Authors: Anne Buist
‘I’m trying,’ said Natalie. ‘It isn’t easy. My gut feeling screams inauthentic; it’s
hard to let go of.’
‘Have you given any thought to why?’
‘Of course. That’s all I try to do.’
Declan shook his head. His brown eyes regarded her with fatherly concern. ‘You try
hard,’ he said, ‘but you’re too close; step away for a moment.’ He offered her another
glass of wine, which she declined.
‘Meaning?’ She was conscious of sounding tense.
‘Tell me why you don’t like her.’
‘She hardly invites warmth.’
‘Is it surprising? Didn’t you tell me her father killed her mother when she was two?’
‘It was the other way around. But probably only because her mother got to the knife
first; I saw the list of prior injuries. Either way, she effectively lost both parents.’
‘I know you understand that would have affected her development.’
‘Of course. No stable base to form the foundations of sense of self, so she learned
to manipulate in order to survive. A disorganised attachment style.’
‘As is the case for Jessie, yet you have empathy for her. Tell me more about Georgia’s
attachment style and how it affected her personality.’
‘I guess she’s also avoidant. She learned to get what she wanted in part by being
good.’
‘So the good child smiled and achieved and got some reward from…was it an aunt that
cared for her?’
Natalie nodded. ‘Yes, but by doing so, Georgia didn’t learn to deal with emotions.’
‘So she’s three years old, lost both her parents and a stranger is caring for her.
How did she feel?’
‘Scared. Confused.’
‘So she could have developed an anxiety disorder but didn’t.’
‘No, she developed a personality disorder instead.’
‘As did Jessie.’
‘Jessie’s borderline—predominantly chaotic. Georgia is predominantly narcissistic.’
‘So again I ask, why the empathy for Jessie but not for Georgia?’ Declan picked up
the bottle and poured another splash into his own glass, a deviation from his usual
routine.
Natalie shook her head. ‘Because she killed three
children! Reason enough surely.’
‘Our job is to understand, not judge. Or at least to understand first.’
‘Then because she lies, because she’s entitled. Because she won’t damn well face
reality.’
‘Natalie, you can do better than that.’
‘Okay, because her survival skills are to pretend and she believes her own story.
Because she isn’t interested in changing, not really.’
Declan sat back in the chair, contemplating her. ‘I asked what your issue was, not
Georgia’s.’
Natalie had to remind herself to breathe. It was maybe a minute before she trusted
herself to answer. ‘She makes me feel powerless.’
‘And what’s that like?’ Declan’s tone was as gentle as she had ever heard.
‘I get it.’ She forced a smile. ‘Scary. And I like to be in control.’ Or at least
have the illusion of it.
Declan leaned forward. ‘Dismissing emotions comes at a cost. For you both.’ He watched
her struggle, then patted her hand. ‘I know I’m not your therapist anymore,’ he said.
‘But it’s inevitable that your own issues come out in your work. You are very skilled
with the chaos of the borderline because ultimately your foundations are not disorganised,
however much your bipolar makes you seem so at times. But you have other answers
to find, and it will take time.’
Was he referring now to her sensitivity to Georgia? Her relationship with her mother?
Her absent father? Or Liam?
Declan watched her carefully. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to talk about? Better
to talk it out with me than no one at all.’
Liam then. She wasn’t sure there was anything to talk
about, but he was right about
there being no one else. She and Tom didn’t do personal discussion, mainly because
in the past it had ended up in sex. Her two oldest friends from school were overseas
and interstate, and she didn’t find other women easy to deal with. More to the point,
most women didn’t like her much. Women her age were uneasy with a woman who enjoyed
sex, liked being single—and thought a man’s marital status was his problem not hers.
Natalie contemplated rolling up her sleeve to jolt Declan. There were bruises on
her arms from Liam’s enthusiastic grip, and over most of the rest of her from banging
into the furniture. Liam hadn’t escaped without damage either, including several
long scratches down his back. God knew how he explained that to his wife. Presumably
the lights stayed out.
