“I fell down the steps. I ... fell down, on the concrete. I grazed my leg. My mum says I’m clumsy.”
“Are you sure that’s how it happened, Sally? Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Sally remembered feeling guilty about lying, but her mother had told her that she had to say that.
She remembered her mother’s words. “Sally, the social worker is going to ask you questions. She’ll try to trick you. She just wants to take me away from you. She wants to leave you all alone. You can’t tell her what Daddy did, Sally. You promise me, now. You promise.”
Sally remembered saying, “I promise.”
“That’s a good girl, Sally. I love you.”
It was only two weeks after the day Sally saw the social worker, when Karl Johanssen started beating her again.
And it never stopped until he died, six years later.
Saturday morning at the clinic was quiet. Sally only had a few consultations to do, and no surgery. To Heather Lorayne, Sally merely seemed a little distant. By five that afternoon, when work was finished, Sally switched off her mobile phone. She would answer no more after-hours calls.
Sally barely ate anything. She went to her flat and cried so hard, she was physically ill. When she had finished vomiting, and slept for a few hours, she got up and went out to walk around the same dark streets she had walked the night before. She didn’t care if she got hurt. She just wanted to be alone, just wanted to think, just wanted to make sense of it all.
Sally was sliding down into suicide. Her thoughts were not straight any more. She was trapped in a circle of pain and desolation.
On Sunday morning, Heather Lorayne thought Sally looked pale, but other than that, and the fact that she seemed quiet, Heather Lorayne would have little else to tell the police, when they came to interview her about Sally’s suicide, two days later. She had no idea that Sally was thinking about killing herself.
Finally, on Sunday night, Sally made her terrible decision. She sat by the dark lake for hours, and cried. All of the years, from the childhood abuse rained on her by her drunken father, to the flight of her mother to Canada, deserting Sally for a new husband, to the abusive boyfriend Ruth had made her break up with two years before that fateful Sunday, to the five years of incredible stress at vet school, and finally to her first, soul-destroying year in the harsh realities of veterinary practice, all the years seemed a waste of time, they all seemed to roll to one inevitable conclusion: suicide.
Karl Johanssen was right, Sally thought. She wasn’t good enough. She was never going to learn how to get life right. There was no way for someone like her to win. These were her thoughts.
Sally was tired, mentally and physically burned out by the passage of the years. She had no strength left to walk away from being a vet, to walk away from her cherished childhood dream and to retrain in some new career. Why do that, only perhaps to face the same disappointment? Only to face the same broken dreams. And, apart from her dear old grandmother, there was no one in the world who really cared about Sally. Apart from Ruth, everyone Sally had ever loved and trusted had betrayed her. Why go on any more, alone and without love? It wasn’t that Sally was afraid to go on. It wasn’t fear. It was simply that when she brought everything in her life to mind, weighed it all up and looked at what lay ahead, there was nothing for her any more. Sally knew, as she looked out over the little lake at midnight, listening to the occasional car drive down the quiet suburban streets a few blocks from the clinic, that the people driving those cars had lives to look forward to. They had people they trusted, they had things they enjoyed, they had somewhere to go. If Sally were to get in her rusty old Kingswood, which was parked back at the clinic, she would have nowhere to go at all. There was nowhere for her. She didn’t belong anywhere. There was nowhere ahead and nowhere behind, only Ruth, and Sally was too ashamed to let Ruth see her like this. Sally thought that Ruth deserved a better granddaughter than she, one who was not such a hopeless failure. She cried.
Sally thought it was braver to choose death than to keep on, like a coward, letting life torture her the way it had done for so many years, the way it had broken each of her dreams in turn until she had nothing left to hold onto. She didn’t want to go on living in a pointless world. The most cowardly thing of all, she thought, would be for her to fail even at her final decision, the decision to end it. She had to have the courage to do this last thing right. These were her confused thoughts, every one laced with pain, each thought lashing at her just as much as Karl Johanssen’s belt had struck her defenceless body as a child. She got up and walked.
