Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781741767223 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Murderball
Head to Head with Australia's Toughest Team
By Will Swanton
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2009 Will SwantonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74176-722-3
CHAPTER 1
The Rock
SHIT CREEK, 8 AUGUST 1993: The arrival of Brad Dubberley in the least attractive of all the creeks has more to do with him being in it rather than up it, and if we're going to paint a perfectly accurate picture here of the harrowing predicament now facing a previously robust twelve-year-old smart-arse, the kid should be seen as laying face-first in the muddied waters of Shit Creek as a torrent of bloodied water gushes over the severed skin still trying valiantly to remain attached to his battered skull. Dubberley suspects his best course of action at this point is to get the fuck up, quite the idea, but there has been a development: He cannot move a God-forsaken muscle.
'I thought I may as well just lie there,' he says now, dunking you in the impression he was largely unperturbed by the grim reaper shuffling towards him with his ugly blank face, shuffling and whispering with their ugly blank faces and blatant disregard for the imminent tragedy of the death of a child. But with all due respect to a self-described cripple who has just turned up late for your first meeting with the wholly unexpected excuse of 'Sorry, mate, they just had to do some panel-beating on my head', you're here to suggest the whole I-thought-I-may-as-well-just-lie-there routine is a mushroom cloud of bullshit because surely no-one is capable of such overwhelming calm right when they realise they're on their way to whatever comes next. Unless that's when there is nothing but calm.
Dubberley's memories of this day are vivid. Black and white photographs taken without his permission. The raw sting of acidic water spearing through his eyes. Snap. The disbelief at being one missed heartbeat away from dying in what amounted to little more than a puddle. Snap. Such a piss-weak and unthreatening body of water, teasing him and mocking him in the after-wash of his own lame fall. Snap. The incredulity upon realising that no matter how desperately the millions and billions and trillions of interconnected neurones in his distinctly unparalysed brain were howling at his arms and legs to get a wriggle on, they were capable of doing no such thing. Snap. He remembers the putrid sickness in the pit of his stomach at being so hopelessly unable to provide his lungs with what they were presently screaming out for — blessed oxygen. And he remembers the thought, just a thought, that Shit Creek would be no place for a boy to die.
Help me.
Please.
They're the most desperate words of all.
There was the harmless walk on a frigid Victorian morning with two mates who saved his life but have since vanished clean off the face of his Earth. The bush track and that's all it is, you know, just an unremarkable bush track, nothing that could ordinarily be described as a killing machine. There was the freedom of it all, being so young and energetic and running wild outside, the football game coming up that afternoon, life, growing up, getting bigger, getting smarter, embracing everything and everyone, the perpetual bliss of living like this. But then came the slip, just one slip in one millisecond of a lifetime, the 50-metre tumble, the silent repeating of the most desperate words of all and then the arrival in his path of the merciless rock; the big old ugly rock that remains in Shit Creek to this day without offering so much as an apology. Brad Dubberley remembers the wailing sirens of the ambulances and the whirring blades of the emergency helicopter and the hurried marching footsteps that stopped at his side and the rat-a-tat-tat machine-gun talk of his frazzled mates and family. He remembers being wrapped in the aluminium foil and the scream of hypothermia and the stretcher that took him into the helicopter and this other life. He remembers thinking, 'Funny, but I can't feel my legs.'
Snap.
Dubberley can still see the looks on the faces of his mother, father and bawling younger brothers because no matter how hard people try to mask their feelings, they never really can. He could read the lines on the faces of his mother, father and bawling younger brothers and when he put them all on the same page they read HEARTACHE. Dubberley remembers these looks because you never forget the things that haunt you as a child. The things harnessing enough power to keep you awake at night before you hide them in the basement with every other fear and loathing; the things that trigger nightmares of enough force to make you sit bolt upright in bed whenever they escape their chains and come out to play in adulthood; the things that forever burn a hole in your brain. Dubberley recalls all this and shakes his head because the day he landed in Shit Creek was the day he should have died. There are few more unflappable, honest and magnificently free-spirited people in this world than Bradley Wayne Dubberley, but right here and now, re-telling and re-living the most horrific moment of his life, the blood drains from his face and he shivers. Someone just stepped on his grave.
