The Darkest Hour (35 page)

L
auren sat perfectly still in the chair beside Joe’s hospital bed. Before he woke again she had to make up her mind.

She didn’t have long, either. Claire was on her way, and once she blasted in Lauren knew she’d be out on her ear.

She frowned, trying to concentrate, but Joe’s hands lay on the outside of the blankets, his tanned skin a stark contrast to the white cotton. The urge to grasp his fingers was almost overwhelming and she shifted her gaze, only to find herself staring at the bruise where he’d hit his head on a pile of concrete rubble and knocked himself out.

He pushed me out of the way.

She blinked back tears and focused on the IV bag hanging above the bed, dripping in fluid and antibiotics to treat the wound that had luckily missed his lung.
Count the drops per minute, don’t think about how he almost died for you. That’s his instinct to protect life, it doesn’t matter whose. It doesn’t change your decision one little bit.

When he’d been awake before, they’d smiled at each other, and he’d asked if she was okay, and asked about Ella and Kristi and Felise, and Thomas, and there’d been not a word about her declaration before he’d sunk back into his morphine dreams.

So.

The way she saw it, she had three options.

One: if he had forgotten what she’d said, did she really want to bring it up again? The memory of his angry response was all too clear, and if that was how he truly felt then saying it again wouldn’t achieve a thing.

Two: if he had full memory of it but was deliberately not saying anything, hoping it would just go away so he didn’t have to actually reject her, then she should accept both his kindness and the fact that she should bloody well put it behind her.

Three.

Three was tricky. Three insisted that whether he remembered or not, she should say it again. She should put it out there. She should be bold and daring, she should remember his thumb stroking her back, and the shove out of the way, whatever his reason . . . and she should remember his kiss by the mulberry tree.

Because that was what it all came back to, right? The thumb and the shove you could maybe attribute to his nice-guy compassion, but that kiss was something else.

She put her face in her hands, feeling like a coward for her inability to decide. What did she have to lose? So what if he rejected her – was she going to shrivel up and die?

She started when the door squeaked open.

Claire stopped short in the doorway. ‘You have some nerve.’

Could she be any louder?
‘He’s asleep,’ Lauren said.

‘You almost get him killed,’ Claire hissed, ‘and then you dare sit around here like you’re important in his life?’

‘We’re friends.’

‘Not for much longer if I have anything to do with it.’

‘I think that’s up to him.’

Claire folded her arms. ‘Nobody cares what you think.’

Anger boiled up inside Lauren. If she stayed much longer she was going to punch the bitch. ‘I think it’s time I left.’

‘What took you so long to realise that?’

Lauren touched the blanket near Joe’s hand and headed for the door.

The corridor was empty. She went to the window and looked down at a bare courtyard where the wind was driving dead leaves into a corner. Her chest hurt and her mouth was sour. She should’ve spoken up when she’d had the chance, when Joe was awake that first time. She should’ve grabbed his hand just now, before Claire came back, and woken him, and asked him for his answer.

Claire came out of his room, frowning at his chart. She saw Lauren and pulled the door firmly shut behind her. ‘I want you away from here.’

‘Free country,’ Lauren said.

Claire stared at her. ‘You’re disturbing people.’

‘Who?’ Lauren looked up and down the deserted corridor.

‘If you go in there again I’ll have security kick you off the hospital grounds.’ Claire stormed away with the chart flapping in her hand, glaring back once before flouncing around the corner.

Lauren looked at the closed door. She had to see him, just one more time. She turned the handle, checked down the corridor, then went in.

Joe lay in the same position as before, his eyes closed, his breathing slow and even.

‘Joe.’

No response.

She bumped the bed with her leg. ‘Joe.’

He stirred but didn’t open his eyes. She bumped the bed again, harder. Claire would be back any second. ‘Joe!’

Nothing.

She knew ways to make him wake: she could rub her knuckles along his sternum, or push her thumb into the bony arch above his eye, or press a pen against his fingernail. But they worked because of the pain they caused, and he’d been through enough.

She stood by the bed. Voices approached along the corridor and she quickly bent to kiss him. She saw the curl of hair by his ear and the pinkness of his skin, and his breath was a rush of warm air against her neck as she pressed her lips to his cheek.

The door flew open. Claire snapped, ‘What the fuck did I say?’

Lauren turned around. ‘I’m going.’

Claire gestured to the nurse she’d brought with her. ‘Call security.’

‘I said I’m going.’

‘I’ll have you banned,’ Claire said. ‘I’ll put in a complaint, I’ll tell them about the tube, I swear; I’ll get you kicked out of that job.’

Lauren looked back at her from the doorway, then past her. Joe was awake. Claire stood oblivious and ranting. Joe’s gaze was fixed on Lauren, and she thrilled at the gentle smile on his face.

‘Get out!’ Claire shoved her out the door, but not before Lauren caught a glimpse of Joe raising a shaky hand.

She stumbled into the corridor as Claire slammed the door. Lauren didn’t look back. The sun broke through the clouds outside and made the windows glow, and lit Felise’s hair as she turned the corner into the corridor with Kristi. They each carried a bunch of flowers. Felise started to run when she saw Lauren, and Lauren knelt in the sunlight and caught her in her arms.

Ella came to slowly. Hearing was first: there was an annoying rustling sound, but she couldn’t open her eyes to see what it was, and couldn’t speak to protest.

Pain came next, colouring her chest and side and back an angry red.

Not dead. In hospital?

She forced her eyes open, and tried to move to ease the pain. Something tugged at her arm.

