I change the subject. ‘What does your inner voice think about a drink at the Bondi Hotel?’
‘My inner voice says Dancing with the Stars.’ It’s his favourite show on TV.
As much as I want to help John, some lines I can’t cross. Only after he backs out of the plant room and drives into the night do I think I could’ve made an exception and joined him for Dancing with the Stars. Maybe I’d even enjoy it. Could it be any worse than going home alone? But it’s too late; he’s already left.
CHAPTER 10
At dawn the next day there’s not a cloud on the horizon over Bondi Beach and the sea is glassy, almost flat. Coming down the hill from the south, I can make out just a few infant waves lapping at the morning sand. Some desperate surfers might try to ride those later: tourists mainly, learners.
When I pull in to the station behind John’s car I see Jerry in the plant room waiting for us. He’s coming off a night shift, standing there moving back and forth on his feet like he needs to take a leak.
‘Check this out,’ he says with amusement, holding up a newspaper for John and me to see. It’s the latest issue of SX News, the free gay and lesbian rag available across East Sydney. ‘You’re famous.’
On page three of the newspaper is an article on drug use in gay saunas, penned by the German manager of Ken’s of Kensington. The man begins his tirade against the prevalence of amphetamines, amyl nitrate and GHB by recounting the story of the patient John and I revived on the transparent floor of his establishment two weeks earlier. And there, about halfway through the article, he writes of his gratitude that the ambulance service dispatched ‘two brilliant gay boys’ to his sauna.
John’s face lights up with a grin, and my stunned expression sends Jerry into a fit of giggles. ‘Two brilliant gay boys! Did you read it? Fantastic!’ He slaps me on the back. ‘How long you been a brilliant gay boy for, mate?’ No doubt Jerry thinks he’s got me. But it isn’t the first time as a well-groomed, well-spoken man with theatrical flair that I’ve been mistaken for a homosexual. And it doesn’t, and shouldn’t, offend me in the slightest.
The article has certainly brought some morning fun to the station. Even John seems cheery.
As office workers head into town, crawling along in peak-hour traffic, we edge our way around them and against the oncoming cars, our siren wailing. A man in Glebe is having chest pains and all the Redfern ambulances are occupied. We’re the closest available resource.
Turns out the patient, Edward, is a qualified hypnotherapist who says he was an ambo at Bondi back in the early 1970s. We treat him for a heart complaint and take him to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, in the inner west suburb of Camperdown. On our way there he tells us how he went straight from military service in Vietnam to ambulance service in Sydney. Edward recalls that the rate of road trauma in an era of non-existent seatbelt and drink-driving laws was high and that, tortured by nightmares of Vietnam, he found it difficult to contend with the blood and guts of ambulance work. It was common at the time for officers to respond to calls on their own, and he went to shootings, fatal crashes and, like us, suicides at The Gap. Even the career of actress and singer Marlene Dietrich came to a halt in his ambulance one night when she hit the bottle a little too hard before her show and toppled off the Opera House stage. According to Edward, Dietrich badly fractured her hip, ending up at St Vincent’s with an injury she never recovered from.
Back then the ambulance service was a conservative, military-style outfit; ambos wore ties and peaked caps and marched in parades. Edward’s superiors took exception to his long hair and earrings and rainbow beads. After finding out about his daily marijuana habit they told him he was no longer fit for duty. Edward had already decided to resign, anyway. There were enough ghosts chasing him from his army days and he didn’t need more.
Soon after leaving the ambulance service, Edward lost his apartment and began to live rough under the Andrew ‘Boy’ Charlton Pool near the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He stayed there for eighteen months, before a man who regularly swam at the pool saw him one day and picked him up by the collar. The man dragged Edward to hospital for help. The good Samaritan left his details, and when Edward cleaned himself up he contacted the man to offer his thanks. Before long the two of them fell in love.
‘So you’re still with this guy?’ asks John.
‘Been with him ever since. Never looked back.’
John grunts, and his grunt sounds cynical to me. If he wasn’t in uniform he might’ve said, ‘Enjoy it while it lasts.’ Love is a dirty word for John right now. To him, no fairytale about a man transformed by love could possibly end well.
