The Gap

by Benjamin Gilmour

  I’ve never heard a controller so apologetic. ‘I can get the Paddington crew to go up there instead,’ she offers.

  ‘It’s okay, we’re closer,’ I say.

  Matt shakes his head. ‘That’s fucked,’ he says.

  But he knows as well as I do that we had the choice of a day off work and we chose to come in. The Gap was always a risk – more than a risk, if the past couple of months was anything to go by.

  I drive up there with lights, no siren. I go much faster than I have before. Suddenly this woman threatening to take her life matters ten times more to me than she might have done a week ago, when she would have been another ‘Gap job’.

  Three police cars are parked in a line, but there’s not a cop in sight. We ascend the path to Gap Bluff, which runs between bushes along the top. After a few rocky bends we see a huddle of police around a girl sitting on the safe side of the fence. She has red hair and facial piercings, and the cops have their handcuffs on her, not because she’s arrested, but to make it harder for her to get up and run to the cliff. A constable tells me they dragged her away from the edge. She struggles to shake them off, but they grip her arms firmly with black leather gloves.

  She yells, ‘Why are you doing this? Leave me alone! I was talking to my boyfriend, I was talking on the phone. Can’t I sit on the edge and talk to my boyfriend? It’s a free world, isn’t it. Let go of me – I haven’t done anything wrong!’

  I ask the cops to un-cuff her. I tell her my name and ask for hers.

  ‘Veronica,’ she spits.

  ‘You’re not in trouble,’ I say. ‘We’re worried about you, that’s all. Are you aware how many people die up here? We’re concerned for your safety.’

  ‘Bullshit you’re fucking concerned!’ she barks.

  Just as I’m about to say more I catch sight of a bunch of flowers tied with ribbon to the fence. The flowers are fresh and I realise they’re the ones that Donna and the others put there today. When I turn back I lock eyes with the Rose Bay Police inspector, who has come up the path. He has seen me notice the flowers and he quickly averts his gaze.

  I ask him, ‘This is the spot, isn’t it?’

  Without lifting his head he answers, ‘Yeah, it’s the spot. I’m sorry, mate.’

  Everyone goes quiet. Matt gets up and walks to the fence and looks out to sea. Perhaps he’s thinking he’ll catch sight of John, I don’t know. Veronica can tell something’s up. She frowns and looks around, confused.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ she asks.

  The cops don’t say anything; they just look at me standing in front of Veronica and then over at Matt. A young policewoman wipes her eye with her sleeve.

  ‘Some people we don’t reach in time, Veronica,’ I say. ‘Some people who we care about, we lose them. But with you we have a chance, understand?’

  Veronica doesn’t quite know what to make of her highly strung rescuers, of the emotion going round. It’s all too weird and she sighs and gives in. We help her to her feet and start down the track to the ambulance.

  After work I go to Bondi Beach for a swim. It’s dusk, shark feeding time I know, but I don’t give a damn. The clouds have disappeared and the waves are merely two foot. The winds that plagued the helicopter’s efforts to retrieve John’s body have long disappeared. But there’s no point searching for our friend anymore. It’s a waiting game now, to see if and when his body turns up.

  Diving into the ocean at the end of a shift is more than physical purification from the gore and bacteria. It’s the purging of sadness, a cleansing of the mind. It’s a ritual I rely on to help preserve my sanity. But as I plunge beneath the waves and come up on the other side I find myself gasping in panic, struggling to breathe. What if John were here now, close by? What if his sea-swollen body was tumbling along in one of these waves? What if I came face to face with him under water, his eyes wide open, looking right at me? He could be anywhere around. It wouldn’t be the first time a body from The Gap has drifted this far south. The thought is so terrible that my stomach churns and I begin to retch. Then the horror turns to anguish and I shed some tears, until I can’t distinguish between the taste of my tears and the taste of the sea.

