The Gap

by Benjamin Gilmour

  Christmas parties are going on all over the place and the city streets are swarming. Ladies teeter on high heels and men in groups slap one another with excitement. Some women in a car at the lights flash their boobs at John.

  ‘Oh God,’ says John in camp disgust. ‘And they think they just did me a favour …’

  Cruising through Kings Cross is a great diversion for John. He loves people-watching, like I do. But his caustic commentary on some of the passing punters seems more vicious tonight, given his current state. It’s like he’s revolted by all that used to amuse him. At Bayswater Road he nods at a young woman crossing in front of us who’s wearing a pair of cut-off shorts with pockets hanging out the front.

  ‘Can you believe girls wear those things?’ he says.

  ‘Not a good look.’

  ‘It’s a fucked look, that’s what it is. A fucked look in a fucked world.’

  Across the street a pack of young men push each other round and one of them trips over, spilling hot chips. A passing vagrant drops to his knees and eats them out of the gutter. There’s a row of Harley-Davidsons and bikies in their colours leaning against them, smoking. Neon flashes above the awnings and thudding techno pulses from a nearby club, where the line to get in snakes around the block.

  ‘Fucking queues,’ says John. ‘These people queue for an hour to get in, then queue for an hour to reach the bar, then queue for an hour to use the toilet.’

  I tell him he’s sounding old. I’m pretty sure he spent his youth in bars like that.

  Control are calling us for a job on Bayswater Road, an unconscious girl. She’s only eighteen and her friends are convinced that her drink has been spiked. It’s a common complaint these days, but genuine spikings are rare.

  John isn’t holding his famous acid tongue tonight. ‘Which of her twenty drinks was spiked, then?’ he asks her teenage friends. I’m relieved his sardonic humour is lost on the group. One of her friends even answers, ‘Who knows?’

  After dropping her to Sydney Hospital we drive down Ward Avenue, where the streetlights are out, and see a solitary man in a trench coat waving frantically. I pull up and wind down the window.

  ‘Sir, you all right?’

  He says, ‘I’m losing control of myself.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I’m developing homelessness.’

  ‘Developing?’

  I’m curious about his use of words, as if being homeless was an illness. I guess it could happen like that. You lose your job, hit the bottle, can’t pay rent, get evicted, crash on a friend’s lounge, get kicked off that, then walk around and end up asleep in a doorway. Or, as one man once described it to me, ‘start camping in the city’.

  ‘Last week I wasn’t so bad,’ the man says. ‘I did some window-washing, had spare change, bought some milk and cereal, cut a banana on top. I was in a hostel, it was pretty good. But this week’s gone to shit and I’m back on the street.’

  ‘What’s for breakfast now?’ asks John.

  ‘Whatever I find,’ says the man.

  We drop him at hospital to see a social worker. Afterwards John says, ‘Could’ve been me, that guy, you know.’ And I remember his comment about Missionbeat.

  He says, ‘I was thinking about a spot in Woolloomooloo under the railway bridge. I’ve had my eye on it. I don’t mind the tramps down there. You can find some quality half-eaten food in bins these days; you’d be surprised.’

  ‘If you eat hospital sandwiches you’ll eat anything,’ I say.

  I’m glad Mick came through with a unit for John to stay in. But it’s only temporary. What happens next month, when Mick gets a full-paying tenant?

  ‘Why don’t you find your own place like I did?’ I ask him.

  ‘And seal my fate?’ he replies. ‘You need to stop pretending you’ll get your girl back.’

  My heart sinks and I feel defensive. He knows less about Kaspia and me than I know about him and Antonio. We’re friends as well as colleagues and we have a close bond, yet we’re also private people who don’t talk very much about life outside work. Most of us at Bondi Station are good at keeping work and home life separate. I know he’s been with Antonio roughly as long as I’ve been with Kaspia, but every relationship and every separation is different. It’s not getting an apartment on your own that seals your fate. It’s the loss of hope for a reconciliation that does it.

