The Family Doctor

by Debra Oswald

  ‘Oh … No. I’ll just take my handbag for now.’

  Anita understood the impulse to walk out with nothing—every single thing in the house now felt contaminated with ugliness and sorrow.

  Mehta nodded his understanding, but he asked Paula, ‘Are you sure you don’t need something warmer to wear now, though?’ It was late April and the night was chilly.

  Paula ran her hands over her bare arms, as if she’d forgotten she was only wearing a cami. ‘Oh …’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Anita. ‘I’ve got a sweater in my car.’

  As Anita drove away from the Earlwood house towards her own apartment, she glanced at Paula in the passenger seat. She looked even flimsier now, shrunken inside the folds of the loose green jumper Anita had found on the back seat.

  ‘Did they say when you can go back to the house?’

  Paula shook her head.

  ‘Well, whatever. Stay with me as long as you want.’

  ‘Thanks. I was an idiot. I should’ve brought some clothes with me.’

  ‘Borrow mine,’ Anita said.

  When they were younger, Paula, Stacey and Anita had often shared clothes. Anita flashed on the image of the three of them, seventeen or eighteen years old, standing in front of her wardrobe, flicking through coat-hangers, chucking things on the bed to consider them in the light. Stacey was more voluptuous than the other two, even as a teenager, but she knew how to pick out the right borrowed garment that would still somehow fit her lavish breasts and hips. She was always coaxing the others to try different clothing combinations, whooping with laughter when a fashion ensemble proved to be tragic or gushing in her Barry White drawl about how sexy they looked.

  Anita blockaded that memory of Stacey in all her fleshly life force. Instead, she fixed her eyes on the road and bunged on a hearty tone as she said to Paula: ‘I’ve got plenty of I’m-a-doctor clothes you can borrow. We can make the sizes work, even if I’ve packed on a little bit of weight.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Paula. ‘Oh, but underwear …’

  ‘Yeah, I guess you’ll want your own undies. Broadway Kmart?’

  The late-opening Kmart was so fluoro-bright it made Anita squint and the conditioned air was desiccated and chilly. A handful of people wandered the aisles, most of them on solo shopping missions. Who would choose to come here at ten o’clock on a Tuesday night? Maybe shiftworkers, restless individuals, shoppers who hated crowds, or people whose routine had been thrown off course by some sudden, unspeakable event.

  Walking through the store, Anita felt disconnected from her body, apart from some faint nausea and a hollow sensation in the belly—the way she would feel at two a.m., prowling Dubai airport halfway through a long-haul flight.

  Paula chose a three-pack of underpants and grabbed a couple of bras.

  ‘Do you need to try the bras on?’ Anita asked.

  Paula shook her head. ‘I’ll take a chance.’

  Anita realised that the process of going into a fitting room cubicle, undressing and dressing again was beyond Paula right now.

  Paula sank even more deeply into a slumped silence as Anita drove to Newtown, parked in her underground spot and took them up in the lift.

  Anita’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a building with a real estate agent at street level, down the quieter end of King Street but within easy walking distance to live music or a tattoo parlour or the cinema, as required. Sometimes she wondered if it was time to move out of Newtown, away from the clog of cars and buses that left a grimy coating on every surface. Then again, the area was never boring, with plenty of weird shops and businesses giving it a spirited go, but without the hipster self-satisfaction of other inner-city suburbs. And there were always, reliably, fascinating humans wandering along the footpaths, laughing raucously and dodging their way between the cars to cross King Street.

  Anita’s apartment was tidy enough not to be embarrassing, with compact furniture that suited the small space and bursts of colour from textiles she’d bought on her South American travels. Even so, there was something provisional about it, as if Anita were camping here, making the best of it while she waited for her life to move into gear. The friends had always chosen Paula and Remy’s house as the properly homey place to hang out, so it felt odd to invite Paula inside for more than a quick visit on their way somewhere else.

  Anita made them toast and mint tea, while Paula stood over the rubbish bin in the kitchen, taking the tags and stickers off all the Kmart underwear as if that was an important and urgent task. On this night, any activity either of them did felt inappropriate, ridiculous, obscene. Ripping off tags was as good as anything to be doing.

