by Jock Serong
There’s stillness and silence. There’s darkness, then there’s movement.
Violent movement, and I want to resist it.
A crushing feeling in my throat but it’s still dark. I want to gag, can’t gag. Voices: calm, determined. Pressure on my chest.
There’s something in my throat. Food maybe. I know there is, and now I’m focusing on it. That, and the terrible weight on my chest. Someone’s hitting me. Hitting me hard in the centre of my chest.
My legs aren’t there. I think my way to them and they don’t respond. I try to fight back against the hitting and the voices tell me not to. Voices not raised but forceful nonetheless. I’m trying to see the owners of the voices but I can’t see. Male voice, female voice.
I’m floating.
Now I’ve got light. I’m on my back, something soft under my head. I’m reaching for my face, fingers finding my mouth, the source of the gagging sensation. Hard plastic.
There’s a tube in my throat.
They slap my hands down. Tell me to relax. What? How do I relax?
The faces belong to uniforms and the uniforms are paramedics.
‘He’s conscious.’
‘Get the ETT out.’
I’m coughing as they handle my mouth and suddenly the object is gone. The woman’s all business and she’s pulled out a bloody great curly tube like a plastic shofar.
‘What’s your name?’
It takes me a moment to process this. People normally know who I am.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Darren Keefe.’
It means nothing to them.
‘What’ve you taken?’
‘Whah?’
‘You took something. You and the girls. What was it?’
Who took what? Took. Took, like stole?
‘Oh. Fuck,’ I say, grinning sheepishly. ‘Ravage me.’
‘What?’
‘Rabitty. Ratshitty. Rap city.’
The female ambo is peering deep into my eyes, moving a penlight torch between them. ‘Concentrate. This is very important. What did you take?’
Something about the urgency of her manner pulls me back.
‘Rhapsody. It was called rhapsody.’
‘We’re working on you right now, Mr Keefe.’
I look around. I’m next to a wall. Pinpoints of hard fluoro light and open sky. There’s a small crowd of people around the two ambos, but they’re all in…Shit. They’re all in scrubs.
‘Hospital?’
‘You’re at St Vincent’s. You’re in the carpark. Someone dropped you here. You and two girls.’
Dawning horror.
‘Where are the girls?’
She looks at the bloke. He says—
‘One two three.’
And they’re lifting me onto a trolley and we’re clattering over asphalt. There’s trees and darkened cars going past. And the world is unscrewing itself again.
This time I’m in a bed and there’s even white light all around me. A drawn curtain. A man standing beside the bed.
‘You look Indian,’ I say. I know that’s a daft thing to say, but someone’s cut the lines to my verbal brakes. His slight smile corrects me.
‘I’m Dr Khan, you’re in the Emergency Department, and I’m a registrar here. How do you feel?’
I know the question’s medical, not social. I try to think it through.
‘Sore throat. Head very foggy.’
He reads a chart as he talks to me.
‘All right Darren. You were dropped in the hospital carpark at 5.58 this morning by an unknown vehicle, along with two young females. On emergency admission you had a blood alcohol count of point two-two. That’s very high, okay? Glasgow Coma Scale ten…You also had at that stage unknown drug toxicity, which we’ve now established to be a combination of some cocaine, but also ketamine and pentobarbital, okay? Now do you know those substances, you know what they do?’
‘Well, the coke I do. How are the girls?’
I can see his face change faintly.
‘You’ve also got a large burn on your left thumb. Do you know where that came from?’
I shrug.
‘Mm. All right, well look, you’ll be fine. We’ll keep you in here and get you rehydrated through that drip and by this afternoon you should be free to go if your obs are good. Now there’s a man here who needs to talk to you. He’s from the police, okay?’
I can’t answer. The walls are closing in.
‘Okay?’ It’s that medical okay, the one that indicates things are not okay. ‘My job is just to check that you’re clinically all right to talk to him. I can’t advise you about what to say, of course.’
He finishes with a small brittle smile and writes something, left handed. Then he’s gone, and I can hear a few murmured words outside the curtain. Another man enters, neat and compact in a suit and tie, a blue-and-white chequered lanyard around his neck. He draws the curtain back after himself and sits in the chair by my bed, carefully places a black zip-up satchel on the floor by his foot, then watches my face for a while, his own face neither hard nor relaxed.
‘Now, Darren,’ he says simply. There are almost imperceptible movements of his head from side to side as he studies me, leaning forward in the seat. He’s young, but he’s watched Christopher Walken.
‘I’m Petro Salinas. I’m a detective sergeant of police.’
He watches me again, searching for a reaction. Finding none, he continues.
‘I know who you are. Obviously.’ He smiles. ‘Cricket fan. Now we need to talk about last night. Before we do, I need to say to you that you are not obliged to answer my questions, but that if you do, anything you say may be recorded and given in evidence against you. You understand?’
