When I recount the story to Jerry he gets a pang of pity and wants to go back and give her a hug. But I tell him to let her be, let her do what she has to, let her save her own life.
‘You’re married with kids,’ I remind him. ‘Don’t get her hopes up.’
Jerry’s not the first paramedic I’ve worked with who has a rescue fantasy. We all probably have one, to some extent. But Belinda doesn’t need another knight in shining armour.
As we leave Kings Cross on our way back to Bondi, Jerry points out a building next to a 7-Eleven.
‘See that joint?’
I nod.
‘Swingers club,’ he says.
‘How d’you know?’
‘Went in there on a job once. Guy passed out. There were people humping all over the place.’
I tell Jerry that a few years back, before I met Kaspia, I worked with a swinger. A paramedic swinger in Newcastle. One afternoon the swinger’s wife called the ambulance station and asked to speak to me. She said she’d seen me in uniform up the road at Bakers Delight and thought I looked sexy and wanted to invite me to a daytime party with seven of her middle-aged girlfriends. I’d have to knock on the door wearing nothing but a giant red ribbon. She told me I could do whatever I wanted, with any of them, or all at once.
‘Please, please, please tell me you went along!’ cries Jerry, as if in agony.
I shake my head. ‘Couldn’t do it. I’ve got principles, see. There’s no way in this world I’ll wear a red ribbon.’
Jerry doesn’t laugh. He’s genuinely incredulous, furious. ‘Unbelievable! Wait till I tell John about this,’ he says. ‘That’ll get him talking again. He’ll give you a bloody hiding for missing out on a good old-fashioned orgy. For crying out loud, what were you thinking?’
We reach the Junction and Jerry suggests we go by John’s place on our way back to the station. We’d planned to do this anyway, but now Jerry has some gossip to make John laugh there’s all the more reason.
I’ve hesitated dropping in on John till now. Perhaps I should have visited on Christmas Day, and I almost did last week. But what if he didn’t want to see me? I respect people’s privacy. Lately, John hasn’t been welcoming to social offers from even his closest of friends, and I don’t force myself on anyone. Since splitting with Kaspia I’ve taken up the hermit life myself; I know how it is. Turning up with Jerry doesn’t feel as weird or intrusive.
The apartment’s on the ground floor of a nondescript unit block. In the stairwell there’s a low shelf, a communal library stocked with large-print books; a clue to the age demographic of the other tenants.
‘A foyer library should be warning enough to anyone without a walking stick thinking of moving in,’ jokes Jerry.
I’m about to knock on the door but Jerry stops me.
‘Wait. Let’s creep to the front window, see if we can startle John naked or doing something embarrassing, okay?’
That scenario is precisely why I didn’t want to come uninvited. I doubt John will be up for Jerry’s schoolboy shenanigans. But I reluctantly follow my partner outside and into a garden of thick hydrangeas.
Against the window we cup our hands over our eyes and peer through the glass. Between venetian slats we can see John sunk into a lounge, watching TV. It looks like another repeat of Dancing with the Stars. He must have heard us, because without turning his head he calls out, ‘Stop fucking around, will you? Front door’s open.’
We let ourselves in and John greets us from where he lies. He doesn’t get up. The place is a mess. The odour of stale beer and cheap wine lingers under the sickly sweet scented candles burning on the mantelpiece.
‘Nice,’ I say, nodding to the candles.
‘Love Candles,’ says John. ‘That’s what’s written on the packet. Good for nothing.’
‘Come on, John,’ says Jerry with a chuckle. ‘You’ve never had a problem in the love department. Who’re you kidding?’
John sighs. ‘Yeah, well, there’s only one lover I’m interested in and he’s fucked off, hasn’t he.’
‘Guess there’s no point telling you that Ben here denied himself an orgy in Newcastle once.’
‘You did?’ John asks.
I nod. ‘They wanted to put a ribbon on me.’
‘Like a pageant queen.’
‘Exactly. So I objected.’
‘Fair enough,’ says John, much to Jerry’s disappointment. Then he asks if we want some beers.
Jerry points to the crates of empty bottles in a corner by the kitchen. ‘Looks like you’ve drunk them all already,’ he says. ‘That’s gotta be, like, fifty empties right there.’
