The Family Doctor

by Debra Oswald

  It was really only then that it hit Anita she would be staying the night in police custody. She was facing serious charges and there was no way she could appear before a judge to be bailed on a Sunday. She would have to spend a night in the station lock-up.

  Rohan negotiated with the officer on duty to let him bring dinner back for Anita and allow the two of them to eat together in the lock-up. They balanced plates on their laps, with food containers on two stools like a small table set between them.

  ‘Thanks for dinner. This is like a weirdly austere version of a private dining room,’ Anita said, attempting to be light-hearted.

  Rohan poked at his food and frowned. ‘I’m sorry you have to spend the night here. Fuck …’

  Anita realised he was annoyed with himself for not being able to fix everything.

  ‘I’ll survive,’ she assured him. ‘Thank you for looking after me. It pays to have a friend with connections on the inside.’

  They both made an effort to smile at each other.

  It struck Anita with absolute clarity that making a life with this man was something she desperately wanted to do. But that left the question of whether he would have any interest in pursuing a committed relationship with an anxious and impulsive woman who kept secrets from him and had now killed a man.

  Anita slept surprisingly well in the lock-up that night. Rohan had talked about booking himself into a motel in town, but in the morning Anita discovered he’d chosen to stay close during the night, in case she needed him. The young constable described seeing Detective Mehta sleeping in one of the back rooms of the station, lying on a short vinyl sofa with his feet propped on a chair.

  On the afternoon of the Monday, Anita appeared before the magistrate in the courthouse an hour up the highway. She was charged with murder—as she had expected—but the police didn’t oppose bail and she was released on her own recognisance.

  Everyone—the lawyer she’d called for advice, other mates in the judicial system, as well as Rohan—everyone was telling her that the DPP wouldn’t proceed with the murder charge in the end. She concentrated on keeping hold of those assurances so anxiety wouldn’t incapacitate her.

  Anita walked into the Sydney hospital room still wearing the clothes she’d worn to the court appearance, because she’d driven straight here, wanting to see Paula before she did anything else.

  She hung back from the hospital bed when she realised Paula was asleep. She looked awful. One side of her face, around the cheekbone and eye socket, was purple and swollen like an eggplant. Her neck was swathed in lurid bruises. But underneath all that wreckage, Anita could see Paula’s skin was pink and alive, not the dead grey when she’d been lying on the consulting room floor.

  Because of the severity of the attack, the doctors were keeping Paula in hospital to monitor her for blood clots, pulmonary oedema and whatever other damage could be done by a near-fatal strangulation.

  By now, Anita had learned about the assaults in the pub. A woman had barged in, inexplicably struck two strangers with a chair and then rushed out. Rohan reckoned it was very clear from the CCTV footage that the woman was Paula and that she’d mistaken one of the male victims for Curtis Wigney.

  When Paula finally opened her one good eye, Anita could see it was flecked with red from broken blood vessels. Her voice came out shredded and hoarse, ‘Hello, friend.’

  Anita leaned over to kiss her on the less-battered side of her face and said, ‘I love the short hair. Not sure about the rest of this look you’ve got going.’

  ‘Was that an insult?’ Paula asked. ‘You’ll have to speak up if you’re going to critique my look. My hearing’s dodgy at the moment—ringing in the ears.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m a bit deaf too, on account of the gunshot noise when I saved your life.’

  ‘Oh good lord, am I going to have to grovel and say thank you constantly for the rest of our lives?’ asked Paula.

  Anita waggled her head. ‘Well, you know, a generous amount of grateful grovelling would be appreciated. We can work out a voucher system.’

  Paula smiled, but when she spoke again she sounded more serious. ‘I’m sorry I lured you into becoming a violent criminal.’

  ‘No, no, it’s great. Liberating in a way. We should rock up to the next Parramatta High School reunion. Paula Kaczmarek and Anita Delgado: Most Likely to Commit Major Crimes.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ Paula wailed. ‘It hurts my throat.’

