The Family Doctor

by Debra Oswald

  ‘At least there’s a chance Brody won’t turn out as useless as my three oldest kids. All of them in their thirties but they still blame me for their pathetic lives. Want nothing to do with me now, which suits me fine. Basket cases, the lot of them. Mind you, if my mentally challenged wife—my current wife, I mean—if that woman keeps treating Brody like a little wuss, then that kid’s just as likely to—’

  Paula jumped in to shut him up. ‘Because I need to take several samples, I’m going to use a butterfly catheter to make things easier.’

  ‘Oh right. Whatever.’

  Ferguson tucked his right arm, the one with the injured hand, against the wall and stuck out his left arm, stiff with apprehension.

  ‘Try to relax,’ suggested Paula.

  As she slipped the tourniquet around his upper arm, the touch of his skin under her fingers was disgusting to her. She tightened the tourniquet with slightly too sharp a tug and enjoyed hearing his nervous intake of breath. But apart from these petty satisfactions, she was amazed to find herself operating on autopilot again, searching for a good spongy vein to tap, calculating how to insert the needle without hurting the patient unnecessarily. Even if the patient in front of her was a violent, controlling, dangerous piece of shit.

  As Paula reached for the butterfly catheter, she couldn’t prise Rochelle out of her head. Ferguson might be here in the consulting room right now, but his wife was more truly her patient. And it was Paula’s responsibility to protect a vulnerable patient from likely harm. It was her responsibility to help Rochelle, to get her safely away from this man without increasing the risk to her or the little boy. By leaving Rochelle in danger, she was failing a patient. She just needed to think, talk to some cops, talk to social services. Even if she couldn’t see a safe escape route for that woman quite yet, there must be a way.

  ‘Your hands are shaking,’ Ferguson scoffed.

  His voice halted the tangle of thoughts in Paula’s head. She looked down and realised her hands were trembling as she held the catheter.

  ‘Not gonna stick that thing right through me, are ya?’ he asked, jokey but nervous too. ‘Do you even know what you’re doing, apart from all the bossy crap you bang on with?’

  The urge to punch him in the mouth was so overwhelming, she felt the electricity buzz down her arm.

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ she said firmly. ‘Many people find if they face away from the needle site, it’s more comfortable.’

  Ferguson twisted his torso round slightly and turned his head to face the wall beside the bed. Paula steadied herself, then inserted the needle in the plump vein in his forearm.

  ‘That part’s done,’ she said.

  ‘Hardly felt it,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re not so bad at this.’

  Paula had always allowed herself a bit of vanity about her needle technique—she could give injections with minimal pain and take blood skilfully from even the most decrepit elderly patient with crumbly veins.

  While Paula drew up blood into the vials, Ferguson kept rabbiting on. ‘Yeah, I’ll award you points for being good at that bit,’ he said. ‘I’m the kind of guy who respects someone who can do their job properly. I’m always having to remind clients how good I am at my job. You get some people—they go, “There’s no way you can pull off X result or fix Y problem or find Z person.” And I say, “Mate, watch and learn.” Fact is, I can track down any-fucking-body any-fucking-where they’re hiding. That’s why my business is successful.’

  He was boasting now, keen for Paula to be impressed by him.

  ‘People don’t realise how doable it is to track people. With the right know-how, that is,’ he crowed. ‘I employ a couple of scrawny kids who are across the digital stuff, backed up by the old-fashioned legwork involved in tracing an individual. I will find that individual eventually, even if they try very hard not to be found.’

  He grunted a laugh and Paula heard Rochelle’s voice in her head. He can find people—that’s what he does for a living, okay? He said he’d find me, then kill Brody in front of me.

  Paula gave in to the urge to dig a little. ‘Rochelle mentioned you have your own business, but I don’t think I really understood—’

  ‘Pfft, don’t waste brain cells listening to her blab on too much. She’s a fucking whiner, my wife. You’ve probably seen her fussing over that boy like—oh … And then, Jesus H. Christ, she whines at me!’

  ‘Oh well, I’m sure Rochelle has her own point of view about—’

  Even that tiny amount of pushback from Paula ignited Ferguson into more open belligerence.

