Leah Giarratano: Vodka doesn't freeze

When her mum came on the line, Jill relaxed a little more. Her calm voice had been there through many of the hard times.

'Hi, baby,' she said. 'How was your day?' Jill smiled. No-one else ever called her that.

'Oh, okay. Foul actually, but I don't want to talk about it. What'd you do?'

Eyes closed, she listened as her mum ran through a Tuesday in semi-rural New South Wales; gossip about the neighbours, all of whom Jill knew, and minute details about her immediate family, cousins, nephew and niece. By the time she hung up, she felt exhausted.

She needed rest, and wished she could bypass her gym for once, but she'd never sleep without following all her routines.

She trudged into her spare room, set up as a gymnasium, floor to ceiling in weights and machines. She wrapped the blindfold around her eyes and began kicking the heavy bag suspended from the ceiling. When Mercy Merris had first heard about paedophile rings operating in Sydney, she'd thought the reports far-fetched. She had then been a clinical psychologist for five years, specialising in working with survivors of childhood trauma, and hadn't come across any evidence for such goings-on. However, one afternoon about five years before, a colleague had invited her to a late evening gathering of psychotherapists at a local hospital, where she'd heard tales of satanic cults and organised kiddie-porn groups that had supposedly existed in Australia for years. She'd listened, incredulous, as members of the group spoke about links between these groups and their overseas counterparts, who, they said, had been breeding children for abuse for generations.

The aim of the meeting had been to discuss therapeutic methods to try to counteract brainwashing techniques that these groups were said to use upon some victims to stop them escaping from the cults. At first, she and a couple of other therapists had asked sceptical questions to try to clarify what they were hearing. Finally, one member of the group spoke to silence them.

'Look, it's great that we have new members at this meeting, and everyone's welcome,' the man began in response to the last question, 'but we're not actually here to prove to anyone that organised paedophile rings are operating in Australia. That's someone else's job. The people who established this group are working with the victims of these groups. We know they do exist, and we need to help each other find ways to de-program the victims.'

The relatively young man, dressed in an expensive, although crumpled, suit, ran his hand through mussy light-brown hair. He looked more like a lawyer than a therapist, thought Mercy.

'If there are people here who'd like to do some reading about these activities, we can give you some references to follow up, but I'm getting tired of the curiosity factor tonight, and I want to get back to focusing on therapeutic techniques to help these people.'

Chastened by his earnest exasperation, Mercy had sat back and listened for the remainder of the meeting. It was like sitting in while a group wrote a horror movie. She heard the young man speaking about one of the patients in his hospital having a 'call-back' activated during one of her admissions to hospital. Mercy gathered that this meant that the therapist had inadvertently triggered some pre-programmed message to return to the cult. He explained that the woman had presented for treatment, but once her therapist had approached a topic that could have identified the cult, an alter-personality, programmed by the cult for just such an eventuality, had surfaced. The woman had switched from sobbing victim to malevolent aggressor in five frightening seconds. She'd picked up a phone and thrown it at the therapist's head, then had run from the room, discharging herself without heeding any of the staff or other patients.

Mercy had mentally blocked a lot of the rest of the meeting, internally asking the questions she longed to ask out loud. Oh come on! she'd wanted to protest. Surely police would have discovered evidence of organised kidnapping, paedophile cults, humans bred to be sex slaves. Why hadn't she heard this stuff on the news? Still, she'd thought, police had never managed to stop her father bashing the shit out of her and her mother and little brothers every night. Lots went on behind closed doors that people didn't know about.

Mercy had later done some reading on the subject, learning that the paedophile rings purportedly contained members of the judiciary and police service, some of whom had supposedly grown up in these cults, and had been selected to be placed in positions of power to further their ends.

But as her reading had widened, Mercy also found literature for therapists treating patients who'd supposedly been abducted by aliens, or who could not let go of their past lives as Roman kings or African slaves. At that point she'd put the material down in disgust and had not returned to the meetings. It was easier to lump the whole lot in as a bunch of loonies, or at best as over-involved counsellors who'd been carried away by some sort of group hysteria. Sure, she knew there were plenty of sickos who preyed on children, but organised gangs of paedophiles running amok in Sydney sounded like a paranoid delusion.

But that was then.

When Mercy arrived at the private psychiatric clinic at which she worked, Carole Dean, Programs Director of the Sisters of Charity Hospital, caught her before she'd made it past the marble reception desk. The receptionist was already waving a fistful of messages at Mercy.

Carole, flawlessly groomed, took in the sight of their foremost psychotherapist with anxiety. A mass of uncombed black curls, a too-tight designer suit and tottering heels had always been delightfully unconventional when paraded with confidence by Dr Merris, but lately she was just looking unhinged. Smelling of smoke and heavy perfume, there was a vacant look in her eyes and lipstick stained her teeth. File notes, unlawfully removed from hospital grounds, poked from a large tote bag; some of them, Carole noted with alarm, smeared with what looked like blood. Carole then noticed a blood-soaked tissue pressed into Mercy's palm. Without doubt, this woman looked more like her patients every day.

'Dr Merris – Mercy – I'm glad you're here,' Carole found herself speaking in the soothing tones she usually reserved for the clients. 'It looks as though you've cut yourself. Let's go to my office and see to that. I'd like to catch up with you before you start your day.'

Mercy allowed herself to be steered from the lobby through the halls of the beautiful hospital. Her head still hummed, but she felt comfortably disconnected from the scenes around her, unaware of the CEO of the hospital headed purposefully in their direction, or of Carole's smooth, non-verbal deflection of him. She sank gratefully into a deep armchair in Carole's office, feeling comforted, as intended, by the beautiful architecture, deep carpeting, fresh flowers and family photos.

'Mercy, you look tired. And you're hurt. Here, let me look,' Carole unclenched Mercy's palm and saw the bleeding gash that had been caused when Mercy had crushed her pager in the car.

'That's deep. What happened? You may need a stitch. Let me call Kim.' Carole reached for her phone and asked one of the nurses from the closest unit to come to her office with a first-aid kit. Mercy watched her serenely.

'Are you okay, Mercy? We've a lot to deal with today. I had to cancel your first few appointments this morning, as we have some important matters to sort out.' Carole was growing increasingly worried by the placid demeanour of this usually extroverted woman.

'Mmm, fine. Just tired.'

'Mercy, I'm not sure whether you know yet… One of your… one of our patients, Carly Kaplan, died yesterday. I'm sorry to tell you, Mercy, she took her own life.' Carole paused, waiting for Mercy's reaction.