The Darkest Hour (4 page)

The water heater was dead and needed replacing but the plumber couldn’t do it that day, so in the evening Lauren and Kristi and Felise trooped gratefully into the Saleebas’ house. Back at home later, Felise declared her intention of having a bath with Max every day for the rest of her life.

Lauren’s headache persisted despite aspirin, and when turning the lights out before bed she paused in the kitchen and took down the bottle of bourbon they kept for emergencies.

‘You going to tell me now?’ Kristi stood in pyjamas in the doorway.

Kristi was a good listener and always made you feel better – made you feel so good, in fact, that once you started talking you didn’t want to stop. Lauren doubted her ability to control herself tonight. All evening her memories of the incident with the ice addict had blended in her head with those of Thomas in the alley. She’d tried to highlight the differences in her mind: that had been night and this was day; there she’d been alone and here she’d had Joe. But it was at a deeper level that it was hurting her; the level where the feel of fear and adrenaline dumps were stored. Physical memory. Even standing there now, she could almost feel where Thomas’s fist had been, up under her chin. She touched the skin there and shivered. ‘Actually I think I’ll just go to bed.’ She pushed the dusty bottle to the back of the top shelf with her fingertips.

‘Spleen,’ Kristi said.

Lauren turned off the kitchen light and walked past her. ‘Goodnight.’

She woke at four from a nightmare. She’d been at the car crash again, finding Kristi drunk, pregnant and sobbing behind the wheel of one car, the dying boy at the wheel of the other. With it came the stale taste of her old life: the silence of her cramped flat broken only by the dull clink of the bottle against the glass, the desolation of Jeffrey leaving her for his panto career in the UK, the inability to get out and meet new people like magazines and work colleagues and her GP said she should.

She got out of bed and went into Felise’s room. The child was an active sleeper, and while Lauren stood there she rolled from her left side to her right, onto her stomach, then thrashed the covers off before curling up into a shivering ball. Lauren lifted the covers over her and tucked them down behind her back, then with one finger smoothed a lank ringlet behind her ear.

She turned to go and found Kristi in the doorway. She put out a hand and felt the sweat-soaked back of Lauren’s pyjama shirt.

‘Don’t say it.’ Lauren kissed her on the cheek as she passed. Kristi sighed.

Back in bed Lauren couldn’t sleep. When she finally pulled the covers close behind her as she’d done for Felise, the contact reminded her of Joe’s back against hers. With that in her mind, she settled.

‘Not working today?’ Aunt Adelina said.

‘Afternoon shift.’ Ella was perched on the seat of her mother’s wheely-walker, the only place left by the time she’d arrived. The ward was stuffy, the air full of chatter in English, Vietnamese, Lebanese and Italian. Her mother, Netta, was sitting up in the bed, Ella on one side, her father, Franco, and Adelina in plastic chairs on the other. A child in a nappy and singlet made his way around the room from bed to bed, holding onto chairs as he went. A woman in a headscarf saw Ella watching him and they exchanged smiles.

Voices grew louder across the room. Her father tilted his head. ‘You hear that, Netta?’

‘Dad, don’t eavesdrop.’

‘How can you not, when they talk so loud?’ Her mother shifted position gingerly in the bed. Her steel-grey hair lay tangled on the pillow. Her nightie was buttoned to the neck.

‘The Italian just goes straight in.’ Her father jabbed his index fingers at his ears. ‘I can’t help that.’

‘You turn your head off,’ Adelina said. ‘That’s what I do.’

‘Easy for you.’ Franco grinned. Adelina slapped him on the arm.

Ella wondered sometimes what it would be like to have a brother, who’d stir you up like that, who would still be joking with you at age seventy. Adelina had never married, and Ella’s father was staying at her house in Sutherland while Netta was in hospital. Franco had wanted to stay home, but he’d grown frail in the last year, was on a wheely-walker of his own now, and couldn’t cook more than Cup-a-Soup.

Adelina was looking at the bedside table. Next second she hopped to her feet, pulled a handkerchief out of her handbag and started wiping the surface. ‘Don’t they dust?’

