Bonkers Page 4

  He frowned at the windscreen. ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘Yes, I am!’ she protested vehemently. ‘I am dumb, Dan! I…’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I can’t read.’

  Dan was stunned. He had noticed Linda only ever looked at magazines and always enticed him away from a book if he happened to pick one up. He’d just put it down to the fact she was a person who thrived on action and movement. Linda was not a particularly relaxing person to be around, but she was fun. She was also keenly intelligent, noticing things about people and places and asking lots of questions.

  ‘Did you miss a lot of school when you were young?’ he asked, feeling as if he were navigating a minefield blindfolded.

  ‘Oh no,’ Linda laughed bitterly. ‘We moved around a lot, but Betty always put me in school. It was her drinking time.’

  ‘But you can’t read?’

  She stared out the window. ‘I can read for a little while. If I do it for too long, I get dizzy and the words start to wriggle about on the page. I did really well at school until fifth grade because I could kind of cover it up. It took me three times as long as the other kids to do my homework, but I made myself do it. I liked being in my bedroom instead of downstairs listening to Betty slurring and swearing.’

  Linda paused for so long that Dan thought she had stopped. ‘When I started fifth grade, Betty had a boyfriend who came to live with us. They were always fighting and things were so bad that I couldn’t even get away from the noise in my room, so…’ She shrugged. ‘My grades went down and I kept on repeating fifth grade again and again and again.’

  Dan clenched the steering wheel tightly, wishing it was Betty Mulholland’s scrawny neck. ‘Linda,’ he said gently, ‘what you’ve described sounds like dyslexia.’

  She flinched and snapped, ‘I know what it’s called, Dan.’

  ‘Lots of famous, successful people—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard all about them! Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Graham Bell, Walt Disney.’ Linda glared at him. ‘If I wanted to invent the freakin’ phone or do a remake of Snow White I’d be really thrilled.’ She turned away to look out the window. ‘I’d be happy if I could just tell my right from my left without having to use a secret code.’

  ‘What secret code?’

  Linda sighed and held out her hands. ‘You know how I tell my left from my right?’ She tilted her head to smile bitterly at him.

  He shook his head.

  She held up her left hand. ‘I wear my watch on my left hand and I write with my right hand.’ She shot him a challenging look. ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t actually tell the time. The watch is just for show. That’s why I’m always late to everything.’

  Even if Dan hadn’t been besotted with Linda, he wouldn’t have been able to dump her as she fully expected him to do following her revelations. He was by nature a rescuer. As a child he had brought home stray dogs and injured birds. He’d always tried to include the littlest and least popular kids in all the games at school. His parents hadn’t been surprised when he’d chosen medicine as a career.

  ‘Yeah, a doctor or a missionary,’ his younger brother Glenn had commented when Dan applied for pre-med school. ‘Except the no-drinking rule would have been a killer when it came to missionary work. And if it was a toss-up between nuns and nurses, the nurses would win every time.’

  Their mother, Molly, who was a regular attendee at the local Catholic Church, instantly took offence at her younger son’s irreverent remarks. ‘Missionaries do wonderful work in very difficult places around the world!’

  ‘I’m sure Dan has given the missionary position a lot of time and thought, Mom,’ Glenn replied solemnly.

  ‘Glenn,’ Kell Brogan growled warningly at his son. He struggled to keep a straight face while Molly Brogan looked suspiciously between them, demanding, ‘What? What?’

  Linda’s upbringing couldn’t have been more different from Dan’s. Betty Mulholland’s tender ministrations and Linda’s ongoing sense of failure due to her dyslexia had made her develop a toughness that wasn’t always attractive. Her natural mistrust of people made them dispensable if they didn’t play the game her way.

  Dan made it clear from the beginning that he expected there to be only two people at a time in any relationship he was in. ‘You screw around on me or lie to me and I’ll walk away without a second thought. Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand,’ Linda said slowly. ‘But does that mean I can expect the same in return?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  He knew it went against her natural instincts, but she badly wanted to believe him. Dan gave Linda the stability she had been looking for all her life.

