Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  ‘I went to him for information. As you instructed. Off the record. He’s a friend.’

  ‘Don’t speak to anyone in the media, whatever you do. What did he tell you?’

  ‘That there’s a frog on the endangered species list which lives in the dam area. That someone was trying to kill it.’

  ‘I could have told you that.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because I only found out in the last couple of days. There’s an expert who lives up your way who’s done a study. Slater? Sleever?’

  ‘Steever, Geoff Steever.’

  ‘That’s the one. Do you know him?’

  ‘I’ve met him. Ex-CSIRO. Retired. No-one you need to concern yourself with.’

  ‘Just the world’s leading authority on sub-tropical amphibians.’

  ‘Was. He’s an old man. Listen, the EIS didn’t find anything endangered. Steever’s probably making it up. One last try for glory. He’s thick with the anti-dam mob. They’d do anything.’

  ‘In another scenario,’ Bain said, ‘we might have said something similar. But the thing is, someone was out there trying to kill the fucking thing. If they didn’t exist they wouldn’t need to, would they?’

  ‘That’s certainly an argument.’

  ‘Fucking oath it is.’

  ‘But for some reason you thought I had no need of knowing this?’ Guy said.

  Silence on the other end of the line.

  ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing. Listen, suffice to say it’s a disaster. Can you make a statement? Speak to the radio?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, Guy? This is your constituency. This issue is what’s made you. We’re a fucking team, Guy. You need to get on board. One poor player and we’re all fucked.’

  ‘As it happens I’m sitting next to my dying wife.’

  ‘Right. Yes. Of course. Give Helen my best wishes.’

  ‘I’m not sure she’s taking that sort of thing in.’

  ‘Listen, you don’t have to come up with anything yourself. I’ll get the office to put something together. For breakfast radio tomorrow. We need you, Guy.’

  Hoping that he’d managed to instil some measure of shame in the bastard. Although it would be fair to ask what he was doing there himself, what function he served, sitting next to her thinking about what he might do when she was dead. Where he might live and which car he might buy with money that was going to come from a project which just right then, he’d have to say, looked shaky. An endangered frog might present a problem for the project under some circumstances. An endangered frog which someone had taken it upon themselves to destroy, while doing their best to kill a conservationist in the process, was likely to present an insurmountable obstacle. Might present an obstacle, even, to his own election. He could see that. No doubt the reason Aldous was so angry. Not that it made him any more sympathetic. A skerrick of thought having slipped into his mind while Bain was talking: that he knew more than he was letting on. Drip-feeding Guy the information. A team. Not sure how he had managed to so effectively blind himself to what he was doing, joining up with Bain and Lonergan et al. He had always hated teams, particularly teams of men and the threat of violence that lurks, always, at their heart; the bullying to conform to something which could as easily prove to be their worst aspect as their best. The power of the clique tied to its antithesis, the thing they were opposed to or excluded, the other. They hadn’t even bothered to tell him, even when his name was all over it.

  He’d meant to ask about the conservationist.

  Helen’s eyes were closed but she wasn’t asleep. Every now and then a tremor seemed to pass through her, causing her breath to catch, become shorter, harsher, her muscles to tighten, the skin on her face, already tight across the bone, to contract further, her thin lips pulling back from her teeth. He pumped the dongle to release the drug but it had no effect. She turned her head and looked at him again.

  He would go and find the doctor himself. Anger so close to the surface. Fury at what had happened, what was happening, at anger itself. Loathing himself for it. Perhaps if he could have something to eat it would be better. The last thing he’d eaten had been the wrap they’d given him on the plane by way of breakfast. There was a vending machine in the lobby. He stood up. Helen’s eyes followed him. Unnaturally large.

  ‘I’m going to get something to eat,’ he said, saying it loudly, as if she was deaf as well as mute. Like an Englishman addressing a foreigner.

  Three or four people on the plastic chairs near the front desk, waiting. Nobody actually bleeding, that he could see. The vending machine carried only the barest minimum. Chocolate bars, potato chips. He bought a Picnic, all his coins could manage. He tore open the wrapper but suddenly didn’t want to be seen standing in the foyer eating it. He went back onto the ward, down the corridor to the room, the damn thing open in his hand.

