The Courier's New Bicycle (12 page)

My mobile buzzes under my pillow in some deep, dark hour of sleep. I'm pulled out of a bad dream, Inez inside the speakeasy shouting at me to leave. I squint at the little glowing screen, Albee's home icon flashed up, and answer to a loud crash on the other end of the line then silence. The jag of fear that shivers through me chases away all grogginess.

‘Albee?' Mobile pressed to my ear, I lurch out of bed past the half-hidden bundle that's Nitro and grope for clothing, the light switch.

I ask again, but there's nothing more from the other end.

My heart rate ratchets up.

‘I'll be there soon,' I promise into the phone.
Please don't let this be like before,
is what I'm thinking. There were three of them with cricket bats last time. He was in hospital with multiple fractures for several weeks.

I call triple-0 from the bathroom, giving the operator
Albee's address as I plug in for a quick subdermal of Courier's Friend. Outside, I run with the bike into the back lane. Then I'm in the toe straps and sprinting. His place will take me twenty-five minutes at full tilt along the empty streets. With emergency services stretched so thin these days, it's likely I'll get there first.

Twenty gut-twisting minutes later, I'm bumping across the footpath, the ambulance screaming up the road behind me. I wave them into the driveway. The stretcher is wheeled out, and the three of us converge at the side entrance. The security screen isn't snibbed and the glass door behind it is ajar.
Bad
.

I propel myself inside on shaky legs, the blood hammering in my ears. ‘Albee?'

Neither sound nor movement in answer to my call.
Double bad
.

Light filters through from the back. I lean the bike and lift a hinged section of the counter, then race with the ambulance officers down the aisle to the workshop.

He's sprawled on the ground near his workbench, the lamp above it still on, his phone a metre from his hand. He's always said I'm ‘1' on his speed dial.

‘Albee!'

I go to crouch beside him, but one of the officers holds me back. ‘Don't touch him, mate. Let us.'

She speaks to her colleague. ‘Could be another one.'

The stretcher is released to floor level. A rubber cover with lipped sides and handles goes on the trolley. Then,
before my disbelieving eyes, they open a kitbag and begin to speed-change into protective clothing.

‘What's your friend's name?' Ambo A asks, pulling on a bootied zip-up suit.

I tell her, watching Albee helplessly from two metres away. His face is a sheen of sweat, his mouth slack and dribbling. I look for the rise and fall of his chest. Then I hear him wheeze.

‘Were you with him when he collapsed?' Ambo B this time.

‘No,' I answer. ‘He rang me. I got here when you did.'

Ambo B puts on a double layer of rubber gloves. ‘What substances is he likely to have taken in the last twelve hours?' He adjusts his googles and mask. ‘Was he suicidal?'

Suicidal?
I shrug uselessly.

The forensically clad duo instruct me to stand well back as they move in on him.

Ambo A leans over. ‘Albee, can you hear me?'

She's insistent, trying to draw him back to consciousness. He responds with guttural noises and muscle twitching.

The two begin a series of monotone checks and responses, working in swift coordination. One pushes something into Albee's mouth while the other lifts a watery eyelid then takes hold of a wrist. A blood-pressure cuff goes on his upper arm, a sensor clipped to the end of a finger. A mask goes over his face and his chin is tilted sharply up. Attached to the mask is a PVC bag with an inflatable reservoir and a line to a small oxygen tank hooked onto the
trolley. As Ambo A begins to squeeze the bag, Ambo B presses something that looks like an adrenaline pen into one limp forearm and watches for a response on the portable monitor.

‘Let's get those fluids in.'

I stare at Albee's lower half. His feet are bare and the bottom of his shirt is buttoned up wrong. I notice his jeans' fly is undone. In an impulse of decorum, I want to zip it up. As one of the paramedics shifts, I get a partial view of my friend's face. His eyes flutter briefly, and I think he's trying to speak. My joy turns to terror when out comes a horrible gurgling sound.

‘Here we go,' warns Ambo A, ripping away the mask and airway protector. Rolled swiftly onto his side, Albee throws up on the floor.

Ambo B gets a plastic tub from the kitbag and shakes a white powder onto the vomit. I look at the container. Sodium bicarbonate.

