Demons (4 page)

Hannah: Pan…

Elena lived in a house not far from me with her mother and younger brother, Ty. Her
parents had split up. It was an average-looking house, nice, suburban. None of us
had ever been inside but my brother, Cody, he knew a kid who was a friend of Ty’s
and this kid said the house was spotless—you had to take your shoes off at the door.
There was every kind of electronic gadget and appliance in there imaginable. The
father wasn’t rich, but he’d felt guilty about leaving the kids behind. Every night
in those last weeks before the break-up he’d come home from work with something new:
Ty got a TV, a computer, a PlayStation; Elena herself always had new clothes and
things. Her hair was shiny, she seemed to have an endless supply of makeup. In fact,
she was the complete opposite of what you would expect an outsider-type like her
to be: pretty, sometimes really confident, although most of the time, when I think
about it, quiet. When she first got sick and spent time away from school none of
us took much notice. Someone one day said: Where’s Elena? Someone said she was away
and that was it. She’s not well, the teachers said. But then she started staying
away longer.

The end of the year came—formal, muck-up day, exams—and we sort of forgot about her;
we assumed she’d dropped out, and we had bigger things to care about. It wasn’t till
years later, when I was in my mid-twenties, that I heard what had happened.

Elena had got sick, then sicker. No-one really knew what was wrong with her. Her
mother was working full-time and since the father disappeared she’d taken on overtime
too, so Elena and her brother were pretty much left to themselves—which was why,
at first, Elena did nothing about her illness but stay in bed and take Panadol. But
eventually the message came back from the school that if she were to be given special
consideration at exam time she would need to get a doctor’s certificate.

Ty took the morning off and went with her on the bus. The doctor examined Elena top
to bottom but couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He presumed it was viral, possibly
even glandular fever, and sent her off for some tests. The tests came back inconclusive
and she was sent off for more. Her brother accompanied her when he could—his teachers
were losing patience too—to those funny medical places in converted suburban houses
which might be your auntie’s place if it wasn’t for the sign in the front yard, the
high counter with the brochures on it and the water cooler in the corner. They’d
sit on the bus, Elena with her X-rays or CAT scans in a big white envelope, Ty with
his Game Boy. Music was Elena’s other companion; she took out her earphones for only
as long as it took the specialist to say, for example, Please lift up your top, or,
Get up on the bed, or, Here’s your referral.

After a while Ty stopped coming and Elena did all this on her own. In between the
bus trips and consultations she lay on her bed and listened to music or played on
her computer. But closing in on all sides always was this awful lethargy, a queasy
feeling in her stomach and a low buzz like from a faulty appliance somewhere up
in her temples. She was sick, and it seemed as if nothing would make her better.

It was a friend of the family’s, a woman called Anna, who suggested one day that
maybe Elena should see an allergist. Her son, said Anna, had found out he was allergic
to varnish. Elena’s mother was so struck by her friend Anna’s advice that she took
a morning off work. The allergist was a couple of suburbs away in a house with a
neat front yard. Elena’s mother saw her in, spoke to the receptionist, then left.
Elena would make her own way home.

She had only just picked up a lifestyle magazine and started flicking through it
when out of the corner of her eye she saw the receptionist leaning over the high
front counter, pointing at the door to her right. The allergist was waiting. Elena
put the magazine down, took out her earphones, smiled at the receptionist and went
in.

The allergist was a middle-aged man named Dr O’Breen, bald on top but with grey-blond
hair falling down around the back and sides. His suit needed cleaning, there was
a fake flower in his lapel. Hello Elena, come in, he said, nice to meet you. That
was funny him saying that, she thought, like their meeting was somehow a surprise
and not just another prearranged consultation like the dozen she’d already had.
He gestured to the chair. On the desk was a black cardboard box with a band of packing
tape reinforcing it all the way around the top. The box had begun to split from overuse.
It was the kind of packing tape her mother used to patch the old atlas she kept on
the top shelf in her bedroom cupboard. A thick rubber band held the lid of the box
in place.

