Ghost Child

by Caroline Overington

  Lisa said, ‘I’ve heard of people waking up from a coma.’

  I knew what she was doing. She was holding out hope, even where there was none. My role, then, was to help her move quickly through the stages of loss – the disbelief, the denial, the bargaining, and the acceptance – so that Jacob would be allowed to die.

  I said, ‘He won’t wake up, Lisa.’

  Peter said, ‘How do you know that?’

  I met his gaze. Perhaps some more information was necessary. I had a common metaphor up my sleeve, one I often used to explain a brain injury to people, and although by using it I would run the risk of trivialising Jacob’s injury, I decided to employ it now.

  I said to Lisa, ‘Have you ever had a swollen ankle?’

  Lisa nodded, as I knew she would. Most Australian girls have twisted an ankle on the netball court. It is normally no great trauma and once the pain subsides it can be amusing to be bandaged and on crutches, essentially unharmed and yet the centre of attention.

  I continued, ‘Good. Then you know that when you have an injury to any part of your body, it swells?’

  She nodded, yes.

  ‘Your ankle is able to swell with fluid because its capacity to swell is essentially limitless,’ I said.

  Now she was confused again.

  ‘Your ankle is not encased in your skull,’ I said. ‘The brain is encased in your skull. Your skull is like a hard shell. When the brain swells, it comes up against that shell, and there is a limit to how far it can swell.

  ‘Pressure builds up, Lisa, and blood vessels that supply the brain with oxygen become constricted, which means they get squashed.

  ‘The swelling pushes down on the brain stem, which controls the breathing and the heart. The damage is permanent. Part of the brain dies, Lisa. The skull protects the brain but in a case like this, it can also damage the brain, and that is what we have found with Jacob.’

  Peter said, ‘Can’t you do something?’

  I said, ‘We have taken some of the fluid and drained it to the abdomen, to reduce the swelling. That will make Jacob more comfortable. The damage to Jacob’s brain cannot be reversed, however. It is permanent.’

  We sat for a moment in silence. Lisa said, ‘There must be something you can do.’

  I said, ‘No.’

  The weight of this news appeared to be settling on Lisa’s spine. She had become a curled ball of agonised flesh upon her chair. She had pulled her knees up to her chest, and her feet were now resting on her seat.

  Peter remained combative. He said, ‘How much do you really know? We’ll get a second opinion, thank you very much.’

  This, too, was common: a second opinion was another straw at which to clutch.

  I had my answer ready. I said, ‘I want you to know this is not a personal opinion. This is the opinion of this hospital’s experts, all of them. If there were a shred of doubt, if there were anything known to medical science that would be useful to Jacob, I assure you, we would grab it. I do not want to lose him. I know you cannot bear to lose him, but lose him we will.

  ‘That said, you are of course able to seek a further opinion. I am certain you will find it is the same.’

  I was aware, obviously, that the death of Jacob would have consequences for this couple. While he lived, police were dealing with a case of abuse, or neglect, or even assault. If he died – when he died – it would become a case of manslaughter, or even murder.

  I had not, until that point, talked to Lisa about what, precisely, had happened to Jacob to so disable him. It was not my business to investigate. But I wanted to know. Of course I wanted to know. Jacob was, by appearances at least, a lovely boy. He was also my patient. I did not believe that Jacob had been beaten. His parents claimed he had been kicked and punched, but if so, where were the scrapes and the bruises? No, he’d taken one blow to the head – but who did it, and why?

  Lisa said, ‘I want to see him.’

  This was an important development. Lisa’s desire to see her son was very closely related to her need to accept the circumstance before her.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We can arrange that.’

  We walked the hall to intensive care together. The police were close behind us. I opened the door to Jacob’s room. Even in the few moments I’d been away, his small body had shrunk a little. He was deeply asleep and comfortably hydrated, lying on a pale blue sheet, his naked chest rising and falling, his eyes closed. Lisa stepped forward. The Royal Hospital employed counsellors specifically to assist parents in a moment like this: parents who needed to say goodbye to their children. This person had been summonsed and I was grateful to see her put a plump hand over Lisa’s long fingers.

