Footy

EMERGENCY (25)

Sean listened to the echoes of the knocker, forcibly preventing himself from turning away. He would say what he had to say, then go. He was filled with uncertainty. He knew that Will loved him, knew it bone-deep, as an absolute truth. But what if Will loved Emma as much? He had to know.

He knocked again. From within, dimmed by passage through solid Victorian masonry, he could hear the same two songs, being played over and over. Otherwise there was silence. Even the noise of the street traffic was muted. He was filled with a sudden misgiving, with the certainty that something was wrong. Unable to shake off his concern, yet also doubting that it was justified, he knocked again, louder. He noticed a button for a bell, set onto the door jamb. He pressed his finger against it, and left it there. Still no response. Why was the music playing? Just two songs, again and again?

Suddenly doubt hardened into conviction. Something was wrong. He stepped back from the door, and looked up and down the street. There must be an alley at the back. Running, panic in his mind, his heart bumping like a lorry on a country road, he reached the end of the side street, and ran up the main road. The alleyway was where it should be, with wheelie-bins; creepers cascading over the corrugated iron fences, winter jasmine blossoms chrome yellow against Windsor green; the spikes of daffodils and iris next to the fences bright against the cobbles, buds swollen in anticipation of spring.

He stopped, panting, and tried to work out which house was Will’s. He strove to regain his breath, to remember how many houses up from the corner the house was. He thought it was the seventh. He stood for a minute to see if he could hear the music. His heart was still so noisy that it seemed impossible that he would. Then with a shock of recognition, he saw a transparent mobile that hung in the window of Will’s bedroom. Will and Emma’s. The thought was a knife into his heart. For a moment he stopped, leaned against the rough corrugations of the fence, despair and loss making him weak. What on earth was he doing here? Will belonged to Emma. He, Sean MacDonald, didn’t count, any more than he ever had. He was just a nobody. A nothing. Will and Emma would stay together. Will would go on picking up blokes in gay bars. He might even fall in love with one of them. Sean turned round and leant his head against the fence. Flakes of paint prickled his forehead. Give up, he thought. Give up. It’s all over.

But the music nagged at him. It was louder out here, in the alleyway behind the house, and it came to him in a sudden burst of understanding what that meant. There must be a door open. Or a window. Why? It was a lovely early winter’s day, but still very chilly. He rattled the gate in the fence. It was bolted from the inside. He looked around to see if he could find something to help him over the wall. There was nothing. He crossed to the far side of the alley and ran at the fence. His momentum let him get up high enough to grab the upper edge of the iron sheets. Muscles honed by weight training pulled him up until he could get his knee over the top. He ignored the ache in his hands where the edge of the fence had pressed deep weals into his flesh. He also ignored the risk. He had a record. If someone saw him doing this and called the police, he would be in deep trouble. He smiled bitterly at himself. Sean MacDonald was always in trouble. It didn’t matter. Something was wrong. He knew that. He was used to taking risks.

He dropped into the garden.

The same two songs were still playing, louder now. The French doors from the lounge onto the garden were open. Through the open doors, he could see the elegant furniture of the room, furniture which he and Will had never used. There hadn’t ever been time. Now he remembered that. He felt sourness rise in him. Now he understood why Will had only been able to spend time together when they were at Sean’s flat.

At first he didn’t notice the body on the sofa, head slumped forward, arms hanging limp over the armrests. When he saw the glass on the floor, the opened blister-packs of pills, understanding came to him in a blinding flash. For a moment, he was taken back to another scene, long ago, and his heart stopped in terror. His head filled with a mist. Everything began to happen in slow motion. He knelt in front of Will, and felt his wrist. There was a pulse. Thank God, there was a pulse. It was weak. Will’s skin wasn’t warm. But there was a pulse. He took out his mobile phone from the zip-up pocket in his leather jacket. It took too long. The phone caught against the zip. “Jesus tap-dancing Christ!” At last, it was free.

He dialled triple-zero.

The call was answered immediately. “Which service, please? Police, ambulance or fire?” The voice was calm, reassuring, used to emergencies.

