Light Duties

"There is no protocol for sitting with something that might not live. You bring what you have, and hope the bringing is enough."

The office window faced east, and by three o'clock the afternoon light had slid off the desk and onto the filing cabinet, leaving me typing in the dim. Winter light in the Hills was economical — it turned up late, worked a narrow shift, clocked off before anyone was ready. I could have switched on the lamp and saved my eyes, but the shadow felt appropriate. Margaret had rostered me on paperwork and shelf-stocking and the soft end of the day's jobs, and paperwork done in twilight felt like a truer representation of what I was being asked to do, which was occupy space without causing further damage to myself.

The arm ached. Not badly — not the way it had on Friday morning when the adrenaline had finally cleared and the actual injury had introduced itself — but constantly, the kind of ache that kept you honest about whether you'd really forgotten it or just managed it into the background. I had the dressing on still, the fourth one, changed this morning before breakfast. Mum had watched from the kitchen doorway without comment, a tea towel over her shoulder, the particular stillness she assumed when she was worried and trying not to be visibly so. She had said, as I was putting on my jacket, will we see you at a decent hour tonight? and I had said I'll try for six, and she had said good in a voice that was carrying more than the word. Then Dad had come in from the garage and the moment had closed, and I had driven to the Haven and told myself I had imagined the weight in it.

I was updating the weekend intake spreadsheet when Dennis put his head round the door. He did not knock. Dennis operated on the principle that if a door was shut, you opened it, and if you were unwelcome you would be told. It was one of the many small courtesies of his that looked, at first glance, like the opposite of courtesy.

"How's the arm."

"Still there."

He considered this for roughly the length of a slow breath. "Margaret said light duties. Margaret meant it."

"I'm typing, Dennis."

"You're typing one-handed. That arm's doing half the work by muscle memory." He eyed the keyboard with the same critical attention he brought to a dodgy fence post. "If you're on records, be on records. Don't go helping Emily shift crates because you're bored."

"I wasn't going to."

"You absolutely were going to." He didn't smile, but something at the corner of his mouth moved. "Put the kettle on in an hour. I'll come by."

He disappeared back down the corridor before I could respond. The footsteps receded toward the macropod paddocks — he would be out there until at least five, doing the heavy work that I was not permitted to do. Dennis did not fuss. His care showed up as schedules and checklists and the quiet, firm removal of things you were not meant to be doing. It was the kind of care that had taken me eighteen months to recognise.

I finished the spreadsheet and saved the file. The weekend admissions were light: one magpie with a suspected wing fracture, one koala joey from the Mount Lofty bushfires that had apparently self-extracted from the follow-up programme and been found shivering outside someone's back door in Basket Range, and — on Saturday afternoon — a wombat joey from a paddock west of Kangaroo Flat. I scanned the wombat entry. Female, Southern hairy-nosed, approximately five months, mother hit on Port Wakefield Road early Saturday, truck driver had kept her warm in the cab and driven her to Gawler where she'd been collected by the Haven rescue run. Stable on admission. Four-hourly feeds. Assigned to Taryn for the weekend. Handed over to me on this morning's shift notes.

I saved the file, pushed back from the desk, and went to find her.

The nursery was two doors down from the office, on the south side of the building where the light stayed steady and the temperature held. A bank of low heat lamps along the back wall kept the ambient at pouch-warm, and the six hooks along the rail held five occupied pouches and one empty one, laundered and waiting. Her pouch was third from the left. The record clipped to the door told me what I already half-knew: good intake all weekend, normal activity, Taryn noting in her neat careful capitals SETTLING WELL. This morning's entry was in my own handwriting. I had fed her at eleven — 40ml, full feed accepted — and she had been alert enough to refuse my first hold before accepting the second, which was the correct wombat answer to a new human.

I unhooked her pouch and carried it through to the warming table under the lamp. The fabric was warm the way it was meant to be warm, the interior tracking her body temperature and the exterior tracking the room. I set her down carefully, one-handed, letting the weight settle before I parted the opening.

She was curled the way joeys curled: knees up, head down, ears flat, front paws drawn in against her chest. Her eyes were closed. The small pink triangle of her nose was just visible at the edge of the pouch opening.

Her breathing was wrong.

It took me half a second to see it and another half to believe it. Not dramatic — she wasn't gasping, wasn't struggling visibly. Just shallower than it should have been, and quicker, and with the faintest whistle at the back of each exhale that I couldn't unhear once I had heard it. I pressed the back of my finger against her flank, gently, the way you did to check a rate without disturbing sleep, and I counted against the second hand of the wall clock.

Forty-six in fifteen seconds. One hundred and eighty-four per minute.

Normal resting respiratory rate for a wombat joey her age was somewhere between twenty and thirty. I stopped counting.

