‘R-right,’ Squid said in a voice that told Ginny he wasn’t quite as brave as he was pretending to be. He really was a very old man. He would have been scared.
She put a hand on his shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. ‘This’ll take no more than five minutes,’ she told him. She’d checked his vital signs. She’d checked his pupils, his reactions. His bump on the head seemed to be just that, a bump on the head. ‘You won’t move, will you?’
‘Not if you promise to keep looking after me,’ Squid said, recovering, and Ginny smiled.
‘I promise.’
‘Then off you go, Brian, and let the lady photograph you,’ Squid decreed. ‘She’s some lady, isn’t she, Doc?
‘I... Yes,’ Ben said.
‘Good call,’ Squid said. ‘I think I’m about to make another prediction. You want to hear it?’
‘No,’ Ginny and Ben said together, too fast, and they wheeled Brian out of the door towards X-Ray before Squid could say another word.
* * *
The X-ray took effort on both their parts. They were both needed to do the roll transfer that was part of their training. From there the X-ray went smoothly, confirming a greenstick fracture.
‘I’ll put a simple splint on it tonight,’ Ben told Brian. ‘We’ll check it again tomorrow—it’ll need a full cast but we’ll wait until the swelling goes down.’
‘Good luck,’ Ginny said. Because she was feeling more and more like an islander, she gave the burly farmer a hug, then headed back to attend to Squid.
He was curled on his side, his back to the door.
‘Sorry I’ve been so long,’ she said cheerfully, and crossed the six steps to the examination couch.
But by the third step she knew something was amiss. Dreadfully amiss.
The stillness was wrong. She’d seen this.
Breathing was sometimes imperceptible but when it wasn’t present, you knew.
She knew.
‘Ben,’ she called, in the tone she’d been taught long ago as a medical student. It was a tone that said, I don’t intend to frighten any other patient but I want you here fast. Now.
She put a hand on Squid’s leathery neck as she called, her fingers desperately searching for a pulse.
There wasn’t one.
* * *
Ben was with her almost instantaneously, the door closed firmly between them and Brian.
They were alone in the room. Ben and Ginny and Squid.
Or Ben and Ginny.
‘Oh, God, I shouldn’t have left him.’ Ginny was hauling the equipment trolley from the side of the room, fumbling for patches. No pulse... She didn’t even have monitors set up. No IV lines. She hauled Squid’s shirt open, ripping buttons.
She was barely aware that Ben was with her. Where was the laryngosope? She needed an endotracheal tube.
Panic was receding as technical need took over, and the knowledge that everything she needed was in reach. She put the patches on with lightning speed...
And Ben grabbed her hands.
‘No,’ he said.
What the...? She hauled back, confused. They had so little time before brain damage was irreversible. Did he want monitors? Proof? ‘Ben, there’s nothing—’
‘Exactly,’ he said, and his hands held hers in a grip that brooked no opposition. ‘And that’s the way he’d want it.’
‘What do you mean? He’s healthy. He was sitting up. It’s only a bump on the head. Let me go!’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Leave it.’ And he held her for longer, while Squid’s body settled more firmly into that awful stillness, while the time for recovery, for miracles, passed them by.
‘Let me go.’ She could hardly make herself coherent. ‘Are you mad?’
‘I’m not mad. Squid’s ninety-seven, Ginny,’ Ben said, and his voice was implacable. ‘He’s left clear instructions. You think he’d thank us for trying to resuscitate him?’
‘He’s well. It’s just the shock.’ She was still struggling but it was already too late. There’d been such a tiny window of opportunity. That Ben could stand there and stop her... That Ben could do nothing...
‘He’s your friend,’ she hurled at him, and it was an accusation.
It was also true.
True for her as well?
When they’d been kids Squid had taught them to fish for flounder, to jag for the squid he’d taken his name from. He’d also shared the eternal supply of aniseed balls he’d always carried in his back pocket.
He was almost a part of the island itself. For Ginny... The thought that this was the end...
She gave one last despairing wrench and finally Ben set her free. But even as he did so, she knew it was too late. She knew it. She felt cold fury wash through her that she hadn’t been allowed to fight. She wanted to hit out, hit something. Hit Ben?
‘You know about medical DNRs,’ Ben said, watching her, calmly questioning. Do Not Resuscitate. ‘Squid signed one years ago.’
‘But they’re for people who have no chance,’ she managed, thinking of a counsellor handing a form to James, ‘Do Not Resuscitate’, and James screwing it into a ball and hurling it back.
‘That’s for people whose life is worthless. I don’t need it, dammit.’
Her father had acted the same way. He’d had three coronary occlusions, a cardiac arrest, pacemaker fitted, defibrillator, there was nothing more to be done, yet he’d never have dreamed of signing a form that said ‘Do Not Resuscitate’.
‘Do not go gently into that good night.’ Dylan Thomas’s words had been her father and James’s mantra, drilled into her with fury.
That anger was with her now. Not to be permitted to fight...
This was why she’d walked away from medicine, because she couldn’t win. Because she wasn’t good enough to win. To make a conscious decision not to win seemed appalling.
