In Two Minds Read online

  In Two Minds

  by Gordon Parker

  Published in 2017 by Ventura Press

  PO Box 780, Edgecliff,

  NSW 2027

  AUSTRALIA

  www.venturapress.com.au

  Copyright © Gordon Parker 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia cataloguing-in-publication data:

  Author: Parker, Gordon

  Category: FA Contemporary Fiction

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-19-2 (print)

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-20-8 (ePub)

  Original cover illustration by Aura Parker

  Cover artwork and text design: Deborah Parry

  Production: Jasmine Standfield, Zoë Hale

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  The paper in this book is FSC® certified.

  FSC® promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests

  Praise for In Two Minds by Professor Gordon Parker

  ‘I can more or less guarantee that you know someone for whom this book will be important and inspiring. There’s a very strong chance that person will be you.’

  – Stephen Fry

  ‘A story has no beginning or end, arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.’

  – Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

  DEDICATION

  TO ALL THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN FACED BY THE BLACK DOG.

  A NOVEL OPENING

  ‘I must have been slandered, for without having done anything truly wrong I was arrested for having done nothing illegal. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the day is bright after a dark and stormy night, and now it’s the worst of times. For today, I was arrested when the clocks were striking thirteen. You’ll probably want to know what was going on, after all the crap the cops just told you. I’m not a sick man, nor am I a spiteful man, clanging with jarring couplets and string-taught with metaphors taking me to the snapping point. If you think I’m out of my mind that’s OK with me. It all happened more or less. Although the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born. I was born twice. To be reborn you have to die first. I don’t want to die. And who am “I”? In a sense, I am Martin Homer. But when Martin Homer was a little boy he was not Martin Homer.’

  The young doctor leant forward to signal his need to interrupt. ‘Would you prefer me to call you Martin or Doctor Homer?’

  Martin leant forward, pointing his finger at the doctor. ‘Just don’t call me Ishmael!’

  And, on the basis of such an oration and other factors, Dr Martin Homer was admitted involuntarily to a psychiatric unit and diagnosed as psychotic.

  MARTIN’S EARLY STORY

  Martin’s parents, Edina and Robert, married quite late and Edina wondered if she was capable of having children, a concern negated by their daughter Joanna being born on their first wedding anniversary. Edina then had four miscarriages before Martin was born five years later. Edina wondered whether it was the progressively unexpected being realised or whether she detected something special and different about Martin. To her, and she kept the precious thought even from Robert, he was the archetypal golden child.

  Joanna was an intense child, who set high standards for everything. When Robert told her that she had a ‘baby brother’ tears trickled down her cheeks for a minute. She rapidly became a caring and protective older sister, ready to pick Martin up if he fell over or cheer him up if he was upset.

  On Martin’s first day of school Joanna insisted on accompanying him with Edina, and on tucking his shirt firmly into his pants before they entered the school grounds.

  As soon as they arrived, Martin let go of her hand and called out to a group of boys swirling around the playground, ‘Children, I’m here.’

  Joanna was immediately aware she had just lost her role as Martin’s self-appointed protector.

  Martin loved the regimentation of school: the bell striking at designated times to mark school start, breaks and end; being required to ‘line up,’ to be checked off; receiving a sticker for good work; being praised for his colouring-in efforts; he loved it all. He paid attention to his teachers, and was generally the first to be chosen for his answer despite all the other waving hands and bursts of ‘teacher’ and ‘Miss’.

  One teacher nicknamed him ‘Sunny’ and his parents adopted the moniker.

  ‘Oh Sunny,’ Edina said, ‘How much light you have brought to our life.’ Robert added a caustic note, not wanting Martin to be too ‘soft’.

  ‘Yes indeed, always leaving the damn lights on.’

  Edina was a superb cook, a fine pianist and a book lover. She read to Martin for more than an hour each night, hovering over certain words, enunciating them slowly and sometimes asking him to repeat them. Over the years, Martin collected ‘beautiful words’ like dalliance, diaphanous, elision, gossamer, halcyon, mellifluous, pastiche, redolent, serendipity…and tintinnabulation. For each word, he kept a memory of the exact context, what book Edina had been reading, where she had sat and her definition.

  It was fun surprising Edina with his wordplay.

  ‘It’s not a garage, Mum. It’s a carage.’

  ‘No Mum, it’s not a trampoline. It’s a…jumpoline.’

  ‘I really don’t think it’s a light globe. It’s a night globe.’

  And the toilet was not to be flushed but to be splashed. He once told Edina that, as he spoke some words, they appeared like a running teleprompt at the front of his head and in full colour.

  He had immediately loved the word onomatopoeia, and even more, the concept to be able to say a word’s meaning.

  ‘Wow,’ he whooped. Edina laughed with pleasure and pride.

  ‘I’m amazed. You understand immediately.’

