Jerry shakes his head. ‘A good save for sure, but the guy was a scumbag. Big drug dealer, it turned out. Probably flogging bad shit to young kids a week later, messing up teenagers’ lives, getting them hooked, killing them. When I think of that it makes me wonder if I really did the right thing, you know, sticking my finger in his heart.’
In a Waterloo park we know too well, there’s a man lying in a bush. He’s overdosed on heroin and we jab him with Narcan. A few minutes later he’s awake. Instead of stumbling off, he looks at us and begins to cry.
‘What’s going on, buddy?’ Jerry says.
‘I always wanted to be a paramedic like you,’ he sniffs, wiping his nose. ‘It was my dream.’
‘What happened?’ I ask, putting a hand on his shoulder.
‘Shit happened, that’s what,’ he replies, looking down at his track marks. ‘I fucked up.’
We feel sorry for the guy. Fucking up is easy. I offer to find him a sandwich and orange juice at the hospital, get him some help, a referral to rehab perhaps. But he asks for a lift to Kings Cross instead, no doubt to score again. We take him to the hospital a few blocks from the Cross and watch him exit and walk down the road. I reflect on the part we have played in the cycle of addiction.
As we leave the hospital, Jerry mentions the name of a former paramedic we sometimes see shooting up at the injecting room on Kellett Street. Hers is another tragic story: a highly qualified woman who used to save victims of heroin in the nineties, when overdose deaths were rife. They say she burnt out and started taking morphine from the ambulance safe. After she got sacked she moved on to heroin. Every now and then we come across her doing mouth-to-mouth on an overdose victim before giving us a perfect handover laced with expletives.
Family conflicts are common this time of year, and we’re frequently called to anger-related trauma. In a fit of rage a man has punched a window with such force that one of his fingers has been sliced clean off. He’s out on the street and gripping his wrist in pain, his hand bound with a shirt. His amputated finger lies among shattered glass.
We wrap his finger in plastic and fold an icepack around it. Some people put their amputated parts directly on ice, but that can turn out badly. Once I treated a man who lost his nose after walking through a window and his friends put his snout directly on ice. When I went to fish it out it was stuck to an ice cube. Only after warming it with my breath was I able to peel the thing off.
As we drive to Sydney Hospital, Jerry says, ‘Did you hear about the job the Naremburn ambos did last Saturday?’
‘No. What?’
‘They were kicking back at the station, watching a cooking show on the ABC, and the TV chef was slicing a carrot in a close-up and suddenly the screen cut to black and some unrelated promo comes on. Well, guess what? A minute later they’re sent to ABC Studios for a lacerated finger.’
Even our patient, with one finger less, laughs out loud.
Christmas is over, but calls to The Gap haven’t yet abated. Before 6 pm we’re sent to Watsons Bay. We’re relieved to see the cops already there, chatting to a woman who is standing like a statue on the edge, her black dress rippling in the breeze. Her name is Courtney. A young constable is doing the talking, but he’s getting nowhere. ‘Excuse me, miss!’ he repeats, trying to get her attention, like a kid in a classroom. I offer to help.
‘Go for it, mate,’ he says with relief.
It turns out he wasn’t loud enough. When I call to her she replies, ‘I can’t hear you!’ It’s the sound of the ocean, a big swell below, that drowns out our voices. I ask Courtney to take a step back so we can have a conversation. She turns and moves towards me, but only to take off her jewellery and lay it on the ground, before saying, ‘Can you give this to Andrew?’
Andrew’s my way in to the conversation. I ask about him and Courtney tells me how he’s left her, how they’re having a separation, and she’s the one at fault. It sounds like she’s had an affair that her husband’s found out about. I tell her I’m separated too, that I’m hanging on to hope that things’ll work out. But Courtney is talking with despair, talking more like John.
The constable comes over and whispers to me that Andrew’s arrived at the scene. I ask the constable to wait with Courtney while I talk to the husband, who is standing with Jerry and the other cops about twenty metres away. Andrew is shaking, his eyes tense with fear. ‘Tell her I love her. Tell her that, will you? I love and forgive her.’
