The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution

by Lisa de Nikolits

  When Google finally came to life, I looked up Callan Park Hospital for the Insane. The listings confirmed what Graham had told me, but I wanted to see if I could find anything about Nancy and I kept clicking until I came across a link in The Daily Telegraph. “Sydney’s shameful asylums: The silent houses of pain where inmates were chained and sadists reigned.” The article was utterly horrifying, particularly the bit about the Chelmsford sleep therapy.

  I admit that my first thought was that sleep therapy sounded like a lovely way to relax, but the full story read like something out of a horror movie. I had to find out more. I had a strong feeling that Nancy had something to do with the sleep therapy treatments, although there was no obvious or immediate connection. I told myself to keep looking.

  The article said that a Dr. Harry Bailey had administered “deep sleep” therapy at the Chelmsford Private Hospital in Sydney in the sixties and seventies. He would put his patients into coma for up a number of days, supposedly to cure a variety of ailments. He combined this with electro-convulsive therapy, which he performed without patient consent, and without anaesthetics. As a result, many otherwise healthy people would either die or be left with serious kidney damage or various other potentially fatal ailments. It seems many of his patients died and countless others had their health and lives ruined, before he was finally stopped.

  But what did this have to do with Nancy? Nothing apart from an increasing conviction that there was a connection between her and the Chelmsford Private Hospital. But what was it? And why had she found me? Was the Virgin shrine at Coogee her portal? I told myself to stop thinking absurd thoughts and using words like “portal,” but the fact was that I’d had the crazy experience and I had to follow the clues, insubstantial as they were. I felt as if Nancy was leading me by the hand and I could almost sense her telling me I was on the right path. This made me wonder about the state of my own sanity. I decided to take a break and grab one of Tim’s coffees and a few white chocolate and almond cookies that Tim left out on the counter.

  Thus fortified, I returned to my computer and found Wikipedia had this to offer:

  “Deep Sleep Therapy, DST, was Bailey’s invention, a cocktail of barbiturates that put patients into a coma lasting up to thirty-nine days, while also administering electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). Bailey likened the treatment to switching off a television; his self-developed theory was that the brain, by shutting down for an extended period, would ‘unlearn’ habits that led to depression, addiction and other psychiatric conditions. Bailey claimed to have learnt DST from psychiatrists in Britain and Europe, though it was later found that only a mild variant was used there, sedating traumatised ex-soldiers for a few hours at a time, not the median fourteen days under which Bailey and his colleague Dr. John Herron subjected their 1,127 DST patients at Chelmsford between 1963 and 1979.”

  Dear God. I read further, wondering how such brutality had been allowed. I kept clicking, desperately trying to find something about Nancy, but there was nothing. Nothing except the feeling that I had hit a home run. I felt certain that Dr. Harry Bailey was the key to this. Another link reported that Bailey had committed suicide in September 1985, “in response to the ongoing media exposure of his practices and disquiet from among the ranks of other health professionals.” In his suicide note, he wrote: ‘The forces of madness have won.’”

  I wondered what he was like, this Dr. Bailey. “Who are you, Dr. Harry Bailey?” I asked out loud.

  I found a pic of him. He was handsome. He looked to be a tall man by the way he held himself and by the breadth of his shoulders. He seemed self-assured, and he had a movie-star smile, and a forelock that twisted and curved over his forehead.

  Back off, he’s mine! The thought thundered through my body, hitting me like a punch that pummelled my spine to my ribs and back, and I gasped.

  “Okay, I get it,” I said, when I could breathe again and I felt the pressure slowly release. “He’s yours. But why me? Why did you pick me? And why did you appear at Callan Park? It doesn’t have any connections to the sleep therapy.”