  Victor, one of our regular psychiatric patients, has been drinking again. His girlfriend usually calls us, fearing for her life. Victor turns violent quickly and sometimes needs restraining. This is not an easy task. He reckons he’s a former Israeli Defense Forces commando who once ‘killed hundreds of Arabs in their sleep’. I used to think it was a grandiose delusion. But once I got to know Victor I started to suspect his IDF story might actually be true.

  We ascend the stairs of his Housing Commission block cautiously, remembering last week down in Little Bay, the man and his cricket bat. I tell John we should wait for the cops, but he keeps going. Of late he’s been more reckless than usual.

  John raps on the door. We both stand to the side, a habit of situational awareness we’re not even conscious of. We shouldn’t be doing this, not without cops, not with Victor.

  Victor’s girlfriend opens up and I follow John in. The alcohol fumes in the unit are potent. Victor’s in the lounge room, wearing nothing but underpants. In his hands are two long knives, their blades pointed down. When he sees us he begins to swish them about like he’s some kind of ninja, spitting and grunting and growling in anger. I scan the room then try to retreat the way we entered. But Victor’s girlfriend stands in the doorway.

  ‘Help him!’ she orders, hands on her hips.

  I feel for the button on my portable radio, the duress alarm. As I push it for the second time in less than a fortnight I trust the system is working, that the number is logged, that alarms will go off in our distant control room, that police will be sent.

  ‘Settle down, Victor. You know what’ll happen if police see all this,’ says John.

  But Victor dances closer, waving his knives, his eyes wide and mad. He likes to remind us he’s a ruthless assassin, but it’s the first time we’ve seen him with knives.

  He moves to within an arm’s length of John, but John stands his ground, hands raised in defence.

  ‘John!’ I yell urgently, my call to retreat. I want to run but won’t leave my partner, and he still isn’t budging. Has he lost all common sense?

  A door bangs open behind me, the door to the street. Police pile into the room and John steps back. A sergeant points a taser, yelling, ‘Put the knives down, Victor. Put them down, or I’ll shoot!’

  But Victor ignores him, keeps on with his antics.

  ‘We’re here to help you. Drop the knives!’

  Victor growls again, then lunges for the sergeant. The cop pulls the trigger. The double barbs fly out and pierce Victor’s chest. A charge hits the cables and he drops to the floor.

  His girlfriend starts to shriek and curse in horror. A moment ago she begged us for protection. Now she pounces on the sergeant, grabs him round the neck, punches at his head. She’s dragged off by the others and handcuffed on the ground.

  After I watch Victor and his girlfriend being taken away I go back inside. John’s still there, frozen in thought. Why didn’t he leave when he had the chance? We could have been knifed; he must have known that. But he’s not at his best and I choose to say nothing; a lecture’s the last thing he needs right now, I’m sure.

  It’s 3 am and we’re parked on the corner of Oxford and Palmer. We watch the drunks stumble in the gutters, clutching pizzas, waiting for taxis. A young punter knocks on my window, while two of his friends snigger behind him.

  I wind down my window just a few inches.

  ‘Mate,’ says the guy, ‘can you breathalyse me? I need to prove to those bouncers that I’m not really drunk.’

  ‘Fucking idiot,’ John says, loud enough for the guy to hear. I put up the window and shut th
e world out again.

  When another man knocks a few minutes later I try to ignore him. But then I see that it’s Raymond, a friend of a friend who thinks he’s a gangster. He wears ghetto fashions: an oversized T-shirt that looks like a nightie and a big baseball cap. But his best accessory is a stainless-steel grill that he clips to his teeth. Last year he turned up at a Sugartime afterparty, tried selling cocaine. I asked him to leave, politely of course. And here he is now. What does he want?

  ‘Hey Ben, yo!’ he says, flashing his grill. I open the window and he reaches inside to shake my hand. John looks at him suspiciously.

  Raymond laughs. ‘You boys waitin’ for a dude to get whacked?’

  I say, ‘Raymond, meet John. John, meet Raymond.’

  ‘Yo,’ Raymond says, nodding at John. He glances around, then leans through the window. ‘You want some Armani? Suits I’m talkin’, I’ve got thirty. Need to offload ’em. Gotta do it right now, know what I mean? Rock-bottom dollar. Genuine product. Cool if it’s no, yo. How about candy? Candy-cane maybe? To get through the night? How about that?’

