Feeding the Demons

by Gabrielle Lord

  ‘Tell me,’ said Gemma, keen to hear the rest of the story. ‘Tell me what happened. Did you read the tale?’

  But Kit was already putting her out the door, and returning to their earlier conversation.

  ‘There’s one very obvious factor,’ said Kit, ‘that we haven’t mentioned that produces pressure and change in a person’s life.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Gemma, turning at the front door. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Starting therapy,’ said Kit.

  Fifteen

  When Gemma got home she looked up the phone book. There were several R. Wyldes living in Pymble, but only two with the prefix ‘Dr’. She rang them both and, on the second one, she got lucky. ‘Are you a medical practitioner or a psychiatrist?’ she’d asked.

  ‘I work three days a week as a psychiatrist,’ said Rowena Wylde.

  ‘My name is Gemma Lincoln.’ She paused. ‘I’m Dr Archie Chisholm’s younger daughter.’

  There was silence on the other end. Finally, Rowena Wylde spoke. ‘What could you possibly want with me?’

  Gemma couldn’t help smiling. You’re the psych, she felt like saying. You work it out.

  •

  Several hours later, Gemma sat with Rowena Wylde in her comfortable lounge room. Large windows opened onto a lush green garden behind the house that was filled with tree ferns and flowering shrubs, and lorikeets squawked in the trees. As she poured coffee for them both from the plunger, Gemma studied her. She was a prosperous, good-looking woman in her late fifties, hair combed back into a chignon that suited her measured, controlled manner. She wore a knitted jersey suit of classic design and silver and amber earrings.

  ‘Sugar?’ she asked, without looking up.

  ‘No thanks,’ said Gemma, taking the cup. This time, their eyes met and Gemma noticed that Rowena Wylde’s eyes were red-rimmed. Had she been crying? Or was the doctor an insomniac?

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ said Gemma. ‘I want to start the ball rolling to reopen my father’s case. But I wanted to talk to you first—’

  ‘On what grounds could you possibly reopen the case?’ Rowena asked.

  ‘There have been a lot of important developments in bloodstain interpretation,’ Gemma said. ‘The evidence that convicted my father was purely circumstantial.’

  ‘I see.’ Dr Wylde considered. ‘Or are you visiting me to find out whether or not I was likely to be the cause of a crime passionel?’ There was the barest hint of a smile.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Gemma. ‘But to ask you whether or not you think my father is guilty. You are a professional woman. Your job is to form conclusions, make interpretations.’ The opposite of me, Gemma thought. My work is simply to gather intelligence. Which I’m doing right now.

  ‘That is true in general,’ said Dr Wylde. ‘But I was emotionally involved with your father. And as we know, the emotions are not always congruent with one’s professionalism.’

  Gemma memorised that last statement. One day, she hoped she’d be able to pass it on to Kit and they could laugh over it. But not now. This was serious. It was an odd sensation, to be sitting here with her father’s ex-lover, discussing these issues.

  Dr Wylde stood up and walked with her coffee to the window. She looked out into the garden and took a sip. ‘You know, of course—or perhaps you don’t—that our profession, the profession I shared with your father, is statistically very unhealthy. Emotionally and psychologically.’ She turned round and leaned her trim bottom against the windowsill, looking at Gemma. ‘Probably physically, too. People assume it’s because of the burdens we carry, because we are sin eaters, the confessions, the strain of dealing with disordered, suffering patients, year after year. Listening to their hatred, their resentments, their distortions, their insanity.’ She raised an eyebrow and sipped her coffee.

  ‘You say people assume this? Do you think there are other reasons?’ Gemma asked.

  The older woman stood a moment, watching a group of rainbow lorikeets vanish into an early flowering eucalypt tree in next door’s garden. ‘Why are we drawn to such a vocation in the first place? People who become psychiatrists, especially those who work with analysis, have a lot of issues of their own. Perhaps we need to keep them away. Of course,’ she added, ‘the same could be said of all human beings. But it is a fact that the suicide rate among psychiatrists is extremely high.’