My mouth clacks as it opens, dried and plasticky. ‘Yes.’
‘Fine.’
He checks his watch elaborately with a raised forearm. ‘The time is now 11.27 a.m. Now the two girls who were found with you early this morning. Do you know who they are?’
He’s picked up the satchel, unzipped it and started writing on a pad inside it with a cheap blue biro.
I think hard but nothing sticks.
‘No.’
‘Well I’ll tell you what we know. One of them is Keely Detheridge, nineteen, retail assistant. No ID on her, but her mother reported her missing and she matches the description. So working assumption is, that’s her. She’s conscious now and able to talk, but she has severe amnesia.’
Thank God for that.
‘They’re watching her liver and brain for any indications of permanent damage, Darren.’
He searches my face again.
‘Now the other girl is Emily Weil, also nineteen, physiotherapy student from Berwick. Very bright kid, apparently.’
Why would you throw in a detail like that, I wonder.
‘She’s on life support as we speak, Darren.’
He looks deep into my eyes and I can’t hide in there.
‘No signs of electrical activity in the brain.’
The watching, again. I don’t know what I’m conveying, because the world is hurtling through me and around the cop and me and I no longer know what on earth I should say. Life support.
He’s seen something, because he leans back and writes.
‘She was clinically dead when she came in, Darren. No pulse, no breathing. Her parents are at her bedside on the floor above us,’ he points at the ceiling with the pen, ‘but it doesn’t look good.’
He sighs. He watches.
‘You know this stuff you’d all taken, this…’ he checks his folder. ‘Pentobarbital. I had to look it up. Not something we see every day. Vets call it euthasol. As in euthanasia, Darren. They use it to put dogs down.’
I can see her now, the black dress. Her mouth.
‘The Yanks use it to execute people.’
The long fingers, the gleam of fine sweat on her chest. The sleek muscles of her shoulders as she danced. Devoid of all erotic context, now I’m seeing an o
verexcited kid. A daughter. Me and people’s daughters again.
‘So why would you take such a substance?’
Part of me won’t answer. The rest of me can’t answer. Why would you take such a substance? He waits awhile. I’m imagining her in the ward on the floor above us. Stuffed with tubes, crowded by machines. Her lips are blue. Not a corpse in the strict sense of the word, but her face is a story told, a movie watched. All of her that was promise is now realisation.
‘Are you refusing to answer my questions here today, Darren?’
‘No. No, I just. I just don’t know what to say.’
The cop carefully writes this down.
‘Who did you obtain it from?’
‘I don’t remember,’ I say, but of course I do.
‘If you can give us a name, we can step in and get the rest of this stuff off the street, maybe save lives. You want to think about that answer again?’
I do. I think about that answer, and what I come up with is that I value friendship above everything. Loyalty is all I’ve got these days.
‘I’d love to help, but the whole thing’s just a blank. We were in South Melbourne after the charity game. Nightclub in a back street in Elwood. Called Moss, I think.’
I can give him this, because I know any number of halfwits are going to come forward and say they saw me. He writes the answer down, but he’s read me well, clearly unimpressed. ‘It’d be really good to get a name…’
‘Sorry.’
‘Mm. All right. Look, they’ll have to consider, if things don’t improve this afternoon, at some stage the, well, the parents are next of kin obviously, and they’ll have to review the continuation of life support. You…follow me?’
I’m falling, through the bed and into the centre of the earth itself, where it turns out they also have fluoro lighting.
‘And if that happens, if they—er—let her go, then it’ll be over to the homicide squad and you won’t be dealing with me. So good luck, anyway.’
He delicately places his card on the bedside table. And with that he snaps the satchel shut and he’s gone. The curtain swings lightly in his wake as the chair sighs and resumes its shape.
The continuation of life support. It must be a wrenching, terrible thing. I try asking the nurses as they come and go about the girl upstairs in ICU, the one who was brought in with me. I try to make it sound like neighbourly concern, and I’m disgusted by my tone even as I do it. The answers range from patronising (let’s just focus on getting you well, hey!) to icy (that’s not your concern).
The hard reality, delivered to me by the wall-mounted television, is that Emily Weil is dead by the following morning, and with her a part of me that I can’t define.
In the days and weeks that follow my instinctive response is self-preservation, and if you think you’d be any different in this situation, don’t kid yourself. It’s like someone’s trying to shove your head underwater, and of course you fight back. You strive for air, you suck and slobber on the breaths you can steal, even if the logical response might be to accept the blame and slip under.
It’s strange how some of it, no matter how frightening or hysterical, just bounces off. The tabloid piranhas parked outside the house. The rolling scrum of microphones and cameras that follows me everywhere. The mysterious demonstrators who seem to have a matching cause for something so randomly hideous; in this case women’s rights tied into a weird alliance called COSI, the Coalition Opposing Sportsmen’s Impunity.
