Through a Camel's Eye (18 page)

THIRTY-TWO

Chris was shocked by how weak and ill Camilla Renfrew looked. It occurred to him that she might never recover, that the broken bone might not heal properly, that she might leave hospital only for a nursing home. Where was Simon, that he was letting his mother suffer and deteriorate like this?

Camilla's eyes were closed and she did not open them when Chris said her name. He did not believe she was asleep. She did not want to be bothered by him, or any other visitor. She had given up.

Chris found a nurse, who reacted to his concern with thinly veiled impatience. Camilla refused to eat, that was her problem. Lack of food made her weak, and she would only get weaker until she changed her mind, or was fed intravenously.

‘But why?'

‘Heaven knows. She complains that her voice exercises hurt her, that's when she bothers to communicate at all.'

‘The message I sent, did Mrs Renfrew get it?'

‘What message was that?'

‘About a stolen camel. Mrs Renfrew was upset about it. I told the sister in charge to make sure she got the message that he'd been found safe and well.'

‘Then she will have, Constable Blackie. But you can see for yourself that Mrs Renfrew is a bit beyond taking an interest in camels.'

‘What will happen to her?'

The nurse gave Chris a look which said, spare me idiotic questions. ‘After doctor sees her this morning, I believe he'll give instructions for her to be put on a drip. You're welcome to sit with her, but I have other patients to attend to. So, if you'll excuse me - '

Camilla was lying face to the wall with her eyes shut. She had shrunk so much that her broken leg looked grotesquely large and ill-proportioned. Chris wondered if the note about Riza might be in one of the drawers beside her bed. It wasn't. He decided he would write another one and place it so that it would be the first thing she saw when she woke up.

He drew Riza smiling - he thought that might amuse Camilla - and underneath the words, ‘I'm back!' He'd recorded Simon's number in his phone, and walked out to the corridor to ring him.

Simon didn't recognise Chris's name and had to be reminded. When it dawned on him that Chris wasn't calling on a police matter, but out of personal concern for his mother, he became defensive and annoyed. The hospital staff were doing their best. His mother was being extremely uncooperative. When Chris asked what Simon planned to do about this, he received the curt answer that it wasn't any of his business.

Chris asked when he planned to visit Camilla again, and was told, after a moment's hesitation, that he hoped to get down on Friday after work.

When Chris returned to Camilla's bed, she opened her eyes and smiled at him, a pale but welcoming smile.

Chris leant across and took her hand.

A nurse from another ward, hurrying past the door, saw a man with his back curved, bent in an attitude of gentle helpfulness, and smiled to herself, thinking that he must be the old woman's son.

Camilla grabbed her notebook and began writing quickly. She held it up for Chris to see.

‘Congratulations! You deserve a medal!'

Chris laughed and asked how she was feeling.

‘Better for your news,' Camilla wrote.

Many of the tasks Chris had performed, during those years of caring for his mother, had been performed without conscious thought. In recent years he'd been inclined to focus on their more awkward times, times when his personality had chafed and grated against hers, when, for instance, it had needed all his patience not to cry out against her habit of sitting in the car outside the Kostandis place.

He was, and had been for as long as he could remember, the kind of man who was inclined to focus more on his faults and failures than successes, and to feel impatient that he could not go back and change them.

He talked a little about Zorba and Theo, skating over details, then asked after Simon.

Camilla's face dropped from expectancy to resignation, then distress. Her whole body seemed to collapse inwards, as though the name on its own, just those two syllables, carried extraordinary power. She shook her head and closed her eyes.

Before leaving the hospital, Chris asked to be shown to the speech pathology room. A group was in session and he couldn't interrupt. He checked the therapist's schedule at the desk and noted a time when she appeared to be free. He left the hospital wondering how best to occupy himself for the next hour or so. He wished that Zorba and Theo were appearing in court right now, today, and felt frustrated at how long it would be before the brothers, represented no doubt by the best and most expensive lawyers, were forced to account for what they'd done.

