by Sonia Henry
He looks over at me. ‘Do you think I’m a bad person?’ he asks out of the blue.
‘What?’ I’m genuinely surprised.
His face is creased with worry. ‘Do you?’
‘Of course not!’
‘I just feel like such a fuck-up,’ he says, sounding truly sad. ‘Like, I’m living in the middle of nowhere, I work a million hours a week for barely any money, and then I go and do something as stupid as getting done for drink driving.’
I shake my head. ‘Mate, everyone makes mistakes.’
I remember the morning I woke my housemates up, screaming from my nightmare, with Max’s concerned face gazing down at me. Sometimes I see him on the ward at work, when he thinks no one is watching, sitting on the edge of some old patient’s bed, having a laugh with them. Max wants to be a surgeon, but he possesses human qualities that I rarely see in the hospital. I secretly think that a low-range drink-driving charge, compared with the changes surgical training will inflict upon his soul, is the least kind of assault that could take place on his character. Max is only a very junior doctor like me, but I fear the years won’t be good to him. He thinks the worst that can happen is that he misses out on his training place or annoys the wrong consultant. I silently worry that he will be chewed up and spat out by a system that doesn’t care much for loveable larrikins.
‘Give your mum a ring and tell her what happened,’ I suggest. ‘I think it’ll make you feel better.’
To my surprise, he doesn’t argue. He looks relieved.
When he reappears on the front porch ten minutes later, he’s a new man.
‘She told me the same thing happened to her when she was my age!’ he crows. ‘I knew I got it from her!’
It turns out that Max’s conservative, successful, terrifying businesswoman mother has made her share of mistakes.
Well, haven’t we all?
twenty-one
After our wild Wingabby weekend I think I will be glad to get back to the hospital. Then I’m called in to work the Monday night shift in emergency even though I’ve been at work since 7 am, and I start to wish I was still at the police station.
‘You know what they call this area?’ one of the consultant emergency doctors asks me as we sit in the emergency department, watching the list of patients waiting on the computer grow longer, then longer again.
I refrain from uttering one of the many less-than-positive answers that float through my mind. It’s nearly midnight and I’m dog-tired. ‘What do they call it?’
‘The killing fields,’ he says, staring wistfully into the distance, looking as if he’s thinking of other, more appealing times and places. ‘They call this hospital and its surrounds the killing fields.’
I believe him. Even if the patients aren’t actively dying in front of us, it feels as though death is always stalking the corridors.
A twenty-three-year-old man-boy walks into the department an hour later after being kicked by his mother’s horse.
‘Fucking animal,’ he says loudly as I examine his wrist. ‘Fucking piece of shit, that horse. As soon as I’m out of here I’m going home to shoot it.’
I prod his scaphoid bone harder than necessary.
‘OWWW! Fuck!’ He glares at me. ‘Take it easy!’
‘Sorry.’ I don’t mean it.
I order the X-ray and offer him some pain relief. I look up his file on the computer and notice he was in hospital six months earlier for punching someone at the local pub. He’d broken several bones in his hand.
When he returns to ranting about shooting the horse, I can’t take it anymore. To the amusement of the rest of the staff in the emergency department, when the patient leaves I call the police.
‘Look, I’m not sure if you can do anything,’ I say to the slightly bemused officer on the other end of the phone, ‘but I don’t think a person should be able to shoot a horse when the horse was, well, just being a horse.’
After assuring me that, no, people can’t just randomly destroy horses, the officer promises to conduct a search of my patient’s property for illegal firearms and check on the wellbeing of said horse.
‘Maybe just don’t say who it was who made the call,’ I add quickly, remembering I have to walk home alone.
‘You city doctors are mad,’ says a gruff old paramedic who stood behind me listening as I made the phone call. ‘You’re mad as cut snakes.’
Eight hours and fifteen complicated patients later, I walk home to find Max sitting on the front porch of Poo Palace. After relating how I prevented cruelty to animals from inside the emergency department, I ask him what he got up to last night.
