Green Dream

by Robert Gollagher

  “I saved the one who didn’t deserve it.”

  Ruth stood up. She raised her voice. “Now, listen to me, Michael Andrews, and you listen good. That is bullshit. Do you hear me? Bullshit! You may be able to fool that damn shrink of yours, but you can’t fool me, and I’m not going to let you fool yourself. This is your life. Sit down!”

  Michael sat.

  Ruth remained standing. “You bloody well do deserve to be saved, Michael Andrews. You bloody well do. You were a good husband to Marie for fifteen years, and a loving friend to the other two people who died. You gave Marie all that happiness, for all those years. You were there for your friends, through thick and thin. You earned their trust and respect, and when the end came, you did your best to prevent disaster. But you’re not God, Michael, you can’t control everything in life, and, mistake or no mistake, you don’t deserve to die for what happened. I know it’s hard to live, but for God’s sake don’t give up the fight or else there’ll be one less good person in this world, and God knows we need all the good people we can get.”

  Michael was silent. Ruth was getting through to him.

  “Don’t give up, Michael. Hold on. Hold on, any way you can, for as long as it takes. Listen to an old lady, when she tells you you’ve got your whole life in front of you. You’re a good man, Michael Andrews. Your wife would want you to live.”

  “I know,” said Michael, at last.

  Ruth sat down, heavily. She sighed. “Will you at least read Sally’s last diary? Will you do that much for me? I’ve kept it from you, until now. Now I think you are ready for it.”

  “Why are you doing all this for me?”

  “Because you’re worth it, Michael. Do you understand that? Because you’re worth it, and because it’s something I want to do, while I still have the time to do it. Can you understand that?”

  “I think I can.” Michael felt deeply humbled by the strength and dignity of this old lady, this Ruth MacDonald, whom he barely knew despite sharing a house with her for three months, and who was dying from cancer. “But, can I do something to help you, too?”

  “You already have,” said Ruth.

  Michael felt a sudden wave of love for Ruth, the first time he had felt that kind of deep affection for anyone since the accident. He suddenly realised that he loved this old woman, and that he was the luckiest man in the world to have come across her just when he most needed help. “I’m so sorry, Ruth, about everything. About everything.”

  “Thank you, Michael. But I’m okay.”

  Ruth got up and left the kitchen.

  She went to the chest by the foot of her bed and retrieved Sally’s final diary, then brought the book back to Michael.

  “Read this,” she instructed. “It’s the last one.”

  Michael took the diary.

  “Read it and learn, Michael. Please. Don’t make the same mistake. Sally would have wanted you to live, if she had known you.”

  Ruth left Michael sitting there. Later, as she tried to fall asleep in the summer heat of her bedroom, she worried that Michael might not learn in time to save himself. She knew he was still far from safety.

  Chapter 15

  That night, Michael began to read about Sally’s final days. There was a kind of macabre fascination which compelled him to read, as well as his overwhelming sympathy for what Sally had gone through. If no one else in the world, other than perhaps Ruth, understood what drove Sally to suicide, at least Michael would understand. As he read the last few pages of the diary, Michael came to understand her death, as if it were his own.

  Tuesday, 13 February, 1996

  Dear Diary,

  Today I had a second anaesthetic death. I didn’t do anything wrong, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the clients. I don’t think I can cope ...

  On that fateful morning, Sally had been very careful to explain the dog’s condition. She looked at the decrepit Silky Terrier and then at the owner. “You understand, Mr Jenkins, that there is a very real risk with doing an anaesthetic. She’s very old, and her heart disease is bad, despite all the medication she’s been taking. She could die under the gas. We have to be aware of that.”

  “I know, I know,” Mr Jenkins said irritably. He was a busy man, and he wanted to get back to his computer shop as soon as possible. “I know all about the risk, but it’s got to be done.”

