Free Quipu by Damien Broderick Page A

let alone her relationship with her family, that you know infinitely more about her than I ever could. I don’t deny it. Yet I am quite certain that she never told you of her frequent hallucinations.
    Once I knew about this, being aware of the limitations of my knowledge, I urged Caroline to tell you of her problems, and to seek psychiatric counsel. Up to this point she had been highly articulate and forthcoming about her splendid relationship with both of you and her sister. In fact, this was something that first attracted me to her; as you pointed out this afternoon I have had ambiguous and strained dealings with my own parents. Yet now she began to contradict these glowing assurances, most markedly in her reluctance to tell you candidly about her hallucinations.
    On those nights she stayed with me, she’d go through prolonged episodes of agitation, trying to make up her mind whether to ring you and let you know where she was. All of this was a little peculiar, but only a little. Failing to call you is not obviously different from any thoughtless/wilful girl forgetting/refusing to let her parents know where she was, and thereby admit that they held the right to control her movements.
    Not telling you about the intermittent hallucinations was more worrying, but—to be cruelly blunt about it—I could see that if you love your family very much and they have a high regard for you, then you might well feel reluctant to tell them you frequently see your dead grandfather coming at you out of the wall.
    By the time I decided things were pretty serious with Caroline’s state of mind, it was already (for a variety of reasons) difficult to do anything about it. Her first-year exams were close, and clearly important to Caroline. It may seem obvious now that it would have been better to stop everything, forget the exams, and call in a psychiatrist. At the time it was my considered estimate that I should do nothing beyond offering what support I could, wait until the exams were over, and then urge her to seek medical aid.
    Why didn’t I “do the right thing” and let you know? You raised this question today and I was unable to answer it in any terms that would not have been absolutely offensive in that place at that time. But the question remains: why did I have the audacity and stupidity to take it all into my own hands?
    Perhaps because I wanted to play Svengali.
    Perhaps because my hostility to my own parents transferred itself to you.
    Perhaps because my cold-blooded intellect wants to test its power and theories in a ‘game’ with living people.
    Perhaps because I am mad myself and driven by the peculiar imperatives of my madness.
    Well, perhaps. I cannot and will not deny that some of these ignoble elements are implicated. But there are two fundamental reasons why I “took things into my own hands” or, more precisely, did not pass them on immediately when they appeared there.
    Firstly, Caroline was plainly reluctant to broach her problems with either of you. Nor with any of her girl friends, except very cautiously and peripherally. It seemed important that she should tell someone . Trust depends on trustworthiness. If Caroline wanted to tell me things she felt incapable of revealing to you, I could not then reveal them to you. (Unless it became unquestionably imperative to do so.)
    Caroline’s trust enabled me to arrange for her to see a psychiatrist. That was a crucial decision in more than one way. It meant that she and I would learn if her state was as serious as I feared. It also meant (since going to a doctor was itself an objective transaction requiring the payment of fees, medical benefits and so on) that sooner or later you would learn about it without any betrayal of trust by me. If the family situation was as open and responsive as everyone except Caroline kept insisting, everything would be sorted out without too much difficulty, though, of course, not without a measure of surprise, shock, pain, resentment