‘Ever heard the expression “fuck your brains out”?’ Natalie said with a grin, knowing
she was being badly behaved and only vaguely aware it was a push-back against Declan
getting too close to her core vulnerability. She didn’t wait for a response. ‘I never
really knew what it meant either until last Thursday night. Let’s just say we didn’t
sleep much.’
‘So what does that mean to you?’ He was using his fatherly I-won’t-judge-you tone.
Natalie grinned. ‘Great sex. He’s married. I don’t want a relationship.’ She saw
Declan’s expression and shrugged. ‘It’s true, okay? Maybe I’m testing types out but
I can’t picture myself settled down with anyone right now, so having fun in the interim
seems a win–win.’
She could see Declan was sceptical. ‘I don’t care what you say,’ she added. ‘Eight
years older does not make him a father figure. Now you—maybe.’
‘Have you considered that maybe you’re a little high? And your libido as well?’
‘Just running on all cylinders.’
‘It might be normal for most people to keep one cylinder in reserve.’ Declan frowned.
‘How much are you seeing him?’
‘Not sure yet.’ She wondered why she didn’t just tell
him it was a one-off. Because she thought Liam might be there at the Welbury gig?
‘True, unless…’ Declan paused. ‘How are you sleeping generally?’
‘It was one night only. I’ve slept normally ever since.’
‘With medication?’
‘Yes.’ Which was sort of true. She’d missed on that one night with Liam, but most
other nights she took her mood stabiliser like a good girl.
Declan seemed satisfied.
Outside Declan’s house, Natalie paused for a minute. Then she fired up her bike and
headed towards the cemetery at the eastern edge of the suburban sprawl, a forty-five
minute ride.
She hadn’t been there in two years. She pulled into the usual side road and waited
for the white Mazda travelling behind her to go by, lighting up the road as it did.
The routine of hiding the bike in the brush and scaling the wall at the back where
the brickwork was crumbling was a familiar one. She hadn’t brought a torch but the
sky was clear and the moon high enough for her to be able to find her way through
the shadows.
She had spent the night of her eighteenth birthday sleeping on the grave, celebrating
her bike licence as well as the mobility she had worked hard to regain after the
accident. It was a big deal that she was able to ride at all, and she’d come to promise
Eoin that she would ride safely. She’d visited on the day of her thirtieth birthday,
to show off her new Ducati. It was far too big for her, well deserving the label
of monster. A reminder of the time she switched meds and went a bit manic, but she
loved it anyway.
He was there waiting for her. She could feel him as she closed her eyes and remembered.
Half a lifetime ago.
‘I miss you still,’ she said. She ran her hand over the letters that were carved
into the stone, unable to read them in the dark, but knowing what they said.
Eoin Rearden 1980–1998
Always in our hearts.
‘You don’t think I should settle down, do you?’ Natalie said to him. ‘If you were
alive would we be married with a couple of kids? Would you have moved on from our
pledge never to get old and boring?’ It was impossible to imagine Eoin, with his
irreverent grin, as anything but a wild eighteen-year-old. If the accident hadn’t
killed him something else would have.
‘I really don’t know what I want,’ Natalie said looking into the starless night sky.
‘I’ve got the band—still a rock chick like I promised. But sometimes I’m so restless.
It’s like I’m waiting for you to come back and catch up with me.’ She listened for
a while to the sounds of the night. The wind rustled the leaves in the nearby tree,
and a car backfired in the distance.
‘You’d like Liam,’ she said. Then laughed and sat up. ‘Actually you’d hate him. Arrogant
twat. Wears suits.’ Natalie smiled. ‘But there’s a bad boy in there.’
It was after ten when she got home. She didn’t take any notice of the car parked
outside her warehouse, faced the wrong way on a one way street, until he turned his
headlights on, and blinded her.
‘Shit!’ she yelled. As she turned her bike into the cul-de-sac, she heard him rev
the engine and take off. Standing in the empty street as the car turned the corner,
she could see only that it was small and pale coloured. No chance of reading the
number plate.
A sound on the roof startled her as she came up the stairs into the kitchen. A cat
most likely. She’d admitted to Tom that she might be in danger, but it wouldn’t be
from any stalker who was seriously mentally ill. They were unlikely to be organised
enough to be anything more than a nuisance, and from the rational thinking behind
the delivery of the USBs she already knew that her stalker didn’t fit this category.
