Obviously, I wonder whether it’s Dr Mercy the clinical psychologist speaking, or Madame Mercy the medium, peddler of woo. Mentally, I’m keeping score like a tennis umpire.
‘I’m sensing a lot of trauma in this place.’
Fifteen–love to Madame Mercy.
‘People around here don’t like to acknowledge the Frontier Wars, but they were real and viciously fought.’
Fifteen–all.
‘If this was a natural wetland, it’s just the sort of place that native people might have congregated for feasts and ceremonies. Didn’t you say there were once eel traps?’
Fifteen–thirty.
‘Awful things were done. Colonists sometimes resorted to gifting the native people “sweet damper”. Not familiar with the term? Ah, well, that’s bread – or sacks of bread flour – sweetened with sugar. Sadly, horrifically, it was to mask the taste of the arsenic. Other times, they responded to relatively minor assaults, thefts or stock killings with punitive expeditions, dispensed collective “justice” with rifles, swords and clubs, killing old people, women and children indiscriminately.’
Fifteen-forty.
‘Killing Aboriginal people other than in self-defence was a hanging offence. But the police had to have the will – and the resources – to detect the crime and bring the perpetrators to justice, and often they didn’t. When they did, juries of fellow squatters wouldn’t convict.’
Can I call the match, or at least the game for Dr Mercy?
‘That sort of thing leaves psychic echoes, and that could be what you picked up. The screaming.’
Evidently not.
‘You said you’d contacted the Traditional Owners. Was there any indication that this might be a sorry place?’
‘No, but we didn’t get around to organising a visit before Em …’ I let the sentence hang.
‘Ah.’
After Em died, it all just became too much for me. It was a blow to the ego, because I honestly thought I was the world’s greatest project manager.
I mean, come on. To turn a spare-bedroom computing project into a company with a half-billion annual turnover in the space of five years – that wasn’t achieved without organisational skills, and Tel was a computer nerd who couldn’t organise two matching socks in the morning.
I was the bookish one with a research background in concordance analysis and corpus linguistics, a decade before most computer scientists had heard of Large Language Models or considered how they might be used to train a general artificial intelligence – and I’d just finished an MBA.
So, I thought that, as organisers go, I was the dog’s bollocks.
Ha. Was I ever wrong.
Em and I had so many balls in the air with this hugely ambitious, complex project, and without her I dropped them all. To my shame. Every single fucking one.
Now, when I drive around the property, I’m confronted with the wreckage of our dreams and the desecration of her legacy.
The infant woodland, a whole winter’s dedicated work by a band of Landcare volunteers, succumbed to the swelling rabbit population. The native grasslands were grubbed up in last year’s dry summer by hungry corellas and galahs. I’ve seen feral cats slinking around, so our chances of establishing the crucial populations of amphibians, reptiles and small digging mammals are slim.
Without Em’s infectious passion to persuade them, our canny, thrifty farming neighbours remain sceptical of the Sky Island Biolink concept, an unbroken chain of native woodlands, grasslands and wetlands joining the Grampians in the North to the Otways in the south.
Because our property falls across the borders of two Traditional Owner groups, it’s unclear, at least to me, who has authority to speak to us on their behalf, and protocols must be followed.
From an organiser with laser focus, almost an excess of drive, I’ve become the opposite: a dabbler, a dilettante. I can’t even motivate myself to learn the damn accordion properly.
I don’t tell Mercy the half of this, of course. But my God it festers.
Unsurprising, then, that by the time the tour has ended, half my field of vision has been sucked into a jagged scar pulsating with light.
‘Anything I can get you? Do you take any meds?’
‘No. Thanks,’ I mumble. ‘Tried triptans but they didn’t do anything.’
‘Ah, no, they wouldn’t work. Not in your case.’
Why not in my case, I wonder vaguely.
‘There’s one thing that should alleviate the sick headache, though,’ she says in a matter-of-fact way. ‘Come here.’
Before my fuddled brain can come to terms with what’s happening, she’s backed me up against the kitchen bench. My jeans are round my ankles, my underpants are round my knees and she’s coaxing my cock into an erection, followed by vigorous pumping with her right hand. Her face betrays concentration, but as little emotion as if she were shaking a sauce bottle.
Some part of my startled mind is thinking ‘I don’t want this.’ Another part is in shock and has checked out entirely. The lizard brain meanwhile is having a party.
She’s rough but deft, and before too long, produces results. She takes the roll of kitchen towel gingerly between her fingertips, peels off a square, wipes her sticky palm. Drops a strip of towel on the semen-spattered boards of the kitchen floor and presses it down with the sole of her shoe.
‘There. You’ll feel better now. Clean yourself up.’
She hands me the roll, then steps out of the room. I soon hear the tap run in the bathroom.
I’m struggling to comprehend and categorise what just happened. Is this what sexual assault is like? Should I feel violated? Do I feel disrespected, humiliated? Anything?
The cold, perfunctory nature of it is so bizarre. As if wringing an orgasm out of my genitalia is as mechanical and impersonal an action as turning that tap on and off.
I simply don’t know how to react. This is not something that forty-eight years of being male has prepared me for.
She re-enters the kitchen. I haven’t moved. Her cool hand on my cheek smells of soap.
‘Best put the little chappy away before he catches cold,’ she observes, then turns to fill the kettle. ‘A nice mug of tea? Two sugars for a treat?’
‘Please,’ I say.
What else can I do?
As I tend to my sore, damp penis, on which the kitchen paper is uncomfortably rough, and tug my clothes back into place, I’m still trying to work out whether this was just a miscommunication. Can she somehow have thought it was what I wanted?
As usual, the migraine attack has brought an inability to string thoughts together coherently. I’m having real trouble grasping the sequence of events, let alone being able to evaluate them.
Whatever might be going on at a cognitive level, there’s no denying the soothing effect of the endorphins now bathing my jangled brain. The sharp, digging pain at the back of my eyeballs has gone, and so has the nausea.
I must have gone to sleep. I come round in my armchair in the darkening lounge. There’s a blanket tucked around me.
It was the front door closing that woke me. I hear footsteps on the gravel, then a car door swings open, closes with a hollow bang. An engine starts, changes pitch. Tyres on gravel. The sounds diminish, disappear.
Mercy has left. Gone to her five-thirty.
Good.
Next week in Blind Spot:
Chapter 8: Perspectives
In search of answers, Ben visits an old friend.
Acknowledgement of Country: This story is set on the lands of the Djargurd Wurrung, while the author lives on Wadawurrung country. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned herein are the product of the author’s imagination. The locations are based on real places.
This is getting very interesting, Steve. 👏👏😊
Now you know what to do for a migraine ….