‘This is what I’m saying,’ Netta said. ‘It’s no good for me here.’

Ella nodded at the intravenous line feeding her antibiotics. ‘You can’t get that anywhere else.’

‘She wouldn’t have got the infection if she was somewhere else.’ Her aunt reached across to dust the nameboard fixed to the wall above the bed.

The Italian family were getting louder. Franco and Netta exchanged glances again. Ella sighed. The argument was about nothing more exciting than somebody’s school report. Talks too much and could do better.
Show me a kid whose report doesn’t say that.

She turned her mobile on. No messages. She turned it off again. What was wrong with the people of this city that they were continually failing to murder one another? And what about the shooting report committee – did they want her to die of suspense?

‘The doctor said I can start to walk tomorrow without that thing,’ Netta said, nodding at the walker. ‘I might be home by the end of the week.’

‘I thought you had to go to rehab once you’re out of this ward,’ Adelina said.

‘I can rehab at home.’

‘Says who?’ Ella said.

‘It’s just taking it easy,’ Netta said. ‘Some little exercises, and be careful. Nothing to it.’

‘What if you get stuck in the bath?’ Adelina said. ‘Franco’s too weak to help you.’

‘Hey,’ Franco said.

‘I can go to Ella’s.’

‘No, you can’t,’ Ella said. ‘I’m not home enough.’

‘I can’t eat the food here.’

Adelina laughed. ‘You think you’ll get better there?’

‘I can teach her,’ Netta said. ‘It’ll be fun.’

‘It’s not that I can’t cook, it’s just that I don’t like to,’ Ella said.

‘Maybe you could take some holiday time,’ Adelina said.

Take leave now, when she’d just got her foot in the door? When a big case could come along at any second? No way in the world. Ella felt in her bag for her phone and switched it on again. ‘I thought the doctor said at least a week in rehab.’

‘Maybe after that then,’ Adelina said.

They were all looking at her. Ella knew it would be a package deal – her dad would come too, as they hated being apart, and Adelina didn’t like to make the drive up from Sutherland more than a couple of times a week.

‘My house isn’t really suited–’ she began.

‘You can come home, stay with us,’ Netta said.

‘Just like old times,’ Franco said.

I have a home
. The room was getting smaller and more stuffy.
Ring, phone, ring!

Her mother grasped her arm. Her palm was cool. Ella looked down at the IV taped in the back of her hand, the sun-spotted skin, the tendons visible across her knuckles. An old lady’s hand. When had this happened?

‘It’s okay if you don’t want to,’ Netta said.

Ella remembered coming home from school to find her mother in the kitchen, fitting a knife deftly into the joints of a chicken, those hands smelling of onion, and how she’d duck away from their touch.

‘Maybe you could just ask if you can take time?’ Franco said. ‘See what they say?’

‘Can’t hurt,’ Adelina put in.

Ella heard the meal trolley coming and got to her feet. ‘Lunch is here. Time for us to go.’

Her mother made a face.

‘They shouldn’t end visiting hours until after lunch,’ Adelina said. ‘Why can’t we stay while you eat?’

‘They don’t want you to see how bad the food is,’ Netta said darkly. She still had hold of Ella’s arm. ‘Will you at least ask about getting time off?’

This was another reason she wished she had a brother. Or sister. Anyone would do. Share the focus. The limelight. ‘I’ll ask.’

Netta pulled her down for an embrace. ‘Thank you.’ Up close she smelled of hospital soap and talc. Her hair was knotty and needed brushing, and her lips were soft on Ella’s cheek. ‘Come tomorrow?’

‘Or I’ll ring,’ Ella said. ‘It depends on work.’

Franco was waiting behind her to hug his wife. Ella stood near the Italian family, listening to their goodbyes, then walked from the ward with her father and aunt.

They said goodbye at the lift. With Franco’s disabled tag Adelina could park in the hospital grounds. ‘Have a safe drive,’ Ella said.

Franco let go of his walker long enough to hug her tight. ‘Ciao, carina. Stai bene.’

‘Si, papa, e tu. Ciao.’

