Finding Eloise

by Peter Ninnes

part 1

Relieved to be escaping Brisbane’s steamy heat, I pushed open the hospital door and followed the signs to the neurology department. My amnesic episode frequency had eased from about one per week to one per month, thanks to the medicine prescribed by my general practitioner. Retrieving memories had become akin to hauling a full bucket of water up from a deep well. Often, the bucket arrived only half full. Sometimes the rope broke before the bucket reached the top.

Dr Singh, the neurologist, gave me one of those looks that I feared from a medical professional. Maybe you’ve been unfortunate enough to receive such a look. It’s the kind that says, “I’ve got good news and bad news, but the bad news is worse than the good news is good.” He perched his elbows on his mahogany desktop and rested his chin on his hands.

“The good news, Mr Ennis,” he said, “is that your memory problems will only get worse if you have more episodes or stop taking the medicine.”

He paused before delivering the bad news. It felt like a soap opera. Dramatic orchestral music played in my head: violins and cellos with a tympanic crescendo.

Dr Singh’s eyes closed slightly as a frown trudged across his forehead. “The bad news, I’m sorry to say, is that the medicine won’t stop the episodes entirely. We can expect them to continue, more or less regularly.”

I thought about that for a moment, trying to connect the good news and the bad news. “What you’re saying is that if I keep taking the medicine, I’ll still have amnesic attacks and my memory will continue to decline?”

“I’m afraid so. But at a reduced rate.”

“What about if we increase the dose?”

“We’re already at the recommended maximum. It’s one of those drugs that if you take more, it could have the opposite effect to the desired one. ”

He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his abdomen, waiting for my response.

“Is there nothing I can do to preserve my memories? Maybe a different drug?”

“We’ve run out of drug options,” Dr Singh said, picking up a pen. He pulled over a notepad embossed with the name of a major drug company.

“Have you ever kept a journal?” he asked, writing the word “Journal” on the notepad.

“No.”

“Then you should start. It will help save your memory of daily happenings. While you’re at it, you should write down your memories of all key events or people in your life.” Below “Journal” he wrote “Key events”. “Holidays, significant birthday parties, births of any children, wedding day, important friendships, and so on.”

“If I can remember them,” I said. After the first episode several years ago, I couldn’t recall my own 40th birthday party. My elderly mother had to remind me that we’d spent a weekend on the Sunshine Coast to celebrate. I’d also started to forget the names of plants that I researched. Google Lens had become my best friend.

“What you remember may or may not be entirely accurate,” Dr Singh said, “but it’s important to write down whatever you can recall. In a year or two, even those memories may be gone.”

He passed me the piece of paper from his notepad. “Pin this on your fridge to help you remember the tasks. Come back and see me in three months.”

As soon as I got home, I began to write down a story that held great importance to me. You may think this memory of a friend from my school days is weird, impossible, or unreal. Yet, it meant a lot to me. Perhaps by writing it down, I’ll not only save the memory, but understand what happened. You may find the details are inaccurate. They may even be contradictory. The entire story may be a figment of my damaged memory. You can be the judge.

* * *

One Tuesday, just before our final Grade 10 exams, Eloise didn’t come to school. Usually, she’d let me know if she was sick. If I was in the shower and Mum had a day off from the bakery, she’d answer the phone then yell to me wherever I was in the house, “Phil! Eloise ain’t coming to school today.”

Mum was good like that. She sat back and let my relationship with Eloise develop. She trusted us. She treated Eloise like her own daughter.

The exams were less than a week away. We’d been studying together every night, either at her place or mine. Her absence was puzzling.

When she didn’t appear on Wednesday, I called her house after school. Her mum, Mrs Troupe, answered the phone, sobbing. I could barely make out what she was saying. The gist was that her carpenter husband, Barry, had absconded with the local nurse, Beatrice, and taken Eloise.

“He’s kidnapped her, Phil!” Mrs Troupe said between wails. “They left on Monday night while I was pulling beers at the Royal.”