  Anita wondered when they would really talk. Probably not tonight. They—Paula, Anita, Stacey—had always been good at talking. But this was so overwhelming, it crushed any speakable words out of their throats.

  The three of them had met as twelve-year-olds on their first day at Parramatta High School. Even though various clusters of school friends had crumbled and regrouped, the three had remained a strong unit. In the years since, circumstance had sometimes frayed the connections—Paula’s impossibly long hours as a medical student, Anita’s three-year stint in London, Stacey’s move to a remote property off the communications grid—but the threads between them never snapped.

  Paula was always the strongest, no question. Even when her husband Remy was terminally ill, it felt as though Paula was the one supporting Anita through the process, demonstrating how to manage it graciously, when to talk openly, when to joke and when to sit silently with the awfulness of it.

  A year later, after Remy died, it became clear that Stacey was the one in desperate trouble, struggling to twist free of her abusive husband. Anita had dived in, been a devoted friend, showered her and the kids with love. But even then, Paula was really the anchor point, calm and generous, taking Stacey, Cameron and Poppy into her house.

  ‘Should we try to sleep?’ Anita asked when they had chewed their way through the toast.

  Paula shrugged. ‘Probably. There’s going to be a huge amount to do tomorrow. A lot of phone calls.’

  Anita’s apartment had one decent-sized bedroom and a smaller room with a sofa bed. Together, wordlessly, she and Paula unfolded the mattress and put clean sheets on it.

  ‘Good night, lovely,’ said Anita, and they embraced briefly, lightly, careful not to tip each other over into emotional intensity they couldn’t handle right at this minute.

  Anita lay in bed, her mind still clenched against the initial shock of the killings. But then thoughts began to ooze up, unbidden. Picturing Stacey’s face. How afraid she would’ve been. Imagining the moment she must’ve seen in Matt’s eyes that he was going to do this thing. Hearing her voice—she would’ve pleaded with him, wept, whimpered with fear. Did Stacey suspect he would hurt the kids? Had she known that before she was killed? If she had realised, did her heart explode into ragged pieces? And the kids—those gorgeous fucking kids—did they register what was happening? Did they know their father was about to kill them in the moment before they died? Anita hoped they didn’t. Jesus Christ, she hoped not. Those exquisite children. Their spectacular, clever, vibrant mother.

  Rage towards Matt burned along Anita’s arteries like a powerful fuel. But at the same time, she felt powerless, crumbling apart with self-pity at losing her friend, immobilised in the face of this ugliness.

  Anita gave in to the weeping, sobs wrenching through her with such force she could barely breathe between them.

  The bedroom door opened and Paula padded in, wearing borrowed pyjamas. She climbed into the bed and curled herself along Anita’s back. Against her ribcage, Anita could feel Paula’s jagged breathing—she had been crying too.

  The two women didn’t say anything, but they lay there together until the morning, either awake or slipping into shallow puddles of sleep, sometimes huddled together, sometimes keeping a hand on the other’s waist or arm, hanging on to each other through the night, so neither of them co
uld die.

  THREE

  CAMERON AND POPPY WERE FANTASTIC AT PARLOUR GAMES. Paula figured this was a happy by-product of having spent a sizeable chunk of their childhood living on a property off the grid, with no internet, no mobile reception. According to Stacey, the solar batteries often failed, and if the backup generator then conked out, which it frequently did, the house would be without power for an indefinite period. So Stacey had built up a repertoire of activities—puzzles, craft projects and board games—that could be done by the light from LP gas cylinders.

  Charades was their favourite. When Cameron first moved into the Earlwood house with Paula, he was horrified that she didn’t know how to play charades.

  ‘I never learned,’ Paula explained. ‘We didn’t play games in my family.’

  Cameron frowned, finding this admission sad and barely credible.

  She laughed. ‘I guess I had a deprived childhood.’