Outside, the day was warming up. She walked through the streets to her car, feeling guilty about not wanting to stay with her parents. It wasn’t that she didn’t love them, it was just the timing. Here was her shot at Homicide – maybe her one and only shot – and she needed to be free to spend twenty-four hours a day there if necessary.

Assuming, of course, that something better than checking phone lists came along.

L
auren lay on her stomach, head to head with the dead man in the twilight, peering into his wide-open mouth. They were in a shallow culvert by one of the railway lines just out of Central station. She’d worked her elbows into gaps between the rocks but the rest of her felt every sharp corner.

The man looked to be in his fifties, though it was hard to tell for sure with the severe lacerations to his cheeks and forehead. There were more cuts on his scalp. His nose was smashed and caked with blood, and the inside of his mouth and throat were the pale no-longer-pink you saw in the freshly dead. Lauren lifted the tongue with the laryngoscope blade, searching with the light for the white flash of the vocal cords and the dark space between them.

Joe squatted beside her over the drug box, lifting his collar off the dressing on his neck. The younger half of a crew from Paddington did cardiac compressions, grimacing as he adjusted his knees on the rocks, while the older squinted in the late evening light for a vein on the man’s arms. The air smelled of hot dust and oil and the metal workings of the train which sat ticking on the tracks nearby. Two uniformed police talked anxiously beside it, the dusty knees of their trousers proof of their initial frantic CPR efforts.

Lauren saw the cords. She took the ET tube from Joe and slid it down the pharynx and into the dark space, inflated the cuff to hold the tube in place, connected the resus bag and started squeezing to blow air into the man’s lungs. Joe stuck the earpieces of his stethoscope into place and held the diaphragm on the man’s left and right chest then over his stomach, making sure the air was going into the lungs and not the gut. He nodded. Lauren handed him the bag and slid the white fabric tape under the man’s neck then looped and tied it around the tube.

Joe squeezed the resus bag hard and fast. The Paddo para said, ‘I’m in,’ over the man’s arm, and Lauren started setting up vials of adrenaline for him to inject through the cannula into the vein.

A senior cop came stumbling and swearing along the rocks beside the line. He peered at the dead man then up at the younger officers. ‘What’s the story?’

‘We pulled him over for running a light in Redfern,’ the first officer said. ‘He seemed really nervous when we talked to him, and then when we were checking his licence he bolted. We chased him to Redfern station and he jumped onto the train. We followed and almost had him, but then he went out the door between two carriages and tried to climb up on top. Then he fell.’

‘What’d Radio give you?’

‘His name’s Adrian Nolan, no warrants, no record. He was driving a rental car.’

The man hadn’t gone under the train’s wheels, but Lauren thought he’d landed on his face and scrambled his brain. Not much anyone could do in those circumstances, but because the police had made an attempt to resuscitate him, and especially because there’d be an investigation into their actions, it was best to carry on with the effort and let the doctors do the whitesheet thing.

The older cop touched her shoulder. ‘How’s he look?’

‘We’ll keep working on him and run him up to St Vinnie’s, but they’ll probably pronounce him the moment we arrive,’ Lauren said.

The cop nodded. The young one looked like he was going to cry.

St Vincent’s Hospital’s ambulance bay was busy. The young Paddo paramedic edged the ambulance along the side and Lauren, looking out the side window as she did compressions, winced at the scrape of the fibreglass body on the wall.

The back door was reefed open and a couple of paramedics from other vehicles pulled the stretcher out. Lauren clambered out then Joe jumped down, catching his foot on the stretcher wheel and stumbling into Lauren. She caught him around the waist then helped him up. ‘You okay?’

‘I hit the tube with my arm.’ He started to pull his stethoscope from around his neck as the doors to the Emergency Department slid open and a doctor looked out.

‘This the arrest?’ he said.

‘Just be a second,’ Lauren said.

The doctor huffed and looked at his watch.

Lauren rolled her eyes at Joe. ‘Let’s just get in there.’

‘I bumped it pretty hard.’

‘Guy’s dead,’ she said. ‘The tube being a little out of place isn’t going to make any difference.’

