Green Dream

by Robert Gollagher

  Green Dream

  by

  Robert Gollagher

  Copyright © Robert D. Gollagher 1999

  www.robertgollagher.com

  Draft Z

  Stretching from the white beaches of the Indian Ocean to the banks of the broad Swan River, there was a city. At the top of the city was a hill, covered in the natural scrub and low trees of the Australian bush. And at the top of the hill there was a huge park – a mixture of lawns, manicured gardens, and large expanses of bushland. Kings Park rose above the clean skyscrapers of downtown Perth, above the freeway interchange, and over the beautiful river. The avenues of the park were lined with towering eucalypts, planted in memory of soldiers who died in the First World War. Those quiet roads now played host to families who came on weekends to ride bicycles, buy ice creams, and throw coins into the wishing well.

  Most of the tourists would go to the war monument, a great obelisk at the park’s edge, to take in the stunning views of the city and of the many sailing boats at play on the water far below. But those who knew the park well knew there was a better place.

  Hidden in the interior of Kings Park was a spiral lookout tower, a winding staircase of silver steel, four storeys high. It crowned a grass fairway, half a mile long, which ran from a quiet garden up a gentle slope to the highest land in the park, at the base of the tower. On either side there was dense bushland, so the fairway itself made a long slash of bright green, when viewed from the tower, running down the slope and pointing away from the city centre to the quiet suburbs in the west. The tower was a little too inland to get a good view of the ocean, but the rolling, pretty suburbs, seen over the bushland of Kings Park, were reward enough for the climb. One could look east, instead, to the city skyline, or south, to the branching expanse of the river. This was the place to come to appreciate the beauty of the city and all the promise that it held.

  Kings Park could be a quiet place during the week, especially away from the tourist places. Early in the morning, before the dull groan of traffic on the freeway would begin, there was tranquillity and solitude to be found in the park’s interior. It was a favourite with joggers and walkers, somewhere to find a route less frequented by others, somewhere to keep fit and to take in the fresh park air at sunrise.

  And so it was, one summer morning in February of 1996, that a young jogger took her usual route, starting at her home in Nedlands and entering the western edge of the park. It was very near dawn when she began her run. By the time she had reached the bottom of the fairway and was preparing for the long run to the top, where she would climb the spiral tower and rest before running home again, the sun had already risen above the eastern horizon. The jogger would be running towards the light. She paused, summoning the energy to attack the long incline. At her side, her dog waited obediently.

  Dogs were not allowed in Kings Park, but Perth, for all its youthful innocence and optimism, was not as safe a city as it once was. Young women had recently disappeared from the nightclub districts, so the jogger had decided to flaunt the rules and take her large dog running with her. It made her feel safe. The big, red Irish Setter was glad of the exercise and it bounded excitedly around her feet, eager to move on.

  The jogger began her long run up the fairway. It was the most difficult stage of her route, every morning. She was dressed in a light pair of shorts and a T-shirt; it was too warm for a tracksuit. In a few hours, the day would reach thirty degrees Celsius, and by the afternoon, closer to forty. Even at first light it was uncomfortably warm. The jogger began to sweat as she trudged up the long incline. It would take a few minutes to reach the tower.

  The dog, let off its leash, bounded ahead with long, effortless strides, then looped back behind the jogger and ran beside her for a while before racing ahead yet again. The fairway was deserted, for which the jogger gave silent thanks. It was the solitude of running that she loved the most.

  At last, the jogger reached the spiral tower and stopped. It was her custom to rest here, to climb the tower and look out over the city. She told the dog to stay and stepped onto the steel staircase. She climbed quickly, jogging up the tight helix, pulling herself along with her outside hand on the smooth safety rail as she went. The tower moved slightly under her, reverberating with every step, and swayed, just barely, in the warm easterly breeze. It was an odd structure to climb: sturdy enough, but with a life of its own, moving just a little, as if to let the jogger know it was aware of her presence. At the top, the jogger turned slowly to take in the full compass of the landscape around her. It was always special, being up there. She never grew tired of it.

  The jogger was suddenly annoyed to hear her dog barking. She looked down, to the bottom of the tower, but the dog was not there. Then she looked west, along the fairway, and saw him. He was two hundred feet or so from the tower, on the southern edge of the fairway, running into the trees and then out again, trying to attract her attention.

  Worried that someone might hear the dog’s frantic barking, the jogger cursed under her breath. “Oh, bloody hell. Here we go.”

  She made her way down the stairs as quickly as she could and ran onto the fairway. It took her nearly a minute to reach the dog. She was sure someone would have heard him by now and that she would get fined. This time, she spoke loudly. “Sam! Shut up! Come here! What’s wrong with you?”

  The dog would not settle. It bounded up to her and barked furiously, ignoring her commands. Then it ran into the trees, where it had been before. The jogger followed, annoyed. She was determined to retrieve the dog and put him back on his leash.

  And then she stopped, suddenly, and went no further.

  The dog had brought her far enough.