Well, said the allergist, I hear you’ve not been well—do you want to tell me about
it? Elena mechanically went through the story, starting from when she had first felt
ill at school, including the doctors and specialists she’d seen. O’Breen made a few
notes. And you just don’t feel well, he said. Is there anywhere in particular? Headaches?
An upset stomach? Any rashes or itches? Elena sketched a general picture of how she
felt, which in a sense was a combination of all of the above and more, bound together
by a constant tiredness that even now made her wish she was out in the waiting room
again, her music on, her face hidden in the magazine, her eyes drooping and her mind
drifting away into sleep. I see, said the allergist. Well. He moved the black cardboard
box in front of him and began to take off the rubber band, something he had obviously
done so many times that Elena couldn’t help being mesmerised. O’Breen stretched it
in and out between his finger and thumb then let it snap onto his wrist. He lifted
the lid off the box.

Inside was a wooden tray holding, at a quick glance, about fifty little vials. All
these vials had labels; from where Elena was sitting she could see Wool, Latex, Paint,
Rayon. Now Elena, said the allergist, we are going to do a few little tests to see
if there is something in your daily life that might be making you unwell: to do this
I will need you to roll up your sleeve. O’Breen was gesturing with a flat hand at
the left sleeve of Elena’s cotton top; again it felt like a gesture rehearsed and
performed a thousand times. As soon as the sleeve was up he came around beside her
and, scribbling with a black biro on her forearm, explained the procedure. In each
spot, he said, I’m going to put a little drop.

There were about a dozen biro marks on Elena’s forearm now: strange symbols, numbers,
letters, each designating the thing to go there. One by one O’Breen took from the
wooden tray a vial corresponding to the marks and put down a tiny drop. Elena read
some of the labels as the allergist moved quickly through them: Dog, Cat, Mouse,
Dust, Pollen. He deposited the last drop and took a sterilised needle saying, quickly,
like it barely needed mentioning: You will feel a little scratch. Then he ran the
needle through each drop, scratching the skin as he went. When he’d finished he put
the needle into a yellow tub, arranged the vials back in their tray with the labels
up, put the lid on the box, slid the rubber band off his wrist, stretched it around
and let it go with a snap. O’Breen pushed the box aside. All right, he said, leave
your sleeve up, pop out into the waiting room, and after fifteen minutes we’ll see
what we’ve got. I’ll call you back when we’re ready. The allergist had already turned
his back on Elena as he went around the desk to his chair. Elena took this as her
cue.

Out in the waiting room the receptionist smiled like she must have done a thousand
times to a thousand other patients who now had to wait the obligatory fifteen minutes
with their sleeves up. Elena smiled in return and sat in a chair next to the disused
fireplace.

At one end of the mantelpiece was a small plastic stand displaying brochures about
allergy and at the other end, incongruously, a child’s rattle. Two chairs down from
Elena was a low table with magazines; she picked one up and sat down again. Against
the wall beside the receptionist’s high counter—sitting down you could only see the
top of her head—was a tank with tropical fish swimming lazily around inside, the
water bubbling softly through the filter. On a chair against the other wall was the
only other person in the room, an old man with his sleeve up like her. He smiled
when she glanced at him, and looked down at the arm he was cradling like it was broken,
as if to say: You have one too. Elena gave him a brief smile, then to avoid having
any more to do with him, she started flicking through her magazine.

The fifteen minutes seemed to go on forever. There was a clock above the receptionist’s
head and for the first five minutes Elena kept glancing at it, then down at her forearm,
trying to make in her own way some connection between the sweeping second hand and
the
click-click
of the minute hand and the slower, more subtle, changes going on
under her skin. But it soon became a pointless game: the seconds swept by and the
scratches on her arm above the black writing describing all those things in nature
that might make your life a misery registered no change at all. She flicked again
through the magazine until she found something to look at, creased the spine and
gave all her attention to the pictures.

