Affection, p.21
Affection, page 21
The two jaunty constables, Clark and O’Donnell, stood behind him with their batons on display.
We didn’t expect to find many people. No one was supposed to live here, and most of the business went on at night, when Flinders-lane apparently seethed with slinky Chinamen who ran opium and gambling dens, sly grog shops and prostitutes.
It looked nowhere near as exotic by day.
It had been relatively easy to get support for that morning’s raid on Chinatown, simply because it confirmed what many people believed about the plague – that is, if they believed in the plague at all. The consensus seemed to be that it was incubated by Chinamen. And ‘Chinamen’ meant anyone with Asian features. In Townsville, many Chinamen were actually Japanese.
Opinion was more divided over how the plague should be contained. A few people had fled. Some were burning drums of oil in their yards to ward off miasmas. Quarantining, inoculation and rubbish disposal were viewed with suspicion bordering on hostility.
But no one opposed ransacking Chinatown.
Turner and I led the team into the street, and the now masked workers fanned out behind us.
On our left was Ross Creek. I couldn’t see it, but the air felt heavier on that side. The lane was supposed to run in a straight line in front of us, but I couldn’t see the end because of the jumble of shacks and gin stalls shoehorned into such a small space. The effect was a labyrinth of walls made of crates, iron and flattened kerosene tins. There were obviously many others in the council who’d turned a blind eye to the place.
‘It reminds me of Shanghai, Row,’ said Turner, sniffing the air. I had my mask on as we stood in the middle of the lane. There was a lot of crashing behind us. Turner’s white coat was stippled with little black flies.
‘Happy memories?’ I asked.
He nodded. I supposed smells could have that effect, but the only memory I associated with something that smelled like a corpse was of a corpse. The creek was undoubtedly choked with dead fish, faeces and rotting fruit, perhaps punctuated by a bloated horse.
‘That smell, like burnt sugar,’ said Turner. ‘Opium. Don’t you smell it?’
Thankfully, no.
Turner walked over to one shack and peeled back the corrugated-iron door.
Inside was another smell even more overpowering: the sharp smell of urine. When my eyes adjusted I could make out rows of empty bunks. The only light came from the doorway behind us and old nail holes in the tin roof and walls. When I walked, the floor gave with a sickly sponginess. I couldn’t see my feet in the gloom. Something scuttled from one corner to another.
I found Turner leaning over a bunk and realised there was someone lying on it.
‘Is he dead?’
Turner poked and the figure sighed. He turned away and picked up something from a beer crate. A pipe. On the crate were other things I didn’t recognise.
I followed Turner back out into the lane and gulped the sweetish air. He called over O’Donnell.
‘There’s a man in there. Get him out.’
I heard the constable swear after he entered the shack. He emerged with the man under one arm and that look of distaste on his face that I remembered from when we opened Gard’s coffin.
‘What do I do with him?’ O’Donnell said.
The man was white, I saw. And reasonably well dressed. God knew what he was doing in that place.
‘Just get him out of the lane,’ said Turner. ‘Put him in the shade. Try not to let anyone near him. And see if you can find out where he lives.’
O’Donnell dragged the man around the rubbish now piling up in the middle of the lane. Turner wanted it all done before a crowd could gather, but that seemed unlikely. Already a few boys had gathered at the end of the lane to watch these strange white creatures build bonfires in the street.
Even the walls of the shacks were stripped of newspaper. Horse-hair mattresses, crates and bunks, chairs and tables, clothing, anything combustible, was thrown on to the pile. When the first few shacks were emptied and lime wash had been slopped over the walls, sulphur was burned inside and the piles of rubbish were doused with kerosene and lit, to the cheers of the boys. A yellow and black smoke blew about us. I wondered what the Reverend Kerr would make of this apocalyptic vision.
An old Chinaman had come down the lane clicking his tongue furiously and waving his arms. He stood there and then suddenly took a swipe at a passing worker. Clark saw this and charged the man with his baton, chasing him in circles until Turner told him to stop. I could have laughed, but saw the old man was weeping.