CHAPTER 2The Game I
Officially, it's wheelchair rugby. Bullshit to that. In the US, it's Quad Rugby. Bullshit to that, too. It shall be called neither on this watch. This is murderball. This is smash-up man carnage based on the age-old sporting principle of spotting the man with the ball, moving in like a pack of street hoods and killing him. Who cares if he's a quadriplegic? Kill him. Who cares if he's already suffered enough physical and mental torment for one lifetime? Kill him. Who cares if he's an amputee, or was born without legs, or arms, or half an arm, or half a leg, or a claw instead of fingers? Kill the fucker. Who cares if there's an unmistakable sadness in his eyes because away from the 32minute adrenaline rushes derived from this high-voltage metallic warfare, life is an ordeal. Bee-atch needs to be put on his arse. If he has the ball in his lap, hands or tray, if he's so much as thinking about getting it, you need to knock him through the floorboards, wheel over to him, stare at his spinning eyes and squawk like vultures over the maggots of a rotting carcass. Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.
CHAPTER 3Fallen
I slipped, skidded, fell over and hit the ground hard,' Dubberley says. 'I kept getting back to my feet but going over again. I was trying to stop but I couldn't. I was going too fast. There's an embankment that goes across the creek. I remember thinking, "I'm going to have to try to jump this." I got to the bottom, tried to jump the embankment and — I just remember smashing my head on this rock and falling into the water. I'm thinking, "I can't move. Why can't I move?" I couldn't breathe. My face was straight down in the water. It was winter in Victoria, and it's such cold water that I was frozen, basically. I remember this kind of gargling. My mates had never done any first aid so I don't know why they did this, but when they got to me they kept my neck and body in a straight line when they turned me over. If they'd twisted my neck or turned my face out of the water, it would have severed my spinal cord. That would have completely done me over. I've thought about this a lot. If I was them, I would have run down, picked me up and thrown me out of the water to get me breathing again. If I was them, I would have grabbed the head and twisted it without even thinking about the neck or the spinal cord or anything like that. If they had done that, it probably would have killed me. But they didn't. I hope they know what they did. They were calm and did the right thing and saved my life. I got lucky in a few ways, with how they reacted and with the water being so cold, it was like putting ice on the injury. I was really pretty lucky.'
Blessed.
Dubberley has lost contact with the friends who did more good than they know. Their names are Nathan Chrystal and Matthew van der Veer. Chrystal's father, John, was the first outsider on the scene, and when he arrived, Dubberley was on his back with his head resting on the rock like it was a pillow, the thing that nearly killed him now trying to cradle him. Altogether too late for that. Chrystal and van der Veer are the ghosts who were there when the bad thing happened, sweeping down the muddied hill and into Shit Creek to rescue their mate before going up in plumes of unwanted smoke. Dubberley regrets their departure from his life. 'I can't work out if it's because they don't want to be reminded of what happened, or if they think it was their fault, which it clearly wasn't,' he says. 'It's not like they pushed me down the hill. They didn't hit me over the head with the rock. I honestly believe they saved my life. Maybe they think I'm in a wheelchair because they did the wrong thing. If they think that, they're wrong. Why didn't they just throw me out of the water? They were so calm. One of them rolled me over really gently, keeping my neck and my body level. I can't even tell you which one stayed and which one went for help. Nathan lived across the road, so he must have gone. His old man came across with a blanket and held me in his arms until the ambulances and fire brigades came. I remember being numb and feeling like the situation was completely out of my control. It felt like nothing was in my hands.'
Dubberley's C5, C6 and C7 vertebrae were dislocated. His spinal cord was cut and bleeding. 'The ambulance got there and they asked me where my parents were,' he says. 'I told them Dad was probably at work. I gave them his number, but he wasn't at work, he was watching my brothers play basketball. The number they called, my uncle answered the phone. They told him there had been an accident. He went to get Dad but he didn't tell him everything because he didn't want to stress him out. I think he might have just told him I had a broken leg, something like that. He told Dad to get up to the creek.'
