by Kylie Ladd
He waited until Richo had finished with the foam, coating the petrol that had spread over the road, hopefully rendering it inflammable, then crouched down again by the shattered driver’s window of the more damaged car. When they arrived a few minutes ago, the young woman inside it had been screaming, but she was only moaning softly now. Matt glanced through the broken glass. The whole steering column was in her lap; the dashboard had been bulldozed almost to her seat. Two broken lower legs for sure, quite possibly the femurs too, and a crushed pelvis. He flinched even though he’d seen it all before.
‘Hey,’ he said, reaching through the warped metal to touch the woman’s shoulder. Her eyes flew open, the dark brown irises almost swallowed up by enormous black pupils. ‘Hey,’ he said again, ‘we’re going to get you out. What’s your name?’
‘Dahra,’ she whispered. Her carotid pulse was erratic beneath his fingers.
‘Well, Dahra, I need you to hold on. Can you do that? The ambulance will be here soon. They’ll give you something for the pain. We’ll cut you out and get you to hospital, OK?’
The woman’s eyes closed again. She was slipping away. ‘My son,’ she murmured.
‘Son?’ Matt asked.
‘Ravi. In the back,’ she whispered with an effort.
Matt peered behind her, but it was impossible to see anything in the crumpled interior. ‘Hang on,’ he said, racing around to the other side of the car. Sure enough, just visible behind the front passenger seat was the lip of a baby capsule. He tried the door, but it was too buckled to open. Behind him, Yann was running out the hoses. Richo must be at the truck, radioing details or readying the Jaws of Life. Matt thought of screaming for the axe, but if Richo had his hands full it might take too long. He stepped back, raised one boot, and kicked it through the rear window. The silver shards sparkled for a moment like snowflakes, then tinkled to the bitumen. To his great relief, Matt could hear a child crying.
By the time Matt finally untangled him from his harness, the boy was screaming. He’d had to use the pliers he always carried on him to sever the twisted webbing, and the blades had left a small scratch on the child’s forearm. Baby, not child, Matt thought as he eased him through the window, and a new one at that—probably only four or five weeks old.
‘I’ve got him,’ he called to Dahra, but there was no response. Matt hurried back to her side of the vehicle, the boy crying lustily in his arms. That was a good sign. Silence was far worse. Despite everything, it seemed the capsule had done its job. Dahra was paler than when he’d left her, her head now slumped to one side. ‘Dahra,’ he shouted. ‘Dahra, wake up! I’ve got Ravi. He’s fine.’
The woman shuddered and groaned slightly.
‘Come on,’ Matt screamed. ‘Wake up!’ Where the hell were the ambos? He reached into the car and shook her slightly. Dahra’s eyes finally opened and she held his gaze.
‘I’ve got Ravi,’ Matt repeated, annunciating each syllable, trying to tunnel his way to her through the pain, ‘but you have to stay awake. Don’t go to sleep. Ravi needs you. How old is he?’
‘Three weeks,’ she said slowly. The last letters hissed. Was her airway collapsing? Too hard to tell—there was no room to examine her, especially while he was holding the baby.
‘He’s big for three weeks. I’d guessed older. Bet he was tough to get out.’ Matt prattled on, throwing her a lifeline made of words. If she slipped away now she might not come back. ‘He’s OK, you know. The capsule was all bent out of shape, but he was snug as a bug inside it. Just a bit grumpy to be woken up.’ Reflexively, his grip tightened on the child, remembering the fear he’d felt as he’d eased him from the car. Was Ravi whole? Broken? Drenched in blood or pierced by debris? For all his years with the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, Matt still struggled with the gore that sometimes went with the job. Maybe everyone did. It wasn’t something they talked about. The skull caved in, grey matter splashed across a windscreen; the men (and it was always men) who’d noosed themselves and not been discovered for a day or two, their necks eerily elongated by the time they were found; the intestines steaming like hot sausages, bulging from a stomach wound. You put it behind you, but none of that stuff ever went away. You swallowed it, you went for a run, you had a shower, then you did your next shift. And it was ten times worse when it was kids. Was that because he had some of his own? Matt couldn’t say. Dan and Charlie were so much a part of him that he couldn’t recall his life before them. All he knew was that if he closed his eyes he could still see every dead child he had ever had to deal with, every battered or blackened body, every chubby hand gone limp. Thank God little Ravi seemed alright.
