Husband Replacement Therapy

by Lette, Kathy

  Soaking up the silent grandeur of the majestic reef, I lost track of time. The turquoise water was so warm I practically grew gills. I felt completely at ease, apart from one moment when a blacktip reef shark took a long look at me, then gave an expression that said ‘I already ate’ and slunk off into the deep.

  When my arms and legs were nearly numb from exertion, I finally bobbed my head up and trod water while clearing the mist from my mask. Gazing up at the blue skies, with their curlicues of clouds, I felt so happy that I should have had my own cloud to walk upon, marked number nine. I realised, with a jolt, that I hadn’t thought of Harry today, not once. And even remembering that I hadn’t remembered him didn’t make me cry.

  A warm breeze rippled across the water. The air itself seemed to waver, the tropical humidity suffusing it with an aqueous opalescence. Blissfully content, I was about to turn back towards the shore when I heard a cry – faint at first, but then a louder ‘Hoy!’ I trod water some more, turning in a semi-circle. Shielding my eyes against the sun’s glare, I finally discerned the outline of a windsurfer on the horizon, and there it was again – an unmistakable cry for help.

  Readjusting my goggles, I swam in strong strokes towards the castaway. After five minutes, I surfaced and lifted my fogged goggles to check my direction. The person lying across the stranded board suddenly came into focus as though a binocular lens had been turned.

  ‘Oh, Jesus. Just when I thought this day couldn’t possibly get any worse,’ the doctor grouched.

  ‘Gosh, it’s just so hard to believe that you’re single,’ I replied, my hair floating about my face like red seaweed. I took in his broken mast. The waterlogged sail blew in and out faintly, like cheeks half-heartedly puffed with air. ‘Not a natural windsurfer, I take it? A case of “persistence beyond the call of talent”, perhaps?’ I touchéd. ‘How did you snap the mast, for god’s sake?’

  ‘I’m not too sure. I just leapt on, the wind went whoosh and next thing I know, I’m headed for Tahiti. I tried to turn the bloody thing around, but I had no idea how and must have yanked too hard because, well . . .’ He gestured to the broken pole.

  ‘You had no idea how? Wait, do you mean you went windsurfing with no instruction?’

  ‘I only popped ashore to buy some indigenous nose flutes, or whatever it is you clichéd tourists do, then, on the spur of the moment, I decided to try windsurfing – a decision possibly influenced by the three daiquiris I downed in quick succession at the beach bar. You see, when I’m not on duty, my philosophy is to get as plastered as possible so that there’s absolutely no chance of my having to save anyone from anything on my day off.’

  ‘And it didn’t cross your mind that, without being able to turn around, you might end up marooned on some volcanic island in the vicinity of Hawaii?’

  ‘I just hope it’s extinct, because you would no doubt take a volcanic eruption as a breach of copyright,’ he retorted.

  ‘Seriously, didn’t you think it might be wise to, I dunno, maybe have a few lessons before you took off into the open ocean?’ I quizzed. ‘You’re always saying the “cubs” on board are so stupid, but clearly you’re the one who should join Densa.’ Oh, I was enjoying this. ‘And while we’re talking about stupidity, why is it that all Aussie blokes are so keen to risk blood loss, broken limbs or waterlogged lungs in your leisure moments?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t anxious about blood loss until now. As I’m drifting further out to sea, I am kinda getting a bit worried about the big fish with fangs below, because my legs are just, you know, dangling here in the water like shark biscuits. I’m a farm boy, don’t forget. Lend me your goggles so I can see what’s down there,’ the doctor demanded.

  I declined his invitation. ‘If you see a shark in the water, you don’t have to worry, mate, because it saw you a long time before you saw it. If it wanted to eat you, you’d be dead already.’

  ‘Oh, that’s so comforting.’

  ‘Well, luckily I’m not a doctor, so saving you is not in my job description at all. I’ll alert the dive centre to come and get you . . . eventually,’ I said, relishing our role reversal. ‘Okay? Bye.’

  I was about to pull on my goggles and stroke back to shore when I noticed his leg. Or, rather, the absence thereof. His left leg was amputated from the knee down. Attached to his stump was an Oscar Pistorius–type blade.