Suicide was no easy way out. It was just her deeply held decision of what was best, that hot night in February. As she wandered aimlessly around the dark streets, past the houses with their lights all off and with their people all asleep, she wondered which houses were happy. Which houses were sad. Which fathers beat their daughters. Which fathers loved them. The unhappy homes, she knew only too well. The happy ones, she would never know. None of it mattered any more. Sally was gripped with sadness, deep and grey and dark sadness, as she walked beneath the uncaring stars. Death seemed right to her. It seemed time to die. She was no longer afraid of it.
It was well past midnight when she finally came back to the flat at the clinic. She wanted to speak to Ruth, but she could not bear to face her. Ruth was always so strong, always such a pillar of strength, how would she ever understand? So, she would write to her, instead. Sally took a pen, lay down on her bed, and wrote a letter to Ruth. It was her suicide note, and it was the last thing she would ever write to anyone other than her own diary.
Tears dropped on the page and smeared the ink.
Chapter 17
Michael kept turning the pages of the diary in his dark room that night, kept following the flowing ink. But he realised there would soon be no more pages to turn, no more story, no more secret thoughts to read. This last volume of the diary was not even filled. There were many blank pages at the end, pages that should have been written. The words in the diary rolled and crashed like a wild river onto the rocks of death. Michael wished Sally never had to die, because after all this reading, she seemed like an old friend to him. And it broke his heart. Ruth must have known it would do that.
Monday Morning, 19 February, 1996
Dear Diary,
I’ll go to Kings Park before the sun comes up. That’s where I want to die. I’ve been to the dispensary. I have everything I need – a drip set, pentobarbitone, pethidine, syringes. Maybe this is the most useful thing about my training. At least I know how to die painlessly. I’m not afraid of death, but I don’t want to suffer ...
That last lonely night, Sally had walked through the clinic and collected the things she needed. It was two in the morning. The treatment room was dark and silent. Sally went to the corner where the intravenous fluids were stored. She took a drip bag and a giving set and hooked them up on a drip stand, ready to flow. Then she turned on the drip, by pushing the little plastic wheel along its blue keeper until it no longer pinched off the transparent tube of the giving set. Immediately, the clear, life-giving electrolyte solution flowed quickly down the long tube from the bag and emptied onto the treatment room floor. Sally watched it empty.
She carried the drip bag over to the bench below the cupboard where the euthanasia solution was kept. Then she took a 500 ml bottle of pentobarbitone sodium and patiently emptied it, one syringe at a time, into the drip bag, until the bag was full of the deadly fluid. Sally held it up and examined its colour. It was a very dark green.
She had filled the bag with the deadly anaesthetic, not because that much would be needed to kill a human being, but because she knew once the flow of anaesthetic started into her vein she would lose consciousness, and she wanted to be sure that the dose which would flow into her body would be great enough to kill her without any doubt. It would have to flow only under its own weight, for where she was going to die there would be no power source to drive an infusion pump. The drip would have to f
low the old-fashioned way, driven only by the force of gravity, and so the bag would have to be full, to make sure the flow would be rapid and that she would therefore die quickly.
She took some intravenous catheters and stuffed them into her pocket. She took more than one, since it would be difficult to place a catheter in her own arm. It would have to be done one-handed, and she might miss on the first attempt. She took some surgical tape, to tape the catheter in, and a roll of elastic adhesive bandage to wrap around her arm, just to be sure that nothing would come out of place once she was unconscious. Then she went to the safe in the office, opened it, and took out the bottle of pethidine. Sally had never used drugs in her life, but now that it was time to die, she knew that pethidine would make it easier. She went back to the treatment room and collected a few syringes and some 22-gauge needles, which she would need for the pethidine. And then she stuffed everything into an old backpack which she still had from her university days. It used to carry her books. Now, it carried the means of her death. Sally was prepared.