  Nancy shimmered in front of me, a hologram of distorted rainbow pixels, fractured by flashes of white light. She trilledwith girlish laughter that echoed like a child’s music box, tinny and terrifying. “Well now, aren’t you a keen little sleuth! Firstly, you opened the door, not me. There you were, all wide open at the Virgin and I was lonely. I’ve been wandering around in what I can only describe as a grey space, a fog if you will, and then there you were, a lantern in the mist! I walked towards you, so very delighted to have found a friend!”

  “But why did you appear to me at Callan Park?” I asked and I felt her mood change. I was being too demanding, asking questions she didn’t like. I could feel her mounting irritation with me.

  “You’re becoming tedious,” she announced. “Because places like that are home to me. I feed off the ravaged pain of the suffering. Besides, don’t be so pedestrian. I could have found you anywhere, because you wanted to be found. You almost summoned me at Callan Park, you and your annoying friend. You both wanted evidence of me and so I obliged, but of course only you could see me. Because we’re soulmates, don’t you know?” There was that laughter again. “But you’re boring me now.”

  I felt her fade and I shouted at the ether of nothingness that she left behind. “But wait, what do you want with me? What do you want?” But there was no reply and I hoped that the hostel was empty and that no one had heard my anguished cries.

  I took a deep breath and closed my laptop. I rubbed my temples. I felt exhausted and drained. I had gotten myself into this mess. Perhaps if I took a nap, I would wake up and discover it was all a bad dream. But I knew that wasn’t the case. I needed to think this through, and figure out a solution.

  I wondered if Nancy had administered the sleep treatments. If she had, no wonder she was stuck in a limbo of hell and well-deserved punishment.

  I clicked on a few more links and found that women left their abusive husbands to seek sanctuary in institutions, only to find the situation there far worse. And they could never leave of their own volition. Graham had been right about that. And, all of this hadn’t even happened that far back in the past. It wasn’t like we were talking about the 1700s, this had happened in the mid-1900s. Dogs and women were considered to be much on the same level then, and I was grateful to not have been born in an age of such ignorance and powerful misogyny.

  I couldn’t find anything else to hold my interest and was about to turn off the laptop and go for a walk when a ping let me know that an email had arrived. Lyndon! He had answered me. My breath left my belly like a released balloon and I clicked on my email, eager to see what he had to say.

  But the message wasn’t from him, it was from the Mr. Ex-Punk Rocker, who he’d shacked up with.

  “Find your lost soul yet?”

  I looked at it for a while. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I wanted to write back that I was the lost soul, and that I didn’t know if there was even a me to find. If I had spent my whole life angry like my father, discontented with the world and hiding from my true self, how could I be sure there was even a real me to be found?

  I bit my cuticle until it bled again, and I sucked the tiny wound while I stared out into space.

  22. LYNDON

  JASON INSISTED I PRACTISE one tattoo a day on him. “Consider me your canvas,” he said generously. “And in return, you can scatter my ashes when I’m gone. Go down to the sea, stand in view of the shop, say ‘Jason says thanks, that was one helluva ride,’ and then let me be dust in the wind.”

  “Like Buddhist sand art,” Sean offered,

  Jason nodded. “Exactly. A mandala. Jason Deed was irrevocably and invisibly here.”

  “I don’t want to think about you not being here,” I said, and my eyes welled up with tears. Jason handed me a Kleenex.

  “Rule of thumb,” he said. “Don’t cry when
you’re tattooing people. First, you can’t see what you’re doing, and second, it doesn’t give a good impression.”

  “I was the same as you,” Sean told me while I dried my eyes and blew my nose. “I cried like a baby for two weeks solid.”

  “He did,” Jason said. “You lot all cried much more than me, and for that, I thank you. Listen Sean, I want to make an anarchist statement that the world won’t forget. Any ideas? We need to be ready for Sid’s birthday.”

  Sean screwed up his eyes and shook his head. “Not off the top of my head, mate. But I’ll think about it. I’ll ask the other boys to think on it too. Lyndon, the shading will work better if you hold the machine at more of an angle. Here, let me show you.”

  “His name’s Liam Lemon,” Jason said, and Sean snorted.

