it was about 1 by the time we got back home. that’s a.m. i put the kid to bed, which took about half an hour all up, from the wiping of vomit from her lips, and the cutting of hospital bracelets from her wrist and ankle. i was hungry, then, and ploughed through two, then three, then four slices of vegemite on rye. and then as an afterthought, a yoghurt popsicle.

around 9pm, in the waiting room outside the operating theatre, i’d made a cup of black tea from one of two teabags left in the communal trough, and rationed out the two green tea caramels from the bottom of my backpack. and before that? well, i’d been lucky enough to have a delicious brunch of justin north’s best salad nicoise (and tea and pudding after) at the alliance francaise. a little before two.

when i picked the kid up from school, she spent a good twenty minutes playing chaseys around the preschool playground with her new chasing-tickling buddy, and then a good three minutes skipping merrily on the concrete stepping stones over in the main school yard. and then there she was, slumped over a mis-stepped stone, screaming. these things happen often enough, but when i turned her right way up, her face was awash with blood, and there was a cut, a gash, a hole that seemed to go in a distance, just above her right brow.

“blood,” she cried. “blood. i can see blood.”

i reached past her, into her schoolbag. chose in a split second the green stripy hoodie over the pink one. pressed it to her head. there was a lot of blood, but the bleeding stopped quickly.

here’s the weird, spooky, lucky thing. the careflight demo helicopter had been at the school that day, and they were just finishing up their last session. the paramedic ran over with her bag of dressings, and in three minutes had doused a gauzy pad in saline, wrapped the kid’s broken head in a length of bandage, and directed us to the most appropriate hospital. the careflight demo helicopter, you see, has neither propeller nor tail. i called my cousin, who recently moved into the next suburb, and took her up on a previous offer of a ride when i needed one. in the time it took us to walk home and retrieve medicare card and coriander cat, she was at our door.

the kid’s head is in my lap, in the car. she is stretched out across the back seat. she is adamant that no one will be sewing her up, mostly, i think, the bitter memory of watching “coraline” some weeks back. and sometimes her eyes shut, and i make inane chatter as we zoom up anzac parade just so she will respond.

after ten minutes at triage, we are sent to an inner sanctum, labelled — somewhat reassuringly — ‘fast track waiting room’, where we wait for a doctor who is all lighthearted until she undoes the bandage. silence. a quick inhalation. the hole in the kid’s head is beyond the spectrum of ER. we wait then, in the fast track waiting room, for a plastic surgeon to come and see us.

then the waiting, and waiting, and around five, the plastic surgeon tells us that eight o’clock is when we could be scheduled for stitches; the procedure will need to be performed under general anaesthetic, and the kid must not have eaten anything for the preceding six hours. we wait, mostly cheery and chirpy, unless anyone mentions the word “stitch”.

and eventually, the kid is suited up in the children’s hospital’s best puss-in-boots print gown, and given a shiny pink sticker, and a brisk walking tour though the labyrinth of corridors, and fitted with a tiny rubber mask, and made to breathe, slowly. and her eyes roll back, and shut, as she struggles against the sleep. and i am dispatched to the waiting room, with her black cat and her pink sandles, to two teabags in a communal trough.

but it only takes a little more than half an hour, to sew stitches in three layers of tissue. the doctor comes by to say that the cut didn’t go all the way to the bone, as he had expected, and only the muscle and two layers of skin had to be repaired.

when i finally get to see her, she is extremely surprised that they sewed her up after all. “but i didn’t feel it!” she says, eyes wide in wonder, and then she asks for apple juice. later, in the ward, she scores a lemonade icy pole and a jam sandwich, and chats, snug in warm blankets, about how it is way past her bedtime. and some hours later, when the nurse is happy, we are released into the dark and silent hospital corridors. we pad silently across the shiny floors, just us in the world, but for someone’s dad sitting alone in the pale light of an internet terminal. my good cousin drives across town to take us home, and only stops once for the kid to vomit up her paltry dinner.

eyes open or shut, i see the gaping wound. i saw it, right after it opened, and then every time the bandage was unwrapped while assessments were made. i may see it for some time yet, although a day later, the horror has lessened. in the early hours, when the house was quiet, i had four slices of vegemite toast, and watched an episode of “buffy the vampire slayer”, so that i could go to sleep.