  When he noticed that I’d noticed, his dark eyes glittered but he said nothing. I didn’t know what to say, so I dog-paddled in awkward silence for a moment.

  There was no way I could leave now, despite how annoying I found the man.

  I quickly calculated the distance to shore. It was only about one kilometre. ‘Can you swim? I mean, with your . . .’ I still hadn’t quite worked out how to mention it, and the bastard doc chose not to make it easier. ‘I suggest we just ditch the board and freestyle in together.’

  ‘You seem to be forgetting my whole shark phobia,’ he admitted, glancing apprehensively down into the depths.

  ‘Most creatures are scared of humans. We hurt sharks far more often than they hurt us.’ I’d been around Emerald for long enough to know that. I hauled the top half of my body up onto the board, on the same side as the doctor. ‘Let’s kick the board in to shore,’ I said, and started a frantic cancan in the water.

  The doctor tried his best, but his right leg was much better at displacing water than the blade, so the board began moving in a circular direction.

  I checked our position against the headland. It was then I realised we were in a rip – a current that was dragging us out of the inlet towards the open ocean.

  ‘Look, why don’t I swim to shore and raise the alarm? You just lie on the board and wait. Okay?’

  I shoved on my goggles and slid back into the water. I was freestyling fast towards the shore, diagonally, to cut across the rip, when my eyes focused on the sandy-ribbed bottom of the sea. It looked like pale corduroy. But it also seemed to be moving oddly. At first I thought it was just reflective ripples made by the rogue tide. But with a sickening thud of my heart, I realised that the sand was alive with sea snakes.

  I turned around and snorkelled at breakneck speed back to the broken windsurfer. My legs were kicking so frantically, I must have looked like the horizontal, aquatic version of Riverdance.

  ‘Sea snakes,’ I panted, scrambling aboard, my tangled hair now resembling a writhing mass of what I was avoiding in the water. I hugged my knees to my chest. ‘I hate snakes. They’re bad enough on land, slithering around, swallowing their prey whole. Some snakes can eat something ten times the size of their own heads, did you know that?’

  ‘Sounds like certain cruise passengers,’ the doctor interjected.

  ‘But snakes in the water is just wrong. Plus, they’re so venomous.’

  ‘But surely most creatures are scared of humans. We hurt them much more than they hurt us,’ the doctor contemptuously paraphrased. ‘So, what now, Jacqueline Cousteau?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘The dive boats will be coming back soon from beyond the reef. We’ll just have to wait to be rescued. Jesus. What a misadventure. It’s like being in a bloody Hemingway novel – The Old Man and the Sea.’

  ‘Oh, ha-ha. Middle-aged, at the most.’ The doctor also dragged his whole body up onto the broken windsurfing board and positioned himself cross-legged, facing me. We sat there in uncomfortable silence – the time racing by as though it were only a year or two.

  ‘So, how shall we pass the time? I suppose we could sing the harmony line to “Kum Ba Yah” ad nauseam?’ he suggested.

  ‘Well, as we’re clearly doomed to spend the next god-knows-how-long marooned together, you might as well tell me what . . . I mean, I don’t want to pry . . . Stop me if I’m being rude, but what . . .’

  ‘Happened to my leg? I wondered when you’d ask. Most people just inquire if I have to take my leg off to have sex.’

  ‘And what do you say?’

  ‘“Oh, so that’s what’s meant by a leg-over.”’<
br />
  I smiled and nodded, hoping to encourage him to elaborate.

  ‘Croc attack. The croc was called Hagrid. It was living in the lake out the back of our medical camp in Burkina Faso. I thought we had a rapport but turns out he just saw me as lunch.’

  I looked at his dark, dancing eyes. It was impossible to tell if he was serious or not.

  ‘To be honest, I didn’t lose the leg doing anything heroic at all really. No croc wrestling or saving wounded from war zones . . . I was out jogging. Trod on a landmine. Decades on from the civil war in Angola and it’s still one of the most mine-contaminated countries in the world. That’s one day I should not have put my best foot forward.’

  I drew a shuddering breath. ‘I’m so sorry. That’s horrific.’

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve been a bit of a prick,’ he admitted after a beat. ‘And you were right. I really was hoping you’d report me. I cannot wait for my cruise contract to end.’