  “You see?” I said. “Couldn’t you have found me a more normal name?”

  “Where’s the fun in that? As a matter of fact, I chose it for you. I wanted to make you think, shake you up. My last name isn’t really Deed. I chose it because actions speak louder than words and I am the sum of my deeds on this planet.”

  “You wanted to shake me up how?” I asked, not impressed.

  He laughed at me. “Your world view is so narrow. I thought the whole lemon analogy would be good for you.”

  “What is your real name?” Sean asked.

  Jason shrugged. “Can’t remember. But we’re getting off topic here.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” I said. “For the protest. But let me finish this.”

  “Right, keep us in suspense,” Jason grumbled. “Hurry up then, I’m dying to hear it, har har.”

  I finished the tattoo and whipped off the gloves.

  “Installation art,” I said to them. “Like Jeanne-Claude and Christo. You remember them? They wrapped buildings and monuments and trees with fabric. But we won’t use fabric. We’ll use biodegradable toilet paper! There are towns in the USA, and I kid you not, that lay down asphalt, or tar as you call it here, and then, to help it dry and also to help it stop it from sticking to bike tires or shoes or car tires, they put toilet paper on top of it. The toilet paper is biodegradable, so it breaks down and disappears in a few days.”

  “And you are thinking we do what, specifically?” Jason asked.

  “I am thinking that we create a very large piece of installation art. We cover the Sydney Harbour Bridge with toilet paper and the message “Stop Shitting On Our World” as our mantra.”

  “I love it,” Jason said, and Sean grinned like Alice’s Cheshire cat.

  “It has to be single ply,” I added.

  “But how will we do it, mate?” Sean asked. “Lyndon … oops, sorry … Liam, you’re our practical guy. That’s an ambitious idea.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” I said, breezy and confident. “There has to be a way. Jason, we may need a bunch of your followers to come out and help us, and I think we may need to take that trip to Sydney after all, as much as the thought horrifies me.”

  “Come to think of it, I know a guy who takes people up the bridge,” Sean said thoughtfully. “He’s gives tours to the top. I’ll invite him to come to the meeting. He’ll have all the intel about the bridge and I bet he can get us access too.”

  “I’ll set up a meeting now,” Jason said. “Lemonhead, you did well.”

  A rush of pride hit my belly in a warm flood.

  “Lemonhead,” Sean chortled. “Crikey mate, I love it.”

  I didn’t want to admit that I quite loved it too.

  Two days later, we left for Sydney. The plan was to take Sean’s black BMW which I didn’t even know he had. It was all gangstered up, with black-tinted windows, a red stripe, and a rear-wing on the trunk. It was low-slung, sleek, and boxy.

  “Cool car,” I said and Jason nodded. We were standing outside, waiting for Sean who had gone to fetch something.

  “A rare one,” Jason said. “Only six hundred of them were made. One of these babies went for over $150,000 in Hong Kong recently. Last model was produced in 1990. They’re collector’s classics.”

  My mouth fell open. “How can Sean afford such a car? I thought his parents had disowned him.”

  “His granny gave him a truckload of money when she died.”

  Just then Sean arrived, not with something but someone. A woman. She was about six-foot-three, and she gazed over my head when we were introduced. The iron in her handshake rattled my spine. She must have been seventy-plus, and she wore her steel-grey hair long down her back, like a defiant old Barbie doll.

  “This is Martha May,” Jason introduced us. The woman looked me in the eye like she was reaching into the back of my head, and I felt reprimanded for something, only I didn’t know what.

  “I’ll sit in the back with you,” she said to me. I made an unmanly squeaking noise and Jason grinned.

  “I’m sure you two will have lots to talk about,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  But when we got into the car, Martha made a point of staring out the window, ignoring me.

  And, two hours down the road, Martha May still hadn’t said a word. But then again, neither had Sean or Jason. I fell asleep, a thing I am prone to do when I am a passenger, and I woke with my neck bent at a weird angle and my glasses askew.