They wheeled the stretcher towards the doors, which slid back to let them in. Lauren looked up at the security camera overhead and smiled her thanks, knowing that somebody at the nurses’ desk had seen them coming and hit the door button.

They took the stretcher into the bright light of the ED’s resuscitation room, the police officer who’d ridden in the front of the ambulance close on their heels. Lauren held the patient’s head in her gloved hands, steadying the tube between her fingers as Joe and the ED staff untucked the sheet from the stretcher. She counted aloud to three and the team lifted the body on the sheet across to the hospital bed.

The doctor checked the patient’s pupils and frowned. ‘What’s the story?’

Lauren ran through it quickly. ‘He’s been in asystole the whole time,’ she finished up. ‘No response to CPR, adrenaline, sodium bicarb and lignocaine.’

The doctor listened for heart sounds with his stethoscope. ‘How long’s it been now?’

Lauren looked at her watch. ‘Forty minutes.’

‘Okay, I’m calling it,’ the doctor said. The tall male nurse who was doing cardiac compressions lifted his hands from the man’s bare chest and stepped back from the bed. The female nurse who’d been squeezing the resus bag disconnected it from the ET tube. ‘Time of death is twenty-ten.’

The doors swung open and Joe’s fiancée, Claire Bramley, walked in.

‘No more staff needed here,’ the doctor said, eyes on his paperwork.

Claire glanced around without answering. Lauren smiled at her but she didn’t seem to see. Lauren heard her hiss something at Joe, and saw Joe look up, surprised, from packing away the monitor leads.

What was her problem?

Lauren stripped the sheets from the stretcher then lifted the Oxy-Viva on top. She put her hand out to Joe for the monitor but he was deep in muttered conversation with Claire.

Lauren wheeled the stretcher out to the ambulance and left it. Joe’s job as driver for the shift was to clean and restock the equipment. Hers as treating officer was to do the case sheet. She’d finish her own work first, then she’d start on his if Claire was still haranguing him inside. But he came out in a couple of minutes, looking distracted. Lauren didn’t ask, just sat writing in the passenger seat, the stereo on, while in the back he was quiet, changing the cylinder in the Oxy-Viva and restocking the drug box.

Lauren had almost finished the case sheet and Joe was making up the stretcher with a clean sheet when the ED doors slid open.

Claire came to stand in the open passenger door. ‘Who tubed him?’

‘I did,’ Lauren said.

‘You checked it?’

She restrained the urge to say,
what am I, an idiot
? ‘Of course.’

‘Didn’t notice it was in the right main bronchus?’

‘That would’ve happened just as we got here,’ Joe said behind Claire. ‘I bumped him and didn’t have time to check it.’

But Claire hadn’t taken her eyes off Lauren. ‘It was your tube,’ she said.

‘It was.’ Lauren kept her voice even.

‘You put it in, so it was yours to look after.’

‘Oh, come on, Claire,’ Joe said, ‘it doesn’t work like that. We’re a team.’

Claire stared at Lauren a moment longer then turned and went back inside.

‘She didn’t mean that,’ Joe said. ‘She knows as well as anyone he was dead. The tube being in the bronchus might make a difference to someone who actually had a chance, but this guy was a goner. You said so yourself.’

Lauren tore the case sheet off the pad. ‘I can’t afford a complaint.’

‘She’s not going to complain.’

‘Has she still got that friend in State Headquarters?’

‘She’s not going to complain,’ Joe said. ‘Trust me.’

‘Coming on top of the bus accident the other month, this could get me reviewed,’ she said. ‘They can send me for retraining. They can move me from The Rocks.’

‘Stop spouting crap,’ Joe said. ‘I’ll go and talk with her, okay?’ He walked back through the sliding doors.

Lauren pressed the folder hard against her chin. The thought of being moved away from The Rocks, away from Joe, made her chest hurt. She slammed the folder down once, hard, on the dash, making her ears ring with the sound.

The resus room was empty except for the covered corpse. Lauren left the hospital copy of the case sheet on the top of his medical file and went back out.

Joe and Claire were nowhere to be seen in the corridors or at the nurses’ desk, and she went back to the ambulance and got in. She put the stereo on, but it annoyed her now, so she sat and worried in silence instead.