  Lying in the scrub was the body of a young woman, still dressed in an old pair of jeans and a red pullover. The lifeless head was slumped to the side and there was froth at one corner of the mouth. The dog nuzzled and sniffed at the body, which was half-sitting up against the trunk of a small tree. The eyes were open, blue and vacant. It was an horrific sight.

  A woman’s scream rang out across the park as the jogger realised what she had found. She felt sick. Months later, she would tell friends that she should have stayed, should have checked the body for a pulse, but that it would not have made any difference, for the girl was dead. At the time, however, the jogger was gripped with such terror that all she could do was run. She feared the killer was still nearby. She didn’t see the scene clearly. She didn’t notice any of the obvious clues, which the police would later point out made her fear unjustified. All she did was turn and run, run as fast as she could, away from that place of death. She ran east, past the tower, onto the bitumen road that led down to the war memorial, to the places where there would be people. The dog followed her.

  The jogger ran down the road for three frantic minutes, before she came at last upon a cleaner working near one of the still-closed food kiosks by the war memorial. She tried to tell her what she had found.

  The cleaner, a portly woman, twenty years older than the young jogger, at once told her to calm down. It took a minute or two for the jogger to blurt out a description of what she had seen. Then the cleaner made her sit down. She telephoned the police while the jogger cried – more tears of fear, and of the relief of fear, than of sadness.

  When the police arrived, they could see the jogger was too distraught to revisit the scene. A young policewoman stayed with her, while the other constable called for support and for an ambulance before driving quickly to the spiral tower. He knew he needed to check if the woman was dead. It was the worst part of police work.

  By the time the constable had parked the police car and run down the southern edge of the fairway, he already doubted he would find the woman alive. It would be another nightclub murder, he su
pposed, another abduction. He went two hundred feet past the tower, like the jogger had said, looked into the scrub, and found the body.

  He felt for a pulse. There was none. The body was still quite warm and not rigid. She could not have been dead for long, perhaps only half an hour. But there was something wrong, for a murder. There was no blood. There was no wound. Instead, there was a plastic intravenous drip bag, connected by a long, clear, snakelike tube to a catheter in the vein of the woman’s forearm. The bag was half-empty. It contained a fluid, an ugly, dark green colour. The constable pulled the dead woman away from the small tree she rested against, thumped on her chest twice in a vain attempt to restart her heart, and began CPR. It was not up to him to pronounce her dead. He knew it was futile, but he blew air into her dead lungs and compressed her chest over the heart between breaths, until the ambulance arrived.

  The ambulance drove straight down the grass fairway and parked only metres from the body. The medics, two serious young men, asked the constable to step aside. The shorter of the two took over the CPR, pressing an oxygen mask over the dead woman’s face, but he shook his head to indicate there was no real hope.

  “What’s happened here?” said the taller medic.

  “I dunno, mate. Looks like some kind of drug overdose. I thought it was another murder, at first. But then I found this.” The constable indicated the intravenous drip set, still hooked up to the woman’s arm. Since he had removed it from the tree, where it had been hanging from a sturdy twig, the drip bag was on the ground next to the body.

  “Ah, Jesus,” said the medic, in disgust and sadness. He pulled angrily at the clear plastic intravenous drip set tubing, ripping it away from the catheter in the dead woman’s arm. “Jesus Christ.”

  The young constable didn’t know what the medic was talking about, but before he had time to ask, the medic spoke again.

  “Okay, let’s move her.”

  The tall medic and the constable lifted the body onto a stretcher, while the second medic continued pumping the oxygen mask. In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, they would intubate her, they would shock her heart to try to make it start, and they would go through all the motions of trying to revive a person that was long since dead. Sometimes, they knew, you could be lucky and pull someone back to life, but the tall medic knew that would not be possible in this case. All because of the dark green fluid.

  The constable was left alone at the death site. Just after the ambulance left, a second police car drove down the fairway and parked where the ambulance had been. A police sergeant got out and walked over. The officer with him stayed in the car, working the radio. Detectives had to be called and the scene would need to be quarantined and photographed.

  “Is this where you found her?” said the sergeant.

  “Yeah, Sarge. She, uh, was probably already dead.”

  The sergeant nodded. “Show me what you found, then.”

  The constable looked a little pale. “She was here, against this tree, sitting up. There was a ... a drip in her arm.”

  “An intravenous bag?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was in it?”

  “I dunno, Sarge. Take a look.”

  The sergeant took the drip bag from the constable. He held it up against the sky and looked through it. The dark green fluid was poorly transparent. “Any sign of a struggle?”

  “No. She was just lying there.”

  “I didn’t think so. This isn’t murder. It’s suicide.”

  “You mean, a drug overdose?”

  “No, son. What would a junkie be doing out here? Nah, I’ve seen it before. This lot’s a suicide rig.” The sergeant held up the drip bag.

  “Sarge?”

  “They call it green dream. It’s a concentrated anaesthetic, pentobarbitone sodium. They make it green, to make sure nobody uses it by mistake. She must have known what she was doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you get the dose wrong, you go into convulsions. It’s pretty ugly. Smashes up the body up pretty bad. She must have known exactly what she was doing. Look at the ground – she went peacefully.”