With Clark at his shoulder ready to thump him, the old man came up to Turner and began yabbering away. Turner patiently pretended to listen, I thought, and then, to my astonishment, began yabbering back.
The man staggered as if hit. He probably had never met a white man who could speak his language. They spoke for a short time and the old man ended up bowing and retreating.
‘What was that about?’ I asked.
‘He wanted to know why we were destroying his business.’ Turner looked a little shaken.
‘What’s his business?’
‘He says he sells women.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I told him to find a more honourable business.’
A few disorientated drunks lurched towards us, but seeing the flames and the creatures in white decided to exit the other way. O’Donnell returned to tell us that a fair-sized crowd had gathered at the end of the lane and what should he do with them?
‘Are they causing trouble?’ said Turner.
‘I don’t suppose so. Not yet.’
The work went on and we gradually moved up the lane. It might have been more convenient to torch the lot, but the shacks clung like ticks to the backs of Townsville’s grandest buildings.
Within four hours we were looking back on our handiwork. Our white coveralls were grimy. The limewashed shacks looked ghostly through the swirling smoke, and the feeling I had from the crowd around us, the white and yellow faces, was a disturbing mixture of excitement, fear, and resentment.
For a short time, there was cause for optimism, if one wanted it. We still had our two plague patients, but the council seemed to have had a change of heart. The effort of cleansing Chinatown would have to be rewarded.
But the conflagration in Flinders-lane might well have had the opposite effect.
People began to fall ill.
Within days, and in quick succession, the plague hospital started to fill. First came John O’Connell from North Ward, James Waldie who sold firewood, Fanny Healy from German Gardens, a married woman Henrietta Walker, John Burke from Cluden, and eight-year-old Francis Hipworth from South Townsville. They took the miserable ambulance ride to Three Mile Creek, their homes were fumigated with sulphur, and their families locked in with the smell for twenty-one days.
The removal of young Hipworth was the first to turn violent.
His mother pleaded, the family cried. They wanted to know if they’d ever see the boy again, but weren’t satisfied with my assurances. The police had to draw their batons as Francis was loaded screaming into the ambulance. His father took a blow to the head. As the ambulance left, the mother turned to me and, with her eyes, wished me dead. It shook me all the more because I’d felt I was beyond shaking.
A butcher from Alderman Castling’s shop near the Victoria Bridge came down with plague and that put the wind up council.
By that stage, no Chinaman nor black had been infected. At least, none had been reported, which I supposed was a completely different thing, but it was proof to some that the disease going around wasn’t plague at all.
The smell of sulphur, burning rubbish and burning rats hung about town in the mornings and it must have been hard for those who didn’t believe in plague to shake the physical evidence of apocalypse. Even Dawson kept a low profile.
As the new patients arrived at Three Mile Creek, Mrs Gard’s daughter appeared to improve.
The Reverend Ward began to fail.
chapter thirteen
You may think I’m exaggerating. It’s true, modern medicine allows me to dispassionately describe a disease by its cause, effect and treatment, as if I could pin it to a cork board to study and say ‘Yes, that’s it’ and move on. But medicine, if it is a science, can’t describe the horror of a bewildered child dying in agony of, say, diphtheria or whooping cough or one of any number of diseases. The truth is that these ancient diseases are monsters, more real and terrible than any dragon or devil or creation of Mary Shelley. So I want you to understand why I say this; that I also believe that I am a man of science, and that the hairs stood on the back of my neck when I entered the plague tent.
Dr Linford Row, from his unpublished memoirs
HUMPHRY HAD FOR SEVERAL days insisted on tending the Reverend Ward himself. Now the minister’s condition was deteriorating and Turner let Humphry stay by the bed, even though it left us with more of the work.
One afternoon, with dark clouds blowing in from the sea and smelling of rain, Routh sent for help. The note was addressed to me, Routh by then refusing to deal directly with Turner.