  ‘Listen, doctor, because you assaulted those guys in the pub, you’re going to need legal representation.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I can find you a good lawyer, have someone standing by.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Paula. ‘Do you know how Nicole Wigney is doing? And the kids?’

  ‘Nicole’s in hospital, St Vincent’s, going pretty well. The kids are in good shape, I’m told. With their grandparents.’

  Paula nodded, drew in a breath to ask more questions, but her breath was shuddery and she was too upset to speak.

  ‘Paula. It’s all good. Well, I mean, not all good obviously, given you’re lying there half dead and we’re both facing heavy-duty charges—but don’t forget you saved those kids. You saved those kids.’

  Paula flapped her hand in the air. ‘Don’t make me cry. Don’t set me off. Crying hurts my throat too.’

  Anita reached out her arms to hug her. It was tricky—with drips and catheters and battered body parts to be avoided—but the two women managed to fold each other in close.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE SEATBELT CHAFED ACROSS ANITA’S BELLY, WHICH WAS sticking out quite a bit now she’d hit the six-month mark in her pregnancy.

  The prospect of the baby had gone some way to improving relations between her and Rohan’s parents. The Mehta sisters had been lovely to Anita from the start, but the parents were, understandably, unnerved by the idea of their son shacking up with a woman who’d shot a man. Rohan promised her their last stiff layer of caution would melt away once the baby was born.

  Anita always expected her parents, brothers and extended family would love Rohan, but under the circumstances in which they met him—as the lovely supportive boyfriend of a woman charged with murder—their positive assessment of him had spun up to the level of nauseating adoration. Rohan was considered so saintly, as well as being handsome with beautiful manners, the Delgado family felt the need to constantly remind Anita how very lucky she was to have him. Rohan claimed not to notice his perfect-man-beyond-anything-Anita-deserves status and that only irritated her more.

  During the period the Department of Public Prosecutions was considering her case, Anita took leave without pay from the newspaper. She was now the subject of media stories, facing criminal charges, so it would be untenable and ridiculous to work as a journalist in the courts.

  She used the time off to revisit the research she’d done into domestic violence and develop it into a book. Whether she liked it or not, Anita’s personal story would always be connected to this material, now that she was notorious in a small way, so she gave in to that new reality and wrote about Stacey and about her own experience of shooting a man, including selected details about Paula.

  All along, everyone kept assuring Anita the DPP would eventually drop the murder charges against her once they’d shuffled sufficient paperwork around for sufficient time. Even so, when that decision came through three months after the Wigney shooting, her relief was so overwhelming she began to hyperventilate and had to rush to the ladies and breathe into a paper bag to recover.

  That night, she and Rohan celebrated with a ritual destruction of all contraception and they fell pregnant that same week. Anita liked to imagine her egg and his sperm hovering there, waiting for the DPP to make a decision—and then, the minute the no-bill came through, the gametes rushed towards each other to make a baby.

  Anita knew her way around the car park at Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre now. She’d visited every week, sometimes twice a week, for the nine mo
nths Paula had been an inmate.

  Paula had been arrested the day she was discharged from hospital, as expected, then taken to Central Local Court and charged with assaulting the two men in the pub. Rohan was confident she would be granted bail, but Paula had declined to apply. Everyone, except Anita, was bewildered by her decision.

  From the very beginning, Paula offered guilty pleas to the assaults and, after four months on remand, the sentencing hearing was set down for a court in Wollongong. Anita wanted to be there for the hearing and Rohan took the day off to go with her. It was a strange kind of outing for the two of them.

  Many friends, colleagues and patients had offered Paula financial help for legal costs and suggested themselves as character witnesses, but she declined all of that, insisting that nothing be done and no evidence presented to mitigate her sentence.

  In the Wollongong courtroom, Paula’s lawyer looked uncomfortable to be following her rigid instructions, anxious he wasn’t doing a proper job for his client, but Paula appeared composed, resigned, relieved that this process was being finalised.