  Robert was a family lawyer with a solo practice. He worked hard to ensure that his two children could go to private schools. When not at work, playing bridge, preparing sermons as a lay preacher and otherwise assisting at the local church, he would help Edina around the house and spend time with his children – Edina calling it his ‘quarantined’ rather than ‘quality’ time. There were few perturbations apart from Robert’s severe migraine attacks, when he might go to bed for several days. The family was blessed with good health, mutual warmth and happiness, unremarkable to others in their milieu, and perhaps supporting Tolstoy’s aphorism that Happy families are all alike. Or perhaps Flanagan’s A happy man has no past. As if an ordinary life is somehow barren.

  Unhappiness crept into the family when Martin was six. Edina noticed Joanna rubbing her neck at dinner. In the bath that night Edina saw a swelling beneath one ear. She gently felt Joanna’s neck. It, the lump, was the size of a small pea. Edina hoped it would be tender. She rubbed it but Joanna did not wince. Edina sought Robert’s advice.

  ‘I’m sure it’s just an enlarged lymph gland,’ he said.

  ‘But what does that mean?’

  ‘The node is doing what it should do, holding back an infection.’ He smiled reassuringly at Edina, who returned a worried smile while her stomach churned.

  They agreed to watch it for a week. Edina would feel the lump once only each day as she did not wish to worry Joanna. She took her to their general practitioner the next week as it had not resolved. Dr Metcalf took a careful history, pursuing any history of immune system problems in Joanna and the family, and felt her abdomen as if it were part of a general examination, not revealing his apprehension that he might
find an enlarged spleen. After clearing his concerns, Metcalf suggested that the enlarged node most probably reflected an underlying infection and recommended a course of antibiotics. They left the surgery, Joanna asking if the antibiotic would have a nasty taste, and Edina in an indeterminate space between hope and concern.

  Six weeks later they had their first interviews at the Children’s Hospital. Robert was mortified not to accompany them, having long before accepted to represent a client at a court hearing.

  The paediatric resident was cheerful and ebullient – both in taking the history and in examining Joanna – but her habits of patting her pockets for possible missing objects and repeating questions mildly irritated Edina. The resident asked them to come back in two hours as, by then, she would have briefed her senior.

  The two of them went to have lunch at the hospital cafeteria. Edina soon criticised herself for such an error of judgment. A child in a pram passed them as they sat at a bare table, his face in a grimace of agitation, emitting cat-like sounds and with his arms and legs unnaturally tense. At the next table, a mother and grandmother sat with an adolescent boy. He was extremely pale, his baldness making him look older than his presumptive years, while he seemingly ignored the drip stand and the intravenous apparatus that accompanied him and his diagnosis. Was this an omen, a portent?

  Edina was also apprehensive about not ‘fitting in’. She was surrounded by parents and families dealing with enormities while appearing unflappable. The conversational snippets she heard were distinctive in their ordinariness, as if they had stopped at the local fast food outlet during a country trip.

  The consultant, Dr Johnstone, conducted a quick physical examination, his hands gentle and his manner engaging. Joanna sat attentively, her bright eyes not widened by fright nor dimmed by despondency. Dr Johnstone suggested it would be wise to run some tests, and his voice dropped as he added, ‘Including a biopsy’. Edina noted that he avoided turning to her to answer her predictable query. Instead he focused on Joanna, smiling gently as he explained that this would simply involve a nick to her neck to get out the ‘cheeky little lump’. Edina hid her anxiety.

  Two weeks later, Robert and Edina returned together with Joanna to hear the medical report.

  Dr Johnstone beamed at Joanna. ‘Why don’t you keep reading your book in the waiting room while I have a little chat with your parents?’ Joanna was happy to agree.

  He ushered Robert and Edina into his consulting room, showed them to their seats and closed the door. ‘I’ll cut to the chase,’ he said, crossing the room to his desk. He spoke slowly and with gravity. ‘It is a non-Hodgkin lymphoma. We need to undertake a breast bone biopsy to check if the lymphoma has reached the bone marrow.’ Elbows resting on his desk he allowed his hands to open, inviting questions.

  Edina and Robert had many. The two took turns asking them. Side-effects of each procedure? What should Joanna know and who might best inform her? Might she die? If death was likely, how long might she have?

  Dr Johnstone addressed each question by providing a range of options. Nothing was ever one hundred per cent. By offering some percentage and by selecting his phrases carefully, he offered a moiety of hope.

  Robert and Edina left the consulting room slowly, arms linked. So this is how it begins, thought Edina.

  Joanna looked up brightly as they approached.

  ‘Will everything be all right?’ she asked.

  ‘The doctor was very positive,’ answered Edina.

  The three went back to the hospital canteen. Tea for the parents. A large chocolate milkshake for Joanna. She asked questions and they answered, not alluding to cancer, merely suggesting that things were not quite right, while repeating that the doctor was quite confident she would do well. Joanna’s milkshake stayed on the table.

  The desperately awaited pathology report indicated a Stage III diffuse lymphoma. Johnstone recommended Joanna receive six courses of chemotherapy involving three different drugs and a steroid, and requiring time in hospital. One parent could sleep near her.