  CHAPTER 16

  Two nights in a row I wake in a sweat from fitful sleep, once from a dream in which I was reading John’s suicide note. But John never left one of those. The police, along with Antonio and Mick, the paramedic whose house John was staying in, looked high and low, to no avail. I wasn’t surprised. John was cynical about suicide notes. He described them once as ‘terribly passé’, each essentially the same. I always disagreed with him on that point; I’ve read many, and there’s variety enough. There are heartfelt goodbyes, but also notes designed to punish, to heap guilt on those the person feels neglected or wronged them. John might not have left a note, but he left behind plenty of guilt, even for those who loved and supported him. And guilt is the cruellest of punishments. It lingers in unexpected ways, sometimes for years.

  As powerful a message as suicide may seem to the deeply despondent, it is tragically flawed if the intention is to punish others. Even if the targets do suffer because of it or, less likely, change for the better, how would the departed ever know, or benefit from it? You don’t need to take your life to make people listen, I wish I’d said to John. The line I’d learnt from him.

  Now he’s gone, I too feel guilt, but I don’t resist it. I sit with it. I reflect on my failings and where I could improve. But I will not punish myself. There’s nothing constructive in that.

  I share my feelings with Jerry when he arrives back at work. He nods in agreement. We can learn from this sadness, to be vigilant for the signs of depression in friends, to take these signs more seriously and reach out more assertively to those we know will not, or cannot, do it themselves.

  ‘He was pissed off with the world,’ says Jerry. ‘He shouldn’t have allowed one person to bring down his empire, his whole self. A single fucking breakup! He owed it to himself to get past those points, we all do. Get past them and you’ll be okay. He should’ve come for a swim with me, or at least stayed on the fucking lounge. Even time can heal.’

  Jerry signs out his restricted medications, then heats up his dinner in the microwave. Any scars from his assault seem well and truly healed, at least the physical ones.

  Thousands of city dwellers are still away on vacation and the streets are near deserted. Or so it seems. The poor, the lonely, the homeless and schizophrenic: few of them have holiday houses up the coast or luxury campers for touring in.

  ‘Can’t believe they sent you and Matt to The Gap,’ Jerry says, shaking his head. ‘You should take time off, mate, a week of sick leave. You know what John would say? Milk it, baby! If it was one of us who died, you or me for instance, he’d take a whole month off, guaranteed.’

  But until John’s body’s found, I can’t relax. And neither can Jerry. He was planning more leave, but tells me he wanted to work until John ‘washes up’. We’re suspended in time by an unanswered question, one that isn’t likely to be answered by the police, who are no longer searching. And the thought of John drifting out there all alone, or trapped under the rock-shelf, is truly unbearable. Like Jerry, I come to work to make myself feel like I’m ready to respond in case John is found.

  Jerry chuckles and says, ‘Lisa at St Vinnies reckons it’s a hoax, that John faked his own death, took a flight to Barbados, somewhere like that, to start a new life.’

  If only he’d chosen Barbados. Another if-only. I’ve met some survivors of suicide who’ve told me they didn’t want to die so much as stop living the life they had, and if there’d been an alternative, like vanishing to Barbados, they might have taken that. Suicidal ideations triggered by circumstances may be an indication that we need to reinvent ourselves and start afresh.

  Jerry turns on the TV. I’m curious about the different ways each paramedic in our crew has responded to John’s death. Some remain off-duty. Others, like Jerry and me, are back on th
e lounge John used to lie on, with his uniform shirt untucked and his rescue boots abandoned on the carpet.

  As we head out on a job Jerry turns up the radio. It’s Love Song Dedications with Richard Mercer on MIX 106.5, the soundtrack to our night shifts. John was a big fan of Love Song Dedications, until he broke up with Antonio. Listening to other people’s love stories isn’t much fun when your own is in turmoil. One caller who dedicated the Titanic theme song to her lover in jail was moving, I remember. But another who announced to his girlfriend and the country that, ‘If you drop a tear in the ocean, when you find it again, that’s when I’ll stop loving you’ was just too much for John. He slapped the radio like the thing had insulted him, then swore and changed the channel with a jab of his finger.

  While most of the city is turning in for the night, someone’s having a bad trip in a Bondi backstreet. Policemen are piled on top of a he-man who thrashes about in a drug-induced state. A small crowd of onlookers gathers on the footpath, some in pyjamas, to watch the entertainment. When I get out of the ambulance a policeman says, ‘Datura.’