‘Remedial drivers’ orientation, mate,’ Max informs me, grinning a bit.
‘How was it?’
‘There’s about a hundred people there and only ten of us can read,’ he explains. ‘So I was voted group leader and I helped everyone with filling in their workbooks. Everyone else in my group is over fifty.’
I’m overjoyed. This will keep us going for days.
‘That’s not even the best bit!’ Max tells me. ‘You wouldn’t have seen the local news—there was a shoot-out!’
To his horror, a local news crew showed up at the end of remedial drivers’ orientation with the intention of filming proceedings to show what a successful intervention the local community has organised. By a stroke of pure serendipity, at exactly the same time, two of Australia’s most wanted, on the run in the local area, were spotted nearby. The police immediately cordoned off the whole town, surrounded the convicts, and the media rushed off to cover the subsequent shoot-out.
‘Thank God for the escaped felons!’ Max says.
With the sun beating down on us, me still in the filthy scrubs I’ve been wearing for nearly two days, we look at each other and start laughing so hard I feel as if my stomach is going to explode. How far away we are from our inner-city life of bars and Mardi Gras and Bondi now!
I suddenly have a terrible thought. ‘If the police were busy with the escaped felons, then who was stopping that boy from shooting his mother’s horse?’
Max looks horrified, then he shakes his head. ‘No way, Kitty,’ he says firmly. ‘That’s not how the universe works. The horse will have sensed what was coming and staged its own escape. I know it.’
I don’t want to believe anything else, so I decide to keep the faith. I imagine the horse running across a field, its mane flapping in the wind.
I feel relieved that, against all odds, we are still capable of hope.
twenty-two
The water is very blue. It’s Sardinia, the Maldives, Sydney on a perfect day. I’m fascinated by how blue it is. I lean over the edge of the yacht and run my fingers through it. After the heat of Wingabby, it’s glorious. I let it wash up my arm, enjoying the sensation. I lie back, looking down at my legs, which now have a golden tan.
I decide I should try to enhance the tan so I untie my bikini top. I lie topless in the sunshine as the water laps the side of the boat.
I close my eyes, relaxing into the moment.
Then I feel a hand tapping along the skin above my bikini bottoms. I open one eye. Hello there.
He’s wearing a white shirt and is tanned and perfect and so masculine. My fears that he’s a bit old and overweight prove unfounded. I have never been this attracted to a man ever, in my entire life. He leans down and kisses me, hard, on the mouth, and I feel myself getting very wet.
His tongue traces my lip, and I reach down and push off my bikini bottoms. He unbuttons his shirt and shrugs it off, and I am underneath him as he kisses me. His hand wanders down between my legs and he starts to rub me there, and I’m so wet it feels as if his fingers are moving along molten silk. I’m so turned on I can barely breathe.
I reach down and feel him. He’s hard, and I spread my legs as wide as I can. He teases me, hovering above me until I beg him.
‘Please …’
He smiles. I can’t believe I ever thought he was awkward. There is nothing awkward
about him now. He pulls my legs around him and thrusts inside me, and I let myself enjoy the feeling, savouring it in my legs and stomach and the throbbing between my thighs as I start coming around his cock and the orgasm is so intense that I feel myself …
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
For a second, I don’t know where I am. I lie on my back, still feeling the after effects of the orgasm I’ve obviously just given myself—in my sleep, disappointingly.
I allow myself five seconds of enjoyable reminiscing about the dream and then force myself to wake up properly. This is unpleasant for a few reasons, the first being that I’m actually on night shift and the beeping that has woken me is my pager. I’ve been asleep in the tiny doctors’ room, underneath a cotton sheet, having a filthy sex dream about one of my bosses. I really need to get a life, I think, feeling depressed.
I sit up and look down at the pager. Code blue. Paediatric ward. I feel a twinge of relief. I’m not covering that ward, so technically I don’t have to respond, but a code blue is a life-threatening situation so I should attend, just for support. Plus, Estelle is covering the paediatric ward and I don’t want her stuck in some horrific situation alone. I rub my eyes, roll off the mattress and hurry down to level two.
