‘People think we raise the dead,’ John says. And I know he also wonders, as I do, if it’s worth the emotional toll on us, the paramedics burdened by the expectation of miracles.
CHAPTER 4
Four days off can rocket past like an ambulance, so it’s vital to make them last, to savour every moment. It takes a while to bounce back from the night shifts though, a day or two at least. Those days are for slow walks, reading in the park, going to the movies. Up until a month ago those days would’ve also been for a date with Kaspia at Fu Manchu, our favourite local diner.
But my days off don’t rocket past at all. Time stretches endlessly before me and I’m unsure what to do with it. Kaspia told me our break would make us more creative and productive. She said she’d lost herself, and was living in my shadow. Time apart would enable me to write more, and she’d be able to focus on a show she was planning to put on in January. As a burlesque dancer, she usually performed for a company called Sugartime in a popular monthly vaudeville directed by Russall S. Beattie. But she wanted to produce her own show, and after that explore her other creative talents.
So I agreed to the split, wanting to be supportive, and picturing myself writing a novel without disturbance in just a few months. I imagined evenings surrounded by laughing artists and poets, sipping cocktails on my balcony overlooking the city lights, jazz musicians jamming in my lounge room.
Instead I’m weighed down by a loneliness that makes me good for nothing. When I try to write, the words don’t come. No one calls, and late at night I lie awake and listen to the sirens going up and down Oxford and Victoria to St Vinnies, reminding me that I’ll soon be back at work again, and that maybe it’s a good thing.
On day three I drag myself out of bed and drive my car to Bondi, this time not for work. Above a shoe shop there’s a music school where I learn guitar. I ring the doorbell and my teacher, Paul, a bald man in his fifties, lets me in. He smiles and shakes my hand.
‘Hey mate, come on up.’
Paul plays piano and a dozen other instruments. On guitar he’s the best I’ve ever seen. There are videos of him on YouTube where his fingers move so fast they seem to disappear.
I first met Paul on a frigid morning at The Gap. He’d climbed the fence at the crack of dawn. For a while it was only him and me, and he told me about the tragic events that had led him to this point. He and his wife of ten years both suffered depression, but his wife’s was more severe. It was so debilitating for her that all she ever talked about was suicide. She’d regularly send him messages while he was with his music students, threatening to kill herself. Paul would end his lessons early and hurry home to stop her. He was in a constant state of worry about finding her dead one day, a worry that compounded his own depression and suicidal thoughts.
One winter night Paul woke up and saw that his wife was gone. He got out of bed and found her hanging in the bathroom. She’d made herself all pretty, as if for a night on the town, wearing her favourite dress and lipstick, hair brushed back. Paul ran into the street, screaming hysterically. The police had to tackle him to the ground. He was in what is known as a ‘grief psychosis’ and needed sedating.
As if this wasn’t tragic enough, Paul told me his adult children blamed him for their mother’s death, suggesting he’d driven her to suicide with his own dark moods. It took him a long time to face the world again.
Months after I met Paul at The Gap I spoke to him on Bondi Beach. He was jogging on the soft sand in the middle of the day, when the sand is hot as coals. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him there but I decided to join him for a bit, running beside him for just a minute or so, to see how he was getting on. He remembered me and shook my hand, although he wouldn’t stop; he had to keep going. ‘It’s my therapy,’ he said as he ran. Then he asked me if I played an instrument. I told him I played piano but wanted to learn guitar. He offered to give me some lessons, the first one for free, his way of thanking me for my help.
‘Where’d we get up to?’ he asks, turning a pencil between finger and thumb. He scrawls a series of chords in my workbook. ‘These are the ones from last time, right?’
I nod. I’m worried he’ll be disappointed, as I haven’t practised much this week. My chord changes are slow, but I manage to strum them out.
‘Not bad,’ he says. ‘More work needed though.’
I’m suddenly conscious of becoming another burden in Paul’s life, a student who never improves.
