Ghost Child (20 page)

It made no sense; he’d been nowhere near that part of me. With hindsight I can see it was a line he’d maybe
used before, but at the time I couldn’t stop looking at it. All day I carried the card with me, taking it out of my apron to read it again, feeling the muscles in my abdomen tighten.

I sent a note back.

It was not subtle.

‘Take me,’ it said.

‘I would be honoured,’ he replied. ‘But this is an auspicious occasion for you, Lauren, an episode of love-making after such a long time. We must make it special. What we need is a special place. With your permission, this is what I shall do. I shall get a room in a hotel. A little old-fashioned, I agree, but let’s be a little old-fashioned, shall we?’

We set a date for a Saturday night. I’d have to work the next day, but that would be fine. Stephen spelled out the instructions. He told me to go to the hotel and collect the key and go up to the room, and then call him, for the first time, on his mobile.

‘I will have my phone in my top pocket, set to vibrate, near my heart,’ he said. ‘I will be waiting to hear what room you’re in, and I’ll come up and ravish you.’

I was pleased with the arrangements because they told me that Stephen understood my fear of being seen as permissive. We would not present ourselves – an unmarried couple – at the reception and request a room. We would be discreet.

And so it was settled. I don’t need to tell you how the
day dragged. I worked in the morning and everything seemed to go wrong. I couldn’t wait to knock off, but time wouldn’t move and then, finally, it was five o’clock. I locked myself in a shower cubicle and used soap and water to shave my legs, nicking myself in my haste.

Hours before it was necessary I went by taxi to the hotel. The man at reception gave me a plastic card and told me it was a room key, and showed me how to use it, but I couldn’t get the thing to work, so I had to go back down and get him to go up with me and let me in. The hotel was supposedly posh but the room was nothing much: just a bed against a padded headboard, and a TV in a cabinet. I wasted a bit of time, looking at myself in the mirror, staring this way and that, practising my expressions, and opening and closing the mini-bar. Then, when I couldn’t stand it any more, I dialled Stephen’s mobile.

He answered first ring.

‘Lauren,’ he said. ‘And how would you be?’

I said, ‘I’m fine, Stephen. Oh, Stephen, I’m so
not
fine.’

‘You
are
fine,’ he said. ‘Finer than fine.’

I gave him the room number and sat waiting for him. When the knock came, I opened the door, and there he was, standing in the foyer, an Art Deco lamp on the wall behind him, looking familiar and yet completely out of context, and wearing a terrible pair of shoes, strange lumpen things – sandals – made of rubber that exposed his long toes.

He stepped toward me and we had a clumsy moment – our teeth clicked together as we kissed. He picked me up and carried me, like a child, to the bed. I felt the muscles in my abdomen tighten. For how long had I thought about what this evening might be like? For months now I’d made up every detail, I’d played it out, I’d fantasised. I’d had him kissing my toes through my stockings and stroking the soles of my feet, making me wild with pleasure.

What I didn’t expect was that Stephen Bass would suffer the same problem as any randy kid in the backseat of a car on the Barrett Estate.

I didn’t think he’d yank my jeans off from the hem and lie heavily on top of me, so that I could barely breathe.

I didn’t think he’d have a penis as white and curled as a witchetty grub and that he’d say, ‘Oh, Lauren, oh, Lauren’ and come, just like that.

That was how it happened, but I didn’t let myself care. I told myself it wasn’t important. I put my cheek gently against his abdomen, and lay there, letting him catch his breath, disappointed, obviously, but thinking, ‘Well, we’ve only just begun. It’s the first time and we’re both nervous and we’ll get better at it.’

I was still resting against his abdomen when his pager went. He reached for it. I snuggled up toward the hair under his armpit. I said, ‘Are you on the roster?’

He said, ‘
I’m
not an
aide
, Lauren. I don’t have a roster.’

I felt embarrassed. He studied the message in front of him and then said what would be his last words to me: ‘You better get dressed. I have to go.’

(Name withheld for legal reasons)

More than ninety per cent of Australian women have at least one and usually two ultrasound scans during their pregnancy. The aim is not – or, at least, not
only
– to determine the gender of the baby. No, these scans are used to rule out a serious deformity, including Down syndrome and anencephaly (where a foetus has no brain or only a brain stem) and some minor deformities such as clubbed feet.

