An Eye For An Eye. Arthur Klepfisz
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tumultuous period of the 1970s receded, with Australian troops no longer engaged in an unwinnable war in Vietnam. Andrew's life had appeared to be going smoothly.
This period of time was said by some to be the worst post-war decade, and as the 1980s progressed, there was a glimmer of hope that world events were improving. In the lucky country, Australians revelled in the historic America's Cup win, but in the rest of the world, natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and floods vied for prominence with man-made disasters. Each time there was a glimmer of hope for peace as one war ended, another conflict arose. Like a brush fire, every time the world dared to hope that things were improving, events erupted to dash those hopes.
By November 1989 the Cold War had ended and the Berlin Wall had been pulled down, whilst at the same time in Tiananmen Square thousands of protesting students had been killed in June 1989. For some, the 1988 downing of a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie Scotland, by terrorists, appeared to be a foreboder of things to come. The decade had begun with John Lennon being shot dead and his killer pleading insanity, in what many considered an insane world.
With a world refusing to be free of conflict and disaster, by 1990, some degree of chaos had also intruded into Andrew Wright’s life, whilst Candy’s death had created potential future problems for Brett Maloney. In the normal course of events, one would not have expected the paths of Brett and Andrew to have intersected. However, the factors which determine these outcomes, whether they be divine intervention, the position of the stars and planets or pure chance, could not guarantee that the lives of these two men wouldn’t cross, and they had.
Andrew gently lay his hand on Karen's right buttock, and watched her full breasts rising and falling with her breathing. Gazing at her aroused him, but he was reluctant to wake her at 5 a.m. He had been waking up far too early in the last few weeks. They never made love in the morning, though he would have liked to. Lovemaking always occurred at night when they were both tired, and this didn't enhance the experience or his performance. He felt that women had it easier sexually, as their level of arousal was not on public display as it was with men. Hard to avoid noticing a limp dick, he thought.
His thoughts went back to the nightmare of the last few years and he chuckled as he retreated from this goulash of thoughts – love, sex and nightmares – a précis of his working life as a psychiatrist.
He had one hour to go before his usual get-up time, when he would dress, shave, grab something for breakfast and dash out of the house to do his hospital ward round, before going on to his rooms to see patients for the rest of the day.
In spite of the early hour, he decided there was no point lying awake in bed exposed to his maudlin thoughts. He'd go and have a coffee at the hospital before starting his round.
As he got ready he reflected, not for the first time, on the corrosive events that he and his family had experienced over the past two years. He, his wife Karen and their two children – Jed, age sixteen, and Bobby, age fourteen – had been through “the mill”. Where the hell, he wondered, had that saying come from? It was one thing to say that pain could be a growth experience and part of life's rich fabric, and another to actually be in the middle of that experience yourself; rich fabric for the lawyers, maybe.
He hated clichés. Karen's older brother Ralph was a walking cliché – anything to clothe and mask his inner-self. Feelings and emotions were not to be shared or exposed as far as Ralph was concerned. Andrew was aware that his own thoughts and feelings had been indiscriminately tearing down fences, often piercing boundaries at unpredictable and inappropriate times, as they scattered in all directions.
There was probably only one cliché that appealed to Andrew. It was said to be an old Arabic saying: “You can piss on me but don't tell me it is raining.” He considered it to be a good way of describing the bullshit that masqueraded as honesty in many people. Not only people, he reflected, but also organisations, such as the media and politicians. But then, one shouldn't stereotype he believed. God, he was wasting hours – no, days, or weeks even – of his life going through all this stuff. He knew he had to cut it loose as it was close to two months since the court case in late April 1990.
He reflected that if one of his patients had presented with these thoughts, he might have been inclined to suspect that they were suffering from some degree of psychiatric disturbance, with features of paranoia, in suspecting an orchestrated conspiracy against themselves. He hoped that he wouldn't judge his patients in this manner, as he worked on the principle that it was their reality and not for him to reject in any clinical way. Today, he allowed the thoughts to stay. He recalled that it was a day like this – but then it wasn't. No two days are ever the same.
Two years ago, on a Sunday in early 1988, he and Karen had been walking leisurely through the streets of Brunswick, reflecting on the tribal nature of suburban life. Occupying the sidewalks and cafes were members of the local tribe; distinguished by tattoos, piercings, scrappy torn jeans and hair gelled into gravity-defying shapes. He and Karen wryly reflected that in attempting to demonstrate their independence as individuals, these young people had in fact become homogeneous. This was their uniform. Andrew found himself staring at them, whilst they appeared oblivious of him. He wondered if they were merely tolerant of his differences or whether they were indifferent to his existence.
He noted how trendy this area of Brunswick had become, where in the past it had provided housing for manual workers. Small workers’ cottages had been done up and the suburb had become so expensive that the same workers would have found it out of their financial reach if they were looking to purchase now. Some remnants of the past remained, and the occasional vagrant could be found sleeping rough on the street, wherever they found shelter, although from time to time, this was actively discouraged by the authorities.
Suddenly the shrill tone of Andrew’s phone pierced his reverie and life was never the same. A nasal voice introduced itself as a male journalist from the Age newspaper, with the lofty appendage of investigative journalist. Without a pause for any social niceties, the voice challenged, rather than questioned – was Andrew aware that the family of a patient he had cared for, who died in hospital in 1977, eleven years before, were pressing the coroner to investigate her death and alleging Dr Wright had subjected their relative to deep sleep therapy.
As the smug voice rolled on, Andrew recalled a woman in her late sixties, who had been a psychiatric inpatient under his care. He remembered her being hospitalised with severe depression and in spite of having a family history of heart problems, she had stressed her body for many years with excessive food and alcohol. Andrew had been working as a consultant psychiatrist for over eleven years at that stage, having commenced private practice in 1966, and his thoughts revisited the scene of the patient dying suddenly from a cardiac arrest and failing to be resuscitated, in spite of frantic efforts by himself and several other doctors in the hospital. Her death had upset him greatly and he felt for her family, but the cardiac arrest had been so sudden that nothing could be done to save her.
He recalled supporting her family in their grieving and having some family members coming to him as patients in the years that followed. His relationship with the family continued to be good and it baffled him how the coroner would be investigating her death eleven years after it occurred, and why the patient’s family were pushing for an inquest now. Having planted the seeds of anxiety, the journalist chose to say nothing further.
Andrew then found it difficult to explain to Karen what the call had been about, as he was struggling to make sense of it himself. The sunny day had now turned grey for him, as if all the oxygen had been sucked out, and he didn't feel inclined to continue their outing. He regretted buying his walkabout mobile phone the year before. It was relatively new technology, and it certainly made him more accessible should emergencies arise. It cost him a packet, over $4000, if his memory served him right, and it meant that not only could he be reached for urgent patient care, but it also allowed intrusion from people whose calls could have waited. However, he knew the journalist would have made contact one way or another.
As Karen and he walked rapidly to their car, they were shrouded in silence.
CHAPTER THREE
Brett's family had migrated from Ireland several years before