waiting for release from the pathologist’s cardiologist. “When can I go?” I asked. “Don’t know. Soon. How’d the test go?” Reema replied, as she passed a water bottle to me. After fasting for twelve hours, I drank like a man lost in the desert. “Fine. I was brave. You would have been proud of me,” I lied. She smiled at my ruse. “Mr Davis?” the phlebotomist said, emerging from his room. “We’re going to call you an ambulance and you’re going straight to Emergency.” That was that. In that single sentence I finally grew up. All humour, lightness, and Superman-sense evaporated. I found my hands covering my face, holding my eyes as I started to cry. Reema put her hand on my shoulder and gently rubbed my skin. The woman at reception offered a tissue. I pulled in the tears and found that I couldn’t look at anyone. Instead I looked out the window, watching the Bondi Junction strangers wandering past with shopping bags and sandwiches. I saw sunlight. Time slowed. Life outside melted into a mood: a piece of music, modern music, atonal with no melody. Though not as crashing as the seventies tertiary postmodern rebels. Rather, I focused on the sounds that filled with whispers and wind, the creaking of doorways and the soft motorised putter of wheelchairs. Thus time became round, as I allowed them to comfort me in tandem with my wife’s touch. Two paramedics with a stretcher entered the pathologist’s. “I feel fine. Really. I don’t need that,” I said. “Gotta do. Protocols,” said Ted, the more attractive of the two. I nodded and climbed onto the stretcher. A white woollen blanket was put over me. “This feels like really bad street theatre,” I said to one of them as they wheeled me through Bondi Junction toward the ambulance. “I know what you mean, mate, we’ll do another ECG in the ambulance as a second opinion, okay?” “What was the first opinion?” “You had a heart attack.” Someone had to say it, I guess. At Emergency, I was wheeled into a corner and felt that it was all a waste of time. I was fine. Reema sat beside me and was holding my hand.
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