The Family Doctor

by Debra Oswald

  ‘Oh. Yes. Yes!’ she said quickly. ‘Please.’

  He sat next to her on the bench seat.

  ‘Sorry if I’m a bit …’ Anita mimed being spaced out and, by way of explanation, she added, ‘I was on that fraud trial today.’

  ‘Phoo … those endless pages of figures.’ He shook his head. ‘That stuff fries my brain.’

  ‘Me too. I was never good at sums. Had a maths teacher who made me chant “Numbers are my friends” over and over.’

  ‘Did it help?’

  ‘Apparently not. I’m still barely numerate,’ she said.

  Rohan smiled.

  Anita closed her eyes and puffed out a breath, defeated.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Please excuse me. I don’t think I’m capable of chatting like a regular human being. Not to you, especially.’

  She felt him looking at her, concerned more than offended, but she still worried she might have been rude, so she added, ‘Sorry if that sounds—I just meant that because you’re connected to Stacey’s case, engaging in small talk is hard to—y’know … Sorry.’

  Rohan nodded. No explanation was required. Then he said, ‘I’m happy to engage in big talk, if you want.’

  He said the words lightly. No pressure. She felt her stomach muscles—permanently knotted tight these days—relax a little, with that sense of being at ease with the other person. She turned the beer glass on the table in front of her and let a silence sit there. It struck her that even the silence was comfortable with this guy.

  Eventually, she said, ‘I wish you could’ve met Stacey. Oh shit—is it okay for me to talk to you about a victim in a coronial case that you’re working on?’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘If Stacey was here right now, she’d be like an energy source in the room. But she wouldn’t try to be the centre of attention or anything. She’d galvanise the place, connect people, get them talking to each other. Contagious enthusiasm. People used to wait for her to arrive at a party, you know? And she wasn’t only like that in a crowd. I mean, even when it was just the two of us, I was always the best version of myself with Stacey. I was funnier and smarter and nicer—if that makes any sense.’

  ‘It does. I’ve got a cousin who’s that person for me.’

  He smiled broadly just thinking about this cousin. Anita realised she’d only ever seen him in the context of crime scenes and court appearances and sombre moments, when a bold smile would not have been appropriate. This was the first time she’d seen Rohan Mehta smile with full wattage. It was a good smile.

  Then he asked, ‘Do you reckon you were smarter and funnier with Stacey, or did it just feel that way?’

  ‘Legitimate question. I don’t know. I’m such a suggestible person, I can’t judge. With my friend Paula, I often feel like I’m too impulsive, neurotic, a “silly duffer”, but that’s not Paula’s fault. It’s not because of something she’s doing to me. Well, Paula can radiate a bit of that patronising doctor thing—but it’s totally benign and it comes from good intentions. Shit … sorry, I feel disloyal saying that.’

  ‘No, don’t worry, I get it,’ he assured her. ‘It’s a manner a lot of doctors take on, don’t you reckon?’

  ‘I do. And look, the main thing to say is that Paula’s a wonderful doctor. I’ve snooped online—those review sites where people rate their doctors. Patients all love her, really rely on her, trust her advice.’

  ‘And you do too.’

  ‘God, yeah. Sometimes I vow to hide my fuck-ups from Paula, but I never can. I have to tell her every important thing in my life, even if I know she’s going to tell me I’m a silly duffer. In the end, I always want that bracing advice from her.’ Anita barked a laugh and Rohan smiled.

  ‘Mind you,’ Anita added, ‘I’m a woman with a long CV of defunct relationships, dealing with the internet dating circus, so how can I realistically discuss my experiences with a woman who met Mr Perfect on her first day at medical school?’

  ‘This is Paula’s husband who died?’

  ‘Yeah. Remy. He was a neurologist. Described himself as an ABC—Australian-born Chinese. Very kind guy and so handsome—I’m talking joke-handsome. We were expecting them to have absurdly beautiful children soon. Until Remy was diagnosed with sarcoma. He was gone within nine months.’

  ‘That’s brutal. Poor Paula.’