  She opened a sliding window and the shrill fussing of the lorikeets was plain to hear. ‘Perhaps it is because we intellectualise the emotions, as someone recently said somewhere.’ She paused a moment. ‘I’m saying “perhaps” a lot, aren’t I. As I get older, I get less sure of everything.’ She half closed the window again. ‘I wonder if the work we do is ultimately helpful. Or if we actually prevent people from contacting their own depths. Whenever a person is talking about feeling, he is not feeling. While he is talking about violence, he is not being violent. Psychiatrists suicide at an alarming rate. And suicide is the ultimate violence against the self. It is to self what murder is to others. Why do so many of our number act out the suicidal part of the suicidal–homicidal split?’

  Gemma was surprised at the way the woman was talking. Is this a doctor’s attempt at small talk, Gemma wondered, or is she trying to do this gently, breaking it to me in the softest way she knows how? ‘Are you saying you think my father was a homicidal man?’ she asked. ‘Capable of murder?’

  Dr Wylde shrugged. ‘Human beings are violent creatures,’ she said. ‘Are you asking me whether or not I believe that he was capable of murdering his wife?’

  ‘I am,’ said Gemma.

  ‘I believe it’s unlikely,’ she said. ‘Simply because Marianne Chisholm, your mother, was in a doctor–patient relationship with him as well as a being his wife. Psychiatrists rarely kill their patients so directly.’ She laughed. ‘We take the liberty of interpreting their behaviour to them. We feed them all kinds of constructs. All kinds of drugs. And it’s not uncommon for us to have affairs with patients. We sometimes even marry them. But it’s rare that we kill them by way of murder.’

  ‘Tell me more about why you say that,’ said Gemma, leaning forward and forgetting her coffee.

  Dr Wylde sat back on her chair and put her cup down. ‘Your mother was your father’s patient. She was a very depressed woman. Did you know that? When she wasn’t depressed, she was unbearably anxious. She was incapable of dealing with life on its own terms and Archie medicated her. That’s what we did in those days. We still do it now as you know. In the ’fifties and ’sixties, the new tranquillisers seemed to be the answer to the mystery of suffering, especially female suffering. Women who “had everything” as we used to think, and yet were deeply depressed. The “worried well”.’

  ‘You seem to know an awful lot about my mother,’ said Gemma, feeling oddly protective of the dead.

  Rowena Wylde’s face changed and Gemma wondered if she were being treated to her professional, caring face. ‘It was natural that your father spoke of her to me,’ said the doctor. ‘We were close and he had a lot of problems with her. And you know he was a very ambitious man. He wouldn’t divorce her, even though she was—’ Here she paused, wondering how to phrase the next part. ‘—somewhat of a liability to a man who showed such promise.’

  ‘Did she want a divorce?’ Gemma asked, surprised, and Dr Wylde’s answer surprised her even more.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘And neither did he.’ She put her cup down on the little cedar table near her chair. ‘I did. But he wouldn’t. He wanted to open a private hospital in partnership with Marianne’s father, who had a lot of money. In the ’fifties, many of us were convinced that the old hypotheses were wrong, and that the answer to mental illness lay in physical rather than analytical psychiatry. Your father visited Tulane University in Louisiana, where a very well-respected psychiatrist was carrying out electrode experiments on living brains, and n
ot only on animals, either. His name was Heath. He used terminally ill patients and people from mental institutions as guinea pigs. You can read up on his stuff in any medical library. It takes a particular sort of courage to carry out that sort of work. Of course, we wouldn’t do that now.’

  Oh really? Gemma thought as Dr Wylde continued. ‘Your father was convinced that what a restless brain needed was rest. He wanted to set up a hospital where he could “switch” people’s brains off and give them a chemically induced rest cure.’

  ‘Like Chelmsford?’ Gemma asked, feeling shocked.