  “Lulu has advanced heart failure, Mr Jenkins, so we’ll use the most gentle anaesthetic we can, but if we don’t operate on these dog-fight wounds, the gangrene will probably be the end of her, anyway. We’re caught between a rock and a hard place, I’m afraid. All this skin, here, is dying. It’s necrotic. And there’s massive infection. Antibiotics just aren’t going to be enough. But doing the anaesthetic, despite our best efforts, might kill her, too. Whichever way we go, there’s a big risk that she could die, but the risk is probably less by trying surgery. That’s probably her best chance.”

  “Look, doctor. Why do you keep repeating yourself? You’ve explained it to me. I want the surgery done. Just do it, will you.”

  “All right, Mr Jenkins. We’ll go ahead, then.”

  “Right. I’ll be back to pick her up tonight.”

  Sally took the old dog through to the treatment room.

  Heather Lorayne looked at the dog. “You’re not going to anaesthetise that old thing, are you? It looks half-dead.”

  Sally sighed. “Yes. It’s getting gangrene in this infected leg. If we don’t operate, it will die. Even if we do operate, it might still die, it’s so weak. But the owner wants us to go ahead.”

  “Poor thing,” said Heather. “It needs the green dream.”

  “I know. But the owner doesn’t want to let go. He’s one of those macho guys who doesn’t show any feeling, but really he loves this little dog and can’t stand to let it go. So, we’re doing surgery.”

  “Well,” said Heather. “It might have helped if he hadn’t let it get into a dog fight in the first place! Poor old thing.”

  “Let’s get all the emergency drugs drawn up and ready, just in case. And we’ll put an IV catheter in, before we start, so that if anything happens we’ll be ready for it. Can you get me a bag of Hartmann’s, please, and a 22-gauge catheter? We’ll get started.”

  “You want to give it something for its dicky ticker?”

  “I already did,” said Sally. “I’ve had it on medication for two days, trying to stabilise it before we operate. Actually, I was hoping the leg would have improved on the antibiotics, but it just got worse. And I’ve given it some more Frusemide and some Millophyline, this morning.”

  “Bloody hell. Sounds like it’s on the way out.”

  “Well, we’ll do our best to save her,” said Sally.

  Two hours later, Heather held the little dog still while Sally placed a gas mask over its face. The dog breathed a mixture of oxygen, nitrous oxide, and halothane anaesthetic vapour. Sally knew that the ECG, from the specialist, had not shown any significant arrhythmias, so she was slightly more confident than she might otherwise have been, but she knew that a dog with endocardiosis – bad heart valves – and chronic congestive heart failure was still a very big risk. She was enormously relieved to see that the anaesthetic induction went smoothly.

  Half an hour into the operation, things were still going well. Sally had removed most of the necrotic skin on the dog’s right foreleg, which had been bitten almost to a pulp by a Bull Terrier eight days ago. “No wonder this wouldn’t respond to antibiotics. Just look at all this scar tissue. And look at the blood supply – it’s non-existent. This leg might still drop off, no matter what we do, but at least she’ll have a decent chance of survival with the gangrenous tissue excised. Poor little dog.”

  Heather dribbled some more sterile saline on the wound, from a sterile bag she was holding up over the operating table.

  At last, the operation was over. Sally took off her gloves and turned off the anaesthetic machine. She and Heather took the groggy dog back to its cage. Sally listened to the hear
t and lungs with her stethoscope. They sounded much as she had expected: bad, but stable. Every beat of the heart was heralded by a loud sloshing noise, a heart murmur caused by the aging heart valves, and there was the crackly sound of fluid accumulation on the lungs, but neither was worse than they had been before the operation.

  Sally breathed a sigh of relief. “Keep a close eye on her while she’s recovering. And call me if there’s any trouble.”

  “Okay,” said Heather.

  Sally was in the office, ten minutes later, writing up the dog’s card, when she heard the call.

  It was Heather’s voice, loud and urgent. “Sally! Sally, come quick. She’s collapsing! She’s just ... collapsed.”

