Sweet Caroline

We walked in silence along the beach, the only sound coming from the howling wind, the crashing waves and the gulls screeching as they circled over the surf looking for their next meal. This was the best time to walk on the beach, the wind driving spray into our faces, its cool freshness washing the cares of the world away, plus the fact that we had the beach to ourselves. Caroline took my hand in hers and stopped walking, forcing me to stop. She turned and faced me. "Darling, what's the matter? You've been moping around for the last day or so, please tell me so that I can support you." This was something that we did for each other from the time that we first met.

If you are looking for a quiet life then Sydney's Kings Cross is not the place for you. Behind the flashing neon signs and the bright lights is a world of prostitutes and pimps, of drug addicts and pushers, of hit men and stand-over merchants and it had been this way since the days of the razor gangs in the 1920's and 30's when Tilly Devine ran the brothels and Kate Leigh the sly grog shops (illegal bars). There had been several half-hearted attempts by the authorities to clean the place up but it still thrives. Inconveniently placed if you were in the medical profession and wanted a quiet life, was St Vincents Hospital.

It was seven years ago and I was a new detective at the Cross and she was an intern in the Accident and Emergency department at St Vincents. I had just lost someone and it upset me that a young life should be so cruelly snuffed out before its potential could be realised. The victim was a young girl, probably eighteen or nineteen, she had no ID on her so I was guessing here, and she had OD'd on heroin. She was found in an alley where her 'friends' had dumped her and if it wasn't for the fact that I saw them from a distance as they ran from the alley I wouldn't have gotten involved.

I called the ambulance and tried to keep her alive until they got there but they were too late. I have to give the ambo's credit for their efforts to drag her back into the land of the living and even they were feeling lost as she was wheeled, her last journey, into A&E to be declared DOA. That should have been the end of it but I felt that I had to do something for her even though she would never be able to show her appreciation.

What made it worse, if that was possible, was that she wasn't anything like the usual street junkie that we had to pick up out of the gutter, she was well and expensively dressed, her make-up was immaculately applied and apart from the one needle mark her skin was flawless. I figured that she was from a wealthy family and had been persuaded to have a walk on the wild side to experience life there, whether she had been persuaded to try heroin or whether it was forced on her, who could say, but it was the worst choice and one that there was no stepping back from.

I had grabbed myself a cup of alleged coffee from the vending machine and was seated in the waiting room, head bowed, watching it get cold when she sat next to me. "You're the officer that brought the girl in aren't you?"

"Yes." My answer was little more than a whisper. "How do you guys do it?"

"Do what?"

"Put up with this sort of thing day in, day out?"

"I don't know about the others but when I first started in this job it was really getting to me and it was showing. One of the older doctors took me aside and gave me the best advice that I could have received, he said to me; 'If you want to survive, and we need you to survive, you are going to have to learn to step out of your body and let your professional self get on with the job at hand without interference from your spiritual self. Your spiritual self is there only for support because it's next to useless at medicine.' She placed her hand on mine and it felt warm and soft. "Come with me." It wasn't an order but an invitation into her life, although neither of us realised it at the time.

We sat for what seemed like hours, but it was only ten minutes, in the staff cafeteria drinking decent coffee and saying little about the incident that was bringing us together. "Why did you want to become a policeman?"

"It was something that I felt that I could do to make a difference in this world. I'm not smart enough to be a doctor or lawyer and I didn't want to be just another beat cop so I worked hard for a promotion into the plain clothes division. I have just been told that I've passed my sergeant's exams and I'm due for another promotion. Why did you want to get into medicine?"

"For the same reason that you wanted to be a cop, to make a difference, to save people's lives, although there are times when I feel that we're wasting our time when we see the same people coming in time after time having been beaten by the same person as before. No-one seems to care enough to do anything about it."

"It's not that we don't care, it's just that in most cases when we think we have enough to prosecute the victim changes his or her story and chooses not to give evidence. Unless we can catch the person actually committing the assault there is little we can do. It's frustrating, believe me."

"Yet you keep going, why?" Her hand was on mine and she looked through my eyes into my soul, she was holding her hand out for me to step out of my body and join her. I was just about to ask her for a date when her pager shattered the mood and she had to rush off leaving me trying to recall the name on her ID tag; Caroline, Caroline Preston.

It must have been fate our meeting like that because as I drove back to the station to file my report I turned on the car radio for some distraction and the music that forced me to stop and listen was a song from Hot August Night, Sweet Caroline, and it had me singing along in my best Neil Diamond imitation, "Hand touching hand, reaching out, touching me," the people in the car next to me must have thought that I was crazy when I let rip with the chorus; "Sweet Caroline, good times never seemed so good, I'll be inclined to believe they never would." and she had done just that, Caroline had reached out and touched me.

The next day I was back at the hospital and I sought her out. She had just emerged from a treatment room when she saw me. "Hi, don't tell me you've brought in another victim?"

"No, actually I haven't, in fact I've come to see you."

"Oh?"

"Yes, I wanted to thank you for the advice that you gave me yesterday, I thought about it after you were called away and it really does make sense, it puts everything into perspective, so, thank you." I had to get in quick with the next bit before my resolve disappeared out the window. "There was one other reason for my being here, would you be interested in having dinner with me one night when you're free?"

