Chapter 20 PHYLLIDA
PHYLLIDA
NOW, NSW SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, AUSTRALIA
It is a strange thing, being unable to move and yet encased in one’s body. Phyllida smells disinfectant and a hint of something sweet; she hears hospital foot traffic. There is pain in her back. Her mind remains foggy and slow, and as she forces her eyes open, her courage wavers.
When she went into the psychiatric hospital thirty years ago, the doctor told her it was the avoidance of the terrible reality—the non-acceptance of what had happened with David—that was causing her brain to malfunction.
He was a lovely doctor. A psychiatrist—Doctor Fedeline.
He collected tiny diecast toys and trains and other rare micromachines.
She had wondered what piqued his interest in such small items, but Phyllida too had always enjoyed the smallness of life, the scraps of things. She had enjoyed hearing about them.
Back then, at the age of fifty, she had learned a great deal from Doctor Fedeline.
Attachment theory, disassociation, a need for control due to her childhood rejection by her mother.
In addition, of course, there was the trauma at nineteen, then again at twenty-nine, not that she had confided the latter to Doctor Fedeline.
She had created a type of protective thinking: that as long as she lived a good life—a life for others—bad things would not happen to her again. But then came the third trauma: David.
Doctor Fedeline was surprised she recovered so well during her stay in that dismal ward.
But he didn’t know her nature. She was interested.
Curious. Fascinated about the capacity of a brain to skip and run and bend in all those incredible ways.
She had her intuition too. She knew he was a good man, and that on every level, he was right.
That day back in 1995—in Doctor Patel’s surgery when David was still very much alive—Phyllida had been in a daily dialogue with herself that would only allow for the possibility of David’s recovery.
Never for the idea of untreatable illness or death.
It was protective thinking. Marvellous and magic. Until it wasn’t.
She supposed she sounded naive, silly even, the way she talked to Caleb Patel back then. But in those days, there was no Doctor Google. You had to go to a library to look things up or ask an actual expert.
She had her herbal remedies, but she had lost her confidence in them.
She didn’t know exactly what she thought Caleb Patel might do, but she believed he would help.
The idea that David’s life could be snuffed out, just like that, was the furthest thing from her mind.
There was surgery, chemotherapy, radiation.
It was 1995 for goodness’ sake. They cured things.
So, she had ignored her niggling sense of foreboding; thought the Morrigan’s appearance in the garden was related to Miriam’s pregnancy.
She wanted to blame Miriam when things started to go downhill, but that was never going to stick.
Miriam’s pregnancy meant they were bound.
David insisted the baby was his, and that Phyllida must be there for both mother and child.
Phyllida couldn’t tell him she had sensed the pregnancy the day she and David had met the woman at her mother’s funeral.
Instead, she let him die with the comfort that he was leaving something behind. And Phyllida acquired a granddaughter.
So, life comes, then death, and then life.
That’s the way it’s always been. Back then, she simply could not accept that David was gone.
She had been afraid of his death. He was her beloved, the only part of her old self in her new world.
But Doctor Fedeline taught her to trust herself again.
To trust in the circle of things. To trust in the small.
Birds, books, small diecast trains; each a spectacular gift.
She read. She studied nature. She honed her intuition.
It is funny, she thinks now, that her lessons began in a bookshop.
A place where there were so many lessons to learn and yet she took so few.
All her years working in her first bookshop—at eighteen, nineteen, well into her twenties—reading and restoring and selling old books—she had barely become any wiser.
Back then she may have been a seer, but she was not yet the Cailleach her grandmother had promised she would become. That wisdom was yet to be earned.
And she honestly thought she had earned it; that the tablets were the answer. Yet, here she still is. What can it mean?