“Ambulance.” Sean was amazed at how normal his voice sounded. Don’t die. Please don’t die. Will, I love you. Oh fuckin’ God , oh Jesus and all the Saints. With one part of his mind, he gave the address, answered questions, gave the details of the kind of pills, and the amount of alcohol imbibed. With another part, he prayed to the God who had let him suffer, who had allowed his mother to die from an overdose, who had let his father beat him up again and again. He prayed, the tears trickling down his face, knowing in his heart that it was useless. He knew God has deserted him. It had been obvious since the first beating from his father. He never prayed. Never cried. Never.

The wait was only five minutes, but it seemed endless. He wanted to go and stand outside, as if being on the pavement in front of the house would make the ambulance come more quickly, as if his urging would make it pass faster through the clogged streets of the city. But he felt if he stayed with Will, he could physically hold onto his spirit, and prevent it leaving his body. I love you, Will. Please don’t die, love, my dear darling, Will, my dearest. He squeezed Will’s hand, his grip tight.

The sound of a siren, on the main road, then in the street outside. Sean went through the hall to let them in. All round him he saw all the evidence of a comfortable middle-class existence, the tasteful original artwork, the umbrella rack, the expensive elegant Kelim carpet. He only thought about it afterwards. Later, if he closed his eyes, he could see the watercolor next to the door, the pattern of the carpet. But at the time, it was a blur, patternless.

The gurney was already unfolded and on the pavement. It was the work of a moment for the two ambulancemen to take it up the steps, through the hall, into the lounge. The two nurses moved quickly but without fuss. One lifted one of Will’s eyelids and shone a light into his pupil, while the other felt his pulse. One listened to Will’s breathing with a stethoscope. They lifted him carefully, unhurriedly onto the gurney, and turned his head to one side. For a moment, Sean wondered why, before realization came to him. They didn’t want him to choke on his own vomit. Only then did he recognize the smell. There was vomit all over the floor next to the sofa where Will had been sitting. Maybe, just maybe, Will had vomited up enough of the pills not to die. Just live, he thought. Just live. I’ll deal with the rest later.

They asked Sean, “How long ago did he take them?” pointing towards the empty pill packets. Sean shook his head in silence, his suffering as mute as an animal’s. They slid a drip into the vein in Will’s arm. As they wheeled the body of his friend and lover out the house, Sean wrote a note for Emma.

Emma, you don’t know me.

I’m Will’s friend. I found him. They’re taking him to the Melbourne General Hospital.

Sean MacDonald.

He followed the ambulance to the hospital on his bike, only a few meters behind the flat red, white and blue back doors, uncaring about the danger to himself. The ambulance slowed down at traffic lights, but its siren brought most other traffic to a halt, and Sean kept up in its slipstream. At Emergency, he parked his bike on the pavement outside the hospital. He was in such a hurry, he didn’t bother to put on the anti-theft chain. Inside, Will was being wheeled into the emergency ward. Sean strode next to the gurney. The ambulancemen left him.

“He’ll be OK,” said one of them to Sean.

“Thank you.” Sean almost wept at the kindness in the man’s voice. But he didn’t believe him.

He sat waiting next to the gurney. There were incomprehensible urgent announcements. A young woman, stethoscope round her neck, pushed aside the curtains and came into the cubicle. Sean guessed she was the doctor. He was surprised to see jeans under her lab coat. She read the notes in the folder. She listened to Will’s heart and chest. Without taking her eyes off Will, she asked “Who are you?”

Sean hesitated for only a second, but it was long enough. “A friend. I found him.” She looked at him then, and her brown eyes softened. Sean didn’t ask if he could stay. He knew that if you asked authority for something, it might say ‘no’, but if you simply assumed you were allowed to do something, often you got away with it.

“You’ll be in the way while we work on him,” said the doctor. She must have seen something on Sean’s face, for she smiled a little, briefly. “You don’t have to go far away. You can sit outside.” She pointed to a row of horrid plastic chairs against the wall, just a few feet from Will’s bed.

He sat there while she and two nurses worked on Will.