  Sally leapt up from the desk and ran through to the treatment room, where the little Silky Terrier was lying, motionless, in its cage.

  “She just ... dropped down all of a sudden. She was sitting up. She was looking around. And she just dropped down, just now!”

  Sally grabbed the limp body and rushed it over to the table. She looked at the gums. They were grey. The pupils of the eyes were fixed and dilated. When Sally pressed gently on the eyeball, it was soft. The intraocular pressure had already dropped. Sally pressed a stethoscope to the dog’s chest. There was no heartbeat. The dog had died – but Sally refused to accept it. “Give me a hand, here! Let’s get a tube down!”

  Heather held up the little dog’s head while Sally put an endotracheal tube down the airway and connected the dog to the anaesthetic machine, which was set to provide only pure oxygen. “Right, now pump the bag! Every five seconds. And start CPR. There’s no heartbeat. She was recovering fine. We were so close to having her through! Damn it!”

  Heather pressed on the dog’s chest five times, then squeezed the oxygen bag. But the little dog was dead, and neither she nor Sally entertained any serious hope of being able to bring it back to life. Its heart had simply given out. The anaesthetic had been too much for it.

  Nevertheless, they went urgently through the motions. Sally injected stimulants and tried to restart the heart. After ten minutes, they stopped trying to revive the dog and accepted that it had died.

  “Stop now, Heather. There’s no point.”

  “She’s gone?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll ... I’ll call the owner,” said Sally.

  Mr Jenkins reacted to the news in a way that Sally would never have guessed. “She’s dead, then?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry, Mr Jenkins, but she has passed away.”

  The voice on the phone line was soft. “That’s it, then?”

  “There’s nothing more we can do.”

  Then there was silence for a moment.

  “Mr Jenkins? Are you still there?”

  The voice was suddenly loud and angry. “Nothing more you can do? Is that all you can say? Nothing more you can do? My bloody dog is dead. I’ve had that dog for fifteen years. Did you know that?”

  “I know, Mr Jenkins.”

  “It was just a simple operation. And now she’s dead!”

  “Mr Jenkins, I’m very sorry that Lulu didn’t make it, but, as you know, it wasn’t a simple operation. It was a very serious situation right from the start, and she was going to die if she didn’t have the operation. We did everything we possibly could, but she was just too weak to make it through.”

  The voice was almost yelling, now. “You said there were risks, a few risks, but you didn’t say she was going to die. You never said she was going to die! What have you done to her?”

  Sally suddenly felt sick. She couldn’t believe this was happening to her again. “We haven’t done anything to her ...”

  “No. You bastards have just killed her, that’s all. It shouldn’t be allowed. You think you can get away with anything. Well, let me tell you something, you won’t get away with it, this time. I’ll make sure you don’t.”

  The line went dead. He had hung up.

  Sally put down the phone and slumped over the office desk. Then she got up and went through to the treatment room. Heather was out at reception, talking to a client. Sally was alone. She sat down on the bench, next to the body of the dog, surrounded by empty syringes, needles, drug bottles and stethoscopes from their efforts to save the dog. She looked at the empty, flat eyes of the corpse, all the life gone from it now.

  Sally cried. Her own life seemed just the same.

  Chapter 16

  Michael’s bedroom was dark, except for a pool of light cast by the reading lamp on the little desk. Something was changing inside him, but he didn’t know what. He felt sad, reading what Sally had been through, especially because he knew there were only a few more pages before she would be dead, but he had to read on. The next entry was dated Friday, 16 February, 1996.

  Dear Diary,

  I’m too sad to face anyone. My life is a failure. My career is a failure. So many people hate me. Tonight, I went walking. It all seems so pointless. I’ve worked hard all my life but for what? So that people can tell me I don’t care? I can’t face any more of this pain. I won’t let life do that to me any more ...

  Sally had taken a long walk along the quiet suburban streets near the clinic after work, that Friday. She had walked by the small, local lake in the darkness, where people came to feed the ducks during the day. She had listened to the chirping crickets and looked up at the stars.