  The judge, a thoughtful, compassionate woman in her fifties, seemed as uncomfortable as the lawyer about the lack of material being presented on Paula’s behalf.

  ‘This is a curious matter,’ the judge said, baffled, scanning the papers in front of her as if they might suddenly offer up some clarification she hadn’t noticed before. ‘The accused is clearly a woman of prior excellent character and the court can take the early guilty plea as an indication of remorse. However, the accused has offered no explanation for her actions and the injuries she inflicted are serious.’

  The judge sentenced Paula to eighteen months, with twelve months’ non-parole.

  On the drive home from Wollongong, Rohan didn’t say anything at first and Anita didn’t want to misjudge the moment by chatting about something trivial, so they travelled in silence for a long time.

  Eventually he said, ‘You know, Paula could have avoided a custodial sentence, most likely.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean, I would happily have testified on her behalf—about the trauma with Stacey and the children. We could’ve organised psych assessments, character witnesses. There was no need for her to cop a sentence that tough.’

  Anita nodded. ‘Paula knows that. But she wants to be punished. Because she feels guilty about the things she’s done.’ The silence after that went on for several uncomfortable beats too long, long enough for Anita to realise Rohan understood that the bad things Paula had done must include more than the assaults in the pub.

  He kept his gaze locked on the road ahead as he said, ‘I’m not going to ask you what that means.’

  ‘Okay,’ Anita replied.

  It was just as well this exchange happened when they were in the car, both facing forward. If they’d made eye contact in that moment, Anita wasn’t confident she would have been able to conceal anything from him. Of course, Rohan had no reason to suspect Paula had killed Ian Ferguson, but it was likely he guessed Paula had something to do with John Santino’s death and that Anita knew about it.

  After that conversation in the car, there was a kind of tacit agreement: he would never ask her and she would never tell him.

  Anita would always have to live with her guilt about concealing the two murders. It was like carrying a chunk of darkness around inside. For the sake of Rochelle and Brooke and their kids, she would keep Paula’s secret, but she could never feel completely at ease with that.

  In the months after she killed Curtis Wigney, Anita waited for something like crippling remorse to hit her, but it never really did. That man was going to kill Paula. She hated that it had happened, but she never doubted she’d done the right thing. It was surprising—she was someone generally simmering with self-doubt, but not when it came to the most extreme thing she’d ever done.

  When Anita passed through security at Silverwater and entered the visiting area, she nodded hello to the prison officers she’d come to know. To begin with, the staff had assumed Anita was Paula’s romantic partner, but when Rohan joined her on a few visits, it shook their theory. Then one of the staff twigged that Anita was the woman who’d shot the deadshit guy down the south coast and the officers were even more confused by her. She quite enjoyed giving off an air of mystery.

  Paula walked out in her dull green prison tracksuit. ‘Hello, lovely. Thanks for coming.’

  ‘We’ve discussed this,’ Anita reminded her. ‘You don’t have to thank me every time I visit.’

  Paula shrugged and smiled. Even after all these months, Anita was struck by how different her friend looked. The blonde dye had grown out but Paula still kept her hair cropped very short. Her face was gaunt, with a scar around her eye socket where the butt of Curtis Wigney’s rifle had connected. Her body was way more muscular from the tenacious fitness and martial arts regime she was following in jail. Her voice was different too, with a permanent husky tone from the strangulation injury to her throat.

  Once the two women started talking, Anita would look into Paula’s eyes and listen to her speak with such concern for fellow inmates, her plans to fix problems for everyone in her orbit. Anita would feel reassured that under the layer of prison uniform and toughened body, the old tender Paula was still there. But underneath that was another even deeper layer—the part of this woman that would always be altered because of what had happened, in ways that only Anita fully understood.