‘Whoa,’ a voice said. ‘Don’t grab at that.’

Ella didn’t realise she was grabbing at anything. She turned her head to see the source of the voice, but the light was bright and she had to squint, and even then could only see a shape.

‘Hang on, I’ll close the blinds.’

The brightness went away. She blinked.

‘How’s that?’

‘Wayne,’ she croaked.

‘That’s me.’

Sweet warm honey spilled into her veins.
Wayne
.

He sat down in the low chair and put a newspaper on the floor. ‘How’re you feeling?’

‘Crap.’ She felt her side, found a tube there.

‘That’s a chest drain. It’s stitched in so don’t go yanking it.’

‘Ugh.’

‘You should see what’s coming out.’

She dozed for a moment then woke with a start. ‘Lauren?’

‘Fine.’

‘Joe?’

‘On the mend,’ Wayne said. ‘In a room down the hall.’

Her mind was fuzzy. Anaesthetic, she thought.

Another thought. ‘Thomas?’

‘Dead. Tried to do the bolt through the building in the dark, skidded, fell, and skewered himself through the neck on some busted reo.’

She nodded slowly. ‘Justice.’

‘The final kind.’

She searched her foggy mind for another name. ‘Tracy?’

‘We caught her near the scene,’ Wayne said. ‘She’d been waiting for Werner at a pre-arranged spot on the other side of the building. We think that’s why he walked Lauren and Joe so far in, so his escape run would be short. She fessed all, as did stupid Jason Lambert.’

Ella though she was hearing him wrong. ‘Lamby?’

‘He was so desperate for a bit of action that he’d taken whatever she deigned to give him in return for information she couldn’t get herself,’ Wayne said. ‘She’d flagged down the ambulance and led them into the trap, but also stuck a doover on the side of the truck to block their radio signals, so they couldn’t tell anyone what they were.’

Ella struggled to take all this in.

‘Deborah Kennedy told everything, but you know that already. Umm. Sal Rios sent a message asking how you are. He’s at his brother’s bedside but with an officer outside the door. He’ll be facing a few charges but is cooperating fully, in the hope of leniency I guess. Doesn’t seem too bad a guy actually.

‘Oh, and Kuiper came by before, with the Commissioner, to tell you what a good job you’d done, but I said you were washing your hair and couldn’t be disturbed.’ He smiled. ‘Your mother keeps phoning, and your aunt and father are on their way.’

Ella tried to smile, tried to relax back into the bed, but she ached in both body and mind. She clumsily wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist.

Wayne squeezed her knee through the blanket. ‘They reckon you’ll be out in a week.’

‘I thought I was dying.’ She put out a trembling hand. ‘I thought I was gone.’

Wayne took her hand in his. His palms were broad and warm. He turned her hand over and smoothed his thumb over the pads of her fingers. ‘For a while they didn’t know.’ His voice was tight. ‘We were all waiting to hear, you were in theatre for fucking hours, and I thought, if . . . I thought . . .’

She closed her eyes, so tired, so warm, so safe, and fell asleep as he folded her hand gently into his.

I
’d been an ambulance officer for ten years when a writing teacher told me to think about drawing on my experiences on the job for my fiction. It took another five years before I could see the value in this advice and realise that right there in front of me lay a world brimming with drama, a world full of conflict and fascinating stories, and from the years I’d spent doing it, I had the sort of knowledge that can bring a story to life. After all, I’ve scrambled down cliff faces in the rain to reach people screaming in wrecked cars. I know the waxy feel of dead flesh, the sound of a dying man’s last gasps. I’ve breathed the odour of alcohol-rich blood at a car crash in which the driver lay dead. I’ve broken into houses to get to patients who’ve collapsed. I’ve caught babies born on stained lounge room floors. I’ve done CPR until my back screamed and my shirt was soaked with sweat. I’ve held a mother’s hand and looked into her eyes and told her that her daughter was dead. I’ve cared for bashing victims in the middle of brawls. I’ve pressed desperately on haemorrhaging wounds while the blood ran off the stretcher, drenched the floor and escaped under the back door of the speeding ambulance. I’ve been abused, assaulted, bitten and threatened. I’ve wrestled a knife from a deranged teenager, and run away from violent psychotics. I’ve testified in murder cases. I’ve even done my absolute best to resuscitate a dog whose owner thought the two of them were better off dead.

Trouble was, the years of trauma and shiftwork had really taken their toll, and the first ambulance scenes I tried to write bore all the emotion of the cases I’d recently done and came out as little more than rants. It wasn’t until I quit that I was able to get some perspective: it took six months of being out of the job for me to understand how far from normal I’d actually been. I slowly started to realise that
this
was how I should feel, how normal people felt, not the fatigued, depressed, emotionally strung-out person that I had become. I realised that not everyone is dying; not everyone’s life is full of trauma.

The more time went by, the better I felt, and the scenes I wrote were no longer rants. I found that I was able to use in a controlled way everything I’d felt and seen and done, and give those experiences to the paramedics in my story, also giving a bird’s eye view of ambulance work to the reader.

They say that nothing comes without a price. I guess for me, perhaps the price of publication was those years of emotion and pain. At the time, going between doctors, psychologists, sleepless nights and miserable days, it was hard to see that any good could come of it all. But I wouldn’t change my life for the world – not only because the experiences in the job brought me the fodder for the books, but because they taught me to take nothing for granted, and because seeing so much of both the best and worst of humanity, in others and in myself, has made me a better writer, and, I hope, a better person.

Katherine Howell, 2006