The Marriage Gamble

by Meredith Webber

  And getting back to Abbott Road—patients by number? Mike’s mind was still reeling over that one, but for some reason he couldn’t explain even to himself, he felt it was important that this woman didn’t realise the extent of his shock.

  ‘What kind of employee?’ He stepped off the chair, shifted it along and climbed back up, the movement reminding him of his sore toe. Added ‘See a doctor’ to his mental list.

  ‘A medical one.’ The words were terse.

  ‘You’re a nurse?’

  Even as he asked the question he sensed it was wrong. He’d read a memo some time ago, which had explained that nurses in the clinics were no longer called nurses but were attached medical staff, or something equally ridiculous.

  ‘You don’t have nurses!’ The virago came in right on cue. ‘Associated medical personnel—that’s what Trent Clinics have. Not that I’m one of them, anyway. Four hundred numbers, if you’d ever bothered to check out your own system, are allocated to doctors, numbers over fifty to staff working in Abbott Street. I suppose in a way it’s very democratic. If the patients are nothing more than numbers, why should the doctors have names?’

  Mike started to protest but she was in full flight.

  ‘Mind you, I guess when it comes to sacking someone, it’s easier to sack number two hundred and twenty than Mary Smith who, as a person, might just have three kids dependent on her income. After all, numbers aren’t likely to have children.’

  He’d been still assimilating the number thing—it had to be something to do with a wages system—when she shot this barb to lodge under his skin. This time she’d gone too far. Mike climbed off the chair again and strode across to the woman.

  ‘If you don’t like working for Trent Clinics, why don’t you leave?’ he demanded, brandishing the paintbrush in front of her face. ‘I have no doubt the numbers are allocated purely for accounting reasons. Our human resources department has won awards for its efficiency.’

  ‘Probably because it removed the human element from all decisions,’ Jacinta muttered, although she was more intimidated than she let on with the man hovering behind her. ‘Leaving the business with more resources! And I’m not leaving,’ she added, bravado making the words more threatening than she’d intended.

  ‘Not until I’ve got this place back to how it should be—probably how you intended it to be when you first started, before making money became more important than helping people.’

  Uh-oh, she’d gone too far. Jacinta knew it and had drawn back before the icy disdain in his eyes—definitely grey, steely grey—made her flinch even closer to the wall.

  ‘I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have said that.’ But her stammered apology was ignored.

  He turned away, strode back to the wall, climbed onto the chair and began stroking paint along the strip of wall beneath the cornice as if he’d never stopped.

  He’d sack her, that’s what he’d do, Mike decided. Coldly and efficiently. He’d send a memo to whoever was in charge—Chris, if the woman really was a doctor—telling him to get rid of number four hundred and seventy-two.

  But he wouldn’t let her see his anger—wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing she’d scored a direct hit.

  He stepped down from the chair to shift it along and, with the tin of paint and the brush in one hand, had to haul it across the grungy carpet. Of course, given the kind of day he was having, the wretched thing’s legs stuck on a join so he had to lift one side and drag it. He was doing quite well, considering the handicaps of the paint tin and brush, and his anger was still simmering nicely when his fingers slipped and the chair legs dropped. Even before one hit his shoe he knew exactly what was coming. A million red-hot needles jabbed through his toe, then twisted and ground to intensify the pain.

  Someone yelled, it might have been him, and yellow paint swirled upward from the tin before splattering itself liberally over the carpet, but all Mike could think about was stopping the pain.

  Jacinta reached him as he dropped the ground. Ignoring the sloshes of paint, she knelt beside him.

  ‘What happened? Is it your heart? Where does it hurt?’

  He scowled at her but kept his hands wrapped firmly around his shoe. No way was anyone going to touch it—not his shoe, his foot and definitely not his toe.

  ‘You can’t have broken it just by dropping a chair on it,’ Jacinta told him, grabbing his hand and trying to pry his fingers loose. ‘So stop being a baby and let me look at it.’

