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Nudging the process along, though, Nigel would post notices in our pigeonholes inviting us to hear his local preacher or to gatherings for visiting American evangelists – the sort seen on late-night television.
    â€˜While it’s well-known,’ I told Renny in a heartfelt address one evening, ‘that people’s pigeonholes shouldn’t be violated, certainly that nothing should be taken from them, the same cannot be said for what is put inside them.’
    â€˜You should say something,’ she said.
    Nigel waggled his head when I approached him. The flyers stopped for two weeks. When they started again the only defence, for a relative newcomer like myself, was to take the path of ignoring them. What else could I do? In a psychiatric setting, psychiatrists are indispensable. Further to that, I was beginning to understand that – often regardless of their merit -psychiatrists wielded significant power. Anyway, there were more serious problems with Nigel Pathmana-than, problems that weren’t so easy to turn the other cheek to. Could there be something to squeeze in beside the kinesiology, the religiosity?
    With his office being three down from mine on the same side of the corridor, I saw many a disgruntled mother leave his room. Red-faced, stormy with umbrage, dragging on her child’s arm – or scuttling away as quickly as possible, ripe with upset and not trusting herself to hold off from bursting into tears – she (collectively) was the one “blamed’” the one our critics were hearing from, and I know there were many more than did complain. I heard about affronts from Nigel, sometimes first-hand. Things such as: If you’re undisciplined, and I can tell you are by your weight, then your child will see you as ineffectual! would drill uncompromisingly into women who were already feeling inadequate. Sotto voce, he would hammer the nail in further with something like: Why would he take notice of someone who watches television all day?
    But even I underestimated his capacity for sideswiping women until a mother complained to me about recommendations he’d made in regard to her child. I asked him openly what he’d been thinking when he’d suggested the father – a man we both knew, a man who’d been violent to the mother – take over the parenting of their son.
    â€˜The mother’s unable to discipline the child,’ Nigel said.
    â€˜His father’s violent.’
    â€˜Only towards her,’ he replied. ‘Not to the boy.’
    It was the tone of his voice, the sureness in it, combined with the fact that I’d chosen an informal setting (in the hallway a few minutes before our team meeting) that stumped me. Never one to carry an arsenal of comebacks, I remained dumbstruck – and left standing alone in the corridor, I felt decidedly ill. The critics were right. I should be better prepared next time; in the future I’d go to his office and flesh out the conversation.
    I don’t remember there being another situation, certainly in those initial months, that gave me such clear grounds to challenge him on this particular issue. I knew that his effrontery was still being played out behind closed doors – it was there in his language when he talked about patients. Undermining women: it went on, and it was something I had to resign my self to.
    Despite this, unable to let it go completely, I always had an ear out, as if waiting on the sidelines to catch him. My eagerness may have alerted him to be more careful – although he never acted as if I was someone to be careful of. Still, either he was subtler after that, or the women were too afraid of upsetting him, because I didn’t hear anything more along those lines, certainly not directly. Perhaps it was a combination of being female and not medically trained, but I was never more than a hillock on an Everest-sized mountain to Nigel.
    Mind you, Nigel wasn’t as