Befriending a patient is an ethical minefield, especially with the mentally unwell, and is strongly discouraged for a range of reasons that I appreciate. But the professional divide between the paramedic and the patient is not necessarily a positive, in my view. It’s too easily mistaken for a divide between the strong and the weak, the sane and the mad. It’s a hierarchy that perpetuates stigmas. Although I sometimes ask Paul if he’s going okay, I never play the paramedic with him. When I’m in his studio it’s all about the music. He might once have been my patient, but now I’m his student. We all have something to give one another.
The only other time I’ve kept in contact with a psychiatric patient is with a man I met at The Gap, three years ago. There was something sacred about that meeting, something I couldn’t walk away from. His name was Stephen. He jumped from the highest point, confirmed by witnesses. We spotted him floating off the rocks, waving at us. We couldn’t believe our eyes. It’s true that it was high tide, a king tide in fact. Even so, it defied all rational explanation. Survivals are just so rare.
The water police picked him up ten minutes later and we met the launch at the Watsons Bay marina. Stephen was conscious but drowsy, and both his legs and pelvis were fractured. He was deathly pale, his blood pressure at rock bottom. He was losing blood internally but we got a line and started fluids, then splinted him as best we could for the urgent trip to hospital.
The next day we went to visit Stephen in the ward and gifted him a lottery ticket. It was John’s idea, not mine. Stephen’s parents were at his bedside and shook my hand. I couldn’t help but ask him to confirm that he’d gone from the top. He nodded. I asked him what, if anything, he was thinking as he fell. A recent New York Times article on suicide jump survivors in the US had claimed that most changed their minds mid-flight. Stephen told me the drop was almost too quick for thought, but he did remember a flash of regret the moment he fell. Was it a change of mind, I asked? Stephen paused for a minute, then nodded. Yes, he said, it was. It was also a kind of awakening. This idea was consistent with a study in the seventies of those who’d survived a jump and spoke about having ‘transcendence’ and a ‘spiritual rebirth’. Stephen’s mother said she believed an angel broke her son’s fall.
A week later a case of Tooheys Red was delivered to the ambulance station, a gift from Stephen’s father. He must have known there was nothing better at the end of a long summer shift dealing with suicidal people than a cold beer on the verandah. It was a timely present as we’d just run out of beers donated by another patient, a man who’d assaulted us while drunk and woken up the following day feeling guilty about it. Kind of ironic, really, our compensation arriving in the form of the beverage that got the guy in trouble in the first place.
Six months later I called up Stephen’s dad to see how his son was. I didn’t have Stephen’s number; if I did I would’ve called that instead. His father told me Stephen believed he was selected to live, and that his ambition was to find his true purpose. He was studying and working and seeing a girl. He was doing very well.
Occasionally, when I’m speaking to people on the edge, I mention one of these names. Paul, the musician, still alive, sharing his music with the world, including me. And Stephen, the one who jumped and changed his mind.
On the morning of my first day back at work I’m feeling agile, upbeat, ready for anything. Being in the ambulance is a million times better than moping around feeling sorry for myself for messing up my relationship with Kaspia. John, on the other hand, comes in late and doesn’t look well.
He plods up the stairs like a geriatric, every step an effort. He’s badly hungover.
‘Countersign the drugs and we’re good to go,’ I say.
After a double-shot latte we pick up an eighty-year-old woman with cellulitis from a mouldy ground-floor apartment. Her name’s Nancy. As we carry her into Casualty she tells us she could’ve been a big-time singer.
‘My father, he wanted to make me famous,’ she says. ‘But I kept having epileptic fits on stage and a mean girl stole my piano music.’ To prove her talent, Nancy faces a packed emergency waiting room and sings ‘My Funny Valentine’. She has a raw and croaky voice, but it’s strangely beautiful in an unpolished way. When she’s done, her audience of sick and injured people manages a meek applause.
She says to John, ‘You know, the other night my father was in my dream and told me he was coming into the world again. So I went out and bought a box of disposable nappies and a little blue jumpsuit for a baby boy.’