I burst through the door of room 214, expecting to see the intensive care doctor in the middle of a resus. I look around. There’s no one here. Not even a patient.
Someone clears their throat behind me.
I turn and see a nurse hovering. ‘Where’s the code?’ I ask.
‘Been airlifted out,’ he says, looking weirdly uncomfortable.
‘That’s fast.’ I’m surprised. I only just got the page.
‘The pager system went down,’ he explains. ‘It actually happened about half an hour ago.’
He tells me the patient was a three-year-old boy who was having trouble breathing and needed intubation.
‘Where’s Estelle?’ I ask. ‘Has she gone with the kid in the air ambulance?’
The nurse tilts his head slightly and gives me a meaningful glance.
‘What?’
He points over my shoulder and I look around to see that he’s indicated the door to the patient bathroom.
‘In there,’ he mouths.
I walk over and push open the door.
Estelle is sitting on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees, staring at the wall. She’s staring so intently I have a quick look at the wall to see if I’m missing anything. I glance down and notice her shirt’s soiled. On closer inspection I realise there’s some blood, and what looks like vomit. Her hands are shaking. It’s very quiet.
‘Are you all right, mate?’ I ask, trying to sound casual.
‘No one came,’ she mumbles.
I don’t think she really knows that I’m there. I put my hand on her shoulder, and she starts so violently I stumble backwards.
‘Get away from me!’ she screams, lashing at me with her hand. ‘Just go away!’
My mouth drops open. I hardly recognise her in this state; it’s like she’s a completely different person.
Disturbed, I back out of the bathroom as she resumes staring at the wall.
The nurse and I exchange looks. I have no idea what’s going on with my friend, but I know it isn’t good. My stomach churns anxiously.
‘When you say the paging system was down,’ I ask the nurse quietly, ‘do you mean over the whole hospital?’
He nods.
‘Even the code blue team?’ Surely not, I think. The way the system works, the intensive care code blue team receive the page before anyone else. Their paging system is the one thing in a hospital that always works—even a hospital as underresourced as Wingabby.
‘Even them,’ he says grimly. ‘They didn’t arrive until one of the other nurses ran to get them. They were dealing with a sick guy on level six, so it took her ages to find them.’
‘What other doctors were here?’ I demand. ‘Who was here with Estelle?’
I glance over at her, huddled in the corner of the bathroom. She’s an intern, like me. We’re not trained to manage life-threatening emergencies by ourselves, let alone an emergency involving a child. Holy Innocents has no paediatrics ward, so we barely know how to deal with measles.
I almost hope he doesn’t answer, because I have a sinking feeling I know what he’s going to say.
‘It was just Estelle,’ he says, looking increasingly uncomfortable. ‘Well, her and me.’
‘So, you’re like a paediatric nurse, right? You’ve seen a resus? You kind of know what to do?’
He shakes his head. ‘I’m just an agency nurse.’ He sounds apologetic. ‘Someone called in sick, and they were desperate. Normally I’m on the orthopaedic ward.’
What a fucking shit show, I think.
Estelle stirs, and I walk back into the bathroom. Very gently, I put my hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t react this time.
‘It was just me,’ she says, tears spilling down her cheeks.
Behind me, the nurse says, ‘I rang the flight doctor, because we just didn’t know where the team was. Estelle had to intubate the little boy by herself … They gave us instructions over the phone.’
I feel my eyes widen. ‘You intubated a three-year-old? But we don’t know how to do that!’
Sticking a tube down the airway of an adult is no mean feat; it’s something we’ve only ever practised on plastic models. To intubate a dying child by yourself … It takes specialist paediatric anaesthetists years of training to master it, and still they sometimes fail. And here was Estelle, at two o’clock in the morning, forced to do it on her own, in a hospital in the middle of nowhere. I shudder.
