Demons (16 page)

Hannah was on the edge of the couch. Leon had a hand on the small of her back—it
was hard to tell if he was holding her back or pushing her forward. Marshall, on
the other hand, had slumped down again as if trying to protect himself from the blows.
Well yes, said Adam, but I guess we should let Megan finish her story—I don’t think
she was asking for such a long answer to her question.

Phew, said Megan, shaking herself. So what
was
the question again?

They all laughed.

It had just gone five and an early winter evening was coming down. The sky was backlit,
glowing. Evan looked out. I wonder how the Saints went? he said.

The rain was still coming in waves, slapping the roof, the windows, the walls. Everything
strained and creaked. You could hear the legs of the table outside scraping across
the deck and from everywhere a cacophony of gurgling, splashing, slurping. The sound
of earth sucking water seemed to outdo even the mighty sounds of the sea.

So, said Megan. The roadhouse on the way to Oodnadatta. Abbie behind the wheel. What
next? she said. Well, she continued, after the big success with all the actors in
the ward that day, Keely, our go-between, dropped out. She said we’d got ourselves
in too deep. So now it was just Beckie, Heather and me.

Well, the first result of this, said Abbie, was that the actors got cold feet too.
The whispers went down the line, saying how Keely had bailed, and that sent a panic
through them all. We rang around, tried to reassure them, offered more money, but
they weren’t interested. In fact, they thought we were crazy—and we probably were.

I’d wanted to be a nurse all my life, had sacrificed everything for it, and now
here we were, just the three of us, taking all these risks, putting our careers on
the line—and for what? A few extra dollars dropped into a broken system, money that
should have been given to us without strings attached years ago. What we were doing
had outrun our reasons for doing it; we were playing with patient lists now just
because we could. But were we making any
difference
?

Then one day the nursing supervisor called the three of us into her office. She was
a big woman, and that morning she seemed to have puffed herself up to twice her normal
size. She started talking about the pressure we were all under, how we were all in
the same boat, how stingy funding affected us all, not just the radical few; we are
all fighting the same fight, she said, fiddling with her lanyard, and she would be
the last to discourage suggestions from her staff about ways to improve efficiency.
If one group of nurses is managing to clear their backlogs quicker than the others
then she would be remiss in her duty—wouldn’t she?—if she didn’t enquire into their
work practices to see if there might not be something there that she could adopt
in other areas of the hospital. That’s only natural, she said. But in doing this,
you see, girls—she called us girls—in doing this enquiring, we have uncovered a couple
of anomalies. It’s understandable, of course, in a big public hospital, accommodating
thousands of patients every week, that there might be a few record-keeping oversights.
Maybe a patient has been wrongly assigned, maybe a patient has, according to the
records, been discharged early, or late; sometimes we might even have patients on
our records who don’t seem to exist, or, at least, when we go looking for them, we
can’t find them.

Of course, said the supervisor, there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation:
the patient has been discharged and (unforgivably, I would have to say) the records
have not been updated. Perhaps—I suppose this is possible—the patient has been transferred
to another ward of the hospital and, again, surprisingly, the records have not been
corrected. Or perhaps a really bad admission error has been made. John Smith, say,
has been entered as Jim Smith, say, and when John Smith is subsequently found lying
in a bed in 4 East and the record corrected, the non-existent patient, Jim Smith,
has somehow—I don’t know how—been left in the system? It seems far-fetched, true,
that a professional nursing team could do that, but you never know. Or—let me speculate
again—perhaps the patient whose name and details and medical history appear on our
hospital records never existed at all? Now there’s an idea. This one, for example,
I wonder who she is?

The supervisor, said Abbie—hands on the wheel, glancing sideways at me—was holding
up a sheet of paper so we could read it. Jacinta Rose, she said, female, thirty-two,
severely infected cyst, upper right jaw, admitted yesterday am, operated on pm,
moved post-op to Bed 9, 4 North late yesterday evening. But we can’t find her. Anywhere.
Shall we go up and have a look?

It all happened so quickly, the supervisor had barely finished the sentence before
she was out of her chair, the sheet of paper rolled up and thrust in front of her
like a pointing stick. We followed her into the corridor. She started making small
talk—
It’s a lovely day
—
Do you have weekend
plans?
—
There’s the new IV
—and we tried
to stay on topic.
Yes, it is
—
No, not really
—
That must have cost a fortune
. But we
knew we were going to the gallows.

