Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  The years of his professional life a preparation for moments like this; repeated incidents of high stress having trained him to be able to separate his feelings from his capacity to analyse and assess the patient, not Eugenie, the patient, she who had presented with Traumatic Brain Injury; seven on the Glasgow Coma Scale (confirmed) although the particulars were slightly altered since the paramedics had done it, Eyes 2 Verbal 2 Movement 3, at 01:43, according to his no doubt flawed estimate, a patient who, the latest statistics claimed, had an 89 per cent chance of recovery, although somewhat less of full functionality, the latter not being under question at this instant, that was for later, when she might wake from her coma and the wonderfully named eight-step Rancho Los Amigos Level of Cognitive Functioning Scale might be applied; such statistics and measurements being no more than statements of average, nothing to do with an individual case in which an octagonal metal bar has been brought down diagonally across the skull of a woman by a strong young man. Right now it was a matter of the GCS and keeping up the vitals, talking to her, for she was occasionally conscious although not compos mentis. He’d been asked by a patient, one evening in a Canberra Hospital, how he dealt with traumatic incidents in his work and he’d replied, We don’t see the injury so much. I mean we see it, the blood, the trauma, but only as part of a problem to be solved, we see past it to what is achievable. Already so removed by then that he couldn’t say I.

  I see this.

  In the helicopter. Flying through darkness. Many lights below. A big pair of headphones cushioning his ears. His hand on hers. Her fingers cold but holding him as if she knew whose hand it was.

  They’d had lunch at a fine restaurant. Walked in the national park, laid together in the fine-needled shade of casuarinas. One evening at his house, two if you counted the first time she came up with him. The kiss. A thing in itself. Make-up sex in a car. Not much, really, on which to base love.

  For nearly ten years, it turned out, they had lived as children in the same suburb. He four years older than she. After school finished both of them going to work in medicine. Never meeting.

  At Royal Prince Albert they landed on the roof. Eugenie was taken down in a lift for an MRI and CT scan, then to Intensive Care. Sedated so they could intubate, attach drips and monitoring equipment. Leaving him to sit in a chair beside the bed.

  Nobody asked his relationship to her, for which he was glad because he didn’t know how he would answer.

  Still dark outside. Still part of the same night.

  A brain surgeon arrived. Put the scans up on a lightboard and invited Nick to look at them.

  ‘She’s sustained a serious blow. You can see here, where the bar made contact and you can see the bone has cracked, here, here and here. There’s a bit of swelling going on within the cranium but no more than you’d expect at this stage.’

  He glanced at Nick.

  ‘I’ve seen a lot worse,’ he said.

  ‘Which means?’ Nick asked, knowing that such questions were both the most common and the hardest to answer.

  ‘Well, the bone isn’t shattered. At this stage, as far as I can tell, nothing has penetrated the brain itself. I think she’s seen the bar coming and tried to move so it’s glanced off.’ The surgeon imitating her action, ducking aside. ‘There’s a contusion on her shoulder which might confirm this. My guess is she’ll pull through without too much damage. That’s my hope. We won’t know until we wake her up, which we won’t do for a while. A couple of days at least. Until that swelling goes down. I’m not going to do anything at this stage. If the swelling increases or refuses to go down I can release the pressure. But the bleeding has stopped. I think we’ll just clean up the wound and see how we go. The human animal is … but I’m sure you know this … highly resilient.’

  The surgeon started taking the scans down and stacking them together, sliding them into their envelope.

  ‘You should get some sleep,’ he said.

  Nick found a bathroom, washed his hands (again), his face, the back of his neck. Looking in the mirror he saw that he was still wearing the white coat he’d put on at the hospital when they brought Helen in. His stethoscope around his neck. Wondering just how she was going. A surge of concern rising that he’d abandoned her like that. Left the hospital unattended. He took off the coat, put the stethoscope in its pocket. He wondered how many lapses of professionalism he’d been guilty of in the last few hours.