  He shook his head. ‘She talks a lot of bullshit. Mind you, she understands she’s on a good wicket. She tried leaving me once, but I found her. We laid down a few ground rules after that.’

  ‘Ground rules? What sort of ground rules?’

  ‘Point is, I’m very clear with her. And if Rochelle ever tries to take my kid, I’ll find her, sort her out.’

  Paula knew she should leave him to keep talking, keep revealing himself, but she couldn’t bear to let that go unchallenged. ‘Sort her out? What do you mean?’

  Ferguson responded with a few breathy laughs, realising he’d revealed more aggression than he’d intended. ‘I’m joking.’

  His left hand, palm upwards on the exam bed, twitched a bit as he tried to control his temper. Paula pictured his hands encircling Rochelle’s slender neck, mashing her larynx, crushing the blood vessels to frayed threads, squeezing the oxygen out of her.

  Should Paula confront him? Call the police right now? They wouldn’t arrest the guy just for making menacing boasts about tracking down his wife. Paula had no proof. Rochelle would be too afraid to speak openly. And if Paula called in the authorities, Rochelle would be the one to cop it later. But to allow this man to speak like this and then walk out of the consulting room … The prospect was unbearable.

  ‘What’s the hold-up?’ asked Ferguson. ‘We all done?’

  ‘Give me a second. Lie still for me while I, uh …’

  Her body followed her usual practice, on automatic, reaching for a cotton ball and bandaid to cover the needle’s puncture site. On the shelf, she noticed two glass ampoules of adrenaline lying in one of the plastic storage tubs. They kept some in each consulting room for use in an emergency anaphylaxis situation.

  Paula pictured herself—as clear and precise as a training video—picking up the yellow ampoules one at a time. They would feel like glass bullets, cool and smooth in her palm. She would wrench the top off each one with a sharp yank of her wrist and draw the liquid up into a syringe. She would then turn around and inject the adrenaline into the catheter in Ferguson’s arm. Two one-millilitre doses would send him into extreme cardiac dysrhythmia and probably into full cardiac arrest, given his existing medical problems. The injection site would be explained by the catheter she was using to collect blood, and an autopsy would be unlikely to be incriminating. It could be done.

  Paula stood very still to listen to her own sensible voice in her head. The voice spoke slowly and calmly, leaning into the rhythm of the phrases to gain some control over her ragged breathing.

  Injecting the adrenaline into this man would be murder. A doctor couldn’t deliberately kill a patient like that. She was not that person. This was not her. This was grief. This was crazy thinking. If Rochelle was in danger, Paula could not hold herself responsible. Not to this degree. She was not a person who would murder a human being, however foul a human being, however dangerous he was.

  She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, stern with herself, then picked up the cotton ball and bandaid.

  Right at that moment, Ferguson started going off at the mouth again.

  ‘Will this take much longer? This is what I was meaning before—the way females make a fuss, trick you into talk-talk-talking about whatever shit they manufacture in their heads. Look, the point I was making, I’ve got certain skills and I’m … The point is, I’m not a gullible idiot. I’m never gonna let a woman make a fuck
ing fool of me again.’

  He made a hissing noise—a kind of sour laugh. Paula turned around in time to see him lift his bandaged right hand off the bed so he could inspect it.

  ‘You done a decent job? I need this hand. Does it still work?’

  He made a strangling gesture with his large meaty hand, bending his fingers to throttle an invisible creature.

  Before Paula had a chance to block them, she was slammed by rapid-cut images, like a movie trailer on fast-forward. The crackle of fear in Rochelle’s eyes. The gun in Matt’s hand. Stacey’s hair soaked in blood. Brody’s gaze darting back to his mother again and again, checking. Cameron’s anxious, burdened little face. Poppy curled up against the skirting board. Ferguson’s huge paw around Rochelle’s arm, fingers digging into her flesh like the teeth of an animal trap. The meat of Stacey’s neck where it was torn open. This man’s hand squeezing Rochelle’s throat, squeezing the life out of her.