Chris had never taken much notice of Corio Bay or Eastern Beach, having plenty of bays and beaches right at his back door. City beaches were tamed and sullied by the proximity of so much human traffic, and less objects of fear as a result. He decided to walk, hoping to ease some of his anxiety about Camilla.

The day was damp and gloomy. The tankers at the oil refinery sat as though stuck on the water, rather than immersed in it. It seemed foolish to expect that Camilla's voice would ever return, now she was so weak. After spending only a few moments in her company, Chris understood that the speech therapist wanted to use him as a sounding board for her puzzlement about her patient. The woman certainly had no problems with
her
voice box, Chris reflected, framing questions in his mind and waiting for a chance to squeeze them in. Camilla suffered from none of the known diseases which caused loss of speech, such as throat cancer, or Parkinson's. The therapist had initiated a program of exercises to strengthen her muscles and a step-by-step vocalisation of basic sounds. Most patients responded well to this regime.

‘But Mrs Renfrew was in hospital for a broken leg,' Chris pointed out. ‘She was in considerable discomfort.'

‘Many of our patients are in pain. That doesn't alter their desire to speak.'

‘Who suggested the treatment?' Chris asked, though he knew the answer.

His expression must have given him away when the therapist said Simon's name. ‘I'm sure your work would be made easier,' she said, ‘if Mrs Renfrew could answer questions like a normal person.'

‘That's not - '

‘We do our best. We can't cure everyone.'

‘What will happen to Mrs Renfrew now?'

‘That's not up to me. As far as her voice treatment goes, we've had to discontinue, but I expect you know that.'

Chris tried to talk about causes. The therapist kept repeating that none of the tests they'd done showed any abnormality.

‘Are you saying Mrs Renfrew doesn't speak because she doesn't want to?'

‘I'm not a psychologist. That's not for me to say.'

‘But surely it affects your diagnosis and treatment if the problem is wholly, or partly, psychological?'

The therapist shrugged. ‘It may be less relevant than you think. As I've said, the patients referred to me are actively seeking treatment, and even those who might be ambivalent - well, once they feel that their voice production is improving, that gives them the motivation to try harder. The exercises can cause discomfort, especially at first,' she admitted.

‘But you persevered, even when it was clear that Mrs Renfrew was becoming weaker.'

‘We persevered with the patient's best interests in mind, Constable Blackie.'

Chris wished that people wouldn't use his rank like that, when they meant to put him down.

Camilla's doctor was a young South Asian, who looked worried about what a police officer would want with him. Yes, he said, it was unfortunate that Mrs Renfrew's recovery was slow. Yes, she would need professional nursing care for the foreseeable future. When Chris asked how long it would take for her leg to heal, the doctor refused to commit to a time frame.

‘Do you need Mrs Renfrew's help with your inquiries?'

Chris almost smiled at that. He said that Mrs Renfrew had already helped a lot.

He steeled himself for paying Camilla another visit, without having anything to offer her - no escape plan, no words of hope.

While Chris pulled the chair closer to the bed, Camilla reached for her notebook and wrote, ‘I want to go home.'

‘What about your leg?'

‘I have money. I can hire a nurse.'

‘Who is your solicitor?'

Camilla balanced her notebook in shaking hands and managed one more word. ‘Sinclair.'

Bob Sinclair lived in a part of Queenscliff that Chris seldom visited. His house was on a hill opposite the Catholic church, occupying the highest point of land. The town's richest residents lived up there, people who, if they broke the law, managed to do so without attracting the attention of the local uniforms. Chris's heart had lifted at the sight of the name, because Sinclair had been his mother's solicitor. He was surprised that the old man hadn't retired.

Bob Sinclair's head was bald and age-spotted, covered with incipient skin cancers. In answer to Chris's first question, he replied that he'd retired for all but for a few of his oldest clients and that these included Camilla whom he'd known since she was a child.

