Her next of kin, in that case – the only person who still had a loving interest in Donna-Faye – was her old man, Med.
Chapter 15
Med Atley
IT TOOK FOUR HOURS TO GET down the Pacific Highway to the place in Sydney where they had Fat. I was so tempted to leadfoot it, but I thought, Don’t do it, Med. You’re not much good to her are you, if you’re wrapped around a tree?
If you’d asked me what I knew about mental illness at that point, I would have said, not much. I’d heard that people sometimes went crazy, and there were places where they had to go when it happened, but these people, well, they’d never crossed paths with me.
Now I was hearing Fat had a breakdown. They meant it literally, she’d broken down in the street and been taken to one of those places I’d heard about and were holding her there and it didn’t matter that she was 25 years old. I’d have to go in because I was next of kin.
I didn’t know what to expect. I had in mind a place like I’d seen on TV, like something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with people with their arms wrapped around themselves and their eyes popped and their beards half grown out, keeping little birds in their pockets.
I thought of my girl, Donna-Faye, lost in the middle of them, twisting a finger in her hair. Would she know who I was, and how would she react? Maybe she’d try to scratch my face. Maybe I’d have to hold her hands by the wrists and try to calm her down.
Well, it wasn’t like that. Those big places, the loony bins, they’ve gone. Fat was in a normal hospital. There were green signs to show you where the exits were. There was a lady behind reception, and a cafe in the foyer and a flower shop. I went up in the elevator to the mental health ward. The lady on their reception told me Fat had her own room. I thought, please don’t let her be strapped down, and she wasn’t strapped down. She wasn’t even in hospital clothes. She was sitting in a chair wearing a tracksuit with elastic around the bottom of the legs. It was a bit too short or else she was too fat for it, and it was hiked up, over her belly. Her ankles and her wrists were sticking out. Somebody had washed her hair. It was pulled back into a ponytail, and it was too tight. Her eyes looked a bit Chinese. So she didn’t look completely right – she was not in her clothes, and not wearing her own face – but she didn’t look crazy, either.
She was quiet, I give you that. She was quiet, and twitched a bit. I’d seen that before. She’d twitched a bit in adolescence, and now she was twitching again, and looking down at the floor a lot, and whispering, like we had a big secret. I said, ‘Fat, you don’t have to whisper.’ There were no other people in the room. She looked up at me and nodded, and motioned me closer.
I sat on the edge of her bed. She looked around, like somebody might be there, in a room we could all see. She whispered, ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’
I said, ‘What on earth have you got to be sorry about?’ She said, ‘All this fuss’ and I said, ‘Come on, Fat. You’re no fuss. You’re alright. You’re just a bit lost.’
She said, ‘Where have I been?’
I said, ‘You’re here now.’
She nodded. Half an hour later, she said, ‘Where have I been?’
I thought, well, she’s confused. But I had faith in the system in those days. I thought, she’s in the right place. She’s going to get proper help, a bed in a hospital, a psychiatrist to see her through. She’ll get medication. She’s not going to be sent out to fend for herself.
I tracked down the matron in charge of the ward. She told me there was paperwork to fill out. There always is, isn’t there? I’ve come to the conclusion they give you the paperwork to make you think they’re on top of things. What they are on top of is piles of paperwork.
The matron told me Fat would be given what they called a ‘caseworker’ and this caseworker would come and see me once I’d had my visit with Donna-Faye. I asked her what a caseworker was – they assume that you know, when I had no idea – and she said, ‘Ah, well, it’s a person employed by the mental health service to manage Fat’s case.’
Does that sound good to you? It sounded good to me. Somebody was managing Fat. They knew where she was, and what treatment she needed, and whether she was getting it. That’s how it sounds, doesn’t it? It isn’t how it works. How it works is, you have a caseworker and then you get a new one pretty much every time you walk in the door. You’ve got to explain everything all over again because usually that person hasn’t had time to read the file.