  ‘Yes. Impossibly sad. But, y’know, she was incredible all through it. Handled it like a fucking goddess.’

  As more people left the table—heading home or to dinner or to another drinking establishment—Anita stayed talking to Rohan. It struck her that he was a guy who actually listened to the person he was with and—a miracle—asked follow-up questions. Anita knew how rare that was. So often, when she was supposedly having a conversation with a man, she would find herself interviewing the guy, asking questions, then follow-up questions, as the gentleman yabbered happily on. Sure, as a journalist, it was easy for her to fall into interviewer mode, but it wasn’t only her. She’d heard many other women complain about the same experience. When stuck at dreary functions, Anita had a game she played in her own head. How many questions can I ask this guy in a row before he asks me one single question? The record stood at forty-eight.

  On this evening, she found herself in the unfamiliar and embarrassing position of being the one doing all the yabbering without asking questions of the other person. She quickly changed gear to balance things up.

  ‘So tell me,’ she asked Rohan, ‘why did you decide to become a cop?’

  ‘Oh … Do you want a short answer or the quaint childhood idealism version?’

  ‘As quaint and idealistic and childhood-y as possible, please.’

  ‘Okay, well, when I was a kid, my parents had a restaurant—they still do. Indian restaurant.’

  ‘Delicious food?’

  ‘Yes, very delicious. We lived in the flat above, and when Mum and Dad were working downstairs, my sisters and I would be minded by our grandparents. My grandparents were addicted to old British TV detective shows, so I was too.’

  ‘Your dream was to be a gruff, tweedy detective inspector?’

  ‘Pretty much, yeah. What got me hooked—I liked the way an episode would start with all this confusion and mess after a murder, people upset, and then the detective would march in, put the pieces together, and create—you know …’

  ‘Harmony.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘I decided I wanted to do that: calmly show up after a bad thing has happened, find the solution and make everything better for people.’

  ‘So it was a noble career choice.’

  ‘The trouble was, my parents—’ Rohan stopped mid-sentence and groaned.

  ‘Oh wait,’ Anita gasped with mock horror, ‘don’t tell me you got good marks in high school? Oh no, hang on, you didn’t have good enough results to get into a law degree, did you?’

  Rohan went with the joke, nodding with exaggerated sombreness.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Anita.

  ‘Thank you. Clearly you can understand how devastated my parents were when I studied criminology and joined the police force.’

  ‘But they’re proud of you now?’

  Rohan laughed. ‘Oh no, still wretchedly and loudly disappointed.’

  Anita winced with serious sympathy this time.

  Rohan shrugged. ‘I’m a thirty-six-year-old man. I can deal with it.’

  ‘And being a real-life detective, how close is it to what Little Rohan imagined?’

  ‘Ha. Well, different in a multitude of ways, as you might guess,’ he said. ‘For one thing, in a TV detective show, if someone looks guilty but it’s only thirty-five minutes into the episode, you think, “Oh, that obviously guilty guy can’t be the murderer,” because you know there’s another twist coming. In TV, the audiences are trained to expect twists, to assume that “nothing is what it seems”.’

  ‘But in reality …’

  ‘In reality, we get a call and walk into a house—�
�

  ‘Walk in to see a woman and two kids dead on the floor, and the estranged husband with a self-inflicted gunshot wound,’ Anita said.

  ‘Yes. And that scene—it is what it looks like. The thing about real police work, there are virtually never any twists. Might be a more constructive process if there were twists we could undo. But I mean, we walk into that house—we know what’s happened, we know what it is—but … oh fuck … then what?’

  Anita realised that she’d steered the conversation into a dark place, but Rohan seemed okay with that. That was an advantage of hanging out with cops and the journos who routinely covered ugly stories. They were used to ugly. Dark things were understood, with no need to discuss them overtly. But then, if you did end up going there, you knew the other person could handle it more easily than a civilian could.

  ‘You mean because the tragic scene in that house isn’t a mystery with an answer?’ said Anita.