‘Want to bring me another case? Just pile it up on the stretcher like Ben and I did.’
‘I don’t remember that I did that.’
‘You watched me, that’s guilty enough.’
He’s pleased to see us, but he doesn’t look well. He seems lethargic and his face is drawn. I wonder how many visitors he’s had since his breakup with Antonio. Jerry reckons not many. People think flamboyant men like John are never short of friends. They always have a party to be at. It’s easy to underestimate his loneliness, and it looks to me like he’s been on the lounge for days. John has skipped his gym sessions for a fortnight, he says. It’s the height of summer and he loves swimming too, but hasn’t been in the water since he did laps at Clovelly a few weeks back with Jerry.
‘We’ll come round after work on Tuesday, if you like,’ Jerry says to John. ‘I’ll bring those beers.’ Beer might not be the ideal drink for depressed men to bond over. But if having beers allows John some company, so be it.
‘Sure,’ says John, ‘whatever. Just call me.’
He sounds noncommittal. And calling him hasn’t proven very successful to date.
I hear our control on the radio giving us an urgent call in Waterloo, an overdose. John hears it too. He shakes his head.
‘Fucking Waterloo,’ he says, pressing play on the repeat of Dancing with the Stars.
‘Go easy on those dancing celebrities, will you?’ Jerry says as we bid our farewell.
‘Dancing celebrities are all I’ve got,’ John replies. ‘Pull the door shut behind you.’
In the hallway, a nosy old woman peeking through the crack of her front door sticks her head out and asks if everything’s fine. It’s gossip-fishing most likely, rather than neighbourly concern.
‘Saw the uniforms, hope the guy’s all right,’ she says.
‘All good,’ I reply.
But as we walk away, I’m not so sure.
Lisa, an emergency nurse and one of John’s closest friends, is doing a rotation on the triage desk at Sydney Hospital. We see her when we drop off a patient and Jerry tells her how we visited John earlier and found him sitting on his own, watching TV on a sunny day.
‘He’s really out of sorts,’ she says. ‘He was up at St Vinnies yesterday, you know, getting seen by a psych registrar.’
No, we didn’t know that. Why wouldn’t he tell us? Did he feel ashamed about wanting help? Was he worried we’d see him as weak or troubled? Lisa says John’s sister had called him and insisted he go to hospital, refusing to take no for an answer. Lisa then met him out the back of Emergency and helped him slip through a fire door like a celebrity, like his idol Heath Ledger might’ve done.
‘Did he come in disguise?’ Jerry wants to know.
‘Sunglasses,’ she replies.
It’s a shame that seeing a counsellor is still a dirty secret for many of us. Once, when I had a few sessions at a corporate counselling service, I bumped into a high-ranking paramedic manager in the waiting room. It was such an awkward encounter that for several years afterwards neither of us could look the other in the eye. It shouldn’t be this way. I know that, and I also know it’s shifting, too slowly perhaps, but workplace cultures don’t change overnight.
‘Did he stay long?’ asks Jerry.
‘Not long. He got assessed and went home.’
Lisa went on to say that John seemed pretty wr
ecked, but he didn’t want to stay. The psych registrar wouldn’t keep him, anyway. While John was clearly depressed, the doctor felt he wasn’t an ‘acute risk’ to himself.
‘Getting pissed in the middle of the day and watching Dancing with the Stars on repeat sounds pretty acute to me,’ says Jerry.
Lisa shrugs. ‘Plenty of blokes do that, you’d be surprised. Besides, I’m not the doctor. What do I know.’ She got John to the hospital, and that’s an achievement.
A man raps on Lisa’s triage window and barks, ‘Hey, you! Nurse! I need some fucking help here. My tooth’s killing me!’
We leave her with the toothache and go out to the ambulance. It’s knock-off time, but the ten-minute drive to Bondi station is always a gamble. Even on overtime, if someone collapses and we’re the nearest resource, we’ll get the job. Heading back at the end of the day is just about the fastest we ever drive when we’re not on a mercy dash.