  Nick Lasker was standing at the end of the bed in a white coat, looking at Helen’s chart. Even in his own present state, sleep-deprived, disorientated, subject to unexpected mood swings, Guy could see the man was exhausted.

  He held out his hand. ‘Nick,’ he said.

  Lasker looked at it, as if at something distasteful, then looked at the other one, holding its stupid stump of lumpy chocolate protruding from its brightly coloured wrapper, a crude confectionary turd. He looked back at Helen.

  Disconcerted, Guy put the chocolate bar down on the night table. Not sure it would, after resting there, be safe to eat.

  ‘Helen’s in a lot of pain,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ Nick said. ‘She’s on the highest dose of morphine we can give her, but it’s not having much effect. During the night she suffered a rupture to the abdomen. Under other circumstances we might have been able to operate, but I can’t see the advantage. Nor does Helen want us to.’

  ‘Nor I. Is there something else you can give her?’

  Nick clipped her chart back onto the end of the bed and went alongside of her, looked at the drip, rested his hand on her wrist.

  ‘Doctor Lasker,’ Guy said, no Nicks anymore.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She wants this to stop.’

  ‘I know. But there’s not much more I can do than I already have.’

  ‘Well you could be in here looking after her instead of chasing after more interesting cases.’

  He hadn’t meant to say it. He’d thought it, of course he had. But he hadn’t meant to say it. And yet there the words were. Out in the open.

  In the ensuing silence Lasker remained next to Helen, across the bed from Guy. Gathering himself. After a moment or two he looked up.

  ‘You’re under a lot of stress aren’t you?’ he said.

  From the way he said it – the clever employment of psycho-speech, acknowledging the pain of the attacker rather than the thing he’d said – Guy had the sense Lasker was in some way pleased by the rudeness of his outburst, as if it had, in a significant way, changed their status in his favour. Guy started to say something, some rejoinder, but nothing came out. First the words come, then they stop.

  ‘But it’s Helen we need to take care of at the moment, isn’t it?’ Lasker said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What I can do is consult with the Sister about the dosage. We have a responsibility to try to control the pain. To make her as comfortable as possible. Helen asked me to do whatever I can to minimise it. The difficulty is that a stronger dose might have the effect of putting her system into terminal decline.’

  ‘I thought she was already in terminal decline.’

  ‘She is. I’m talking in a more immediate sense. A stronger dose may mean that she won’t wake again.’

  ‘Give it to her. I know it’s what she wants. She’s said so to me, herself, many times. And to you it seems.’ Begging favours of the gods of medicine.

  ‘I’ll go and talk to the Sister.’ Stopping at the door. ‘Is there anyone else you want to discuss this with?’


  ‘No. I want what’s best for Helen.’ Pausing. ‘I apologise for what I said a moment ago. I don’t know what came over me.’

  Lasker didn’t respond.

  Helen had not stirred throughout the exchange. Now, as soon as the doctor was absent, she went into one of her spasms. Lamprey pressed the pain relief device several times, in the same way and with as much conviction as a man waiting to cross the street bangs the button on the pole. He could do that. What he suddenly found he couldn’t do was touch her. Couldn’t quite offer that. She’d gone too far, was out of his reach. She had been for a long time, just not as obviously. For many years now they had cohabited out there on the hill, tied together by their mistakes. He was fairly certain she knew he took his pleasure elsewhere, though they’d never discussed it. He never enquired about her. He had thought her sanctimonious, unforgiving, wedded to her grief. He had turned away from her, into his work, and when that wasn’t going well, into other things. It might be that she had harboured no opinion about where he took his pleasure, but around his career she’d never been short of judgement, even if it hadn’t always been expressed. Her critique of his work in television, of the people he associated with, of his convictions, had been a constant. Like she was his fucking mother. Now, though, extraordinarily enough, she was choosing to leave. Wrestling with some devil on the bed next to him. Taking with her thirty-eight years of his life.

  Time passed. This particular spasm appeared to ease. Watching Helen retreat from the fight, physically calming, although still breathing in these short broken breaths, he found himself subject to curious and unpleasant spikes of emotion – washed by waves of frustration, pain, boredom – interspersed with periods where he simply felt nothing at all, this last the most difficult to deal with, his capacity for distance, for indifference, writ large. They were all, no doubt, aspects of grief. He was informed enough about the psychology of the human animal to know that. But the knowledge brought no help.

