Knight on the Children's Ward

by Carol Marinelli

  She was exhausted. Annika rested her head against the mirror for a moment and just wanted to close her eyes and sleep. She was beyond exhausted, in fact, and from this morning’s assessment it seemed it had been noticed.

  Heather would never believe that she was working shifts in a nursing home, and the hardest slots too—five a.m. till eight a.m. if she was on a late shift at the hospital, and seven p.m. till ten p.m. if she was on an early. Oh, and a couple of nights shifts on her days off.

  She was so tired. Not just bone-tired, but tired of arguing, tired of being told to pack in nursing, to come home, to be sensible, tired of being told that she didn’t need to nurse—she was a Kolovsky.

  ‘Iosef is a doctor,’ Annika had pointed out.

  ‘Iosef is a fool,’ her mother had said, ‘and as for that slut of a wife of his…’

  ‘Finished.’

  She was too glum thinking about her mother to smile and cheer as Luke came out, in fresh track pants and with his hair dripping wet.

  ‘You smell much better,’ Annika settled for instead, and the shower must have drained Luke because he let Annika thread his T-shirt through his IV.

  ‘What are you looking so miserable about?’ Luke asked.

  ‘Stuff,’ Annika said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Luke said, and she was rewarded with a smile from him.

  ‘Oh, that’s much better!’ Lisa said, popping her head into the bathroom. ‘You’re looking very handsome.’ Annika caught Luke’s eyes and had to stop herself from rolling her own. She sort of understood him—she didn’t know how, she just did. ‘Your mum’s here, by the way!’ Lisa added.

  ‘Great,’ Luke muttered as Annika walked him back. ‘That’s all I need. You haven’t met her yet…’

  ‘You haven’t met mine!’ Annika said, and they both smiled this time—a real smile.

  Annika surprised herself, because rarely, if ever, did she speak about her family, and especially not to a patient. But they had a little giggle as they walked, and she was too busy concentrating on Luke and pushing his IV to notice Ross look up from the desk and watch the unlikely new friends go by.

  ‘Are you still here?’ Caroline frowned, quite a long time later, because, as pedantic as Ross was, consultants didn’t usually hang around all day.

  ‘I just thought I’d catch up on some paperwork.’

  ‘Haven’t you got an office to go to?’ she teased.

  He did, but for once he didn’t have that much paperwork to do.

  ‘Annika!’ Caroline called her over from where Annika was stacking the linen trolley after returning from her supper break. ‘Come and get started on your notes. I’ll show you how we do them. It’s different to the main wards.’

  He didn’t look up, but he smelt her as she came around the desk.

  A heavy, musky fragrance perfumed the air, and though he wrote it maybe twenty times a day, he had misspelled diarrhoea, and Ross frowned at his spiky black handwriting, because the familiar word looked completely wrong.

  ‘Are you wearing perfume, Annika?’ He didn’t look up at Caroline’s stern tone.

  ‘A little,’ Annika said, because she’d freshened up after her break.

  ‘You can’t wear perfume on the children’s ward!’ Caroline’s voice had a familiar ring to it—one Ross had heard all his life.

  ‘What do you mean—you just didn’t want to go to school? You can’t wear an earring. You just have to, that’s all. You just don’t. You just can’t.’

  ‘Go and wash it off,’ Caroline said, and now Ross did look up. He saw her standing there, wary, tight-lipped, in that ridiculous apron. ‘There are children with allergies, asthma. You just can’t wear perfume, Annika—didn’t you think?’

  Caroline was right, Ross conceded, there were children with allergies and, as much as he liked it, Kolovsky musk post-op might be a little bit too much, but he wanted to step in, wanted to grin at Annika and tell her she smelt divine, tell her not to wash it off, for her to tell Caroline that she wouldn’t.

  And he knew that she was thinking it too!

  It was a second, a mere split second, but he saw her waver—and Ross had a bizarre feeling that she was going to dive into her bag for the bottle and run around the ward, ripping off her apron and spraying perfume. The thought made him smile—at the wrong moment, though, because Annika saw him and, although Ross snapped his face to bland, she must have thought he was enjoying her discomfort.

  Oh, but he wanted to correct her.

  He wanted to follow her and tell her that wasn’t what he’d meant as she duly turned around and headed for the washroom.

  He wanted to apologise when she came back unscented and sat at her stool while Caroline nit-picked her way through the nursing notes.

  Instead he returned to his own notes.

  DIAOR… He scrawled a line through it again.

  Still her fragrance lingered.

  He got up without a word and, unusually for Ross, closed his office door. Then he picked up his pen and forced himself to concentrate.

  DIARREA.

  He hurled his pen down. Who cared anyway? They knew what he meant!

  He was not going to fancy her, nor, if he could help it, even talk much to her.

  He was off women.

  He had sworn off women.

  And a student nurse on his ward—well, it couldn’t be without complications.

  She was his friend’s little sister too.

  No way!

  Absolutely not.

  He picked up his pen and resumed his notes.

  ‘The baby has,’ he wrote instead, ‘severe gastroenteritis.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  HE DID a very good job of ignoring her.