When she had finished, and everything was packed, she spent the rest of the night awake. She cried. She went and sat outside under the stars. She came back in and rested on her bed. And, at last, she went back into the clinic, to the cages in the treatment room, and said her goodbyes to the animals there. How ironic, she thought, as she looked at the rabbit, and the three cats, the cockatoo, and the sleeping ferret, and then the two dogs, that caring for these beautiful animals had been part of what had pushed her to her death. How ironic, that she loved the animals and their company so much more than the company of people, people who so often seemed to be against her, no matter how much she tried. She said goodbye to a German Shepherd, in hospital for its severe diabetes. It reminded her of Ruth’s dog, Emmy, before she had died. She remembered all the times they had taken Emmy walking by the river. And then she cried again. The dog looked up at her, confused. Sally opened the cage and hugged it. And her tears flowed.
Her thoughts became sadder and more confused. She closed the cage and left the dog there, then got up and went back to her room. Kneeling at her bed, she cried until it seemed she had no more tears left inside her. She felt weak, and she was ready for the end. She had barely eaten anything in two days. And now she just wanted it to be over.
It was a warm February night, but even so, Sally did not want to be cold at the park, so she pulled on a red pullover, a gift from Ruth two years before. She was wearing an old pair of jeans and sneakers. She took the backpack, walked out of her little flat, and didn’t bother to close the door behind her. Her old Kingswood, a rusty, brown station wagon, was parked behind the clinic. She got into it and started the engine for the last time.
She drove through the darkness to Kings Park. It took her fifteen minutes to get there. She drove along the deserted streets in silence. When she reached the little car park near the spiral tower in the interior of the park, she switched off the engine and sat in her car for a few minutes. The park was dark and empty. She was alone.
She noticed a little light starting to begin. It would be sunrise in half an hour. It was time to begin. She had to get ready. She wanted to die when the sun was up, not in the darkness, not alone.
She got out of the car and went to the spiral tower. She dropped the backpack at the base of the tower and walked slowly up the long helix of the staircase until she reached the top. There was just enough light now to make out the rolling panorama of the trees and houses of the suburbs of Perth. Sally looked out over the city, she looked at the skyscrapers, bristling with lights, and the sleepy river. She felt the tower move slightly under her. She loved this place.
It was a Monday morning, but still too early for the groan of traffic that normally came from the freeway interchange half a mile to the east. Everything was idyllic and peaceful. The air was fresh.
It was beautiful.
Sally felt a deep, heavy weight upon her soul. She knew it was time. The landscape was beautiful, but there was nothing in it for her. It was as if she could see it, but not touch it. Happiness was something for others to experience, and it would never be for her. She came down the tower, one heavy step at a time, as if she were walking away from a dream that could never come true and back to the bitter reality of the ground. It was over.
Sally picked up the backpack and walked down the long grass fairway to the west. After a short distance, she turned into the bushland on the southern edge of the fairway, and looked for a suitable small tree. She found one. It had a trunk big enough for her to rest against, so she could sit up when it was time to inject the anaesthetic, and a little twisted branch, sturdy enough to hang the drip bag from. She cleared away debris from around the trunk and made a space for herself to sit down. She was far enough into the trees not to be discovered too soon, for she did not want to be rescued, but close enough to the grass of the fairway that her view of the sky was not much impeded.