When I go back to Courtney and pass on the message, she cries and says she doesn’t believe me. She moves closer to the edge. The constable beside me says, ‘She’s gunna go, she’s gunna go …’ I ignore him and get Courtney’s attention again. I tell her how genuine Andrew sounded about forgiveness, how fearful he looked.
‘Think about the good times you could have with him again,’ I say. ‘He sounds like he adores you. Come on, take my hand, take it for Andrew, for yourself, for love.’ She turns and steps towards me and takes my hand. The constable and I help her climb back over the fence.
As I carry Courtney’s high heels to the ambulance I try to lighten the mood.
‘How did I go?’ I ask her.
She laughs through tears and says, ‘Not bad, but a little bit Oprah.’
A little bit Oprah? John will love that when I tell him.
CHAPTER 13
New Year’s Eve is a failure. I choose not to work it, hoping I’ll be invited to a party, make some new friends. But my phone doesn’t ring and I find myself walking down to Circular Quay on my own, through jubilant masses of couples and families, past smiling revellers with streamers and whistles and glow-sticks. I look for a place to watch the fireworks from, but I’ve left it too late. I get caught in a crowd crush on the corner of Albert and Phillip, behind the concrete monstrosity of the Cahill Expressway, which blocks out completely any view of the harbour. All I can do is listen to the fireworks, the whistling and cracking of rockets exploding, the thudding like that of incoming mortars, shaking the buildings and echoing through the city.
I’ve never cared much for new year’s resolutions, and I’m not superstitious. But Kaspia sees signs and omens everywhere, and I begin to worry that she might make some grand realisations and resolutions that will affect our future together, as she enters the new year alone.
I try going for a drink at a local small bar, but the other booths ring out with laughter and conversation as I sit on my own, looking like I expect company that never turns up. So I go home and lock myself away again. I write a little, and read and listen to some blues on vinyl. I don’t need to go out; I have enough supplies. Over the course of four days I eat two-minute noodles, a handful of frankfurters, and a few meals I get delivered. I drink six beers. This would be several less than Jerry would’ve had, and considerably less than John.
As for John, late on my last day off I call his phone but it goes straight to voicemail. I think about getting out and driving down to see him uninvited, but change my mind. Then I consider going to Balmain for some lunch, hoping to bump into Kaspia, but change my mind about that too. No one likes a stalker.
My shift back with Jerry begins with the unexplained death of a man in his fifties. His apartment’s another museum of loneliness: bottles of spirits, a marijuana bong, the director’s cut of the French film Betty Blue on VHS. As far as we can tell there’s no evidence of foul play, no self-inflicted wounds, no empty pill packets. Just a body, and the stagnant odour of isolation.
Guarding the scene when we leave is Wendy, the ‘hottest cop at Waverley’ according to her colleagues. She recently did a long-term undercover operation disguised as a sex worker in the Cross. She loitered on street corners with a lipstick and pistol in her handbag. When I ask her why she’s back in uniform, she looks annoyed. Going undercover was the worst job of her career, she tells me. Not because of the criminals and customers, but because of all the pesky police cars doing laps of the block just to check her out in her miniskirt and knee-high boots.
Observing
the talent on the street has always been a way emergency workers pass time between calls. Few of us can deny we’ve given running commentary on pedestrians – their fashions, their faces, their interactions – all from the safety of our ambulances. Only occasionally does a foolish paramedic overstep the line and wind down the window. Less than a month ago, Kaspia told me she’d been sitting at a bus stop on Oxford Street minding her own business when an ambulance crawled past and a paramedic leant from the passenger window and said, ‘Hmmm, yes please!’ Kaspia told me not to worry; she reminded me she was a burlesque dancer, and that it wasn’t the first time she’d received such a comment. But for a good day or two I was furious.
A call to a George Street hotel forces us to scoff the dinner we’ve been eating in the front seat of the ambulance. In the foyer, one of the guests is hyperventilating. His chest is heaving, his hands are in a spasm.