Richo materialised beside him with the Jaws of Life. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I had to help Yann with the lines. There’s an ambulance on its way. Should be here any sec.’ He shook his head. ‘There’s friggin’ people everywhere, except the ones we need.’
Matt didn’t look away from the woman in the car. ‘Dahra, this is Richard. He’s going to cut you out.’ Was it just his imagination, or did she nod slightly? She had seen her boy now, was gazing at him hungrily. At the corner of his vision, cars slowed; pedestrians jostled one another to stare. Matt couldn’t understand it. They’d soon lose their appetite for carnage if they were the ones who had to pick up the pieces.
Richo knelt down beside the damaged car, foam soaking his overalls.
‘Do you want to check on Yann? I’ve got this now.’
‘Nah,’ Matt said. Yann was only in his first year of the job, but he knew what he was doing. ‘You won’t take long. I reckon Dahra wants to keep her eyes on Ravi, don’t you?’ He shuffled in closer so she could see her child in his arms. If she survived this it would be Ravi who’d got her out. He’d be the same, Matt thought. As long as his kids were OK he could probably withstand just about anything. The moment Dan had been born he had felt his life shift. There had been complications with the delivery and Rachael had had to have an emergency C-section. He remembered almost jogging behind his wife as she was wheeled into theatre, half-crazed with panic at what she was going through, and then Dan had been yanked out of her, grey and with the cord looped twice around his neck, and he hadn’t thought about her again for another half an hour. Not while he stood helplessly by while the cord was severed and Dan was suctioned, not while the burly obstetrician applied compressions with two thick fingers, not even when Dan had pinked up and was handed to him, still doused in blood and amniotic fluid, to hold. Rachael had had to call out from the other side of the room to ask him what they’d even had—a boy or a girl? Boy, he’d replied, without looking over.
It was strange, he’d thought later. He loved Rachael passionately—had loved her pretty much from the moment he’d first laid eyes on her, shivering and barely covered by a pale pink nightie outside a block of flats one Melbourne dawn. Her flat wasn’t the one on fire, but everyone in the building had been evacuated. Maybe it was because he’d draped his coat around her shoulders; maybe it was because back then she’d still been young enough to think that firefighters were hot, that they spent their days cavorting topless in calendars and rescuing people, not mired in admin and grumpy from shift work; but when she dropped in to the station to return Matt’s coat she had asked him out. That was Rachael all over. If she saw something she wanted, she went straight after it. He’d been astonished that that something was him, and had asked her to marry him only five months later before she had a chance to change her mind. Matt had never changed his: Rachael was gorgeous and smart, her body fitted neatly into his when they walked side by side or danced or lay down together. Despite all that, when Dan and Charlie came along, she’d been demoted.
Maybe he had been too. Maybe that was the way it was meant to be. He gazed down into Ravi’s face. The baby had gone quiet, and his black eyes stared back at Matt quizzically. He was so intricate, so fragile. Nature must have designed things so that, once offspring came along, the parents would divert their attention to it, for all their attraction or devotion to each other, t
o ensure it survived. Matt laughed to himself. He’d failed Year Eleven biology, yet here he was concocting his own theories of evolution. Still, it made sense. He loved Rachael every bit as much as he had when they’d stood at the altar, possibly more, but that love had been eclipsed by what he felt for his children. He adored them. He couldn’t quite believe they were his. Dan, with his dark hair and his white teeth, his quiet sense of humour, the music that emerged from his fingertips; Charlie, his dreamy Charlie-girl, who would perch on the arm of the couch and rub his shoulders when he’d had a long day, whose room was filled with pictures of ponies and unicorns and the glass animals that she’d hung from her curtain rod so that they caught the sunlight and sprinkled it over everything else. Dan looked a bit like him and Charlie was ash-blonde, like her mother, but otherwise they were exactly, perfectly themselves, and he thanked God or Whatever for them every single day.
