by Ron Elliott
‘He’ll zap you with his death ray.’ A joke. She was joking.
*
Iris was shown into the visitor’s room. It was empty but not yet cleaned. It smelled of male sweat and crisps. A birthday card lay on one of the tables.
The door was unlocked, Rodney shown in. He was in prison greens, about thirty, and soft around the face with dark curly hair.
‘I’ve been sent to Special Wing.’
‘Hello Rodney.’
‘Some big bloke came up in the yard. I’m gonna get bashed.’ He remained standing. ‘I’m no paedophile and they got me in with the rock spiders. I’m a marked man in here.’
‘It’s to keep you safe.’
‘You gotta get me out.’
‘Not in my power.’
He sat down in the chair opposite Iris. He said, ‘Lisa has dropped the charges.’
‘She didn’t charge you.’
‘Kimberly. Kimberly was mistaken.’
‘I thought we were working on that, mate. I thought we were taking responsibility.’
‘But if she doesn’t give evidence …’
‘It would hurt her, Rodney.’
‘I’d make it up to her. See, I get the empathy. I’d see her right.’
‘I would never support that.’
Rodney stood again.
Iris stood too, stepped back from her chair.
The guard inside the door took a step towards them. He was young and not so big.
Rodney said, ‘How can there be charges if there’s no witnesses?’
‘There are. The police, Child Protection, the GP and me. We’re all witnesses. You too, Rodney. You’re the main witness to this.’
He banged the table.
The guard came all the way forward, ‘Settle down, sport.’
‘Fuckin Lisa shouldn’t have taken her. You fuckin dykes got into their heads. They’ll do me in here.’
‘I know you’re angry, Rodney, and I know you’re scared, but let’s think about Kimberly.’
‘Can we think about me for a sec? How about that?’ he demanded. He glared at Iris, his fists bunching. ‘You’re supposed to be helping me!’
Iris edged back casually to put the table between them. The guard tapped Rodney’s shoulder, stepping back before Rodney could turn. His feet were balanced. ‘You are out of order. Lockup time.’
Rodney glanced at him. Calmed, his head dropping. ‘Right, right man. Sorry. Getting stitched up here.’ He raised his hands showing surrender, compliant. Then he pointed at Iris. ‘You put me in here. You get me out.’ He allowed himself to be led towards the door.
The guard paused there, looking back to Iris.
She shook her head. No trouble. No report. No progress either.
*
Two guards led Iris to the Crisis Centre. She walked across an inner yard, ignoring a distant derisive catcall. It would be dinnertime soon, followed by the long night of prison. A gate was unlocked and relocked. A white door. A white corridor.
The Crisis Centre only had eight beds. It was a secure hospital-like ward which held potential self-harmers and successful self-harmers. Those who harmed others populated other parts of the prison and those particularly vulnerable to those men were held within another protective area. Iris passed a young man with bandages on his wrists. Someone was calling, plaintive, pained. One wall of the cells was open plexiglas, each with a closed-circuit camera. The toilets were visible with non-moving seats. Everything was fixed with rounded edges. Table, bed, toilet. Iris paused at a cell where a man in his thirties sat on his bunk growling to no one, ‘Leave it. Leave it now. Leave it.’ A schizophrenic not taking his medication, in need of a bed somewhere other than in a prison.
The statistics suggested one quarter of the prison population suffered from a diagnosed mental condition. This was besides those with personality disorders: the narcissists, borderlines and sociopaths. This was before they came to prison. Then you could add depression, anxiety and growing feelings of powerlessness. Followed by drug abuse and violence and enormous amounts of empty time.
Halfway down, they came to an Anglo-Indian. He was dressed in prison greens, his left arm bandaged.
He sat on his bunk with his feet on the floor of the cell. Iris detected the barest hint of rocking. He turned to her, when he sensed she wasn’t moving on. He stood and bent slightly in a bow.
