The Hypnotist’s Love Story

  "I'm not that nice," said Ellen. "When I saw you holding the ultrasound photos, I wanted to kill you. It turns out that I do have limits. I don't want you near my baby."

  Her eyes had turned steely.

  The words "I'm sorry" came into my mind, but they seemed insultingly inadequate.

  I said instead, "Patrick is lucky to have you." And it occurred to me that I might actually mean it, that in a far-off, more generous part of my mind, I could even be happy for him.

  Her face shifted in some tiny, subtle way. She said, "He's still in love with his first wife."

  "Yes, of course," I said. I could feel my senses starting to drift. "He still loves Colleen. First love and all that, but, so what, she's dead, isn't she? I always knew that I loved him more than he loved me, but I didn't care. I just loved him so much."

  A great wave of tiredness was dragging me somewhere far away.

  "I know you did." Ellen stood up, adjusting my blankets, like a mother. "You loved him. And you loved Jack."

  For a moment I seemed to swim back up to lucidity again, and I said, "Have you hypnotized me?"

  She smiled. "I've been trying to unhypnotize you, Saskia."

  And then I was drifting away again, and I heard her say, "It's time to move on now, Saskia, and let go of all those memories of Patrick and Jack. It doesn't mean it didn't happen, or that Patrick didn't love you, or that you weren't a wonderful mother to Jack. I know that you were. It doesn't mean that he didn't hurt you terribly. But now it's time to close that door. Imagine an actual door. A big heavy wooden door with an old-fashioned gold lock. Now close it. Bang. Lock it. Throw away the key. It's closed, Saskia. Closed forever."

  When I woke up again, the room was empty and the hypnotist's visit seemed like a dream.

  Chapter 23

  Love! Give me chocolate any day!

  --Ellen's godmother Pip

  The suffragettes didn't starve themselves for the vote

  so that you girls could starve yourselves for a man.

  --Ellen's godmother Mel

  Oh Lord, what superficial nonsense she'd been spouting: Close the door. Close it forever.

  For heaven's sake, the woman had broken into their house in the middle of the night and watched them sleep. She was probably schizophrenic or bipolar or who knew what. She probably needed anti-psychotic medication combined with intensive ongoing therapy. Ellen's sappy little comments were like giving her vitamins when she needed surgery.

  Also, closing the door wasn't quite the right metaphor. You didn't close the door on your memories. That was encouraging repression! Something to do with water might have been better. Cleanse yourself ... oh, whatever.

  Ellen yawned hugely without bothering to put her hand over her mouth. She was driving back from the hospital. There wasn't as much traffic as usual on the roads; people were staying home because of the dust storm. It was still windy, although not as bad as the previous night. The sky was heavy with gloomy clouds, and the entire city was covered in a fine layer of orange dust. Everything looked grimy. She drove by an empty outdoor cafe and saw a woman wearing a hospital mask and mopping the floor. A mother hurried from her car carrying a toddler with a sheet draped over its head, like one of Michael Jackson's children. Then a young man wearing shorts and a T-shirt jogged by, as if he'd jogged straight through from another day, a sunny, blue-skied clean and ordinary day.

  Why were you even talking to her? That's what everyone would say. You must be crazier than her! Did you take her chocolates and flowers? A get-well card?

  She looked at her watch. It was noon. She thought back to early that morning: It seemed like days had passed since then, not hours.

  When it became obvious that Jack was well enough to move around, Patrick had decided to drive him to the hospital. It was clear to Ellen that he couldn't bear to sit and wait for an ambulance, he needed to be moving, taking action, and most important of all, he needed to be far away from Saskia. Ellen could sense the heat of his simmering fury emanating from his body like a low-grade fever. She offered to stay at home and wait for Saskia's ambulance. "You can't stay with her," Patrick had said, but Ellen pointed out that as she was barely conscious (breathing shallowly and obviously in a great deal of pain), she wasn't a danger to anyone, and besides, they could hardly just leave her there alone, with a note pinned to the door for the paramedics. Patrick hadn't been in the mood for lighthearted remarks of that nature. Let's call the police, he'd said, and hand her over. But Ellen had convinced him to concentrate on Jack.