  Stop being a baby? When he was in more pain than he’d been when he’d broken three ribs in the Wests versus University game?

  ‘Leave it alone!’ he roared, but she took no notice, sliding her small-boned fingers under his then levering his away. After which he couldn’t speak at all as pain ricocheted through him once again.

  She’d taken off his shoe and the small cool hands now cradled his instep.

  And the toe felt—slightly—better.

  ‘Looks like gout,’ she said calmly, and the words had barely registered before outrage flooded through him.

  ‘Gout? I do not have gout. Old men have gout. Heavy drinkers have gout. I’m fit, healthy and not yet forty. I do not have gout. I have an ingrown toenail. What would you know about it anyway?’

  He’d sounded quite mature as he’d denied the gout, but the last denial had been a bit over the top, and the final demand definitely childish.

  ‘Because four hundred numbers signify people on your medical staff. I thought I told you that. I’m a doctor here, Dr Trent.’

  ‘Some doctor if you can’t tell the difference between an ingrown toenail and gout!’ he muttered as she rested his heel very carefully on a cushion she’d dragged from another chair.

  ‘Your toenail’s not the best, but the swelling around the joint of your big toe is nothing to do with that. It’s gout.’

  And, having pronounced this sentence on him, she walked away.

  Mike bent forward and peered at the toe. It was definitely red and swollen around the middle joint—more swollen than it had seemed this morning. But the toenail had been sore on and off for weeks, so he hadn’t looked too closely, simply assuring himself he’d do something about it some time.

  ‘Here, take these.’

  He looked up to find the virago standing over him, two small white tablets in her outstretched hand.

  ‘They’re colchicine, not arsenic,’ she added, naming the suppressant usually prescribed for gout. ‘Here’s some water.’

  Jacinta thrust her other hand forward and, suspecting she might throw it at him if he didn’t respond, he took the paper cup of water from her then, gingerly, the tablets.

  ‘I can’t possibly have gout,’ he grumbled. ‘I’m too young and I look after my diet.’

  ‘It’s more to do with heredity than diet, and passed down through your mother’s genes,’ she said calmly. ‘You can have blood tests which will show a build-up of uric acid if you like, but the quickest test is to take the tablets at intervals during the day and if it goes away you know it’s gout. If it doesn’t then you’ve an infection in your toe that’s moved to the joint and you’ll probably have to have it amputated.’

  She was exaggerating, of course! Well, he hoped she was. He hadn’t been out of hands-on medicine for so long that antibiotics could no longer clear up a bone infection.

  ‘But why now?’ he muttered, more to himself as he tried to make sense of both the diagnosis and the situation.

  ‘Say your toe’s been sore, and then you get a bit rundown—no doubt tired from counting all your money—the urate crystals that build up in your body would go to the weakest point—the sore toe.’

  The explanation was acceptable but the dig she’d got in—couldn’t resist it, obviously—was more than Mike could take without retaliation.

  ‘The money I make pays your wages,’ he reminded her. ‘It also supports an intensive-care bed at the children’s hospital, several overseas orphans, a whole platoon of workers, not to mention the families of all
my staff.’

  Bad move—it would have sounded better if he’d had the number of families, but he’d already admitted to her he didn’t know the number.

  Numbers—they’d become a recurring theme!

  Surely patients weren’t called by numbers.

  She had to be wrong about that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MIKE swallowed the tablets with a mouthful of water, set the cup down and very gingerly climbed to his feet. His toe throbbed, but it was slightly better without the shoe on it so he left it off. Jacinta had returned and was making an ineffectual effort to clean up the spilt paint.

  She was kneeling on the floor, as far from him as she could get and still reach the mess. Her defensive attitude told him she knew she’d overstepped every boundary between employee and employer, yet something in the way she moved weakened his resolve to stay angry.

  Something in the way she moved made him think thoughts he hadn’t thought for a long time—and certainly didn’t want to think now. He’d never been attracted to small neat bodies—and had made it a policy never to get involved with staff.

