Opportunity by Charlotte Grimshaw

led away. He was going
to kill my aunt, kill us, then himself. My mother said, 'Just
yourself will do.' She was steely, contained, determined. She
looked after us well. When I graduated she told me, 'You're set
for life. Your father should be pleased. But he won't be able to
bear it. He'll look at you and see what he could have been.'
    I thought, I look at him and see what I could have been.
Instead, I was a doctor. It was a happy day, my graduation. My
mother and sisters and Karen and I spent it together. It was as
if we'd all made good . . .
    After the ballet I woke up in the night. I'd dreamed my
father was standing at the end of the bed, raising his glasses to
his face. Here I was in my tasteful bedroom, between expensive
sheets, my beautiful wife next to me. He was seeing what he
could have been.
    But the dream had turned bad. Instead of triumph, I felt fear.
    I dreamed that I looked at him, and saw what I am.
    ***
    About five years ago I moved into my current consulting
rooms. I share a floor with other specialists. Our practice is
modern and friendly. I rush between the hospital and my
private rooms. I'm often called out late at night. I sweep
through the empty streets in my big car, through suburbs
washed with rain. I enjoy the silence before the crisis, before
my date in the corridors of pain. I'm used to seeing women
in agony. They plead and scream, they swear and cry. I touch
them somewhere neutral, on the shoulder, or on the foot. I
control them. I take away their pain.
    At the public clinic the patients are overweight, tattooed
and smoky. They present with diabetes, pierced genitalia,
venereal diseases. They are not armoured with nice accents
and designer clothes. But I find them more restful than the
hectic matrons of Remuera and Parnell, who make every
consultation a social event. Sometimes, when I get home from
my private clinic, I feel as if I've been at a seven-hour cocktail
party, without booze.
    One day my secretary told me, 'There's a man on the phone.
He says he's your father.'
    My hands started shaking. I went into my room and took
the call. I heard voices and music. The slurred voice said,
'Working hard?'
    I tried to treat him like pain. To assess the situation from a
long way off.
    'It must be good,' he said. 'All those women. All that money.'
The voice trailed off. He made a sound, like a sob. 'You're just
like your mother . . .'
    'I can't talk to you,' I said.
    What do I know about him? I remember waiting outside
his work to give him a birthday present. I was nine or ten. He
took the present, opened it, but he didn't seem to see it. I
found myself explaining what it was. He laughed a bit; he
looked everywhere but at my face. I was puzzled. When I tried
to talk to him he slid away from the subject. He made wild,
irrelevant assertions, daring anyone to disagree. He had a
high, strange laugh. When others made a joke he looked
pompous and high-minded, but he laughed when nothing
was funny, or when something was sad or brutal or shocking.
He never answered a single question I asked.
    He was musical. He was clever. Those were the only things
I knew about him. I never saw a genuine expression, or heard
a real voice. Can alcohol do that much damage — can it make
a personality disappear? Or had he been shadowy, incomplete,
wrong all along?
    'He's been arrested again,' my mother said. He bounced
between dry-out facilities and the courts. He hit rock bottom
and stayed there. Then I learned he was working part time
driving taxis. A mate was lending him his cab. Can you
imagine it — that drunk, driving your wife, your daughter
around? We talked about it. Karen was sorry for him. She
didn't want him to be poor. She has a kind nature. But she said
his drunkenness made it dangerous for people and he ought
to be stopped. What could we do about it, though? I practised
not thinking about it. I became very good at that.
    I was sitting in my room dictating notes. The young
assistant Viola came in with some files.