  A young nurse came in, apologising for interrupting. ‘Just need to check a few things,’ she said, unhooking the chart, taking Helen’s pulse.

  Lamprey checked his phone. He’d had it on silent. Ten missed calls. A whole raft of emails piling up. Flicking through the headings to see if there was anything he absolutely had to attend to. Addressing the nurse.

  ‘Last night,’ he said, ‘there was an emergency up this way … I heard a woman was attacked out along Dundalli Creek … was this hospital involved?’

  ‘Oh yes. It was terrible. It was one of our staff. Hit with an iron bar by some young thugs. Cracked her skull. Awful.’ The nurse had turned her attention to the machines beside Helen.

  ‘Who was it?’ Guy asked, knowing instinctively.

  ‘Eugenie Lensman. She’s been here for years. I’ve not heard how she is yet. We’re all thinking of her.’ Clipping the charts back onto the end of the bed. ‘Doctor Lasker was on duty. He was fantastic. Flew down to Brisbane with her, wouldn’t leave her side. A wonderful man. I don’t think he’s been to bed yet.’

  Eugenie Lensman. Brained by some idiot who, according to the local news, was in favour of the dam. Guy slumping back in his hospital chair. Taking it hard. The image from the first time he’d met her coming to mind, at his home, visiting with her father. Standing by the bookshelves, looking through his library, an innocent who was, at the same time, fundamentally self-contained, her own person, containing multitudes. It was why he’d picked her. Bain, asking if he’d organised this, an idea so clearly ludicrous it didn’t bear consideration. Except that he did, in that moment, feel a sense of responsibility. As if, in stealing her for a character, he had in some way created this.

  Lasker had left Helen to fly to Brisbane with her.

  After taking him on as replacement for Miles, Helen had asked him, casually, ‘You don’t mind me appropriating your young man?’

  ‘He’s not mine,’ he replied.

  ‘I thought perhaps …’

  ‘No, I was curious about him, I will admit it. But he won’t do. He doesn’t understand books.’

  ‘He is a doctor.’

  ‘I know. But a love of science doesn’t preclude literature does it?’

  ‘I can’t help but see the attraction, though,’ she said. ‘There’s a freshness to him, isn’t there? Something uncomplicated and true.’

  He wondered if Lasker had already been working with the anti-dam mob even then. No wonder he was so down on him. He, too, thought Guy had something to do with those thugs. Hurting one of his nurses. Or more. Who knows.

  The cheek of the man. He had invited him into his home. Given over to him the care of his wife. Now here he was, beholden to him, caught up in the machinations of this town with its smallness, its bitter politics, its strange deracinated history, its residents all inextricably tied up with each other. The whole crappy frontier state of Queensland with its wilful embrace of ignorance and brutality. A province of a province. The decisions Helen had forced him to make which had led him there and everything that followed, all of it spooling out at his feet, slithering and coiling on the hospital floor, impossibly tangled.

  Lasker came back with the Sister. He explained that he was going to record the conversation they would have over the next few moments. The man apparently oblivious to the bile seething around him. He asked if Guy had any objections. Only to you, he wanted to say. Desperately trying to concentrate. He said he had none. Just questions: What is your relationship with Eugenie Lensman? Are you her lover? How long has this been going on? Lasker fiddled with his smartphone, then, apparently satisfied, explained what he proposed to do. Increasing the dose of morphine would make Helen more comfortable, he said, but it could, also, give rise to catastrophic failure in her system. Did Guy understand this? He did.

  ‘Your wife,’ Lasker said, ‘has a Do Not Resuscitate order. What this means is that should she suffer from a catastrophic failure the hospital is not to attempt to resuscitate her. Do you understand that?’ He did.

  Guy added, for the benefit of the machine, that he had asked Doctor Lasker to give his wife whatever pain relief was in his power in order to ease the pain.

  Lasker turned off the recorder. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you’re certain you want us to go ahead with this? You’re certain that there is no-one else who should be part of this discussion?’

  He’d forgotten Sarah.

  ‘We have a daughter,’ he said. ‘In Perth.’

  ‘Perhaps you would like to consult her?’

  ‘She’s coming over here now, she isn’t due till midnight, even later.’ Looking at his watch. It was only late afternoon. ‘If you give Helen more pain relief is something likely to happen quickly?’

