by Debra Oswald
‘Oh yeah.’ Paula was uneasy, not wishing to tell any more lies than she had to. ‘I’m here to see a woman I’ve been worried about. I don’t need to rush off this second, though. Have you chosen a name yet?’
‘We talked about names ages ago, but now I’m thinking I like Ava. It means breath of life.’
‘That’s beautiful.’
Brooke pulled a goofy face. ‘Sorry, I’m blabbing on and you’re being so nice to me and I don’t even know your name. I’m Brooke.’
‘Paula.’
‘Well, thank you for being so nice.’
Then Brooke cooed to the baby, ‘Hello, baby Ava, I was spinning myself into a tizz until this lady turned up, wasn’t I?’
‘Will you have help when you go home?’ Paula heard her own voice coming out sounding normal, using the tone and wording she would use with any young new mother. There was nothing in Paula’s manner to indicate she had any particular agenda. ‘Have you got grandparents on hand?’
‘My parents’ve been amazing since everything went—’ Brooke stopped herself from finishing the sentence. ‘Mum and Dad want me to live with them.’
‘Oh terrific.’
Brooke’s breathing shivered with anxiety. ‘Nah, well, the baby’s dad wouldn’t like that.’ Then she pulled a grim face. ‘Not that he really wants the baby.’
‘Ah. Are you sure he doesn’t want her?’
‘Pretty sure.’ Brooke did a sharp impersonation of John Santino. ‘I don’t want that baby.’
‘I see. So does that mean he’ll—’
‘But he wouldn’t want to let us go either. I don’t know. Anyway …’ Brooke broke eye contact, sinking away from any connection with Paula.
Paula was tempted to fire out dozens of questions but she couldn’t risk pushing in a way that might make Brooke shut down.
The baby may have picked up the surge of stress through her mother’s body because she fell back from the nipple and started fussing and writhing. Brooke’s fragile confidence crumbled and she was on the edge of panic about how to help her whining baby.
‘I don’t know how to …’ she mumbled. ‘Could you, for a sec, could you … ?’
Paula picked up Ava from Brooke’s lap and held her high on her shoulder, letting the baby grumble and snuffle into her neck. Paula inhaled the smell—breastmilk sweetness mixed with the scent of the child’s delicate skin. Ava did a small burp and quickly settled.
Brooke hauled herself slowly to her feet and shuffled towards the bedside table. Meanwhile, Paula placed Ava on the koala blanket and swaddled her into a tight little parcel, the baby relaxing the way newborns often did when they were enveloped.
‘You’re good at that,’ Brooke observed. ‘Bet you’re good at gift wrapping.’
Paula smiled. ‘I always like it when my patients bring tiny babies into the surgery. It’s one of my favourite parts of the job.’
Paula wondered if she’d been too reticent a moment ago, if she’d missed her chance to coax the young woman into talking about her situation. Now Brooke seemed keen to change the subject, trying to sound light-hearted.
‘I feel a bit embarrassed about scoring this fancy private room,’ she said, as she poured herself another glass of water. ‘It’s only because I had a blood transfusion. Because I had a—um …’ She swirled her hand over her belly, searching for the word.
‘An abruption?’ Paula offered.
‘That’s the one. Turns out the trick is: bleed enough and you score a private room.’
‘Do they know what caused the abruption?’
‘Oh … I got—I landed against a table pretty hard. A couple of times—well, three times. Anyway, the doctor reckons I’ve recovered really well. And my baby wasn’t affected in the end and that’s all I really care about.’
Paula kept her mouth shut. She couldn’t appear too nosey. And she shouldn’t launch into a lecture on coercion and abuse.
As Paula gently lay baby Ava in the crib, Brooke eased herself back into bed, worn out by pain. But she smiled as she gazed at her daughter’s face through the side of the clear plastic crib.
‘I’m really glad I had a girl,’ she said. ‘Even if she’s got Johnny’s genes in her, there’s less chance she’ll turn out like him—because she’s a girl. If that makes sense.’