  He went back to the chair next to Eugenie. Sat, looking out into the rest of the ward. The nurse assigned to Eugenie was balancing on a stool at the end of the bed, the wide report sheet clipped onto its table, making notes. A curtain prevented him from seeing the patient behind him. A glass-walled booth at the centre of the ward. The only part of the room fully lit. Computer monitors glowing. A standing nurse talking to a sitting doctor, their words inaudible. The attending nurses each with their patients. The dead part of night. He stared out at the limited activity, ignored and uncomprehending. He fell asleep, sitting up. One benefit from all those years as an intern.

  When he woke it was daylight. The ward full of people, doctors, nurses, nurses’ aides, specialists. Six-thirty. He went to the bathroom again and washed, eyeing off the unused shower in the corner. No towels, no clean clothes, no point. Unshaven. He was due at the surgery in two hours but didn’t have a car, hadn’t drunk anything since before midnight. He looked like shit warmed over.

  He found a cafeteria and ordered coffee and breakfast, pulled out his mobile phone, tried to ring the surgery but got no reply. He tried Joy at home. She answered. This, however, meant he had to explain what had happened and where he was. She, of course, knew Eugenie and was appalled. The fact he’d accompanied her – one of their own – to Brisbane did not, for some reason, surprise her. He said he would try and get back as soon as possible. If she could manage to reschedule some patients. Perhaps he could take a train?

  When he made it back to the ICU Marcus was there.

  ‘I came down before the traffic,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t going to sleep any more anyway.’

  Nick explained what he knew about Eugenie’s condition.

  ‘There’s a husband, isn’t there?’ Nick asked. As if he might maintain his innocence with this man.

  ‘Yes,’ Marcus said.

  Nick lowered his head. ‘I’m sorry. I knew that,’ he said. ‘Does he know she’s injured? Where is he?’

  ‘In the Pilbara. He knows but there’s a cyclone threatening. He can’t get out just now.’

  ‘Right. The thing is,’ Nick said, ‘I came down with her in the helicopter. I don’t have a car and I’m due back in Winderran. I’m wondering if I could borrow yours. I could bring it back this afternoon when I’m finished. I could bring your wife down too, and Eugenie’s girls, maybe.’

  ‘If Eugenie’s going to be in a coma for a while there’s nothing I can do here,’ Marcus said. ‘I’ll drive you back.’

  The traffic heavy on Gympie Road, the stop lights streamed for the incoming flow, pulling them up again and again.

  Marcus described what had happened at Roselea.

  ‘I went out on the veranda. I didn’t figure they’d hurt me, which doesn’t mean I wasn’t scared they might. I was unarmed. It’s not, you know, Latin America.’

  ‘Yet.’

  ‘I’m standing there in the glare of their lights, no chance to speak with the noise. I guess they wanted to say something, or hear what I had to say, I don’t know, but after a while they turned off the music and the motors, left the lights on. I don’t even know what I was going to say. I just thought that if I stayed inside they’d want blood. I mean metaphorically. I mean they’d start smashing things up, shooting at the house maybe and then someone might get hurt. But before I could say much of anything there was a shout from down by the creek. There was another vehicle down there I hadn’t seen and it started up, sounding its horn, tearing off up the hill. Some sort of signal I guess. These jerks out the front of the house started their motors up again, made to
take off. The trouble was it’s been really wet at our place. That front paddock’s like an ice-rink. Two of them take off but the third one’s gone onto the grass and is spinning around and around. The driver’s panicked, and he’s flooring it and it’s fish-tailing all over the joint, throwing up dirt and mud. The other two have stopped halfway to the causeway. I figure it’s because they’re waiting for this idiot but then I see something down on the causeway. I called to the others. Just then the ute in the paddock gets traction and lurches off the grass onto the road, sideswiping one of the other vehicles. That’s too much for them. They take off, working their way around the obstacle down on the causeway. By that time I’m running down to see what’s happening, couldn’t give a shit about these fucks in their four-wheel drives. I didn’t even take a number plate. I could have, I was standing right next to them when they were stopped. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Geoff was down there with Eugenie. Blood all over him. I took one look and jumped in the car, went up the top of the road with the mobile and called emergency. No sign of these bastards. I’ll give the ambulance people this: they were there within five minutes. When we got back down to Eugenie they had her laid out on her side next to the drums. Geoff said that they were going to hit him but she got in the way.’