She hung the drip bag on the tree, then sat down and pushed up the left sleeve of her sweater, exposing the vein at her elbow. She worked calmly, as she had been trained to do, and focussed only on the important task at hand – she had to get a catheter in that vein. She had done this in the past, in dogs and cats, many times. She had done it when under pressure, when several emergencies had to be treated at once and there was no time to waste, even when hysterical clients had watched her every move, demanding that she save their animals hit by cars, or poisoned, or dying with infections. Sally had always been able to catheterise the veins, like a true professional. And that is how she slipped the catheter into her own vein, working only with her right hand. She pulled out the little steel stiletto from inside the catheter, once it was in her vein, and watched her own blood, bright red, drip out of the hub of the catheter onto the pale skin of the inside of her arm and then onto the dirt. She let the blood drip, so that it wouldn’t clot, and deftly taped the catheter in with surgical tape. Then she took the end of the long tube of the giving set, which was still filled with a few mls of harmless saline solution, and plugged it into the hub of the catheter. She could run it for a few seconds, before the green dream in the drip bag would make its way down the tube of the giving set, and all that would enter her vein for those first few seconds would be harmless sterile saline. She switched on the tap and did this, to wash the blood out of the catheter, then immediately switched the tap off again. It was not yet time for the green dream.
Sally put another layer of narrow surgical tape around the catheter, now securely mated to the tube of the giving set, and taped it tightly to her arm. Satisfied, she took the big roll of elastic adhesive bandage, three inches wide, and wrapped it around her arm again and again, so there could be no chance of the catheter falling out of her vein when she was unconscious. And then, everything was ready.
Sally had prepared for her own death professionally.
She had done it perfectly.
Then, finally, she allowed her emotions to come back.
She felt grey and tired, hopeless and empty.
The sun was beginning to come up, now. It was dawn. A lovely, golden light was washing across the park from the east. The grass of the fairway and the trees on its other side were an impossibly beautiful, emerald hue. The sky was blue and orange. And it was time.
Sally took a large syringe full of pethidine from her backpack and injected it into the medications port of the giving set. The narcotic analgesic flowed swiftly into her vein and a few seconds later it had reached her brain. Within a minute or so, she felt a wonderful sense of relaxation come over her. She was still was aware of her pain and heartbreak, but the pain was dull and distant. She saw more beauty in the view of the dawn around her, and thought less of the failure which her life had been. Pethidine was meant for the pain of a broken leg, but it was equally good for the pain of a broken heart. Sally felt no anxiety, only a calm sadness and a growing sense of peace. But the pethidine also robbed her of her thoughts. She could not think clearly with the drug in her system. Her thoughts
ebbed and flowed like waves, as if she were dreaming. There was no chance of stopping, now.
Sally cried, all of a sudden. The tears flowed down her face rapidly. She wiped her eyes so she could see more clearly. She wanted to see the sky, and the grass, and the trees. The scene blurred with her tears. She didn’t sob. She was past that now. The salty tears just spilled over from her eyes in silence, and ran down to her mouth, where she tasted them, and dripped off her face, onto the red sweater Ruth had knitted for her, two years before. Sally was ready for the end.
She reached up with her right arm, to the tap on the giving set. She pushed the little blue wheel forward in its plastic keeper, all the way open, and watched to see that the pentobarbitone sodium was flowing quickly, dripping rapidly through the dripping chamber beneath the bag and flowing – deadly, swift, and green – through the long, transparent tube of the giving set and into the vein in her left arm. It was flowing as it should. She knew what would happen, now.
The anaesthetic would flow down that long tube, into the vein of her arm. It would race along the vein and rapidly flow into the superior vena cava, the great vein inside her chest that returned blood from the upper half of her body to the right atrium of her heart. From there, the anaesthetic would flow down into the right ventricle which would pump it through her lungs before it returned to the left atrium, then through the mitral valve, and into the left ventricle, the most powerful part of her heart. Sally thought how empty those terms were, and how meaningless. How little medical school had taught her about life. That was not her heart, that thing which beat inside her chest. And soon she would be at peace, for with every mighty beat of the left ventricle, the heart would pump the deadly, green fluid up into the aorta, from where it would rush into the carotid arteries in her neck, and then straight into her brain. Every beat of her heart would supply more of the anaesthetic to her brain. All this, she knew, would happen in just a few seconds. First, she would fall asleep, as the green dream engulfed her brain. Then, she would become deeply anaesthetised. Finally, her heart would stop. And then she would be gone.
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