  I checked my watch. Three hours. We had been in the car for only three hours, which meant we had nine more to kill. I yawned. “Anyone want to play I Spy?” I asked.

  Martha whipped around to face me. “I spy with my little eye, something beginning with a C,” she said.

  “Car?”

  She shook her head.

  I went through all the things I could see that started with a C, but none of them were right.

  “Capitalist,” Jason finally said, and he sounded amused but also tired, in the way parents told their kids to stop fighting.

  I looked at Martha and her eyes were lit up with hatred.

  I recoiled. “Hey,” I said, my hands raised in peace offering, “you don’t know anything about me. Maybe hold off judging me for a while.”

  “I Googled you,” she said.

  I was startled. “Really? And what did you find?” I was curious. I had gone through a spate of Googling myself after I won my last award. I had been gratified to see that I had a whole three pages, primarily dedicated to the accolades my magazine had won but also featuring my keynote speeches at industry functions.

  “Report on Industry and Investments,” she said. “RII. You were the ringleader of that circus for what, thirty years?”

  “Thirty-three,” I said, correcting her. “And despite what you and Jason think, I am not Satan. I was just your average Joe, making a living to support my family.”

  “I’m sure that’s what the Nazi guards said too,” Martha replied. “Just doing my job, boss. Putting food on the table for my wife and kids. Giving in to the man because I had to. No one held a gun to your head.”

  “And what would you rather I had done?” I was angry. “Run an anarchist newspaper that earned me diddly squat and lost me everything? Would that have met your approval, Martha?”

  I spat out her name, and Jason turned around.

  “Imagine,” he said, “if everybody didn’t do what they had to, to put food on their families’ tables? Imagine if we all lived noble lives, if we took care of the planet and tried to fight for a way of life that wasn’t fuelled by the American Dream of having so much stuff you needed storage lockers to keep it all. Imagine that.”

  “Yes, you all keep saying things like that,” I told him. “But none of you actually says how we should do it. What job would I get? You tell me. Don’t attack me because I was part of the system. Yes, I was an unthinking part, but you guys, all of you, none of you have even got one suggestion about how we can realistically live in a different way. Jason, some old guy gave you the shop. Sean, your granny gave you freedom, and Martha,
I don’t know, maybe you are living a true and noble life, and if that’s the case, good for you. But back off attacking me. Until you actually come up with a plan to live differently, don’t use me as your whipping boy.”

  There was silence in the car for a while, which made me feel victorious.

  “Google said you stole a car and a cat and abandoned your wife after thirty-five years of marriage,” Martha said, breaking the silence.

  I ignored her.

  “Internationally-acclaimed editor, husband, and father of two steals a Jeep with a prize-bred Maine Coon in the back and subsequently disappears.”

  “I hope Queenie will be okay,” I said anxiously to Jason.

  “She’ll be fine,” he said for the hundredth time. We’d had to leave Queenie behind. Jason had said it wouldn’t be a great idea to breeze back into Sydney flaunting a spectacularly memorable cat who was on a most-wanted list. Queenie had the apartment to herself and would be visited twice a day by one of the barbers who had promised me with his life that he would take good care of her.

  “You’re not very good at addressing the issues,” Martha said.

  I folded my arms. “I don’t owe you anything,” I said. “You’re a stranger to me, and you don’t know my life story.”

  “And your life story would justify all your actions?”

  I turned away from her. Abandoned my wife. It sounded so terrible. But I hadn’t abandoned her. I had just stepped out for a bit. I was just taking a moment to think about my life. Didn’t I have that right? And Jason had emailed her. If anything, I had given her freedom to think about her own life. It was true that I had done it in a brutal sort of way but sometimes things just happened, opportunities presented themselves, and you had to run with them.

  I didn’t want to think about Margaux. I turned back to Martha. “Okay stranger,” I said. “Tell me about you.”