When we got to the lift I excused myself, saying I’d left a patient for a urine sample
in the toilet on my ward, and before the supervisor had a chance to object I headed
for the stairwell. I came out on the fourth floor looking like I’d run a marathon
and raced to the nurses’ station where Ange, one of our original members, was on
duty. Hurry, I said, the supervisor’s coming, get me a gown, a bandage and a shaver
or I’ll tell her you’re in on it too. Ange did what I said. In the toilets I stripped,
hid my clothes in the sanitary bin, shaved half my head and flushed the hair down
the toilet, wound the bandage around my jaw then ran to Bed 9, got in and ‘fell asleep’.

The sheet had only just settled on me when I heard the
click-clack
of the supervisor’s
heels. Then I heard Beckie’s voice. Yes, here she is, she was saying, it looks like
she’s sleeping; I think we’ve got her on morphine so it’s probably best not to wake
her. I heard the footsteps stop, then felt the shadow on the window side as the supervisor
looked down at me. It was quite serious, Beckie was saying, and they had to remove
some surrounding tissue; even her mother wouldn’t recognise her when she came back
from theatre. That was the last thing I heard before I felt the supervisor’s fingers,
pulling at the bandage.

So, said Abbie, that was that. We were dragged up before
the hospital board, the others too, and asked to explain ourselves. There wasn’t
much to explain. The union backed us for a little while but then they saw the error
of their ways. We’d brazenly manipulated the patient records of a well-known public
hospital and we were going down. Forget about the public good, the means justifying
the ends—there are systems in place to prevent that kind of thing.

Anyway, said Abbie, to cut a long story short, some time after this Ange told me
she knew someone who worked in the remote communities up in the Territory. Apparently
they’re not so diligent with their record-keeping and there is no Board of Suits
to tell you you’re evil. You do what you can with the money you’re given. That might
suit me for a while. Abbie stared at the road ahead. Ah, she said, perfect timing.
She was pointing at a road sign:
Oodnadatta 10
. So, she said, what’s your story?

They all sat in silence for a while, thinking:
Oh, I see, now we’re going to get
another story, Megan’s story within the story, and if that’s the case then maybe
we should look around for some more wine?
But then Megan, reading the room, said:
No, that’s it, that’s the end. When we got to Oodnadatta I decided not to go all
the way with her. The car rental company said they could get me a replacement the
following day and would put me up for the night. And Abbie, she was weird—it
might
have been true, I don’t know—but I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear any more of her stories,
or for that matter tell mine. She dropped me off. I said thanks and good luck. But
I couldn’t help looking at her crew cut as she drove away, thinking about the supervisor’s
expression and the plumber pulling the hair out of the toilet, the faces of the board
when she got dragged up before them. I wonder if stories can change how things are
in the world or if they’re just us telling others what we think the world looks like?
Do you know what I mean?

It was dark. Lauren pulled the curtains closed. Do you want to stoke the fire? she
said. Evan did. Megan was still on the couch, thinking about her story and the question
she’d asked at the end. Yes, said Adam, I think they do. Really? said Megan. Does
me pointing a camera at a blackfella change anything?

Nothing changes anything, said Leon. They all looked at him. The power’s elsewhere,
he said, always has been—but no-one knows where elsewhere is. It might have been
the politicians once, a long time ago. Writers and artists once had power to change
things. People say it’s business now, global corporations, the media, the new media—but
I don’t believe that either. They’re powerless too, they’re chasing an idea of power
that even they know is elsewhere. People power? Nah. I don’t believe it; no left-winger
can believe it after what happened to Soviet Russia. Maybe that’s power’s natural
property, said Leon, to coagulate, concentrate. Stalin. Mao. Pol Pot. Mugabe. The
excitable energy and goodwill of the people, that great maelstrom of
peopleness
,
all that fantastic fire is eventually distilled into one single despot. Maybe by
its very nature power can’t be a spread out thing. And that was the trouble, for
someone like me, a journalist with a conscience: no-one changed anything unless he
or she was lucky enough to be the one who became the despot, the right person in
the right place at the right time in whom all that power was held. So no, Megan,
or Adam, sorry, stories change
nothing
.