I said to the matron once, ‘Why does it have to be this way? Why don’t they hand over the file and explain what’s gone on, so we don’t have to do it every week? Better still, why can’t we keep the same person?’ She was sympathetic. Everybody is very sympathetic. She shrugged and said something about resources, and people moving on, and the workload, which is what you hear in every government department you go near these days.
They have no money. They have no staff. Everybody is burnt out. Mental health is the worst.
Anyway, after I’d spent a bit of time with Fat, mostly just sitting with her saying, ‘You’ll be right’ and, ‘We’ll get you on your feet again’ I went and met the caseworker. I was up-front. I said, ‘I’m Donna-Faye’s father. I want the truth. Is she mad? Because something about her doesn’t look right.’
The caseworker shook her head. She said, ‘Mad is not really a term we use anymore.’
I wasn’t in the mood for that. I said, ‘They found her walking stark naked down the street. That sounds mad to me.’
The caseworker said, ‘I’m not sure the term is all that helpful.’
She asked me to sit down, and I did. We had a long conversation. She was the first to tell me what had actually gone on, which was that Fat had had an acute psychotic episode. I didn’t know what that was. Was it the breakdown they’d talked about on the phone? The nurse who called me said she’d had a breakdown. The caseworker said, ‘Yes, okay, for your purposes, breakdown is fine. She’s had a breakdown.’
I didn’t mind that diagnosis. I thought, Okay, you break down, you get up. It might just take some time.
The caseworker wasn’t so sure. She said some people – people like Fat – they have these brain snaps in their late teens, early 20s, and people think, oh, they’ll be alright. They might have been under a bit of strain – Fat had had her baby taken away remember – but they’ll be fine when things start going right for them. It doesn’t always happen.
It’s hard for people to accept,’ the caseworker said. ‘Sometimes people don’t go back to where they were.’
I wanted to know if Fat was going to be locked up. I mean, if she was never going to be normal, would she have to be locked up? The caseworker said, ‘No, no, we don’t lock people up, not anymore.’ She said, ‘Fat will stay on the ward for a couple of weeks’ and they’d get people out to talk to her, to understand what had happened to her, and when she was stable, she could go, which sounded pretty good.
I said to her, ‘And when will she be stable?’ but she couldn’t say.
I thought, well, I’ll go home, come back when they know more, but the caseworker said, no, stay. Let’s talk. She asked me about our family – not about Seth, because it seemed like everybody on the ward knew all about Seth – but age-old stuff, like how Fat had come along 10 years after Blue, and how she’d had to grow up without her mum.
The caseworker said, ‘Maybe Fat always felt like a mistake?’ I said, ‘Well, she was a mistake! A happy accident, I used to call her.’ The caseworker said, ‘That can be hard on a child’ and I said, ‘No. Pat had a problem with it, but that was Pat’s problem. It wasn’t my problem.’
She asked me about Haines and why I thought Fat had hooked up with Haines. I said, ‘I’m buggered if I know. I tried to put her off the idea.’ She said, ‘It sometimes happens with young women. An older man – a more powerful man – might make her feel special.’
I said, ‘That makes it sound like I’m to blame for her ending up with him.’ She said, ‘Maybe Fat blames herself f
or her mum leaving home. Maybe she thinks you blame her, too.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t.’ I also said, ‘It’s strange to me that people see Fat as the problem. She’s not the problem. That idiot Haines, he’s the cause of our problems.’ The caseworker paid no attention to that. She said, ‘Why do you call your daughter Fat?’ and I had to say, ‘It’s not fat-fat. It’s Fat. Donna-Faye. Faye. Fat. Rhymes with her mum Pat, her sister, Kat.’ She said, ‘But she’s not a small girl, is she?’ and look, I admit, that was the first time I thought, well, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to have saddled her with that nickname.
The caseworker nodded and said, ‘Well, thank you, Med, and that’s it for the first session, and you can go and sit with Donna-Faye if you want’ and it wasn’t til then that I realised I was even in a session. I went and said bye to Fat, but she was zonked out, so I headed back to Forster. It was after midnight when I got home. The dog was hungry. I let her sleep inside.