  ‘Will you go back to Doctors Without Borders?’

  I saw his shoulders slacken. ‘I wish I could go back to my old job, but the truth is, I left under a bit of a cloud.’

  ‘The tweet about the clitoris having eight thousand nerve endings and still not being as sensitive as a white man on the internet that, um, rubbed your boss up the wrong way?’ I laughed.

  ‘No. Truth is, I found out I was operating on a man who’d raped about ten women, and, well, I “accidentally” genitally mutilated him.’

  My mouth opened and closed like a puppet whose ventriloquist had laryngitis, while I tried to think of something to say. ‘Um, I think that’s a little more than “leaving under a cloud”. It’s more like leaving under a cyclonic typhoon and possible asteroid onslaught. What were you thinking?’

  ‘What I was thinking is that the food crisis that’s gripping parts of southern Ethiopia is all because of ethnic violence – violence that has driven nearly a million people from their homes. Doctors Without Borders treated more than two hundred children in two weeks for severe malnutrition. The grim freight of human suffering I’ve seen – well, it’s scarred my retinas, and maybe my psyche a little bit,’ he confessed.

  His eyes caught and held mine. My irises are the palest blue possible, but the doctor’s molten chocolate orbs got even darker as his story deepened.

  ‘And, of course, rape is a weapon of war . . . and this cocksure dipshit was bragging about his many “conquests”. I was draining his acute perineal abscess, STD-related, and performing a circumcision due to multiple infections. It was only supposed to be a little dice and splice, but – well, I was so war-weary and shell-shocked, I couldn’t even really remember which end of the syringe went into the patient. And oops, what a shame! My scalpel slipped . . . which meant I took off more than the tip, leaving a bit of a stump.’

  I was appalled and intrigued in equal measure. ‘Well, one thing’s become clear. Now I know why you doctors wear those little green masks – so that nobody will recognise you when you’re out of the operating room. So, what happened?’

  ‘The official line was that it was an accident. But then I got ratted out to my supervisor by my girlfriend, who didn’t quite appreciate the irony of genitally mutilating a rapist, apparently. And so, here I am.’ He let out a sharp, contemptuous bark of a laugh. ‘At least it taught me to never trust a woman again.’

  ‘Well, maybe not a millennial who takes photos of her food to post online. And hey, big news – life lets you down. You’re not the only one. It’s like when I got my first period and didn’t immediately want to waterski or play tennis in a white miniskirt. That’s when I realised that existence was not going to live up to my expectations. The world is clearly a deranged place, and humans are lurching to the right while the planet implodes environmentally. We’re all going to hell. All you can do is try to behave a little stylishly en route.’

  ‘Stylishly? In that outfit?’

  ‘Hey, at least I won’t get sunburnt and have to go and see the ship’s doctor, who’s a complete bastard, by all accounts.’

  The start of a grin began to tug at his mouth. ‘So, what about marriage?’

  ‘Well, that’s an interesting offer, as I’ve only known you for about five minutes,’ I replied, cheekily.

  ‘Ha-ha. No, I mean, was I right? Are you unhappily married?’

  Disarmed by the sun and our precarious situation, I let my guard down for a moment. ‘Well, if you really want to know, my husband of twenty-eight years recently flunked the practical exam for his marriage licence. I told him to do something to himself that only an incredibly athletic person could ever do, then booked a cruise and buggered off.’ I sighed.

  ‘Ah . . . hence the sheet burn on the nose, I suppose.’

  ‘Doctor–patient confidentiality?’ After he nodded, I continued in a small voice, ‘I wasn’t very accurate on the old truth-ometer about that one-night stand I had. It was actually a total disaster. He lost all interest. I think it was the shock of seeing pubic hair,’ I blurted.

  ‘What? Really?’ The doctor laughed. ‘Well, speaking as an old bushranger, I can’t help but feel sorry for a young man who can’t cope with a stroll in the long grass. The poor buggers have been brought up on porn, where everyone’s shorn. However, I must confess to being slightly jealous of him, whether or not he got lost in the jungle.’

  I didn’t look in the direction of the doctor but I felt his gaze brush warmly across my face and smiled, despite myself. ‘What’s your name? If one of us is going to have to eat the other to survive, we might as well be on a first-name basis, don’t you think?’