I gathered from the note that Bacot wouldn’t free another doctor and Humphry wouldn’t leave the Reverend’s side, and he needed a second opinion on two patients. Medicines were late, so could I collect them and lend a hand?
No cab could take me to Three Mile Creek. Humphry had his buggy with him. There were no patients waiting for the ambulance, so I had to take the Carbine. I stopped at the public hospital to collect a box of laudanum.
The plague hospital might have been a military camp now. The tents were square and tight, centred precisely inside a barbed-wire fence creating an illusion of order. The glare from the canvas infected the scrub around it and lit the face of Routh so he seemed to be in a fever himself as he accompanied me first to his office with the supplies, and then to the lone tent to which the Reverend had been moved.
He complained about the lack of staff and what Bacot, Turner and the Epidemic Board weren’t doing about it.
‘Is it adequate, though?’ I said.
‘Adequate?’ He pointed his two chins at the tents we passed. ‘Primitive, I’d call it.’
‘Better than West Point, surely.’
‘Hmm.’
‘How are you treating him?’
‘The Reverend? Laudanum for the pain. What would we do without it, eh?’
Routh wanted me to go to the main tent to see his patients, particularly the Gard child whom he thought was fully recovered. He seemed keen to discharge her. He might need the bed soon, he said, the rate Turner was incarcerating people.
‘I’ll see Humphry first,’ I said, so we cut across the grass towards a lone policeman, who got up from his chair and began fiddling with a rope that tied a gate to an inner fence, a loose affair hardly likely to stop anyone who wanted to, say, step over it. He added some sense that things were under control, but there was little chance of this patient escaping.
We stopped outside the canvas flap of the smaller tent. The Reverend Ward had had to be isolated to spare everyone further distress. He’d stopped swearing, said Routh, but his screams were torturous. We pulled up our surgical masks. And then hesitated a moment at the entrance.
‘Poor bugger,’ was Routh’s final, muffled opinion, and we stepped from the modern world to meet this monster from the past.
The air was hot and drowsy with ether. There was nothing to stir it. The light that soaked through the canvas made every person in that tent appear drained of blood. A nurse sat on a hard hospital chair by a bed with a wet towel in her hand and a basin at her feet. Humphry was hunched over a table with some papers and bottles and might well have been asleep. On the bed lay a form covered in a white sheet.
Humphry stood suddenly and met us by the bed. All of us were perspiring now. I had to take my glasses off and wipe them.
‘Where’s Turner?’ said Humphry. His eyes were red and had dark puffy sacks beneath them.
‘Widding the town of wats,’ I said. A poor joke at Turner’s expense, and I felt ashamed as soon as I said it, but Routh tittered so no harm done.
Humphry summarised the medical history of the Reverend William Ward, minister of the Church of England. The Reverend Ward was taken ill five days before with abdominal discomfort, fever, chills, and such. Bacot found swollen glands in the groin and Humphry had serum taken, confirming pasteurella pestis.
Blasted Bacot had sent him to Three Mile Creek in the middle of the night.
‘You can imagine the to-do all this caused,’ added Routh. Bacot had now sent a number of patients off into the night, to Turner’s disgust.
Humphry finished by saying the patient had been given vaccine, the buboes had been drained, his condition had deteriorated and it appeared the germ had entered his blood system and there were signs of septicaemia in the past few hours.
‘It’s not easy, you know, providing this sort of care,’ said Routh. ‘I need more doctors if people are going to end up like this.’
Humphry ignored Routh and nodded past me at the bed.
The Reverend Ward’s eyes were open and watching us, which gave me a start. I leaned forward to see his face better. The conjunctiva was no longer white; it was livid, and I could see the tracks of bloody tears which had run down his face and puddled in an ear. His hair was wet where the nurse had been dabbing his forehead. His eyes flicked from me to Humphry. I pulled my mask away and gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile, introduced myself.