"I'd like that, would this evening be too soon?"

"Wow! Yes, no, this evening will be fine, better than fine, what time would you like me to pick you up?"

"I'm supposed to finish at five, if you want to pick me up then it will save me trying to get a cab, you can take me home to change and then I'm all yours for the evening." She was all mine for the evening? Was that a slip of the tongue or have my dreams all been answered?

She was supposed to finish at five and by five past I was beginning to think that I'd bombed out yet again. I was there waiting for her at least five minutes before five only to find, when I asked a rushing nurse, that she was still with a patient. Twenty minutes later she rushed out of the treatment room pulling her surgical gloves off as she walked briskly towards me. As she reached me she stood on her toes and kissed me. "Who's your friend Callie?" One of the nurses asked.

"This is. . ." I realised that she didn't know my name.

"Morgan Owen." I said and held out my hand to the nurse.

"I'll just be a second, don't you dare leave without me."

"A second I can wait, after all I've already waited three hours so what's another second." She poked her tongue at me and scurried off to return a couple of minutes later minus white coat and surgical gloves.

We never did make it to dinner that night. When we got to her apartment, small but with a great view over the beach at Tamarama, she went off to take a shower leaving me to browse around her living room. I found Hot August Night and placed the CD in her player and selected Sweet Caroline. I could hear her singing along in the bathroom. "What made you play just that track?" she asked as she emerged towelling her hair.

"It was playing on my car radio as I drove back to the station last night and it seemed to fit you."

"That's what my father thought as well, I think that that track wore out on his vinyl album before any other, he used to tell me that I was his 'sweet Caroline'."

"To me you'll always be Caroline, never Callie, unless you prefer that name."

"I prefer Caroline. Would you like a drink before we go?"

"Sure, what do you have?"

"Nothing too exciting, just some wine, chateau cardboard." (4 litres of wine in a bladder inside a cardboard box with a pouring tap, cheap and in most cases drinkable.)

"Wine's fine with me." Wine was joined some time later by something that she managed to find but I can't remember what it was because my attention was welded to her. We talked about our lives to this point, she, unlike me came from an upper middles class family and had gone to a private girls school on the North Shore before studying medicine at Sydney Uni. This was her first job and while it was long hours she found that she enjoyed it and had chosen to specialise in trauma medicine, repairing victims of motor accidents and other such incidents.

I, on the other hand, was from a working class family and my parents wanted my brothers and I to have a better education than was available to them so that we could realise our full potential. High school I found uninteresting, the subjects that I loved were not taught fast enough for me so I was bored, those that I was not interested in I found boring for an entirely different reason and did just enough to pass my exams. While I managed to pass all subjects my grades were not good enough to get into the Uni course that interested me so I ended up applying for the police force because some aspects of police work interested me, these did not include sitting in a patrol car and booking motorists for petty breaches just to make my quota for the day.

It seemed only natural that at some point in the evening I should try to kiss her and even more natural that she should allow me and return that kiss. That kiss led to this point in our lives that we now found ourselves. It hasn't been an easy marriage for us, what with juggling conflicting work hours that meant that our lives together were snatched moments between chaos, but neither of us were about to give up on this and go our separate way.

We grew so very close to each other it developed into an almost a telepathic bond, if she was having a hard day I would feel it and ring her to reinforce the support that she had already felt and she would do the same for me. Sometimes, as she came off duty she would stop on her way home and get us a couple of cups of coffee, proper coffee. It had become a regular sight, her walking into the station with one of those cardboard trays and two large cups of coffee, smiling at the Desk Sergeant before walking down the corridor to the squad room where she would put the coffee down before giving me a passionate kiss and sitting on my desk, her leg against the arm of my chair, my hand on her thigh.

Two months ago we actually managed to arrange a three week vacation, the first since our hurried one week honeymoon six years ago, and spent it lazing on the glorious beach at Byron Bay, three weeks of sun, surf, and each other. It felt almost as good as our honeymoon, in fact many people who saw us thought that we were newlyweds. Caroline worked on her tan as far as sunblock would allow, she had seen too many melanoma cases to risk becoming one herself, while I kept covered up as much as possible because no amount of sunblock could save my skin from burning.

We walked the beach, tried body surfing, the personal contact with the wave more involving than on a board, drowning bait in the surf and having to buy fish to cook on the way back to our rented house. In the privacy of the house we didn't walk around naked, both of us found the vision of the other wearing a robe over nothing was a bigger turn-on than seeing each other naked, it was the anticipation of what was unseen rather than what was seen, she would bend over me allowing a glimpse of her breasts or she would come up behind me and slide her hand under my robe a grab my rapidly rising cock. Sliding my hand under her robe and feeling her smooth flesh got me going quicker than I expected

I would come up behind her and wrap my arms around her, my hands seeking out her breasts, my fingers her nipples and she would lean back against me and utter this purring sound like some contented cat before reaching between us for her cock, well it was my cock but she had laid claim to it. When he was sufficiently hard she would bend at the waist and allow me entry into our sexual heaven, pushing herself back onto me so that he, my cock, could penetrate deep inside her. Our orgasm was almost always simultaneous although sometimes it was her second to my first which could be as a result of one or other of us touching her clit. Then there were the times when she would grab me and take him in her mouth to prepare him for her assault on him. She loved to straddle me and ride him, her hips moving in different ways as she explored new and different ways to increase our pleasure. After we had both come she would take him into her mouth once more to cleanse him of our juices.