There’s been many a short career in ambulance work. Some leave because of bad backs from carrying patients down stairs or dragging them out of crashed cars. Others, like Edward, have been rocked by post-traumatic stress. Nowadays paramedics are as likely to resign from the boredom and banality of the calls: the UTIs and common colds we’re presented with, and the social work that makes up much of our day.
Outside a cubicle in the emergency department of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, I bump into a guy I used to go to high school with. His name is Hugh, and his thick eyebrows and long face remain unchanged. He was the biggest and meanest bully in my year and I was one of his prime targets. He also thought I was gay, and no amount of protest convinced him otherwise. Like those nightclub bouncers who assault punters in CCTV blind spots, Hugh never missed a chance to hit me when the teachers weren’t looking.
Seeing him in that hospital bed, I don’t shrink in fear or turn on my heels as I once might have done. Seventeen years after graduation I’m far from the awkward, timid teenager I used to be. Within a year of joining the ambulance service I was out of my shell and presiding over life-and-death situations, bringing order to chaos with command and control. I had a uniform and respected skills. I’d never take bullshit from a bully again.
This time it’s Hugh who shrinks from me. As I approach him he sees my uniform, and I can tell he’s recognised me. His eyes widen in fright, as if anticipating a vicious revenge, but I just feel sorry for him. He looks so helpless in that cubicle, so vulnerable in his backless hospital gown. I approach him with a friendly smile.
‘Hugh!’ I shake his hand. ‘What’re you doing here?’
He looks around nervously, checking that no one has seen or heard us speak.
‘Took an overdose,’ he tells me in a hushed voice, almost a whisper.
‘What of?’
‘Antidepressants.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, mate,’ I say.
‘Listen,’ Hugh says with a face creased in worry, ‘don’t tell anyone, okay? Please. I don’t want anyone to know about this. Promise me?’
I reassure him that I don’t keep in touch with many of the ‘old boys’, and I wouldn’t tell them anyway. Hugh might once have ruled the playground, inflicting insults and violence on other kids, but even then, when he towered over me with his fists raised, surrounded by his accomplices, I could see right through him. He was chronically insecure, and when I look into his eyes now there’s fear, just like the fear I once felt in his shadow.
Before leaving the hospital I say goodbye to Edward, and he gives me his contact details. You never know when a trusty hypnotherapist might come in handy, he tells me. Edward says he’ll write the ambulance service a letter of appreciation about us. He knows thank-you letters are attached to our files, help keep us in the good books.
Back at the ambulance I tell John about running into Hugh, the ex-bully. John tells me he had a similar experience last year on a job in Kings Cross, when he found his former head prefect overdosed on heroin in a squat. Funny how things turn out, he says.
Uncannily, our controller dispatches us to Potts Point minutes later to treat an unconscious male, a suspected drug overdose. We arrive at a narrow lane, a dead end, with less than a foot of room on either side. I reverse the wagon down it in case we need a quick getaway if things turn bad. John knows what
I’m doing and why. After our last fortnight of volatile patients and relatives we can’t be too careful.
At the end of the alley a man in a dirty tracksuit is standing over a body. The scene is a textbook heroin overdose, with the patient hardly breathing and his pupils so small we call them ‘pinned’. At least he isn’t in cardiac arrest like the pie-eater’s flatmate. John moves the guy on his side and runs some oxygen through a bag and mask. We give him Narcan and wait for him to wake. Used condoms, wet tissues, bloody syringes and vomit are scattered around us. This is our workplace.
‘Quite the popular alleyway,’ John comments.
No wonder the disgruntled residents of a townhouse backing onto this spot have spray-painted FUCK OFF, JUNKIES on their garden wall. Though it’s hardly been a deterrent.
John’s only halfway through one of his favourite hospital sandwiches when we’re sent to the Housing Commission’s most notorious high-rise blocks, on Belvoir Street, Surry Hills. People call them ‘suicide towers’ given how many people plunge to their deaths from the balconies.