It was a design magazine, and the article was about houses built in exotic locations:
in a rainforest with a living area built into the canopy, on the side of a hill overlooking
the sea with a roof covered by sand and dune grass, and, finally, a house blended
into the rock of Sydney Harbour to the extent of actually having a boulder in the
living room and a deck built into a craggy outcrop over the water. The owners, said
the article, loved food and wine, and the dining-room table at which they entertained
was long and curved ‘like the beach below’, set with baskets of fruit and mini pumpkins
and gourds. A sculpture hung above it, a crayfish basket holding seafood carved
out of driftwood. Elena was so absorbed with the pictures of this house and the people
who must have lived in it that for a moment she didn’t notice the receptionist calling
her or, for that matter, O’Breen himself, waiting at the door to his room. The doctor
is ready, said the receptionist. You can come in now, said O’Breen.

Back in the consulting room Elena sat down while O’Breen brought his chair from around
the other side of his desk, settled himself next to her and took her arm in his hands.
He had red, flaky patches on his scalp. He was looking at the scratches, first from
a distance then up close with a magnifying thing that he put over his eye. It took
him a long time to say: No. Elena wasn’t sure what he meant. She kept looking at
his bald patch while he looked at her arm. No, he said, again, lifting his head and
taking off the magnifying thing, nothing there at all. You are at one with Nature,
Elena, he said, in a funny, pompous voice, and he pushed himself away.

The little drops I put on your arm, Elena, contained distilled quantities of the
substance you see on the label. For example, Mouse. I get them from Spokane, Washington.
No-one else does them here. If you were allergic to, say, Mouse, said O’Breen, your
skin would come up in a little welt, like a mosquito bite, where I scratched it.
The marks in black pen tell me what I have put where and in this case all of them
describe common allergens, things we find in the natural world: animals, plants and
so on. You’d be surprised how many people are allergic to Mother Nature. He did that
smile again. But not you, as you see. So. O’Breen pushed off with his chair and sort
of pedalled his way back around behind his desk and in one smooth movement pulled
the box in front of him, slid the rubber band from it onto his wrist and took off
the lid. Let me see your other arm, he said.

On Elena’s left forearm this time O’Breen scratched a drop each of Formaldehyde,
Isocyanate, Sulphur Dioxide and Epoxy Resin and sent her out into the waiting room
again. This time while waiting she started to think about what O’Breen had said,
how he seemed to be making a distinction for her between a natural and an artificial
thing and how, yes, especially over the last couple of years, she had become impatient
with the artificial in a general sense, be it the cheap Asian-made but fashionable
clothes her schoolmates wore or the stupid, superficial things they said. Elena had
just started to go a little further with this thought when she realised that fifteen
minutes had passed and O’Breen was calling her back.

The diagnosis this time was also straightforward. On each scratch on her other arm
the welts were up, an angry red already spreading out beyond the wound itself. O’Breen
examined each of these marks, pushing back the skin on either side with his thumbs
and leaning down with his magnifying thing. He said nothing, a specialist utterly
absorbed in his work; it was only as he drew back and pulled a plastic bottle of
cortisone cream across the desk towards him, flicking the cap and offering it to
Elena, that he finally said: Yes.

Elena was allergic to everything we might call ‘modern’. O’Breen explained how there
are, on the one hand, substances we find naturally, in nature, and, on the other,
manufactured or artificial substances that we have created molecularly from the
ground up. It was the second category, exclusively, that Elena was allergic to and
sadly these substances were everywhere.

After that first assessment Elena regularly went back during the following weeks
to the house behind the low brick fence with the sign in the yard to be tested for
yet another suite of substances. She was allergic to them all. One day O’Breen stood
her in her underwear in the centre of the room and ran a wand emitting electromagnetic
waves over her body: this too brought her out in a rash and left her with a headache
and a queasy feeling that lasted for days. O’Breen prescribed various drugs and creams
and started to make up with her what he called an ‘action plan’, so that she might
eliminate these allergens from her life. After the fourth visit the receptionist
gave Elena an envelope to take home and on the bus she carefully prised it open.
Addressed to her mother, it was the bill so far. Elena hid it in her underwear drawer
and never mentioned it again.