  Sally had always been too terrified to go out at night, since she had nearly been raped eight weeks earlier, and especially since the police had found no trace of either the man who had threatened her or the driver. But on that hot, dry Friday night in February, two days before her death, Sally’s sadness far outweighed her terror. She no longer cared about the risk.

  Sally just had to get out of the clinic, had to escape, had to walk, had to think, had to try to make sense of it all.

  She found no answers, only loneliness, out by the lake at midnight. The only thing she knew was that she couldn’t go on letting life torture her so endlessly. She felt as if Karl Johanssen had won, had destroyed her after all. She could still hear his drunken voice, across all the years, the voice she used to hear screaming at her when she was a little girl.

  “I told you not to, but you did it anyway!”

  Sally remembered the way he used to spit with rage.

  “You’ve been a bad girl, Sally. I do the right thing by you, I try to give you a chance, but this is how you let me down, uh?”

  Sally remembered the way she used to reply.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry.” Her tiny voice used to sound so pathetic, the way she used to cry as she said she was sorry, back when she was six years old, when she was eight, when she was ten.

  “You know, I don’t want to hurt you, Sally, but you give me no choice. You need to be taught a lesson. Always you need a lesson.”

  Sally remembered the way he used to take off his belt, the way he used to let it swing ominously from one hand, the way he used to show the belt to her before the beating came.

  “You know what happens to bad girls, Sally. You know the punishment. But you still do these things, don’t you? Why, Sally? Why do you do it? Why don’t you listen to your father, uh?”

  She remembered the way he used to slur his words. She remembered the alcohol on his breath. She remembered his Dutch accent. But most of all, she remembered shaking her head, shaking her head and crying. She would cower in the corner of her bedroom, behind the bed. She would cry out for her mother, but her mother would never come. There was always only Karl Johanssen, pulling her out from her hiding place and standing her in the middle of the room. He was a big man. Sally remembered his big hands, how his big left hand used to clamp onto her left shoulder and hold her, standing there, where he could beat her best.

  “Maybe one day you’ll learn!”

  She remembered the blows.

  “But I don’t think so, Sally. I don’t think you’ll ever learn.”

  She remembered the pain, the inescapable
pain, as the belt whipped down onto her back. Sometimes he would use the buckle – that was the worst. When it slammed into her back, or into her legs, she would almost faint from the pain, but Karl Johanssen’s big hand would stay clamped on her shoulder and hold her up. There was never anywhere to run to, and never anyone to help her.

  “No. Girls like you don’t learn, do they, Sally?”

  She remembered how the pain used to go past the point where she was still even fully conscious. She used to have nightmares about that pain, and about how she would never know when Karl Johanssen would take it upon himself to tell his daughter that she hadn’t been good, no matter how good she had been. She was always never quite good enough, no matter how perfect a child she tried to be. There was no way to please Karl Johanssen. And then the pain would come again, and that hand, crushing her shoulder.

  “Lucky for you, Sally, I am a patient man.”

  Then he would let her drop to the carpet, where she would lie, desperately trying to recover, trying to breathe, shaking her head and crying, wishing the pain to go away.

  She remembered that he would just turn and go.

  He would just leave her there, like that, without a word.

  She remembered how, a day later, or a week later, when she thought it was safe, she would go to her mother, and tell her what had happened, in tears.

  “There, there, dear. Dry your tears.”

  She remembered what her mother used to say.

  “You must try to be good, dear, then this wouldn’t happen.”

  She remembered the lies her mother told the social worker, when Sally was ten and Karl Johanssen had gotten carried away with the belt buckle and left marks on Sally’s legs. The marks on Sally’s back, a shirt could hide, but her legs could not be hidden by the skirt of her school uniform. She remembered the social worker asking her, “Who did this to you, Sally?”

  And Sally remembered sitting there, in the social worker’s office, with its strange smells and shelves full of books, and saying what her mother had told her she must say.