Shattered: even tough guys get the blues

Shattered: even tough guys get the blues
GARY TIPPET
October 4, 2009

ON HIS worst days, Terry Keating wakes to the smell of burning flesh. On his best days it's just a triggered memory away, lingering at the back of his consciousness with the pretty girl from 26 years ago.

She's silhouetted in the doorway where he first saw her. Still standing, though God knows how. He takes her to a bench in the courtyard and gently sits her down, but he can't touch her because she is so terribly burnt that her skin comes off in his hands.

Her name is Angela and she says just two words to him, over and over. ''Help me.'' But he can't.

He keeps other memories in there too. A bus full of dead tourists, mutilated by the semi-trailer that sliced down its side; a furious drug dealer swinging around to aim a pistol at his face; suicides; cot-death babies; a riot of refinery workers booting him into oblivion in the beer stink of a pub carpet.

He has constant nightmares and cold sweats and wakes up kicking, screaming, fighting. He lashes out in bed so often his partner, Shirl, turns her face away so she doesn't wake up with a black eye. He dreams of someone shooting at him or of his car crashing. He'll be struggling in his sleep, or running, but he's never been able to get away.

Police, like other emergency workers, don't forget all the really bad things they've seen or experienced: each traumatic episode is like a snapshot stored away deep in some corner of their brain. But Terry Keating's internal photo album overflowed.

Keating was a policeman for 14 years. He was a detective senior constable and worked undercover, CIB and sexual investigations in the western suburbs. He put away pushers, bank robbers and child abusers and was good at it: commended four times and highly commended once. ''I loved The Job, just loved being a copper,'' he says.

But it cost him two marriages and four children; a couple of other relationships; his self-respect; and for a long time - he thought - his mind. And, at his lowest ebb, it almost cost him his life.
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Shattered even tough guys get the blues