  When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics told Ellen they were taking Saskia to Mona Vale Hospital and not to try to follow them but to take her time driving there, and that Saskia was in good hands. They seemed to take it for granted that Ellen would also be coming. So she got dressed and drove to the hospital and then sat for hours in a crowded waiting room, reading trashy magazines without absorbing a single word, surrounded by wheezing asthmatics who had been affected by the dust storm. Finally, a nurse told her that she could see Saskia for a few minutes.

  In the meantime she'd spoken to Patrick once on his mobile. He'd taken Jack to a private hospital in Manly and they were waiting for an X ray on his arm. He hadn't even asked about Saskia, and he obviously assumed that Ellen was still at home, because he told her to try to get some sleep.

  How would he react when he heard she'd actually been at the hospital, and that she'd talked to Saskia? Would he see it as a betrayal? Was it a betrayal?

  The thing was, talking to Saskia hadn't just felt like the right thing to do, it felt somehow imperative, for both of them.

  Ellen thought about the despair on Saskia's face as she lay in that narrow hospital bed. She seemed to Ellen like someone who had lost everything in a natural disaster, someone who was trying to grapple with the fact that the entire framework of her life no longer existed.

  Had she really hit "rock bottom"? Perhaps that despair Ellen thought she saw was just the pain (which the nurse had said would be considerable) and that once she was back on her feet, she'd be back to her old ways.

  Her phone rang on the passenger seat beside her and she saw that it was Patrick calling. He must be home with Jack by now and was wondering where she was. She was only a few minutes away, so she didn't bother pulling over to answer.

  There was no question that this would mark a turning point for him. Now that Jack had been hurt he would definitely want to get the police involved. If Ellen tried telling him that she thought Saskia may have reached her own turning point, he probably wouldn't believe her. She remembered him crawling across the bed in that eerie dawn light, his face ugly with fear and fury.

  If she was wrong, if Saskia continued to stalk them, then Patrick's hatred for her was gradually going to destroy him. It was like acid, corroding him from the inside. She felt that it had already given his personality sharp edges. Most of the time those edges were hidden by the identity he liked to show the world: the easygoing, straightforward Aussie bloke. But over the last few months, as she'd got to know him, to truly know him, as they both moved beyond the infatuation stage, she'd seen the edges reveal themselves. The bitterness. The mistrustfulness. The anxiety. And he'd already suffered so much grief in his life before he even met Saskia.

  She wondered what sort of person Patrick would have been if Colleen had lived. They probably would have had more children after Jack. Patrick would have been a typical dad, involved with the school, leaving the domestic decisions to his wife--a simpler, sweeter person. A happier person.

  And the tiny baby who had waved at them yesterday would never have existed.

  Well, whatever. A foolish and pointless line of thought.

  She yawned again. She was not only exhausted but starving: that urgent, ravenous hunger she'd never experienced before pregnancy. When she got home, she wanted to climb into bed with a huge plate of toast and a cup of tea, and then she wanted to pull the covers up and fall straight into a deep, dreamless sleep. She would tell Patrick she was too tired
to talk, too tired to talk about anything--the past, the future, the present.

  He doesn't ...

  Don't think about it, she ordered herself sharply.

  But it was useless, because she knew that on some level she hadn't thought about anything else since last night, even in spite of everything that had happened. It had added to the nightmarish quality of the past few hours.

  He doesn't love me as much as he loved Colleen. He has doubts. He looks at me and thinks of her and sees that it's "not the same." He will never love another woman the way he loved Colleen.

  She examined her feelings, slowly and tentatively, as if she was lifting a piece of clothing to examine a gunshot wound.

  Did it hurt?

  Yes, quite a lot.

  She thought about Saskia's matter-of-fact acceptance that Patrick would always love Colleen best, and she understood something with simple, startling clarity: I don't love Patrick as much as Saskia does.