I don’t ask if the child’s still alive. Suddenly, I don’t even want to know. All I want to do is teleport the three of us out of this horrible little room to somewhere familiar and safe. I want to be sitting at the pub down the road from 19 North Avenue, at our regular table, gossiping about boys. Get us out of this godforsaken place! I scream inside my head. No one hears me. No one comes to our rescue. The airlift we so desperately need is flying over a crystal blue sea, delivering supplies of champagne and cocaine to Bond girls sitting on yachts.
‘She got the tube down, though,’ the nurse says, crouching beside Estelle. ‘She did really well.’
I’m deeply impressed.
‘You did everything you could and more, man,’ I say, sitting on the floor beside her. ‘You were stuck in an impossible situation no one in our position should ever be put in, and you did a fucking good job, all right?’
Estelle remains motionless on the floor, hugging her knees. ‘His whole body was blue,’ she says, finally looking up at me. Her eyes are so blank they scare me a little bit. ‘Like, he was blue. As blue as your scrubs.’
I cringe.
‘I’ve never seen anything like that.’ Estelle sounds almost reflective. ‘It was like a picture from a textbook, you know?’
Fantastic. What a great on-the-job learning experience.
‘It’s weird,’ Estelle continues. ‘All that keeps going through my head is that guy, the one who told us that story in our last year of uni.’
She’s delirious, I think.
‘You know.’ She sounds frustrated. ‘That emergency doctor. Tim … No, Toby.’ She frowns. ‘He told us that story about the kid who’d tried to cut off his own hand.’
How could I forget. Toby Henderson.
‘I asked him how he coped.’ She laughs, but there’s no humour in it. ‘Remember what he said?’
‘You just don’t,’ I hear my voice saying.
‘I didn’t believe him.’ Estelle’s voice is rising. ‘I didn’t fucking believe him!’
The paediatric room has cartoon characters painted on the wall to make it seem like a cheerful place. But as I look closely I can see that the paint is cracking, and the smiles on Mickey and Minnie’s faces are fading. There’s an abandoned Lego set on the table.
I have the sensation that I’m looking down on the scene fr
om above. We are Lego figurines. The floor is grey, splashed with red, and Estelle is a white Lego woman, sitting in the corner of the Lego room. I’m blue, and the nurse is black. A big hand picks up the figures and moves them. I hear the voice of a child playing doctors and nurses. ‘Then the doctor moves here and saves the patient!’ But the game is no fun anymore. The doctor is crying. The patient is dying. The grey Lego floor is dirty with blood. Our puppet master doesn’t like the way the game is going. The doctor isn’t doing what doctors are supposed to do. The child has a tantrum, knocking over the Lego hospital and leaving the figurines scattered on the floor. Discarded, until someone decides to pick them up again. We are little dancing doctor bears made of Lego. Tug our strings, and we move on command.
Toby Henderson was right. How do you cope? You just don’t.
There’s an unusual feeling welling up in my stomach, burning a path to my chest before flaring in my brain. I don’t recognise it at first, but when it roars into my consciousness there’s no mistaking what it is.
It’s anger.
I look at Estelle, still slumped on the floor, muttering to herself. Estelle is one of the smartest, most beautiful, most fearless people I have ever known. To see her in this position enrages me.
My fury is pierced by the shriek of my pager. We all jump. Estelle’s face is raw with panic.
Mechanically, I reach for the pager and read the message.
Room 312, chest pain. Urgent.
There’s another shriek. Estelle’s pager is going off now. She struggles to her feet.
‘You should just go home,’ I tell her. ‘Just get your stuff, tell them you’re sick, and go home.’
Estelle’s eyes plead with me; she is fighting an internal battle I know only too well.
‘I can’t,’ she says, the battle already lost.
The hand picks up the little Lego doctors and puts them back into position. A child giggles. The string is tugged. Up! And they begin to move.
Dance, little doctors! Dance!
twenty-three
Even the longest of nights ends when the sun rises. I stand on the top level of the hospital, watching as light starts to flood the town beneath me. The world looks so calm outside, it’s disconcerting. That people have been sleeping peacefully in their beds feels impossible.