For a moment I didn't move. The nursery was quiet around me — the hum of the lamps, the faint rustle of a possum settling somewhere in its pouch at the other end of the rail, the distant tinny sound of a kookaburra from the treeline. I watched her and felt the particular quality of wrongness in the room, the way the air registers a change before your conscious mind does. She had been fine at eleven. She had been fine at one, when I'd glanced in on my way past to the office. Something had shifted in the last two hours while I had been sitting at the desk not thinking about her because I had not known I needed to be thinking about her.

I closed the pouch gently, tucked her back against her hot-water bottle, and lifted the whole carrier against my chest with my good arm. My injured arm I used only as a brace, the way you used a bad tool when the good one wasn't enough. I walked fast, not quite running — not because I thought running would make it worse, though it might, but because running was what you did when you had already decided it was an emergency, and I was not yet ready to commit to that word.

Margaret was in her office with the door open. She was on the phone, standing — she took most of her calls standing, something about blood flow and concentration — and she looked up the moment I crossed the threshold. Whatever she saw in my face stopped the conversation mid-sentence.

"Peter, I need to ring you back." She did not wait for Peter to reply. She hung up, crossed the office in three strides, and was already moving toward the door. "Show me."

I didn't speak on the way to the IC room. Margaret did not ask me to. She walked half a step behind me with that particular attention of hers that was simultaneously assessing me and assessing the air, and when I set the carrier down on the exam table in the IC room she was gloved and beside it before I'd fully let go.

She parted the pouch. Her hands were older than I sometimes remembered — the skin softer, the knuckles slightly enlarged — but they moved with the economy of someone who had done this for four decades. She laid two fingers along the joey's flank, watched, counted. Her lips moved without sound. When she looked up, her face had arranged itself into the neutral professional configuration I had seen her deploy hundreds of times, and the neutrality told me everything.

"How long?"

"She was normal at eleven. I saw her again at one, in passing. This was three."

"Any known contact with other admissions at intake?"

"She's been in the isolated pouch rail since Saturday. Same row as the sugar gliders and the ringtails, but separate bedding, separate handler gloves. Taryn followed full protocol."

She nodded once, absorbing that, and turned to the wall phone. Her fingers were already dialling before I had registered that we had moved from assessment to action.

"Stephen. It's Margaret. I need you to tell me where you are and how fast you can get back." A pause, long enough that I heard the faint rise and fall of his voice on the other end. "A five-month-old Southern hairy-nosed, respiratory rate one-eighty-plus, shallow, slight expiratory rattle. Stable on admission Saturday, normal feeds through to eleven this morning, presenting now." Another pause. Margaret's eyes held the middle distance, doing the calculation. "Right. Right, fine. As fast as you reasonably can." Another pause. "I'll take oxygen to her now. Jerome's here — he'll sit with her till you arrive." A beat. "Yes. I'll tell him."

She hung up.

"He's on campus," she said to me. "Faculty meeting. He can leave now but he's in the city. Call it two hours door-to-door, depending on the expressway. He'll ring when he's on the road." She was already moving to the supply cupboard, pulling down the small-animal oxygen concentrator and the roll of paediatric tubing. "I'm going to set her up on low-flow. You're going to sit with her. Log respiration every five minutes, temperature every fifteen. If the rate climbs past two-ten, or if you see any cyanosis at the mouth, or if she has a seizure, you come and get me. I'll be in the treatment room with the koala."

"Understood."

"Jerome." She stopped, oxygen line in her hand, and looked at me properly for the first time since we had entered the room. "You caught this. Taryn didn't catch it on the morning feed because it wasn't there to catch. You caught it because you went back. That matters."

I didn't know how to answer. She didn't wait for one. She assembled the setup with quick competent movements — flow meter to concentrator, tubing to flow meter, small soft mask to tubing, mask to face. The mask was too big for the joey's snout; Margaret tucked a fold of sterile gauze along the edge to narrow the fit, not sealing the mask to the skin but resting it so the oxygen pooled around the nose and mouth. It was the trick she had taught me my first month. She had taught me most of what I knew about the small patients.

"Four litres per minute to start. Log the baseline now. I'll be five minutes away. I'm going to tell Emily to keep the public side quiet — no tours, no noise through this wing."

Then she was gone, and the room held only the joey and me and the soft persistent hiss of the concentrator.

I set the log sheet on the table beside the carrier. I wrote the time — 15:14 — and the baseline rate I'd counted before Margaret arrived: 184. Next to it I wrote the rate under oxygen for the first interval, counting once more with my fingers at her flank and my eyes on the clock. Forty-three in fifteen. One hundred and seventy-two. Marginally better. Not better enough to mean anything yet.

I sat down on the sitter's chair.

The chair was the one we had always used for IC vigils — a plain hardwood kitchen chair, too low for the table, with a cushion tied to the seat that had been re-covered three times in the years I had been coming here. It was not comfortable. It was not meant to be. If the chair were comfortable you would fall asleep, and sleeping through a vigil was a particular kind of failure that nobody at the Haven talked about openly but everybody guarded against.