  ‘I’m not going risk losing the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Dan,’ she assured him, stepping into his arms. ‘I love you.’

  4

  Dan was so head over heels in love with Linda that it would have killed him to walk away as he so resolutely assured her he could. Several of his friends tried to dissuade him from marrying Linda. Luke, a friend from the hospital, warned him about her. ‘Linda Mulholland is bad news, Dan. She’s checked out every resident in a twenty-mile radius and she’s determined to marry one of them.’

  Dan ignored Luke, but was shaken when his mother, with her staunch religious convictions, asked why they didn’t just live together for a while before getting married. ‘After all,’ Molly said, ‘everybody else is doing it.’

  Linda’s introduction to his family wasn’t an outstanding success. Her defensive attitude combined with an attack of nerves at meeting her future in-laws made her appear brittle and careless. The Brogans never saw the sweet, funny, loving woman Dan knew.

  ‘She’s very pretty,’ Kell said.

  ‘She’s very tall,’ Molly offered.

  ‘Sleep with her, but don’t marry her,’ Glenn advised bluntly.

  The two brothers didn’t speak again until just before the wedding when Glenn stood up as Dan’s best man.

  Linda was deeply hurt and resentful. ‘Your family doesn’t like me.’

  ‘They don’t know you,’ Dan replied. ‘Give them a chance.’

  They married six months after they met. Betty Mulholland was not invited.

  Everybody agreed that Linda made a breathtaking bride in a wedding gown of ivory lace and a long, gossamer-fine wedding veil attached to a tiny satin cap at the back of her gleaming black hair. Dan paid for the wedding dress because Linda had set her heart on it and couldn’t afford it.

  Linda loved being a doctor’s wife. She quit her job as a nail technician and enrolled in adult-education classes that she never completed. Dan made the mistake of finding out about the many reputable teaching programmes for dyslexia in their local area.

  ‘I am not attending any more of those dumb classes!’ Linda yelled. ‘I’ve been through all of them at least twice and they don’t work! They never work!’

  ‘But, Linda, you can’t have tried them all,’ Dan insisted. ‘What about the Irlen method?’

  ‘Oh great! Is that the one where you wear dorky glasses with pink lenses?’

  ‘Who cares what you look like if it means you can read and write?’ Dan yelled back, finally losing patience.

  Linda burst into tears. ‘Don’t shout! Please don’t shout at me!’

  She had been so indoctrinated by Betty that all she had of any value was her looks that Dan might have been talking in Zulu for all the impression he made. Linda was so frightened of looking stupid or unattractive, she refused to even consider the idea of glasses. In her opinion, being beautiful was all that made her lovable.

  Dan learned how to accommodate Linda’s dyslexia. He read everything he could find on the subject and grew increasingly frustrated as he became convinced her problem was not insurmountable. It was not a lack of skill on Linda’s part, but a lack of will. But he didn’t have the faintest idea how to break through the habits and beliefs of a lifetime. He bought her a waterproof digital watch so she never h
ad to remove it and always had a reference point to tell left from right. He made sure she always carried her mobile phone so he could call her to remind her she had to get to something on time. As time went by, he became less of a husband and more of a parent.

  By the end of their first year of marriage, Linda realized that being a doctor’s wife meant long hours alone and sleep broken by the phone ringing to call Dan back into the hospital for an emergency.

  ‘I never see you!’ she complained. ‘I’m bored out of my skull!’

  ‘What did you expect, Linda?’ Dan retorted. ‘When you married me, you married the job. We come as a package.’

  When he suggested that maybe they start a family, she looked at him as if he were mad. ‘You want me to sit at home on my own all day with a baby? What if it turns out like me instead of you? That’s just what we need—another dummy in the family.’

  Dan couldn’t argue with her on one point: his hours at the hospital meant he would be an absentee father, which wasn’t what he wanted.