  Dr Wylde raised an eyebrow. ‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘Chelmsford was a nightmare. But your father was convinced that narcotherapy was moving in the right direction. With back-up from the relevant experts in long-term sedation. He wanted a hospital in which he could practise his ideas and he wouldn’t have risked losing the support of the Lincoln money by divorcing the old surgeon’s daughter. Dr Lincoln was a force to be reckoned with and very powerful in the medical lobby of those days. He’d destroyed the careers of several promising doctors whose moral code didn’t accord with his religious principles.’

  Gemma remembered her Methodist grandfather, the forbidding presence in their grandmother’s house, and wasn’t surprised to hear this. But the notion of the Lincoln money seemed somewhat romantic. What Lincoln money? There had been a modest inheritance for the two sisters, spent long ago. This is starting to sound like a Mills and Boon romance, she thought. Also, this new aspect of her father’s professional interests was upsetting her. She hadn’t got what she wanted even though she didn’t know quite what that was, but she didn’t want to stay any longer talking to this woman about her family. She stood up, irritated and frustrated.

  Dr Wylde took the cue and stood with her and they walked towards the door together. ‘I know this wasn’t a social visit,’ said Dr Wylde. She stopped and looked Gemma in the eyes. ‘You want to know if your father is a killer, don’t you.’ The brutal statement hung in the air. ‘Of course you do. Why else would you be here? You see,’ Dr Wylde continued, ‘if you really believed he was innocent, there’d be no need to talk to me. To talk to anyone. You’d just go ahead and reopen the case.’

  Gemma remembered Kit saying that one of the things that was most unacceptable to her about many psychiatrists was their arrogance in assuming they knew more about a person’s inner workings than the individual himself did, as if human beings ran along predictable, theoretical rails laid down by the great Victorian and Edwardian fathers, and that they alone had the key to all psychologies. And yet, the woman had touched on something.

  ‘I don’t need to talk to anyone to convince myself,’ Gemma said, stung by Dr Wylde’s words. ‘But you can surely understand that I would want to meet you. You were part of it.’ She felt defensive, off-balance and angry.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ said Dr Wylde, opening the front door as if their entire discussion was now irrelevant, vanishing like a mist into the past. Gemma stepped past her, eager to be gone.

  ‘It’s true I was a part of it. But there were others,’ Dr Wylde said. ‘You see, Archie was a philanderer.’ She must have seen the shock on Gemma’s face because she softened her tone. ‘I’m sorry. I forget that this is not just about an ex-lover of mine. We are talking of your father after all.’

  ‘How many others?’

  Dr Wylde shrugged. ‘It wasn’t something I wanted to know about. Several. He was a man of strong appetites and, well . . .’ She thought better of speaking further.

  ‘And my mother was a depressed woman,’ Gemma finished for her.

  Dr Wylde leaned closer and touched Gemma briefly on the arm. ‘I’ll tell you something that nobody knows. The woman is dead now and it doesn’t matter.’ The look on Gemma’s face must have put her off, because she took her hand away and half turned, as if regretting the moment of intimacy.

  ‘Don’t speak of my mother like that,’ said Gemma, the heat of anger flushing her.

  The doctor turned back to her. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘You misunderstand me. I’m not speaking of your mother.’ There was the slightest pause and she continued. ‘There was a woman—one of Archie’s patients—who believed she was in love with him.’ The doctor snorted. ‘That sort of dependency is very common in our business and a skilled practitioner knows how to utilise it as part of the therapy. I’m sure you know about it. Perhaps Archie was not assiduous enough in discouraging the woman. Perhaps he even cultivated her interest . . . Whatever happened, the woman suicided when Archie told her he wouldn’t be leaving Marianne. That much I do know. It all happened just a few days before the death of your mother. Your father was just very lucky that she didn’t leave a note exposing him.’ She shrugged. ‘Although it hardly mattered later—with what eventuated.’