Paula decided to pick up on this chance. ‘Brooke, I don’t want to pry, but are you afraid of this man, the baby’s father? Did he hurt you?’
Brooke shrugged and her face crumpled into tears.
Paula plucked a couple of tissues from the box and handed them to her. ‘You shouldn’t have to be hurt or afraid. No one should. There are people who can help you. The police can help you take out an AVO, for one thing.’
Brooke shook her head. ‘Johnny would hate that. It’d rile him up even more. He’s got money and lawyers and he’d fight it. The thing is, sometimes Johnny says he doesn’t want the baby, but other times he makes a lot of fuss about how we all have to be together and he won’t—I mean, I think he’ll settle down in the end and I’m hoping it’ll be okay. Hopefully he’ll love her when he sees her. I hope so.’
So much hoping. Paula wasn’t convinced hoping was going to be enough to keep this young woman safe. But there was no point pushing her or bombarding her with information about John Santino. Brooke was essentially open-eyed about the man with whom she was entangled. Her survival tactic, for now, was to yield power, to endure and to hope. She couldn’t envisage any other safe path.
‘Hey, look,’ said Paula. ‘Ava is fast asleep, sucking her thumb. Very happy.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Brooke, managing a wan smile. ‘That’s how she got her little milk blister.’
‘You need a nap too. First bit of advice I give all my patients when they’re new mothers: you sleep when the baby sleeps.
Forget all the jobs around the house, forget all your worries and have a snooze.’
Brooke laughed and did a little mock salute. ‘Whatever you say, doctor.’ Then she flopped back against the pillows, looking so vulnerable and too young to have this many burdens.
‘Second bit of advice: call your mum and dad,’ Paula added softly. ‘Ask them to help you. Anyway, I’ll disappear now and let you sleep.’
‘Thank you, um … I’ve forgotten your name, sorry. Thank you.’
Brooke’s eyelids were already fluttering closed, so Paula was able to slip out of the room without any fuss.
SEVENTEEN
THE FOLLOWING DAY, PAULA RETRIEVED JUDY’S BOTTLE OF unused Dilaudid from the locked cupboard in the consulting room, cocooned it in bubble wrap, wedged it in her handbag and took it home. She wasn’t sure she would use it. She wasn’t sure she would do anything at all.
Her thinking was vacillating constantly. After Ian Ferguson, she had vowed she would never do anything like that again. But she couldn’t ignore the fact that Brooke Lester was in real danger from a man who had assaulted women and murdered his previous girlfriend when she tried to leave him. That man had almost killed Brooke and their unborn child, and he would almost certainly not allow the young mother and baby to slide out of his control. There was no guarantee the authorities could protect her, especially if fear kept her silent.
Two ideas were suspended in Paula’s head simultaneously:
It would be wrong to use her knowledge of the situation and her skills to intervene.
It would be wrong, given her knowledge of the danger this woman faced, not to use her skills to intervene.
Near the medical practice, there was a hair salon Paula went to occasionally to have her split ends trimmed. She avoided that place and walked into a salon where no one knew her. On this Friday afternoon, there were several women having foils done or big-night-out hairdos. Was there any chance they could dye her hair blonde right now, even though she didn’t have an appointment?
The hairdresser was intrigued by the impulsiveness of Paula’s request and, as he smeared her long wavy brown hair with the eye-watering chemicals, he asked
a few tentative questions. Paula just smiled enigmatically.
She felt the peroxide tingle and sting as it cooked on her scalp. She had considered using a blonde wig instead, but whenever she’d seen her patients wearing wigs while undergoing chemotherapy it always looked so fake. Any hint of fakery would arouse suspicion. She couldn’t risk it. Still, going blonde was a big call. She mentally drafted an explanation she could offer Li-Kim when she arrived at work on Monday morning, leaning on the notion of seeking the boost from a radical change in look.
Paula went home from the hair salon with the stink of the dye chemicals wafting around her head like her own personal toxic cloud. She ate dinner and watched some TV, as if this were any normal Friday night. At nine p.m., she held her head under the shower, then draped a towel across her shoulders and dug out Stacey’s old hairdryer from the bathroom cabinet.
