by Lilian Darcy
To Joe’s ears it sounded sweet, seductive…naïve. It sounded like a siren song whose hypnotic influence he had to fight or it would weaken him and drag him under.
‘I don’t want this,’ he said. He tried not to sound harsh, but knew he had to sound firm. ‘You don’t know what you’re offering. Christina, it doesn’t work, that whole idea of a problem shared being a problem halved. Not when it’s stuff like this.’
‘So you’re the only one who gets to be a hero. Boy, you have tickets on yourself, don’t you?’
‘It’s not like that. Your involvement would only compound the pressure. And I’ve got enough pressure. That’s exactly what I’ve loved about being here, being with you. So much less pressure.’
She paced around the garden some more, still angry and agitated. Her breathing came in little gasps and he knew it was because of the battle inside her between yelling and crying. In the end, she did both.
‘Go! Just go, OK? If you’re going to keep talking like this, I don’t want to hear it. I never thought I could be this angry with you. I—I can’t even talk about it any more.’
He looked at her and saw that she meant it. And she was right, of course. He’d said what he had to say, what she deserved to hear—the basic explanation. Now he needed to leave her alone to digest it, and to come around to his point of view.
Love wasn’t enough, if what two people needed from each other was so totally different, and in such conflict. It wasn’t enough if one of them was only going to drag the other one down. He should never have said the L word, because for her it meant a future, and for him it didn’t.
He just didn’t have the space.
Todd had driven to the gate to pick him up, as he’d promised to do.
Promise? It had been more like a threat.
‘Take your days off, then, dag-face, but if you’re not back on this spot by five o’clock Tuesday afternoon, I’m not waiting.’
Jack had dropped from the cab of the truck that had given him his last lift at four forty-five. His watch read six-ten as Todd’s ute scrabbled to a halt in the dirt on the far side of the gate.
‘Hungover?’ was Todd’s cheerful greeting. He’d wound his window down but hadn’t bothered to get out of the car.
‘Head’s splitting,’ Jack answered on a drawl.
Of course it wasn’t true. He never wasted too much honesty on Todd. Digger wasn’t so bad. The kind of bloke who respected you if you earned it. Todd didn’t have enough discrimination to respect anyone.
‘Come on, fathead, climb over,’ he said.
‘I want my back pay first.’
Todd laughed. ‘What, you think I carry that kind of cash around with me?’
‘I know you do.’He pointed at the back of the ute. ‘It’s taped to the side of the tyre well, right there.’ In a plastic packet, and the tape was that strong cloth kind. It was a pretty obvious hiding place.
Todd’s eyes narrowed, but he recovered quickly. ‘And where are you going to keep it?’ he jeered.
‘Lend me the tape and I’ll find somewhere.’ Against his own chest, probably.
‘Half. You can have half. Gesture of good faith.’
Jack nodded. He hadn’t expected more. To be honest, he hadn’t known what he’d do, what his next move would be, if Todd called his bluff and refused to give him anything, but apparently the man needed him enough that he had some leverage now.
Gotta strategise a bit more in future, Jack, he told himself.
Todd was going to shift his stash, for a start, so Jack would need to learn the new hiding place as soon as he could, or the first half of his back pay might be all he’d ever get. And he should listen to his instincts and think a bit more about what was going on here. Why did Todd carry so much in cash anyhow? And those reports he came back with from ‘the boss’—they were inconsistent sometimes.
The trip down south, even though Jack hadn’t got where he wanted to go, seen who he wanted to see, had cleared his head, hardened his spirit. The night he’d spent, two days ago, dossed down on some damp shrubs behind the bus shelter at the hospital, he’d barely slept but he’d thought a lot, watching the patterns of bright and dark through the hospital windows.
It hadn’t been a waste of time, as he’d thought at first. It had fortified him somehow, and when he’d set off again, walking north beside the highway just before dawn, he’d felt as if he was carrying something new and good inside him. Pining and mooning and dreaming didn’t do you any good. You had to plan, and you had to take action.