  “Jesus,” said the constable. Now he understood what the medic had been so angry about. There would have been no chance of reviving the woman, with her body full of an anaesthetic overdose.

  “Are you all right, son?” The sergeant put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “This your first suicide case?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, Sarge.”

  The sergeant spoke with sad irony. “You’ll get used to it.”

  When the two policewomen knocked on the door of Ruth MacDonald’s large home later that day, it was to bring the kind of sad news they were trained to bring, that the old woman’s granddaughter had passed away that morning. She had been declared dead by doctors in the Emergency Department at Royal Perth Hospital, after prolonged attempts to revive her. The cause of death was an overdose of pentobarbitone sodium.

  Ruth would later discover a letter, the last one that her granddaughter, Sally, ever wrote. It would arrive in that afternoon’s post and it would confirm what the police had suspected, that it was suicide. But when Ruth answered the knock at her door and spoke to the policewomen, she did not yet know any of that.

  Strong, as always, Ruth replied simply. “Oh, no. That can’t be.”

  Then she asked them inside.

  That day broke her heart more than any other day in her long life.

  Chapter 2

  Where the broad expanse of the Swan River branched to the south and briefly narrowed to a humble channel under the old Canning Bridge, it ran into a quiet body of water too shallow for the big boats from the wealthy sailing clubs of the north shore. This was the Canning River, which snaked gently south and then east through the southern suburbs of the city. It was a river that Ruth MacDonald had known most of her life. She had taken many quiet walks along its shores over the years and found much peace and reassurance there, first with her husband so many years ago, then with her young family which fate had stolen from her, and, in the end, after her husband’s death, she walked the riverside path alone.

  It seemed to Ruth, after seventy-five years of living, that life had led her slowly and relentlessly to being alone. She still remembered the happy day when, as young woman, she had met Fred MacDonald, her future husband, almost fifty years ago, in Melbourne. Ruth had been a simple girl and her family had no money, but they had prized her education. She had risen to become a schoolteacher, a profession of which she was proud, and had met Fred at a community dance, held in the gymnasium of the school at which she worked. The dashing young man had an honest optimism about him, which Ruth had liked, and when she got to know him, she soon knew that she would love him. It was just after the war and Fred MacDonald spoke of business, of moving west and building a new life there. After the wedding, they had left the city of their birth and come to Perth, which, at that time, seemed like a country town compared to the sophistication of Melbourne.

  At first, things were hard, but Fred kept his promise and after a succession of lowly jobs he found a future for himself in printing. His business expanded over the years from one tiny print shop to a chain of modern copying centres. MacDonald Printing allowed Fred and Ruth to live a comfortable life. Ruth was able to stop teaching and to raise the family she had always wanted. Eventually, they moved to a stately home in Mount Pleasant, a quiet suburb on the western bank of the Canning River. Ruth had walked the banks of that river for more than three decades, before the fateful day that two policewomen had come to the house and informed her that her beloved granddaughter, Sally Johanssen, was dead.

  Ruth was a survivor. Her experience with grief started early. Although each successive blow seemed like more than she could overcome on her long path to loneliness, she had in fact become stronger with each passing year. As a young mother, she had lost the eldest of her two children, James, to influenza, before his first decade was out. Some kinds of pain are too great even for words
and Ruth became silent and withdrawn for a time, after that first great loss. She always suspected that the death had forever traumatised her only remaining child, Claire, who had been eight years old when her brother passed on. The second blow came unexpectedly and cruelly, when Fred had died of a heart attack, nine years later. He was barely forty-five years old and he was the only love Ruth would ever know. When he died, a part of Ruth died along with him, never to return.

  Fred had left a sizeable estate. Although Ruth would not be rich, she was able to keep the large riverside home that she so loved. But as Claire grew from a child, confused by grief, into an angry young woman, she became more and more alienated from Ruth. When Claire married and left Perth with her new husband, a Dutchman named Karl Johanssen, ironically it was to return to Melbourne. The family history had gone full-circle. Ruth had lost Claire, almost as much as she had lost James. And then she was alone, with her house, and the river.

  When Sally was born, although the child was on the other side of the vast continent that is Australia, the news was a joy to Ruth. Claire did not prevent Ruth from having contact with Sally, and over the years, in letters, and in occasional trips, Sally came to love her grandmother as her favourite relative. And Sally needed every ounce of that love, for the man Claire had married, against Ruth’s wishes, was a violent alcoholic. It nearly made Ruth’s blood boil, when she heard the stories from her granddaughter about Mummy being hit by Daddy, about the smell of booze on Daddy’s breath, and about the nights when he would not even come home at all. Claire had seemed, to Ruth, to have become a lost woman many years before, but when Karl turned his drunken anger away from Claire onto his defenceless daughter, Ruth lost all respect not only for him, but for Claire, the mother who would let her daughter be beaten. Claire did eventually separate from Karl, but not before Sally had been forever traumatised by the beatings that came senselessly and unpredictably from her father.

  Ruth was a compassionate and strong woman, but when Karl died, drunk as he had lived, taken by a car accident, she found she could shed no tears for the man. And then, one of the happiest things that had ever befallen Ruth came to pass. Sally came to live with her.