  Lisa said, ‘I want a priest.’ That, too, was a request easily accommodated. The hospital had its own chapel.

  I allowed Lisa to stay in the room, briefly, without me. I am neither a guardian of the courts nor the coroner. I understood that an investigation was underway, but in my view a mother should not be prevented from saying goodbye to her child.

  A police officer – a detective, I assume – approached me in the corridor. He was perhaps thirty-five, and in the process of surrendering to middle age.

  He said, ‘What’s the prognosis?’

  I gave him my diagnosis. ‘Blunt-force trauma.’

  He said, ‘Will he make it?’

  I said, ‘No.’

  ‘Priors?’

  He meant: has Jacob been injured before? As I’ve said, in my examination of Jacob’s body I had noticed that his collarbone was marked by a small nodule, suggestive of a fracture left to heal without medical attention, and there was evidence of other breaks. All of this I would put in my final report. At that moment it seemed useful to say only, ‘Yes.’

  The detective said, ‘We don’t want her in there too long.’

  ‘I’ll see how it’s going,’ I replied.

  I returned to Jacob’s room. Lisa was weeping. She turned to me and said, ‘He can’t die.’

  He could and he would … and so do we all. Some of us at the age of 100, bored to tears by the length of our lives; some of us at the age of eighteen, after living in a blaze of glory and then burning out in a car crash; some of us in middle age, wishing we had just a few more years to enjoy the grandkids; and some of us, like Jacob Cashman, gone to God at the age of five.

  I said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  I can’t remember how long Lisa continued to sit with Jacob, although I suspect we didn’t sit for long. There is only so much to say to a person lying unconscious on a hospital bed. People say ‘Goodbye’, and some, maybe most, also say ‘I’m sorry’ – for what, I’m never sure, but it seems we’re always sorry for the things we didn’t do for the dying.

  Lisa said, ‘What now?’

  I said, ‘With your permission, I will give a directive to end the artificial life support. The respirator will be taken away.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘He’ll slip away.’

  He’ll slip away. Oh, how I wish that were true. If only death were like that! Instead, Lisa would leave the room. I would sign the necessary paperwork. The nurses would turn the lights down and remove the machinery. Then, in the darkness, Jacob would begin to fight for his life. His small body would jolt. His chest would heave off the bed. His jaw would clench and his small hands would grope the air, trying to hold onto something, anything, in this world.

  He wouldn’t feel pain. Morphine would be administered immediately, and continuously, through a drip in the back of his hand. Still, his death would be agony. I don’t mean that in the traditional sense of the world. No, when I say that death is agony, I mean it in the true sense of the word. Agony comes from the Greek, from ‘agon’, which means ‘struggle’. That is what we do at the end of our lives. We struggle. We rage, as Dylan Thomas put it, against the dying of the light … and we lose.

  We all lose.

  Detective Senior Sergeant Brian Muggeridge

  I didn’t think Jacob was going to die
. He was in a bad way, that was obvious, flopping around the way he was that day in the house on DeCastella Drive, but it didn’t look like a fatality. There was no blood. No bruising. It was the paediatrician at the Children’s that set me straight. He was an older guy, balding on top and blue scrubs, like every doctor you’ve ever seen. He told me, ‘Blunt-force trauma.’

  I said, ‘Will he make it?’

  He said ‘No’, or something like it, or maybe it was the way he’d said ‘Blunt-force trauma’, I just figured he was telling me there was no hope.

  I wondered what was going through the bloke’s mind. I mean, he’d had to operate on the boy, cut the kid’s head open, work half the night trying to save him, and then he’d got to spend another hour in the waiting room with the people who likely put the kid in the hospital in the first place. It boggles the mind. The nurses, too: they’d had to tend to the kid, and they’d had to look at Lisa falling about in the corridor, and at Peter trying to hold her up. Surely they knew. But they never said anything.