Our patient’s name is Hope, an African immigrant on the sixteenth floor. She cries and touches a bruise round her left eye. There’s a wound on her head and clumps of her plaited hair lie on the carpet. Her boyfriend has beaten her up again, she tells us. He made some threats too, about sending a mob to kill her family back in Sudan. Hope sobs loudly and then, with lightning speed, she jumps onto the kitchen bench, slides open the window and tries to throw herself out.
John’s impressively quick. He lunges for Hope’s leg and grabs her ankle as her weight shifts, just in time. John wrenches her back into the room and the two of them fall onto the floor in a heap.
‘That’s it, Hope, you’re coming with us,’ he snaps.
We drop her off at RPA and, when we return to the ambulance, I commend my partner for his reflexes.
‘Ironic, isn’t it,’ he says. ‘Her name. She’ll be discharged and back there tomorrow, you wait.’
Or maybe not. People do get out of their suicidal thinking with intervention – some of them, at least, the ones without a serious mental illness. And even the latter can be helped. Suicide is preventable, people’s lives can turn around. Problem is, as paramedics, we rarely see the follow-ups, the positive results, the transformations. We just talk them down and drop them off and go to the next one. When I make this point to John he says, ‘Revolving door, that’s what it is. Revolves until they achieve their aim.’
‘It doesn’t revolve forever,’ I say. ‘People get better. Life’s like that. Hills and valleys.’
John’s annoyed. ‘Hills and valleys? Some fucking valleys never become hills again. You thought about that? Some valleys go on and on, far as the eye can see. Desolate plane.’
A few hours later we head to St Vincent’s with a patient suffering flu. She requested a lift because ‘people on benefits can’t afford taxis’. We don’t argue. John could do with a dose of his fun-loving nurse mates in Emergency, anyway. The hospital is a social club for doctors, nurses and paramedics as much as it is a place for the sick and injured. Standing around our stretchers we gossip like hairdressers, occasionally forgetting our patients can hear every word.
‘Nice earrings,’ John compliments Suzy, the triage nurse.
John and Suzy are long-time friends. She gives him a hug, tells him not to worry about Antonio, things might still work out, they often do. John chokes up a bit so Suzy takes him by the arm and out into the ambulance bay for a heart-to-heart. She’s good at those. These nurses owe him one. It’s usually John who’s counselling them about their love lives. Straight women seeking a gay man’s advice on romance might be hard to understand, but many seem to want it. Only men can truly know the secrets of pleasing men, John once explained to me. And he’s been pretty good at keeping a man too. Until now.
John and I pick up a forty-year-old woman with abdominal pain. Her name is Karen and we think she’s got pancreatitis; we’re not sure. Whatever the cause, she describes her pain as severe but flatly refuses our offer of morphine. I give her an alternative, methoxyflurane, and she happily inhales it until she’s pain-free and rather high. Methoxyflurane is a central-nervous-system depressant better known to the public as the ‘green whistle’. It has a few side effects, but those that aren’t mentioned in the literature are loquaciousness, feelings of sexual desire and properties that have led us to call it a ‘truth serum’. Once peak levels are reached, secrets of all kinds gush forth unhindered by fear or shame, often in the presence of people from whom these secrets have long been kept.
Karen’s anxious husband is riding up the front with John when she drops the bomb.
From the back of the ambulance she calls out, ‘Graeme? Graeme! Guess what? I know you’ve been having an affair with Alice. I’ve known for ages. You can’t hide it anymore.’
There’s a deathly silence.
Graeme turns around and I see his face has lost all colour. ‘What? What did you say?’
Karen sucks on the green whistle again like she’s puffing on a Cuban cigar. ‘I said, I know you’ve been fucking Alice. And, let me tell you, since I found out about that, I’ve been fucking Roger.’
‘Roger?’ Her husband sounds alarmed. ‘Roger Roger?’
‘Roger Roger,’ confirms Karen.
It’s never been so awkward in our ambulance. Neither John nor I dare interrupt their conversation, although John briefly turns to glance at me with a look of amusement.