  ‘It’s not certain, but it could happen in the next couple of hours.’

  ‘I don’t believe it would be fair on Helen to keep her in this amount of pain any longer,’ he said. ‘I don’t think Sarah would thank us.’

  Saying the words but knowing they were untrue. If Helen was still alive when Sarah arrived she would storm in demanding more tests, more drugs, different doctors, different hospitals. Torturing her mother as a way of appeasing her own guilt at whatever it was that she thought she had done wrong, which was probably no more than survive, a pain that had taken her to the other side of the country to marry some sort of fool.

  He checked his phone for messages. Its battery was now flat.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Go ahead.’

  As the drug started flowing Helen’s face seemed to relax. Was that a projection? When Lasker and the Sister left he sat down beside the bed again. This time he took her hand in his. A frail bony thing, cold to the touch. In all these past hours she had, he thought, been a powerful force operating in the room, making the decisions. Pushing him away so that she could herself go. An act of will. With the increased dose of morphine she was relinquishing control.

  More of this magical thinking, of course; a salve to his conscience. But it seemed a moot point. At least she now looked as if she were asleep
, breathing more peacefully.

  He sat beside her, just him and her and all the machinery. The anger draining out of him, as if he, too, were affected by the drug. Now, at last, out of this calm, some thread of love rose up in him from beneath the scars. It seemed possible that he had not, in fact, stopped loving her; it was just that for so long she’d been so unavailable he’d got out of the habit of it. They had become, at best, fellow travellers, spectators of each other’s lives, shuffling along together because, well, he didn’t know why, because, perhaps, for all their lack of intimacy, he knew, fundamentally, that he was a better man with her beside him. It wasn’t, now, that he wanted her back or even wanted one last burst of recognition or acknowledgement, it was simply that he could see her, separate from him, doing the business of dying, and that it was her business and nothing to do with him. That when she was done he would be alone and he wasn’t sure what that meant, to be rudderless, without guidance, even from afar.

  twenty

  Eugenie

  Much later she had trouble distinguishing between what she experienced within the coma and what happened afterwards. There was no point at which she could say I was asleep then, I am awake now. There was a long transition period even before the official transition period, the one where the nursing staff played Kim’s game with her, where they asked her the meaning of simple childish words, as if she was stupid, words she knew the meaning of perfectly well, just couldn’t find the language to say what they were. This was not a story in which the character gets caught up in certain events and then, when they are over, goes back to the life she was living before. The person she became on the other side of the coma was different from the one before. She looked the same, had the same name, the same daughters, the same house, the same job, but she was, she liked to think, larger, by which she meant more inclusive, not just of everybody and everything, but of herself. More at ease, as if there was both less to be done and more appreciation of how those things might be achieved, more recognition of those in her life and less need of them at the same time.

  What she remembered was the people who visited. Not so much the conversations with them but their presence, sitting with her. Sandrine – her grandmother, not her daughter – speaking to her in French of course, a wonderful flowing stream of clear pure language, rippling over the stones of an alpine meadow, running between moss and heath while a vast sky cradled the mountains around about – where the sound of the water was the meaning itself as she had always believed it to be, as Yvette had told her it was in Bene Gesserit when they played in the wide sandy river bed, in the small clear pools backed up against round granite boulders, the sand on the soles of their feet grating against the hard smooth rock. Yvette telling stories about her, about Eugenie, pronouncing it the French way Oo-gen-ee, like it was a tune, stories about the boy who won which had morphed, the way stories do, to stories about how Eugenie had won, local girl wins, but did not know it, nobody had told her that she was the winner and so she had lived her whole life thinking she had to struggle to survive, to fight against life when all the time she was the one who had been awarded the prize, this was what the people who gathered in her room were telling her, sometimes individually, sometimes in great crowds, streams of people passing in through the opposite wall and out the one behind her as if her bed had been placed on the pavement of a busy street in Sydney or maybe Paris because some of them definitely looked French and they all knew who she was and although she didn’t know them she was not afraid or anxious or confused, it was natural that she should be where she was, in a bed like a boat in a flowing river, people washing towards and around her, this was not a trial, they were saying, this wasn’t some ordeal whose aim was to teach her a lesson, with all the attendant possibilities of failure, nobody was going to test her on anything at all, this was it, this and this and this, local girl wins.