Green Dream

by Robert Gollagher

  By now, Michael could walk well enough to go across the road to the river. He spent a lot of time sitting by the riverbank or walking a short way along the bicycle path. He would go out in the heat and watch the seagulls. He avoided the river on weekends, when there would be boats about and too many people picnicking, playing with their children, or – at night – netting for prawns, but on weekdays, during the heat of the day, there were few people about and Michael would watch the gulls whirling and drifting in the hot summer air. His thoughts brought him no peace, they were just the same old thoughts that kept going around and around in his head and which never provided him with any answers. It was the same guilt and the same misery. There was nothing new. The river was not beautiful to him. It was simply there. The motion of the gulls merely gave his eyes something to look at, while inside him the bitter tide of his emotions ebbed and flowed.

  He wasn’t really getting better at all. The psychiatrist knew it and Michael knew it. The only thing he was getting better at was giving people the illusion that he was okay. In truth, he was worse than ever. The world seemed more empty and more pointless to him with the passing of every meaningless day. What was there for him, now? Life without Marie was hardly life at all, and life, knowing that he was responsible – no matter what anyone said – for Marie’s death, and for Ian’s and Diane’s, was barely something that he could open his eyes to each morning.

  Sometimes he wished that he would fall asleep and that the morning would never come. That would be justice. He couldn’t live with his guilt. Michael Andrews was losing the battle to live, and he was trying to hide that fact, from the psychiatrist, by cheerfully reporting he was painting again, and from Ruth, by heeding her encouragement to go walking. And so he came across to the river and thought the same thoughts and felt the same guilt and watched the world grow greyer and greyer. The long slide had begun. The slope that he would have to climb to get up again was getting steeper and more slippery by the minute. Michael was dying.

  The greyness came to him often, stronger and stronger. Not quite two weeks after Christmas, he went outside near midnight and looked around at the garden. There was a bright moon which bathed the garden in an eerie false twilight. Above him, the stars were dim. It had been six weeks since Michael had come to live with Ruth and nearly five months since the accident. He had hoped that he might have forgiven himself by now, but that hope had grown faint. He had hoped that leaving the hospital would lessen his pain, once he got back into a more normal environment, but he only felt worse. The emotional pain was unbearable. His bones had healed and his spirit had broken. Michael went back inside. He went to his room.

  In the room, he closed the door and looked at the heavy doorframe – a man could hang from that, he thought. He remembered W.B. Yeats’s famous poem about death and about flight: ‘In balance with this life, this death.’ It seemed to Michael that it would be a perfect balance, to die now. He didn’t care about himself and perhaps his death would atone for what happened, in some way putting right the injustice that occurred when he lived and the others died. And, besides that, there was also the pain to be considered. For all his contempt of himself, for letting his friends die, he still did not believe that he must continue to torture himself by living in such an empty world. There was nothing for him here, any more, and his grieving was beyond description. He did not hate himself so very much that he would consent to living a life of misery, and a life of misery was all that he could see ahead of him. To die seemed both justice for his failings and the only truthful answer to Shakespeare’s old question. There was a kind of crazy courage that a suicidal man can know, which Michael had that night. To Michael, the idea of suicide did not seem crazy, it seemed like the only just and fitting ending to his life, and to him it would certainly not be an act of cowardice but one of courage, to both pay his debt for what he had done and to boldly choose the second answer to the great question: not to be. But he could not do that to Ruth. He could not have her find his lifeless body swinging from a rope in this room. He couldn’t do it here. And he was not ready, not yet. He still had to make peace with the turbulent thoughts inside him. He didn’t want to die confused. He wanted to die in one mind. Michael could not hope for any peace from his crushing guilt, but at least he wanted the storm in his mind to grow calm and for the end to come without confusion. But it would not be tonight. He couldn’t do that to Ruth.

  Michael broke down and cried.

  And then he slept.

  Ruth was not aware of just how close Michael was to not living any more, but she was worried. In the morning, when Michael had gone to the garden and set up his easel, then sat in front of it with a dry paintbrush, Ruth decided that she would do what she had once thought she would never do, that she would share what she had once thought she would never share with anyone. She went to her bedroom and got a key from her dressing table. She took the key and used it to open a large, wooden chest at the foot of her bed. Inside the chest, on top of some folded bedlinen, were several diaries. She took the first of them and went out to the garden to see Michael.

  “Michael.”

  “Ruth. G’day.”

  “There’s something I want you to see.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Mike, when you first came here, I told you, you wouldn’t get any questions from me. I know what it’s like. But now I want to show you something. You see, I lost someone very dear to me, too, not that long ago. Here.” She held out an unframed, 6-by-4-inch photograph.

  Michael felt very uncomfortable, but he could not bring himself to be rude to Ruth so he took the snapshot. He recognised the young woman in the photo as the same one he had seen in the portrait in the library. “Who’s this?”

  “That’s my granddaughter, Sally. I lost her two years ago. She was the most important person in the world, to me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know. Mike, Sally took her own life. I don’t blame her – she had a hard life. It was just too much for her. But she was so young.”