  ‘Will the police get the people who did this?’

  ‘They should do. I mean it should be a breeze. They smashed into each other. That’s not something you can hide so easily. The vehicles’ll be covered in mud. There’s tyre tracks everywhere to match up. They know where to look anyway, because of what the girl told us.’

  ‘You knew that Eugenie and I … we’d been seeing each other?’

  ‘Lindl knew. She and Eugenie are pretty close.’

  ‘She didn’t want anyone else to know. I had to go to great lengths …’ he paused. ‘I don’t want you to think this is something I do, you know, sleep with other men’s wives. Eugenie said she hadn’t been happy with David for years, that she wanted to leave …’ fizzling out, loathing the patter emanating from his mouth.

  Marcus glanced over at him.

  ‘You’re serious about her then, yourself?’

  ‘Is that a test question?’

  The day had the sort of brightness only achieved after not having slept. Sunlight bouncing off the cars, four-wheel drives, utes, vans, vast aluminium-bodied gravel trucks, all of them surging forward together with each change of the lights. Everything, at one and the same time, too close and too far away. Passing through little shopping centres stunned into submission by decades of traffic, advertising signs that had lost their meaning from being read too many times by too many people.

  ‘If you want to see it that way,’ Marcus said. ‘But I was actually asking about you, not her. How it is you’re doing. I don’t figure you spent the night beside her because you’re her doctor.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m sorry.’

  Was he serious? If there was brain damage, for instance, would he still be there? Did they have enough shared experience to warrant that sort of commitment? He doubted it. But there’d been enough to feel her injury in himself. For it to have got past his doctorial defences and enter into the places within himself reserved for those he loved. They’d been talking about how they got into medicine. In the national park, walking off the lunchtime wine. How they’d managed to get from Stanmore, that strange little suburb moored between the railway tracks and Parramatta Road, to Winderran via hospitals around the country. And why.

  ‘I always liked to care for people,’ she’d said. ‘I’ve never spent that much time wondering why. Well, not until recently anyway. Not until my marriage started to fall apart. It seems I’ve been compensating.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, the usual.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Family?’ Not elaborating the point. ‘When you’re young you think you can do anything you want. Or I did. Let me say that. I thought I could be all sorts of things and I think I thought I’d put on nursing like a coat and wear it for a while. What I didn’t realise, I guess, is that after a time you become whatever coat it is you’re wearing, never mind what you still think about yourself inside. You’ve only got one life. You haven’t got hundreds of them to choose from.’

  They’d reached Carseldine. Marcus pointed to the lights that had brought them to a standstill, again. This time at the head of the rank. ‘These are the last ones for about eighty kilometres,’ he said. ‘It should be plain sailing from here. You can have a sleep if you like.’

  Closing his eyes, letting the acceleration of the car push him back into the seat. When she’d been talking like that he’d thought about the way he’d been pushed into medicine and followed it. Giving himself over to it at the expense of everything else. Sex dressed as love as a form of relief from it, getting him into all sorts of shit along the way. Two children now who seemed to always get second best and it was of no account, just for the record, that it had been the same in his generation, when he was a child, that his father hadn’t been there for him or his brother, that was irrelevant, you couldn’t go measuring things with false comparisons, this was now, not then, and he knew what he was capable of giving and knew that he hadn’t been giving it and he’d thought, lying there in the tessellated shade with this new woman, the not-so-distant sea a bass note beneath the sound of the wind in the casuarinas, how it might be possible to do it differently, not just with his children, but with her, as if – and here was the mistake of course, slipping itself in there the way it always did – as if her presence might make the difference, that the way he felt for her, the sense of care which welled in his breast when he looked at her, when he was with her, which was associated with sex, aligned with it, but in this case coming from another, more subtle place, might allow him to take a different course.