Joe reappeared after ten minutes and climbed behind the wheel. He started the engine but didn’t pull out of the bay.

Lauren breathed in his aftershave mixed with railway dust and sweat. ‘She’s going to complain, isn’t she?’

‘I don’t know what she’s going to do.’ Joe sighed. ‘I’ll talk to her again tomorrow.’

Lauren knew she should call Control to say they were clear. ‘Let’s drive.’

But Joe didn’t move. He held the steering wheel in the small circles made by his thumbs and index fingers. ‘It’s my fault.’

‘I stopped you checking the tube,’ Lauren said.

‘It’s not really about that,’ he said. ‘Claire found me cutting out the picture from the newspaper this morning. The picture of us.’

Heat rose in Lauren’s throat. The colour shot of the two of them standing with their arms wrapped around each other between the ambulances had been on the front page of that day’s paper. Kristi had read the accompanying article and said, ‘No wonder you were upset. Why didn’t you tell me?’ Lauren hadn’t been able to explain. Felise had wanted to stick the picture on the fridge but Kristi told her to take it to the attic, much to Lauren’s relief. It would’ve been strange to see that embrace every time she went to get the milk. It made her think of a couple in love – not that she was in love, of course. Survivor’s glee was the term she’d come up with. Sitting tied up, back to back, no shirts on, while the crazy ranted and raved and waved the knife about – who, she wanted to know,
wouldn’t
come to rely on Joe’s wide warm back as the safest and most precious thing in the world? Who wouldn’t feel a bond afterwards?

‘Car Thirty-four,’ Control called. ‘Thirty-four, I need you for a stabbing.’

Joe drove out of the hospital grounds as Lauren grabbed the mike and tried to clear her mind. ‘Thirty-four’s complete at St Vincent’s.’

‘Thanks, Thirty-four. I have a man stabbed on New South Head Road in Edgecliff, outside the shopping centre. Bystander CPR in progress. Police are on their way.’

Joe hit the siren and beacons and put his foot down. Lauren hung the mike up and braced a hand against the dash while she was there. People said she flogged the truck around but Joe was much worse. He was just lucky he’d never pranged one or been snapped speeding like she had.

‘What did Claire say?’ she asked.

‘She wanted to know why I wanted to keep it.’ His eyes were glued to the road. ‘Reckon this will be genuine or false?’

‘False,’ Lauren said. ‘What’d you say to her?’

‘CPR’s in progress.’

‘By a bystander. That’s no guarantee he’s in arrest,’ she said. ‘What did you tell Claire?’

He made a face. ‘I tried to explain that it was just such a weird and intense time,’ he said. ‘It’s a good picture, our faces are mostly turned away from the camera, we’re kind of two anonymous paramedics.’ He made the same face again, adding lamely, ‘It makes me think of . . . just . . . people looking after each other.’

‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Exactly.’ The streetlights flashed by. The beacons twirled red and blue across the fronts of houses. She pulled on gloves. ‘What’d she say to that?’

He swung around a corner. ‘She didn’t seem convinced. Even after I said that if it was her in the paper she’d be cutting the picture out too.’

‘Thirty-four for an ETA?’ Control said.

‘Two to three,’ Lauren said into the mike.

‘Still going for false?’ Joe said.

‘Drunk asleep on the footpath. He’ll be moaning every time they press on his chest. We’ll have to transport him for fractured ribs.’

‘I don’t know.’ A cat dashed across the roadway and Joe lifted his foot from the accelerator for an instant. ‘There’s something in my water telling me otherwise.’

‘You and your water.’

He glanced over at her. ‘Standard wager?’

‘Gilly’s
and
an Egg McMuffin.’

‘You’re on.’

He turned onto New South Head Road and flipped the siren off.

‘There.’ Lauren pointed to a group of people on the footpath as one ran out to the road and waved.

There was nowhere to park. Joe stopped in the left lane of traffic, leaving the beacons going and switching on the hazard lights for good measure. Lauren jumped out and reached into the back of the ambulance for the Oxy-Viva and first aid kit.