  Paula’s disadvantaged childhood became a running gag between them. Cameron would tease her, adopting an exaggerated expression of pity. ‘Did you get to eat chicken when you were a kid?’ ‘Did your parents ever read you books?’ ‘Were you allowed to drink water from the tap when you were little?’ He loved that Paula would wail with mock angst, loved that this silliness was their special shared thing. And Stacey was relieved to see her anxious son daring to be cheeky with Paula. It was good to see delight on the face of a boy burdened by so many worries.

  Cameron made a big deal out of teaching ‘Poor Paula’ how to play charades. The four of them would write movie, book or song titles on scraps of paper, four titles each, then put the folded scraps into Stacey’s upturned straw hat. They never turned the game into a competition—there were no points or winners or time limits.

  ‘We play for the glory of the doing and the guessing, don’t we, guys?’ said Stacey. ‘And who needs time pressure? Too much pressure in the world already.’

  They took turns—youngest to oldest—which meant Paula went last, being three months older than Stacey. It intrigued the kids that their mother had once been twelve and that she’d been friends with a twelve-year-old version of Paula back in those ancient times.

  When it was Paula’s go, Cameron patiently explained the rules, the signals to use, and if she looked stuck about how to act out a word, he would whisper advice to her. Paula made a big deal about relying on his help.

  Poppy was barely eight, but she could confidently dissect words into their syllables and come up with rhymes in order to offer ‘sounds like’ clues. She threw the whole of her little body into the miming, especially if it required flamboyant emotion or imitating animals. But then some detail would crack her up and she’d dissolve into giggles. Cameron would pretend she was doing it on purpose as a clue and he’d call out guesses—‘laugh’, ‘giggle’, ‘wee your pants’—which would send his sister into more flurries of laughter. If Stacey signalled to him to cool it, Cameron would nod earnestly and keep quiet until Poppy had controlled herself enough to complete the clue.

  When it was Cameron’s turn to perform, he would have his serious concentrating face on, sucking in his bottom lip a little, tiny creases in his forehead, determined to be precise and effective with his actions. He was especially satisfied if Poppy guessed his signals.

  Now, Paula could still picture the exact spot in front of the fireplace where the kids used to stand when they played charades, and she could imagine the straw hat with the folded bits of paper sitting on the coffee table. That was why she wanted to move back into her house as soon as it was feasible. There were memories embedded in so many places in that house—images of her husband, and now Stacey, Cameron and Poppy too. She needed to be there.

  For two weeks, Paula stayed at Anita’s Newtown apartment, going in to work most days, taking off the occasional morning to do police interviews, meet funeral directors and handle the other administrative tasks that follow the killing of a close friend and her children. She preferred to keep occupied, seeing patients, driving to and from the practice, even if it meant she had to field the awkward, soggy but well-meaning questions from her fellow doctors. All the doctors except Li-Kim, who knew Paula too well to prod at her by constantly asking, ‘How are you?’

  Li-Kim was forty-two, smart, a diligent GP, dryly funny, discreet, loyal. She was forever trying a new weight-loss method. ‘Paula, let’s be realistic: I’m short and dumpy, with a sweet tooth. I’m born to be round. Why should patients pay attention to advice from a fat doctor?’

  They’d joined the practice in the same month, immediately clocking each other as potential friends. Then Remy met Li-Kim at a medical conference dinner and the two of them hit it off straight away. Two years later, when Li-Kim and her wife Connie had their first daughter, they asked Remy to be the godfather.

  Since the murders, Li-Kim had been shepherding Paula’s work schedule with gentle care and unobtrusively covering any necessary absences.

  When Paula decided it was time to move back into her own house, Anita tried to talk her out of it.

  ‘Oh, Paula, are you sure?’ she asked. ‘It’s only been two and a bit weeks. Is it too soon? If ever a location was primed for PTSD … shit, your place …’

  ‘You can’t let bad memories trump the good ones,’ Paula argued.

  ‘Okay. I get you want to go home,’ said Anita. ‘But should I—I mean, do you want me to come and stay there with you for a few nights or something?’

