asked.

  “Yup, I’ll get them. Maybe you want to take your friend out into the garden.”

  Graham took me by the arm and led me outside, I sank down onto the sunburnt crackly grass. Mite came out with us and he licked my face with his Vegemite breath. I put my arms around his doggy warmth and felt the life seeping back into my bones.

  “Auntie Nan was a real piece of work,” Graham mused, and she lit a cigarette. “This whole thing leaves a terrible taste in your mouth.”

  Nancy returned with a shoebox. “The medical authorities tried Harry Bailey. He was charged with manslaughter, but nothing came of it, and he got off. But he was disgraced, so he killed himself. I think Auntie Nan offed herself too. She hated being without him.” She sat down next to me and rifled through the box.

  “Here you go,” she said, and handed me a photo. Nancy Senior was stunning. She was in her nurse’s uniform, with her hair tied back. The clarity and symmetry of her features were spectacular: high cheekbones, large eyes, dark eyebrows, curved mouth.

  “She was gorgeous,” Nancy said. “And she was pure evil. You know you hear about kids who kill kittens and puppies? That was Auntie Nan. Even my father, her brother, was scared of her. He said she would hit him for no reason, just punch him or slap him, and then she would laugh like it was the funniest thing. He was older than her and much bigger, but still she bossed him like there was no tomorrow. He tried to tell his parents but they wouldn’t hear a word of it. And then, he didn’t believe me about her either! The irony of it.”

  “Maybe they all knew the truth,” Graham said. “But they were too afraid to do anything. I can imagine she was pretty scary.”

  “Such beauty,” I marvelled as Nancy handed me more photographs. There was my ghost, a vision in a swimsuit, one leg bent at the knee, model-style, a smile on her perfect mouth.

  “And she was obsessed about being clean. She loved the bleach, did Auntie Nan. There was never a speck of dust in her house. But when the women in the asylums had their periods, she would give them one pad for the whole time and told them they stank and were disgusting. She wouldn’t let them wash and then she held her nose when she walked past. Sometimes, she tied them up until they couldn’t hold their bowels anymore. She made them sit in it for a day or two before she got an orderly to clean them up. She told them they were filth, and that they didn’t deserve anything else.”

  “She told you all of this?” I was horrified.

  “Yes. She thought it was funny and in a way, I think she liked to brag. What kind of sick person tells things like that to a kid? Like I said, I told mum and dad but they swept it all under the carpet. ‘Don’t hang your dirty laundry out in public,’ mum would say. And my dad would add that, ‘Family is family, never forget that.’ None of us did anything. But then again, what could we do?”

  “I can’t help this woman,” I said, and I was desperate with fear for my own life.

  “A part of you must identify with her,” Nancy
said, and she started to put the photographs back in the box but then hesitated. “Do you want one?”

  I recoiled. “No. But thank you. So, you think if I fix myself, the part that relates to her, then I’ll be able to get rid of her?”

  Nancy shook her head. “I don’t know what you can do. But don’t be afraid of her. I’m not.”

  “I think we should go now,” Graham said. “Margaux, you look shattered. We’ve been here for an hour. Thank you for your time, Nancy.”

  An hour. We had only been there for an hour. It felt like an eternity. I struggled to stand, and Graham helped me.

  “Good luck,” Nancy said, and she watched us leave, with Mite sitting obediently next to her.

  Graham helped me into the car. She buckled my seat belt into place like I was a child. As we drove away, I craned my head and saw that Nancy was still watching us. I hoped we had left Auntie Nan behind, with her, but I knew better than that.

  We were halfway back to Graham’s house when I realized something. I should have taken Nancy Junior up on her offer of a picture of Auntie Nan. It would help me with the exorcism or whatever it was that I was going to have to do to get rid of her in my life. “Graham,” I said reluctantly, “I’m sorry, but we need to go back. I need a picture of Nancy. I should have taken one. I wouldn’t ask, but I think we should.”

  “No problem,” Graham said, and she swung the car around in a neat U-turn. “It was my fault. I rushed us out of there. There was probably more that Young Nancy could have told us, but I was worried about you.”

  “And you weren’t wrong. I felt like the world was made of wax and that an evil witch was holding it too close to a flame.”

  We drove back in silence and parked outside the house. This time there was no Mite running around barking, and the place looked locked up and quiet.

  “I wonder if she went out,” Graham said, as we let ourselves in the garden gate.

  We walked up the cement path, dodging those inexplicable car parts that I never asked Nancy about. I couldn’t see Nancy Senior allowing such debris on her front lawn and Young Nancy, as Graham had dubbed her, didn’t strike me as a natural-born mechanic.

  We knocked at the door and there was a mewling noise sound.

  “Mite?” Graham guessed. “What a weird noise though. He barked last time. That’s odd.” She leaned down and pushed the letterbox open. “Oh no,” she shouted, and she turned the door handle, but it was locked.

  “We have to get in,” she yelled. “Nancy’s on the floor. Here, use my phone. Call 0-0-0 and tell them to track the location from my phone.”

  I called while she grabbed one of the heavy car parts and started smashing at the door.

  “Oy! What are you doing?” The man in the filthy boxers came out of his house and shouted at Graham.

  “She’s on the floor,” Graham yelled back. “I’m trying to get in.”

  The man ran to the fence and vaulted over it like a hurdler, enormous belly and all. “I’m coming!” he yelled.

  I was open-mouthed, but I was trying to give the operator the details as I had them. Graham stepped aside as the man hit the door with a series of blows with his shoulder and it crashed open, swinging wide.