  ‘Brody. Brody Quinn.’

  ‘Ruby Ryan. But you already know that. I’m no doubt filed at the medical centre under “most annoying patient”. Or “status dramaticus”.’

  And then he really smiled. It was a slow, genial glow that started in his eyes and pulled at his lips until his face was wreathed in radiant delight. I almost gasped at the sudden and spontaneous warmth of it.

  Marooned on our paddleboard, awaiting rescue, I ascertained certain things about the ship’s doctor. Firstly, that he wasn’t as awful as I’d first thought. And secondly, that he was incredibly sexy, even without a full complement of limbs.

  Drifting in the sea, we had nothing to do but talk. In a nutshell, this is what I gleaned. Brody’s daredevil father had taught him to ride horses and motorbikes, fly planes and to parachute. In his teens he’d ridden with a camel train across a desert. ‘A big desert,’ Brody said, reminding me that Queensland is nearly eight times the size of Great Britain. ‘The correct answer to “Are we there yet?” was generally “No,”’ he explained.

  He’d eaten snakes, once used the corpse of a sheep as a sleeping bag, and rowed, naked, in a bathtub down the Brisbane river to raise money for his friend’s kid who had cancer. He spoke Indonesian and Portuguese. He had a black belt in karate. He’d survived an attack from a cassowary, which he said looked like an unusually stupid emu wearing a party hat but was actually one of the world’s most dangerous birds. Growing up in Queensland, he’d got good at dodging crocodiles, too . . . although he was more concerned about crocodiles in uniform, dictating to civilians in war-torn climes.

  While we talked, he didn’t do the usual self-obsessed male monologue. He also asked me questions – perspicacious, sensitive questions, about my life, my childhood, my passions. After an hour or so, with cramp setting in, the doctor readjusted his sitting position. As he balanced himself, his hand brushed my flank, giving me an instant jolt of pleasure. My nipples tingled without permission, and I coughed to cover my embarrassment. Brody patted my back gently, and this time not only did my nipples tingle insubordinately but there was also a bit of a cooee from my nether regions. An involuntary shiver shimmied up my thighs and said hello to those eight thousand nerve endings.

  Stop it! I ordered my loins. You know how this turned out last time – mortal humiliation and the inability to walk past the ping-pong table in case Wayve has given his mates a detailed description
of his trek through your Amazonian rainforest.

  But it felt as though we had enough electricity between us to power the broken windsurfer not just back to the beach but on a record-breaking, round-the-world trip. Brody gave me a look that only just fell short of igniting my hair, and I felt myself moving towards his mouth. ‘Wait.’ I stopped abruptly. ‘What about the breach of doctor–patient ethics?’ I gulped.

  ‘As we’re going to drown at sea, does it really matter?’ he said, smiling roguishly.

  He moved towards me this time, but the board tilted and rocked, and we both nearly slid into the sea. And so, balanced on our board, we just sat and gazed at each other, holding hands. We gazed for so long and with such absorption that neither of us noticed that the tide had turned. It was bird song that alerted us to the fact that we’d drifted free of the riptide and were now floating towards the shore. A breeze scented with cinnamon and nutmeg tickled my face. From the trees came the most exotic chorus – birds carolling, frogs baritoning and insects percussing in a hot hum of happy greeting.

  We dragged the board up under the trees then walked along a dappled track. The jungly hills quickly gave way to a fringe of civilisation. The doctor moved at a saunter, carrying himself casually, even languidly, despite the leg blade. He hailed a battered rust bucket driving down the road and paid some locals to take us back to the jetty.

  I retrieved my stashed beach bag from behind the granite boulder, peeled off my wet board shorts and rashie, and slipped a shift over my swimming costume. Brody, meanwhile, explained to the water sports staff where to find his broken windsurfer, palming them a tip.

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ I asked him, fizzing coquettishly as we walked towards the tender. Coquettish fizzing? Really? At my age? Who was I? Pussy Galore?

  ‘Working, sadly.’

  ‘Oh, well, in that case, I think I’m going to be feeling quite sick in the morning.’

  ‘Ah, yes, and what ailment do you think you’ll be contracting between now and then?’ he asked with a cheeky grin.