The easiest treatment for anxiety-related hyperventilation is a paper bag over the face, or an oxygen mask on low. But there’s a better way, a more challenging but sustainable solution to calm a patient down: reassurance and breathing techniques. Luckily, Jerry and I share a preference for the latter approach. We both enjoy the fun of running impromptu meditation sessions with our patients. As a qualified yogi, Jerry has quite the knack for it. So does John, when he’s in the mood. And it’s become a sort of challenge between the three of us: how quickly, without the aid of a paper bag, we can calm a patient down and bring their breathing back to normal.
Jerry sinks into a leather lounge near our patient and closes his eyes. He’s telling me, in his own way, that he wants me to run the session today. I don’t mind.
Pacing back and forth, I guide the patient through a meditation with creative visualisation. In his mind I paint the picture of a placid lagoon on a distant Pacific island. I take him drifting on the surface of these tranquil waters, gently, effortlessly, in the late afternoon. The foyer is quiet now, apart from my voice, which I try to make as lilting as a tropical breeze. The only sound my patient can hear is the distant hush of surf on the reef. I tell the anxious man that he’s weightless, in body and mind. He lives here, in this perfect paradise, like a castaway. There are no worries in this carefree place.
Ten minutes in, the man is completely relaxed. His eyes stay closed when I’m done. And when I turn around it seems the rest of the guests in the foyer are in the same state. They all look asleep. I wake Jerry with a nudge and we quietly slip from the scene.
After lunch we get sent to a brothel we’ve been to before. It’s been repainted in primary colours, though I can still see stains under the new coat as we carry our gear up the stairs. We pass rooms with nothing in them but a mattress on the floor and a scattering of used condoms and syringes. Reception’s behind chicken wire, and the only room service the place offers is a courtesy ambulance call.
Before the injecting centre opened round the corner there were shifts where we’d get several overdoses at this place alone. Recently we revived a man in Room 18; he was unconscious, with a half-full syringe still hanging out of his arm. Before we could put the needle in a sharps container, a working girl who was hovering over us reached down and pulled it out of his vein, injecting herself with the leftovers.
Craig, an excitable Paddington paramedic with a closely shaved scalp glinting like chrome, arrives to help us with a combative drug-affected patient. But he only makes things worse. Craig crashes into the room as if entering a boxing ring. Rude or aggressive attitudes rarely succeed in the clubs and brothels of the Cross. Amphetamines and certain drug combinations can make people volatile, especially when they’re extremely sleep deprived. These patients are as fragile as pick-up sticks but can blow up like landmines. To avoid being a trigger I always make sure I approach them cautiously, with a passive manner and disarming smile. It’s not fail-safe, but I’ve found this demeanour reduces the chance of aggression.
Craig yells at a scarred man who’s holding a cigarette between his teeth. ‘Put that bloody smoke out, mate! We’re using oxygen, for fuck’s sake.’ The whole room is full of drug-affected people who’ve come in trying to help, their eyes darting this way and that. When Craig barks orders they all begin to bristle. The smoking man gets up and tries putting his cigarette out on Craig’s arm. Craig pushes him into another guy with jail tattoos, who promptly decks the smoking man, sending him flying onto the bed. In no time it’s an all-out brawl, with the one and only exit blocked. Jerry asks for urgent police assistance on his radio. Into the mayhem of the fighting mob our patient decides to projectile-vomit. I’ve seen it coming and I press my body into a corner, using our oxygen bag as a shield.
Trapped by the brawl in another corner, Jerry calls out to me, ‘Can you believe this time last week I was fishing?’
If only our partners, our friends, our children could see us in these moments, it might inspire greater patience when we come home cranky. The pressures of the job have certainly been a factor in the arguments I’ve had with Kaspia, mainly after night shifts. I’m forever asking her to judge my behaviour with consideration for the night I’ve had. But as much as our partners might try to understand, they never get to witness the wrestles in brothels, the screaming parents of critical children, or the times we lock eyes with the dying. They might attempt empathy, and for that we are grateful, but even a good imagination can’t replicate the madness of reality.
