Show Me a Huia! by Chris Barfoot

Author:Chris Barfoot [Barfoot, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-08-02T22:00:00+00:00

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Interfering simpleton!

Randall Richardson sat in his study in his Epsom home studying the file of the patient under discussion.

What right had Mountjoy got to go sneaking around his property and talking to his patients, then to ring him up and ask if he could help with the treatment? And just because he felt sorry for that person! It was getting to the point that he would have to go to another church. Harry Mountjoy was a good man, but simple, one who was always bludging on his parishioners for cups of tea, a person practised at holding babies at christenings and standing at bedsides and gravesides, but a man totally lacking in knowledge of the ways of the world. A gullible man whom people could twist just by making him feel sorry for them.

There was a time when he had wondered whether he should speak to the vicar about his own problem. He had decided against it. He was used to keeping his own counsel, and to do otherwise would show a lack of confidence in himself. He also suspected the vicar’s rather narrow theological outlook and his naive political views. How could this unworldly man understand his wrestling about the whole direction of society and the anger which grew in him as a result? The Anglican Church regrettably was no longer the bulwark of society it once had been and, if it was made up of people like Harry Mountjoy, it would never face the present threats. In fact it sometimes even supported them. He recalled with disgust a vestry meeting where a motion supporting the Maori terrorists had been put forward by Stan McTaggart.

He thought about the phone call again. The thing that concerned him was not the vicar’s naivety or his failure to obey instructions, but the fact that he was not telling the truth.

His vicar was a very poor liar.

He knew which patient it was. This person had been his individual and particular responsibility. By a mixture of personal bonding and drug dependency, he had established a relationship which had kept this patient at the hospital for nearly two and a half years without using locks or bars.

Fortunately, the problem had been neurotic and not psychotic and there had not been difficulties with violence or criminal conviction. If so, the patient would have been under a different system requiring stringent team supervision. Fortunately too, the patient’s parents had both died, and with no immediate family Randall had more freedom to develop his own treatment. Moreover, being a private concern, the hospital was not visited by patient advocates who could be an administrative complication.

The patient’s problem was associated with guilt, and this guilt produced nightmares during which he would wake up screaming. The relief which he prescribed was a particular drug which deadened all nervous reactions. It was not the only form of treatment, nor was it the orthodox treatment recommended by his professional body, but it was the one which in the circumstances was the most effective.

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