  Then, in the middle of the night, in the early hours of a Tuesday morning she was brought in on a gurney bleeding from the head and it felt like he had been meant to be there for her, that it wasn’t a mistake, wasn’t some false positive, some twisted self-justification to do with sexual gratification or ownership or fear of abandonment, lack of self-worth or compensation, it was to do with wanting to provide love for another person, no, not even wanting, because it was without volition, it was what it was.

  He opened his eyes and looked across at this stranger who’d been up all night, just like him, but who was driving him home now up the Bruce Highway.

  ‘In answer to your question,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’ Marcus said.

  ‘I’m serious.’

  nineteen

  Guy

  He slipped out of the airport surrounds and onto the freeway system at speed, turning north on the arterial, grateful for the lack of traffic. Speaking too soon: within minutes he was at a standstill. The northbound lanes caught in the long tail of an accident or roadwork somewhere beyond anyone’s understanding. Ten thousand cars easing forward one metre at a time over roads designed to be traversed at a hundred times the speed. Hard not to take it personally.

  After ringing Lasker three or four times he’d called the hospital, connecting to a phone at a nurses’ station that rang long into the night without recourse to an answering machine, only eventually picked up by a nurse who told him that, yes, his wife had been admitted after suffering a relapse. She was now, though, in a stable condition, resting, but she, the nurse, thought, if she might say it, that it would be good if he could be there.

  ‘Are you saying she’s about to die?’

  ‘No Mr Lamprey, I’m not. Not immediately anyway, I don’t believe so. But she is extremely ill.’

  ‘Can you put me through to Nick Lasker?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, Doctor Lasker is not available.’

  ‘Why ever not? He’s her doctor. He left a message for me saying, specifically, that I should call him, at any time of day or night. I’ve been trying to phone him for hours.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Lamprey, but Doctor Lasker’s been called aw
ay.’

  ‘How can he be called away when he’s already on a case? He’s my wife’s doctor. If she’s in crisis then he should be there.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Lamprey. I’ll pass that on to him as soon as I see him.’

  The small hours of the morning in a Canberra hotel room.

  Getting out his laptop. Navigating the internet for a seat on an early morning flight to Brisbane. Doing something, anything, to cover for the overwhelming sense of Helen’s mortality; for his own failure to be there. The disease now in her liver.

  The phone on his lap, glancing down to flick through screens in the hope of finding the number for the Party offices in Canberra. Trying not to rear-end the car in front. The drivers all around, likewise, talking to disembodied others via the power of Bluetooth. Only just after nine in Brisbane but ten in Canberra due to Queensland’s reluctance to compromise on even the simplest of political imperatives. Time getting away on him.

  The switchboard operator condescended to put him through to a secretary who routed him through, in turn, to the media department, one of whose minions was supposed to be picking him up from the hotel in approximately fifteen minutes. Explaining to this unknown individual in the simplest possible language that he was, in fact, in Brisbane, on his way to see his wife in hospital. The traffic at a standstill. Speaking in one-syllable words while concentrating on the movement of a truck a long way ahead, waiting to see it move so that later he, too, might also do so. The heat building. Going back to the radio when the call was over in the hope of hearing a traffic update but thus locking himself into the insufferable chatter of call-back on the local ABC; tormenting him with inanity.

  The phone cut in just when there might have been a break for the long-awaited traffic report.

  It was Bain. Unexpectedly furious. ‘What’s this all about, Guy?’ he said.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s Helen, Aldous,’ he said.

  ‘What’s Helen got to do with these goons?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard the news?’ Bain said.