  ‘In a TV drama or a mystery novel, the puzzle gets solved by the end of the story and that neutralises the danger from the psychopath or the “unlikely killer” or whatever kind of monster it is. But in the real job, we can’t kid ourselves. Things are usually pretty much what they seem. We can’t hope for twists. And monsters are still out there.’

  Mehta sounded resigned to that, and Anita felt a spike of annoyance. ‘But even if there’s no puzzle to solve, there’s urgency—I mean, to stop it from happening to the next woman, that’s an urgent fucking matter, isn’t it?’

  Anita realised she’d snapped at him, firing an unfair amount of anger in his direction. But he seemed to understand and not take it the wrong way.

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘It’s urgent.’

  ‘But I guess at the point you homicide guys are involved in a case, the terrible thing has already happened,’ Anita said.

  Mehta nodded bleakly.

  ‘Same for me. I sit in court covering one murder trial after another. Another dead woman and then another woman, and I don’t … The system is fucked.’

  ‘I don’t disagree,’ Rohan said. ‘How could I disagree? We’re failing every day.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to suggest what you do isn’t … Getting justice for people after the terrible thing has happened—that’s still something.’

  ‘Yes, it’s something.’

  They both stared at the tabletop for a few moments, letting the weight of that settle around them—settle enough that they could give themselves permission to talk about something else. Eventually, they got talking about a recent trial, about food, about their families.

  Anita realised quite a few people had left by this time. It occurred to her that she could stay longer, and if he stayed longer (he was making no sign of leaving), it would just be the two of them.

  She felt comfortable with Rohan. Really, she had to admit, she was attracted to him. He was a thoughtful man and certainly a very beautiful man. But the attraction felt incongruous, improper. This was the detective working on her friend’s murder. Even Anita—not renowned for the wisdom of her choices with romantic partners—could see that might not be a wise move at this point.

  ‘I should go,’ she announced abruptly and stood up.

  ‘Oh,’ Rohan said. ‘Sorry. Was it a mistake to talk about—’

  ‘No. You haven’t made any mistakes. I was up for talking about it. And thank you. It was good. Good to chat.’

  She gave an awkward farewell wave and slipped out towards the street. Good to chat? Chat? What sort of ludicrous way was that to describe the exchange they’d just had? Sometimes Anita reckoned she had the social skills of gormless fourteen-year-old.

  On the bus home, she texted Paula.

  Went to the pub tonight and talked like a regular human being. A xx

  I’m proud of you. P xx

  Anita decided not to mention her conversation with Rohan. Instead, she texted: It’s good to get out of the house. Shall we find some live music to go to this weekend?

  I’d love that. Call you tomorrow morning. Sleep well. P

  By the time Paula received Anita’s text, she’d already accepted she wasn’t going to sleep well that night.

  She was sitting in the kitchen, drinking ginger tea, scrolling around on her laptop. Since the funeral, she’d been methodically sifting through old photos of Stacey and Matt, hunting for the first hints of what was going to happen. This was her version of a hospital morbidity and mortality meeting, reviewing available evidence to understand what symptoms she’d missed, how she should have handled it better.

  There was a shot taken in Stacey and Matt’s first year, in the garden of the house Anita, Paula and Stacey were renting together. Stacey and Matt were both so inconceivably young, with luminous skin and shining hair. Paula examined the curl of Matt’s mouth—the way the smile was always on the verge of turning into a self-pitying pout.

  He used to tell anyone who would listen that Stacey had ‘rescued’ him. She would always add that the rescue was mutual. Since she was a teenager, Stacey had talked about her ‘family deficit’, the feeling that she’d been rejected by her father and by extended family on both sides. Right from the start, Matt offered to fix the deficit she felt. ‘We will make our own family,’ he would say and Stacey would nod, eyes full of tears. He got a hook into the most vulnerable part of her.

  By the end of their first year together, he had ditched all his other social connections and invested his emotional life entirely in her. He rang Stacey countless times a day, left romantic notes for her to find and would pop up unexpectedly at events to bring her some cute gift or food treat. Matt’s obsessiveness had always made Paula and Anita uneasy and the two of them analysed it endlessly.