It takes six months for the thing to work its way through the system, to finally manifest in a courtroom. For the four days of the inquest I endure the hate-filled stares of the parents. But it’s late on the third day that something gets under my guard.
The barrister acting for the family has the mother in the witness box. She is, I don’t think I’m overstating this, a wreck. She weeps and sobs and chokes and it takes hours to get a simple few words from her. So it’s hard to know why the barrister feels the need to ask her, just as things are winding up for the day—
‘What disappoints you most about Mr Keefe’s conduct that night?’
There’s a brief stoush between the barristers about whether the question is permissible, and in the end the coroner lets it in just because she’s curious about the answer.
Which is this: she understands her daughter might have been starstruck; that maybe she was a willing participant in the drugs. But she was a young girl, barely more than a child, and I am a grown man—physically at least. One who got himself into such a state that he couldn’t help her daughter when she might have been saved.
‘He abandoned my girl.’ She forces the words into the room, almost incoherent. ‘And now she’s dead.’
And until that moment, through all the questions from the media and the police, from Wally and from Mum and the whole fucking lot of them, it’s never once occurred to me that this is what I did. I abandoned Emily.
After dwelling on it all for another four months, the coroner delivers her findings.
She reads, eyes down, in a monotone. The judgment is in the words, not the inflection. Next to me in the gallery, Mum sits in a skirt and jacket that she probably would’ve preferred to be unveiling as mother of the groom. She’s grief stricken. In the car on the way in, she’s been blaming everyone but me.
‘Well, these girls will throw themselves at sportsmen, won’t they.’
I tell her I don’t think that’s much of a justification. And besides, I haven’t been a sportsman for some time.
‘All I’m saying is they know what they’re getting into,’ she hisses.
Now she sits stoic among the wreckage of her son’s reputation as people examine her for traces of emotion. Her hands are laid neatly on her lap, but they’re trembling. At first I think it’s the stress. But the top one appears to be pressing down on the bottom one to contain it.
Tremors. Through my distraction, I realise I need to talk to someone about that.
The coroner finds that I was present when the substance was purchased or otherwise obtained, and when it was administered. She finds I most probably had no active role in the girls’ decision to take the substance. She takes particular care to single me out for refusing to give evidence on the grounds I might incriminate myself, noting simultaneously that it’s my right to do so but that it’s my own conscience I have to grapple with. She concludes that Emily Weil died by misadventure, having been administered a toxic quantity of a controlled substance, causing respiratory failure and eventual death.
The substance can’t have been controlled very effectively if a delusional man-child and two hyped-up kids can get their mitts on it in a nightclub.
The coroner refers the matter of my involvement to the police, and by late July I’m facing charges of using and possessing a controlled substance, to wit, pentobarbital.
I’m inclined at first to fight the charges. There’s enough money sloshing around to pay for the sharks, even though the owners of Globe confirmed within hours of my discharge from the hospital that I was now on indefinite leave, to enable me to get all the help I need. I take this as a boning.
But Wally works his way into the mess: phone calls here, coffees there. I would say it’s his permanent role in our family, being the titular CEO of the enterprise. But it’s also his permanent role to be the face of Australian cricket. It does him and the sport no good to have me staggering perniciously around on the public stage. Another instinct reminds me that nothing from my brother comes freely: he’s either repaying a debt he perceives he owes me—or he’s setting up a debt to call in later. It’s the way of all politics, as I’m starting to learn.
The advice, he tells me, is to let the charges go through. Look as sorry as hell and cop it. Despite the gravity of the outcome, according to Wally’s best bureaucratese, the penalty could be quite minor. They’re not saying you killed her, he assures me. They’re saying you took drugs with her and she died. I think about the Weils. I doubt the distinction would mean very much to the
m.
So Wally arranges a fantastically dreary barrister to come along to court one bleak Tuesday morning and say a little piece about me, what a decent man I am. How it’s hurting me, how I’ve changed.
We cram into an interview room adjacent to the court, streaked with the scuff-marks of a thousand other miscreants. The barrister goes through it all, glossing over the squalid bits and looking for redeeming features, which we both know are morbidly outweighed by the squalor. He has a complete copy of the prosecution brief, and I thumb through the photo book, reconstructing a night I barely remember. Handbag contents, my wallet and phone, the hospital carpark, tyre marks. Then, working backwards in time, the front door of Moss, an image of an alleyway I don’t recognise, tin and timber fences stretching away towards a vanishing point.
The photo is in there because it shows a spray of vomit on the fence and the ground. Indeed, the following photo is a close-up of the same thing. How many people vomit, let alone piss, fuck, shoot up or even take a shit in laneways behind nightclubs, I wonder. It’s hard to know what such an image could prove.