It took me a few seconds to process. Finally, I asked, “Kidnapped her? Where did they go?”

“Gympie. Jack from the garage was on the same bus, going to get some parts. As soon as he arrived, he called me, even though it was past midnight. He couldn’t believe it.”

“Did he say how Eloise looked?”

More sobs echoed down the line. “They... they all looked happy.” Her voice took on a sharper tone. “Jack was two rows behind. He saw Eloise giggling with that hussy as if they were the best of friends. Barry, the bastard, was sitting by the window. Jack could only see the top of his head. But he could hear him, laughing like a besotted schoolboy at Beatrice’s pathetic little jokes. We all know what a shallow piece of work she is, even when she’s caring for patients.”

Beatrice had sewn up my foot when I presented to outpatients after stepping on a piece of glass. She seemed like a good egg. I guess Mrs Troupe felt otherwise.

For a year or more, I held out hope that Eloise would contact me or come back to our little town. I tried to track her down. Every trail went cold. I assumed that, for reasons beyond my understanding, she didn’t want to be found. As a fifteen-year old, I must have misread her feelings for me.

At the end of high school, I left Blattby to study Botany at the University of Adelaide. I abandoned all hope of ever seeing Eloise again. Even Mrs Troupe never heard a word or, if she did, she didn’t tell me. All this happened in the days before mobile phones. It wasn’t just a matter of sending a text.

Mrs Troupe stayed in Blattby after her family ran off. She had nowhere else to go. She kept serving up schooners at the pub before dragging her feet to the family’s sprawling Queenslander. I knew that house back to front. Its wide living room windows overlooked the lush front lawn sprinkled with Carpentaria palms. The lawn soon turned into a pocket of weeds once Mrs Troupe’s husband left. Every time I saw Mrs Troupe wrestling the big old petrol mower in the yard, she seemed to be a little slower and a little more hunched over.

After Eloise left, I rarely went around the back of their house. I imagined the weeds advancing on the veranda, where I’d shared many meals with the family at their six-seater table with its green metal legs and glass top. Mr Troupe would be cooking steaks and chops on the old-fashioned charcoal-burning barbecue in one corner. Mrs Troupe would bring out salads. If I came early enough, Eloise and I would make parfaits for dessert with cake on the bottom, layers of red, yellow, and green jelly, and a big dob of cream on top, all in sparkling fake crystal glasses.

In the other corner of the veranda lounged an old couch. Stuffing peeked out from holes in the arms. It smelled like dust, with a smidgen of mould and the scent of kelp rotting on a distant beach. After we’d washed the dishes, Eloise and I would sit there watching the last rays of sunlight filter through the leaves of the three ancient Moreton Bay Fig trees that lined the far reaches of the yard.

From the start of Grade Nine, if her parents weren’t home, we’d lie down on the couch in each other’s arms, chaste from the neck down, exploring each other’s lips and tongues.

The Moreton Bay Figs must have been thirty metres high and just as wide. Their canopies of glossy green leaves resembled three giant bowls linked together. Sitting on the veranda during the scorching summer, the area below the canopies was filled with the kind of darkness that would suck you to your doom. Their buttress roots jutted into the yard like a beanstalk giant’s feet. When we were little, we feared those roots would stomp us into mush.

Eloise introduced me to those trees on our first play date. We attended the same pre-school. Eloise had whispered to her mother that she wanted me to visit. We were four years old. I was fascinated by the trees, but Eloise said to never go near them.

When we reached Grade Two, we plucked up the courage to skip over the roots and venture into that wasteland. The cool air dabbed at our faces. A rotten fruity smell assailed our nostrils. The dim light embraced us with a parent’s care, the kind of parent that didn’t run off in the night and never return.