  He did an excellent job at pulling rank and completely speaking over her head, or looking at a child or a chart or the wall when he had no choice but to address her. And at his student lecture on Monday he paid her no more attention than any of the others. He delivered a talk on gastroenteritis, and, though he hesitated as he went to spell diarrhoea, he wrote it up correctly on the whiteboard.

  She, Ross noted, was ignoring him too. She asked no questions at the end of the lecture, but an annoying student called Cassie made up for that.

  Once their eyes met, but she quickly flicked hers away, and he, though he tried to discount it, saw the flush of red on her neck and wished that he hadn’t.

  Yes, he did a very good job at ignoring her and not talking to her till, chatting to the pathologist in the bowels of the hospital a few days later, he glanced up at the big mirror that gave a view around the corridor and there was Annika. She was yawning, holding some blood samples, completely unaware she was being watched.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for these…’ Ross said when she turned the corner, and she jumped slightly at the sight of him. He took the bloodwork and stared at the forms rather than at her.

  ‘The chute isn’t working,’ Annika explained. ‘I said I’d drop them in on my way home.’

  ‘I forgot to sign the form.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He would rather have taken ages to sign the form, but the pathologist decided they had been talking for too long and hurried him along. Annika had stopped for a moment to put on her jacket, and as his legs were much longer than hers somehow, despite trying not to, he had almost caught her up as they approached the flapping black plastic doors. It would have been really rude had she not held it open—and just plain wrong for him not to thank her and fall into step beside her.

  ‘You look tired,’ Ross commented.

  ‘It’s been a long shift.’

  This had got them halfway along the corridor, and now they should just walk along in silence, Ross reasoned. He was a consultant, and he could be as rude and as aloof as he liked—except he could hear his boots, her shoes, and an endless, awful silence. It was Ross who filled it.

  ‘I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you…’ He had—long before he had liked her.

  ‘Oh?’ She felt the adrenaline
kick in, the effect of him close up far more devastating than his smile, and yet she liked it. She liked it so much that she slowed down her pace and looked over to him. ‘About what?’

  She could almost smell the bonfire—all those smiles, all that guessing, all that waiting was to be put to rest now they were finally talking.

  ‘I know your brother Iosef,’ Ross said. ‘He asked me to keep an eye out for you when you started.’

  ‘Did he?’ Her cheeks were burning, the back of her nose was stinging, and she wanted to run, to kick up her heels and run from him—because all the time she’d thought it was her, not her family, that he saw.

  ‘I’ve always meant to introduce myself. Iosef is a good friend.’ It was her jacket’s fault, Ross decided. Her jacket smelt of the forbidden perfume. It smelt so much of her that he forgot, for a second, his newly laid-down rules. ‘We should catch up some time…’

  ‘Why?’ She turned very blue eyes to him. ‘So that you can report back to Iosef?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Tell him I’m doing fine,’ Annika snapped, and, no, she didn’t kick up her heels, and she didn’t run, but she did walk swiftly away from him.

  A year.

  For more than a year she’d carried a torch, had secretly hoped that his smile, those looks they had shared, had meant something. All that time she had thought it had been about her, and yet again it wasn’t.

  Again, all she was was a Kolovsky.

  It rankled. On the drive home it gnawed and burnt, but when she got there her mother had left a long message on the answer machine which rankled rather more.

  They needed to go over details, she reminded her daughter.

  It was the charity ball in just three weeks—as if Annika could ever forget.

  When Annika had been a child it had been discovered that her father had an illegitimate son—one who was being raised in an orphanage in Russia.

  Levander had been brought over to Australia. Her father had done everything to make up for the wretched years his son had suffered, and Levander’s appalling early life had been kept a closely guarded family secret.

  Now, though, the truth was starting to seep out. And Nina, anticipating a public backlash, had moved into pre-emptive damage control.

  Huge donations had been sent to several orphanages, and to a couple of street-kid programmes too.

  And then there was The Ball.

  It was to be a dazzling, glitzy affair they would all attend. Levander was to be excused because he was in England, but the rest of the family would be there. Iosef and his wife, her brother Aleksi, and of course Annika. They would all look glossy and beautiful and be photographed to the max, so that when the truth inevitably came out the spin doctors would be ready.

  Already were ready.

  Annika had read the draft of the waiting press release.

  The revelation of his son Levander’s suffering sent Ivan Kolovsky to an early grave. He was thrilled when his second-born, Iosef, on qualifying as a doctor, chose to work amongst the poor in Russia, and Ivan would be proud to know that his daughter, Annika, is now studying nursing. On Ivan’s deathbed he begged his wife to set up the Kolovsky Foundation, which has gone on to raise huge amounts (insert current figure).

  Lies.

  Lies based on twisted truths. And only since her father’s death had Annika started to question them.

  And now she had, everything had fallen apart.

  Her mother had never hit her before—oh, maybe a slap on the leg when she was little and had refused to converse in Russian, and once as a teenager, when her mother had found out she was eating burgers on her morning jog, Annika had nursed a red cheek and a swollen eye…but hardly anything major…

  Until she had asked about Levander.

