Holier Than Thou (12 page)

18

I sat on the balcony running my tongue over the enormous, sour-tasting gash I had bitten out of the inside of my mouth at dinner. The bleeding had stopped but it still hurt like hell. I could hear the sounds of Tim washing the dishes inside.

‘It’s freezing out here!’ I called to Tim.

‘Then come inside!’

‘Nah . . . ’

It was a Thursday. The loved-up neighbours’ flat was dark and the Pakistani father was swinging the toddler into the air. Actually that toddler looked more child-like these days.

At long last I had managed to round up the old gang to meet up in the city the next night. I would get changed at work and get the train straight in. We were meeting at 6:30, so all those privately employed could attend their ‘boardroom drinks’ at 5 p.m. and give me time to make my way in from the ghetto. Tim came out wearing my pink Eiffel Tower apron, kissed me and settled down to watch
Top Gear
. I hadn’t called my mother in a while. Then again, she hadn’t called me.

My mobile rang. Nick. He was on a B-shift and on-call.

‘Hey.’

‘Hey. Where are you?’

‘Loitering in the ambulance bay. Where are you?’

‘On my balcony. How’s the shift going?’

‘Okay. An anorexic girl; a developmental-delay guy who set fire to his group home; a young guy who beat up his parents after they wouldn’t give him any more money; a couple of our regulars who have gambled away their pensions, called themselves an ambulance and come to ED for dinner . . . There’s a little lull right now.’

‘Keep working,’ I said. ‘People on welfare are depending on you.’

I saw that on a T-shirt once and it had become one of our in-jokes.

‘Are we having drinks after work tomorrow night?’ asked Nick.

‘I’m actually meeting up with some friends in town after work.’

‘Oh.’ He sounded crestfallen.

‘Just . . . I haven’t seen them for ages and we really need to catch up.’

‘Of course.’

‘But afterwards we might head up to Purple Sneakers.

Interested in meeting up there?’

‘Um . . . yeah. Text me and I’ll gauge my motivation. Better go, I can see the triage nurse looking for me.’

‘You poor bugger.’

The lights went on in the love-nest flat and the two women came staggering in through the door carrying a large rolled-up rug. They got it to the ground and unrolled it on their cold, tiled floor. It was a lovely warm red colour. It totally changed the room.

‘Timbo, we need a rug,’ I called.

‘Okay.’ he called back.

Lara had nominated a wine bar called Quist near Martin Place. A wine bar.
Will they have beer?
I wondered. I really felt like a beer.

Earlier, I had hung up on one of my clients who was screaming and sobbing and falling about, in order to call an ambulance for her. She said she had just taken all the medication in her house, which, frankly, I doubted, but if she had and it came out that I hadn’t called an ambulance . . . the paperwork would be unbelievable. The paperwork would be heinous. But as I waited for the operator I thought to myself,
It might be so much easier to not care
.

Nick was on a day off and I missed him.

I found Abigail first in the heaving crowd of suits and loud voices. She sipped a hard-won mojito ad-wfontnd hugged me with one arm.

‘Hey, Wozza. Can you believe we are the ones who have to come from far away and we are the first ones here?’

‘Hey. Yeah, I can believe it. How are you, Abs?’

‘Good, good enough.’

‘How was work?’

She grimaced. ‘We’ve had this guy on one of the medical wards under police guard, waiting for him to open his bowels, ’cause they say he is a drug mule and they picked him up at the airport. He hung on to his bowels for like . . . all this week, no joke. He was in so much pain but he was just shitting himself . . . except not actually. Then this afternoon the poor bugger started to pass faeces involuntarily, and he passed condom after condom of drugs. When I left at 5:30 he had passed nine and was still going.’

‘So, work . . . ’

‘ . . . was everything I dreamed it would be when I was a little girl, yes.You?’

‘Similar.’

‘How are the crazy people?’

‘Actually they are not all crazy. A lot of them are just deeply pissed off.’

‘Well . . . either way, I shove them off to the psych team in the hospital at the first whiff of dodge.’

Anger flared in my chest.

‘And we wonder why mentally ill people have such poor health as a population,’ I said testily. ‘We wonder why they have trouble accessing
medical
care.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, Holly, but I just don’t want to be the sucker that gets bogged down for hours with a crazy person so I don’t get to do my actual work.’