  The plant Datura stramonium grows in abundance around the eastern suburbs. There’s a datura tree in the lane behind my terrace. Its flowers hang like soft pink bells from its branches, but the flower’s beauty is deceptive; those in the know refer to them as ‘devil’s trumpets’. To achieve the hallucinogenic effects of datura, some people boil the flowers down and drink the potion, while others smoke the leaves or swallow its seeds. Whatever the mode of consumption, datura is a gamble. Unlike with psilocybin mushrooms, a happy trip is not the norm and no one ever gets off lightly. An experienced user of hallucinogens once described datura to me as ‘a journey for life’. He took it twelve years earlier, mixed it into a cup of Milo, and was still in recovery. The handful of datura overdoses I’ve encountered all presented in a similar way: bloodcurdling screams, eyes wide with horror and violent struggles.

  ‘I can’t see! I’m blind. I’m blind!’ shrieks the man. One of datura’s side effects is temporary blindness, as profound pupil dilation paralyses the eyes.

  No wonder there are six cops holding him down.

  ‘He was all over the road,’ says the cop. ‘Lashing out in a panic. No one could touch him. Nearly got hit by a car.’

  We get some help to sedate the man, put him in padded restraints that attach to his wrists and his ankles, and take him to hospital. One of the cops gets in the front passenger seat and tells me that most of the police there came down from The Gap.

  ‘Another one over, a few hours back. Found a pair of slippers, velvet ones. There was nothing in the water, nothing on the rocks. Been a few this week, eh? Crazy times.’

  Less than a kilometre up the road from the hospital, in Potts Point, a woman has tumbled off her balcony. We’ve heard a few ambulances responding to falls already tonight. Two men in Coogee off a cliff by accident, and a drunk man off an overpass on the north side of town. Ever since John went over The Gap, the word ‘fall’ has made me feel sick. It makes me wonder what John must have felt with gravity wrenching him down. Was he looking at the disappearing railing above, the headland cliffs, the sky behind? Or was he facing the rocky shallows rushing towards him?

  Jerry guesses what I’m thinking. ‘We’ll be okay, we don’t know this lady,’ he says, flicking on the siren and pushing through an intersection.

  He’s right. We don’t know this lady. The thought should make things easier, yet I’m seeing John in all my patients and it changes how I am with them. Lots of paramedics work this way, imagining their patients are their parents, their children. To me, compassion comes without the need to superimpose the ones I cherish onto my patients. But I see how this helps to deepen the quality of care, and I know I’m doing it now with the image of John.

  The woman is lying on the concrete path under her third-floor balcony. She’s only semiconscious but manages to tell us she locked herself out and was scaling the wall to her balcony when she fell. Her pelvis has snapped, we’re sure of it, and one of her legs sticks out at an angle, her tibia protruding through the skin. I think of the photo that the tourist took of John on the rocks. His body seemed intact, Trevor said, and he looked surprisingly peaceful, as though he were asleep. At least there is that to keep hold of.

  There’s a police cage truck in the emergency car park at St Vincent’s; a couple of cops lean on the bonnet, eating ice creams in the dark. An angry guy in the back of their wagon is kicking and yelling at the top of his voice, ‘She fucken infected me! I went down on her and now my lips are fucken killing! I’m gunna stab that bitch when I get outta here!’

  Having seen me scrubbing blood off my stretcher, one of the officers comes over and says, ‘You’re mates with that ambo at Bondi who topped himself, right?’

  He must be the insensitive constable who delivered the flowers, I think, and let out a sigh.

  ‘Yeah,’ I reply. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Can you take an exhibit?’

  ‘An exhibit?’

  ‘The guy’s wallet.’

  I want to say, John, his fucking name was John, you moron. But I let him off the hook. He’s young.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll take it,’ I reply.

  The cop hands me a plastic bag with John’s service wallet in it. I take it out and feel its weight. The leather is cracked and heavily worn. I open it up and look at his badge, a gold crest that is not so gold anymore; the gold has rubbed off almost down to the metal. It doesn’t even glint when I turn it to the light. Opposite the badge is a service identity card that expired in 1998. Typical John, I think, never bothering to update his ID. In the picture he has youthful good looks, and is tanned and smiling, with an elegant moustache.