  They had been sorting out her father’s things, a painful task at the best of times, and Annika had come across some letters. She hadn’t read them—she hadn’t had a chance to. Nina had snatched them out of her hands, but Annika had asked her mother a question that had been nagging. It was a question her brothers had refused to answer when she had approached them with it. She asked whether Ivan and Nina had known that Levander was in an orphanage all those years.

  Her mother had slapped her with a viciousness that had left Annika reeling—not at the pain but with shock.

  She had then discovered that when she started to think, to suggest, to question, to find her own path in life, the love and support Annika had thought was unconditional had been pulled up like a drawbridge.

  And the money had been taken away too.

  Annika deleted her mother’s message and prepared a light supper. She showered, and then, because she hadn’t had time to this morning, ironed her white agency nurse’s uniform and dressed. Tying her hair back, she clipped on her name badge.

  Annika Kolovsky.

  No matter how she resisted, it was who she was—and all she was to others.

  She should surely be used to it by now.

  Except she’d thought Ross had seen something else—thought for a foolish moment that Ross Wyatt had seen her for herself. Yet again it came back to one thing.

  She was a Kolovsky.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘SLEEP well, Elsie.’ Elsie didn’t answer as Annika tucked the blankets round the bony shoulders of the elderly lady.

  Elsie had spat out her tablets and thrown her dinner on the floor. She had resisted at every step of Annika undressing her and getting her into bed. But now that she was in bed she relaxed, especially when Annika positioned the photo of her late husband, Bertie, where the old lady could see him.

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning. I have another shift then.’

  Still Elsie didn’t answer, and Annika wished she would. She loved the stories Elsie told, during the times when she was lucid. But Elsie’s confusion had worsened because of an infection, and she had been distressed tonight, resenting any intrusion. Nursing patients with dementia was often a thankless task, and Annika’s shifts exhausted her, but at least, unlike on the children’s ward, where she had been for a week now, here Annika knew what she was doing.

  Oh, it was back-breaking, and mainly just sheer hard work, but she had been here for over a year now, and knew the residents. The staff of the private nursing home had been wary at first, but they were used to Annika now. She had proved herself a hard worker and, frankly, with a skeleton staff, so long as the patients were clean and dry, and bedded at night or dressed in the morning, nobody really cared who she was or why someone as rich as Annika always put her hand up for extra shifts.

  It was ridiculous, though.

  Annika knew that.

  In fact she was ashamed that she stood in the forecourt of a garage next to a filthy old ute and had to prepay twenty dollars, because that was all she had until her pay from the nursing home went in tomorrow, to fill up the tank of a six-figure powder-blue sports car.

  It had been her twenty-first birthday present.

  Her mother had been about to upgrade it when Annika had declared she wanted to study nursing, and when she had refused to give in the financial plug had been pulled.

  Her car now needed a service, which she couldn’t afford. The sensible thing, of course, would be to sell it—except, despite its being a present, technically, it didn’t belong to her: it was a company car.

  So deep in thought was Annika, so bone-weary from a day on the children’s ward and a twilight shift at the nursing home, that she didn’t notice the man crossing the forecourt towards her.

  ‘Annika?’ He was putting money in his wallet. He had obviously just paid, and she glanced around rather than look at him. She was one burning blush, and not just because it was Ross, but rather because someone from work had seen her. She had done a full shift on the children’s ward, and was due back there at midday tomorrow, so there was no way on earth she should be cramming in an extra shift, but she clearly was—two, actually, not that he could know! The white agency nurse dress seemed to glow under the fluor
escent lights.

  He could have nodded and left it there.

  He damn well should nod and leave it there—and maybe even have a quiet word with Caroline tomorrow, or Iosef, perhaps.

  Or say nothing at all—just simply forget.

  He chose none of the above.

  ‘How about a coffee?’

  ‘It’s late.’

  ‘I know it’s late,’ Ross said, ‘but I’m sure you could use a coffee. There’s an all-night cafe a kilometre up the road—I’ll see you there.’

  She nearly didn’t go.

  She was extremely tempted not to go. But she had no choice.

  Normally she was careful about being seen in her agency uniform, but she didn’t have her jacket in the car, and she’d been so low on petrol… Anyway, Annika told herself, it was hardly a crime—all her friends did agency shifts. How the hell would a student survive otherwise?

  His grim face told her her argument would be wasted.

  ‘I know students have to work…’ he had bought her a coffee and she added two sugars ‘…and I know it’s probably none of my business…’

  ‘It is none of your business,’ Annika said.

  ‘But I’ve heard Caroline commenting, and I’ve seen you yawning…’ Ross said. ‘You look like you’ve got two black eyes.’

  ‘So tell Caroline—or report back to my brother.’ Annika shrugged. ‘Then your duty is done.’

  ‘Annika!’ Ross was direct. ‘Do you go out of your way to be rude?’

  ‘Rude?’

  ‘I’m trying not to talk to Caroline; I’m trying to talk to you.’

  ‘Check up on me, you mean, so that Iosef—’

  He whistled in indignation. ‘This has nothing to do with your brother. It’s my ward, Annika. You were on an early today; you’re on again tomorrow…’