Megan was about to strike at her brother and his insidious idea, the way he’d turned
her melancholy moment into his own smart brand of nihilism, but before she had a
chance Marshall was talking. I’ve got a story, he said. Do you reckon I can tell
it? Everyone looked at him. Shouldn’t we eat? said Leon. Marshall threw his hands
up. There you were, all hoeing into me, giving it to us politicians—we’re liars,
we don’t do anything. Well, do you think I’m happy with the situation? (He was on
his own trip again.) I mean, you talked about those people before, Leon—Lee?—in your
story, the protesters, everyone shouting:
We want to change the world!
But what did
they achieve? You try to make one happy, you put the other one’s nose out of joint.
We’re too polite, we have to be. We’ve become polite-icians. And why? (No-one knew
whether Marshall wanted an answer.) Because there are always two sides, he said.
Never three. Or four. Or twelve and a half. It’s always on the one hand this and
on the other that. So how do you get hold of an issue that’ll actually give you some
traction? Politicians aren’t leaders. Once were, not now. We’re followers, folks.
Real leaders are going to have to come from somewhere else. Sport maybe. I don’t
know. Guerrilla knitting. He drank. Anyway, he said, it’s short, trust me—and I don’t
think it’ll hurt anyone’s feelings.

They all agreed that maybe they did have time for one more before dinner.

Well, said Marshall, putting his glass back on the table, this story is something
another pollie told me just after I’d taken up my seat. It’s about a Canberra backbencher
and the problem he had with this guy in his electorate. Maybe stories don’t change
things—Megan, Leon—but things in the world
become
stories, don’t they? It was yours,
Megan, said Marshall, that made me think of it. It’s about real estate, too, in a
way, which should give a few people here a few laughs. It’s called
Like Bartleby
.
Contrary to the secret opinions of certain people in this room, I did pay attention
at uni and if you remember in first year we studied Melville and he had a story about
a clerk in an office who refuses to go home and actually ends up sleeping there and
his boss, the guy telling the story, doesn’t know what to do. Well this story is
a bit like that, said Marshall, and he picked up the stick. That’s why I’ve called
it
Like Bartleby
.

Marshall: Like Bartleby…

The backbencher’s name was Payley and his seat—unlike mine, which I wrestled from
the blue bloods by a one per cent margin—was rusted on Labor, twenty per cent margin
at the last election. Mostly outer suburbs with lots of new housing estates full
of aspirational lower middle class which, as we know, is contemporary Labor’s core
constituency. All mortgaged to the hilt. They’re popping up everywhere out there,
these estates, like mushrooms after the rain. Fair enough. Why wouldn’t the farmers
want to sell? The land is worth jack shit as farmland but for housing it’s worth
millions. Most get sold off the plan: some newlyweds go out for a drive on a Sunday,
turn off into one of the new streets that have been cut through the paddocks, have
a look around and say: Yes, this block here, this looks nice. They visit the display
suite, pick a house—the
Fortitude
, say, or the
Liberty
—and whack down their deposit.
Six months later, they move in. It’s a pretty efficient system, when you think about
it, if anything it’s been working a bit too well. But occasionally you get a spanner
in the works.

Payley first got wind of it through his electorate officer; a reporter from the local
rag had rung to say he was running a story and would his boss like to comment? The
story was about a young Indian couple who had recently bought a house off the plan,
they were expecting their first child and were pretty keen to move in. The woman
was seven-and-a-half months pregnant. But the house was only a few weeks away from
finished when someone started squatting in it. The couple had gone out there one
Sunday for a look—there were still a few fittings to go in and some last-minute painting
to be done—but when they put their faces to the window they saw a man sleeping on
a mattress inside. They went to the display suite and spoke to the woman but she
couldn’t do anything and suggested they ring the police. The police came round and
looked in through the window and banged on the door and then things started to get
complicated. The couple said it was their house, yes, but naturally they weren’t
living in it yet, and no, they didn’t have any documents with them to prove ownership.
The cops banged on the door a few more times. Still the man inside didn’t move. They
suggested the couple take it up with the housing company—surely they were responsible
for security while the house was being built?—and if they still had problems they
should try the police again.