Paula had never been much good at doing anything with her hair beyond pinning it up or back, so she watched a YouTube tutorial on how to blow-dry wavy hair straight. Copying the video, she aimed the blast of hot air from the dryer as she rolled the brush through each section until she ended up with more or less straight hair. She was surprised how much further her hair fell down her back once the kinks and waves had been smoothed out.
She gazed at her reflection in the mirror. The straight blonde hair was an alien sight, like a ridiculous wig for a fancy-dress costume. Which in a way it was. She reasoned that John Santino would be more likely to chat to her if she turned up looking a certain way, and straight blonde hair was one component of the look. She was a good ten or fifteen years older than the women he was usually attracted to but hopefully that wouldn’t matter—she wasn’t trying to seduce the guy, just hook his attention long enough to start a conversation.
She dug out a pair of stiletto shoes she hadn’t worn for years and found a tight, low-cut top that fitted the look. She didn’t own anything like the pencil skirts Santino favoured, so she had gone out and purchased one in her lunchbreak.
With the outfit on and the long straight blonde hair loose around her shoulders, Paula resembled one of those lookalike mannequins police set up on street corners to jog the memories of passers-by, to help an investigation. Dr Kaczmarek was now a mannequin of Kendra Bartlett and Brooke Lester. But she wasn’t trying to solve a crime. She was contemplating committing a crime in order to prevent one.
She took an Uber to a busy corner in Surry Hills, and from there she walked the four blocks to Protozoa. It was too chilly a night for a short skirt and pantyhose, and she’d forgotten how uncomfortable very high heels could be, pitching her pelvis forward, pushing too much weight onto the balls of her feet and chafing the skin into blisters within minutes. There was an additional degree of difficulty walking in the pencil skirt, which only allowed for small, restricted steps.
According to the information Rohan had given Anita, Protozoa was where John Santino had been hanging out since his acquittal. Because it was unconnected to his own businesses, the place afforded him some anonymity.
As Paula walked down the stairs from the street and into the basement bar, she reminded herself that this was only a reccy, or possibly a practice run for something she might eventually decide not to do at all. She could pull out of this trajectory at any moment.
Protozoa was a dark rabbit warren, with a few tables near the bar and booths tucked along the walls. Business appeared slow at ten-thirty on a Friday night. It was one of those places that had so little trade, you could only assume it was a front for illegal transactions. The dim lighting went some way to concealing the disgusting interior, but the fuggy smell—a soup of beer, cheap cola syrup in the mixed drinks and body odour—was hard to disguise. Every surface was slightly sticky and Paula’s shoes made a wet thock sound with every step she took on the tacky floor.
The music coming through the sound system was an incongruous playlist of old rock anthems, poppy dance tracks and sentimental ballads. It covered over the fact that there wasn’t much in the way of sparkling conversation happening in the place. Once Paula’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, she noticed there were several patrons drinking alone, scrolling through their phones. Even the half-dozen people sitting in pairs were sucking on their drinks in morose silence or engaged in sporadic, awkward dialogue.
Protozoa was a gobsmackingly sad establishment. Presumably the owners had fancied the sound of the word when they chose it as the name without investigating the meaning. In fact, ‘a single cell parasitic microbe’ accurately captured the microscopic life breeding on the fixtures and furniture inside.
Paula felt self-conscious as she walked between the tables. Luckily, the new hair, shoes and clothes helped—a costume to play the role of someone who would feel confident about strolling into a bar like this alone.
She made a show of scanning the place, as if looking for someone she knew, before she fronted up to the bar. She ordered a bottled beer, on the basis that a sealed commercial product was the thing least likely to be contaminated by the E. coli which clung to every surface.
Taking the beer to one of the small round tables, she took off her warm jacket and sat down, crossing her legs in the braided, vampy way which was the only possible position in such a tight skirt. She tugged her top a bit higher on her shoulders, self-conscious about the two centimetres of cleavage.