Ravi startled as the ambulance arrived, sirens blaring. ‘Ssssh,’ Matt soothed, rocking him gently. He’d have loved more kids: two or even three more, a noisy, bubbling eruption of a family. Two children was financially and logistically sound, but still sometimes seemed too few. When Charlie was out and Dan was in his room they might as well not have had any at all. That’s why it had seemed such a blessing when Rachael had unexpectedly fallen pregnant three years ago. She was forty-four; he’d had a vasectomy—it shouldn’t have happened. But the vasectomy was only a month or so old, and apparently they still should have been taking precautions. He’d probably been told, but he wasn’t really listening. The operation hadn’t been his idea. Rachael had made it abundantly clear that her child-bearing days were over and he needed the snip if he ever wanted to sleep with her again. Rachael was the boss; Rachael called the shots. It had always been that way—partly a circumstance of her personality, but also partly, he suspected, because she earned most of their money and they both felt that that gave her the right to do so. Matt had regretted the vasectomy even as he nursed the bag of frozen peas to his groin, but he knew he was just as much to blame for it as his wife. He’d acquiesced. He couldn’t say no. How sweet it had been then to see her holding up the test stick, two pink lines glowing. But not for long.
As he threw his arms around her, Rachael had said, ‘I’m getting an abortion.’ Matt had been horrified. They could afford another child, he’d protested; they had enough room in the house. Yes, it would be a bit of a squash, and Dan and Charlie might have to share a room for a bit, but they’d think that was fun, he had done it with his own brothers when he was a child. Rachael had pulled herself out of his embrace and dropped the pregnancy test into the rubbish bin.
‘No. I’m done. I told you I was done years ago. I’ve finally been appointed senior curator, and Dan’s in high school. It would be ridiculous to go back to having babies.’
It wasn’t ridiculous, he had tried to tell her. It was a miracle. It was meant to be—look at all the odds this child had already had to overcome to bring itself into existence. How could you deny that? Rachael had regarded him coolly and said, ‘So you’re going to carry it, are you, and nurse it, and get up to it every night, and change all its nappies and mash up its vegetables?’
He could, Matt had protested, he could do all that, except the carrying. She could go straight from the delivery suite back to work if she liked. He’d handle it. He really wanted this child. But Rachael hadn’t been listening. ‘We both have to want it,’ she’d said. The next Monday she had called in sick to work and taken a taxi to a clinic in East Melbourne. Matt had been on a night shift when she left, and hadn’t known what she was doing until she returned home pale and crampy later that day. He’d cried when she told him. She’d been back at the museum the next morning.
‘Nearly got you, Darla,’ Richo said.
‘Dahra,’ Matt corrected. A paramedic was hovering with oxygen and—he hoped—morphine. Silently he willed Richo to work faster.
‘You still going to do that session at St John’s this afternoon?’ Richo asked.
‘I guess so. If we’re finished here.’ Matt had forgotten all about it during the morning’s events, but he enjoyed giving the school talks, was one of the few who actually volunteered for them. He loved the look on the smaller children’s faces when he walked in wearing his full gear and helmet; he liked trying to inspire the older students to think about what they were going to do with their lives. He just liked being with kids, really. Ravi shifted in his arms and he adjusted his grasp. The boy was seriously heavy for a neonate. Would their own, lost, child have been a big baby? Would he have slept through the night at just ten weeks, like Dan, or skipped crawling and gone straight to walking, like Charlie? But there was no point thinking about it, he chided himself. What was done was done, and he was grateful for what he had.
There was a final shrieking of metal and a sudden gasp from Dahra as the steering column was lifted free.
‘Dahra? Dahra, hold still for just a minute more so I can get a line in,’ said the paramedic, slipping seamlessly into the spot where Richo had been. Two of his colleagues stood alongside with a gurney, waiting to ease her from the wreckage. Her eyes, which had again fallen shut, immediately opened and sought her son, then Matt. He lifted Ravi higher so she could see him and watched both pain and ecstasy ripple across her face. It was a lot like being reborn, he thought.
Charlie stopped in the middle of the pavement and transferred her heavy school bag from one shoulder to the other. Her whole upper body ached, and her uniform was stuck to her back with sweat. It was stupidly hot for March. For a moment she thought about turning around and going home, having a shower and sneaking a Coke from the fridge if her dad wasn’t home, but she’d promised her mum that she’d visit Nan, and her mum would be sure to check that she had. She shrugged her bag higher and tried to catch up to Britta, who was walking ahead of her, dragging a stick along a picket fence.
