The Healing of Broken Souls

Chapter 11

"So, tell me this plan of yours," my father asked as we bounced down the cart track in the dark. It was five in the morning. Two hours before sunrise on Spain's east coast in mid-May.

"Okay ... so I checked all the Spanish twitching websites last night to see if there'd been any hemipode sightings recently. There weren't any, but there were a few reports of quail sightings."

"Aha! And, as we both know, quail and hemipodes often share the same habitat."

"Exactly. I'm taking us to one of the locations flagged. It's actually the rough bordering a private golf course on the coast, but the blogger who wrote the post said you can get access from a beach." 

It took us an hour to find the golf course and then we had to carry all our gear along a narrow strip of pebbles to get to the site. Walking on the loose stones was tricky and by the time we reached it, my father was panting for air. He sat on a fallen tree trunk and breathed deeply from his oxygen bottle while I set up the hide facing a dense thicket of sagebrush. 

It took my father ten minutes to recover.  When he finally said he was okay we settled ourselves into the hide to wait for the dawn. The air was thick with the scent of herbs and lavender. As the sun slowly rose over the sea behind us a gazillion small birds came to life as if an alarm had gone off. Sparrows and finches darted through the foliage searching for breakfast. The constant chirping and twittering was deafening, but after an hour things began to calm down and most of them disappeared into the branches of the taller trees nearby. I made sure my recorder was switched on and then broke the silence.

"So what happened when Mum went to see her doctor?"

"Oh, yes, that. As I was telling you, Michael, we'd had a difficult journey home and Clara was exhausted. That was a Sunday, so first thing on Monday morning, even though she was feeling better, I took her to our local health center and demanded to see her doctor. We didn't have an appointment so the receptionist was stroppy and kept saying that if it was so urgent we should have gone to A&E, but I persisted and, after waiting for about two hours, we did get in to see him.

Clara explained all her symptoms, how she was getting bouts of double vision and couldn't keep her eyes open. How at times she felt as if she was ploughing through treacle and that her legs and arms felt like lead. The doctor started asking about her alcohol intake and even her sex life. He was brusque and patronizing. He told her she was being silly, that she was just tired and needed to cut down on what he called 'the high life'. He prescribed a tonic and some vitamin pills. He didn't even examine her properly.

When we got back home, there was a queue outside the launderette and bags of washing piled up at the door. Clara was mortified. It was the first time she'd ever been late opening up, and she blamed me for making her go to the doctor. It had been a complete waste of time and meant she had to work twice as hard to catch up, as well as dealing with angry customers who'd been waiting to get in. I missed an important lecture that morning too, so the whole thing was a fiasco.

"I take it that the tonic and vitamins didn't help?" 

"Of course not! A couple of weeks later she was ill again, and that was how things went for the next few months. Clara struggled to keep going but the strain was getting too much. I tried to help as much as possible. When she was really bad, I would stay at home and run the launderette as best I could. My grades started to drop. But I cared more about Clara than my studies, and I was terrified I might lose her, because, after my father's outburst, she refused to marry me and gave me back her engagement ring."

"So that's why you never married?" I presumed.

"That was the reason we didn't get married at the time. But I convinced her that once I earned my law degree we could do anything we wanted. I wouldn't need my allowance. I'd be able to get a well-paid job with a law firm, so all we had to do was wait another two years. She told me to keep her engagement ring safe and propose again when I had my degree."

"That sounds reasonable enough. What went wrong?"

"Clara made several appointments to see her doctor again while I manned the launderette, but it was always the same. He insisted it was all in her head. I tell you, Michael, I swore that when I was a qualified lawyer I'd get that doctor struck off for negligence. Her condition was getting worse. The symptoms were appearing more and more frequently and, of course, this was all before the internet. We couldn't just google her symptoms. I went through countless medical books in the university library but I couldn't find anything resembling her illness."

"Couldn't you afford to pay for a private consultation, with a specialist?"

"We thought of that. We had some savings. The problem was, we had no idea what was causing her illness so we didn't know what type of specialist to consult.  But, in the end, we did find someone who took her seriously."

My father lapsed into silence and I didn't press him. He seemed to be gathering his thoughts for the next part of the story. 

"I think that's enough for today, Michael. It was all a long time ago and I have to get things straight in my head otherwise I might forget some important details. I don't think we're going to see a hemipode or even a quail today, so I'd like to go home. To tell you the truth, I'm not feeling too good."

I was disappointed. I was impatient to know what illness my mother had suffered from, but I decided to let him tell me in his own time. We packed up and picked our way slowly back to the Landy. 

The bumpy track leading to my finca made my father worse and I had to stop a couple of times to give him some respite. When he struggled out of the passenger seat he looked haggard and grey. He refused my offer of lunch, saying he'd eat later, and went to his bedroom to rest. For the first time, I was worried he may not live long enough to admit that, in a fit of rage ... he had attacked my mother.