“Death, birth, work and rap in the cold norm” - a short story by Ryan Leaf
In the last 6 or so weeks there has been a series of events that have shaped and changed my life, for what I assume, will be for the rest of the time that I live it.
I will try to the best of my descriptive abilities to detail these events and in some way seek a sense of release from what these occurrences have produced in me.
I had known for some time that my partner Camilla was pregnant, with a boy. After writing and recording three LP’s in as many years and numerous guest verses for other people’s albums I was kind of wishing to have a holiday. I hadn’t had a holiday from work in five years. Instead I would start raising a child.
I, like many, come from a working class back round. I had known little luxuries in life and at times had been homeless and destitute. Raising a child properly for me would be like a Macca’s boy catering for the queen. I currently work as a duct air-con installer and just recently had finished a 15 date national tour supporting Pegz. I don’t know anyone else asides from DJ 2Buck that leads a life of physical work compounded by multiple tour dates. The tolls on the mind and body through this combination accumulate and manifest in constant agitation, a clash in varying body clocks, fatigue, lack of personal space and time and an overall disdain for all walks of human life that cram into your complex rat race. Every time this form of lifestyle happens I get really sick with the flu and my relationships with friends and family suffer from me not wanting to be around anyone. My parents were splitting up again which would mean calls upon calls of counseling as the pair of them became poorer then they already were. I would prefer to just sit at home and get drunk reading a book. It had been weeks of this - three to four gigs in a row on the weekend, no sleep, working overtime to pay bills and keep the boss happy, birth classes in the week day evenings (which of all were the worst), lack of money, lack of time, too much drinking, no time with Camilla. I would usually arrive home Sunday, after working and then touring. I would eat dinner with Camilla which was our only time together all week (as she was still studying), then bed, then wake up at 4:50 am, work, straight into OT and then start all over again. The light at the end of the tunnel was the 2 weeks free I would have until the baby was due. In that 2 weeks I would just work, save money, read, get my taxes sorted - that was my holiday. Before the last weekend of shows my father called me at work. He was upset and told me that my cousin (for the sake of confidentiality I will call him Blake) had died the night prior.
Blake was born in Darwin. He looked like me - a half-cast Maori but in actuality he was full blood or at least as full blooded as they come nowadays. He was a child born from a devastating case of incestuous abuse. Blake was the elephant in the room staring at my whole family as a by-product of absolute shame. His mother and stepfather neglected him and as a result his attitudes and character would be carved out of a lack of compassion, with most wanting to know little of him or how to help him. He became a problem child with all the trimmings and was on a steady downhill slope from a young age. Consequently he was sent to live with my Uncle in Penrith at the age of 14. In the years following he was kicked out of school, had regular run-ins with the law and was keeping company with teenage thugs. My parents intervened and he lived with them for a while and he steadied a little. Despite his history he was one of the most naturally affectionate people I had ever met. Admittedly it was strange to me for an adolescent boy to sit there hugging me while watching TV, but that was his true nature. Soft and yearning for connection. He eventually started working with my father as a roof plumber and the tradesman lifestyle suited his personality. He was a perfect lad. Thin lanky stature short shorts, T.N’s, the works. He had a street-smart wit and in many ways he was what I would have imagined Pegz would have been like at his age.
He grew into an extremely confident and intelligent young man and being Maori plus having blue eyes equated to lots of little girls for Blake. In 2007 I began working with my father as well. Blake, my brother, father and I all worked together. We drank together and Blake and I smoked ciggies together. Like most Polynesian teenagers he was secretly in awe of the fact that I made rap music and given the unstable nature of our families, I knew that my music was a beacon of hope for him to find and pursue his own passion one day. He liked 2pac and most of the top 40 rap, but working together exposed him to my collection and he drank it in. He specifically liked the Funkoars and Drapht and after a while he knew all the words to “Sex Fiend” by L.C. I had an unspoken influence on him and as rebellious as he was, he would still heed the things I would strongly suggest. I asked him to stop dealing and he did. I told him the rap he liked was shit and he stopped buying it. I knew that he was smart enough to go on and do much better things but given the rate of failure people had had trying to help him I was comfortable just to give him small chunks of advice and watch him from afar.