‘Hey, wait up,’ she called, but Britta didn’t pause. Charlie forced herself into a jog. ‘My bag weighs a ton,’ she complained when she eventually drew level. ‘I’ve got so much homework. It sucks.’
‘Don’t do it,’ Britta said. ‘It’s only Year Seven. It doesn’t matter.’ Her stick careered off the pickets and onto the iron railings of the next house, clanging loudly. A dog barked from behind the gate.
‘What about your parents?’ Charlie asked. ‘Don’t they check?’
‘Sometimes,’ Britta said, ‘but I just lie.’ She flashed a broad smile at Charlie, and Charlie smiled back. It would be good to be Britta.
‘How’s Liam going, then?’ Britta said. ‘I saw you talking to him in English today. Was he asking you out?’
Charlie gave her a shove. ‘He’d forgotten his textbook. He wanted to look at mine.’
‘Sure he had. He just wanted an excuse to sit beside you and stare into your eyes.’
‘You’re nuts.’ Charlie giggled. She’d actually been so aware of Liam next to her—his untucked shirt, his long fingers playing with a pencil, his strange musky male scent—that she could barely look at him. She’d been glad he’d asked to share with her, but also relieved when the bell went for the end of the period and he headed off to Maths. She herself had gone to Food Tech, where she’d made drop scones while analysing every single word he’d spoken to her. She’d kept some of the scones for her nan. They were a bit burned, but Nan wouldn’t notice.
‘Well, he definitely likes you,’ Britta said. ‘It’s cool.’
‘Ivy told me on the weekend that she thinks he likes Megan,’ Charlie blurted. She hadn’t meant to tell anyone, but ever since Ivy had casually dropped it into conversation at pony club on the weekend the thought had stung, pricking her every time it crossed her mind. Britta dropped her stick and kicked it along the pavement, knocking it into the gutter.
‘Ivy’s a bitch,’ she declared. ‘She’s just trying to stir you up. What would she know about Liam?’
‘She said that she saw Megan writing him a note, and that she put it in his locker.’
‘So? Maybe she did. That’s Megan’s problem. Maybe she wants to swap lockers. Maybe she’s his long-lost sister and she only just found out. I mean, she has to tell him, doesn’t she? You would. It means you’ll get an extra present at Christmas.’
Despite herself, Charlie laughed. ‘You’re an idiot. There’s no way they’re related. Megan’s so ugly.’ It wasn’t true, but it felt good to be mean, to purge her doubts with venom.
‘Don’t listen to Ivy,’ Britta said. ‘Liam chose you to go outside with him at the party, didn’t he? Some people just like to cause trouble.’
‘But why?’ asked Charlie.
‘For fun, I guess, or because they can. For power.’ Britta tossed her hair back. ‘Some people get a kick out of that, out of messing with other people’s heads. I’d rather play Minecraft.’
They had reached the nursing home. ‘You are so wise, grasshopper,’ Charlie said, bowing to her. She felt much better. She should have told Britta earlier.
‘The price of my wisdom is an ice-cream,’ Britta replied. ‘Let’s go to Cold Rock when you’re done.’
‘OK,’ Charlie said. ‘Are you sure you won’t come in?’
Britta shook her head. ‘No way. Old people freak me out.’
Charlie hesitated outside the door to her nan’s room. She never quite knew what she’d find behind it. When Nan had first moved into the home she had seemed much the same. A little vaguer, but her blue eyes had still lit up every time she saw Charlie. As the weeks turned into months, though, her grandmother had changed. She no longer smelled of 4711, the old-fashioned cologne she so loved, but of floor polish and boiled vegetables. Next it was her clothes, her favourite wool skirts and soft cardigans gradually disappearing from her wardrobe, an array of shapeless nightgowns materialising in their place. More recently it was her body. Her nan was shrinking before Charlie’s eyes. She’d lost weight, she’d grown stooped, even her hair had lost its curl. It was the dementia, Charlie’s mother had explained. It meant she couldn’t care for herself anymore. Nan no longer noticed when her hair needed washing; she couldn’t always get her spoon into her mouth. The nurses did their best to help, but they were busy.