Phillip Dubberley walked into the black and white photograph to be confronted by the most harrowing scene imaginable — a child, his child, immobilised on a stretcher. His child was immobilised on a stretcher. 'Mum and Dad and my brothers came and the foil was getting my temperature up — and that's when I started thinking, "Shouldn't I be able to feel my legs by now?"' Dubberley says. 'I thought it must have been the cold or the shock. You're twelve and you think there has to be a reason that isn't going to be too bad. You're too young to properly understand. You get hurt and you think you just have to wait a while and your body will fix itself pretty quickly. I didn't know what a quadriplegic was. I didn't know anything about the spinal cord. I thought I'd broken a few bones, something like that. They put me in a helicopter and took me to hospital in Melbourne. Dad was in the helicopter with me. Mum had to drive up. I guess they both had an idea what was wrong by then. They didn't say anything but I could kind of see from the way they were looking at me that there might be a pretty big problem.'
Van der Veer was blond with a bowl haircut. Chrystal was taller with neat brown hair. The Ballarat News ran stories accompanied by photos in which the haunted van der Veer never smiles. Chrystal manages an unconvincing grin when his father is by his side. The report stated: 'A twelve-year-old Ballarat boy was airlifted to the Austin Hopsital with severe spinal injuries after he fell down a steep hill and creek embankment ... Brad Dubberley, of Nelson Street, was playing with two friends on a steep hillside behind Progress Park, Brown Hill, about 11.30 a.m. when he slipped on wet ground ... rolled across a dirt track and then fell down a four metre vertical drop into Yarrowee Creek, landing on a large rock ... breaking his neck in three places and causing bruising, bleeding and swelling in the spinal area. Unable to move, Bradley had taken his last breath and was choking on the water. One of the injured boy's friends, Matthew van der Veer, twelve, raced for help while the other, Nathan Chrystal, eleven, went to his aid. Chrystal says: "I knew he was hurt so I came flying down. He was sort of talking funny, really slow."'
It was half an hour before the paramedics arrived. By then, John Chrystal also had hypothermia. Dubberley was taken to Ballarat Base Hospital. He was immediately transferred to a terrifyingly confronting place called Austin Hospital, where a single blue door has the words INTENSIVE CARE UNIT plastered across the top of it and untold terrors inside. The waiting room is full of resolve until another stern-faced doctor comes out to deliver another round of life-altering news. It's impossible to sit in the waiting room of the Austin Hospital without growing old. Phillip Dubberley says of van der Veer and Chrystal, 'Bradley owes them his life.'
Dubberley says: 'Those mates, you know, they were the difference between me being an incomplete quadriplegic and a complete quadriplegic. I'd broken my neck. Any little movement when they got to me would have just about killed me off. We were really good mates. We used to do everything together. We played footy together, played cricket together, spent nearly every day together. I'd just always hung out with them. It's a shame we don't see each other any more. Maybe they think if they see me in a chair, they'll feel uncomfortable about it. Maybe it would make them relive the whole thing. I'm not really sure. It was a long time ago and if they do feel bad about any of it, they shouldn't. They did nothing wrong. Things just happen. I'm not religious or anything, but I do think things happen for a reason. You'll hear this a lot from blokes who have had these sorts of accidents — it can be just as hard, or harder, for the other people involved. Especially the families. I don't think it's in anyone's nature to go out celebrating if they avoid getting hurt while their mates are badly injured. It must have been frightening for them. I really wanted to keep in contact with them, but I just ended up thinking there's no point in trying any more if it was going to make everyone feel uncomfortable. I never thought we would lose contact but that's the way it has gone.'
Dubberley was expected to die before dawn. 'The doctors said I wouldn't see the night through,' he says. 'They thought the hypothermia was going to kill me. I just wanted to wake up the next morning to prove them wrong. Then they said I'd be dead by the end of the week and it was the same deal. I just wanted to get through the week because they said I wouldn't. They were like, "You're never going to walk again." What was I going to do? Take their word for it? I was like, "Fuck you guys, I'm going to prove you wrong." Being so young, you just want to do the things you're told not to do. They'd tell me to pick up a block. I'd slide it to the end of the table. "There you go, you pricks, I've got it." I was too young to realise the point of it was to learn how to pick things up, not get it into your hand by sliding it across the table. I thought I was being clever when I wasn't. It was cheating, but cheating is just finding a way to help yourself out. We're always cheating, I reckon, in all our day-today stuff, just working out the easiest way to get shit done.'