CHAPTER 14
Jerry and I take our coffees to the beach and chat to the lifeguards starting their shift. The swell is up at the southern end and dozens of surfers are competing for waves. Soft-sand runners ply their route by the sea wall where a couple of artists, up early, are working on a mural. A yoga session is taking place by the shoreline, near a man who’s fishing off the beach. On the boulevard in front of us a family of Sikhs walks past, followed by a model who one of the lifeguards thinks is famous, then a couple of Hasidic Jews and an old man with a parrot on his shoulder. This diverse beauty of Bondi is why I love the place, why it’s hard for me to leave.
At 8.30 am we get called to an intoxicated male, an Irishman in a backstreet. Nine out of ten times that we’re called to a drunk in daylight hours down here it’ll be for an Irishman. Most citizens of Bondi are unaware there are Irish ghettoes in their suburb. A unit block on Simpson Street is one such place. There’s a flat there with a missing front door, the rooms inside lined with mattresses on which dozens of backpackers sleep packed together for a fiver a night.
‘Where am I?’ the Irishman asks, rolling over on the footpath.
‘Dublin,’ says Jerry in an Irish accent.
The guy looks around, confused. ‘Ye shoor aboot dat? What pert a Dublin?’
We give him a lift to his hostel and put him to bed.
Later in the morning we’re driving through Vaucluse on the way back from a case when Jerry shouts, ‘Stop the ambulance! Quick!’
I brake and pull over. ‘What is it?’
Jerry opens his passenger door and gets out. In my mirror I see him walk ten metres back to some junk on the side of the road that looks like it’s there for the next council clean-up. Vaucluse is one of the richest suburbs in the country and there are people in vans who make a living by just picking up stuff here that people throw out.
When my partner comes back he is carrying a canvas, at least one by two metres, a painting I can’t see until he turns it around and holds it up to show me.
It’s a nude. A slightly bored-looking woman with a narrow waist and broad hips.
He lowers the painting and beams. Once Jerry saw the sketch of a nude on an old lady’s wall and studied it for ages, until she told him to take it as a gift. But this one, he reckons, is bound for the station.
Jerry puts the nude in the back of the ambulance and we go down New South Head Road. We’re halfway to the station when a call comes in for an old man fallen in Point Piper.
‘Damn it!’ says Jerry.
‘Let’s turf the nude,’ I say.
Jerry looks at me, incredulous. ‘Turf the nude? You crazy? We can’t do that! She’s a beauty, and worth a bit too.’
‘Worth a bit too? How do you know?’
‘Price tag on the back says $800.’
‘That’s not much.’
‘What do you mean? We just got an $800 painting for nothing! It’s going in the gallery.’
‘Gallery?’
‘Gallery! Ambulance station gallery, right beside The Gilmour and that one of Don Quixote. Now drive the bloody ambulance!’
I pick up speed along the bay, where million-dollar yachts are moored, and turn right past the police station. We arrive at the address a short time later.
Jerry and I are hoping the man will just need to be lifted off the ground, but he ends up needing more than that. His name is Harold and he may have been unconscious. He doesn’t know what day it is, so he needs a full assessment at the hospital. Luckily, Harold’s confused enough to think nothing of it when Jerry puts him into the ambulance beside our nude, her bosom inches from his face.
‘Oh, my! How lovely!’ the old man remarks with a smile, and he perks right up.
When we finally get the painting to Bondi, Jerry hangs it on the wall of the station and stands back, looking at it as proudly as if he’d painted it himself.
‘Mighty fine work,’ he says, nodding.
On closer inspection it isn’t too bad. Better than the rest of the art on the walls, that’s for sure.
The station phone rings and I expect it to be a manager alerting us to a complaint received from the public about a pair of paramedics seen loading up a nude from a Vaucluse council clean-up. But it’s only our controller with a job for us in Dover Heights. I breathe a sigh of relief.
It’s a mystery call, another ‘concern for welfare’ case. An elderly woman, Gladys, was meant to be meeting her friends for lunch but didn’t show up. They’re worried because her husband of fifty years died last week and the funeral was yesterday. We suspect our patient has simply double-booked or forgotten her appointment. But the man who was hanging behind his door is too fresh in our minds for us to be complacent.
There’s no answer when Jerry rings the bell of the brick veneer home, which is dwarfed on either side by box-like mansions. Jerry is about to return to the ambulance when I try the doorhandle and find it unlocked.