She had seen something in him that no one else ever had.
She’d told him he was strong and smart.
Time to start proving it.
On Wednesday, Christina had the day off.
She knew it would be tough. Sleeping in until nine-thirty had been a stupid strategy of denial. Now she just felt thick-headed and sluggish, only getting to breakfast at a quarter past ten. On top of it all, she felt nauseous, and two pieces of buttered toast with Vegemite didn’t do enough to settle the feeling.
Yesterday, she and Glenn and Grace had done another clinic flight, one of their regular island hops. It was like a different world. Ocean instead of desert. Tourists irritated that illness had disrupted their expensive break, instead of locals trying to get on with their normal lives. The cases had all been pretty routine, no drama, no patients to bring in to the ED. She hadn’t set eyes on Joe at all.
She’d arrived home before dark, but the empty house hadn’t felt any better in daylight than it did at night. She’d co-opted a couple of people into going for a drink at the Black Cockatoo, but then she’d only had a single lemon squash and left after less than an hour. The smell of beer had made her feel ill, and the noise of the other drinkers had jarred.
She knew she’d have to advertise for a new occupant for Joe’s empty room very soon, because she would fall into too many bad habits if she stayed on her own.
Not eating right, for example.
Those plates of congealed scrambled egg had just got chucked in the bin on Monday night, and she’d had an evening meal of tea and chocolate biscuits instead.
She wouldn’t look after herself unless she had someone here to shame her into it, she knew that. What she really needed was someone she could look after, someone to give her the incentive to have salad ingredients and vegetables, cheese and cold sandwich meat in the fridge, decent bread in the pantry, a bathroom she cleaned twice a week, someone she wouldn’t want to appear in her pyjamas in front of at noon on a Saturday.
Megan Cooper.
Megan and her baby.
The idea came to her as if a voice had spoken it in her ear, and her brain was slow to catch up.
Could it work? Would Megan be interested?
She was almost ready for discharge. She was only still there because she hadn’t got the feeding thing sorted out, and because the family situation was complicated. Jackson would need a little longer, and Megan would probably spend most of her time at the hospital by his side even once she was no longer officially a patient herself, but it would help her to have a place she could come to just to crash occasionally, do laundry, eat a home-cooked meal.
‘I’m going to ask,’ she decided, speaking out loud to her coffee-cup. It was a poor substitute for the conversation partner she really wanted in her kitchen right now.
Don’t go down that path, Christina.
Stay practical.
What else did she need to consider?
Rent? She wouldn’t charge anything. Or not until Megan was well and truly on her feet anyhow, and then only for the sake of the girl’s pride.
Joe had insisted on paying for his room for the first few months, two years ago, but it had been obvious that he had been trying to save every possible cent that he earned here. Christina had seized on a couple of leaky taps as an opportunity as soon as she’d realised.
‘I’m hopeless at that stuff, Joe, and I’m not interested in learning. I’ll call a plumber…or if you have t
he skills, could you do it? Could we make it in lieu of rent, that you’ll tackle those jobs that come up from time to time?’
He’d agreed, and she hadn’t had a leaky tap, a loose board on the veranda, a wayward lawn, a sticky door or a blown light bulb since.
Why did all her thought tracks come back to Joe?
She made a growling noise, put her coffee-cup on the draining-board and focused again.
Rent. The issue of rent. Megan might not be able to barter her rent with practical skills. She’d been raised on a farm, but she was young and not ready for motherhood and she had a fragile baby to take care of. But it would be great to have the two of them in the house. Especially great to have a baby…
Tick, tick, tick. Biological clock. No father in sight.
Christina Farrelly!
It was all arranged about Megan and the baby by the end of the afternoon.
‘And I’ve put a box in the staff tea-room, Christina,’ Jill Shaw told her, in her office. ‘For donations of clothing and personal items for Megan and Honey and the baby. Honey had nothing when she flew in with you.’
