Black Wattle Creek (Charlie Berlin #2)(27)
‘That is odd, she was so sure of herself yesterday morning. How did she sound?’
‘A bit strange, actually. Really hard to put my finger on why. Just a bit odd. Still, if she wants to drop it I guess this means you can get back to the darkroom.’
‘And I guess that’s the end of my sponge with passionfruit icing.’ Berlin made the comment hoping to lighten the mood a little and he got a brief smile out of Rebecca. He was glad now he hadn’t mentioned anything about Blackwattle Creek. There was definitely something strange going on out there, but if Beryl wanted to drop it he had plenty of other things to keep him busy.
Dessert was a steamed pudding out of a tin. Rebecca’s homemade version was better but the kids didn’t seem to mind. Berlin had fruitcake instead, and Rebecca said she’d make it up to him later and she most definitely did. She might have also been helping him get over his disappointment of Essendon’s loss in the grand final, he figured, but after about five minutes he forgot about Jessop and Blackwattle Creek and Cyril’s leg and everything apart from the salty taste of her skin, the touch of her fingers and that long slow tumble down into a place of passion and comfort and safety .
EIGHTEEN
‘Get up and get dressed, Charlie, you don’t have time for a shower.’
He looked up. Had he fallen back to sleep? If he had it was her fault. The phone had been ringing, he remembered, and sun was coming in through the open blinds. She was wearing her red overcoat and had Sarah by the hand. The child seemed only half awake, confused and a little scared.
She tossed him the trousers he had folded neatly over the back of the chair the night before. ‘I’m taking the kids next door. Maria said she’d look after them. Get dressed and get the car started.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Alice’s sister called. Alice is in at the Royal Melbourne.’
‘What’s she doing in hospital? Is it the baby? Is something wrong?’
‘It’s not the baby. It’s Bob. And it sounds serious.’
She left the bedroom and he could hear her yelling at Peter to get a move on and then the sound of the front door slamming. Since it was a Sunday morning, traffic was light. Even so, Berlin used Pascoe Vale Road rather than Bell Street, as he thought it would be quicker. They passed Queens Park and its cannons and Berlin cut it fine on a couple of red lights, which had Rebecca pushing her right foot down hard against the firewall. A car had broken down in the left lane on Mount Alexander Road so he used the tramway, cutting sharply back in to the left just as they came up on the hospital.
As they approached, Berlin felt the usual tightening across his shoulders. Hospitals held a lot of bad memories for him and he avoided them if he could. He hated the sickly smell of disinfectant and ether combined with floor wax; it made him swallow hard and want to turn and run.
He knew the nurses at the Royal Women’s had probably laughed at him behind his back at the sight of him chain-smoking and pacing the fathers’ room, white-faced and sweating while he waited on the birth of his children. He would never claim to anyone that he’d been in as much pain as Rebecca was in the delivery room, but when it was all over there was blood on his palms from his fingernails tearing at the flesh to hold back the terror. When they told him after Sarah’s birth that there were complications, and that Rebecca would have no more children, he was ashamed at his momentary feeling of relief that he was done with that waiting room forever.
They found an area marked ‘Hospital Staff Only’ and left the car there, parked badly across two spaces. In Casualty an orderly was busy mopping the blood-smeared floor. Please don’t let it be Bob’s, Berlin begged under his breath. A nurse found the file and said Roberts had been sent up to a ward on the fourth floor. When Berlin asked about his injuries she flipped over a page and simply said, ‘Extensive.’
They stood together in silence on the ride up in the lift. The fourth-floor duty nurse pointed them towards a single room down the hall. Alice Roberts was sitting beside the bed in a steel-framed hospital chair, clutching a crumpled white handkerchief and sobbing. She was as big as a house in her shapeless maternity smock. Rebecca knelt beside her and gently rubbed the small of her back, but it seemed as if Alice didn’t even know she was there.
Lying on the bed was a figure covered up to the chin with a sheet. With Alice here it obviously had to be Roberts, but you couldn’t tell by looking. His head was bandaged and what Berlin could see of the face was puffy with nasty purple-blue bruising. The left side was twice its normal size, the eye swollen shut.
A doctor in a white coat was reading a chart by the bed. He glanced up at Berlin. ‘You another policeman or a relative?’
‘I’m a copper, we work together but he’s a close friend. How is he?’
‘Not too good but he’ll survive. We pulled him out of Casualty when we learnt he was police. That place is a bloody zoo on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.’ He glanced at Rebecca,
‘Sorry about the language.’
‘No need to apologise, I’m a big girl.’
‘So what’s the story here? What’s going on?’
The doctor looked at Berlin and then glanced down at his clipboard. ‘No real lacerations to worry about. Broken left arm, broken nose, possible jaw fracture, possible rib fracture or fractures – I’m guessing at least three but we’ll know when the X-rays come back. He’s going to be in a lot of plaster for a wee while. Gonna hurt like buggery too.’ He glanced at Rebecca again. ‘From the look of things, he got himself a good kicking when he was on the ground.’