Her phone was a handy prop—checking messages was a way to keep up the performance that she was waiting for someone who was late. Even so, she was conspicuous. Within ten minutes a guy sidled over and stood a metre away until she eventually looked up. He was only in his late forties, but already alcoholism had mottled his face with enlarged blood vessels and his abdomen, tight with ascites fluid, was stretching the front of his T-shirt. He stood there smiling at Paula. Was it a come-on smile? Too hard to decipher in the low lighting.
Finally, he said, ‘Hi there. Are you, uh …’ The guy didn’t even have enough confidence to finish whatever pick-up line he’d planned to use.
Paula jumped in quickly. ‘I’m waiting for my boyfriend.’
He showed her the palm of his hand to indicate he would leave her alone, then he sauntered over to the bar, as if that had been his destination all along.
Paula felt a swell of pity for the man. What a miserable, exposing business mating rituals could be. She glanced around the room and wondered if the solitary individuals were waiting here for their dating app prospects and if the awkward couples had arranged to meet via a dating site but things weren’t going well. Paula knew the basics of the current dating world, thanks to her patients’ stories and the media, plus Anita’s vivid tales of misadventure, but it was all so far from Paula’s own experience, she felt like a naive observer from another era. Early on, she’d had two proper boyfriends—one at school and one in her first year at university—but soon after that, she and Remy became a couple, when they were both only twenty. Which meant Paula had never had to deal with the shuddering vulnerability of the whole dating palaver.
She made the beer last for twenty minutes, then headed to the ladies so she could survey other corners of the bar on the way there and back. She couldn’t see Santino anywhere.
She bought a second beer, read a few articles on her phone, scanning the tables and booths every now and then, as if looking for someone she knew. After another fifteen minutes with no sign of Santino, she gave up and walked out into the street.
Maybe he’d stopped coming to this bar. Maybe this whole idea was a stupid mistake.
The following night, she went back to Protozoa. She wore the same outfit but with a different top so her return appearance might be less obvious. This time she chose a corner booth which offered a good view of most areas of the bar. She held her phone to her ear, nodding and murmuring as if in the middle of a call, while she discreetly scanned the faces of the patrons.
When her gaze swept past the fire exit, she spotted him. John Santino. Sitting on his own in one of the booths. Wearing jeans and a polo shirt rather than the suits he’d worn in
the TV footage, but it was definitely him.
Paula felt the whoosh of adrenaline through her chest, making her skin prickle, but it was hard to interpret her fight-or-flight response. Was it an aggressive urge to attack this predator? Was it a fear response—the instinct to flee a dangerous man? Or was it panic about her own potential actions? The function of her sympathetic nervous system was too primitive to offer much high-level interpretation. Whatever was going on, she wanted to override instinct and take control of the process.
Santino was drinking a neat brown spirit, maybe bourbon, as he flicked at the screen of his phone. After a few minutes, she observed him conducting a phone conversation with someone who was clearly annoying him. After the call, he was huffing, petulant, and he threw his energy into irritable texting, stabbing at his phone with his index finger.
Paula slid along the booth seat, planning to walk to the bar so she would be in Santino’s field of vision, but as she got to her feet, Santino received another text, shoved the phone in his pocket and stalked out of Protozoa at speed.
All through that weekend, Paula kept herself in home detention and barely went outside in the daylight. That way she could avoid questions about her newly blonde hair and steer clear of any regular chat that would throw her off course. She watched a lot of television and ate a lot of toast.
On her third night at Protozoa, Paula was worried the barman might recognise her as the woman who’d been there alone the previous two nights. Maybe he’d assume she was a sex worker touting for business. Then again, that might not be considered a problem at a joint like this. In any case, when she walked down the stairs she clocked a different guy behind the bar, so there was no problem anyway.
She ordered a bourbon and ice. It was Sunday, so the place was almost empty, and she had her choice of spots to sit. She followed her usual routine, feigning busyness with texts and murmured phone calls. There was no sign of Santino and she figured coming here on a quiet night was probably a waste of time.