There are seven virtues, seven deadly sins, seven fires in Hell, seven stages of grief and seven cervical vertebrae in the human neck. The central nervous system comprises the brain and the spinal cord. The C1 to C7 run along the spinal cord, the 45-cm communication super highway of nerves delivering instructions from the brain to the body of a fully functioning human being. Quadriplegia results from the breaking of a vertebra followed by the shattered bone slicing through the spinal cord like Jonah's Spear. The brain can then howl all the orders it likes to the hands, arms, feet and legs, like get the fuck up you're drowning in Shit Creek, but it's pointless because the telephone line has been slashed by the reaper's knife. The dead cells are unable to rebirth so once the spinal cord is severed, it can never be repaired or replaced. 'It's possible to break your neck without becoming a quadriplegic — if the bone doesn't cut the spinal cord,' Dubberley says. If this fate should ever befall you, if you ever get this ridiculously lucky when only millimetres separate mild trauma from a full-blown medical Armageddon, get down on your knees and pray in thanks to whoever you think may have been responsible.
Dubberley's saviours were van der Veer and Chrystal.
Quadriplegia is a loss of movement in all four limbs but not, as per the popular misconception, the loss of all function. The C1 is at the top of the neck. The C7 is at the bottom. A slashing of the spinal cord at the C4 or above leads to a lifetime of respirators, 24-hour care, electrical wheelchairs, and in all likelihood, an expedited funeral. Complete quadriplegics, and a smattering of incomplete, including a few of the magnificent bastards to be introduced in these pages, will think they're better off dead. Damage the spinal cord at C3 or above and you won't have to wait long. Dubberley's cord was nicked, bruised, swollen — but not severed. He's incomplete, the right side of his body capable of restricted movement, the left remaining so stunned by the happenings in Shit Creek fifteen years ago that it hasn't moved an inch since. 'It's almost as if I've had a stroke,' he says. 'The hard thing is getting your head around being in a wheelchair because of something that is nothing more than rotten luck,' Dubberley says. 'I went for a walk. That's all I did, go for a walk. Where was the risk in that? People do more stupid things and get away with it every day. Before and after my accident, I've taken more risks and nothing has happened to me. People have lucky escapes every day. All I did was go for a walk with my mates. What bloody risk, you know?'
A stunt motorbike rider in Australia called Robbie Maddison has suffered brain haemorrhages, paralysis, fractured vertebrae, punctured lungs, smashed teeth, seizures, a shoulder torn off the bone and a bottom lip ripped clean off his face. He's had broken legs, toes, ankles, forearms, collarbone and 28 fractured fingers. Maddison says the devil may care. There's no accounting for how he avoids landing in a wheelchair while a twelve-year-old boy goes for a bushwalk and becomes a quadriplegic. 'You know when you go and jump on a motorbike that it can go wrong,' Dubberley says. 'You know you might head-butt the ground and not get up, but that's part of the risk you are obviously willing to take. It's part of the kick you get from making it. That doesn't mean anything bad should happen, because it's not like a motorbike rider deserves to have anything go wrong. But if things do go pear-shaped, at least he knows it was part of the bargain. Going for a walk, it — you know what, it doesn't matter. You can sit and sook and take forever to get over it, or you can never get over it, or you can try to get going again. You just move on.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Murderball by Will Swanton. Copyright © 2009 Will Swanton. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Part I IN THE BEGINNING,1 The Rock,
2 The Game I,
3 Fallen,
4 The Game II,
Part II THE PLAYERS,
5 Ties that bind,
Part III THE SMALL DANCES,
6 So what?,
7 Oceania Championships, Sydney,
8 Super Series, Melbourne,
9 Canada Cup, Vancouver,
Part IV THE BIG DANCE,
10 And on the first day,
11 And on the second day,
12 And on the third day,
13 And on the fourth day,
14 And on the fifth day,
15 And on the sixth day,
16 And on the seventh day,
17 And on the eighth day,
18 And on the ninth day,
19 The end,