  Graham rushed inside and felt Nancy’s pulse. “She’s still breathing. Ask them if I should give her mouth-to-mouth or chest pumps. ”

  I relayed her questions. “Is she breathing regularly?” I asked.

  Graham knelt down close to Nancy’s mouth and nodded.

  “Then don’t do anything. Just wait for the paramedics.”

  The neighbour was pacing the small living room, his eyes wide. Mite was still sitting at Nancy’s head. There was nothing we could do except wait.

  The sirens took forever to sound, and even after we heard them, the ambulance took an age to arrive. But once they were inside the house, things moved with great speed.

  “We’re taking her to Westmead,” one of the paramedics said. “What’s her name?”

  “Nancy Simms,” I offered. “We just met her. We don’t know much else.”

  “She has a bad heart,” the neighbour added. “But she hasn’t had an attack in ages. You lot probably brought it on,” he told us accusingly, and I agreed with him. I was willing to bet anything that Nancy Senior made an appearance after we left, and her visit had not been a friendly one.

  “We’ll stay and get the door fixed,” Graham said to the paramedics as they left with Nancy bundled up on the stretcher. “And we’ll come and check on Nancy in the hospital.”

  “I’ll fix the door,” the neighbour said brusquely. “Youse both should leave now. I’ll take care of the dog too. You’ve done enough harm.”

  “But I need to find a picture,” I was insistent. “Nancy said I could.” I stared at him, not brokering an argument, and he backed down.

  “Get what you need and go. I’ll be back now to fix the door. Don’t hang around.”

  I rushed into the flower-wallpapered kitchen cave and flipped on the light. Sure enough, the shoebox was on the table. I whipped it open and screamed, jumping back, hands to my mouth. The pictures of Nancy were damaged, as if lighter fluid had been spilled on them and they’d been set on fire. But, just like the Virgin Mary, only Nancy’s face and body were blacked out, each image a perfect silhouette while the rest of the photograph remained unblemished.

  I grabbed the box and hurried out to find Graham. She was talking quietly to Mite and rubbing his pointy little Batman ears.

  “You get them?” she asked, and I nodded, thinking I’d explain later. Just then the neighbour returned with a toolbox and a nasty expression on his face.

  “Get on with youse then,” he said. We didn’t need to be told twice.

  As soon as we were in the car, I showed Graham the photographs. She winced. “We’re going to need the help of a white witch I know. Wait, you met her. Trish. She was at lunch that day.”

  “I remember her. She told me I needed to widen my sphere of availability so there was more of the probable within my grasp. She said I’d find the answers that way. Yes, let’s talk to her.”

  “But let’s go and check in on Nancy at the hospital first, yeah?”

  “Absolutely,” I said and we drove off, with the ruined photographs in my lap, taunting me.

  26. LYNDON

  I WALKED AIMLESSLY and wandered into a park with neat flowerbeds filled with yellow and violet pansies. The curving asphalt path had a broken white line in the centre, like a mini-highway. The path took me to a yellow brick memorial wall with a black marble plaque bearing hundreds of names. It was the Australian Truck Drivers’ Memorial Wall.

  This Memorial is dedicated to the memory of truck drivers who have been accidentally killed on Australian roads while performing their duties in the transport industry.

  Henderickus W. Davis, “Ricky the Rat,” twenty-eight. Timothy “Porky,” thirty. William J. Blake, “Bill,” thirty-six. Gordon R. Blades, thirty-three. He’d lived the same number of years my career had lasted. Then I too had been swerved off the road of my life, reduced to being researched by an aggressive feminist grey-haired Amazon … who suddenly appeared at my side.

  “I want to be alone,” I snapped at her.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she sighed. She pointed at William J. Blake’s name. “He was my mother’s brother. He died when I was eleven. I remember him very clearly. And I remember his death.”

  There wasn’t anything I could say. I studied the plastic flowers stuck into the wall, flowers that had outlived the people they were commemorating. I thought about my glass-etched trophies and my certificates and how they would outlive me, and how they meant nothing.

  “A man is following us,” Martha told me. I looked around quickly, but I couldn’t see anyone. “He comes and goes,” she said. “I saw him hanging around Jason’s shop too, just before we lef
t.” I was convinced that the man was just a figment of her angry imagination—all men were the enemy.

  “How come I haven’t seen you around the shop?” I asked. “If you’re such a great friend of Jason’s, then how come?”

  “Jason and I were lovers, not friends. And we have political affiliations. After my husband died, Jason and I enjoyed one another’s bodies for a time.” She looked around. “He’s gone. The man I told you about.”

  I wanted to tell her that there was no man, that she was imagining things, but I couldn’t be bothered.

  “You don’t need to belittle me to empower yourself,” I told her.

  She shook her head. “I’m not belittling you. I merely commenting on your life as I see it. You’re as free to comment on mine. And as for empowering myself, I don’t need you, or anyone, to do that. You need to find a way to be comfortable with yourself, Lyndon.”

  “I am very comfortable,” I instantly asserted. “My whole life I have been extremely comfortable.” Something about this woman made me feel like I’d been caught stealing marbles?

  Depression hit me like a wave. I was not, nor had I ever been, comfortable with myself. And I had worn this secret shame like the lining of my suit—out of sight, but there, rubbing against my shirt, my skin. But shame about what? I wanted to ask Martha what it was I felt so ashamed about, but that in itself stunned me. Why would I want to ask Martha anything? I hated this trip to Sydney. I hated Martha. She ruined my happiness with Jason. Things would have been wonderful if she hadn’t come along. We would have had fun. Instead, I was more depressed than ever. I wanted to walk away from her as quickly as I could, but I was so mired in gloom that all I could do was stand there and look at the names of dead truck drivers.