Blake was a cocky little cunt when he wanted to be, especially on a worksite. I had never seen a 16 year old boy completely school a tradesman of 30-50 years of age until I worked with him. It was quite spectacular, yet it was one of his largest downfalls. Every one argued with Blake as he told people how to do their jobs better. I hated it when he did it to me, but loved it when he did it to others. This was his double-edged sword - what made him an incredible worker also made people hate him. He read constantly and was comprehensive. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of useless facts, mainly from Zoo magazine. I nearly got him to read “1984” just by talking about it to him, but books were a bit too uncool for the friends he kept (so he wanted to watch the movie instead).
Eventually his antisocial behavior meant my father had to fire Blake. Although it was necessary it was hard for me to think of him surviving in Western Sydney commission housing where he lived with his friend and family of which included his meth selling bikie father. After the sacking he meandered through different jobs until he relocated back to Darwin. When I found out the news that Blake was going back to Darwin I knew in my heart that it was a bad thing for him. Darwin had given him nothing and would take away what little he had. After he had left I saw his posts on Facebook sporadically and mentioning him around my own family became almost taboo as my father was still offended at how they had split.
Blake then got kicked out of his mother’s home and after a weekend of drinking he crashed his car around a tree and was gone.
The first thing I thought when I found out that Blake had passed away was that I knew something bad was going to happen to him and that his passing was almost inevitable. Once this thought digested, I was stricken with a harrowing and agonizing sadness. I had friends who had suicided and ones who had overdosed. I had family members who had died from old age and some from ill health. Never had a death affected me like this. Literally within minutes of finding out about Blake “ Pieces of a Puzzle” came on Triple J and all my fellow workers cheered with excitement. They gathered around my scissor lift as it elevated towards the sunlit sky. It had not been sunny in weeks. They mocked my rap hands parodying me. The song itself was parodying me in some way. It seemed that the world itself was laughing at me. And I felt for the first time a deeply sincere and regretful shame at what I had done with the time I was given in life. My maniacal pursuit of creative fulfillment had amounted to this - a song on the radio that people didn’t understand. So blinded by my own ambition that I hadn’t even once considered going out of my way help Blake. I started to realize that I was the only person in life that he would ever listen to. As my scissor lift reached the apex of the roof I stared out at a sunny skyline. The roof was the type Blake and I worked on the most. Stabbing memories flickered in my mind, the most painful I had ever experienced and I started to go into shock. Whoever was crafting my fate had been very cruel in delivering the news of that death, at that time, at that place of work. In the last month I had pushed the boundaries of my works leniency therefore I could have no time off, nor could I slack off even to mourn. Grieving was something I just could not afford. I rested my head on the cold corrugations and one of the foreman said “Caa’n moit! No toim for snoozy!” At lunch I ordered a pie and a coke then I bummed a ciggie even though I had given up smoking. I sat on the roof ridge, ate the pie washed it down with the coke and smoked away. It was what Blake and I called the pie, coke, smoke breaky. That was my mourning.
The last gigs of the tour finished. Life began to slow a little. Blake’s loss was stored in me like my soul was swollen and constipated. I had shed no tears, too scared to think I was allowed to do so. The baby was 2 weeks away and until then I had to have iron eyes and an iron mind. Birth classes continued with condescending bitches that kept portraying birth inaccurately as it would turn out. Things were starting to move and businesses of all kinds were changing with stressful implications. Music, work, baby, Blake. I steamrolled through life with no chance to be actually human. The first weekend off in 5 weeks came. Camilla was to go to RPA hospital for a check up and I decided to go as she hadn’t asked me to. Once checked, it turned out that Camilla had very high blood pressure and this was to be remedied by the induction of the birth of our son. The weeks of mounting pressure were reaching a violent fever pitch. We were far from prepared for our child. Our house was a mess. Camilla was still studying till a day prior. Our birth “package” of clothes food and sanitary items was non-existent. It was beginning to be too much. I don’t know what a nervous breakdown is but I think I was close. Time slowed painfully so. Indefinite and ambiguous outcomes flew from the mouths of the non-concerned, hurried beings of the hospital. Everyone in a great hurry, but nothing happening. No progression. Just limbo as to what our fate was. Finally they allocated a room for Camilla and began inducing the birth of our first child.
