Working nights is a truth filter. Strip off the uniform, taxi driving is a portable alibi, extended sulk in responsibility’s garb. I am my father’s son minus the imagination. And balls. Absent at my mother’s moment of greatest need, hiding a hemisphere away. Bereavement is one more problem I thought I could outrun.
Watching this vapid billboard sideshow, it finally catches up. My father would agree, now I understand what drew me in. My rejoinder? Middle finger raised at Sergey Vladimirovich. I might have come down in the world, and you thought me better than I am, but I didn’t cheat on my wife. Or rat on the Motherland. And you know what else? I’m still standing.
As if pissing on my father’s hopes is the mark of a man. Of course the dead have no right of reply.
Passing drivers would see wild punches thrown at a passenger cowering behind the backrest. Any moment police will tap on my window. Is it road rage when the victim is my own shadow?
I loosen my uniform from the angry sweat, fire up the Camry, wriggle to the middle lane. Rev past a truck at illegal speed. Freeway momentum carries me past the off-ramp to the airport taxi pool where drivers await orderly dispatch in threes or fours. I cruise to the drop-off bay outside International Departures, where a Lebanese in blue-grey traffic controller livery gives me a quizzical once-over. The sign glows: strictly five minutes or tow away, seventy-two hour confiscation. The ensuing fine is a good night’s takings. My second potential career-ending moment within months.
I switch off the radio, the engine. The airport doors part before me with a soft whoosh. Whisk-whisk goes a floor buffer. A woman in a green blazer at the check-in desk is the only other person in sight.
‘Any flights to Moscow tonight?’ Passport, banknotes, driver’s license, bluff. The bare essentials in hand for a clean, more or less legal getaway. Explanations can wait. The big questions hover. What am I fleeing? Marriage? Responsibility? And what would I be running to?
‘Doubt it, but let’s see.’ She lip-syncs down the options. ‘Booked out, booked out… ah. Bingo. Qantas 6.05 am departure, connecting with Emirates. 12.40 pm leaving Dubai local time. Just yourself sir, I take it?’ She can spot a fugitive. ‘May I see your documents?’
I show my passport and visa.
‘One way? I see your visa has only, what, four months left? Without a return ticket you might have trouble coming back. If you accept that risk I can still issue the fare, just thought you should know.’
‘Thank you for helping me decide. I will go outside for a minute and think. Maybe come back. Okay?’
Her good humour speaks fifty languages. ‘I’ll still be here.’
At the exit door I see the traffic controller, ticketing book at the ready, bearing down on the Camry. Simultaneously we each increase our speed. I go into my last-resort hapless-foreigner routine, arms flailing like a stricken windmill, less effective on other foreigners. Two irate-looking drivers stand beside the cabs I am blocking. Mine is double-parked. The traffic controller stops beside the Camry, shakes his head. Mouths ‘What were you thinking?’ but puts his book back in his shirt pocket.
Clouds lift, unveiling the Southern Cross – God’s stencil work. My trajectory is a mad zigzag, but my compass has never felt surer. Traffic lights oblige green all the way to the West Gate Bridge. Tired moon, diaspora of stars above. The Yarra beams them back from the bottom of a jar. A pilot tug labours upstream towards Fisherman’s Bend. Further out I see a theme park baroque of petrol tanks, families of metal candles posing for a photograph. Salty onshore breeze.
At the bridge apex I stop at an emergency telephone, turn on the hazard lights and pop the bonnet hatch, feigning engine breakdown should a road patrol drive by. Cameras protrude over the railing, their lens cocked seawards, scanning the void for suicides. Just last week a man climbed the railing until coaxed down, causing three hours of traffic chaos. Missing the point, the newspapers highlighted his escape from a psychiatric centre. Up here where poetry meets science, it all makes sense – if suicide ever does.
When time dissolves in space, everything connects. The supranational state is born amid celestial shootouts; satellites zapping laser beams, tracking each and every taxi movement in Melbourne. The Camry is a blip on someone’s screen. Me? A rogue pixel.
I take out the street directory and ponder where to go next. I remember I have not turned the radio back on. A female voice pierces the static.
‘Vassili, how long you been off air? Your wife rang us about half an hour ago, very upset. We couldn’t make out what the problem was, but you’d best head home.’
Blood, scarlet on crimson, criss crosses the toilet and bathroom floors. A familiar herby smell, only stewed. Anna lies on our bed, clutching its source.
‘When did it start?’
‘An hour ago, maybe. But I’m in no state to keep track.’
I take her arm, lash myself for renting an upstairs flat. Ten precious minutes lost. I lever her onto the back seat, race back for documents, toiletries, undergarments, a clean dressing gown, towels to staunch bleeding. She slumps, mouthing ‘God, God, God…’ Saint Tatiana is a square impress in her gown pocket.
Even at ten o’clock the directory insists the quickest route to St Vincent’s Hospital is an L flipped sideways. If my experience is any guide, it is wrong as often as the Bible. The cricket is over at the MCG. Damn Australia, I hope England won by five hundred tries. Or goals. Whatever. Sport gets into everything here, even mercy dashes. The Camry grinds the length of Punt Road. An arc of witches’ hats marks off resurfacing on the left turning lane from Hoddle to Victoria. I try to nudge through anyway. A stationary truck, driver’s head dozing on elbows, won’t move half a car length. Until I wind down the window and scream.
‘My wife and baby are dying, make way fuck you fool!’
I glance back at Anna. She looks dreamy, beatific. Hormonal narcotics kicking into childbirth? Blissfully haemorrhaging to death? I try to recall scant details I know of her mother’s death, should the doctor ask about family history. Nothing useful comes.
I run consecutive red lights. A motorbike turning across my path misses me at Smith Street by a side mirror. Swerving right, I park in a disabled bay alongside the Emergency entrance, scoop up Anna and carry her inside. If I was quicksilver at the start of the evening, now I’m a maniac on the boil. We become the nucleus of a commotion. A flurry of white coats. She is seen and admitted within ten minutes, whisked away on a trolley. One of the nurses attending doubles back to me.
‘You’re her husband? You might as well go home, you’ve done all you can. She’s in no danger but we need to get the bleeding under control.’
‘Thank you, I will stay till there is news. Is it permissible?’
‘Could be a while. Take a number.’
‘Do you have your Medicare card?’ asks the counter clerk.
‘No.’ My spine freezes. ‘Does it matter? I have my passport.’
‘That’ll do.’
Providence after all.
‘Medicare or not, she’ll get the same standard of treatment. We’re not America. Yet.’ A reassuring smile.
Around eleven, Emergency settles into a suspending-animation experience – transhemispheric flight minus the juddering, spilled coffee and farting neighbour. About sixty patients, or should I say passengers, are left, just over half the seats in the waiting room. From a ceiling monitor 24/7 CNN World News, broadcast via SBS, shows carnage, with English subtitles, from Rwanda’s civil war. An estimated 500,000 Hutu and 1,000,000 Tutsi killed in 100 days. A long ad break segues to a Norwegian – judging by all that flaxen hair, tanned skin, fjords and pine forests – family drama, modernized Ibsen perhaps, again subtitled. It threatens to turn soft porn. Only threatens.