As we circle Kings Cross, waiting for a call, it feels like we’re cruising for business. In that sense we’re not so different from the street-corner sex workers and dealers and pimps. We all make a living off the lost and the lonely, and not many people know these streets like we do, or work quite as late.
Like John, Jerry doesn’t mind a chat with the working girls in the Cross. We park on Bourke Street off Darlinghurst Road, and the transgender girls fix their make-up in our side mirrors. John knows a few by name, as does Jerry.
‘Did John tell you about the tranny who stole his defibrillator from the scene of an overdose?’ says Jerry.
I shake my head.
‘She was spotted a few hours later strutting along Victoria Street with it slung over her shoulder like a handbag.’
We laugh, and Jerry winds down his window and asks the women how business is going. They reply with baritone grumbles that it’s slow, far too slow. I sense we’re cramping their style, scaring off customers, so I start the engine and pull onto William Street.
Ten minutes later, as we cross the Forbes and Liverpool intersection, Jerry recognises one of the women who plies her trade outside the Christian Science Church. Her name’s Belinda. When she sees Jerry she waves at us and smiles. I toot the horn for him.
‘She’s so lovely, a really lovely person,’ he says. ‘Last time we picked her up she asked me to be her boyfriend. Then she saw my wedding ring. Man, was she crushed.’
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ I say. I was there, after all. She was probably wondering why he had such a cheap-looking wedding ring. He’d bought it on eBay for a dollar, not wanting to wear his real one at work.
I tell Jerry I bumped into Belinda a few weeks ago, on a day off, at the Surry Hills post office. I was sending a Christmas package to some friends overseas when I caught sight of her at the island bench. She was holding a card with a laughing Santa on it, and it seemed like she was trying to think of something to write. She was thoughtfully turning a ballpoint pen between her finger and thumb. I watched her as I put my package together. She didn’t recognise me, at least not at first, probably as I wasn’t in uniform. After a while she gave up and just slipped the blank card into the envelope, then carefully wrote ‘To Dad’ on the front.
That’s when I decided to speak up.
‘Belinda? Hi, I’m the paramedic working with Jerry. We’ve picked you up a couple of times in the ambulance.’
‘Oh, yeah!’ She smiled and appeared a little shy, perhaps embarrassed she’d been identified by someone knowing a bit too much about her line of work.
‘How’s
Jerry?’ she asked. ‘He’s such a sweet guy; it’s been at least a month since you guys took me in.’
‘He’s fine, always looking out for you near the church.’
‘Yeah, a lot of people do,’ she said, giggling.
When I asked about the card she sighed despondently. Her greatest wish was to spend Christmas with her father, she explained, but it wasn’t going to happen.
‘Last time he told me to only come home when I’m clean. I love him and I know he loves me, but I can’t shake the addiction. Everything I do is for heroin.’
She said she was sending the card so her father would know she was still alive. I offered to help her write a few lines in it, but she said she had nothing to say, no positive update to give him. Then she spoke of the countless times she’d come close to getting off the street, away from the drugs and the sleaze. For years, seemingly kind and wealthy men had given her a taste of the good life, promising the world to her. And each time, one after the other, they’d thrown her back again.
‘To be a saviour is a man’s fantasy, right? But men can’t follow through. They’re all talk.’
Belinda sealed her envelope. Tears quivered on her lashes. She put on her sunglasses.
‘Nowadays I play on their fantasies for money. It’s all just an act. I play the victim, they play the saviour. That’s how it is.’
For a moment I wondered if she played the victim with paramedics too, or if her victimhood was less of an act with us. Her tears looked pretty real to me.
Belinda couldn’t even scrape together fifty cents for a postage stamp from her purse, so I gave her the money. Before I could turn away she kissed me goodbye on the cheek.
‘Thanks so much, I owe you one,’ she said. ‘Tell Jerry to have a happy Christmas, won’t you? He knows where I’ll be.’
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