  John’s eyes light up now.

  ‘Gold dust? Pepsi cola? Know what I mean?’

  ‘How much?’ asks John.

  I look at my partner and see he’s not joking.

  ‘For you boys, cost price, yo.’

  John takes out his wallet, looking for money.

  We’re out in the open on a Darlinghurst corner with hundreds of punters milling around, not to mention the cops I can see on patrol. So I tell Raymond, ‘All good, mate. See you round, eh?’

  ‘No sweat, yo,’ he says. ‘Take it easy now, boys.’

  John starts up the ambulance, does a U-turn up Oxford. ‘Where’d you find him?’

  Before I can reply, the radio cuts in and we’re given a case.

  ‘I want Raymond’s number,’ John demands. ‘Understand me?’

  Then he flicks on the siren and goes through a red.

  Our last patient tonight is a man with angina, a welcome relief from the drunks and assaults. Ron is seventy, a retired police sergeant. He is friendly and chatty on the way to St Vinnies. It’s 3.30 am and I warn him about how wild it can be at the hospital. But he knows about that. He worked at Rose Bay as a cop in the eighties. I ask if The Gap was busy then too. The question throws him off kilter and his smile fades away.

  Ron closes his eyes, says, ‘That place gives me nightmares. It’s always been bad. The Gap made me quit. One day I just walked and never came back.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘A fuck-up, that’s what. A guy on the edge who wanted to jump and was there for two hours, driving us nuts. He was wasting our time, and I told him directly, if he wanted to jump he should bloody get on with it. And that’s what he did. The guy bloody jumped. Those were the days before we knew about counselling. I said the wrong thing and I’ve carried the burden.’

  Our monitor’s beeping as Ron’s heart rate goes up. He puts his hand to his chest. It’s time to change the subject.

  Negotiating with someone at The Gap is all very well if they have a change of heart and come back from the edge. But if it goes the other way, what then? I’m grateful it’s never happened to me, although it could any day. The mind of a person standing on the edge is a slowly ticking time bomb that we try to defuse before it’s too late. A few careless words are like cutting the wrong wire.

  We stop for the sunrise on the way back to Bondi station. We park at the north end of the beach and take in the view.

  ‘What if things start improving with you and Antonio, now you’ve moved out?’

  ‘Move out and it’s over, I told you before.’

  We sit there in silence, the sun on our faces.

  Time apart is important; it offers space for reflection, realisation and progress. Even the counsellor Kaspia and I saw together told us that separation helps ‘maintain our identity’. Moving out is not the end. It might have the opposite effect, might refresh the relationship. At least, I tell myself that.

  Surf lifesaving veterans, their speedos printed with BONDI, walk slowly up the ramp, dripping from an early swim. They smile and give us a wave, oblivious to the night we’ve had. Japanese tourists in sun-visor caps line up their slippers in neat rows before testing the sand with their toes.

  John points to the clifftops.

  ‘Albatross – see it?’

  The bird is a beauty. It rides on the currents of air for a while then, spying a fish in the blue depths below, plummets like a missile and pierces the sea.

  ‘Ever wish you’d been born as a bird?’ John asks.

  The albatross rises above the surface again, wings laden with water.

  ‘Yeah, sometimes,’ I say. ‘What about you?’

  ‘All the time,’ he replies.

  CHAPTER 8

  Christmas is only one week away. I go to Bronte on my second day off and park on Pacific Street outside the apartment block Kaspia and I used to live in. I loved this place. It was a charmed life we had together, despite the arguments. I take a short cut to the beach down the side of the block, just as I did every day when we lived here.

  The surf is no good so I throw out a blanket, read a book in the sun. I keep looking around to see if Kaspia’s here but remember it’s Thursday, a day she’s at work.

  The beach is deserted. It’s different on weekends, but weekends don’t mean much with the odd hours we work; penalty rates, maybe. That’s about it. Sometimes I feel I must look indulgent, surfing or relaxing at the beach on a weekday. It’s the way I come down from the adrenalin of work. But people might wonder what million-dollar business has allowed me such leisure. Or perhaps they imagine I’m an unemployed bum.