‘That’s right, only her handbag.’
‘She’s bought some underwear in town, but we all know that money is tight for that family so she doesn’t want to invest in a whole new wardrobe.’
‘That’s thoughtful of you, Jill,’ Christina said.
‘Yes, well. Some kinds of needs are obvious and easy to meet.’
Charles appeared in the doorway, having done his usual magic trick with the silent wheelchair. He was pretty magic at catching up on a conversation halfway through, too. ‘We’re talking about the box for the Coopers?’ he asked.
‘Yes, Dr Wetherby, I hope you approve.’
‘Don’t approve of the Dr Wetherby bit, Jill,’ he said with a grin, ‘but the rest of it’s fine. There are three packets of nappies in there already, I noticed.’
‘Oh, wonderful!’ Christina answered. ‘We’re going to have to empty it three times a day.’
‘I thought of that. It’s a big box,’ Jill retorted.
And finally she smiled.
Christina caught Charles’s lingering look of approval at the change in Jill’s face, and wondered about it. First Brian clucking over their director of nursing, now Charles. Prickly Jill had been a little softer lately. She was getting over her bad marriage, and her divorce. What might happen next? Brian and Jill? And what about Charles? Had he ever thought of marriage?
She couldn’t wonder about it for long, because Charles had something to tell her.
‘I’ve spoken to Glenn. I’m hitching a ride with you tomorrow.’
‘On the clinic run? Springing a performance evaluation on us?’
‘Do you think you need one?’
‘Not urgently!’ She grinned, and got the same approving look that he’d given to Jill.
He cares about all of us, that’s all it is, she decided. Cares about his hospital and his staff. Brian’s free to give Jill a shoulder to cry on, and my dinner with him tomorrow is nothing more than filling in time. There’s no mess…
Except the one between her and Joe.
No one could help her with that.
‘Well, you’re safe from inspection for the moment anyhow. I’m taking a day off,’ Charles said. He frowned suddenly. ‘You and Glenn and Grace are heading into the Gulf country, but you’re going to take a detour first and drop me at Wetherby Downs.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘HOW did it go today, Christina?’ Charles asked as they climbed into the air, away from Wetherby Downs.
For once, his mind didn’t seem fully focused where his mouth was, Christina thought. He had asked the question absently, his gaze straying back to the arid view from the aircraft window before he’d even heard her answer.
‘Pretty routine,’ she told him through their headsets. The twin engines droned on. ‘Although I took a few bloods and tissue samples. We might have some follow-up, bringing a couple of people in for treatment.’
‘Mmm,’ he answered, still looking at the ground below. ‘Lord, it’s dry! I could see it on the way out this morning, the perceptible shading off of the green into brown as soon as we were over the mountains.’
Christina looked at the land below. It spread out like a map, the detail of the terrain clear but flattened by their increasing altitude. She saw cattle moving toward a wide, tree-lined loop of creek, and a windmill turning lazily against the backdrop of dry, red earth.
‘How is Wetherby Downs?’ she asked
They’d picked Charles up from the private airstrip at the huge station fifteen minutes ago on their way back to Crocodile Creek. The strip was a couple of kilometres from the main homestead, whose location was marked from the air by its groupings of desert-hardy trees. He’d just been sitting there on his own, with his wheelchair parked by a fence-post as he’d watched the approach of the plane. For some reason no one had waited with him after dropping him off, and he’d looked like a very solitary figure.
Helpless, you would have said, if you hadn’t known him the way they knew him in Crocodile Creek.
‘It’s on the market,’ he answered bluntly, his jaw tight.
‘That bad?’
Christina couldn’t believe it. She knew that on such a vast acreage there should still be water. Gunya Creek was spring-fed and permanent. It never dried up. Even if Charles’s younger brother had had to sell off some stock to ease the burden on resources, a place of this size had its surplus capital from the good years invested—protected—elsewhere.
