Prognosis

by Vallance, Sarah

  I was a late starter when it came to alcohol, but I made up for it fairly quickly. I did not drink anything until I was twenty because I didn’t like the taste. I discovered my love for alcohol when I first started work at Parliament House, soon after I graduated. People who worked in politics drank wine with lunch, and then met after work for drinks in the parliamentary bar. Parliament House was home to a large assortment of alcoholics—mostly crusty old men with stained ties; jackets flecked with dandruff; and lank, greasy, combed-over hair.

  My drinking went awry when I started working with Tim in Corrections. Fortunately for both of us, we worked together for only a year. Occasionally we would begin drinking as early as ten thirty in the morning when the bar opened at Parliament House. At lunch we would share a bottle of chardonnay—two if we were bored—and somehow, after a few hours’ work, wind up back in the bar at five, and we would drink until it closed. How we ever managed to avoid getting fired remains a mystery. For one year of my life—my twenty-fifth year I believe—I behaved like a lunatic.

  At a party once, a friend dared me to drink a large bottle of gin on my own; I did it and suffered only a dull headache the next morning. My ability to hold my alcohol was legendary, and friends watched me in astonishment. My parents enjoyed a glass of cask wine with dinner most nights, but they were not big drinkers and I had never seen them drunk. No one in my family had a history of alcoholism.

  When I was twenty-six I saw an ad in the newspaper with the headline “Worried About Your Drinking?” I visited a clinic at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital where a doctor took notes on my drinking history, drew some blood, and let me know I was well on my way to becoming a full-fledged alcoholic.

  I told her I was the only person I knew who had never vomited from drinking. That was something I had always considered to be a badge of honor.

  “That makes you higher risk for alcoholism than anyone else!” she said. “You miss all the warning signs.”

  She asked me how many drinks I had in a night, and I told her I tried to stop at six. Or eight. But that on Saturday nights that number could double with no ugly side effects. Well, none that I could detect, anyway.

  “How many nights a week do you drink?”

  “Four or five,” I said.

  I told her about the bottle of gin.

  “You are an alcoholic,” she said, insisting that a 750-milliliter bottle of gin would kill most people. “Do you really want to die from drinking? It’s not a nice way to go.”

  The news that I was already an alcoholic rattled me. Sitting in the chair with the doctor opposite me, I was visited by an image of myself hunched over a shopping trolley stuffed with all my worldly possessions, dressed in filthy clothes, spending every last cent on gin. I pledged to eschew all alcohol for the next year. I lasted about half of that, but I did manage to moderate my alcohol intake somewhat when I started drinking again.

  James cast his groggy eyes along the line of women who had entered the bar and were sitting opposite us. “None of those appeal?”

  “Sorry.” I shook my head.

  “Let’s go out on Sunday. Sunday is lesbian night in Sydney.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and hugged him.

  I met James on Sunday for dinner at a café on Victoria Street. The place to be, apparently, was a bar not far from Kings Cross railway station.

  James looked at his watch. “We’re going to be way too early.”

  “Why?” I asked. It astounded me that I had to stay up so late in the vain hope of having sex with someone. Heterosexuality was so much simpler. James and I took our time over dinner and headed to another bar he knew just around the corner before making our way over to the lesbian bar at eleven p.m. We sat on stools, getting drunker and drunker, and studied the patrons.

  “None of them?” James asked.

  “Nope.”

  Then a new woman appeared. She had shoulder-length blonde hair, brown eyes, and good teeth. She looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. She approached us.

  “Hi,” she said.

  I returned her greeting. “Would you like to come home with me?” I asked. She turned around and walked away.

  James looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “What?”

  “You scared her off!”

  “Did I?”

  “You don’t get it,” he said. “You need to do the legwork!”

  “What legwork?”

  “Buy her a drink, take her to dinner. That sort of thing.”

  “I don’t want to have dinner with her! Is that what you do every time you see a man you like? Buy him dinner? If we did have dinner, I’d probably lose all interest in her!”

  “Girls are different! You have to get to know her!” he said.

  “I just want sex! Then, if it’s good, I’m happy to get to know her. I’ll buy her dinner then. What’s the problem with that?”

  James thumped his head on the table. “This could take years.”

  It took a month of going out twice a week before I met an attractive travel agent who actually offered to come home with me. In the taxi on the way back to my place, she stuck one hand inside my shirt and her other hand down the front of my jeans. I liked her immediately. So did the taxi driver, whose eyes were fixed on his rearview mirror. Once home, we headed straight to my bedroom.

  “I get excited doing things to you,” she whispered into my ear. I tried to reciprocate, but she pinned me down to the bed. She started to lick me and told me that she could do that all night.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  After we had sex—or rather, after I got sex—she told me she’d had a good night. I assumed, in jest, she meant meeting me. “That too,” she said. She had also found a wallet in the street with $500 inside.

  “Did you hand it in to the police?” I asked.