In Fifth Grade, Mr Troupe nailed short lengths of timber to make a ladder up to a junction of two large branches of the middle tree. We climbed the ladder, grabbing at rungs like the macaques we’d seen on a school excursion to the Brisbane Zoo. From that height, we peeked through the leaves and over the back fence at the neighbour’s house. Paint peeled from the weatherboard walls. Mould grew around the door frames. The flywire in the screen door seemed ready to fall off. A puff of wind blew a column of red dust up from a clearing in the middle of the yard.

Eloise let out a long breath of air. “Would you look at that!”

I stared at the scene. “It’s like they dumped everything they ever owned around the edge of their yard.”

“Four broken cars. The red one looks like it had a crash.”

“Two motor bikes,” I said. “Or is it one-and-a-half, since the white one has no wheels?”

Just past the red car lay a trampoline that had died of a broken net. Next to that, a humiliated Hills Hoist, arms akimbo, and its wires suggesting they’d been attacked by a giant cat. A lidless washing machine cuddled up to a fridge, whose open doors stared sightlessly at the ruins. On the other side of the fridge, three suitcases formed a wonky pile, faded stickers peeling off their sides.

A child’s bike gathered dust near the back wall of the house. Scattered about were random bits of old clothing, scraps of paper, plastic bags, grubby squares of cloth that might have been babies’ nappies, timber off-cuts, faded newspapers still in their wrappers, buckets, animal bones, a roll of chicken wire sprouting weeds, a spade with a broken handle, and more junk I can’t remember.

I’ve travelled to all corners of the country looking for plants. I reckon one yard like this exists in every small town. Sometimes it’s right in the main street, next to the bank or the general store. More often, it’s on the periphery, where the garbage spreads into the adjoining paddocks like a metastasizing melanoma.

“It’s kind of weird how there’s an empty patch of dust right in the middle of the junk,” I said. “How come it’s empty?”

Before Eloise could offer her opinion, the back screen door creaked open. When we saw the person who came out, we reached out to each other for protection.

“That must be Mr Bowen,” Eloise said. “I’ve never seen him. I’ve only heard his awful dogs.”

Mr Bowen’s hair stuck up like an ancient greying toilet brush. His hands resembled fossilised coral. He held a cigarette between his thumb and index finger. The smoke idled above his head as he leaned over to pick up a stick and threw it across his yard.

“Get that, you bloody animals!”

A pair of huge dogs — maybe Dobermans, but I wasn’t sure — burst through the hole in the screen door and raced for the stick. The lead one grabbed it in its teeth. Then the second one arrived. They fought for the stick, sending spirals of dust to mingle with cigarette smoke. Eloise’s fingers gripped mine tighter.

“Aren’t they terrible!” she said in my ear. I agreed. Their slobbering mouths, angry eyes and muscled bodies told me that if I was the stick, they’d gladly rip me to shreds. Yet, we couldn’t take our eyes off them.

After a while, Mr Bowen tired of throwing the stick.

“Get inside, you useless lumps of meat,” he said, giving one a kick up the backside as it ran into the house.

“Why does he keep them if he doesn’t like them?” I asked.

Eloise didn’t answer. Her brow furrowed. The sides of her face drew in, as if she was biting her cheeks.

From time to time on our adventures into the trees, we’d see the dogs. Sometimes Mr Bowen watched them fight. More often they prowled around the yard, sniffing junk or fighting over plastic bags or clothing. When they ceased their patrol, they lay in the dusty shade of the house, tongues hanging from their mouths and their eyes darting about, searching for threats. Eloise grew more and more annoyed with them.

“I want peace and quiet,” she’d say. “Their noise drives me crazy.”

I suggested we find another place to rendezvous.

“Why should we? Those dogs are horrible and shouldn’t be allowed in a town. They belong on a farm or in a prison.”

Through our remaining schooling years, we continued to climb into the trees. Eloise’s dad gave her some longer pieces of timber and together we made a rough platform. We’d lie on our backs, looking up at the dappled patterns of sunlight and talking about every topic imaginable. These times were idyllic, except when the dogs were in the yard. Eloise became increasingly irritated by their antics and their disruption.

Proceed to part 2...