Chris described Camilla's state of mind and health. He said he'd just come from visiting the hospital and that, in his opinion, Camilla would be much happier and recover more quickly at home.

The solicitor took Chris's meaning, and Chris was glad of it, glad he did not have to refer to Simon directly, or to his intentions. There was one of those small silences that occur between relative strangers when meaning has been implied and understood. The two men looked at one another, then Bob Sinclair turned and stared out the window. Chris had never been inside his house, had guessed, but never confirmed, how much of the ocean was visible from those wide, clean windows.

‘You know the day Harold Holt drowned,' Sinclair said, startling him. ‘I was standing right here when I saw the helicopters circling. Someone's drowned, I thought. The search went on for hours, and then of course we heard it on the news.'

Chris went white and could not prevent himself from clutching an edge of curtain for support. Had the solicitor forgotten his father, or was he being deliberately cruel? If so, what on earth was Chris doing there, enlisting, or trying to enlist his help?

The old man stared out across the channel with a faint smile on his lips. Chris cleared his throat. Quickly, he searched his mind for alternatives. There weren't any. What mattered was that he should act on Camilla's behalf.

When Chris was a boy, his mother had told and re-told the story of Prime Minister Holt's disappearance. She'd stood on the headland watching the helicopters and the rescue boats, along with three-quarters of the town's population. The first time Chris went to Portsea, he'd trudged over to the back beach with a school group, and been shown the spot. One of the more imaginative theories was that Holt had been picked up by a Russian submarine. It was the days of Khrushchev, after all. Theories multiplied when no body was washed ashore; not even pieces of the politician's wetsuit.

The story had come back to haunt both Chris and his mother. He hadn't been able to bear her making the comparison. ‘Hush!' he'd cried, and, ‘Please!'

Here was the horizon he'd escaped from in Swan Hill, the expanse that mocked him by its reach, the blend of sea and sky which had swallowed a country's leader and made him disappear without a trace. The mockery of it filled Chris's mouth with bile.

Clean windows made it worse, the view paid for by a lifetime's professional success. Chris was appalled by the barren expanse ahead of him, the more so since, were he to attempt to express his feelings, the solicitor would stare at him in disbelief. He knew depression had been growing in him; yet at the same time it seemed sudden, unforeseen. And why hadn't it lifted now he'd found Riza, now Julie's camel was back where he belonged?

The shipping channel was full of buoys and markers, defining precisely this human activity, or that. And on land, there were the lighthouses. He only had to step onto the footpath outside his own station door to be aware of the black one's jutting, solid shadow on the headland, its white twin a little further round, and further still the great stick marking the Point Lonsdale reef.

Full of definition, yet none of it availed him. He hated the very idea of commercial shipping, would have swept it out of existence like an angry three-year-old. He had no doubt a psychologist could explain his black mood, in language that was smooth, remote and logical. And he knew in advance that the definitions psychiatry offered would seem as false and alien to him as the ones his eyes sought out only to disclaim.

Yet what truth of his own did he have to set against them? How had he come to this point, that all his inner markers had deserted him? Was he making too much of ordinary grief?

His assistant was a case in point. When they'd rung to tell him they'd appointed her, he'd asked to have a look at her file, and had noted that both her parents had been killed when she was only three. How had this loss marred and shaped her? Of course it was impossible to tell. Even her close friends might not know. All Chris could think was that he'd never meant for it to be like this. He'd never meant to wake up in his forties with so little to show for his time on earth.

Chris forced his thoughts back to Camilla, who was alive and in danger. Bob Sinclair was speaking and Chris had missed half of what he'd said. He apologised and asked him to repeat it.

‘There are several ways in which the law might be of use.'

Chris listened carefully while the old man explained that Simon Renfrew would apply for power of attorney if he had not already done so. ‘He might persuade the doctors in Geelong to sign the forms.'

‘Why not come and see Mrs Renfrew yourself?' Chris suggested. ‘On the way, we can discuss the options.'