  Saskia hadn't cared if she loved him more than he loved her, whereas Ellen did care. If she was handing over a slice of her heart, she wanted the exact same size given back in return. Actually, she really preferred a bigger piece, thank you very much.

  What she really wanted was to be adored. She was having a baby. She deserved to be adored.

  Well, that was just infantile, wasn't it?

  Women had babies all the time without the support of an adoring partner. She had a loving partner. That should be enough! She was lucky! Her own mother had given birth without a man.

  Ellen was lucky. She had more than her fair share of love. In fact, perhaps that was the problem. She'd been spoiled with far too much adoration.

  She would forget about what Patrick had said about Colleen. She would never think about it or tell a friend, and she would certainly never mention it to him.

  Yes, it might be difficult, but it was the right thing to do.

  There was a polite toot of a horn from the car behind her, and she realized that the traffic light she'd been waiting at had turned green while she was sitting there feeling virtuous. She lifted her hand in apology and put her foot on the accelerator.

  Lucky, she reminded herself.

  "So you're going to need a lot of support over the next couple of months," finished up my doctor. He seemed very young, with flushed, baby-smooth cheeks. I must be getting old.

  I remember when Mum was in the hospital she couldn't get over the youth of her doctors. "I get the giggles," she told me. "They sound so serious, but they just look like kids playing dress-up!" she whispered to me.

  The kids knew what they were talking about, though. She'll probably make it through Christmas, one of them told me. But not much longer.

  I wasn't there when she died. I had to go home because Jack was starting school. Funny that I thought it was "home."

  My doctor confirmed what Ellen had already told me. Fractured pelvis. Broken ankle. They were scheduling me for surgery the next day. I was going to be on bed rest for the next six weeks.

  I wondered how long Jack's arm would take to heal.

  "I don't have any family," I told him. I don't know why I said that. Perhaps I thought he could prescribe me one.

  "Well, you're going to need to rely on your friends," he said. "I noticed you had a visitor earlier. She seemed like a close friend, very concerned about you."

  He was talking about Ellen.

  "Mmmm," I said. "I don't think she'll actually be visiting again."

  "Oh," he said. "Well, as I say, you're going to need support, so you might want to call in some favors. Don't worry. People love to help in a crisis. It makes them feel good. You know, useful. You'll be surprised at how your friends will step up."

  "I'm sure I will be," I said.

  I couldn't tell him that there was no one to step up, that I didn't have that ordinary social framework, that there was just me, that there was no one I could possibly ask for help. This man had no idea that people like me existed: people who look and sound well educated and normal on the outside but are actually as lonely and crazy as a homeless bum.

  Then I remembered that the difference between me and a homeless person is that I have money. I'll pay someone to be supportive, I thought. There must be some sort of a service for people like me.

  "You'll get through this," said the doctor.

  I tried to smile politely, but my facial muscles rebelled as if it was an unfamiliar move, as if I'd never smiled before.

  The doctor pressed the morphine clicker into my hand and patted my shoulder. "Give yourself some pain relief. Enjoy it while it lasts. We'll be weaning you off soon enough."

  I pressed the red button.

  Jack was sound asleep when Ellen got home. He was lying in his bed curled up on his side, looking tiny and pale, the arm in the cast over the blanket.

  "The doctor prescribed him some strong painkillers," said Patrick quietly, as they stood together in his bedroom looking down at him. He pulled the quilt up and let his hand rest briefly on Jack's forehead. "He'll probably sleep for hours."

  As they walked down the stairs together, Ellen felt Patrick's fury rise steadily like a boiling kettle. They went into the living room and he began pacing back and forth, talking nonstop. He hadn't yet asked where Ellen had been. He wanted to tell her about how he'd already phoned the police and they'd told him to come in to make a full report and begin the process of taking out a restraining order against Saskia, how Jack's injuries could have been so much worse, how he thought Jack was dead when he saw him lying at the bottom of the stairs, and did she think that too, and that he should have taken the restraining order out so much sooner and he'd never forgive himself for that, never.