  Robert, so used to assisting people with problems, felt the masculine imperative to fix things and come up with a solution. He scoured the literature on lymphomas and pondered whether they should get a second and even a third opinion. Some days he worked longer hours, others he spent entirely at the hospital. He prayed to God more but resisted an instinct to bargain: God, let her live and I will…as his rationality held him back – sometimes only just, because his heart was broken.

  On one visit – when Joanna appeared sad and was clearly in pain – he wanted to climb into the hospital bed with her, to lie alongside her and cuddle her, so that she could rest in his arms; even to straddle her, as if he could provide a shield to deflect the miasma.

  Seven-year-old Martin tried to brighten his parents by smiling even more often and more widely, but there were signs of stress. He had little appetite.

  When he was allowed to visit, he always took Joanna a hand-printed card with a brotherly message written on it. She would ask him predictable questions about school and his best friend, but he could tell she was not really interested in his answers. Once she cried and asked if she could hug him. Martin felt uncomfortable and tried to smile more widely. Why did they not have clowns in the ward to brighten up all the patients? She was so pale and had a body smell he could not identify.

  Martin would not go to bed until his parents arrived home from hospital. He started to wash his hands six times in the hour before bed and to put his toys away in a strict sequence. If he obeyed such rituals, he reasoned, Joanna would live.

  Joanna died three months after the node had been detected, following an allergic reaction to one of the chemotherapy agents, and, finally, from a severe lung infection. Both Robert and Edina were there when her eyes widened and whitened with alarm before seeing her parents and smiling a wan, reassuring farewell.

  Martin spent little time at home over the next fortnight. He took his four favourite toys to his grandparents, playing endlessly with them.

  Around Martin, Robert and Edina tried to minimise their grief. Once, when Martin listened at the bedroom door, he heard his mother’s wailing – what he called ‘ugly crying’. When Edina emerged from her bedroom, she saw a note on the floor.

  Please Mum. Don’t cry. I love you. Martin.

  Edina felt guilt compound her grief as she noted how Martin’s luminance had completely disappeared. She quietly observed to Robert, ‘I don’t accept the view that we will ever get over it.’

  Robert nodded. ‘Or that we will or should move on.’

  They looked at each other blankly. There were no recriminations and no what ifs.

  Over the next two years, Martin noticed his mother was often overly bright. Robert spent more time at home, and his migraines sometimes caused him to stay in bed with the blinds drawn and the door closed for up to a week. All three consolidated a new existence that involved keeping busy and viewing each other as more precious – but there was an undertow.

  One summer’s morning Robert appeared from the bedroom after a three-day migraine and told Edina that he and Martin were going to the beach together. Just the two. Father and son.

  Edina hesitated. ‘Why not the three of us? I can’t go today because of tennis but we could all go tomorrow.’

  Robert spoke firmly. Edina noted his pallor and how little light there was in his eyes but was more struck by his insistence.

  ‘The forecast for today is good while tomorrow’s is not encouraging.’

  She turned to Martin. ‘Daddy’s had a very nasty migraine. Having a surf with you should make him feel a lot better.’

  The two drove off in Robert’s Saab, Martin smiling widely at Edina while his hesitant wave signalled both tentativeness and his will to please.

  They headed to Avalon, Robert choosing the Wakehurst Pathway route. During the drive, Martin was struck by his father’s quiet intensity, and felt an increasing sense of foreboding.

  ‘Dad. Can we swim in the
rockpool instead of the surf?’

  Robert made no response, simply tightening his grip on the wheel. After a while Martin whistled quietly to himself.

  Three minutes after they passed the athletics centre the Saab veered sharply right, headed for a palm tree before it fantailed and slipped vertically into Middle Creek. Martin’s head slammed into the side of the car and he instantly lost consciousness. The ambulance team arrived just after the tow truck and took him to Royal North Shore Hospital.

  Two days later Martin awoke. Edina was at the foot of the bed. She moved quickly to hug him, held him closely for a long time, crying gently.

  The social worker advised Edina to initially only ‘touch’ on issues. She said nothing about the accident, simply expressing delight at how well he looked and that the doctors were confident he would recover completely.

  Martin looked up at her. ‘Where’s Dad? Was he hurt too?’

  Edina cried softly into her handkerchief.

  Martin knew Edina was seeking to protect him from hearing about the death of his father. He turned on his side and punched the pillow from below.

  The next day Martin was discharged. Late that afternoon, Edina told him his father had drowned in the accident. Martin ran to his bedroom where he sat on his bed and rocked, intermittently banging his head against the wall. Edina followed, and the two slowly rocked together. She with tears running down her face, while Martin wailed for the next hour.

  Once his tears had subsided, he looked into her face with an intensity Edina had never before seen in him.

  ‘I’m nine, Mother. I’m old enough. You must tell me what happened!’

  But it wasn’t until the next morning at breakfast that Edina addressed his request, having mulled over options during a sleepless night.

  ‘It was horrible, Martin, but your father saved your life.’ She hesitated, waiting for a query but there was none. ‘The car slid on the road, went into a deep creek and you were knocked unconscious. Your father broke his leg. Somehow or other he dragged you out of the car and threw you on the grass before he fell back into the water…’