Further down the ward, there was an old lady, with what Sean assumed was Alzheimer’s, crying inconsolably, and trying repeatedly to get out of her bed. Her arm was bandaged and he saw the brown stains of Friar’s Balsam at the edge of the bandage. The nurses kept on putting her back into her bed. “I must get home. The house will burn down. I must get home.” She went on crying, she kept on trying to get out of bed, and the nurses kept on putting her back. Eventually, one of the nurses lost her temper. “Get back into that bed and stay there!” The old lady’s weeping subsided into snivelling. Sean wondered whether she’d gotten used to being spoken to in that tone, whether a daughter or son or carer routinely kept her under control in that way. Sorrow and grief filled his heart. He felt suddenly the risk that underlay everything good, everything happy. At any minute it could all end. He wondered whether he would end up in a ward like this one day.

A young woman in the opposing rank of plastic chairs clutched her stomach, shrieking, and groaning. “It hurts. It hurts. Somebody help me.” No one did anything. Sean deduced that her case wasn’t anywhere as serious as she herself believed.

A young man, of Lebanese or Arabic descent, lay silently on his gurney, his eyes dark with pain, a bloodied body, a saline drip tied into one wrist. He looked as if he’d been in a fight, or perhaps a car accident. He met Sean’s eyes, and then looked away, his misery occasioned by much more than mere physical pain.

All round him, Sean heard moaning and weeping, muttering, quiet fervent prayer. On the chairs, on either side of those waiting for treatment, or alone, watching intently or staring unseeing at the floor or the cheery notices on the wall, were shell-shocked families, silent with desolation.

It was a vision of hell.

Sean sat in mute misery. His gaze moved across the floor, up the walls, back to the drawn curtains round Will’s bed, then started the circuit again. There were marks in the lino. They looked like faces. Some paint had flaked off the wall. A child’s sock lay forlornly in one corner.

Another doctor came out, a man about Sean’s age. “You’re Will’s friend? You found him?”

Sean nodded, unable to speak. He hadn’t been able to give Will’s surname when they’d filled in all the paperwork. He’d been afraid they wouldn't help Will at first. He’d often dealt with authority and bureaucracy. But it seemed that attempted suicide trumped even the System.

“Is he married?”

Sean nodded.

“Can the hospital contact his wife?”

“I don’t have her phone number. I left a message for her at the house.” Sean knew that they wouldn’t have asked if Will wasn’t close to death. But he was too spent to cry.

The doctor nodded, eyes searching Sean’s face. “His position has stabilized. He’ll remain in intensive care for a while, so we can keep an eye on him.”

“Can I sit with him?”

The doctor nodded. “Don’t disturb him. Let him rest.” Almost reluctantly, he added, “Don’t worry. We’re doing our best. And you found him in time.”

There was another of the ubiquitous plastic chairs next to the bed. Sean sat in it. There was a tube going into Will’s arm. Instruments with green-on-black screens. Sean didn’t know what they were for, but they were somehow reassuring. The little green graphs were moving. As long as they were moving, Will was alive. He took Will’s hand in his, not even thinking that there might be objections. He talked to Will, softly, saying nothing of his love or what he felt for Will, but talking, stupidly, of his life, of his mother and father, of all the things that had shaped him, of a book he’d read recently. He drifted into a doze. Just before he slept, he found himself praying. He had never believed that God cared about poor people in general or about him in particular. But somehow it seemed worth taking the chance. “Fuck it!” he thought. “What harm can it do?”

He held tight onto Will’s hand. He wasn’t going to let him go. He loved Will. He needed Will, more than he had ever needed anyone. It didn’t matter that Will was weaker than he, that he was married, that he might be permanently damaged by his suicide attempt. He would look after Will, be the strong one for both of them. Will was part of him, as essential as his arm or his heart.

He dreamed. In his dreams, he and Will were together, and always would be. It made no sense, in that time, at that place, but the dreams were happy, filled with a warm soft summer light, with feelings of contentment and fulfilment.

When Emma pulled apart the curtain around Sean’s bed, her hands trembling with fear and shock, she found the two of them, fast asleep. Sean was still holding Will’s hand, his mouth curved in soft smile.

<<Chapter 24

© 2009 Nigel Puerasch. All rights reserved.
Romantic m2m novels and short stories