  "I've been trying to work out how she got in," he said finally.

  "I don't know," said Ellen tiredly. While Patrick had been talking, she had lain down on her grandfather's leather couch and put her forearm over her eyes. Patrick had offered her a cup of tea when she first got home, but so far it hadn't materialized. "I moved the key after the last time."

  "What?" said Patrick.

  Ellen realized her mistake too late. She opened her eyes. Patrick had stopped pacing and was standing frozen in the middle of the room. "What 'last time'?"

  She opened her mouth to speak and closed it again. She was desperately trying to find the right balance between honesty and enraging him further. She gave up.

  "She left biscuits on the doorstep when we went up to the mountains," she said. "I think she might have cooked them in my kitchen."

  "What? She broke in before and you neglected to tell me?"

  "Well, I might have been wrong." Ellen sat up and folded her arms protectively across her stomach. "I just had a feeling." Patrick was looking at her almost as if he wanted to hit her. An image came into her mind of the way he'd grabbed Saskia by the shoulders as if he was about to throw her up against the wall.

  "I'm not Saskia," she said involuntarily.

  "I know you're not," he said with an impatient, disgusted move of his hand. "But why did you not mention this to me?"

  "I didn't want to upset you," said Ellen. "I know how much it upsets you."

  "You threw them out straightaway, of course."

  "Of course," said Ellen. Honesty was often overrated.

  "Because they probably had rat poison in them. Or, Christ, I don't know, anthrax!"

  "She doesn't want to kill you, Patrick. She loves you."

  "How do you know what she wants?" said Patrick. "You have no idea what she wants. God Almighty, the woman watched us sleep last night!"

  "I just talked to her at the hospital," said Ellen. "I think it's finished. I really do. She promised me. Anyway, she's going to be stuck in bed for a long time."

  Patrick sat down on the chair in front of Ellen. It was the chair where her grandmother always used to sit to watch TV. Patrick looked too big and rough for it. Ellen had to stop herself from saying, Don't sit there.

  "You talked to her," said Patrick slowly. "Why would you do that?"


  "I just felt if I talked to her, I might be able to make a difference."

  "Right," said Patrick. He ran the palm of his hand roughly across his face, pulling at the stubbled skin. "So, you two girls have a nice chat?"

  "I really think she's hit rock bottom," began Ellen.

  "Oh, dear, the poor thing," said Patrick.

  Ellen went silent. He'd earned the right to be sarcastic.

  They locked eyes for a few seconds and then Patrick looked away and shook his head.

  He took a deep breath. "You're meant to be on my side."

  "I am!" said Ellen immediately.

  "It feels like you're on her side."

  "That's--silly."

  "If you had some ex-boyfriend stalking you the way Saskia stalks me, I wouldn't hesitate. I'd knock his head off."

  "You're saying I should have punched Saskia?" said Ellen, unfairly, but needing all the points she could get.

  "Of course not," said Patrick tiredly. He sat back and closed his eyes.

  There was a pounding sensation at the very center of Ellen's forehead. Her wrist itched unbearably.

  Guilt. That's what she was feeling, because he was partly right. She'd tried harder to understand what it must be like to be Saskia than she'd tried to understand what it would be like to be Patrick.

  The mature thing would be to say nothing, to not try to defend herself and to certainly stop aligning herself with Saskia.

  Instead she said, "Are you thinking it now?"

  "Thinking what?" Patrick opened his eyes.

  "Are you thinking about Colleen?"

  "What are you talking about? Why would I be thinking about Colleen? What has she got to do with anything?"

  He looked completely, innocently baffled.

  So much for her virtuous decision in the car. Part of her longed to rewind and take it back, but the other part, her basic, instinctual self, wanted everything, every single thing, out in the open.

  "You said last night that sometimes you look at me and you think about Colleen, and you think that it's not the same and that you'll never love anyone as much as you loved Colleen."

  "I said that?" said Patrick. He paused. "I never said that!"