He turns to me. ‘A cup of warm water,' he commands.

I find a cup in the kitchenette, fill it, and return to the workshop. Ambo B is sopping up the powder-covered mess with paper towel. He takes the cup, adds a scoop of bicarb and pours the solution on the floor, sopping it up with more paper towel. Then the cup, the sodden wad and one layer of gloves go in a sharps bin.

Agonised, I hover at the edge of the workshop. It reeks of vomit and something else my panicked brain won't put a name to yet.

Ambo B has taken over squeezing the bag. Ambo A tightens a tourniquet on Albee's upper arm and taps for a vein inside his elbow. The intravenous line is attached, then something syringed in.

‘Two of atropine,' says Ambo A, and a wave of terror brings spots dancing in my vision. I lean heavily against metal shelving. The thought of losing my long-time friend is unbearable.

Now they're opening Albee's shirt. I crane around them. The white scars across his chest are revealed, one below each nipple. I panic that they'll suspend their ministrations — some have before with him, realising what it is they see — but they're attaching little pads, the leads connected to a machine on the trolley.

Both pairs of eyes are on the machine as it begins to blip. It's mighty slow. Surely that's not his heartbeat?

They do a speed-search across his abdomen then his arms, moving onto his feet and calves. I panic some more when they take scissors to his jeans, cutting them from hip to trouser end. The fabric cleaves apart, revealing Albee's pale skin covered only by boxer shorts. They check the fronts of both thighs before rolling him onto one hip and lifting away the waistband to peer at a buttock cheek. It's while repeating the procedure on the other side that they pause.

‘There,' says Ambo A at a purplish mark inside a sizeable swelling on Albee's right cheek. ‘Delivered IM, like the others.'

‘Delivered what?' I squeak.

‘Intramuscularly.'

‘Third one in as many days,' says Ambo B.

‘Third
what
?' I plead as they readjust Albee's shorts.

Ambo A looks back at me. ‘OP poisoning — organophosphate. Whatever your friend
thought
he was injecting, it was laced with a pesticide.'

I'm horrified. My eyes smart with tears.

Ambo B breaks open another ampoule and syringes it into the IV line.

‘What's that?' Fear beats in my throat like a trapped bird.

‘Atropine. It's an antidote.'

I try to process what I've just been told: Albee injected a pesticide into himself, and so did two others the same way before him. It seems completely impossible. In the thirteen years I've known him, he's tried a variety of anti-oestrogens then straight testosterone, and for the last few years he's bought EHg product exclusively from Gail. Any little extras, such as new recipes of Courier's Friend, he gets from me. Using another company's product is just something he'd never do.

The ambos use the rubber cover from the trolley to lift Albee, rolling him onto it, then raise the trolley to waist height and rush it between the bike-shop shelves, rails rattling and IV bag jiggling. As they're sliding him in the back of the ambulance, the muscles of his legs and arms start to spasm, working like a broken wind-up toy.

‘Do something!' I shout.

They already are.

‘Five of diazepam,' Ambo A, busy with the airbag, calls to her counterpart. The shot goes in, and Albee spasms some more. I can't bear to watch.

The doors slam on the lit cabin. Ambo B peels his protective clothing into a biohazards bag and climbs in the driver's seat. As the vehicle wails down the street, I dash inside and grab the keys to the panel van off the hook behind the counter. Leaving my bike, I pull closed the security screen and glass door and race through the workshop into the backyard.

The Sandman fires up immediately. Its tyres screech out of Bike Heaven's driveway. Gunning the engine, I follow in the wake of the siren and flashing lights.

 

It's already a busy Wednesday in the Emergency Department. Staff to and fro behind the half-glass doors, someone moans, a child cries out. I fill in an information form for Albee at the reception desk, and am grilled again on what contact I had with him before the ambulance arrived. I say none and ask why, and am informed that his skin and bodily fluids — even his breath — are contaminative to others, and that right now he's being washed down and his clothes incinerated.