There were three crucial stages of the induction. The first was an applied synthetic hormone that was to last 12 hours roughly and would start to bring on labor. This was a success. Too successful. Camilla was ready to go into labor quickly without anywhere to go to. We waited hours as she felt the contractions in the shared room she had stayed in overnight. Under staffed and lacking in facilities we waited for what must have felt like an eternity for Camilla. Public healthcare is a winding mechanism that holds no emotional attachment to anything and we slipped in and out of its cracks. The gap had been too large and the hormones were thinning in effect. By the time we were transferred to a labor theatre the contractions had stopped. My boy didn’t want to come out.
Time for the second stage, the breaking of the water. It was done. Then the third stage which was another hormone administered via a drip and we waited again. Nothing seemed to be taking effect. The hormone was released by a machine that would increase the dosage exponentially. It went up and up. Nothing.
The change of staff happened and typically resulted in a lack of information and a short period of confusion. It was getting late now and concern was creeping into people’s faces. Camilla was contracting but ineffectively. The new mid-wife discovers that her water wasn’t broken properly first time round and proceeds to break it, again. Instantly the mounting hormones from the drip take an effect with the new rupture and Camilla violently descends into labor. Time to push. Pain. Panic. I remind myself that this is all normal, just chill out. More pain. No action. What’s happening? “Push! Push! Nearly there!” They say this until the words start to lose their meaning. If we were nearly there why is she still pushing? Still pushing some more “So close! So close!” Amongst the confusion one starts to know instinctively that this isn’t close. That this isn’t normal. That this is different. A quick call is made and the room is filled with doctors. Important doctors. And their poker faces are held with professional and diplomatic optimism.
Smooth and slow talking with lots of fast and hasty movement. His head is stuck and won’t come. There’s talk of instruments and more pushing. Two contractions before emergency C-section. Baby’s heart drops or stops? Whatever it was, it was bad. One last push for this method is left. They have cut her. There are objects being forced here and there. I am 6 feet tall and nearly 100 kilograms in weight, unfit but quite strong, and all the strength in my body was pulling backward and upwards on her legs as they pulled downwards and outwards on my son’s neck and head. The head popped out. They had mis-diagnosed the positioning of him. He was posterior (facing upwards) a crucial mistake as the heads diameter is much larger this way. The force of the forceps have torn my son’s ear and as they try to birth the rest of his body I see his pale face and his ear is sliced, sitting inverted and inwards on the left hand side of his head. It looks like his ear has turned inwards and is listening to what is happening inside his lower eye socket leaving a salami looking patch of un-skinned flesh where the ear should be. I pull on Camilla again. So much force and pressure. Enough to break a grown mans arm. He’s out. There is a large bloodied and bruised section on his head where the “suction cap instrument” was and it looks like he is wearing a Jewish skullcap made of thick blood. They cover his ear and head and rush him away. Rich, crimson stains are spattered everywhere. Bloodied surgeon utensils lay idly around. Camilla is shaking profusely with shock. I try to comfort her but she tells me to check on the baby. He is breathing with his eyes open and I could see that he was in trauma. The doctors tried to tell me he is fine and healthy but their faces start to lose their poker like qualities and I can read in them that he is a high-risk baby. I look at my son thinking that it may be the last time I see him alive. His breathing was slowly starting to fail and they had him on an oxygen machine. I turned to Camilla who is on the bed alone and her shaking had worsened. My mind won’t allow me to visualize how she looked right then, but all I saw was red flashes and blood all over her lower body. She told me she was fine and to follow the baby as he had been sent to the nursery. I wandered down in a surreal haze.
Was my boy okay? I had asked the doctor if he might have brain damage and as usual I was given watered down dribble about how anything and everything could happen and to just “wait and see”. I walked into the nursery, off my living tits on adrenalin. I approached the incubator they had my son in and I felt like I was going to faint. I saw a team of people making a big fuss over him.