  ‘Anyway, enough of me blathering about stuff in here,’ said Paula. ‘Tell me how the pregnancy’s going. Is your heartburn still bad? When’s the next scan? Have you and Rohan found a new place to live? Now I wish I hadn’t sold my house so fast—you guys could’ve lived there.’

  Paula had put the Earlwood house on the market when she first went to jail, then arranged, via a lawyer, to give a generous chunk of the proceeds to the two men she’d assaulted. Anita understood and respected that impulse, but she was trying to persuade Paula to keep enough money from the house sale so she could buy a small flat after her release. It was unclear how Paula would make a living once she was out, having been deregistered as a doctor.

  Within the jail, she’d very quickly become known as The Doc, like something out of a cheesy prison movie. Some inmates needed convincing that Paula wasn’t going to act snobby because she was a doctor, but once word spread about The Doc’s story—she’d been almost killed defending two kids from a violent man—it earned her a degree of respect from her fellow prisoners.

  Paula could talk endlessly to Anita about the vulnerable people she’d met in there, women trapped in abusive relationships, likely to be sucked back into those risky situations once they were released. She would launch into her slightly bossy benign doctor mode with some of the women, especially the younger ones, making sure they knew their legal rights and the resources they could use, urging them to learn self-defence techniques, encouraging them to believe they were worth more than being bashed and terrorised. Maybe the women were prepared to accept her helpful bossiness because they sussed out that Dr Kaczmarek truly didn’t think she was morally superior to anyone.

  For many of the inmates, Paula had become a mentor, a coach, a mother figure. A warrior-mother. A she-wolf.

  Lately, Paula had spoken a lot about Leila, a young woman due for release in a couple of weeks, desperate to be with her kids, who had been living with her sister. But she was terrified of her violent ex-boyfriend—he’d threatened to follow the sister to the jail on the day Leila got out and track her down. So Paula had recruited Anita to help, coordinating with the sister to set up a safe escape route. Anita would whisk Leila away from the

  Silverwater gates on the day of her release and take her to a place where she could be reunited with the sister and the kids.

  Anita knew Paula had started developing ideas for a kind of underground railroad for women who needed support to escape dangerous men, help beyond the services official refuges could offer. In Paula’s mind, it was something she could coordina
te from inside the jail, with Anita’s help on the outside, and then she could build on it after her release. The plan was probably crazy. Almost certainly dangerous and unwise. But there was never any doubt in Anita’s mind that she would be Paula’s ally in this campaign, in whatever way she was able.

  Sometimes Paula would ask Anita for news of Ruby, Jye and Nicole. Nicole had written to thank Paula for helping her kids and Anita had stayed in contact with the grandparents. The latest report was that Jye was boisterously happy at big school and Ruby was doing well in year nine, only going off at the mouth and landing in trouble every now and then. Nicole’s physical recovery was solid, and she’d started working at the council swimming pool.

  The warning buzzer sounded for the end of visiting time.

  ‘Oh, it’s always too soon,’ Anita groaned.

  ‘Wait one sec,’ said Paula. ‘Give me a proper look at the belly.’

  Anita stood up and posed flamboyantly with her gigantic belly.

  ‘You’re so beautiful,’ Paula murmured.

  Anita huffed a laugh. ‘The security guy always gives me the greasy eyeball like he suspects it’s a fake belly I’m using to smuggle drugs and weapons in here.’

  ‘Forget that stuff,’ said Paula. ‘Sneak in some decent food.’

  ‘Next you’ll want me to smuggle in protein powder and anabolic steroids, now that you’re in training to be a competitive bodybuilder.’

  Paula gave her a sly smile. ‘What can I say? My body is my weapon.’

  The trickiest part of the day for Paula was trying to fall asleep on the unyielding narrow bed in her cell.

  Prison hadn’t proved as bad as her friends had feared. The many small deprivations and humiliations she faced as an inmate felt appropriate, even welcome, in what she realised was a deep-seated desire to be punished. But, really, none of that stuff mattered to her much. The burdens she was carrying in her head were far more important than the physical restrictions.