Prologue 

My first four novels came one year after another. This one has taken longer, primarily due to my going through retirement and other exigencies of life. A secondary reason was that it took longer to craft.

Tartan Identity was relatively easy compared to this effort. I had the starting point – the abrupt end of Identity Theft (about which I had some adverse comment); and I had the last line, an irresistible pun. All I had to do was fill in the middle bit; and the middle bit was spiced up with sex and derring-do.

The story sprang from the mysterious zone of my imagination over which I have no control. The shapes of the characters came readily; fashioning themselves from bits of people I have known, mixed with a touch of invention here and there, and glued together by the demands of the plots and subplots.

The response to Tartan Identity however surprised me, given I had anticipated a certain amount of negative reaction to the sexy bits. However, I tell you ladies from the feedback I received, there is a great deal going on in your minds that many men are not aware of – and age is not an indicator of attitudes either!

So we come to The Dog Catcher from Keister North. One of the problems I had in writing this book was trying to moderate my use of the amount of the fascinating material that I had or that came to hand during research relating to technical aspects of the tale; just so the story could survive. Another was that current events kept catching up with the invented story.

Notwithstanding, the characters and events in The Dog Catcher from Keister North are wholly fictional and were set in the future at the time of writing. So any comparison of characters in the book with real people you may know is unequivocally co-incidental; and, in some cases, a damned shame! 

Paul Frisby

Read a sample: Pauline Negotiates

Pauline Curtis was sitting up in bed looking past her doctor’s shoulder and through the top floor window of her private room at Brisbane’s Greenslopes Hospital. She was looking in the general direction of the north of the city and roughly towards where her family home was located. In the foreground were the roofs of the multiple buildings that made up the older parts of the complex. Notwithstanding the elevation of the hospital over the surrounding suburbs, she could see no further north than the tall towers that dominated the Brisbane City skyline in the middle distance. The early business of the day and the warmth of the river water had surrounded the city in a misty microclimate in the cool of the winter morning.

Pauline was in a way pleased she could not see her family home. She wanted to avoid it at all costs. For Pauline Curtis her family home was nothing less than a trap.

Pauline didn’t know whether the Keister Shire’s workers’ compensation or her private health insurance company was going to foot the bill for her hospitalisation but as far as she was concerned they could fight that out between them. She had told the hospital it would be workers’ compensation and no doubt the hospital’s accounts department had already begun to pursue the cost of her stay. The advice she had given was on the basis that she felt the facts of her injury were indisputably such that no one could argue differently. Still with Keister Shire Council you never knew what the outcome might be. Moreover the speed of events had been such that, while no doubt someone had told the powers that be about what had happened, she had not had the opportunity to make any sort of report; let alone fill in a claim form. All she had received were a couple of phone calls from her friend Diana in the Chief Executive Officer’s office enquiring about her condition and wishing her well.

On the other hand Pauline reflected, if you had to be unwell this, her most recent hospital stay and her first since a teenage appendectomy, had made her firmly of the belief that Greenslopes Hospital was the sort of place you would want to be unwell in. The private room was of generous size, and so was the ensuite bathroom. The floor was carpeted and thankfully so was the corridor outside. Pauline’s recollection of other hospitals was that they had been noisy places.

It was just after half past nine in the morning and she knew she only had a limited time left to dictate terms. This was partially because the doctor that was at that minute sharing the commendable space of the room with her bed and other furniture had done everything he wanted to do, seen everything he had wanted to see, and said everything he had wanted to say. No doubt Doctor Wasniak had more patients to examine, but before he left Pauline wanted him to do something for her. Doing it before he left, that was immediately, now, in the next three minutes, was essential.

Given the woman’s usual pattern of travel by train and taxi from the family home trap in the suburbs on the other side of the city’s towers, she knew she only had about twenty more minutes of free time until her mother descended on her.

Now her relationship with her mother was, from her side of things, reasonable; as long as her mother didn’t try to run her life. That was an ongoing tendency her mother had, and Pauline’s understanding from her friends was that, if it came to giving ratings her mother was from the top of the order. Should there be such a thing as a parenting world cup her opinion was that her mother could smother for Australia. While Pauline could understand that her mother had a continuing concern for her, particularly when she was an only child; when that concern kept putting her adult self into the position of an over-dependent eight year old it was intolerable.

From a medical perspective, things were much better. Doctor Wasniak was satisfied that all of her five fingers on her right hand had an excellent blood supply from both arteries, that she could work them all independently, albeit gently and with care lest she pull at the stitches in her wounds, and no infection had set in or was now likely to set in. He had announced that he was prepared to let her go if everything was satisfactory for another twenty four hours; but with conditions.

The doctor, who had placed most of those stitches and with whom she had built up a certain rapport, had given her permission to be discharged as long as she monitored her temperature on a daily basis, continued to take oral antibiotics as prescribed, and visited the hospital twice a week for a wound inspection and a change of dressings; the hospital’s outpatients department to decide when to remove the external stitches. She fully understood that plastic surgery to make her arm look prettier was an option down the track but that she could do that only when her wounds had fully healed; and her psyche was properly adjusted to the situation. Pauline had absolutely no argument with any of that. It all made sense.

What she wanted from the doctor was for him to declare her fit to fly; and she wanted it in writing should the airline query her condition. She understood she would be discharged with her arm in a sling, still be a little frail and have something of a hospital pallor. She also wanted him to write down on her chart that she would be fit to convalesce under the care of her own doctor at the Keister Hospital. It would be even better if he would write down that such a move would be preferable, but she would take the first option if that was all she could get. She knew that someone else would read that chart.

Pauline could cope with the antibiotics and the yucky way they made her feel. She could cope with monitoring her own temperature. She could cope with reporting to a hospital, daily if necessary. She could even cope with Keister and the Keister Shire Council. What she could not cope with was the smothering care that she would be cotton-woolled in if she went home to convalesce with her mother. Doctor Wasniak was however taking some convincing.

“Look Mark,” she said to the doctor with whom she had built up something of a friendly relationship, “I may not be a doctor but I am twenty six years old, have a science degree and I know what infection is all about. I’m a fucking health inspector for Christ’s sake. You said yourself that Keister Hospital did a good job on me before they flew me down here so they can look after me now.”

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