Nothing I can do to protect him now, I turn wearily to the waiting area. Painted salmon pink, with seats to match, its low table is stacked with
House & Garden
magazines from the previous century. Half a dozen people sit in various attitudes of defeat: there are those waiting to be helped and
those waiting for a verdict — and no way will I sit there with them.

I walk down the linoleum corridor to call Gail. Halfway through my second sentence the tears come. I slide into a crouch against the wall. Gail guides me through the details before we ring off.

Back at reception I'm informed that when they're done washing him, Albee will be moved to Intensive Care.

‘Can I go there?' I ask.

The nurse makes a quick appraisal. ‘Family members only,' he warns, then says softer, ‘They'll be too busy to let you near for a while. I'd get a snack and a cuppa from the all-night cafeteria. It's better than the stuff they have up at the ICU.'

There's a sign pointing along the corridor to the place he means, but the Tum-Tum Tree café is not where I want to be right now. Nor is it here, staring at off-pink walls and twiddling my thumbs. I need to search Albee's place for what he took, and remove any incriminating evidence before other interested parties decide to conduct their own treasure hunt. The police I'm not worried about. It's those self-appointed guardians of the moral good at Neighbourly Watch Central.

I ring Gail again as I'm walking towards the exit. We agree for her and Anwar to meet me at Bike Heaven.

It's still dark outside. I sit in Albee's panel van and stare at the pair of fluffy dice hanging from the rear-vision
mirror. As long as I've known him, he's had a love of kitsch. I lean my head on the steering wheel.

It's usual, if a bit awkward, to self-inject into a buttock, but I'm convinced Albee didn't do it by himself. There had to be someone else there who'd been let in and who left in too much of a hurry to close the front door. Albee is too careful to have forgotten. So was the jab in the bum with his permission or by force? I don't like one bit what image rises next: my friend lying on his bed, face down, pants down, someone behind him administering the dose.

Shivering, I turn the key in the ignition and the heater up full bore. The van clunks along Temperance Street and Atonement, then left onto Saviour for the straight run down into South Melbourne.

Pesticide
… surely not something the inner-city emergency services would encounter often? The two previous call-outs had given the ambos the heads-up and almost certainly saved Albee's life. I don't want to think about whether or not the others had survived, but a spate of poisonings in quick succession says there's likely more of the substance being circulated in the marketplace.

I swing into Albee's street. Not a light on, nor a soul about. In this neighbourhood the doors would stay bolted at the sound of a siren, nobody caring to see what kind of emergency vehicle is arriving and who's being put in it, nobody wanting to know that much of anybody else's business.

Pulling into Bike Heaven's driveway, it suddenly comes
to me — the other sickly thing apart from vomit that I'd smelt in Albee's workshop.

It was perfume.

 

I bypass the front counter and ceiling-high aisles of shelving and begin my search in the workshop area, careful to avoid the place where the vomit was cleaned up.

Unlike the clutter in the aisles, Albee's work space is immaculate, each tool with its allocated place on a pegboard or in plastic slide-out trays below. The bench is a well-used surface with clamps both ends, the shelves underneath holding cleaning fluids and neatly folded cloths. Eight bikes hang from the ceiling rack at the back wall. There are more in the shed outside.

I empty the rubbish bin. If someone else brought the stuff, there might be the telltale remains of packaging, like wax off the seal of a polyshell, or an empty ampoule; if Albee did it to himself then fell ill straightaway, there's sure to be. Trouble is, I don't know how long it was between the dose and its effect, and because the stuff was injected into a muscle rather than a vein, it would have been slower onset. Slow enough, for instance, for Albee to get dressed … badly.

Nothing obvious in the workshop. I move on to his flat, starting in the bathroom where it's standing room only between the shower, washbasin and toilet. I check the cistern and the shower recess, then the set of narrow shelves behind the mirror, removing a few items I wouldn't want
the snoops to see and popping them in my backpack. Done there, I enter the studio space.

Albee's living room is also where he sleeps, the bedding on the fold-out couch in disarray. A lava lamp sits beside it, the globs of goo collected at the bottom of a nasty green suspension. The dentist I went to as a kid had one of these, based on some misguided notion that we, the waiting, would find it comforting. To me it's a piece of the past never meant to endure — but try telling Albee that.