We explored every subtle nuance of each other's body, each erogenous point of contact that would lead us to making love as if we had been born to it, no text book necessary just travel the road of the heart. As with everything about us, our sexual lives were a joining of our physical and spiritual lives into a single entity, two wholes forming a bigger and better whole, we were inseparable and invincible, we were us.

"You're right, there is something bothering me and I need your help. Two nights ago I found a young girl who had been badly beaten and while I waited for the ambulance she identified her assailant, it was a cop. She was a prostitute who worked in one of the brothels in the area, he was there getting a freebie and he got too rough with her. Before anyone could intervene she was unconscious and he left. Everyone was scared of him and what he could do if they reported it and they didn't want her found on the premises so she was dumped some distance away."

"Do you have any idea who the other cop is?"

"Yes, I know him. He works at another station but I recognised him from her description of a couple of distinguishing features like the healed gunshot wound on his left upper thigh and the chipped front tooth."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"This is what's bothering me, you see there's this unwritten law about grassing on fellow cops no matter what they did, and as far as he's concerned she was just another prostitute and not worth the bother."

"But he had no qualms about availing himself of her services and treating her the way he did. I would bet that he has been married and his wife has left him."

"Yes she did, they're divorced now. I've heard rumours about him playing the field with no hint of a permanent relationship."

"So, in spite of the unwritten law you feel that you have to do something, don't you?"

"I know that I have to do something, but what? If I file a report it will more than likely be lost in the system and not followed up, if I front him with what I know he'll just tell me fuck off and not stick my nose in his business, and if I go to Internal Affairs I will become a pariah and I don't know that I could handle the pressures that would go with that."

"Okay now's a good time to step outside your body, to work out for yourself which is the most important to you, your physical body that can do your job blindfolded or your spiritual self that has to live with the repercussions of whatever you do. If you walk away from your spiritual all the help that I can give you will probably not be enough. The very thing that brought us together seven years ago will be gone."

"I know that you're right, I guess a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." Caroline hugged me and kissed me with the same passion that she showed from the very start of our relationship.

"You do realise that this is going to cause a stink don't you?" My boss had just finished reading my report.

"That's why it has taken me a couple of days to get the courage to file it, I know that he'll tell his mates that I'm a complete bastard for ratting him out, but what choice did I have, the girl recognised him."

"But she's dead, without her you have no proof."

"But if I do nothing I'll have to live with it for the rest of my life. I crime has been committed and I know who committed it and I cannot treat her any differently to any other victim of a crime, I have to see this through whatever it takes. So she was a prostitute, but she was a person just like you and me, don't you think that she and those like her deserve some support? If we do nothing we're condoning this behaviour."

"Leave it with me, I'll have an off the record chat with his boss and see whether he thinks we should proceed."

I thought that would be the last I'd hear of it but I was wrong. "Your man isn't very popular with his boss, this isn't the first time he's come the heavy with one of the girls but then he hasn't managed to kill one before. There will be a disciplinary hearing and until the matter is resolved he has been suspended. You will be required to give evidence at the hearing so you better be prepared for a grilling. In the meantime I think that I'll have a little word in someone's ear."

My phone rang as soon as I got back to my desk. "Hi Darling, how did it go?"

"I was just about to call you, there will be a disciplinary hearing and I'm going to have to give evidence and I'm not looking forward to that, facing a man who thinks that I'm pond scum for reporting him and from what I've heard he doesn't take kindly to any criticism."

"I know that you've done the right thing and you won't regret having done it."

"I'm already copping some nasty looks from some of the guys here, he's obviously been spreading the word that I'm not to be trusted."

"Surely the guys that you work with know you well enough not to condemn you for what you've done."

"I don't think that they know the full picture, just his side."

"What can they do?"

"Apart from not having anything to do with me, not a lot. Look, I have to go, I'll see you tonight. Bye Darling." I had a lot to do, not the least of which was to talk to the staff at the brothel to see if they would be prepared to give evidence at the hearing. This proved to be an almost fruitless exercise because they were scared of him, not even the threat of charges of being accessories after the fact would sway their decision

"Look, we can tell you what happened but there is no way that we will give evidence, he or one of his thug mates will make sure that we will be so scarred that we'll never work again." Rosie was not happy about this and her frustration and helplessness was showing. "He moves with a very nasty crowd that are into drugs and firearms trafficking as well as assaults, and from what we've been told, the odd murder or two. No we cannot and will not give evidence. I feel sorry for you going up against him, you're never going to be safe again."

While this was happening my boss was on the phone to Bernie Marston the local crime boss and a long-time friend. "Bernie, we have a problem, your niece's ex has been a naughty boy."