  He eventually chose paediatric orthopaedics as his specialty, and loved it with a passion. Gradually, Dan began to gain a reputation as one of the best young orthopaedic surgeons around. He was fascinated by the work being done using Ilizarov splints, a type of surgery where a special frame was attached to bone with pins and screws that were turned regularly, causing the healing bone to grow. It had been used with great success in children who in the past would have walked with a limp for the rest of their lives. Dan was so gifted at successfully operating on difficult cases that, despite his youth, he started getting calls to operate on children from out of state, and he published a number of highly regarded papers on the topic. But although his star was on the rise, Dan never lost his modesty or let his success go to his head; watching kids deal with pain and long months of rehabilitation kept him humble and his feet firmly on the ground.

  Linda became increasingly frustrated and bored as the years passed. Dan was her life. She was highly intelligent, yet had no purpose in life but to cook his meals, look after the house and go shopping. Her low self-esteem also made her extremely jealous. Several times she accused Dan of having affairs with some of his more attractive female colleagues and was barely civil to them at any social occasions. In retrospect, Dan could see that Linda had been a time bomb just waiting to go off.

  When he saw an advertisement for a surgeon at a children’s hospital in Auckland, New Zealand, specializing in the Ilizarov technique, Dan applied and was jubilant when he was hired. He hoped that a complete change of scene would allow Linda and him to start again.

  ‘You expect me to leave my friends and my house to go to some tinpot little country at the bottom of the world?’ Linda asked incredulously.

  ‘It’s only for a couple of years tops, and it’s a great opportunity,’ Dan insisted. ‘I don’t think you realize how lucky I am to get this job at my age.’

  ‘For you, maybe. But what about me?’ she raged.

  He regarded her stonily. ‘I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t when it comes to you, Linda. You keep saying you hate being on your own so much; well, this will mean a reduction in my working hours. I’ll have my own team and we’ll have more time together.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that one before,’ she sneered.

  Dan finally lost patience. ‘Well, you can always stay here, Linda. Suit yourself.’

  He walked out of the house and spent the night at a drive-in, watching a movie he couldn’t recall. It was the first time he’d ever walked out on Linda, and she was badly shaken when he eventually returned home in the early hours of the morning.

  She flung herself into Dan’s arms the moment he walked through the door, sobbing, ‘Don’t leave me! You mustn’t ever leave me!’

  ‘Honey, I don’t want to be apart from you, but you make it so damned hard,’ Dan soothed, holding her close. ‘If I honestly thought giving up my work would make you happy, I would.’

  Linda lifted her head from his chest and said sharply, ‘No! Don’t ever stop being a doctor.’

  Dan loved New Zealand and he loved Auckland. Due to its position in the upper half of the North Island, the city is subtropical. In a country of only four million people, one million of them live in Auckland. The city straddles a narrow isthmus between two harbours, the Manukau and the Waitemata. The Manukau Harbour to the west has black-sand beaches, surf and a gannet colony, plus the lush rainforest of the Waitakere Ranges. Dan was entranced the first time he went walking there; the New Zealand bush was so thick and unique with its prehistoric-looking tree ferns that it wouldn’t have seemed out of place to see a dinosaur go lumbering by.

  In stark contrast, the Waitemata Harbour to the east has white sandy beaches, calmer waters and the added bonus of quick access to the Hauraki Gulf with its multitude of tiny islands. One in seven Aucklanders owns a boat and the two harbours are their playground, gigantic paddling pools where they can swim, surf, boat, dive, fish and laze to their heart’s content.

  Dan loved the ocean, and the easy-going Auckland lifestyle was tailormade for him. He and Linda rented a house on the North Shore right above one of the beaches, giving him ample opportunity to indulge his love of water sports. He bought windsurfers for himself and Linda, and a mountain bike to tackle the hilly streets surrounding his home.

  Linda hated Auckland. She hated that the seasons were different, which meant Christmas was in summer and her birthday in June was in winter. She couldn’t get used to people driving on the left-hand side of the road and was nearly run over on a number of occasions when she forgot to look the opposite way crossing the street. It annoyed her when she kept getting into the wrong side of the car, and she soon tired of windsurfing so Dan ended up going alone. She complained that Auckland wasn’t so much a city as a big town and that the only decent shopping was across the Harbour Bridge in Parnell and Newmarket.