I was astounded when the poor chap smiled back. His gums were bleeding and the blood had stained his teeth. Routh gave a small cough and excused himself from the tent.
The Reverend mouthed a word several times.
‘Do you have pain? You do?’ Humphry said. ‘I’ll find some laudanum.’
I pulled my mask up and leaned closer. The man’s face looked like a pudding sprinkled with raisins, the small black patches of dead tissue, smaller than liver spots, signs of the disease in its advanced stage. I reached out my hand to touch his face, to feel if the flesh had any spring left in it.
I was staring at his open mouth when he coughed, and as I jumped back his body arched and I swear I heard his sinews crack.
The nurse was trying to force him flat on the bed, but the cough produced a seizure that created more pain, prolonging the spasm; bloody tears ran down his face and dark veins boiled at his temples.
Humphry hurried over with a syringe and quickly jabbed it into the Reverend’s thigh, and after an eternal minute his body relaxed and settled back on the bed, the only sound a wet rasp from the man’s chest. And my own heartbeat.
‘That nearly finished him,’ said Humphry, his voice slurred from fatigue. He leaned over to put a stethoscope to the man’s chest and nodded at my gown.
I looked down and there was a fine spray of blood over it and I suspected it was over my mask as well. I took off my glasses and wiped the mist of blood from the lenses. I had no reason to fear for myself. I’d had several courses of Haffkine’s vaccine now. Nevertheless, I tried to slow my breathing and wait for the palpitations to subside.
The sheet had fallen from the upper part of Ward’s body and he was naked underneath, unable no doubt to tolerate the clinging touch of a gown. His thin mottled chest rose and fell painfully.
‘How much laudanum do you have over there?’
‘Enough.’
I pulled the sheet from his groin and saw the buboes were leaking from where they’d been earlier drained. The two bruises joined at the pubis. I gently replaced the sheet and the Reverend shuddered at the touch.
I turned to Humphry to say something. He was looking down at the Reverend and suddenly reached past me.
I turned and saw the man had raised his head and chest again well off the bed, and his eyes and mouth were open. Humphry grabbed him by the shoulder, but couldn’t push him back. It looked as if the man was choking. His arms were straight and rigid, as if desperate to hold on to the soul that was trying to flee the wretched body. He trembled. He made no sound. The nurse looked terrified.
‘I can’t stand this,’ said Humphry, and turned away as the nurse held the man despite her own horror.
I said nothing, but stood transfixed by the scene; a bloody drool ran from Ward’s mouth as he struggled with the thing that was eating him.
Humphry appeared with the syringe and in one smooth motion plunged it into the man’s thigh.
He stood back.
‘How much was that?’ I said.
Humphry wiped a sleeve across his forehead. ‘Enough.’
The nurse had given up and the three of us stood back and simply watched.
I can tell you, I don’t know at what point the man died. I thought I heard a sigh, but the eyes and mouth remained open, the back arched, arms outstretched.
After what must have been a minute, but could have been longer, Humphry stepped forward and tried to gently push the man back, but his contortions appeared to have become locked with death. Humphry put a stethoscope to the Reverend’s chest, shook his head and turned away.
The nurse straightened the cadaver as best she could, and she eventually turned her head and let out one small sob herself.
I pulled the stained sheet over him, and knew that would be the image that would stay with me, the one my mind would tuck away in the gallery it saved for special horrors.
I stayed for the funeral. The Reverend Ward was buried at the cemetery by the Reverend Walsh, a Methodist minister who acted in an interdenominational capacity as the plague hospital chaplain. Humphry made a fine speech and I think he was relieved it was over.
The burial was done at an almost undignified pace. The Reverend’s arched body was wrapped in a sheet soaked with sublimate and somehow fitted into a coffin with quicklime packed around the body, the coffin nailed shut and buried in a deep grave in the sandy soil. Lime was thrown over the coffin and, within an hour of death, there was a cross on the plague cemetery’s first grave.
