Griffin Has You on Speed Dial (Part One)

As he exhaled, his face settled into repose. I saw his chest falling and not rising again.

‘Th-the heck?’ I muttered, eyes locked wide. Alarmed, Benji surged forward and pressed the call button.

‘Where are they when you need them? Heelp!’ mum yelled and punched the button twice.

Soon, a swarm of doctors and nurses streamed over us only to encircle the bed and attach more IV’s. Despite being pushed aside, Benji refused to look away from the screen and the wavy line progressively growing weaker and weaker. I was scuttling backwards until my body slammed the wall. The chaos roiling through the room was unfolding in full scope before my eyes. Mum’s head bobbed backwards at the activation of the defibrillator, a thin wail leaped out of her lips.

After a time, the line turned ruler straight. At the sight of zero mum let out a yelp that doubled her over. Stumbling on the heart monitor, her hands were flailing around for something to clasp onto as if she was about to crumble. Benji lunged forward and snatched her by the arm so that to deter her sinking to her knees. Steering her to the nearest seat, he crouched down next to her. Had I not shot a swift glimpse to Benji a couple of seconds later, i'd missed him blinking rapidly with a chin that trembled. Are you holding it in any longer, Benji?

A nurse in blue scrubs ran over us.

‘I’m so sorry, Mrs. Godfrey.’ she said with tear-glazed eyes.

A cry burst out from mum as she gripped on Benji’s hand; knuckles standing out stark and blanched, nails digging into his palm. I knew she became deaf to the consoling words of Benji when, shortly after, she let loose another cry and then, a succession of four more. Five perhaps. They arrived in waves: fits of brittle sobbing broken apart by short lapses for breath.

My own breathing hitched. My hands were dangling low and tense by my sides. Maybe I shed tears at first, though I cannot recall anything spilling down my cheeks. Besides, I didn’t feel like crying. I just closed my eyes, squeezed them shut and opened my mouth only to thrust some air out. My throat had closed up. Yet, with my tongue jammed at the back of my teeth, I was soon blurting out “puh” and “buh” sounds accompanied by the chunter of what sounded like pa, pa-paw, pops, poppa and finally papa.

‘Hey! Wait!’ Benji ran after me with a voice that wobbled as I swung out of the room.

In a desperate search for closure, I discounted his shouting and raced down a flight of pale grey stairs. A draft of migraine-inducing air lanced across my face. It was warm with a tincture of bleach. I must have spent a full half-minute moving downwards at a speed that contracted my lungs. I was unable to draw a breath and my pounding footsteps were the only thing I could hear. I carried my eyes up the polished floor to the crowded hallway that stretched beyond.

‘He shut down?’ My question surged like a four-year old counting numbers, eliciting no response from the strangers. They just hurried away, parting for me to pass through.

The automatic sliding doors wheezed open with a buzz. I rushed to the car park with no coat on, shrugging off the snow-layered roof of Teddington Hospital on January 21. The air had a nasty bite to it; sharp edged, the sort of gust that can blow tears from your eyes.

With dim vision and hearing that faded my consciousness was floating through a blurry, inky space. So clouded, I failed to make out the paramedics wheeling in patients and ended up colliding with one of the trollies. Only when they came up to me did I realise I must have hurt my ribcage. I would have granted them my sincere gratitude instead of merely striding off, had I heard their muffled voices, jerking in and out of connection.

Actually, I would have walked away anyway. Who cares about a line of wounded, soon-to-be bruised ribs?

A couple of paces to my right edged works that produced a clatter of dismantled scaffolding and folded machinery. I scrambled up the foliage wall of the hospital’s parking space and let myself tumble on the other side. I reared up and moved closer not bothered by the drone of the engine.

‘Oi! Wha cha doin’? Move!’ one of the bricklayers hollered out chucking his hands up in the air.

Paying him no mind, I neared settling underneath an eight-legged, spider-like construction that leaned at a perilous angle above me. Perilous for sure, though at that moment it just seemed right and far from life-threatening. Had I stretched out my hand to reach for the joists than a code flashed a warning that foundation failure was imminent. Even then, however, I didn’t step back. Only when a batter board came apart, all set to come down on me, a sudden gale miraculously blew and careened me back onto the entrance of the parking level.

The ambulances were lining in a gentle arc. Adjusting my weight against the last ambulance, my eyes roamed across withered swathes of grass laying like locks of hair on a barber’s floor. Death had made the stems curl and become yellowish. In a shimmer of mist on the skyline, a bunch of naked trees huddled together for company. I gulped a breath and took refuge in the darkness raging behind my eyes.

The screech of tires and violent bangs of metal forced my eyelids to flutter. Through my lashes, I watched sets of legs sprinting to what turned out to be a car crash. I widened my gaze but never wavered in my motionless position or blank expression. I peeped at the highway that laid several metres away from me. There was traffic snaking up: two lines of steel and rubber bathed in their own putrid fumes, and now in mayhem for another one swerving and tumbling over and over into the central barrier.

A long-term closure of the arterial road seemed to be the equivalent of the long-term… No, not long-term, permanent closure of the large artery supplying his heart muscle. Catastrophic. A proper dialysis leading to doctors collecting asystole rhythm strips in three leads to declare his time of death.

A hooded man with hunched shoulders and a head hanging low broke from the crowd. Enfolded by a thickening fog, he marched towards me treading rubbish along with his thick boots.

‘You got a lighter?’ A cigarette was drooping from the left corner of his mouth on a face so sunken in. His tone was gruff, eyes downcast. I patted on my pockets and yanked out a lighter. Robotically, I stretched it to him. He lit it up and the flickering flare lengthened his clumpy lashes, blackened his firm brows.

‘My dad just passed.’ The words bounced off my clenched teeth giving me a swollen tongue.

‘That’s hard hun!’ He stressed every syllable. So obnoxiously, my stomach knotted up almost reaching a vomit pitch. I needed to block that voice somehow.

He raised his head and fixed me with lips set in a semi-pout. The encounter with his coal-black eyes made me flinch. I reeled backwards, breathing all wrong as though my lungs were bound with ropes. Such eyes evoked what Benji would have called a ‘transitory evocation of yesterday’ and my mind automatically thrusted the rewind button, arriving to a recent memory.

Last Tuesday: the black coffee beans of my dad’s morning coffee. The guy’s dilated pupils fleshed out how dad’s grin expanded when I dropped the lump sugar in his cup and it landed with a splash. His rows of carved out teeth reenacting dad’s fifteen-minute fit of uproarious laughter over that plop of the sugar block.

The man mumbled something amid puffs that alighted me back to a post-flashback phase; a state I hadn’t realised I hurled into until I found myself on the ground, curled up in a ball. I cupped my face and tears were dripping along my fingers.

Quit whining, you have brought this upon yourself was the least I could understand from what he had possibly said. Flecks of cigarette ash skidded down his black uniform. They smeared his tracksuit leaving a silver blob right in the middle that seemed to carry no thrill for him. My glossy stare and panting gasps were his centre of attention.

He expelled the smoke standing within a plume of grey mist.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked right after.

‘Gwen.’ I choked out in between sobs.

‘I’m Griffin.’

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Griffin Has You on Speed Dial (Part One) last modified: 18 December 2020

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