  But Paula could see Anita was nervous about the idea of sleeping in the Earlwood house, as if malevolence was now soaked into the walls in transmittable form. Anita had always had an anxiety problem, sometimes being gripped by quite irrational fears, so Paula understood this offer would truly cost her. It wouldn’t be right to burden her friend with more than she could handle.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Paula. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll call you if I’m not.’

  On her way to the house, Paula stopped by the supermarket and bought vegies, milk, bread, fish, fruit, cheese. By stocking the fridge with fresh food, she would reclaim her home, inserting wholesome ordinary things into it.

  Turning into the street, she saw the bank of flowers stacked along her front fence. Seventy, eighty, maybe a hundred bunches, forming a burial mound of vegetation and cellophane wrapping, piled against the low brick wall of Paula’s front yard. Some of the flowers were decaying, clearly put there very soon after the deaths, but others looked fresh, with intensely blue delphiniums, pink stocks and the crisp whiteness of chrysanthemums sitting on top of the half-rotten mass.

  Tucked between the bouquets were envelopes, addressed to Cameron or Poppy or Stacey, many written in children’s chunky lettering. There were also two sheets of cardboard, the kind kids use for school projects, covered in messages and little drawings. One was from the primary school Cameron and Poppy had attended, the other from the preschool where Stacey had been teaching. Paula tried to imagine how the other kindy teachers would explain what had happened to Ms Durack.

  She left the flower pile where it was for now and approached the front door. She had readied herself for this—walking in there again—and she tensed her abdominal muscles, like someone guarding against a gut punch. In the preceding days, she’d arranged for crime scene cleaners to go over the place and she’d bought new rugs to replace the bloodied ones the police had taken as evidence.

  She walked into the living room. The cleaners had put some items back in the wrong places—the granite bird was on a side table instead of the mantelpiece—but, really, the place looked bizarrely normal.

  The doors to the kids’ bedroom and Stacey’s room were shut. Paula left them shut for now. Anita and she had agreed they would sort through the stuff together at some point. No rush.

  She turned the TV on, volume high, to fill the house with the burble of voices while she cooked herself some dinner. Afterwards, she sat gingerly on the sofa, as if any sudden physical move might trigger a disintegration. She clicked on an old series of Frasier and found she could
pretty much enjoy it, letting the episodes roll on, one after the other, lulled into a welcome stupor by the sitcom’s humour and goodwill.

  A storm had gathered itself up since she’d been in the house and, over the sound of the TV, Paula heard the rain start to sluice down. She ran out into the front yard to rescue the paper tributes, tucking them under her shirt to bring inside. After wiping off the water droplets with a tea towel, she laid the letters and cardboard sheets on the kitchen table. Once they dried, she would slip them into plastic sleeves. It would be a sorrowful but satisfying task. It would be something, anyway.

  Her hair and clothes were now quite wet—it was the kind of rain shower that soaked you through within minutes. In wet socks, she padded into the bathroom to towel her hair dry and it was then, in that undefended moment, thrown off her careful course by the sudden storm, that she was pierced by a memory.

  ‘Paula, can you come?’ The sound of Poppy’s voice calling out from the room she shared with Cameron. The little girl had just had a shower, her pyjamas slightly damp from the steamy bathroom, and she was rubbing her long hair dry with a towel.

  ‘Can you please get the knots out of my hair?’ Poppy asked, holding out a brush and a bottle of leave-in conditioner. ‘Mum’s gone to the shops and I can’t do the knots by myself.’

  ‘Oh sure,’ said Paula, but not feeling sure—she’d never de-knotted a child’s hair before.

  Poppy plonked herself on the edge of the bed and flicked her hair back, trusting Paula could do this. Paula worked gently through each section of hair, trying not to tug too hard, while Poppy chattered on about a school excursion to the Maritime Museum. Once Paula was confident she wasn’t yanking Poppy’s scalp in a painful way, she enjoyed the ritual of it, the satisfaction of turning the tousled clumps of hair into a smooth, straight curtain down the girl’s back. She was moved that Poppy trusted her so simply, and she was struck by the intense sweetness of having a connection with a child who wasn’t her own, but a child she’d been given the chance to love.