with an accident that changes everything, an accident forcing me to leave town for my own safety.
At 10 pm on a Friday night I am in bed, lying awake in a silence one never hears in Sydney, imagining the wild time my friends are having there, bar-hopping around Darlinghurst and Surry Hills, seeing bands and DJs, laughing and flirting with girls.
When the phone rings, I jump back into the cold, dark room, sit bolt upright, snatching the receiver.
‘Peak Hill Station.’
‘Yeah mate, let’s see … some kid hit by a semi on the main street, says it’s near the service station. I’ll sort you out some back-up from Dubbo. They’re just finishing a transfer so it might be an hour or so, maybe forty-five – if they fang it. Booked 10.01, on it 10.02. Good luck.’
No matter how many truck drivers Doug the policeman books for speeding through the main street, few semitrailers slow down much. They have a tight schedule and Peak Hill is just another blink-and-you-miss-it town clinging to the highway.
As it turns out, the fourteen-year-old Aboriginal boy lying in the gutter has only been ‘clipped’ by the semitrailer, a hit-and-run, although I suspect the driver wouldn’t have noticed. A crowd from the mission has quickly formed and they urge me to hurry as I retrieve my gear.
‘C’mon brudda, ya gotta help tha poor fella, he ain’t in a good way mister medic.’
Relieved to find the boy conscious, I put him in a neck brace and begin a quick head-to-toe examination to ascertain his injuries. As I’m doing this I feel a hand squeeze my buttocks, more than one hand, in fact, until a good many are occupied with my bum cheeks. I look around but the crowd encircling me is too dense to identify a particular culprit. I wonder where Doug the policeman is, he always seems to arrive well after a drama is over.
The crowd shuffles back half a foot when I ask for some room, but pushes in again when I take a blood pressure reading. A second time I feel the hands, this time squeezing and caressing my buttocks with renewed enthusiasm, one of them even giving me an affectionate little slap. Such a thing is most distracting in emergency situations. Moreover, it’s shameless sexual harassment. I grab my portable radio, calling for urgent police assistance. That should wake Doug up, I think to myself. Again I demand the onlookers move away, but my request is ignored.
‘Listen brudda,’ says an elder among the group. ‘We don’t trust you whitefellas, we gotta watch you, make sure you do us a good job, you know wad I mean?’
Finally Doug turns up, huffing and puffing and waving at the crowd to move on. Reluctantly they do, now giving me space to load the patient. Doug offers to drive the ambulance to the hospital and I call off my back-up from Dubbo as the boy seems to have suffered little more than minor abrasions.
Early the next morning I am woken by the sound of a car with holes in the muffler going up and down the dirt road beside the nurses’ quarters. Crouching low, I crawl in my underwear to the kitchen where I’m able to peek out between the lace curtains on the window above the sink. Idling on the grass outside my place is a beaten-up, cream-coloured Datsun packed with Aboriginal girls.
‘Shit,’ I curse to myself. From my position at the window I can make out their conversation as they speculate on my whereabouts.
‘He ain’t come out from that house all morning, I reckon he in there, he in there, I’m telling ya.’
‘Maybe he gone walkabout.’
‘He ain’t gone walkabout! Ambo guys don’t go walkabout, they gotta be ready, you know, READY!’
‘Yeah, and we seen two ambulance in that big shed, means he in there, he in there for sure!’
Not wanting to get caught undressed, I crab-crawl my way back to the bedroom and throw on my uniform, complete with all its formal trimmings. Maybe if I wear the tie and jacket with gold buttons down the front and speak with a firm tone I can scare off my stalkers. By the time I psych myself up to step out and challenge the girls – a butter knife in my pocket for reassurance – the Datsun does a donut, whipping up a cloud of dirt and farts off towards the highway. The girls catcall before the car shudders over the cattle grate at the end of the track and disappears.
I phone Doug and explain the situation.
‘Yeah, I heard,’ he says.
‘Heard what?’
‘The blackfellas are a bit upset with you.’
‘Me? Why? I did fine with that kid last night.’
‘Sure you did but you also got yourself a big problem in the process, mate. Those Koori chicks are trouble and you’re the talk of the mission today. Heard they even got a special name for you, what is it again? Ah, Romeo! That’s it!’
‘Romeo?’
‘Romeo, as in Romeo and Juliet, you know, that movie that’s just come out?’
Baz Luhrmann’s sexy contemporary interpretation of the Shakespearean classic had recently done good business at the Australian box office. Even Aboriginal kids in Peak Hill, miles from any cinema screen, knew about it. Unfortunately I didn’t look anything like Leonardo DiCaprio. How could the girls have come to such a comparison based on the quality of my arse alone?
‘Take it from me mate, whatever you do, don’t be going down the mission on a job, understand? You’ll either be set upon by the women or a jealous bloke will glass your throat.’
He paused for a moment. ‘Actually, you got to get out of here.Those girls won’t let up until they pin you down. Literally.’
‘But Doug, you’re a cop for crying out loud!’
‘Come on. Cops can’t touch no blackfella these days, let alone a female of the species. You know that. Sorry to tell you this, mate, you’re on your own.’
Never have I covered the 20-metre distance between the nurses’ quarters and the ambulance station in less time. Whatever door I pass through, I make certain it’s bolted behind me. Despite Doug the policeman’s fear-mongering, if a call comes in for the mission I have every intention of making an official request for his assistance. This way he cannot, by law, refuse to help me. The idea of driving anywhere near the southern part of town has put me on a knife’s edge. What’s to say a bitter indigenous bloke down there doesn’t ring triple-0, fake some illness and jump up to strangle me with my own stethoscope?
My hopes of being nothing more than a passing interest are dashed the following day with the approach of the Datsun again at 10 am. It circles the ambulance station five or six times, coughing and backfiring. The car eventually skids to a stop and one of the girls gets out and peers through the window to see if I’m inside. Lying motionless behind the lounge, hiding for a good ten minutes, I wonder what my job has become. There is no question in my mind how different a situation like this would be if I were a female paramedic and my stalkers were male.
The Bogan Times comes out on Monday and ‘Peak Hill’s Romeo’ is front-page news: ‘Local Ambo Talk of the Town!’
Management in Dubbo are concerned. My wellbeing is under threat and the service has a responsibility for my safety next time there’s a call to the Peak Hill mission.
Within a week I get surprising news. Out of all the applications