“Is he alright”, I asked. They responded with an auto-pilot remark which flew well above my head. “Does he have brain damage?” I asked as I started to shake from the shots of adrenalin, not dissimilar to the way Camilla was. They did not answer me. I asked again, “Will he have brain damage you think?” They explained that the bruise on his head from the suction cap utensil was enough to raise concerns of brain damage. I then asked what the worst-case scenario was and they told me they weren’t allowed to tell me what that was.
I looked at them all, shivering and sucking in my breath like I needed to suck in three little inhales for every large exhale like the breathing patterns of a child who had cried itself into hysteria I then stuttered, “Yeah. My. Cousin. Died. Last. Week! He’s. Dead. And I didn’t. Help him!”
“SSzah SSzah SSzah.” My breathing quickly jolted in then slowly out. I left the nursery and all the fuss-makers in there had tears held back in the eyes of their faces. I walked out into the foyer near the lifts. It was 3am and I knew I was overwhelmed with adrenalin and that losing my shit would help nobody. I felt that I needed to express it all out so I started hitting myself on the top of my head with steady and heavy punches. Then I tried to cry, but nothing came. I just sounded like a cranky old dog that got petted too hard. I then entered the lifts and went up and down in them again punching myself in the head. My neck was beginning to hurt from the jolts of impact. The truth was that the avalanche of repressed emotion I had built up from Blake’s death was making me catatonic. I hopped out of the lifts and started doing star jumps but as I was unfit it was a short while until I ran out of steam. I went back to the labor ward and tended to Camilla and her mother. After a brief time of resting with my eyes closed I watched them wheel Camilla off to get surgery. She had what they called a fourth degree tear down there, as a result of consistent fuck ups and mis-diagnosis.
Time waned and I felt like I hadn’t slept in days because that was precisely the case. Camilla came back from theatre and straight away wanted to see Lucius our son. He was still being monitored in the nursery. We went and saw him and his condition again was shrouded in a lack of certainty. It would be days before he could be held in his mother’s arms and be breastfed. In the interim I didn’t sleep. I was starting to hallucinate. I had moments where I saw Blake sitting in the room on the bench near the window. He looked fresh and was smoking near my baby’s cot. I told him in my sleep-deprived voice, “You’re not alive…… What are you doing here?” He looked at me smiling cheekily. “Your son is beautiful bro! Pity he looks nothing like you!”, and he started back handing away his smoke near the cot I jumped up infuriated trying to wave away his smoke and found myself flopping my hands around on a door near the bathroom. I was losing my marbles slowly with stress. There wasn’t even a cot in the room.
In the days that followed my son Lucius received plastic surgery to his ear at another hospital. Camilla rested and eventually was able to mother our child. She went through the entire birth without painkillers. The doctors later told us it was the worst type of birth to have excluding death or long term disability. After the experience I developed an intense hatred of the public health care system. The whole thing was dystopic in nature. The incubators made me think of Brave New World. The building structures and the heartless utility-esque approach to human life made me think of Orwell. Some of the women in these hospitals were cold and truly horrible people. One of the lactating nurses told Camilla that she had to leave immediately due to the shortage of beds. She could hardly walk and had held our son only once. She hadn’t even breastfed and they wanted her to leave. The food that I bought for myself to eat as I stayed (they do not supply food to the carer nor sanitary items for the lady) was stolen within a day by what I assume would have been the cleaning staff or the nurses themselves and in the shared eating areas there was no running water at all. The constant misquotation of time raised your hopes only to get crushed by being constantly delayed and situations being prolonged.
But in the end I am grateful for the luck I had received. My partner and my son are safe with me now asleep in my house far from the self-centered filth of humanity. On this night of conclusion I have a small piece of time and mind to mourn the loss of my cousin. Who will never get to see the eyes of my son. My son who was nearly sent to the place where my cousin rests, will not get to see my cousin’s face in this lifetime. Although the two will never meet the scars of a cold normality have bound them.
So as usual I go back to work. I keep writing, recording and performing rap music. My next work will undoubtedly be affected by these events and it will probably be more ‘emo’ for lack of a better word at least now some will know why.
Peace. And good luck dealing with the filth.
Ryan Leaf aka Dialectrix.
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