‘The cattle are doing fine,’ Charles said. ‘It was my decision to put the place up for sale, since I have partial ownership, and it has nothing to do with the drought. Everyone’s going to know about it soon enough, so there’s no point in secrecy.’
‘Why?’ she asked blankly. She could see that Grace and Glenn were both listening, just as curious.
‘Because even with a direct approach from me, my brother refused to help the Coopers, not in their current crisis, and not by giving them back the creek access they had for three generations. And since my father neglected to specify in his will that the family property was not to be sold in order for one of the part-owners to realise their capital share, I’m doing just that—forcing the sale. There are pastoral companies who’ll be very interested, because they know they can push for a rock-bottom price in this drought.’
‘But, Charles—’
He ignored her. ‘I spent some time sitting with Jim Cooper last night. We were pretty good mates in our teens. Now he’s a broken man. If there’s any chance of him getting back on his feet, physically and emotionally, he’s going to need a miracle.’
‘And you’ve found one?’ Christina asked eagerly. Everyone at the hospital wanted the best possible outcome for the Cooper family.
Charles shook his head. ‘I tried. But my brother is a pompous idiot, and weak with it, which doesn’t leave me with a lot of choice. If Philip isn’t going to honour his obligations as part of the local community, then I’m going to put my share of the money from the sale of Wetherby Downs towards helping the community in a different way. Wygera needs a swimming pool. Crocodile Creek needs better scanning equipment. The doctors’ house could do with a new fridge, I’m told. Any suggestions to add to the shopping list are very welcome.’
Well, he’d shocked all of them!
‘Th-that’s very generous of you, Charles,’ Christina told him.
‘It isn’t,’ he snapped back tersely. ‘It’s blackmail. I’ve used two strategies on Philip over the course of our lives. I’ve protected him, and I’ve ignored him. Both of those strategies appear to have failed. We’ll see what happens with this one.’
‘Is this…?’ Grace began, sounding unusually tentative. ‘Charles, you’ve told us this isn’t a secret, but—’
‘But does that mean I want the news spreading like wildfire? Of course I don’t, but it’ll happen anyway. Tell whoever you like.’
Had anyone ever seen
Charles like this before?
Christina certainly hadn’t. She wondered what had gone on between the two men, and whether Charles’s lonely wait for the aircraft was significant. Who had driven him out to the airstrip? Why hadn’t they stayed? Who had been the angriest, Philip or Charles?
Nobody felt much like talking after this, and she was glad to realise that the flight back to Crocodile Creek would soon be over.
Famous last words. They got a radio call to divert to Wygera on the way in, to pick up a patient. The rescue helicopter was transferring a young woman in pre-term labour at twenty-eight weeks gestation down south to a hospital with a high-level neonatal unit, and couldn’t be spared for an emergency at the settlement right now.
Wygera.
Joe had gone out there with a nurse on a clinic visit today, Christina knew, and her body went into fight-or-flight mode when she thought about seeing him. That queasy feeling from yesterday was back, and flying through a patch of rough air didn’t help.
She and Joe hadn’t parted well on Monday night. She’d looked up Treacher Collins syndrome on the internet the previous day, but all that had done had been to strengthen her belief that if Joe really cared about her, he should let her fully into his life. He was so proud of his half-sister. Christina would have loved to meet her, but clearly Joe never planned to let that happen.
She had been angry, hurting about it, questioning Monday’s decisions and reactions, ever since.
But no lightning bolts of clarity had hit. Was she right to feel angry? Was she crazy to keep on looking for ways to give him another chance? What could she do to prove that he was wrong?
Joe and nurse Lindsay Palmer met them beside the airstrip, in the staff vehicle they’d used to drive there from Crocodile Creek that morning. In the back of the vehicle, stretched awkwardly along the back seat, they had a kid with his arm curled protectively around some rickety thing that looked like a school craft project.
‘Appendicitis,’ Joe reported, yelling over the slowly subsiding propeller noise. He flashed Christina a glance and they both forgot to smile or say hello, too distracted by how complex their feelings were.