  As for the parents, well, how must they have felt, seeing all these good folk, these professionals, the counsellors and whatnot, fawning over them? Did they feel any guilt? I wouldn’t rule it out, but the victim mentality is pretty well entrenched in some people. If they felt sorry for anyone it was mostly themselves, and I’m sure if Lisa was thinking anything that day at the hospital, it was basically that this wasn’t her fault. Sure, her fella might have hit the kid, but how was she to blame? That’s how she would think.

  Anyway, it wasn’t up to me to right the wrongs in the world. I had to get to the bottom of the matter and I wanted to do it quickly. All the papers, all the radio, they were still running with the story that Jacob had been set upon, and it’s not right to have a community believing that kind of thing can happen. It wasn’t fair on the people of Barrett, for one thing, and it has a knock-on effect. Parents start driving their kids to school and picking them up instead of letting them walk, and nobody is allowed to go out and play because they think the neighbourhood’s not safe.

  Jacob’s life support was removed at noon on November 12, and he would have passed away shortly after that. The death certificate records the time of death as 12.30.

  We got the bloke from media liaison to type out a quick statement for the reporters in the foyer. It was brief enough. It said, ‘Jacob Cashman’s life support has been withdrawn.’

  They would get that, straightaway. It meant: the kid’s dying.

  The statement went on, ‘Jacob’s mother, Lisa Cashman, and her defacto husband, Peter Tabone, are assisting police with their inquiries.’

  They’d get that, too. Take it from me, whenever you see the words ‘assisting police’, it means they’re being questioned and the cops think they did it.

  I watched the media guy hand the statement around, and I heard a couple of reporters chatting. One of them said, ‘Him or her, do you reckon?’ and his mate replied, ‘Him. Definitely him. Whadda you reckon?’

  ‘I reckon her.’

  ‘Come on, mate. It’s always the bloke.’

  They were packing up their gear. There was no point hanging around the hospital, not if the parents were going to be at the police station. One of them turned to me and said, ‘Are we going to get an arrest today?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, mate.’

  ‘Where are the other kids?’

  ‘Welfare.’

  Welfare. That’s what we used to call the state government department that is now referred to as the Department of Community Services, although officially it’s called the Department of Child Protection and Family Services, I think. To me, it’s basically the welfare department, and it’s never been any good, although apparently there’s also a new slogan: ‘Every Child, Every Chance.’ You can read into that whatever you like.

  ‘God help them,’ the reporter said.

  I agreed with him, but I said, ‘That’ll do.’

  The media followed us back to the police station at Barrett; we were all there by 2 p.m. They weren’t going to get inside. That would be ridiculous. The story was getting bigger; there were heaps of them. They’d have to set up on the footpath. The media guy was trying to herd them.

  ‘Leave a spot clear for pedestrian traffic,’ he said, opening his arms to show how much space he wanted around the front door. ‘I’ll come out when we’ve got a development. I think we all know it’s gonna be a while.’

  That was fine by most of the hacks on the footpath. It’s hard to believe now, but news was once something that was revealed twice a day: first in the morning newspaper, and again on the six o’clock news. It wasn’t something that was posted on the Internet as it happened, all hours of the day and night. These guys were seriously permitted to sit in the November sunshine all afternoon, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for developments. Naturally enough, their big concern was food. They’d been at the hospital all morning, drinking instant coffee and looking for a place to take a leak. Now they’d have to wait some more, and they were hungry.

  ‘I’ll do the run,’ said one. ‘Who wants what?’

  ‘Is there a place with hamburgers?’

  ‘I really need some water.’ That came from the TV girl, the one who looked like Jana.

  ‘Where’s the nearest milk bar?’

  The media guy proved his usefulness, again. He stepped up and said, ‘The best place for you guys is the joint on the corner of High Street. I know the bloke there. He’ll take care of you. Listen, can you get me something, too?’