In more than eighty per cent of cases where a serious deformity is found, a woman will opt to end the pregnancy. In Australia, a woman is entitled to an abortion if continuing the pregnancy would impact upon her wellbeing, or that of the foetus. We can argue from here to eternity about the morality of that decision, but the law is on the woman’s side and, in the community,
too, late-term abortion in the case of foetal abnormality is widely regarded as a regrettable but understandable decision.

Elizabeth Boyce was different. Her husband was different. When she arrived at the offices of specialist obstetrician Stephen Bass, she was twenty-three weeks pregnant with her second child. Mrs Boyce’s first pregnancy had been unremarkable: a healthy boy delivered vaginally at thirty-nine weeks, essentially full-term, with no haemorrhage or perineal tear. This second pregnancy was another matter. The first trimester passed without incident, but, at the twenty-two-week scan, problems were detected. The picture wasn’t entirely clear. As good as new technology is, it cannot provide all the answers. The foetus had a curious and seldom-seen combination of problems: an oversized kidney, an enlarged heart, and malformation of the spine.

In the opinion of the Royal’s specialists – not only Bass but others he brought in specifically to examine Mrs Boyce’s scans – the child’s deformities were very likely incompatible with life. If the foetus were able to survive the trauma of birth, it would likely die within a few days. Bass offered Mrs Boyce the opportunity to interrupt the pregnancy then and there, to bring it prematurely to a close: in other words, to abort the foetus before the pregnancy became pronounced. Mrs Boyce declined that option. Bass advised Mrs Boyce there was a significant risk in continuing the pregnancy, both to
her own health and that of the child. Nevertheless, Mrs Boyce opted to continue.

Seven weeks later, Mrs Boyce presented herself at the Royal’s emergency department, saying that she was in labour. By this stage, she was thirty weeks pregnant. It was a Friday night. Bass ran a series of tests, none of which were reassuring. He told Mrs Boyce that she wasn’t in labour, she was having what are known as Braxton Hicks, or false contractions, but he wanted her to stay in hospital under observation in a private room, away from other labouring mothers, in case the onset of labour was imminent and because the outcome was likely to be poor.

Bass did not normally work on a Saturday, which is a privilege accorded the senior staff. He could manage his patients in a way that left Saturday afternoon free. So when Mrs Boyce went into labour on a Saturday, Bass wasn’t there. He’d left instructions with nurses on the maternity ward to page him if things got serious – that is, if Mrs Boyce entered the first stage of labour (rupture of the membranes; cervical dilation; contractions less than sixty seconds apart) and so, at around 8 p.m. on Saturday 12 August, 2002, Bass was paged. He arrived at the hospital shortly before 9 p.m., and immediately assumed responsibility for Mrs Boyce. He stayed with her until the child, Baby Boyce, was born at 4 p.m. on the Sunday. As he’d predicted, the outcome was poor. The child did not survive.

Now, stillbirth is a shocking event, particularly in a private hospital in 21st-century Australia. Almost without exception, the parents of a stillborn child seek an answer to what may well be an unanswerable question: why did
my
child die? They bury their child, they channel their anger and grief, and, ultimately, they look for somebody to blame. In the case of Baby Boyce, the obvious target was Stephen Bass.

In the early stages of the formal complaint against the hospital, Mrs Boyce’s legal team argued that Bass had disapproved of her decision to continue with a high-risk pregnancy because he knew the child was likely to be born with severe deformities.

They said that Bass had left the hospital on the Friday, knowing that Mrs Boyce was likely to go into labour, and had not returned until it was too late to perform an emergency caesarean, and that he had done so deliberately. Moreover, they said that he had not attempted to revive the baby because he did not want so disabled a baby to live. In short, they said that Bass made a Godlike decision to let the baby die.

Now, I’ve known Stephen Bass for many years. He is an obstetrician of considerable skill. Ambitious? Certainly. I’ve heard it said that it would not be wise to stand between Bass and a glittering prize. That is a formulation that Bass would likely accept with humour. It has also been said that specialists like Bass will at all costs avoid the birth of a child with serious deformities.
Such cases can and do end up in court, and even those deformities that are apparent on ultrasounds may, in the hands of a jury, be erroneously attributed to labour, and therefore to the negligence of the obstetrician. Huge compensation payments are rare but devastating. It does affect a specialist’s insurance.