  One Easter weekend, still in the early years, the three women had rented a holiday cottage at Bundeena. This was not long before Stacey fell pregnant with Cameron, so it should have been the opportunity for Paula to say something, to intervene and prevent the catastrophe.

  Bundeena was meant to be a girls-only weekend—no boyfriends invited. Remy had been happy to stay home (he was on call at the hospital anyway) and Anita’s then beau, Secretly Married Martin, was also content not to come. (It would later become clear that he had family duties, including an Easter egg hunt with his small children, whose existence he had not yet revealed to Anita.) Matt was a different story. He hated Stacey being away. He phoned her several times and finally manipulated her into agreeing to return a day early.

  On Sunday morning, Paula and Stacey headed off on a bushwalk, leaving Anita to sleep off a hangover in the cottage. Paula figured this might be a good chance to broach her worries. More low-key, just Stacey and Paula, so there’d be no sense of two ganging up against one.

  Paula aimed to keep her tone chatty as she asked, ‘Do you ever worry that Matt is a bit … I don’t know … a bit too dependent on you?’

  Stacey barked a laugh and prodded her finger into Paula’s ribs. ‘I love the way you phrase that as a question when clearly what you’re thinking is “Stacey should definitely worry that Matt is too dependent on her”.’

  ‘Oh. Well—sorry. I was only—’

  Stacey clutched Paula’s arm with mock panic. ‘Ooh, do you think I should be worried, doctor?’

  ‘Okay. Piss off. I’ll shut up.’

  But a few steps further along the path, Stacey said, ‘The thing is, Paula, I’m not an idiot. I hear the way Matt talks—as if I’m a hundred per cent responsible for his happiness. Which I realise is unhealthy. And the kind of sludgy underside of that is he thinks I’m responsible for his unhappiness too. If anything goes wrong—like when he failed his course last semester—he can only process it by blaming me, by finding some reason that what’s happened is my fault. He thinks I’m the only person who can make him happy, but flip that and it means if he ever feels bad about himself, I must be the one making him feel bad. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do. And look, you can obviously see—’

  ‘That’s it—I do see w
hat’s going on. Me and Matt are working on it. Because I love him and we’ll find our way through this.’

  Even way back then, Stacey had insight into what was happening. But the insight didn’t save her. She was an intelligent, capable woman with friends who cared about her, and that didn’t save her either.

  By the time Cameron was five and Poppy was three, Matt had been sacked from many jobs, dropped out of courses, regarding himself as a victim of rip-offs by bad people. Stacey stuck by him, joked him out of sulky moods, boosted his confidence, financed his schemes. Really, Matt had exploited the very best impulses in Stacey—her stoicism, her generous heart, her ability to forgive. He took those strengths and twisted them back on her, made them into shackles. Paula despised him for that.

  Next, she clicked on a photo from two years ago—Remy in hospital, having chemo in that ghastly floral armchair she spent a lot of energy hating, as if tasteless upholstery was the main problem they were facing. Stacey was perched on the side of the chair, one arm around Remy and the other pointing to the chemo drugs with a flourish, like a TV presenter. As soon as Stacey heard about Remy’s diagnosis, she had arranged to come down from Maryvale to visit.

  In the next photo, Cameron was in the armchair, folding himself around Remy as if he could cure him through the power of his fervent wishing. Poppy sat cross-legged on the floor between Remy’s legs, her little hands planted on his bony knees. Remy loved those kids and he was so grateful Stacey had brought them down. Paula should have persuaded her to stay in Sydney then and not go back to Matt. That was what she should have done.

  There was a photo taken the last time Paula and Anita visited the Maryvale property: Stacey posed in front of the new tractor, draping her hair forward to cover the bruises on her jawline.

  Anita had asked straight out, ‘How did you get those bruises?’

  ‘Oh lordy.’ Stacey laughed. ‘Clumsy me tripped over in the machine shed, landed on top of this very tractor, sprawled out like a cartoon character.’

  Paula and Anita had known the explanation was a rehearsed lie. But they’d both also sensed the shame Stacey was feeling and they didn’t want to embarrass her. So they let all the lies she told that weekend go unchallenged.