‘Well?’ John asks her. ‘Did your father show up?’
‘No, he didn’t. A terrible shame,’ replies Nancy, downcast. ‘I reckon the carpet turned him off. He always hated the carpet in our place. I can only blame myself. After all these years I never ripped it up.’
A drunk man calls for an encore from Nancy, but she’s sombre now. We’ve taken the song right out of her. In youth it’s easy to say we don’t have regrets. The future is long, full of promise and dreams. We’ve got less to look back on, less to weigh up, more time left. But old age is marked by quiet, by slow days and weeks and years for reflecting on what life was, what it wasn’t, what it might have been. Health problems are just one discomfort. Regret is painful too. And many regrets are worse than not becoming a famous singer. Old age has few upsides, especially if your partner has passed away before you. No wonder John talks of dying in his ‘prime’. His worst nightmare is to be on his own in old age, to die with no one beside him. There aren’t many health workers I know who aspire to longevity. If those who make toasts to long lives understood what this actually entailed, they’d keep their mouths shut.
John throws the ambulance into oncoming traffic. We hurtle down the wrong side of New South Head Road to upmarket Bellevue Hill. The eyes of approaching drivers widen in horror. An ambo with a death wish, some might be thinking. Normally he’s cautious, always the one to slow me down. ‘Going a bit hard, aren’t you?’ he’ll say when I push it. But now it’s John who’s swerving around the banked-up cars at busy intersections in a way that makes me nauseous.
As we miss the mirror of a delivery truck by a whisker, John blurts out, ‘Fucking Antonio!’ and leans on the horn.
‘You okay, mate?’ I have to raise my voice to be heard above the siren.
‘It’s bullshit!’
‘Has he left?’
‘Two days ago. Walked out.’
Why hadn’t he told me this earlier?
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I gather you were drinking on your own then, last night?’
‘I always drink on my own. Antonio doesn’t like it.’
I remember John telling me about Antonio coming home from work and finding him sloshed on the lounge with the sun still up. He wasn’t impressed. Our colleague Jerry, who’s known John longer than I have, reckons his drinking got bad after one of his nephews died a year ago. It was a tragedy that cut John to the core. The son of his sister was only nineteen and just coming out as gay, trying to make sense of his feelings and place in the world. His Uncle John was pretty much his only confidant, someone who understood him and could help him grasp his sexuality and the daunting prospect of sharing it with his parents and friends. But then one day, while John and Antonio were on a holiday in Rio, the teenager stepped in front of a train. He was killed instantly. John was devastated, and he blamed himself for a while, as most people do in such cases. Blamed himself for not having been there, not paying attention when he was needed most.
John rarely brings up the topic of his nephew anymore. Not because he doesn’t think about what happened; of course he does. But it’s hard remaining composed and useful in a job like ours while focused on our personal grief. It’s a compassion competition, and compassion for our patients and their relatives trumps compassion for ourselves. If it didn’t, I guess we’d probably quit. If self-compassion came first, wouldn’t it be sensible for us to stay at home and avoid getting tangled in the turmoil of strangers?
John pulls up at a red-brick house with a carefully tended hedge out front. It’s the only 1930s house left in a street of newly built mansions. We take our gear through the open door and down a hallway. In the lounge room a group of relatives stand and look at us. Beside them is a truly horrendous sight: an elderly woman crushed by a wooden cupboard. She must have severed an arterial vessel because there’s blood up the walls, right to the ceiling. We’re no detectives but we speculate she tripped and fell on the carpet, grabbing at the open cupboard door and pulling the whole thing onto herself.
Despite the graphic nature of the scene and her violent death, the family is oddly composed. One of the woman’s daughters-in-law even comments, ‘She was so unwell, you know; it’s probably for the best she’s dead. Couldn’t be more perfect, really.’
Couldn’t be more perfect, really? This might be a reasonable thing to say about someone who’d peacefully slipped away in their sleep. But a grandma crushed by a cupboard?
John and I glance at one another, which is enough to see the other is equally appalled by the relative’s attitude.
