OUTBACK AMBO
Australia
For two weeks I have sat here in this fibro shack along the Newell Highway listening to the ceaseless drone of air-conditioning, waiting for the sick and injured to call me. Coursework for my paramedic degree is done and all my novels are read. Now I wait, occasionally wishing, with guilt, for some drama to occur, some crisis, no matter how small, anything to break the monotony of my posting.
From time to time my mother sends me a letter or her ginger cake wrapped in brown paper. For the second time today, I drive to the post office in my ambulance.
I’m stationed in Peak Hill in central New South Wales, a town some locals might consider their whole world. But to me, a nineteen-year-old city boy with an interest in surfing and clubbing, I am cast away, marooned, washed up in the stinking hot Australian outback.
‘Sorry, champ,’ says the post officer. ‘Nothing today.’
And so I drive my ambulance around the handful of quiet streets where nothing ever changes, where I rarely see a soul. Shutters are down, curtains drawn, doors shut. Where are they all, I wonder, these people who apparently know my every move?
I turn down towards the wheat silo and park, imagining how I would treat someone who had fallen from the top of it. After that I go to meet a flock of sheep with whom I’ve learnt to communicate. Much of it is non-verbal. We just stand there, the flock and I, face to face, staring quietly, contemplating what the other’s life must be like. Now and then we exchange simple sounds by way of call-and-response. Whenever I think I’ve gone mad I remind myself that most people talk freely to their pets without a second thought.
Earlier in the year, the Ambulance Service of New South Wales sent my whole class to remote corners of the state. I understood, of course, that in our vast country with its sparsely populated interior, everyone is equally entitled to pre-hospital care. Only problem is that few applications to the service are received from people living in the bush. Instead, young, degree-qualified city recruits from the eastern seaboard end up in one-horse towns.
As I entered the Club House Hotel in Caswell Street on my first night, twelve faces textured like the Harvey Ranges turned my way, looked me up and down taking in my stovepipe jeans, my combed hair and patterned shirt. As if my appearance was not out of place enough, I foolishly ordered a middy of Victoria Bitter and the room erupted in thigh-slapping laughter. Before I ran out, a walnut of a man nearest to me leant over to offer some local advice.
‘Out here, mate, it’s a schooner of Tooheys New, got it?’
I never went back to the pub, at least not socially. When called there in the ambulance for drunks fallen over, I was always greeted with the same row of men in the same position at the bar, like they had never gone home. It didn’t take me long to realise I’d need to find entertainment elsewhere.
In less than a month Kristy Wright, an actor playing the role of Chloe Richards on the evening soap Home & Away, has become the object of my affection. As the elderly will attest, a routine of the ordinary brings security of sorts, a familiar comfort, and Home & Away is just this for a lonely paramedic with too much time on his hands and not enough human company. Kristy is not particularly glamorous, nor is she Oscar material. Perhaps it’s her likeness to my first proper girlfriend, a ballerina who ran off to Queensland, married someone else, and broke my heart. Whatever the reason, I’m deeply smitten and make sure never to miss an episode.
For a small fee I have taken accommodation in the nurses’ quarters on the grounds of Peak Hill’s tiny brick hospital with its single emergency bed. Adjacent to the hospital lies the ambulance station consisting of a small office, a portable shed with air-conditioning and a garage containing an F100 and a Toyota 4x4 ambulance for difficult terrain. My new home next door is a freestanding weatherboard cottage, a little rundown but quaint nonetheless. Lodging at these nurses’ quarters initially sounded quite appealing to a young, single man, but the place never came with any nurses in it.
At 8 pm I ladle some lentil soup out of a giant pot I prepared earlier in the week, heating it up on the electric stove. After dinner, at 9 pm, I run the bath, making sure my blue fire-resistant jumpsuit is hanging by the door and my boots are standing to attention below, ready for the next job – if I ever live to see it, that is. Two slow weeks and I’m beginning to think they should close the ambulance station down before their assets rust away. The population plummeted a few years ago when Peak Hill’s gold mine hit the water table and ceased operations. Locals left behind would disagree, but maybe ambulance stations ought to come and go with the mines.
When the call finally comes it catches me off guard, just as I knew it would, cleaving me from a deep 4 am sleep.
‘Huh?’ I grunt into the phone. The dispatcher in the Dubbo control room 80 kilometres away sounds just as vague.
‘Okay, what we got here, let me see, ah, semi rollover on the Newell Highway six kilometres south of Peak Hill … well, that’s about all I have, mate … good luck with it.’
I hang up, slide out of bed in my jocks, splash my face at the bathroom sink, head to the door.
Keys, keys, ambulance keys. I teeter on the remains of sleep, trying to think of where I put the keys. When I throw my legs into the jumpsuit I’m relieved to hear them jingling in a pocket. My boots are on and I’m out.
The engine of the Ford springs to life, the V8 gives a mighty roar, a call to action. Adrenalin, like petrol charging through the lines, ignites me for the fight. I flick on the red flashing roof lights, the grill lights on the front, and then, as I skid onto the highway, I let the siren rip through the stillness. There’s not a car in sight, no one at all to warn of my approach, but this run is for the hell of it. I’m doing it because I can, because for two weeks I’ve been bored out of my brain and I’ll be damned if I won’t make the most of a genuine casualty call.
The Ford is a missile; eight cylinders of muscle thundering down the highway. In no time I cover the six kilometres, wishing the crash was further away for a longer drive. Last month it took me sixty minutes on the whistle travelling at speeds of 150 kilometres per hour to reach a child fallen off a horse at a remote property.
Up ahead a pair of stationary headlights in the middle of the road beam at me. They appear, at first, to be sitting higher than normal, but when I get closer I realise the semitrailer to which they belong has flipped upside down. It’s a most peculiar sight.
No one has motioned me to stop. In fact, there is no one about at all, not even Doug the policeman. Further down the road I spy another truck pulled up with its hazard lights on and assume this driver must have called the job in.
The motor of the upturned semi is still idling. It’s an eerie sound in the absence of any other. I decide that, for the purpose of making the scene safe and preventing an explosion, I ought to switch it off.
From what seems to have been the passenger side of the truck a steady stream of blood runs slowly to the shoulder of the road. The entire cabin of the semi is crushed and when I call out ‘Hello there!’ I don’t even get a grunt of acknowledgement.
This is my job, I remind myself. It falls on no one else. It is precisely my duty, without further delay, to climb underneath the overturned truck, attempt to turn off the ignition and ascertain the number and condition of its occupants.
With a small torch in hand, I get down on my chest and crawl into a narrow passage about a foot high with twisted metal and shattered glass all around, my head