The clock above the door said 15:16. Stephen would be, if he was lucky with traffic, back at the Haven by five. More likely half past. I had about two hours to hold. I had fed her at eleven and the next feed was due at three. I would not be giving that feed. A wombat in respiratory distress could not have fluids by mouth, not safely — Margaret had taught me that too. The pouch and the oxygen and my hand on her flank were all she was going to get from me.

I took out my phone.

The message to Mum needed to be short. I thought about this for longer than it deserved — about what to explain and what to leave out, about how to soften the fact that I was not going to be home for the dinner she had set aside the morning for. In the end I understood that softening was not the point. The point was the animal. Mum would understand the animal. Mum had spent most of her own life around creatures that did not talk, and she had never once asked me to choose between one of them and her if the creature needed me more.

I opened the camera.

The photograph took four attempts. The light was flat and clinical and did her no favours. I angled the phone so the lamp did not glare off the pouch fabric, and I tried shooting from above and from the side, and in the end I got a version that looked, if you didn't know what you were looking at, almost peaceful. The pouch swaddled around her. The small pink snout just visible at the opening. Nothing in the frame to communicate the speed of her breath. A sleeping joey, photographed from above, held in cloth.

I typed the caption beneath it.

Sorry Mum. Emergency. Raincheck?

I looked at the words for a moment before I sent. The apology was genuine; the word emergency was factual; raincheck was a word I could not remember having typed to my mother before in my life and it felt, oddly, like the most honest part of the sentence.

I sent it.

The reply came within two minutes, which was faster than I expected. Mum was not a fast texter. She composed messages the way she composed Christmas cards — carefully, with an awareness of their permanence.

Of course love. Take care of her. Ring if you need us.

And then, a few seconds later:

I'm proud of you. X

I read both messages twice. Then I put the phone face down on the table beside the log sheet, and I did not look at it again.

The clock said 15:21. Rate check was due.

I counted. Forty-two in fifteen. One hundred and sixty-eight per minute.

Margaret had been right, or the oxygen had been right, or the act of being placed in a quieter room had been right. The rate was coming down. Not to normal. Not close to normal. But the trajectory had reversed, for this one five-minute window, and I wrote the number in my careful left-handed capitals and underlined it once, the smallest permissible celebration I would allow myself.

I pressed my good hand against the pouch, gently, feeling the warmth through the cloth. Her breath moved under my palm — quick and thin, but still there. Still there.

The light through the small window had shifted toward amber while I wasn't watching. Somewhere in the building a kettle clicked on — Dennis, probably, who had said he would come by in an hour and who would now, when he arrived to find me absent from the staff room, track me here and put a mug on the table beside me and leave without speaking, because Dennis knew when silence was the thing being offered. Somewhere further out, a magpie started its afternoon warbling, that Australian sound that was half melody and half proclamation. The joey's ears did not move. I could not tell if she had heard it or if she was too far inside herself to register anything except the warmth and the soft hiss of the oxygen and the small steady pressure of my hand.

I had thought, when Margaret told me on Thursday that she saw something in me, that she meant the rescue. The eagle in the wire, the decision to hold on, the reflex that had kept my hand on the blanket when the talon had come down. I had thought the thing she had named in me was capacity for action — the instinct that stayed functional when the thinking mind had checked out.

Sitting here, counting a small wrong breath in a small still body, I thought perhaps she had meant something else. Perhaps what she had actually been naming was the opposite. Not the instinct to do, but the discipline to not do — to stop, to wait, to refuse the easier labour of frantic activity in favour of the harder labour of sustained attention. To be the creature in the room who was not panicking, so that the other creature in the room did not have to.

There was no protocol for this. Not really. The oxygen flow was set. The mask was in place. The log sheet would catch any deterioration. The vet was on his way. Everything that could be done was being done, and my function in the equation was to be the unmoving thing at the edge of the table, the warm hand through the cloth, the steady presence that the joey could register or not register but that needed to be there in case registering mattered.

I thought of Pip, on Thursday afternoon. The way she had relaxed against me in the final minutes. The way her breath had gentled. I thought of Stephen's voice saying she can still hear you and the uselessness of anything I had said aloud, and the fact that I had said it anyway because something in me had needed the saying.

I did not say anything to Mabel. There was no one here to hear me do it, and she could not understand in any case, and the sound of my voice might unsettle her more than it steadied her. But I let my hand stay where it was, and I let the weight of her existence press up against my palm, and I let myself feel — with the full acknowledgment that would have embarrassed me if anyone else were in the room — that I loved her, this small wombat I had known for four hours, who would live or would not live within the next three, and whose life was worth sitting in a hard-backed chair for whether the sitting changed anything or not.

The clock said 15:26.

I counted.

Forty-one in fifteen.

I wrote it down.