  Then Paula was aware of her body operating on a different kind of automatic pilot. She’d rehearsed it in her mind already, so there seemed to be no decision-making at all as she followed each step of the process.

  She picked up the two ampoules, the glass bullets smooth in her hand, twisted off the tops and drew up the liquid into a syringe. As she moved closer to Ferguson, she didn’t dare speak, in case her voice betrayed her.

  ‘You going to get this finished now? Is this it?’ he asked, so all Paula had to do was make a small murmur of assent for him to stay lying there, still and vulnerable.

  She carefully inserted the needle of the syringe and pushed all the adrenaline through the catheter and into the man’s vein. She immediately took a step back, as if to step away from what she’d just done.

  Within seconds, Ferguson’s heart rate surged, accelerating, tachycardic. He gulped a breath sharply and wrenched his head around. He swung his torso upright and made eye contact with Paula—his expression surprised, panicky, pleading rather than accusing. But a moment later, he sank flat again, clutching at his chest as his heart was failing him.

  Paula slipped the empty glass ampoules and the syringe into the yellow plastic sharps bin. By now, Ferguson was in deep trouble, writhing, breathless, groaning on the examination bed.

  Paula forced herself to spin away, turn her back to him. She crossed her arms across her chest, holding one wrist down with the other in order to fight the deep-seated impulse to save a patient. Over and over, she reminded herself this action was being done to save Rochelle and her little boy. This was saving innocent lives from almost certain danger. To hold steady to this course, she conjured up the image of Rochelle and Brody huddled in the corner of the consulting room, while Ferguson thrashed on the bed.

  After a minute, maybe more, he flung his arm out, knocking a metal basin onto the floor with a loud clanging noise. Anyone in the practice might have heard that.

  Paula swung open the door of her consulting room.

  ‘Need some help here! Patient in cardiac arrest. Li-Kim, can you get the—’

  ‘I’ll grab the defib,’ said Li-Kim.

  ‘Jemma, ring the ambos.’

  By the time Li-Kim wheeled the practice defibrillator into the consulting room, Paula was making a show of doing CPR.

  The two doctors worked on Ferguson for five minutes, until the paramedics hurried into the surgery. Paula rattled off a quick handover: ‘Sixty-two-year-old man, had a fall during a dizzy spell, history of hypertension and cardiac disease, untreated.’

  Then Ferguson was rushed out the door on a gurney.

  Paula and Li-Kim flopped back against the doorframe, out of breath.

  ‘Do you reckon he’ll make it?’ asked Li-Kim. ‘Didn’t look good.’

  Paula only managed a vague noise in her throat.

  ‘You right, hon?’ asked Li-Kim, squeezing Paula’s shoulder.

  ‘Uh, yeah. Well … you know …’

  ‘Yeah, stuff like that always throws you off. Want me to ask Jemma to move the rest of your appointments?’

  ‘No, no. I’ll be fine.’

  Paula sat back at her desk and saw that Ferguson’s medical file was still open on the screen. She added a few notes.

  Came in with a minor hand injury after a dizzy spell led to a fall. Discussed the need to take prescribed hypertension medication and to follow up on cardiac tests previously ordered. Patient is reluctant to do so.

  She looked down at the keyboard to see her hands were still trembling. She had no idea if Ian Ferguson would survive.

  The smell of the half-eaten banh mi in the bin drifted up, suddenly overwhelming her. She lunged for the metal bowl that had fallen onto the floor and vomited into it, bringing up her stomach contents, then retching up bile, then dry-retching with painful spasms.

  Eventually her guts settled and she mopped at her mouth with tissues, shivering a little from the chill of the sweat on her face.

  EIGHT

  ANITA WAS UNCERTAIN OF THE ETIQUETTE SURROUNDING an encounter like the one she’d had with Rohan Mehta. It hadn’t been a date and didn’t fall comfortably into the one-night-stand category. It was sex between sort-of colleagues, but last night wasn’t the equivalent of fucking a fellow journalist. She’d never slept with a policeman before. And the backdrop, the context, or whatever you wanted to call it—the killing of three loved ones—threw standard guidelines out the window. There was no accepted practice here.