‘Last week, Abs, one of my clients was taken to ED, sweaty, delirious, unwell . . . They called psych without a single medical examination, even though she couldn’t walk, it took hours for psych to get to her, and when they did she was drenched with sweat, shaking with this horrible tremor, and trying to eat the steel bar on the side of her hospital bed. It turned out she was horrendously lithium toxic and could have died. Her kidneys are fucked up for sure.’

‘Well, okay, that was a bad call by the triage nurse.’

‘You think?’

‘But nine times out of ten—’

‘And they have no one to look after them, no one to advocate for them—’

‘Settle down, Hol; I’m not the bad guy.’

‘If my mother was taken to hospital with a serious medical condi meguy.tion, and turfed off to psych without any medical investigation I would be lawyering up; I would be writing to my MP; I would be calling
A Current Affair
; I would be storming into the hospital general managers office . . . ’

‘You know, Hol, sometimes the holier-than-thou thing? It gets a little much. You are holier than all of us, okay? I get it. Can we talk about something else?’

I wanted to ask her if her decision to toss oncology in favour of radiology still stood, but I knew things were already too tense. We were both relieved when we saw Dan approaching. He had removed his tie and opened his shirt and had a friend in tow.

‘This is Xanon,’ said Dan, after he’d kissed Abigail and me. ‘He works at my firm.’ Dan had talked about this particular colleague before. He was a large, unlovely but very well-fed looking guy, part of a satirical newspaper that had recently signed to ABC for a weekly TV show.

‘Xanon, this is Holly, and this is Abigail, two of my oldest friends.’

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

Dan went to the bar to get us drinks and I tried not to pout about him bringing a friend to what was supposed to be a closed affair, just the original four. Four since Liam had left.

‘So what do you ladies do when you’re not waiting in bars for young Daniel?’ enquired Xanon in private-school tones.

‘I’m a doctor,’ said Abigail expressionlessly. Abigail would rather die than let someone know they’ve impressed her, and the last thing she wanted was to go silly over the comedy-writer-cum-management-consultant with the prime-time TV deal. The feeling was mutual. Xanon did not want to give a moment’s pause to someone who wielded a stethoscope and might perhaps compare their actual contribution to his wielding of graphs, PowerPoint presentations and ‘recommendations’ at Xavier and Co.

‘And you? Er . . . ’

‘Holly. I’m a social worker.’

He looked flummoxed. No one is ever impressed by what I do. Just mystified. ‘You . . . Oh. Where?’

‘I work at Elizabethtown Mental Health Service. Do you know where that is?’

‘Erm, well . . . only from the news of course. Pow-pow . . . ’ He mimed shooting a gun.

‘Actually there’re far more stabbings than shootings,’ I said, a little huffily.

‘Well!’ boomed the well-fed satirist. ‘You must just
hoover
up all the moral high ground at dinner parties. That’s a perk.’ And he yawed at his own wit.

Abigail didn’t join him in laughter, even though she was pissed off at me and probably agreed with him. I appreciated her loyalty. I alwaysalt="0em"

Lara didn’t arrive until after seven. She trit-trotted in with slightly unsteady steps, flanked by a girl about our age, similarly and expensively suited, and with well-cut-and-coloured blonde hair.

‘Hey there, sports fans!’ she shouted. ‘
This
is my very good friend and colleague Averil. And we . . . are the tiniest bit drunk.’

I saw Daniel perk up noticeably. He loves bedding the private-school girls that were so withering to him when we were in high school. And if they have been pre-lubricated by Friday-night boardroom drinks, so much the better. We expanded the circle to incorporate them, and as we did so Tim appeared, kissed me and fought his way over to the bar. I almost burst with pride looking at him. He was so handsome. And he was
my
boyfriend. Averil and I made chit-chat over the din of music and shouting. She was working on a big project with Lara. She had grown up in Rose Bay and went to school at Kambala. Now she had her own flat in Bronte with another colleague from the firm. She was looking forward to a late-season ski trip to New Zealand with her boyfriend as soon as the big project was finished. And how did I know Lara? And what did I do?

There was silence for a moment following my answer, and Averil seemed not to know what to say. Then she recovered.

‘Actually we do quite a bit of pro bono work at Wolf Parkinson White. Pro bono means, like—’

‘I know what it means.’