  ‘Sign here,’ says the constable, handing me a clipboard and pen, ‘to confirm you’ve received the exhibit.’

  I take the pen and sign the form.

  ‘Love to stay and chat,’ says the constable, ‘but my partner’s got my ice cream and it’s melting.’

  I laugh politely as he walks away.

  When Jerry returns to the ambulance I show him the wallet and he also looks at John’s mugshot for quite a while. He smiles as happy memories flood back.

  ‘John, John, John,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Life goes on after you’re dead, mate. You knew that. People don’t stop for long, they don’t change much. Most people will forget about you, never think of you again. Shame, damn shame, damn waste.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll forget,’ I say.

  ‘Me neither,’ says Jerry.

  His family won’t either, that’s for sure.

  ‘Do you think I should keep the wallet as a memory? Do you think John would mind?’

  ‘Of course he wouldn’t mind. Keep it.’

  CHAPTER 17

  All hope that John will be washed ashore has well and truly faded now. His memorial service will be held on the Central Coast, where his parents live, at the Catholic church they belong to. In the absence of a body, his family have decided not to call the service a funeral.

  The day of the memorial is scorching hot. I planned to go alone, but Kaspia phoned and insisted on coming with me. I pick her up in Balmain and soon we’re on the F3 heading up the coast together. I tell her how the other paramedics at Bondi and I noticed John deteriorating in the month before his death, beset by the guilt about his nephew, the distress about his breakup with Antonio, the despair over moving out.

  ‘Sometimes it’s only when you physically separate that you realise how connected you were, how in love …’ I say. I don’t turn to look at her when I say this, just keep my eyes on the road. I feel her staring at me in quiet thought and I start to worry that maybe she thinks the opposite, that when you physically move apart you realise how far out of love you’ve fallen.

  After a minute or two of silence she gently puts her hand on mine where it’s resting on the bench seat. I can’t be sure if she’s doing this out of sympathy because of John, or if it’s something more.

  Th
e car park outside the chapel is full when we arrive; there are minibuses of paramedics who have driven up from Sydney. It’s a phenomenal turnout. Several hundred ambos from all over the state are gathered together, most of them in dress uniforms with pressed white shirts, ties and medals. I could’ve worn my medal too, dug it out of my underwear drawer. But I know how John disliked the pomp and vanity of heroes.

  We meet Jerry and Matt and all sit together. I see John’s family up front, then Donna, Barry, Frank and Tracy. A slide-show tribute to John is projected on a screen. There are rolling images of him as a happy boy playing around a backyard sprinkler, others from his teenage years in which he wears neon-yellow shorts and later, in his twenties, laughing with friends in Aloha shirts. He was always a man of charisma and style, the life of the party.

  I’m not surprised the Catholic priest who leads the service doesn’t mention suicide. Instead he tells us John was ‘lost at sea’. I’m disappointed he’s skirting round the issue, but perhaps it’s the metaphor that he’s going for. John was lost at sea in his final days on earth, and I was one of the sea-going vessels that never picked him up. It’s possible John would have liked the romance of being lost at sea, an image that conjures up castaways and pirates.

  While most of us manage to hold ourselves together, when John’s teenage niece sings ‘Amazing Grace’ in the most angelic of voices, people surrender. At the end of the service, all the paramedics in the church form a guard of honour at the door. Traditionally a military custom, it has long been part of what emergency workers do at the funerals of their fallen. So we stand side by side without saying a word, a passage between us for the mourners to walk through.

  The melody of ‘Over the Rainbow’ rings out from the church as I’m shoulder to shoulder with my fellow paramedics. And I’m overcome, as many of us are, by the deepest of sadness. It’s a sadness not only for John, but for all those who could see no other way than to take their own lives. It’s a sadness for my guitar teacher Paul, and Martin with the John Lennon glasses, and the man called Stephen who survived his fall, and for Courtney, who cheated on her husband. I’m sad for the girl whose father John and I saw reading her suicide note at The Gap, and the hundreds of others who disappeared before we could reach them, the dozens who’ve died just this summer.