Iris stepped to the small round communication holes in the plexiglas.’
Hello,’ said Iris, ‘My name is Iris Foster. What’s yours?’
‘James. You can call me James.’ His accent sounded Australian.
‘Glad to meet you, James.’
‘Really?’
‘Do you know what day it is, James?’
‘Let me see. A lot has happened in a short space of time. We travelled for a day. Some locking up and locking down. Is it Tuesday?’
‘Yes.’
‘Afternoon, nearly evening because I can smell food coming. I don’t watch the news, I’m sorry, so current affairs won’t be a useful topic. Can I choose astronomy for double points?’
‘Have you been psychiatrically assessed before, James?’
‘You remind me of an actress.’
‘Oh.’
‘Jodie Foster.’
‘Why do I remind you of her?’
‘You look like her. The hair, your face. Your figure. Jodie Foster.’
‘My surname too?’
‘What?’
‘Foster. Iris Foster.’
‘Oh, sorry.’ He seemed momentarily uncomfortable, but recovered his grin. ‘Hmm, that was probably the big clue.’
‘She was in Silence of the Lambs, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes, she was.’
‘Would you have a part in the film?’
‘I’m not an actor.’
Well, he wasn’t barking. Perhaps with elevated happiness given his circumstances. Even charming. His thinking seemed ordered if slightly vague. It felt like he was playing games though. An ironic vibe.
‘Do you hear voices, James?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’
‘I hear yours. I can hear murmuring. One of my neighbours is having a bad time. He’s hearing voices, I suspect. Those two guards are talking world soccer.’
‘Why do you light fires?’
He didn’t answer. His shrug might have been apologetic.
‘Tell me about fire, James.’
‘It’s not good. Terrible. Destructive things, fires. Heat.’
Iris felt James was reflexive about the fire, rote, expected replies, which were also disjointed. She watched his face, subtly contorting with an inner demon perhaps. He beat it down, and gave her his attention once more.
‘What’s your surname?’ she asked.
‘I don’t have one. Are you angry with me, Iris?’
‘Where are you from?’
‘You won’t answer my question.’
‘I was asking.’
‘Vee vill ask zee questions.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Mars.’
Iris didn’t say anything.
He smiled, embarrassed, ‘I should answer differently. It always causes such problems.’
‘You appear so human.’
‘Yes. Everyone says that.’ He stood quite still. His hands were clasped before him.
The Norwegian girls had described him as quite beautiful, Iris recalled. ‘You know a lot about Earth. The Silence of the Lambs, for instance.’
‘Yes. I’ve been here for a while. Jodie Foster was also in a film called Contact.’
‘I haven’t seen it.’
‘Oh.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘She discovers aliens.’
‘Ha ha. Really?’
He grimaced.
‘Do you really think you are a Martian, or is it a kind of joke?’
‘No joke.’
‘A little bit?’
‘I understand you think it’s
weird.’
‘Have you always been a Martian?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are there times, were there any times, when you wonder if the whole thing seems a bit “unreal”, like a dream?
‘Yes. Lots of the time. Do you ever feel like that?’
‘You’re educated.’
‘What does educated mean, really?’
‘Yes. You’re right. I’ve heard you can throw knives, juggle.’
‘Would you like me to show you? The juggling, I mean. Have you got items in your purse?’
‘A lighter?’
‘Oh.’ He appeared shamefaced.
‘Do you remember the girls in Candonin?’
‘Where is that?’
‘In the desert, I think.’
‘Ahh.’ It meant something to him.
‘Do you remember you were brought here by policemen?’
‘Yes, I was in the back.’
‘There was a fire.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you want to escape?’
‘I had to get out.’ James walked away from the glass, sitting again on the bunk.
‘How was there a fire?’
‘I crashed. I crashed, we crashed. They were shouting.’
Iris leaned closer to the communication holes to hear him properly. ‘Do you remember the school, James?’
‘I have to get back to them. Get them out.’
‘At the school?’
‘At the crash. There was a crash.’
‘Did you hurt your arm in the crash?’
‘Yes, there was fire.’
‘Yet, you said you crashed a while ago. James, you told me you crashed some time ago.’
He considered his bandaged arm, blinked at it. He looked up at Iris, smiling. ‘I get confused. It can be very confusing on your planet.’
‘Yes, it can.’
Chapter five
Iris went straight to her home office. She and Mathew both had offices on the ground floor. Mathew’s was moderately spartan. Huge desk. Wall of law books. A rug, a single reading chair under the window. Iris joked that Mathew’s home office was modelled on the Third Reich. Space as power. Mathew didn’t like the joke. He called her office ‘the junk shop’.
Iris’s office was cluttered. It had been her workplace at one point. Clients had been able to come around the side of the house, entering directly through the French doors. There was a comfortable couch, other lounge chairs. She still used the wooden filing cabinets to hold the few files she was working on from the practice.
Her office was full of relics. A large painting of a bushfire was on one wall, painted by a child. A battered brass fire-extinguisher sat in a corner, a gift on Iris’s departure from the fire service. Iris still had pictures done by Rosemarie. They charted her life from barely recognisable faces and stick figures all the way to a couple of paintings from Rosemarie’s high school art class. They were all framed, scattered about the walls and cabinets. There was a stethoscope and a microscope in a wooden box, both once owned by her father. A couple of his history books were in the bookcase.
It was the butterflies, however, which dominated. Framed display cases filled the walls. A smaller frame held a purple Lycaeides melissa, another a sole red-banded jezebel. Twenty blue morphos were arranged in a deep wooden frame. Another contained a spiral arrangement of different sized monarchs. Ulysses swallowtails were everywhere, the blue and the green, also the darker Mexican ones with black dots. Once the family discovered Iris’s fascination with butterflies, it became a default gift. The office had never been restful. It positively pulsed with detail and colour.
Iris opened her laptop to her file on Francesca Garbello. It was time to write a letter acknowledging the breakthrough of the recent visit. Francesca had been raped. Her husband was at work, her children inside the house. Francesca was unloading shopping from the car, which was in the garage. She hadn’t closed the garage doors yet. He grabbed her from behind, pushing her face down on the back seat of the family car.
In spite of physical injuries, Francesca tried to keep the rape a secret. Her husband, Carlo, noticed certain of the symptoms, and assumed he had done something to upset her. When he attempted lovemaking, Francesca broke down and told of the assault.
The identification of post-traumatic stress in war veterans in the 70s led to the discovery of many of the same symptoms in rape victims. Indeed, the trauma, loss of power, assault on identity and benevolent world unity were common. Sleep problems, self-blame, anxiety, depression, bipolar, substance abuse and flashbacks were found to be common features in a number of soldiers and many rape victims.
Studies showed that in the first seventy-two hours after a rape, distress was acute. Ninety-four per cent of victims exhibited PTSD symptoms at two weeks, falling to sixty-four per cent at one month, and fifty per cent at three months. Fifty per cent of rape victims can self-heal after three months. For a variety of interlocking reasons, as in unaffected soldiers, these people are resilient enough to mend unassisted. However, the other half-need help. Trauma shatters the sense of self. It breaks the sense of personal autonomy, safety and justice. It also breaches attachments to family and society. Relationships suffer. Social support was essential for recovery.
Francesca, at her husband’s insistence, had gone to Dr Chew a year before for cognitive behavioural therapy. Dr Chew began therapy at first with Francesca, subsequently with Francesca and Carlo. Dr Chew’s files revealed she had been particularly sensitive to the cultural factors which might aid or inhibit Francesca’s recovery. Whilst not a virgin when she married Carlo, Francesca had been with few partners; she counted fidelity as a central tenet of marriage, as did Carlo. Francesca felt she was now dirty, used goods. Her husband would never forgive her for her (unwilling) infidelity. Carlo felt he had not been a man, failed to protect his family. They were both filled with anger because they had not identified or exacted revenge on the rapist who seemed to have escaped completely. Certain of these attitudes were societal ideals, others were bound by gender stories. Dr Chew had unpicked some of these.