I do not believe that Bass suggested abortion to Mrs Boyce to protect his numbers, for want of a better term, or because he does not believe that seriously deformed infants should be kept alive. Had there been a way to save Baby Boyce, a severely disabled baby, I’m certain Bass would have taken it.

Nevertheless, Mrs Boyce wanted somebody to blame for her terrible loss. Her legal team asked the State Coroner to look at the case. If the Coroner found that Bass had deliberately let the child die, they intended to take the case to the civil courts, at which point the hospital would likely have stepped in and offered a settlement. In a worst-case scenario, they would also press for criminal charges.

As part of the hospital’s preparation for the Coroner’s inquest, I had to interview Bass. He told me there were no ‘signs of life’ as Baby Boyce emerged from the birth canal. In other words, he was of the opinion – that is, of the professional opinion – that Baby Boyce died before she was born, and no amount of intervention would have altered the outcome. There was a fair amount of evidence to back that claim: evidence from
the EFM machine, from the autopsy, from other specialists who had examined the baby, and from the midwife who had been on duty that evening, and I thought the combined evidence of these professionals would see the case resolved in Bass’s favour.

I did not expect at that point that Lauren Cashman – or Lauren Cameron, as we knew her then – would become a star of the inquest. I mean, for Heaven’s sake, she was an
aide
at the Royal. I had her down on my list of people who had been present at the birth of Baby Boyce, and therefore as a potential witness, that’s all.

But then, when Bass confided in me about his relationship with Lauren, and asked, ‘Is it relevant?’ I knew instantly it would be a problem that could potentially cost the hospital many millions of dollars.

Let me explain: the affair itself had nothing whatsoever to do with the birth and death of Baby Boyce, but if it became
public
– the obstetrician was in bed with an aide when his patient had started labouring with an extremely disabled baby – well, we were sunk. Oh sure, we could argue that Bass had known Lauren only briefly, that she had no involvement whatsoever in the birth process beyond the fact that she was in the room working as an aide on the Sunday, mopping up blood, and wheeling the empty baby cot out of the room … but let’s face it, the detail gets lost in such cases. The public would be appalled that Bass had been with his mistress when Mrs Boyce went into labour,
and that public indignation would be enough to sink him.

Was I surprised to learn that Bass had a lover – a very inconvenient lover? No. Nor was I surprised by his choice, in this instance, of mistress. There is something in the psychology of men – of some men – that causes them to seek a girl different in every respect from their wives. Bass’s wife, as I understand it, is a specialist in her own field, an utterly brilliant woman who combined motherhood with a career at a time when that would have been a more complex juggle even than today. I understand that she is a generous woman with a lovely wit. There seems little doubt that Bass is either in love, or in awe of his wife. And so, who does he choose for a mistress? A woman who earns $12 an hour.

The instant I saw Lauren for the first time, I knew … well, how to put this? I knew there was something of the mongrel about her. She’d come from the wrong side of the tracks. She’d smoothed her rough edges, but there was something not quite right about the way she spoke: occasionally, she’d lapse into a broad Australian accent and then she’d correct herself, and begin speaking like an ABC news reader.

In our first meeting, she’d said to me, ‘How is he?’ And I understood that to mean that she and Bass hadn’t spoken since the birth of Baby Boyce. She asked me whether it was true that Bass couldn’t speak to her, because both were to be witnesses at the inquest, and I
immediately felt sorry for her because that wasn’t true at all, so I told a little fib. I said, ‘Well, it’s probably for the best that he doesn’t speak with you, but perhaps after the inquest, you could give him a call?’

It seemed clear to me that he would never take that call. She was obviously still in love with him, and he was wishing they’d never met. I’d said to him, ‘How many people know about this affair?’ He’d said he didn’t know. I asked Lauren the same question. She said she didn’t know, but she suspected there were rumours.