  She looked at me like I was from another planet. “Why would I do that? If some idiot is stupid enough to lose his wallet, someone is going to take his money. That’s what happens.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, silly,” she said, turning to kiss me. Before we fell asleep she told me she had a girlfriend but that they had been fighting.

  “Oh,” I said. “Does she know where you are?”

  “She’d kill me.”

  I slept with one eye open, worried she was going to rob me. I woke before her and made sure my valuables were still where they should be. Nothing appeared to be missing. When she woke, she wanted sex again. Well, her idea of sex, to which I was not averse.

  “Can I see you again?” she asked, before getting up and putting her clothes on.

  “Um, sure.”

  “Good. I like you.”

  I smiled. I didn’t like her particularly, but she knew how to find my clitoris, loved sex, was pretty, and had large, perfectly formed breasts that I liked very much. George, who wasn’t an especially good judge of character, refused to leave her side. She tickled his ears and kissed his nose. Bess kept her distance. The travel agent called me later that day.

  “Can I come over?” she asked.

  But you only just left! I thought. “No. I’m sorry, but I’m really busy,” I said. I needed some time to find and lock away my grandmother’s sapphire bracelet. I toyed with the idea of hiding it in the chimney, but settled on a spot downstairs underneath the floorboards.

  “Tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Okay.” She arrived at seven o’clock the next evening and led me straight to the bedroom. Too bad she’s a thief, I told myself, but that seemed to be a small price to pay for my sexual satisfaction.

  “Do you want to go out and eat?” I asked after we had finished. “There’s a new Thai place up the road.”

  “No, I’m happy here,” she said.

  We continued to have sex for the next three weeks. I couldn’t explain my sex drive. I was a brain-damaged, sex-crazed lesbian. Only one good thing came of this. The travel agent seemingly never picked up on any hint of my brain
damage. It was a good sign. I had reached a point where I could disguise my shortcomings—until someone asked me what a hypothesis was, or to spell “rhythm.”

  Then one day we had sex, and when it was done, I decided I never wanted to see her again. It was over. I couldn’t explain what had happened.

  “I need to focus on my PhD. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all,” I said.

  “You used me.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. And you do have a girlfriend.” I showed her out. After a final scout through my house, I realized I was missing a jumper she once admired on me and a pair of knee-high boots.

  My problem wasn’t just my unfulfilled desire for casual sex but the puzzling internal conflict it created within me. Most of my friends were men. My troubled relationship with my mother had left me with an unconscious hostility toward women. I had a deep well of resentment toward my mother for walking away from me after my accident. And then, when I thought about it, I realized women had caused me grief for most of my life. The only exceptions were my grandmother, who died when I was eleven, and one of my high school English teachers.

  In both primary and high school, a succession of female teachers seemed to dislike me on sight. I was rambunctious and didn’t like being told what to do. Worse, I struggled to sit still and delighted in distracting everyone around me. Our family doctor had told my parents he thought I was hyperactive. They hoped it was something I would outgrow.

  My aversion to authority came from my father.

  “How can you be expected to listen to someone you don’t respect?” he asked me after the only parent-teacher night he ever attended.

  I looked at him solemnly and nodded. “Exactly,” I said.

  “Mind you, I think your English teacher is very good. And she likes you,” he added. My English teacher was a Polish woman in her late twenties. And it was true that I liked her, even more so after she took me aside once and said, “I used to be just like you at school, really naughty. Don’t change!”

  Later that night I heard my parents arguing. “Tom, you really aren’t helping matters when you tell her every teacher she has is an idiot.”

  “I liked her English teacher!” he said. “And she was the only one who had anything nice to say!”

  One evening a couple of months after I stopped seeing the travel agent, I was invited to a birthday party where I met Laura. Laura had a pretty face with full lips, pale-blue eyes, and thick dark hair, and resembled a taller version of Kate Winslet. She was polite and well-mannered and had an excellent sense of humor. I looked at her closely and wondered, What’s the catch?

  As the night progressed, we found ourselves engrossed in conversation. When we weren’t talking, we were doubled over in laughter or trying to compose ourselves. I hadn’t enjoyed myself so much in a long time. At the end of the night, when I asked Laura for her phone number, she gave it to me and kissed me on the cheek. I called her the next day and asked her out for dinner.

  We met in Bondi at a restaurant by the beach she had been eager to try. Laura was obsessed with good food and wine. I bought her dinner, and we talked until the restaurant closed. She told me about her favorite books, her favorite artists, her interest in design. I told her that I had always wanted to be a writer but that I took a few wrong turns and ended up in aged care. She dreamed of having a furniture shop—selling pieces she had handpicked from around the world and restored. For the first time since my accident, I forgot all about my damaged brain.

  We left the restaurant and wandered around the rock pools at North Bondi Beach.

  “I have a hypothetical question for you: What would you do if you found a wallet in the street with $500 inside?”

  “Call the owner of the wallet if there was a contact number, or hand it in to the police,” she said.

  “Would you remove the money?”

  She looked at me as though I was crazy. “Of course not!”

  “Do you want to come back to my place?” I asked. “We don’t have to do anything, but it would be nice to spend the night together. And you can meet George and Bess.” It was a shocking and genuine request.