‘Ginny, Squid is ninety-seven years old,’ Ben said again, placing strong hands on her rigid shoulders. He must feel her anger but he was overriding it. ‘He might look as if he’s weathered to age for ever, but he’s been failing for a long time. He has arthritis in almost every joint. He can’t do the fishing he loves, and he’s been getting closer and closer to needing nursing-home care. Add to that, from the moment the earth shook his face has been one vast smile. He was right, we were wrong. You don’t think that’s a good note to go out on?’
But how could death be a good note? ‘We could have...’
‘We could have for what, Ginny?’ Ben said, still in that gentle yet forceful voice that said he saw things behind her distress and her anger. Things she didn’t necessarily want him to see.
‘You have to fight.’ She could hardly speak. So many emotions were crowding in. James’s words, flooding back...
You stupid cow, get the medication right, you know I need more. Damn what the oncologist says, give me more now!
‘No,’ Ben was saying. ‘If we pulled Squid back now, what then? You know cardiac arrest knocks blood flow to the brain. You know the really old struggle to re-establish neural pathways. Ginny, he’s left us at the moment of his greatest triumph and I for one wouldn’t ask for anything better for such a grand old man.’
Anger was through and through her, but behind it was a fatigue that was almost overwhelming. It was like all the emotions that had built within her from the moment of James’s death were here in this room, the armour she’d tried to place around herself shattering into a thousand pieces.
‘I fight the battles I want to win,’ Ben said. ‘I wouldn’t want to win this one.’
‘You didn’t want him to live?’
‘I want everyone to live,’ he said evenly, refusing to rise to the emotion she was hurling at him. ‘But at ninety-seven I know where to stop. Ginny...’
�
��Don’t Ginny me,’ she whispered, and he touched her face, to give pause to the hysteria she was so close to. She flinched and he stopped dead.
‘Is that what happened?’ he said. ‘Did James hit you because you couldn’t save his life?’
There was a moment’s deathly silence. Okay, more than a moment, Ginny conceded. There was a whole string of moments, packed together, one after the other, leading to a place where she was terrified to go.
‘No,’ she said finally in a dead, cold voice, a voice she scarcely recognised as her own. She glanced at Squid, at the peace on the old man’s face, and she knew Ben was right. She knew it. She had no reason to be angry with him.
There was a time to die and that Squid had died at his moment of greatest triumph... A consummation devoutly to be wished?
Maybe, but that was the problem, she thought. James and her father had seen death as defeat. It was why, afterwards, she’d walked away from medicine. To see death, time and time again...
‘No,’ she said, and then decided it was time to be honest. ‘Okay, once. Towards the end. Don’t think of me as a battered wife, though, Ben. I was no doormat. Yes, I put up with abuse when he was dying, but he was dying. The one time he slapped me I walked away for a week. Then I had a call from the hospital saying he’d had a bleed. I had no choice but to go back. James lashed out because I was living and he wasn’t. There was nothing I could do but put up with it until it was done.’
He did touch her then, a feather touch on her cheek. ‘You should never have put up with it. Dying gives no one the right to abuse another. That someone could hit you...’
‘It’s okay.’
‘It’s never okay.’
‘Yet you say Squid’s death is okay.’
‘You equate death with violence? It’s not the same thing, Ginny, and you know it. Not a peaceful, timely death at the end of a life well lived.’
There was another of those silences. The searchers had ceased for the night, ready to start again at daybreak. The stream of incoming patients had ended.
‘Is this why you took Button?’ Ben asked finally, heavily. ‘Because you felt obligated? Like you felt obligated to return to James?’
‘No.’ She shook her head fiercely at that. ‘No way. Do you really think of me as a wimp?’
‘No, but—’
‘I did go back to James because he was dying and there was no one else to care,’ she said. ‘But Button’s no obligation. The way I see it, Button’s the one true thing that’s come out of this. Veronica and James can betray all they like, but to hurt Button... I’ll love her and we’ll make a new life for ourselves, without their shadows.’
‘Good for you,’ Ben said, a trifle unsteadily, and then he touched her face again. ‘And this time you didn’t even flinch. You’re some woman, Ginny Koestrel.’ He hesitated, glancing down at Squid.
‘I’ll organise this,’ he told her. There’d be paperwork, formalities for Squid that had to be done and they had to be done now. Medical imperatives had to take over. ‘You fix Brian’s splint and then we need bed. We’re both exhausted. Too much emotion. Too much work. Too much...everything.’ His hands were on her shoulders again, but there was no force, only warmth and reassurance and friendship.
And something more?
‘I...I do need to find Button,’ she managed.
‘Mum and Hanna have Button safe. They won’t thank you for waking them, and you know they’ll contact you in a heartbeat if Button needs you. My apartment’s here. Stop fighting the world, Ginny. Squid’s stopped fighting. It’s time you stopped, too.’
* * *
It was four-thirty when Ben finally led Ginny into his apartment at the rear of the hospital. She was so tired she could barely stand. She should sleep in the search and rescue tents, she thought, or in the refuge centre or...or...
Or stop fighting. Stop thinking she had to fight.