  No wonder paramedics’ relationships can be troubled. We work while others play and play while others work. Days off in the week might be calm in the suburbs, and the parks may be empty, galleries uncrowded, but we end up on our own in the middle of the week while our partners are alone on weekends, surrounded by couples and families.

  My manager calls me while I’m still at the beach to offer me a day shift tomorrow. It’s overtime rates, at Paddington station.

  I’ll be teamed up with Tracy, a vivacious, young ambo new in the job. She’s awfully nice; too sweet, some have said. She’s got rosy red cheeks and her blonde hair is braided with ribbons. She looks far too innocent for ambulance work, but in reality she’s been on the road for months, so it’s doubtful she has any innocence left. It doesn’t take long for rookies like her to grow the thick skin they need to survive.

  We’re sent to a drowning at Elizabeth Bay. A man saw his neighbour fall into her pool. Tracy usually drives like a nana, but today she’s on fire and we get there in no time. A man waves us down.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Tracy says, ‘I’ll follow with the gear.’

  Running is a no-no. It makes people panic. You might lose your footing, fall over, get hurt, and if you do reach your patient you’ll end up too breathless to be of any use. But I make an exception. I run up the side path, hurdle a gate and land with a stumble. I look up and I see her, an elderly woman, facedown in the pool, her nightie ballooning around her in the water.

  I pull off my boots and whip off my shirt, then I jump into the shallows, half-swimming, half-wading. I grab the patient’s shoulder, roll her over. She’s in her late seventies, her face pale and slack-jawed. To me she looks dead, but I drag her out and drain her airway.

  Tracy arrives, lugging equipment. I’m waist deep in water as we work on the woman. Tracy does the compressions and I ask how she managed to open the gate. She giggles a little, as she pumps up and down, and tells me she simply lifted the latch.

  Another crew turns up and we all work together. We continue our efforts while loading the patient onto our stretcher. Then we drive her to St Vinnies, doing CPR in the back. I do compressions with one hand, while holding on to a bar for support with the other, as the ambulance bounces over median strips and gutters. CPR in a moving vehicle isn’t that effe
ctive, but we’re committed now. After reaching the hospital, the senior doctor calls time of death a minute later. It’s another anticlimax I can add to the list.

  I’m used to that feeling, the deflation I get after cardiac arrests. Even though so few of them make it, our monthly newsletter is full of survivors, photos of those who’ve returned from the dead. They’re sometimes presented with little heart badges, trophies or watches, supplied by the company that makes our defibrillators. Everyone’s smiling: the patient, the families, the brave paramedics, those who can say they finally saved one. And the ambos look happier than the people they’ve saved. One day I might also appear in a photo, presenting a patient with a near-death memento. But with my luck it’s doubtful.

  We return to the station. Tracy thanks me for making the rescue. She tells me she’s thinking of starting a club with a group of her girlfriends, a paramedic women’s club that will meet once a month to talk about other careers.

  ‘The Society of Ladies, we’ll call it,’ she says. ‘We’ll chat about dream jobs: the life of a florist or how to run a pet shop, that kind of thing.’

  She’s been here five minutes and is already plotting escape. For me it was different. As a brand-new recruit I was keen for the action, the trauma, the drama. I sat near the radio waiting for a call; I couldn’t get enough. I dreamt about jumping into swimming pools with my trousers still on to save unconscious women.

  ‘We’ll meet wearing dresses and bitch about uniforms,’ Tracy tells me as we drive.

  Maybe to keep our nightmares at bay, all we need is high tea: some scones and cream and a cup of Earl Grey.

  After I’ve put on a dry pair of pants, we head to Waterloo for a man who’s experiencing psychosis. His apartment is decorated with pages he’s torn from pornographic magazines, framed and hung up. One centrefold model holds a mean-looking dog and a bundle of chains. Our patient has stars tattooed on his face, and when I lift up his shirtsleeve to take a BP I see another tatt of a woman with her legs spread wide.