  Dan failed to understand how anybody could be miserable when they were surrounded by so much beauty. They had a nice home, enough money, and he wasn’t working the insane hours he had back home, which meant that he and Linda should have been able to enjoy themselves more. He watched fathers playing with children on the beach and wondered why it couldn’t be him. Eventually he just stopped listening to Linda.

  He thrived on the work at the children’s hospital in the city and got along well with his colleagues, who appreciated his outstanding surgical skills and modest, self-deprecating charm. And, as always, he loved the kids.

  When Linda complained that she had nothing to do all day and that she was homesick for the States, Dan dug in his toes and refused to budge. ‘I can’t leave, Linda. I’ve signed a contract.’

  ‘So? Contracts can be broken.’

  ‘I won’t do that,’ Dan said coldly. He was coming to realize Linda would never be happy—certainly not with him. But whenever he raised the subject of them separating, she panicked and told him she couldn’t live without him, that she loved him.

  They met another American couple at a cocktail function held at the hospital for a retiring member of the surgical staff. Janice Millar was a gynaecologist who worked at the main hospital further up the hill from the children’s hospital. She was a rather plain woman who had spent most of her life struggling with shyness. Dan felt an instant affinity with her, having conquered the same problem himself.

  Janice clearly adored her husband, Jack, who was involved with one of the yachting syndicates planning to try to win the America’s Cup back from the Swiss. Jack Millar was charming, attentive and completely unfaithful to his long-suffering wife. Linda was enthralled by the glamour he exuded and the witty stories he told about competitive yachting. It took Dan all of five minutes to realize what a phony Jack was as he dropped the names of some of the millionaires and billionaires who financed the syndicates. Even Janice looked embarrassed, but Linda lapped it all up.

  From the moment Jack set eyes on Linda, he pursued her relentlessly. Bored and feeling neglected despite the extra hours D
an spent at home, Linda was a plum ripe for the picking. Those extra hours together had hammered home the unpalatable fact that she and Dan had little in common. It also frustrated Linda that the longer they were married, the harder she was finding it to get Dan to give in to her whims and tantrums.

  Dan had no idea his wife was having an affair. He was simply relieved she seemed happier and was no longer either sulking or throwing tantrums when he walked through the door at the end of a long day. What finally alerted him was the way Linda would hang up the phone when he walked into the room or the line would sometimes go dead if he answered a call.

  His suspicions were confirmed when he caught Jack fondling his wife’s breasts by their host’s swimming pool at a barbecue in March, about eight months after they’d arrived in New Zealand. Linda was giggling and egging him on when Dan came on the scene.

  He went rigid with shock. The pain in his chest made him feel as if it were going to burst open. Although he’d long ago realized his marriage was over, he was still devastated to finally have the proof. Dan saw Linda watching him over Jack’s shoulder as Jack bent to kiss her breasts. Her face was clearly visible in the moonlight, her expression gloating. Dan was so disgusted that he felt physically ill. He suspected Linda had seen him coming and had wanted to be discovered.

  She slapped Jack on the shoulder. ‘Jack! Jack! Stop it! We have company!’

  Jack finally lifted his head from her cleavage and looked shocked when he saw Dan watching them from just a few feet away. ‘Shit!’ he yelped, yanking his hand from beneath Linda’s top.

  Dan’s initial reaction was to beat Jack’s face in. His expression was so lethal that Jack backed into Linda, who tripped and would have fallen into the pool if she hadn’t grabbed his back. ‘Watch it!’ she snapped angrily.

  Dan suspected he would have pounded Jack senseless if he hadn’t suddenly caught sight of Linda’s avid expression in the moonlight. She looked excited, as if she were enjoying the whole scene. He felt the bile rise up and burn the back of his throat. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘Jesus.’