I’m mobile when my sergeant calls. “Can you start drifting down Cameron?” he asks. “Lake Alice is kicking off outside the chemist.”
Carl is reading the job on his phone, a step ahead of the dispatchers. When the job finally comes through I’m already in the main street, scanning for my frequent flyer. The dispatcher’s irritating voice sing-songs over the radio. “Any units available for a disorder, one intoxicated female on Cameron Street abusing shop staff. Any units in the area?”
I’ve been hearing that voice for years, but I will never know the dispatcher’s name or what she looks like. She’s just doing her job: sending cops into shitty situations as brightly and breezily as she can. And I’m just doing my job: locking up the same people for the wrong side of 20 years in my home town. Except I don’t bother with the bright or the breezy.
“Ten seven areas, comms.”
I find Alice, barefoot by the picnic table outside Callaghan’s. She’s yelling, her left arm wrapped around a wine bottle.
“Kia ora Alice, what’s been going on for you today?” She’s lucky there are no body cameras on cops yet. That’ll be it for me once they come in, but there is still CCTV on the main street, and every second passing car will have their windows down and their phones out.
“Fuck you, pig shit,” she says.
“You can’t be sucking on the sav round here. It’s a liquor ban area, sis.”
I hold my hand out for the bottle. Alice’s eyes widen, and she drains the rest of her wine. “That’s one way to get rid of it,” I say with a shrug and tuck my thumbs into my vest. I lean against the table to seem less confrontational. “Let’s get you home, eh?”
“I’m not getting in your car. You’ll lock me up.”
“For breach of a liquor ban? Really?”
I wouldn’t have arrested Alice, but the pharmacist sidles out, circling behind me to complain in my ear. “She’s been threatening my staff,” he hisses. “Harri was in bits; she had to go home.” I keep my eyes on Alice.
“Does she have a weapon?”
“I don’t know, but she said she’d fillet her like a fish.”
“Go back inside, please.” Old Callaghan returns to his shop, watching Alice over his half-round glasses.
“You were trespassed from the pharmacy two weeks ago, eh Alice?” Alice ignores me. She is searching the gutter for cigarette butts, which are much harder to find these days. The college kids all vape.
Alice is a mess. It’s been a long time since she looked well, but today her head has been shaved and it looks like the clipper has left nicks and grazes on her scalp. There are smears of blood on her arms and down her rank T-shirt. “Who cut your hair?” I wait for a minute. “I’m not leaving you in the street, Alice. You can get in the car on your own, or I’ll put you in myself.” I’m as nice as I can manage.
“Get fucked.”
I could radio for back-up, but I don’t bother. I close the gap. “Alice, you’re under arrest for speaks threateningly and wilful trespass.” Alice raises her wine bottle by the neck and swings it down towards my head. I step smartly inside the arc of Alice’s reach, blocking with my left forearm and thrusting the heel of my right hand into Alice’s throat, hard enough to wind her. I grab Alice’s arm as she bends forward gasping, and twist it behind her back, forcing her face down onto the footpath. I wedge my knee into her side so I can unclip the cuffs from my belt. The bottle rolls away and stops against a stunted magnolia, one of the line of leafless trees haunting the street, each in their own steel grate. If I had intended to issue an infringement for Alice’s public drinking I’d have to seize the bottle or at least photograph it, but Alice is beyond getting fines.
“I can’t breathe,” wheezes Alice.
“Don’t start that. I’m nowhere near your neck.” Still, optics is a thing, so I roll Alice onto her arse and let her sit there for a bit, then haul her to her feet and fold her into the back of my patrol car. I lean in to fasten her seatbelt, turning her head away with my hand on her check so she won’t spit. Alice is lucky she got arrested by me. The younger cops would have sprayed her.
“I’m not having the Lake in here.” The custody sergeant is belligerent and this is why I hate my job. It’s not people like Alice, it’s people like you, I think, glaring at him.
“She is here.”
“She can’t stay, she’s off her face.”
“She’s been off her face for forty years. She’s fine.”
“We don’t put drunk people in cells anymore, Liz; it’s too much risk.” I want to grab Brad’s baby face by his ears and smash it on to the desk, so I just look at him.
“What do you want me to do with her?”
“Take her home.”
“I tried, Brad. She’s been evicted. There’s no one home at her son’s place so I couldn’t leave her there. Too much risk.”
Brad has never liked me or my prisoner, and he straightens papers on his desk. “Her son’s on bail; he’s got a curfew, he should be there.”
I take a slow breath. “He’s already breached, Brad, so he will get arrested when he turns up. Maybe that’s why he didn’t answer the door.”
Technically Brad outranks me but that’s not how things work in small town stations. I’m still a match for the delicate flowers they recruit these days, but Carl walks into the watchhouse. “Get the CAT team on the phone, Liz,” he says. I make sure Brad sees me respecting my section sergeant so he knows it’s his attitude that’s the problem. “Sure. They’ll be thrilled.”
The crisis team prides itself on obstructing police referrals from the very first point of contact. I’m on hold for forty minutes while the operator tries to put me through to all the local numbers, none of which are answered. It’s gone past five and it’s Friday. I don’t mind because as long as I’m trying to get through to mental health, Alice is in a cell. She’s yelling her head off, a litany of filthy language echoing down the hallway, and Brad sends a jailer to watch her.
Brad has checked every box in the custody management system, so Alice is now officially in need of constant monitoring: slurred speech, flags for mental health, unbalanced/uncoordinated, behaviour: assaultive. I roll my eyes at my Carl, who is frowning at the computer screen. That’s on Brad; he didn’t have to do that. “She just wants a mince pie then she’ll sleep it off. She can get bailed once she wakes up.” Carl knows I’m right, but Brad goes off down the corridor to make sure I searched Alice thoroughly for ligatures.
I get through to local mental health just as Brad comes back. “She’s got a head injury!” Brad announces, and of course the psych nurse on the phone hears him.
“Has the patient been seen by ambos?”
“She doesn’t need an ambulance,” I say. “She’s got a few cuts. She’s not injured, she’s ill.”
“If the patient has lacerations we’ll need her medically assessed before she can be seen by our triage team.” Fuck it. Fuck him. And fuck you too, Brad.
The ED nurses aren’t happy with me. Alice is bellowing because I’ve cuffed her to the railing. They don’t believe it’s necessary, it’s demeaning. Patient rights. Dignity. Wah wah. I tell them she tried to bottle me, and point out the items she would brain us with if she could. They roll Alice’s bed into the resus room to get her away from other patients, but they’re worried in case a real resus case comes in. They can put her in the ambulance bay, I tell them. I don’t care.
I can’t leave Alice alone, but there’s a six hour wait to be seen. Eventually they agree to shove some ketamine into her, but it doesn’t make much of a dent in her aggression. Alice is a veteran: it would take more to knock her out than the doctor is willing to chart, because of the alcohol. I guess emergency room doctors, like custody sergeants, are always weighing the what-ifs. I wait, and Alice dozes off. Sleep is a good thing, but I lean over the bed every so often, making sure the woman keeps breathing. Brad would be insufferable.
I look at the poster taped to the wall above the basin. You’re not alone. Reach out for help. It’s meant for stressed clinicians. There’s a picture of a person in scrubs, head in hands, dim lighting. Police stations have something similar but it’s a crock. You are alone, and there is no help. I put a chair beside Alice’s bed and try to get comfortable.
The department enjoys relief for an hour or two before Alice rouses. “Tell them I’ll top myself,” she says. “They can’t chuck me out.” I wasn’t expecting that.
“Good morning,” I say.
Alice turns her head on the pillow. “You sitting there like your shit don’t stink.”
“I’m sure ours smells the same. But you can say you’re going to kill yourself so they’ll keep you. If I said it I’d get chucked out in a heartbeat.”
“Same same but different.”
“Yep.” Alice stares at the ceiling. I stare at the wall.
“I mean it though,” says Alice, and I believe her. If Alice wasn’t such a soak she’d no doubt have done it years ago. It’s the addictions that make her want to die, and stop her being able to. There’s a word for that. I can’t remember if it’s irony or paradox. It doesn’t matter. “What’s your plan?” I follow the protocol. The answer to that question tells you if someone is serious.
“Bridge. Truck. I dunno.”
“Thing is though,” I tell her, “they strip you naked at the mortuary. You’re on a stainless steel tray with a drain hole, and a cop takes your photos with a phone, front and back. I don’t know who I’d want doing that.”
“You’d be dead, you wouldn’t care.”
“True.” But I do care. If I thought it would annoy the organisation I’d turn the electric blanket up to three and within a week my body would be one with the bedsprings. They can take all the photos they want of that.
“What does Lake Alice mean?”
Her question startles me. “Where have you heard that?”
“You cunts call me that.”
“You never heard of Lake Alice Hospital?”
“The loony bin? The one they shut down?”
I wonder why she asked. Surely it’s obvious. “I’ve never called you that.” It’s true: I’ve never said it out loud. There but for the grace, etcetera.
A doctor appears in the doorway. He’s in a good mood. The American locums always are; they don’t stay long enough to wear out. “Hi there!” he says. “Where’s my patient?”
“You want to go first?” says Alice.
Asked what was on her mind when she wrote her story, the author replied, “This story is informed by my noticing the dehumanising that can creep into the work of first responders over time. A person with a job to do can regard a subject (patient, passenger, prisoner, whatever) as little more than the problem they present. Similarly, the person on the receiving end may not see the human behind the uniform. I enjoyed bringing the patient and the police officer together in this story where one mirrors the other. Alice may have the mental health label but she shows good insight, and the jaded cop still has a shred of humanity.”