‘Bed,’ Ben said. ‘The bathroom’s through that door. You want pyjamas, there’re spares in the bureau, bottom drawer. They’ll be big on you but they’ll be comfy. There’s a spare toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet.’
‘You’re ready for anything,’ she murmured.
‘I’m ready for any of my eleven siblings to land on my doorstep any time,’ he said dryly. ‘You try having brothers and sisters on an island as small as Kaimotu. Ben, Mum’ll have a fit if she sees me like this. Ben, I just need a bit of quiet. Ben, no one at home understands me. This place doubles as the McMahon refuge centre.’
‘You have lucky brothers and sisters,’ she said wearily, and looked at the nice, big sofa in the sitting room. ‘This’ll do me nicely, as I suspect it does your siblings. Thank you, Ben. Goodnight.’
‘You’re using the bed.’
‘I’m not taking your bed. There’s no need. The way I feel, I’d sleep on stones.’
‘Me, too,’ he said, and then there was silence. A long silence.
Exhausted or not, things were changing. Twisting. It was like a void was opening, a siren was calling them in.
‘I don’t suppose,’ Ben said, oh, so casually, ‘that you’d like to share.’
‘Ben...’
‘No, okay, not an option,’ he said hastily. ‘I’d never sleep with a woman who expects a raised hand to be followed by a slap.’
‘I know it wouldn’t,’ she said, astounded. ‘I know it never would be.’
‘And I’d never sleep with a woman who thought I might blame her for things that go wrong.’
That was a bigger statement. It was a statement to take her breath away.
Not all men were like James or like her father, the statement said.
Ben was her friend.
But Ben was standing in front of her now and she knew he was asking to be much more.
Sharing a bed...
More even than that.
‘We do need to sleep,’ she said uncertainly, but more was right in front of her, a huge, overwhelming impossibility that suddenly seemed possible.
To take a moment that had happened all those years ago—and take it forward?
Ben’s hands were on her shoulders again—she was starting to get used to it. She was starting to get used to the feel of him. To the comfort of him. To security and to caring.
To love?
How could she possibly think that? How could she possibly fall in love again?
But right now fatigue was taking the edges off fear and caution and the knowledge that love could haul your life out of control and spin it into a crazy vortex of darkness. Right now there was only Ben, gently propelling her into his bedroom.
He proposed to sleep out here. Alone. Well, why not? He’d asked to share and she’d reacted with fear. The moment she had, he’d backed away.
He’d never push. He respected her.
Did she want respect?
The feel of his hands...
The knowledge that his body was right here, right now...
The fact that this was Ben...
Things were twisting, changing. She was feeling like a caterpillar cocooned in her impenetrable skin, only suddenly the skin was bursting.
She wasn’t sure what was inside.
She wasn’t sure, but Ben was here, now. Her lovely Ben.
No matter what this night had held, no matter about her armour, no matter about all her vows, this man was a huge imperative overriding all else.
Instead of allowing him to twist her away, to propel her away, she twisted back, so she stood within his hold, so close she could feel his breath, so close she could feel his heartbeat.
‘Ben,’ she said, and she looked up at him and he looked down at her and she knew she didn’t have to say a word. Everything that had to be said had been said.
‘You know I love you,’ he said, and the
world held its breath.
Love?
‘I always have,’ he said conversationally. ‘I may not always have been faithful...’
‘Not? When I’d imagined you pining for years and years?’ Somehow she managed to sound shocked, and somehow, amazingly, there was laughter in the room.
‘No, but when you smacked Robbie Cartwright over the head with a wet chaff bag because he’d spilled my tadpoles and then went down on your hands and knees and scoured the mud until every last tadpole was saved...I fell in love with you then. Yes, Ginny Koestrel, there have been other women, as there have been other men for you, but our love was forged when we were eight years old and it seems it’s there for life.’
‘Ben...’
‘And I’m not teasing,’ he said softly, laughter fading. ‘I have no idea why this emotion has surfaced again after all these years but it has, and if you’d care to share my bed...’
‘But in the morning...’
‘Can we worry about the morning in the morning?’ he asked. ‘Ginny, this is just for here, for now. It’s been one hell of a day. Say no now and we’ll sleep apart, but...’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m saying yes.’
There was a moment’s loaded pause. Maybe more than a moment. She looked up at him and he was so...solid. Here.
This man had been her friend for life. She’d walked away from him for all sorts of reasons, some of them right, some of them wrong, but now, for this night, he was offering her love and warmth and desire.
Love...
This wasn’t a going-down-on-bended-knee love, she thought. This was a love born of friendship. She knew, she just knew, that taking what Ben was offering would never be used to hurt her, to hold her, to commit.
He wanted her in his bed now, in his arms, and there was no place she’d rather be.
‘It’s nearly five,’ she whispered. ‘We need to sleep.’
‘So we do,’ he said.
‘So you’d best make love to me now,’ she said, ‘because there’s no way I can sleep without it—except with drugs, and I don’t hold with drugs when there’s a very sensible alternative.’
MIRACLE ON KAIMOTU ISLAND/ALWAYS THE HERO Page 11