‘Oh good. Well Lara asks to be involved in those cases quite a bit. A couple of months ago I asked to be put on one . . . just to see, like, what goes on, you know?’

‘Yeah? And what does go on?’

‘Okay, like, we were representing this, like, freak. I’m sorry but there is no other way to put it. She was, like, a fruit loop. And she kept not attending any of the appointments we made for her, or she would show up, like, an hour late and be sitting in reception with plastic bags and these, ancient Homy Ped sandals, and she had this freaky make-up and obviously no bra, and she smelled so bad I was, like, oh my god I can’t even sit in the same room as you.’ Averil was quite animated by now, the telling of the tale had clearly aroused one of her talents.

‘And it was, like,
hello
, we are providing you with a free service and you are, like, not even showing up?’

‘Hmm,’ I contributed.

‘And then! On the day we were actually supposed to be in court she didn’t show up at all! Who does that? Anyway, at that point I got myself off the case. I was, like, can I please do some work that actually matters? There’s probably a warrant out for her arrest by now.’

She laughed as if that was the funniest thing in the world. What the hell was Lara doing hanging out with this chick? And bringing her to drinks? I could’ve brought Nick but I couldn’t imagine him in that setting. And I wanted quality time with my friends.

I was very relieved to be out of there at 9 p.m., when we all walked up Pitt Street in search of dumplings. In the blessed fresh air. Lara was trashed and she and Averil staggered arm in arm. Tim and I held hands. Abigail and Daniel were at the rear, abreast with Xanon and his recently arrived girlfriend, Rebecca. It took me a moment to place her face but then I twigged that she was Rebecca Hulme, who had a regular column in the Opinion pages. Ecstasy should be legalised, she thought. Among other things. As we waited for the walk signal on the corner of Pitt and Park, I unbuttoned the top two buttons on Tim’s shirt and kissed his chest.

‘Hey, gorgeous,’ I said, imaginatively.

‘Are you drunk?’

‘Little bit. Not, you know—’

‘Cross now!’ He pulled me across the street.

Once we were settled in the restaurant I pulled out my phone to text Nick.

Hey Nicholarse, we having bite to eat, should be at Purps by 11. Want to meet there? H-T-T ;-)x

I fumbled around under the table putting it back in my bag and resurfaced to hear Rebecca telling Dan and Xanon about her next article at the far end of the table.

‘I mean, most of our friends are lawyers and they’ve been so helpful, and of course Xan and his friends at Xavier. And one other friend who is an advertising executive has given me a lot of time. The Black Dog Institute was great. Overwhelmingly, I am hearing that the people in these office towers are hurting. They’re worked too long, too hard. They’re hurting, but they feel they can’t speak up. Can’t ask for help. The stigma, you know. They’ve always been the cream of the crop, always high achieving – they feel they don’t really have any choices. They are a shoo-in for depression.’

I caught Dan’s eye and cocked my head to one side in my most empathic social worker pose.

Are you hurting
? I mouthed. He grinned, and then looked back at Rebecca.

‘Well I don’t care what any of you think, I am going to see Beyonce and youse can all just deal,’ Lara shouted at the other end of the table.

Averil let out a whoop of laughter while fiddling with her mobile.

‘Is it him? Is it him?’ Lara squealed and they both huddled around the screen.

‘Thank god,’ said Abigail, as the dumplings arrived.

We had free fortune cookies with the bill. I bit into mine and retrieved my slip of paper.

‘Hmmmm,’ mused Lara. ‘
Your nightmare will wake if you do not tell the truth.
That’s kind of heavy. Abby-gail?’

‘
The temple bell has stopped but the music still comes out of the flo. That’s not a fortune. Give me a real fortune, somebody. Hols?’

‘
Do not eat.
Again – not a fortune.’

‘Come on, turn it over.’

I did so and found myself staring at the paper.

You will hurt the one you love the most.

I stuffed it into my skirt pocket.

We walked on up to Purple Sneakers, losing Xanon and Rebecca who were going to a party at a friend’s city apartment. I hoped that Averil was drunk enough to realise she should call it a night, but clearly she was going wherever Lara went. It was approaching eleven and there was a bit of a queue happening. We stood in it, listening to Muse spilling out and bouncing up to the scraps of sky between the tall buildings. I leaned my head on Tim’s shoulder and closed my eyes.