Man in the Shadows by Peter Corris Page B

were clever and brave and everything was all right.
    I cleared a space on the bench beside the phone, switched on the reading lamp and opened Annie Parker’s diary. Someone said that historians are people who read other people’s letters. I’ve never done any historical research but I’ve read a few private letters and I understand the attraction. A sort of fly-on-the-wall feeling with a touch of taboo. Reading a private diary was much the same. Annie made half page entries, never missing a day. The diary began in the early part of the previous year and stopped two days before she died.
    I flicked over the pages, just getting impressions at first. Adults who write a lot or take notes acquire bad habits—personal shorthands and squiggles that mean zero to anyone else. Or they take to typewriters and word processors and almost forget how to write by hand. Annie’s writing was neat andclear, a regular script without quirks, like that of a mature child. I remembered that she’d had a good school record before she went wild.
    She kept a simple record of what she’d done, who she’d seen and how she felt. The entries were brief with the identities of people concealed:
Saw C.A. and scored. Went to Bondi. Heavily hassled by L. who’s splitting (he says) for Bali. Wanted me to go with him. No thanks. Feeling better about F.
She was concerned about her weight:
48 k. Not bad.
And her health:
Saw Dr Charley and got a prescription for antibiotic. No drinking for three days.
    Greenway was ‘G.’. The entries confirmed what she’d told me—that they’d met at a drug clinic and clicked. She knew he was bisexual. For the time they were together the entries were brief and mostly positive:
G. is a fantastic fucker and talker and I’m not real bad myself when I get going.
Trouble started between them over the AIDS test. She couldn’t understand ‘G.’s reluctance to have it. Then he disappeared. The entries after the breakup were black:
Slept all day. Hanging out. Methadone is murder.
    I turned back to her record of her period in Southwood Hospital.
Have to hide this,
she wrote.
No diary keeping allowed. Fuck them!
Things didn’t improve. She had nothing good to say for the staff or the treatment but she liked some of her fellow patients:
M.Mc. is a sweetie and he’s brilliant! Nothing wrong with him. What about A.P.?
The writing became crabbed and hasty:
Long, creepy interview with Dr S. today. No programme. No way!
One entry was tear-stained:
M.Mc. was done today. He’s finished. No-one home
. A few days later the letters ‘E.F.’, ‘J. O’B.’ and ‘R.R.’ were encircled. Then, the day before she left the hospital she recorded:
M.Mc., E.F., J.O’B. & R.R. have been transferred (they say).
    The process by which Annie got out of the hospital was a little hard to follow through the maze of initials and other abbreviations. It happened a few weeks after ‘J.O’B.’ and the others were ‘transferred’. It seemed that a new member of the staff, a ‘Dr K.’, had helped her to secure a certificate of detoxification. A solicitor had done the rest. While in the hospital Annie had read a lot:
The Brothers K., W & P., The I. of Dreams.
She had come out resolved to find ‘M.Mc.’ but there was no sign that she’d done anything about it. She was ‘maintaining’ and working at the clinic when she met ‘G.’.
    It wasn’t hard to make a certain amount of sense out of it. Something was happening at the hospital that Annie was afraid of, wanted no part of. There appeared to be victims. It half-fitted with Greenway’s story of being hired by someone who was concerned about one of the patients. But that story had been an invention; he now said that he had knowledge of the motives of his hirer who was taking his time in collecting what he’d paid so much money for. It all got back