  Michael wanted to get up and run out of the garden. He wanted to be anywhere but talking to Ruth, hearing all of this. He didn’t like talking about emotions, and he felt caught completely off-guard.

  “She kept diaries,” Ruth continued. “I’ve never shown them to anyone before and I never thought I would. She left the diaries to me. She wanted me to know what happened. I suppose... I suppose she wanted someone else, someone other than herself, to know what she had gone through. I suppose she wanted to say sorry, too.”

  Michael said nothing.

  Ruth handed him Sally’s first diary. “I thought you might want to see this. Would you do me a favour, Mike, for me, and take a look at it? You see, I don’t want to be the only person who knows about her, and ... it would help, if I could talk to someone about it.” Ruth knew Michael would not willingly take any help from her but that he was too good a man to refuse to offer her help, if that was how she couched the question.

  Michael took the diary. He opened it and looked at the neat writing in blue fountain-pen ink. It was written in a young hand, the handwriting of a conscientious student and of someone who had taken pride in the secret journal she had kept.

  “Okay, Ruth. If you want me to.”

  Ruth smiled an ironic smile. Then she walked away and left him sitting there in the garden. She had done all she could do.

  Chapter 6

  Michael had never kept a diary. It intrigued him, to hold in his hands the secret thoughts of another person, so carefully written. He followed the flowing blue line of the ink as it swept up and looped down from one letter to the next, a broken thread that filled the pages of the diaries that recorded the final year of a young woman’s life. Michael wanted to find out about the woman. He wondered what could have brought her to the same precipice as he – the border between life and death, the border which he himself planned soon to cross. Perhaps, in reading her last words, he would be able to silence the confusion in his mind and find just a li
ttle of the peace he craved.

  Michael flipped through the pages of the thick, leather-bound volume, looking for the end. But it was not complete. It was obviously only the first in a set. He found no mention of suicide. And so he contented himself with beginning at the first page and reading it through. He soon realised that Sally Johanssen had written in her diary as if she were writing to her closest friend – more than that, that her diary was the closest friend she had.

  As he read, Michael could almost feel what it must have been like, to live the days that she had lived, to experience the things that she had experienced. The diary transported him to another world, another time, three years in the past, when Sally was still alive, and – he thought bitterly – when Marie was, too. For three weeks, he read it each night, before he slept, and immersed himself in Sally’s forgotten world. It was a world that started with hope and optimism and with the fulfilment of a dream. And although Michael felt that he understood that world, as he read, the real truth of what happened was far more intense than even the heartfelt and meticulous diary could convey. The diary began:

  Monday, March 13, 1995

  Dear Diary,

  Today is my interview with the veterinary hospital. I think I can get the job. I hope I can. I’m so tired of looking for work, and if only I can get this job, I can stay in Perth ...

  Sally hoped she wouldn’t have to pick up the coffee cup the veterinary nurse had just left on the desk for her. She was afraid her hand might shake. It was too late to be worried about that, however, since Dr Thomas Kellerman already thought the young woman sitting in the chair opposite him seemed a little too unsure of herself. Kellerman liked confidence in his employees. Still, he thought, as he turned the pages of Sally’s resume, her academic record was outstanding, and there were glowing letters of reference from two university professors and from a local veterinary surgeon. Kellerman was not especially keen to employ a woman, nevertheless. All of his four veterinary nurses were female, but it had long been a secret policy of his to employ only male veterinarians. Kellerman was in his early forties, set in his ways, and although he would never admit it publicly, he felt that men made better leaders. To Kellerman’s dismay, most of the new generation of the profession were women, so he had little choice but to consider female applicants for the position of Veterinary Associate which he had recently advertised.

  Sally’s long, blonde hair was collected back into a simple ponytail and she wore a smart, tan shirt and light brown slacks. She was tallish, for a woman, with a slim figure and a pretty face, and there was a youthful earnestness in her pale blue eyes. Kellerman found her quite attractive, and although he doubted her, because she was a woman and because she seemed nervous, he had to admit to himself that it might be pleasant having her around the practice. His wife had long suspected that he sometimes hired veterinary nurses more for their looks than for their abilities, but this was not strictly true. Kellerman demanded competence from his staff and he was not about to employ someone just because she was a pretty girl, although being a pretty girl was certainly no disadvantage.

  Kellerman was a stocky man with a neatly cropped beard and a balding head. His brown eyes lacked sympathy and his expression was perpetually serious. He spoke with the accent of a man born and raised in Sydney and sent by his parents to one of the better private schools.

  Kellerman drove a BMW and managed to maintain the appearance, if not quite the lifestyle, of being someone with money, although it was his inheritance that had allowed him to pay for the veterinary practice. In fact, the practice was not very profitable, compared to other small businesses, and like most vets he had not done particularly well for himself until the later years of his life, and certainly had only earned a pittance in his early days as an employed veterinarian. But nowadays he was not at all short of cash. So much so that the senior veterinary nurse, Heather Lorayne, who managed the office and did the bookkeeping, was sure that her boss was doing a large proportion of his business in cash and that this money never graced her ledger and was never declared to the tax man. There were other stories that Heather might have told about her boss, including several affairs that his wife would have been enraged to discover, one of which had involved a former veterinary nurse, but Heather had long admired Kellerman and liked to think that he had a special affection for her, even if he had never acted upon it, so she kept her knowledge to herself and made the books look as clean as she could, every June.

  Heather Lorayne had already made up her mind that Kellerman would certainly employ the pretty, young woman she had just made a cup of coffee for. So she closed the door of the office behind her and left Kellerman to finish the job interview in private.

  “Merit honours, first class,” said Kellerman. “And I see you took special topics in internal medicine and pathology, specialising in dogs and cats. You never wanted to work with large animals, then?”

  Sally cleared her throat. “Not really. I quite liked equine rotations, in fifth year, but I decided small animal practice was where I wanted to go.”

  “Why was that? Did you find the farm work too physical?”

  “No. Not at all. It’s just that I wanted to specialise in medicine, and I enjoyed working up difficult cases. Small animal practice seemed to have more opportunity for that. And ... ”

  “Yes?”

  “I really like working with pets.”

  This didn’t seem to impress Kellerman. “What about surgery? It looks like you’re keen on medicine, but out here in practice what matters is how fast you can get through the day’s surgery list. We consult from nine to twelve, then do surgery from twelve to four, and consult again from four to seven. You have to have the surgery done by four, or there’s chaos.”

  “Well, Dr Kellerman, I can’t say I’m an experienced surgeon. We don’t get the time to do a lot of surgery in college. I can handle all the basic ops – spays, castrations, abscesses, stitch-ups – but I can’t pretend to be fast at things like caesars and enterectomies yet. I haven’t done any orthopaedics.”

  “Hmmm. Well, you’re only a new graduate. I can’t really expect more than that ... but it is difficult for the practice, having to train a new grad from scratch. It takes up a lot of our time.” Kellerman failed to mention that his previous young associate had quickly left the practice, nor did he reveal that another two vets had done the same. In fact, three vets had come and gone in less than two years. Kellerman liked to think this was because young people were ungrateful for the opportunities he gave them. In fact, his practice had a bad reputation and experienced vets would not work for him. Sally was naive enough to think him sincere.

  “I want to learn, Dr Kellerman. I’m willing to work hard, and I’ll do my best to be as efficient as I can. I know it won’t take me long to get up to speed. And I’m not one of these new graduates who flit about from job to job. I want a job with a long-term future.”

  “Well, we work long hours, here, Sally. Nine to seven, according to the book, but I’d expect you to be here at eight-thirty, to check the animals before consulting, and we rarely get out of the place at night until seven-thirty. Sometimes we’re here till eight. And I don’t want any clock-watching. We finish when we finish and not before.”

  “Right,” said Sally. “That’s no problem.”

  “Your roster would be one weekend in two, and you’d share the after-hours duty with me. That means you’ll carry a mobile phone and be on call three nights one week and four the next. Every second weekend you’ll get a half-day on Friday and work nine to five on Saturday and nine to one on Sunday, as well as taking all the after-hours calls for the weekend. Your normal roster will be Monday to Friday. Four weeks holiday a year.”

  “Right.” The hours sounded daunting to Sally. They were well over fifty hours per week, even up to sixty, and with seven nights a fortnight on call she wouldn’t get much sleep, either. Small animal practice was a difficult job, a matter of constantly dealing with the public at times when they were most emotional
– when their pets were ill – and making diagnoses and prescribing treatment under constant time pressure, looking after animals in hospital, then doing anaesthetics and surgery in whatever time was left over. But challenge had always been a part of Sally’s life, and she believed she was up to the challenge. This was her dream, to be a vet, and she wasn’t about to let that dream slip out of her fingers now. “That sounds okay.”

  Kellerman grunted. “We can’t afford to pay you that much, I’m afraid. For a new graduate, the salary I had in mind was twenty-two thousand. Now, you understand that’s a flat salary – we don’t pay overtime. We’ve had real trouble, in the past, with vets watching the clock, and we don’t want any of that trouble again.”

  Sally was disappointed. She had been hoping for a little more. Kellerman’s offer was less than what new schoolteachers were being paid, and for a fifty- to sixty-hour week, with three or four nights handling after-hours emergencies on top of that, it hardly seemed to justify the five years of desperately hard study that Sally had put herself through. She knew her salary would rise with time, but it would take many years before she was earning anything like the income that most people imagined vets earned. But money was not everything. What mattered to Sally was that Kellerman was discussing salary, which meant he was thinking of giving her the job. “And what about after-hours calls?”

  “We pay you twenty-five dollars for each case you see after nine at night or before eight in the morning. And – this is important – if there’s surgery to be done in the middle of the night, we expect you to do it then and there. You can call a nurse in, if you like, but we don’t want surgery being put off until the morning.”

  “Right.” Sally hoped that the practice had few after-hours calls, since she had always been a person who needed her sleep. It was hard enough working ten-hour days, without getting no sleep the night before. The money was irrelevant. Sally would not have traded a good night’s sleep for twenty-five dollars if she had any choice. Unfortunately, there was no choice.