  “Sure!” she said, and took my arm in hers as we walked back to the road to find a taxi.

  She spent that night at my house. I wasn’t seized by the need to lock away my personal belongings. I knew she wouldn’t steal anything.

  6

  DOGS ARE THE BEST PEOPLE

  It took a month of dinners, breakfasts, picnics, and trips to the beach before I mustered up the courage to tell Laura about my head injury. I was falling in love with her, and I didn’t want to scare her off, but it was something she needed to know. The fact that she hadn’t mentioned any concerns over my cognitive functioning or memory felt like a cause for celebration. But I could not keep my secret from her forever.

  I told Laura about Tim and how we had always pushed each other to do silly things, indulged each other’s dares. I told her about the time he lent me a blue flashing police light he had borrowed from a friend, and how I had attached it to the roof of my car and went on a joyride, menacing unsuspecting drivers. I told her how Tim had arranged for a police helicopter pilot—a friend—to take us on a tour over all the prisons in Sydney. I told her how Tim had arranged for me to drive a highway police car. Tim was a lot of fun, I told Laura, and I liked him a lot. I knew Laura would like him too. I told her about my life before the accident, my father, my job, and my PhD. Then I told her how it felt to somersault over the head of a horse and land on the back of my head.

  “But you seem fine,” she said.

  “The neurologist told me I would never work or study again.”

  “Well, he got that wrong.”

  I told her about the disability pension. “I lost my job,” I said, “and everything fell apart.”

  “Well, you’re fine now!”

  “You can see no evidence whatsoever of my damaged brain?” She was the first person I had asked.

  “No sign whatsoever,” she said. “I promise.”

  “You haven’t noticed how many things I forget?”

  “No! I forget things too. Everyone does. Your memory is fine.”

  Nothing made me happier than hearing those words.

  Laura is an extrovert, and I was happy to let her lead our conversations. But I wondered if I talked more and she talked less whether the problems with my brain would become more obvious. It had been a long time since I had talked to anyone except James and my new work colleagues, and those conversations were usually brief and focused. Talking required a great deal of effort. It had been considerably easier for me to learn to read and write again than to form coherent thoughts in my head and utter them. I was out of practice.

  Laura and I had been together only ten weeks when I asked her to move in with me. My brief time in the lesbian community had taught me that women like Laura came along with all the frequency of flying saucers. Now that I had found her, I wasn’t letting her go. I knew ten weeks was a ludicrously short span of time in which to make such a decision, but gay women, even those who haven’t suffered brain injuries, behave in odd, inexplicable ways. Particularly when it comes to life-changing decisions like living together, buying a house, getting a dog, or having babies. Mercifully, neither of us wanted babies. Only one of us wanted dogs.

  The most immediate benefit of Laura moving in was a nutritional one. On the day she arrived, she opened the door to my pantry, peered inside, and shouted, “What on earth have you been eating!?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Pasta?”

  “Pasta with what? Barilla tomato sauce? How disgusting! You eat like a student!

  “Where are the garbage bags?” she asked. She proceeded to throw out everything in my pantry except a large pack of caster sugar that she kept “in case we make meringue.”

  “I love meringue! Can we make some?”

  “Sure!” she said. And she did, while I watched.

  It was the best meringue I had ever tasted.
<
br />   People with head injuries commonly lose their sense of taste or smell, or sometimes both, but thankfully my sense of taste had returned. Or perhaps it just took decent food to stimulate my appetite. In any case, Laura was an excellent cook. Slowly she began to educate me about food, and I rediscovered the pleasures of eating. She wanted to find the best chocolate there was; she’d come home beaming, armed with fifteen different types of chocolate, and we would sit down and feast. She did the same with coffee. With anchovies. With olive oil. Eating with Laura was a joy.

  Six years my junior, Laura was still considerably more grown-up than me in every way I could imagine. She was maternal, though she didn’t want children. She was serious and career-minded, like I used to be. She managed accounts for an advertising agency and loved her job. She had a clear career path mapped out with milestones to achieve every two years. She made lists and plans and crossed things off as she finished them. I had never known anyone as well organized as Laura.

  I was the opposite. Living with Laura made me realize brain damage had stripped me of my ambition. I wanted nothing more than a normal life—a couple of dogs, a girlfriend, a home, and a job. That seemed to be a massive achievement, given the mess I had been barely a year earlier.

  I tried to tell Laura about the difficulties I had faced returning to my PhD. “It’s really hard for me to focus,” I said. “My brain doesn’t work the way it used to.”

  “Of course it’s hard!” she said. “If it was easy, everyone would have a PhD.”

  “It’s hard for me because of the accident.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’re just making excuses,” she said.

  And I started to think she might be right. In any case, I had decided to put my PhD aside for a few months and try to live a normal life.

  Laura told me about her childhood. It was not without its own ugliness.

  “My father died of esophageal cancer when I was twenty-one,” she said. “I was away at college when my mum called to say that he had died.”