Chapter Eleven

Dear Jack,

I’ve ripped into you a few times for getting stuff wrong, but at least you’ve never said that I met Mark Delaney on the Front Ward at Caloola, as if he was a patient there like some other reporters I could name.

I mean, I did meet him on the Front Ward but he wasn’t a patient. His mum, old Joan Friedgut, was a patient and she’d been there for twenty years, maybe more, before I even arrived.

You’re probably thinking, ‘How could Mark’s mother be “old Joan Friedgut” when he was called Mark Delaney?’ But it should be obvious that anyone called ‘Friedgut’ would want to change their name. You’re supposed to say it Fried-Goot not Fried-Gut, but I can tell you that nobody called old Mrs Friedgut Friedgoot, she was always Fried-guts.

Mark thought it made him sound like a wog, which was another good reason to change it.

Mark’s mother wasn’t a wog, she was Australian, and when I got to Caloola she was already there and nobody seemed to know why exactly, meaning what the actual psychiatric diagnosis was, but she was pretty much zonked out the whole time with drugs we had to give her.

I saw you made a big point in one of your articles of saying that it was interesting that Mark’s mother was in Caloola, and I know what you were getting at. You were trying to say, ‘Oh, well, Mark’s mother was in Caloola and she was psychotic and don’t these things run in families?’

That might be true for schizophrenia and maybe for depression but Mark was not a depressed person. He had a drinking problem and he couldn’t control his temper when he was drunk, but both of those things were pretty normal when you consider what he had to put up with when he was growing up.

Anyway, you wanted to know how we met so I’ll tell you: Mark would come up to see his mum at Caloola and I’d be there on the ward, simple as that. Why he came up to visit his mother I don’t know because like you made clear in one of your articles, she was a prostitute before he was born and the only reason she married that old Hans Friedgut was because she couldn’t figure out who Mark’s father was.

In case you don’t know how I know that Mark’s mother was a prostitute, he told me. It was back when he was still a visitor at Caloola and I was brushing his mum’s hair and I asked, ‘What did your mum do before she ended up here?’ And he said, ‘She was a whore.’ I nearly dropped the brush because that’s not the kind of thing you hear every day, and then I said, ‘Oh, Mark, you shouldn’t say that. Maybe she wasn’t nice to you – my mother wasn’t nice to me either – but you can’t call her a whore.’

He said, ‘No, she was a whore whore,’ meaning an actual prostitute, and that shocked me because I didn’t know any prostitutes and now I was standing there brushing one’s hair. Anyway, Mark told me that his dad was probably one of his mum’s customers and she’d told him once that she wouldn’t have bothered to have him except by the time she found out it was too late to have an abortion. So she’d looked around instead for somebody who might want to marry her, and there was old Friedgut waiting by the tent for his turn.