  They probably settled down to greasy burgers, cigarettes and Coke – a Coke and a smoke and a choke, they called it – and we brought Lisa and the boyfriend through a back door. The idea was to shield them from the cameras, although you never get away with it, not entirely. There’s always one bloke, usually from The Sun, snooping around the back, trying to get the picture, and yeah, he got one.

  The Barrett Police Station was not a sophisticated operation, not then, and not now. We had three people to interview – that would be Lisa, and the boyfriend, and Harley. I didn’t even think about Lauren. Why would we want to talk to Lauren? No, that wouldn’t come until later. But every one of the people we did want to interview would have to be taped, and Harley would need to have a social worker on hand, or else the evidence we collected would be inadmissible. Everybody’s got their right to a lawyer, and all that. Barrett didn’t have an endless supply of rooms. There was no two-way mirrored glass. You see that on TV but you didn’t get it at Barrett. One of our interview rooms was actually converted from the storage cupboard. We had to sit with plastic drums storing liquid for the photocopiers, and does anybody remember how that smells?

  Anyway, we stuck Lisa in the main room, and Peter in the room with the photocopier. The two kids we didn’t want to talk to – Hayley, who was just a toddler, and Lauren – got their social workers and were told to have a bit of a play, Mum would be out soon.

  I wanted to start with Lisa. It would have to be formal. My feeling was still: it’s got to be Peter. So I went into the room where Lisa was and sat opposite her at the table. I stared into her face. She looked ragged. Bone dry, if that makes sense. She was stained with cigarettes, and she was still smoking. We at Barrett were trying to get our heads around the idea that cigarettes weren’t the best idea. There was a new ban on smoking in city offices, up in Melbourne, but at the Barrett cop shop, you could still smoke – everybody smoked – so we let her smoke, too.

  I’d been watching her over the course of the day, and I’d decided that Lisa wasn’t stupid. She was defensive; she was uneducated, but not stupid. She knew her rights, too. Straight up, she said she wanted a lawyer. She wanted to say ‘nothing to nobody’ that might be used against her. I’m no genius at the interview thing. I’m not going to pretend we had a Silence of the Lambs-type operation going on at Barrett, where we’d get inside people’s heads and make them crack. We didn’t. In fact, all we knew about the criminal mind was that if we ever came across a proper psychopath, somebo
dy with a real bit of evil or a touch of nous, we’d be stumped. Happily, we didn’t come across that kind of crook. The sad and the violent, we had a lot of that. The plain stupid, you bet. That was our lot at Barrett. Psychopaths, not so much.

  I had a pretty good idea what Lisa’s take on the situation was going to be. First up, she was a grieving mum who’d just lost her son, so she was going to play that card. Next up, she’d deny everything, and that’s where I figured I’d get her. That’s where she’d trip up. Let me see if I can explain. Let’s say you’ve got a bank robbery in Bourke Street at 9 p.m. on Saturday. A police officer will take his suspect and say to him, ‘Were you in Bourke Street at 9 p.m. on Saturday?’ If he’s a smart guy, a good crook, he’ll say, ‘Certainly, sir. I was indeed in Bourke Street at 9 p.m. on Saturday.’

  Now, that might sound counterintuitive. Why does the guy want to put himself at the scene of a crime? But that’s the thing. Chances are, we’ve already placed him at the scene. These days, we’ve either got him on the CCTV, or we’ve got a witness, and he knows he’s easy to place there, so he says, ‘Yeah, that was me.’

  A dumb guy, an inexperienced crook, he’ll deny every thing. He’ll say, no sir, not me, and then we pull out the CCTV, and we’ve already caught him lying.

  Now Lisa, I was guessing she fell into the second category. She was smart, but not an experienced crook. She was the type to say, ‘Nope, wasn’t me. I weren’t there,’ and land herself right in it.

  What I needed to do then was find some facts that were incontrovertible, and see if she’d deny them. I had a little something up my sleeve, something that didn’t quite make sense, and I was mulling it over when Lisa said, ‘Where are my kids?’