I did the ring around the following day, telling Edna and Blue and the others what had happened, giving them the latest instalment. Blue wanted to know if he should visit. I told him no. By this stage he’d hooked up with a local girl – was she already his wife? I’m not sure, but he’d definitely hooked up with her, and maybe she was already pregnant? She must have been, because I think that’s why I told him not to come. Kat remained a bit elusive. I don’t think she’ll shoot me for saying that. It is the truth, after all.
For my part, I visited the hospital once a week, and as I’ve said, every time, there was a new caseworker and I’d have to go through the whole story again. It didn’t seem to me like the most efficient system, having all these young people popping in and out, trying to get on top of Fat’s problems every week, but when I mentioned that, I was told, ‘Oh, the system’s so stretched.’
As to whether Fat was actually getting better, nobody seemed to be able to tell me. It didn’t seem so, not to look at her. She was docile. She was tired. She was sometimes friendly. But she wasn’t Fat. Something wasn’t right. I wish I had a better way to explain it, but really, that was it, she wasn’t Fat, so I was pretty surprised, three months into Fat’s stay there, when I got collared in the hallway by a matron-type of lady, who told me they were getting ready to move her out. I said, ‘Move her where?’ but this lady didn’t seem to know. She said, ‘We never keep anyone much past a few months on this ward. They stay two or three weeks, and then they move on.’
I said, ‘Okay, but move on where?’ On the one hand, I was thinking it would be good to get Fat closer to Forster so I could see her more often. But the lady didn’t seem to know where she’d be going, only that she’d have to go.
‘We need the beds,’ she said.
I spoke to Edna about it. I said, ‘They’ve got Fat on the move, but I don’t get where she’s going.’ From what I understood, the institutions – the asylums, for want of a better word – had all closed back when I was a young man, but I wanted to be sure about it, so I asked a nurse at the hospital, who confirmed it, saying, ‘And more’s the pity.’
I said, ‘Oh, come on, they were terrible places.’ She said, ‘Well, it’s better than having the mentally impaired on the street, slicing each other open with broken bottles.’ I had to agree with that.
Anyway, this matron-lady, she gave me some paperwork, and said I’d have to sign it. It was a form, under the Mental Health Act, that would make me Fat’s guardian. I said, ‘I’m already her father.’ They said, ‘Yes, but she’s over 18. You need to be her legal guardian.’ I said, ‘And if I don’t sign them?’ They said, ‘The State of NSW will become her guardian, and you won’t have much say in what happens next.’
The matron told me, ‘Legally speaking, once you’ve signed those papers, it’s as if she’s a child again. She’ll be your ward, and you’re her guardian, just like when she was small.’
I thought, well, that makes sense. Who else should take care of her if I didn’t? I was happy to tell Fat about it, and when I did, she hugged me, like she used to hug me when she was little. Well, not quite. My arms can’t get around her middle anymore.
I said, ‘We’ll get you better, Fat.’
Signing those forms seemed to trigger something in the system. The very next visit the matron saw me coming down the hall, plastic bag with grapes in it in one hand, carnations in the other, and she said, ‘Have you come to take Donna-Faye?’
I said, ‘Take her where?’ She said, ‘Take her home.’ I didn’t understand what she meant. Home? Nobody had said anything about home. But the matron said, ‘She’s got permission to leave. Her caseworker signed off on it.’ Well, that could have meant anything. Which caseworker? When?
I thought, There must have been a mistake, or else somebody is kidding. Fat was still fairly heavily medicated at that point, liable to walk into walls and keep walking, if you see what I mean.
But the matron said, no, now that she had a guardian – that would be me – she could leave. I said, ‘I’m supposed to treat her?’ and she laughed, and said, ‘It’s all done in the community now. It’s so much cheaper and easier.’ I thought, for who, but of course, I knew. Cheaper for governments. Cheaper for hospitals. Pretty difficult for us, as I suppose you know.
Anyway, the matron said a doctor would decide on the treatment for Fat, and she would have a chart with her medication on it and there would be people on hand to help me, if I ran into any trouble, and I should talk to her caseworker if I had any concerns, so I trotted down the hall to the caseworker’s office. It was somebody new again. I said, ‘Is this serious?’ because it seemed to me that Fat was still a long way from being well. I said, ‘I’m not sure this is right’ and the caseworker said, ‘Well, we need the bed.’
I said, ‘Well, I’m not sure I can take care of her. I work full-time. She’d be home alone.’
The caseworker said, ‘But didn’t you agree to be the guardian?’ And I said, ‘Yes, but I still have to work.’ In truth, work had been getting away from me. I’d been there a long time but people were starting to notice. I guess that explains part of why I agreed to what they came up with. The caseworker said, ‘Well, there is one other option.’ I was ready to hear it. She told me that a ‘bed’ had opened up – that’s how they say it, they say a ‘bed’ not a ‘spot’ or a ‘place’ but a ‘bed’ – in one of the Department’s units in regional NSW, and if we were quick, Fat might be able to get that bed.
I had, by that stage, learnt to talk the way they talked. I said, ‘What kind of bed is this?’ The caseworker said, ‘The program is called Re-start.’ All their programs have names like that.
I asked what it was about. She said there was a group of units where people could live while they were trying to get their lives back together. She said it was State-government funded, which is another word for ‘free’, and as I was finding out, anything that is free in mental health goes like hotcakes.
I said, ‘And it’s for people with mental health issues?’ (See what I mean about my language, Your Honour? Nobody talks like that. Nobody says ‘mental health issues’. But that’s how they get you talking.)
The caseworker said, ‘No, it’s not.’ Strictly speaking, it was for anyone but the mentally ill. It was for ex-crims coming out of prison, who needed to get onto their feet, or else it was for people coming out of rehab, who wanted to get away from their old suppliers, and it was for refugees who come to Australia with not much in the way of skills, not even English.
I said, ‘I don’t see how Fat fits into those categories.’
The caseworker said, ‘She doesn’t, but the bed is there, and it’s funded and I’m willing to make a case to the health department that Fat qualifies because she needs to get away from Paul Haines.’
And in the end, that was what got me over the line, the idea that somebody understood what a loser he was, and that Fat needed to get away from him.
I should be clear: Haines had not been on the scene, not since Fat had entered the hospital. I had not seen him since that day he’d b
een stoned on the couch. He’d never even rung up to see what was going on. But Haines was an opportunist. I didn’t doubt that he’d come sniffing around my place once he knew that Fat was there. It would be a power trip for him to get her home. Would she have gone with him? I hate to say this but probably, yes. So I said, ‘Okay, let’s get this Re-start underway.’
There were forms to fill out, before Fat could move. There were brochures, too. I looked through them. They had photographs of the units where Fat would live. I couldn’t say how accurate they were, but in the pictures, they looked pretty good. They had aluminium security doors and fluorescent lights. They were that cream colour the government loves.
I said to the caseworker, ‘Where are they?’
That’s when she told me. That’s when she floored me, actually. She said, ‘They’re in Tamworth.’ Tamworth! Do you know where Tamworth is, Your Honour? Because I tell you, before all this happened, I’d never been there. I knew it as the country music town. I knew it as the place with a Big Guitar. I did not know the health department was sending mental health patients there.
I said, ‘Why Tamworth?’ The caseworker said, ‘Oh, it’s deliberate. It creates jobs, and it helps get people away from the city centres, where the problems are.’
I said, ‘Fat doesn’t know anybody in Tamworth’ and the caseworker said, yes, that was the point. ‘It’s Re-start, remember. Donna-Faye will get a little unit to herself. Only the GP in town will know she’s there.’
I was anxious about it. Where I was, outside Forster, it wasn’t too difficult to pick up the New England Highway and end up in Tamworth but, as with the hospital, it would be hard to get there more than once a week.
The caseworker said, ‘She won’t be alone, though. There are other people in the same block of units.’
I said, ‘Who lives there? Other nutters?’ (Which, I suppose, shows that I didn’t have the PC language quite right. The caseworker said, ‘I thought we agreed, Med. We’re not calling anyone nutters anymore.’)
I Came to Say Goodbye Page 15