  The two women stood a moment in silence and then Gemma turned away. Dr Wylde watched her as she walked down the steps and towards the front gate.

  As Gemma opened the door to get into the Mazda, she turned and saw the doctor still standing at her front door. Gemma walked back to the front gate so she wouldn’t have to speak loudly.

  ‘Dr Wylde,’ she said, ‘did you kill my mother?’

  The woman’s face drained paper white. She opened her mouth as if to say something, then turned on her heel and swung inside, slamming the door behind her. In the car, Gemma’s mobile started ringing. She unlocked the door and snatched the phone up, sliding into the seat. ‘Hullo?’

  ‘Gemma, it’s me,’ said Angie. ‘We’ve found Bianca Perrault. I’m at the crime scene now. National Park near Heathcote.’

  ‘Where? What happened?’ Gemma gripped the steering wheel with her other hand.

  ‘We haven’t got a formal ID yet.’ Her friend’s voice nearly broke up and Gemma had to fight to hear her. ‘This place is tight as a fish’s . . . wouldn’t be able to get you in . . . doctor’s doing his stuff right now . . . severe stab wounds to the upper body . . .’

  ‘I’m not hearing you too well,’ said Gemma, seeing once again her slashed clothes, the mutilated blouse and skirt.

  Angie’s voice strengthened momentarily then faded again. ‘. . . all wrapped in garbage bags and rolled up in a doona . . . shoved under some logs along a fire trail. Some hikers found her. Come in later when . . .’

  ‘Hullo?’ said Gemma. ‘Angie? You’re breaking up.’ But there was no response and Gemma sat for a while in her vehicle. Her mother, Dr Wylde, Mrs Moresby, the accounts clerk at Maroubra and now Bianca all whizzed around in a danse macabre with the ghost of a thirty-year-old suicide. She flopped back in the seat with the phone still in her loose fingers. Sometimes, the screen on her laptop just stopped, frozen, as too much data hit it too quickly. And that’s what seemed to be happening to her mind right this minute in the car outside Dr Wylde’s leafy residence. She recalled the white face and shocked expression of the woman. Would I be so shocked if someone asked me a question like that, she wondered. Some moments later, when she could move, she started the car with trembling fingers.

  Sixteen

  Clive had decided to come to as many sessions a week as he could for the next few months and Kit had offered him a cancellation. He seemed tense when he arrived and sat down heavily on the mattresses without looking directly at her.

  ‘I’m full of hatred,’ he said.

  Kit nodded. ‘We all are,’ she said, ‘until we realise it. Until we can admit it.’

  ‘What can I do about it?’ he asked.

  ‘Feelings of hatred are powerful energies in your mind. It’s no use trying to fight them with other parts of your mind. You just end up with a civil war between your ears. Let’s try a different approach.’

  Half an hour later, Clive lay back with his eyes closed, deeply relaxed.

  ‘I want you to give the demon of hatred a form in your imagination,’ said Kit. ‘Tell me what he looks like.’ She saw
his face move to become very grim.

  ‘I can see him very clearly,’ Clive said. ‘He looks like a medieval inquisitor. He’s dressed like a Dominican. A shaven head with tonsure. Long, cruel fingers. I think he would be good at turning the thumbscrews. He has a tight, pointed face. No lips. Just a hard white line. Goodness.’ His voice changed. ‘My mother had a mouth like that.’

  There was a silence. ‘His eyes. I can’t really see his eyes. They are shadowed. Like a death’s head. He is very big. And very powerful.’

  ‘We’re going to feed him up,’ said Kit. ‘Really feed him up. Because the more he’s pushed away, the more he’s denied by you when you start to feel guilty and bad about the thoughts in your own mind, the more hateful and powerful he becomes. You start to feed him and then you pull the food away from him before he can ever satisfy himself. The more famished a demon becomes, the more dangerous.’ She paused. ‘Can you imagine me making a bowl out of the top of my skull? Imagine I can just lift the whole top of my skull off and turn it upside down.’