This Too Shall Pass Read Online Free PDF Page A

me, their demeanour would flip between boredom and anxiety. Even students in torn jeans, studded belts, high Mohawks and earplugs, would look up under a worried brow, searching for an elusive tram they knew wasn’t coming.
    The second trip was shorter. Past the large hospital – my employer – past gardens full of native trees – gardens that housed the zoo, gardens that were flanked by high-rise flats – the tram would climb into a suburb where an array of fast food outlets stood unashamedly. Marlowe Downs was a short ascent from there. In the middle of prime real estate, amongst the aquiline trunks of gum trees – their skins smelted on seamlessly in piebald pinks and greys – the low-slung building looked back over the city. It was to be my second home. My workplace. The microwave for my freezer brain. A house, supposedly, of good things.

TEN
    I want to introduce my superior straight off. Tall, s pectacled Celia Dawes. Head-forward Celia, who walked as if her thoughts had amalgamated to cause a magnetic field, one that pulled her northwards or towards the moon. On the morning I started work she was giving a lecture, the details of which were in my pigeonhole. It was taking place at the hospital, back down tram-infested Gingham Road – the tracks connecting the two services like an umbilical cord between unknown species.
    Already late, however, I took a hospital-issue car.
    It should have been easy but wrangling with the car park attendant about my status as a new employee, travelling the grey concrete loops to park, traversing the bowels of the hospital along long underground corridors, and then climbing upwards to study tiny letters on doors in a wide dark foyer made arriving no small feat.
    Finally, on opening the doors to L25, or the Milly Logan Lecture Hall, an unexpected diorama was revealed: a hundred or so people sat listening intensely to the tutelage of a thin angular woman. She was spouting forth in an erudite but, at times, confusing manner on obsessive-compulsive disorder in children.
    Assuming that I was in the right place and this was Celia Dawes, I crept in and slid onto one of the only empty seats, a chair in the first row. Celia’s busy style of speaking, combined with her robust gesticulation, was mesmerising. Following her, though, wasn’t quite as easy. The uncharted course she took began to yaw about so that it was difficult to link her ideas. Some seemed to be just fragments, as if requiring the listener to gather the bits, take them home and, like pieces of an unmade garment, stitch them together. And there was Celia’s long brown hair; it was a little Cousin Itt-ish, shaking the way Cousin Itt’s had when, every so often, her head jerked, seemingly involuntarily, in a manner which was close to a nervous tic.
    â€˜I want to show you footage of compulsions,’ she said, taking a step away from the audience towards the front of the room.
    â€˜Symptoms are common in well children, but at the point of interfering with—’ Halfway through the sentence she reached up to pull a screen down over the blackboard and at the slightest touch, at almost the suggestion of her hand pulling on the string, the entire contraption, case and all, fell off the wall. It crashed fitfully against her head before clattering loudly and awkwardly onto the floor where it oscillated once before lying motionless. She gripped her head, hunching over. She was obviously in agony.
    When no one got up to help her, I, self-consciously, walked the gauntlet between lecturer and audience, cowering to excuse myself.
    â€˜Are you okay?’ I ventured, my arm stretching out supportively although I wasn’t actually touching her.
    â€˜Prudence,’ she said in a tetchy tone from under her thatch of hair, ‘would have paid if I’d have found where she was hiding out.’
    Or, at least, I think that’s what she said.
    She kept hugging her head and I crept