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had enlightened me or I might have concluded that my job was shitty and thankless! I thought briefly about calling her bluff and rescheduling the assessment til the next day, or the one after, or whenever I could be sure that it would not run into unpaid overtime, but I could still hear the daughter’s tearful recounting of her mother’s paranoia and dehydration and knew that I had to go that day.
    When Nick and I showed up, we met the interpreter at the front fence. The woman who had called ushered us in to the family home and anxiously filled us in on the events of the previous week. We could hear the old lady, Mrs Luu, screaming in her bedroom while we tried to listen to the daughter.
    ‘What is she saying?’ Nick asked the daughter.
    ‘She say . . . She say terrible things . . . but there is no one else in there with her. I don’t know who she talk to . . . But she keep screaming back at them . . . ’ The daughter broke down and cried.
    I fished a crisp tissue out of the packet I kept in my pocket and silently handed it to her.
    ‘She say I want her dead . . . She say I try to poison her . . . that I work in organise crime or something crazy . . . She won’t go in shower; she say there are cameras in there.’ More sobs. ‘She up all night . . . all night.’
    When we finally managed to get Mrs Luu out her bedroom to talk to us we found her so paranoid and perplexed that she could barely string a sentence together in her own language. Mrs Luu was a tiny, frail lady with flyaway wisps of hair coming out of her bun and framing thick glasses. Her lips looked dry and parched and her breath was fetid.
    We tried introducing ourselves and asking some questions about how she was and what was troubling her. The interpreter said that her speech often veered off tangentially and made no sense, that she seemed hesitant or blocked in answering the most simple questions.
    ‘Are you scared, Mrs Luu?’ asked Nick gently.
    The interpreter translated.
    There was a long pause as Mrs Luu looked constricted and answered with a brief word.
    ‘Yes,’ translated the interpreter.
    ‘I hope we can help you, said Nick.
    But come Friday, we had to conclude that we had not really been helping that much. Choong had gone out on Tuesday morning – and prescribed an antipsychotic medication. It was left to the poor, harried daughter to supervise the taking of the medication and to look after her mother.
    ‘I’m casual at my job,’ worried the daughter. ‘I take more days off, no pay and then they stop giving me shifts.’
    ‘Your mother may have to be admitted to the hospital if no one can look after her, Amy,’ said Choong gently. ‘She may have to be admitted anyway if she is not improving in a few days.’
    ‘The mental hospital?’ The daughter looked alarmed.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘No! I look after her.’
    Mrs Luu refused to take the medicine anyway.
    height= width="0em"On Friday she was still not eating or drinking, and had barricaded herself in her bedroom with the meat cleaver from the kitchen. The daughter, Amy, sobbed this out to me on the phone. I said we would come immediately.
    ‘This is nuts Nicholarse.’ I stood up and addressed Nick over the partition. ‘She’ll have to come in.’
    ‘Yep.’ He stood up too, clicking and unclicking his ballpoint pen.
    Nick drove the short distance to the main hospital building. We pulled into the ambulance bay of Bannerman House, the mental health unit situated at the back. I ran inside to collect the schedule – the certificate ordering that Mrs Luu be brought to hospital for psychiatric assessment – from Choong, who had just crossed the last ‘t’ with his fountain pen. I blew on it to dry it.
    ‘I don’t know where we are going to put her,’ Choong muttered, looking at the whiteboard in the nurses’ station that showed an already overflowing ward.We both flinched every time the person in the seclusion room threw him or herself up against its walls.
    ‘You’ll sort