Before I’m able to stop her going on, Karen says to me, ‘Don’t get me wrong. I do love my husband. See him up front? See how sexy he is? See his sexy profile? You know what my special name for him is? Donkey Cock. That’s what I call him, yes I do. Donkey Cock. And it’s so true! I’m telling you, the thing is just enormous.’
Graeme cranes around to look at us again. He’s been listening to everything. It’s a nightmare for him, this ambulance ride, this red-and-white confessional on wheels. Distracted, John swerves to miss a car and slams his hand on the horn.
‘Graeme? Can you hear me?’ shouts Karen between tokes on the whistle. ‘I know all about it, Graeme! You think I don’t know, but I know. I know what you’ve been up to with Alice. But I only did it once with Roger, last year. Truth is, I love you, baby. It’s you I love, Graeme! I don’t love Roger at all. Can you hear me? Donkey Cock?’
Graeme is presumably too shocked to answer. Only the sound of our ambulance rattling over the bumpy lane on Oxford Street can be heard. John does the most sensible thing and switches on the stereo. He turns it up full volume. It’s Elton John singing ‘Tiny Dancer’. By the time we pull up at the hospital, Graeme looks like he needs a green whistle himself, while Karen is happily hollering the lyrics at the top of her lungs.
In the afternoon, the body of a woman is found washed up on a small nudist beach at Lady Bay. One might expect the naked sunbathers would pack up their summer picnics and go home at the sight of a white corpse lolling in the shallows. But the dead woman deters no one.
The cops reckon she’s another ‘gappie’ – their term for a jumper from The Gap – and her body, now bloated, is tossed against the rocks by innocent waves. After falling off the cliff on the other side of the headland several days ago she must have been washed into the harbour.
‘They’re going over three a week,’ says John to the cops.
‘Bad year for it, eh. Bad year,’ says a senior sergeant, wiping sweat from his brow.
December is ordinarily the busiest month for suicides. Some of us attribute this spike to lonely people having the communal festivities rubbed in their faces. Other experts blame the sunlight, a counterintuitive explanation given what we assume about seasonal moods: for me, winter is miserable and summer lifts my spirits. But despite Greenland having the highest suicide rates globally, statistics show that Northern Hemisphere suicides peak in June and Southern Hemisphere suicides in December. The theory is that increased hours of sunshine boost the energy and motivation required to go through with
the act.
John and I watch from a low cliff above the beach as tanned men flex their muscles and parade their penises. Lying on a tartan blanket less than twenty metres from the dead body are two nude men clinking champagne glasses and laughing loudly. Further up, an old man slips into the water and begins an elegant breaststroke. None of them has noticed the floating cadaver at the end of the beach.
The Rose Bay police inspector appears through some bushes with a laminated map and clipboard, patting down his hair and waving a fly from his face. The inspector’s phone rings and he walks off to have a conversation. Half a minute later the Police Rescue boys arrive wearing Santa hats. They rig up their abseiling gear and take off their utility belts, resting them on a boulder.
One of the rescue guys asks us to keep an eye on their guns. Then they abseil over the edge.
John looks at the weapons lying there, then across at me. I’m not quite sure what he’s thinking, but judging by the mischievous twinkle in his eye he’s probably imagining we could grab the guns and rob a bank. But the police inspector finishes his call and is already making his way back.
A geriatric birdwatcher, wearing a khaki safari suit drenched in sweat, stumbles out of the scrub. He apologises profusely, then asks if any of us has spotted a yellow-faced honeyeater in the area. We shake our heads and he disappears into the bushes again. Shortly afterwards we see a fully laden pleasure craft belonging to Captain Cook Cruises heading towards our escarpment, before suddenly veering away. The captain must have noticed the unpleasant view he was about to expose his Christmas party revellers to. Then, on the other side of the beach, we spy a press photographer clambering along a rock ledge nursing a giant telescopic lens.
‘It’s all happening here at Lady Bay,’ says John.
The police inspector grunts. ‘Guess I should speak to that guy,’ he says of the photographer. The press usually avoids suicide stories, as some can encourage copycat trends. ‘The paper won’t publish a picture of this anyway,’ says the inspector.
The Gap Page 11
