Excerpts from
The Snake in Sydney
By Michael Larsen
Saliva was running out of her mouth and she gasped in desperation for air between the stunned, elderly couple who had helped her in through the door of Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital. A tall younger man, who Annika assumed was part of the same group, readily held the door for them.
The girl walked with slack legs, her head wobbled from side to side, and Annika noticed that she clutched her hand. Then she collapsed.
Annika was already approaching them, having given instructions to prepare the intensive care unit. She made sure that the anaesthesia unit was informed, so that they could get the equipment ready and, accompanied by the departmental sister and a porter, she hurried to meet the little group, the porter pushing a hospital bed in front of him.
‘Carefully,’ said Annika, as together they lifted the girl up onto the bed, ‘has she been drinking?’
The shaken couple looked at her. Then the man, tall, tourist-pale with sunhat, shorts and khaki socks in his white deck shoes, pulled himself together. He grappled a little with a stiff black canvas bag which he had hanging on his shoulder, and which Annika presumed belonged to the girl. Then he said:
‘We ... we are tourists. Sweden. We don’t know ...’
‘I speak a bit of Swedish,’ said Annika.
‘Oh,’ said the man. ‘Yes, we don’t know anything ... we just came across the girl.’
‘Is she breathing?’ asked Annika and without waiting for an answer she bent down over the girl’s face where she felt a weak, warm breath on her cheek. She could detect no trace of alcohol. With her hand she located a faint, irregular pulse.
Annika quickly checked the hand the girl had been clutching and almost immediately noticed two bite-marks. One of them distinct. The other only indicated by a small, thin mark on the skin. She was no longer in doubt as to the cause of the girl’s condition.
Bapi, snake. Or the ominous yirritja, as Kookillo Dhamarandji, John Farrow’s helper at the reptile park outside Brisbane, used for poisonous snakes.
She pulled a gauze swab out of her pocket, wrenched off the packaging with her teeth and pressed it against the back of the girl’s hand. Next she carefully pulled the girl’s arm out, let it fall loose along the side of the bed and locked her own hand with a firm grip around the girl’s upper arm.
The little party half-ran beside the hospital bed which the porter steered along the corridor. Annika examined the girl, as far as the difficult circumstances allowed. The imprints from the snake’s teeth were quite far apart and Annika made a mental note that there was no appreciable swelling around the area of the bite, this unfortunately was not an unequivocally good sign. She carefully turned the girl’s hand and noticed two microscopic marks, which, to be on the safe side, she also attributed to the snake. Half-running, while she tried to find more bites, her brain was working on overdrive.
‘Is she allergic?’
‘We don’t know her,’ said the elderly Swede.
‘Where did you find her?’
‘She was sitting in a car. Out by Quarantine Head.’
She sent a hail of questions over the two Swedes, asked about medical insurance and vaccination certificate, but it was obvious that they knew next to nothing about the girl. Nor did the younger man contribute any explanatory details. Actually, afterwards Annika could not remember if he had said anything at all or spoken with the others or just kept in the background all the time, and the only thing Annika had noticed about him, apart from an impression of his height, was a scar which twisted its way down his right cheek.
Translated by Gaye Kynoch
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