John doesn’t hesitate to get bossy with the family. ‘I think we all need to leave the room. It’s a crime scene until proven otherwise. Thank you. The police are on their way.’
We wait for the cops in the air-conditioned ambulance and try to guess what the relatives are discussing in whispers out the front.
‘Market value of the property,’ says John.
‘Without a doubt,’ I reply.
We manage to get a second coffee before we’re sent to ‘a female held hostage’ in a Bondi apartment. Kidnapping’s not the kind of call we get that often, so it sparks our interest.
As we pull up at the address John’s phone pings with a message from Antonio. John starts texting furiously. ‘I’ll wait here,’ he says with agitation. ‘You handle the kidnapping.’
I leave him be and get out and squeeze past a couple of cop cars then walk up the narrow staircase of the unit block. Inside the apartment two constables are questioning a man in his thirties who’s sitting on the ground. I look around at the apartment, which is filthy and dank. There’s no furniture except for a dusty computer on the floor and piles of DVDs lying around. A fold-out plastic Christmas tree is on its side and most of the windows are boarded shut.
One of the constables approaches and says, ‘Bloke here met a girl from Prague on a dating site. Convinced her to live in Australia. Paid for her flight, picked her up from the airport, brought her here. But he wouldn’t let her go. She’s been locked in that room there for a month.’ The cop points to an adjacent bedroom. ‘In the end she cut her wrists and he freaked out when he saw the blood and called for help. That’s the lowdown, mate.’
In a corner of the bedroom I find the woman with lacerations and marks from being tied up. The wounds aren’t deep, but I dress them anyway. She speaks no English, and all I can do is gently guide her down the stairs and into the ambulance. Through tinted windows we watch the cops escort her kidnapper to a cage truck for his own taste of captivity. He’s pumped up, sweating, red in the face. There must have been a struggle after we left the room because gold tinsel from the guy’s two-dollar Christmas tree is entangled in his handcuffs and trails along behind him, twinkling in the midday sun. The police push him into their wagon, and one of the constables picks up the end of the tinsel and tosses it in behind him. The constable slams the door shut and we hear him say, ‘Merry fucking Christmas, dickhead!’
At St Vincent’s I eat a falafel roll in the ambulance and think about the kidnapping. Every case of
domestic violence I’ve encountered, every terrible story of romance gone wrong, makes me reflect on the relative harmony and stability of my relationship with Kaspia. Maybe we were fine all along, but simply didn’t see it. The good times were many. How could we forget? We’d journeyed through Indian deserts by motorbike, across Bulgarian mountains by car, into Moroccan villages by bus. We’d seen the world together, danced together, laughed together. Our lives were entwined in an epic story deserving of a happy ending. So what happened? Did we take each other for granted? Did we get bored when our world adventures ended and we settled back in Sydney?
I want to call her and say hi, see how she’s going. But then I notice John on his phone pacing around the ambulance bay, shaking his head and gesticulating, and I know he’s talking to Antonio. This is quite likely the way my conversation with Kaspia would go if I broke our no-call agreement, and I decide it’s not worth it.
When John finishes his call he gets back into the front passenger seat and I hand him a mini apple juice and hospital sandwich. He likes hospital sandwiches, which I can’t stomach. Though he nods in thanks, he’s too distracted to be hungry and puts my gift in the side door for later.
‘I’m moving out,’ he declares.
‘What?’
‘Antonio can stay in the house. I’m packing my things.’
‘Really?’
‘Well you moved out, didn’t you? Now it’s my turn.’
‘Where will you go?’
John sighs. ‘No idea. I might call Missionbeat.’ He lets out a short laugh without smiling at the idea of being collected by the city’s homeless van. But it’s not so silly. We’ve both met doctors, lawyers and corporate types living rough. Any of us could end up on the street. A personal tragedy, a few bad decisions or one bad job is all it would take.
‘My place is pretty small, a kind of studio, but the lounge is yours,’ I offer.
The Gap Page 4