  She definitely should’ve handled things differently this morning: sat up in bed, said a decent goodbye to him, like civilised adults acknowledging a mutually satisfying but once-only event. By pretending to sleep and letting him leave, she’d allowed a murky gap to open up.

  Around midday, he texted her.

  Hi Anita. Thanks for last night. Rohan.

  She responded immediately.

  Well, thank you. Thanks for the lift home.

  Ridiculous—as if the transport had been the notable part of the evening. She wondered if her tone was too prim, given the fact that the two of them had ‘rubbed their pink bits together’ as Stacey had always liked to call it.

  A moment later, he sent another message.

  No worries. And thank you for the comfort food.

  She texted straight back.

  Thank you for the comfort.

  The second she hit send, she regretted it. Had she jumped awkwardly from polite to playfully suggestive? She didn’t want to give this very decent man the wrong impression, so she added a follow-up text: I’ll see you round the courts. Anita.

  She waited for a reply but the phone was silent in her hand. Which was to be expected. Her last text didn’t require any response from him and, arguably, her message had a closing-things-off crispness, punctuating the exchange with a clear implication that their interactions would be purely professional from now on.

  Then, after twenty minutes—had Rohan been considering how to respond or was he just busy with a work matter during those twenty minutes?—he replied: You will. All best, Rohan.

  Anita glanced at that text several times over the course of the afternoon. Did the wording suggest disappointment that she was shutting down intimacy? Or was the ‘You will’ a clue that he was hopeful things would spark up again when they saw each other? Then again, ‘All best’ was quite formal, like the sign-off to a business email. Or did his ‘All best’ indicate he was being self-protective, having realised she was parking him back into the ‘colleague’ slot? Or were all the words in his text soaked with relief, glad that Anita had re-established a cordial, professional distance and he was therefore free of obligation to her?

  ‘For fuck’s sake, stop now.’

  Anita uttered those words out loud as she walked across the newspaper office. She often berated herself aloud in order to wrangle useless ruminations into mature thoughts. Hearing her own voice come out strict and sensible was sometimes enough to shut down foolish thinking. And this adolescent fussing about Rohan Mehta was certainly foolish, as well as being horribly inappropriate, given the far more
important matters of the last twenty-four hours.

  She was hanging out to talk to Paula. They still hadn’t talked properly about the video on Matt’s phone. Anita needed to know how her friend was handling the news. They needed to share this moment in some way, carry the dark weight of it together.

  Once Paula recovered from the bout of vomiting, she cleaned her teeth at the sink in the consulting room then took a few minutes to steady herself before packing away the defibrillator and tidying up the paraphernalia that had been knocked onto the floor when Ian Ferguson thrashed and when Paula, Li-Kim and the paramedics worked on him. She kept the small window open and turned on the ceiling fan so the vomit smell could disperse a bit, before spraying a eucalyptus-scented disinfectant around the room.

  There was a temptation to ring the hospital and ask about Ferguson. Would she be glad to confirm he’d died? Or would it be a relief to discover he’d survived, so she wouldn’t have to confront the consequences of what she’d done? She didn’t know what to feel. This seemed so unreal, there was no way to align it with the regular structures of her mind.

  Eight more patients were on her appointment list and Paula made it clear to Jemma that she would see everyone, with apologies for running late.

  Through the afternoon, Paula listened, smiled, nodded, pulled perky faces at a baby, examined a skin lesion, offered advice about hormone replacement therapy, did a pap smear, vaccinated a toddler, filled out a workers compensation form, prescribed hypertension medication and referred patients to various specialists.

  During the months Remy was sick and then during the bleak stretch of time after he died, she had been determined not to impose her grief on patients or on people she encountered in a casual way. In the process, she had developed strong muscles for faking regular behaviour, functioning as a doctor, functioning as a human being, in a way that would appear entirely normal from the outside. It was the same in the weeks after Stacey and the children were killed. By now, Paula was match-fit for faking normal.

  Even when her last patient had gone, she remained in that ‘I’m a normal doctor’ mode, sitting at the computer in the consulting room to catch up with test results and emails.