She had also explored their family and relationship concepts based on their heritage as traditional Italian Roman Catholics. God’s justice was respected and they were persuaded to talk to a priest about these matters. However, the potential ‘shame’ from wider family was so heavily feared they had decided not to tell their respective families, even though both Dr Chew and later Iris continued discussions concerning which members of their families would understand their pain, would want to help them. Long term, eventually, it might be important to have other family members bear witness to their trauma.
Narratives of self-blame were also evident. Dr Chew was clearly focusing on these with Francesca and Carlo. Of course, Carlo had to go to work. He could not stay at home all the time. Yes, maybe Francesca might have closed the garage door before getting out of the car, which she now did (albeit in a different car). They’d sold the other car, moved houses. She did have to go shopping. She might have gone to the police and therefore obtained DNA evidence. This evidence may or may not have caught the culprit. Many people do not report rape. Francesca felt it would be like being assaulted again, by doctors, or by having her shame paraded to the world. It was also natural for Francesca to want to try to wash the dirt from her body, to want to crawl away – not to die, to recover.
Dr Chew had worked with them both concerning the negative self-narrative around Francesca’s perceived failure to fight back. She had fought. She had protected her children through her actions of compliance in a situation beyond her control. She continued to fight back, in recovering, in remaining strong for her husband and children.
In their new life, they phoned each other a couple of times a day. Francesca was no longer hypervigilant or numbed. Her drinking was down to one glass of wine with dinner. She no longer experienced flashbacks of the assault, except when she and Carlo attempted intercourse. The specific stimuli surrounding imminent penetration caused Francesca
panic attacks in which she couldn’t breathe and felt imagined pain. Iris was helping them with their lovemaking. It was time to highlight how far they had come in a therapeutic letter.
Dear Francesca and Carlo,
I am writing this letter to congratulate you both on the amazing journey you’ve shared with me. My intention here is to celebrate with you how far you have both come and to remind you about how strong and loving you are. I hope you might be able to refer to this letter in the future, should the snake start to try to sneak back into your lives from time to time (as we agreed, mainly when you are tired or feeling insecure).
*
Iris heard Mathew come in around six, but she kept working on the letter. She wanted to bring in the phrase ‘feed the love, starve the fear’. She also wanted to highlight Carlo’s patience in his wife’s recovery as a sign of their ongoing commitment to each other.
She might finish before she got ready for the dinner. It was an important law society do. Round tables of husbands and wives in black tie, ball gowns. It was a fundraiser for multiple sclerosis, also a see-and-be-seen affair. Networking. Weaving. Mathew Foster, charming, judicial.
The practice of law, of course, was boring. It was clerical, fernickety, time-consuming. It was an occupation of margins, of reducing risk, of exploiting increments. Except when one of them had a high-profile court case, although they were not supposed to share, especially at such events.
A couple of wives were friends outside the office and they compared children’s tales that soon became too specific, too prolonged and too self-referential. Many of the men in the office went cycling together, which was a difficult conversation to join. Two of the lawyer’s partners were interesting. Jacinta’s husband, Thomas, was in education at the university, often provocative. Roland’s wife, June, was an arts administrator, always very witty about visiting actors and drunk artists.
At six thirty, Mathew appeared at Iris’s office door, already dressed in his tuxedo.
‘Oh,’ said Iris peering at him past the glare of her desk lamp. ‘I’ll get ready. I thought we were leaving at seven thirty.’ She stood.
‘I thought I’d go in early for drinks.’
‘Right. Well, all right. Shall I meet you at the do?’
‘You hate these things.’