I thought to myself, ‘This is a disaster.’ But there was nothing to do but prepare for the inquest. It was to be held in the Coroner’s Court, on Parramatta Road. The Coroner’s Court is a grim building. How could it be otherwise? The Coroner deals with unexpected and suspicious death, with explosions and major fires, with murders and drownings and decapitations. Grief permeates the wall paint.

It’s also a busy building. The press likes a Coroner’s Court hearing, because the details are usually both fascinating and macabre. The case of Baby Boyce had garnered significant attention even
before
it came before the Coroner, however. Mrs Boyce wanted to acknowledge and honour her daughter, and so she had taken the story to the media long before the inquest, and they gobbled it up. As a story, it had everything the media wants: a wealthy doctor; a child with significant deformities; an attractive, articulate mother prepared to fight for the
child’s life. We’ve all seen cases like it: a person who is being kept on life support in a hospital, for example, with parents who refuse for years to turn off the machinery, so the hospital has to take action in court. There was a case like that in the USA; it ended up with even the President himself becoming involved. The right to life is a complex, emotional issue. Columnists love to sound off about it. In almost every case, such matters can be relied upon to spark debate … even before you throw in a sex scandal.

In a perfect world, the case would be fought on the facts: we’d argue that Baby Boyce was deceased before she was delivered; they’d argue that Baby Boyce was very much alive; the Coroner would review the case and make a clinical decision, and the matter of Lauren, as I referred to it, either wouldn’t come up or would be ruled out of evidence. The world is not perfect, however.

The first hint of the way the inquest would
actually
proceed came to me when I saw Lauren Cameron’s name at the top of their witness list. Immediately, I suggested to the Royal and to Bass that we settle, but they would not agree. I told them that the appearance of Lauren’s name at the top of the list meant that they very likely knew about the affair, and intended to make an issue of the relationship. They said that they would simply argue as planned that any questions about a relationship between Bass and Lauren be ruled out of testimony, and therefore be kept out of the press.

I thought, ‘Good luck,’ for it seemed certain to me that somebody, somewhere, had found out about it and blabbed.

Anyway, on we went. The counsel assisting the Coroner was John Bateson. He’s a well-respected senior counsel. We’d rowed together at university. I held him in high regard.

He’d opened the hearing by taking testimony from Mrs Boyce and Bass, and then he called Lauren. I got ready to object to just about everything. Bateson started by saying, ‘Oath or affirmation?’

Lauren took the Bible and swore to tell the truth.

Bateson said, ‘Your name for the inquest?’

Lauren replied, ‘Lauren Cashman. Lauren Cameron.’

That was odd. I picked it up, and so did Bateson. He said, ‘I’m sorry?’

Lauren said, ‘My real name is Cashman, I use the name Cameron. At the hospital, I’m Lauren Cameron.’

I thought, ‘Oh great. So now she has an alias, too? She’s the lover, and she’s a woman of mystery. The press will be
delighted
.’

But Bateson pressed on. He said, ‘And you are employed at the Royal Hospital, Sydney, as a nurse’s aide?’

Lauren nodded, which prompted Bateson to say, ‘You’ll need to speak up, for the transcript.’

Lauren had a voice like chimes. She leaned into the microphone, and said, ‘Yes.’

Bateson said, ‘Very good. And you were present
during the birth and death of the child known as Baby Boyce?’ Lauren replied, ‘Yes.’ Bateson said, ‘And you understand that this inquest is inquiring into the circumstances of that death?’ and again Lauren replied, ‘Yes.’

There was a pause as Bateson shuffled through some of the papers on his desk, and then he continued. ‘Miss Cameron, you understand that this is not a court of law, don’t you? This is a Coroner’s inquest. An inquest is an attempt to unravel events leading to an unexplained or unexpected death, and you are here because we would like you to tell us, in your own words, what you witnessed on the day that Baby Boyce was born and died.’

I do love the way we lawyers persist with that fiction:
in your own words
. Not a single witness would take the stand without spending several hours with the hospital’s team of lawyers, going over their testimony, time and again. Don’t take that the wrong way. We don’t encourage the witnesses to lie, but we don’t want them to say something stupid, either. We tell them what the questions are likely to be. We go over their answers. The idea is to keep the inquest on the rails.