She liked her own company. Now she found herself wishing for the buzz of the Halfpenny.
Looking out across the rooftops she reassured herself that the driver could have
been anyone and that she was up to tackling the large motley coloured tom cat that
was there now.
Natalie had taken to checking the
Welbury Leader
online. On Monday morning, Travis
and Tiphanie were back on page one. The local journalists probably didn’t have anything
else interesting to report; they interviewed Tiphanie and dragged a brief quote from
Travis’s mother. The local maternal child health centre was reported as saying they
would be running a parenting support group, as the young mothers had been ‘destabilised’.
Senior Sergeant Damian McBride said there were ‘several lines of enquiry still being
pursued’.
Chloe was still missing. And Amber, not Travis, was in gaol.
To add to Natalie’s sense of disquiet from the previous night, she found an article
in the mainstream paper on multiple personality disorder, quoting Wadhwa, his pudgy
face beaming with insincerity. He couldn’t comment on the case of Georgia Latimer,
he said, since it was ‘before the courts’ but managed to make his thoughts abundantly
clear.
Maybe someone would charge him with contempt and make Natalie’s day.
Georgia was booked to see Natalie Wednesday, on the assumption that her bail appeal
would be successful. When she turned up on time it was apparent the optimism had
been warranted. She looked smug, and there was good enough reason, though the fear
of returning to prison would be in the background. Yarra Bend was far removed from
her normal life. Prison would be worse.
Georgia made only the briefest reference to the court case, and instead told Natalie
about the apartment she had found, and then: ‘I’ve been shopping. With friends.’
Georgia’s demeanour was disconcerting and even with Declan’s insight, Natalie had
to fight hard not to judge her. Emotional distancing was the hallmark of the avoidant-attached
child as an adult. But the real issue for Natalie was whether Georgia was responsible
for her actions. If Wadhwa was right, she was not. Her suppressed rage was expressed
in one or more separate personalities that she had no control over. Natalie still
thought it more likely that she had a personality disorder, which meant that when
her rage was triggered Georgia had a choice about where to channel it.
There was no simple direct way to answer the question; if Georgia had D.I.D. she
couldn’t have told Natalie even if she had wanted to. If she had a personality disorder—and
was criminally responsible for her children’s deaths—there was a good reason to conceal
the truth. Either way what Natalie needed was to access Georgia’s subconscious.
‘I’ve been wondering about what you said at the end of the last session.’ A patient’s
parting words were often
significant; sometimes an attempt to prolong the interaction
but at other times a way of throwing a lifeline to the therapist;
this is what is
important but I’m too scared to go there.
‘Oh, I can’t really remember,’ said Georgia, smile still fixed in place. ‘What did
I say?’
‘That Paul could be difficult when he didn’t get his own way.’
‘Did I say that?’ She bit her lip. ‘He…liked…well you know.’
‘He liked what, exactly?’
‘The intimate side of marriage.’
Oh come on.
Sex might have been an issue, but Natalie didn’t buy the coyness.
‘I mean,’ Georgia continued, ‘he was my first, you know, serious boyfriend, and I
was a bit of a prude. Virginia and Vernon, my aunt and uncle, were very uptight,
didn’t really talk about sex. So Paul thought I was a bit reluctant. But it wasn’t
a problem, not after we got married, at least…’
‘So how was sex for you?’
‘It really wasn’t a problem.’ Georgia smiled. ‘We had our lives very sorted, it worked.
For three years it all went beautifully.’
Until she had children.
‘It was harder because I was tired, after Genevieve was born,’ Georgia continued.
‘Did that create problems?’
‘Paul…well, I guess he helped with Genevieve. She was a very unsettled child, particularly
around dinner time, so he’d walk her or give her a bath.’
‘Unsettled?’
‘Nothing serious, she just seemed to be prone to colds. I had asthma as a child and
I worried she might have it too.’
‘Did she need to have tests?’
‘What? I don’t think anyone ever thought it was that serious.’ Natalie jotted a reminder
to chase up the GP’s notes. ‘Paul got…impatient.’