‘Let’s check inside,’ I say.
Jerry follows me in. I shout, ‘Hello? Ambulance here!’
‘You’re not an ambulance,’ Jerry says.
‘Very observant,’ I reply. ‘You check the back room, I’ll check the front.’
I don’t expect to find anything, so I’m caught off guard when I do. The bedroom is a bloodbath. The woman we’re looking for is on the floor, slumped against her dressing table, and she looks deceased.
‘Jerry!’ I call out. Then, ‘Gladys? Gladys, can you hear me?’
Crouching down, I feel for a pulse in her neck. I’m surprised to find she has one. It’s weak, and fast. Her chest suddenly heaves with a breath, then she opens her eyes, slowly, like her eyelids are heavy.
Behind me Jerry says, ‘Bloody hell,’ and goes to get some gear. He calls for backup on his way out the door.
The patient is pale as talcum, and isn’t speaking. She smells of alcohol; an empty bottle of sherry lies beside her. She has a large gash on her head from falling against the dresser. It’s where she’s lost all the blood from. I’m glad I’m wearing gloves.
I lay Gladys flat and raise her legs. Jerry’s at my side now, unzipping the red kit of dressings. He holds a trauma pad firmly on Gladys’s head, then wraps a roller bandage round it. I can’t palpate a blood pressure, meaning she’s almost bled out and is hypovolaemic.
Jerry gives Gladys oxygen while I start an IV and an infusion of Hartmann’s solution to make up for the blood loss. We need to raise her pressure. Once the line’s connected I pump the fluid through, then hang the bag on the handle of a drawer so I can go for a second IV. Jerry leaves to set up the stretcher. By the time he comes back, our patient’s more alert. Gladys stares at us and in a feeble voice she asks, ‘Are you angels?’
‘Hardly,’ Jerry snorts.
‘Am I still alive?’
‘Yes, you are,’ I say.
Gladys looks downcast.
‘But I wanted to be with my husband,’ she says.
I stop pushing the infusion and glance over at Jerry. His face is as solemn as mine.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.<
br />
The sadness we feel about Gladys slows us down for the rest of the day. But we have to leave work on a high, and Jerry does his best to lighten things up. Our final patient is a woman with emphysema who needs some oxygen. When I open our oxygen kit I’m horrified to see a banana skin lying there among the masks and tubes.
I mouth a swearword to Jerry and he gives a cheeky smile. He knows how much I hate the smell of bananas, how I can’t be in the ambulance when he’s eating one, how banana skins make me nauseous. A banana skin in the oxygen kit is a deliberate act of sabotage and it’s not the first time he’s done it. Last year, Jerry secretly put a banana skin under the driver’s seat of the ambulance in the height of summer without telling me. The smell drove me crazy until I searched high and low and discovered it there. Everyone at the station thought it was hilarious.
As we sign in to the ambulance’s data terminal the following night I remember it’s the date of Kaspia’s show. It would be easy for me to drop by in the ambulance on the pretext of a call. Jerry, with his appreciation of nudes, would love the burlesque too; he’s been to several shows already and delights in the nipple-tassel-twirling. But there’s a good chance Kaspia might see us in the shadows. And if she didn’t then our friend Russall, the director, would. A casual visit could backfire and mess up any chance I have of getting back together with her.
If I’m honest with myself, visiting the club wouldn’t really be about catching a glimpse of Kaspia again. It would be to see if any handsome men in the audience, impressed with her performance, were buying her drinks and trying to seduce her. I would be there for no good reason. Kaspia and I had never made an explicit vow of celibacy for our time of separation; it was just implied that we wouldn’t sleep with others. I guess we should have discussed the parameters of our breakup, the finer details. We should have been clear, to prevent these distrustful, shameful thoughts arising.
By 10 pm the city has half a dozen emergencies waiting for an ambulance. We’re sent into town and get one right away, a stabbing near Kings Cross Station. On the way I tell Jerry about a stabbing I went to earlier in the year outside a nightclub in the city. A man was standing on the street, looking at us expectantly when we pulled up, so I asked him if he knew where the patient was. He replied, ‘Right here.’ Then he turned around to show us the handle of a kitchen knife sticking out of his back.
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