  ‘Leave it. I’ve an old carpet runner I can put down over it until the carpet’s replaced.’

  Jacinta looked up at him, unable to believe the offer—or the suggestion that a new carpet would follow.

  ‘That would be wonderful,’ she said, and smiled because she meant it. Though she guessed she was still teetering on a knife-edge as far as her job was concerned, and was still completely befuddled by the situation.

  Her boss—here—in Abbott Road, painting walls, suffering gout—and disturbing her body in a way it hadn’t been disturbed since Rory Ahern, the high-jump champ, had smiled at her in high school.

  But, befuddled or not, she knew he’d offered a temporary truce. It was up to her to accept it.

  ‘I can give you a bottle of the tablets,’ she said, as she collected her useless cleaning cloth and began to edge back towards the paint tray and roller. ‘You’ll need to take one every two hours, day and night, until the pain goes away or they make you sick. Of course, you probably know that—the making-you-sick part—but most people can tolerate ten, or up to fifteen, without ill effects. Of course, once they make you sick—’

  She stopped, mainly because her companion was looking even more befuddled than she felt.

  ‘I’ll just get on with the painting,’ she muttered. ‘If I keep going I’ll get it done. You don’t have to help. In fact, you should rest your toe.’

  He took no notice, limping across to the paint cans, refilling his small tin and limping back, then climbing, very carefully, up onto the chair.

  They worked in silence for what seemed like a very long time, possibly because Jacinta was so aware of his presence in the room.

  Eventually he broke the silence, asking how come she’d had tablets on hand, and she realised it probably hadn’t been very long at all. He was continuing from where she’d told him she’d give him a supply. ‘I understood the rule was no drugs on the premises.’

  Mike covered another narrow strip of old green paint and waited for an answer. He knew the question was petty—getting his own back after he’d weakened and all but promised to replace the carpet—but if he was going to learn more about the present status of the company he ran, he may as well start now.

  ‘No addictive drugs like codeine or morphine derivatives or methadone are kept here. We give clients scripts, which they have filled at the pharmacy next door, but non-addictive drugs, like the gout tablets, well, if a drug company rep wants to leave some samples…’

  ‘You keep them? Is this common practice?’

  It was in most medical practices but against the Trent Clinic ‘rules’, Jacinta knew. The reasoning was that a medical practice shouldn’t put itself under obligation to a particular drug company. A principle she agreed with—in principle!

  She hesitated, but not for long.

  ‘A lot of the people who use this clinic have no money,’ she said. ‘I know it mightn’t cost much for them to have scripts filled, but the three dollars fifty they have to pay might have been set aside for milk for their kids or a cheap evening meal.’

  He could hardly argue about that—now, could he? Jacinta moved on to the third wall.

  ‘And where do you keep these samples?’

  Ice had crept back into his deep voice.

  ‘I had a secure cabinet built in.’

  She painted furiously as she muttered the words. She’d asked Carmel about using the office drug safe where emergency pain relief and other supplies were kept, but when permission had been refused she’d gone right ahead and organised her own secure cabinet. Even though she was breaking the rules, she was safeguarding the drugs she did keep on the premises.

  ‘Where?’

  Intrigue had melted some of the ice.

  ‘I’ll show you when we finish painting,’ she promised, so relieved he hadn’t exploded she turned to flash a smile at him. ‘If we keep stopping we’ll never get it done.’

  So it’s ‘we’ now? Mike thought, hiding a smile of his own. He’d already had an example of how far Dr Jacinta Ford would go if given even a hint of encouragement, so returning smiles was definitely out of the question.

  He’d finished painting the strip along the cornice, filled in around the doorjamb and had begun on the back wall—where a lot of work awaited him around each of the three doors—when a loud knocking on the front door startled him enough to smudge his careful line.

  ‘Uh-oh!’

  Two simple sounds that radiated guilt.

  He turned towards his fellow worker, and caught the sneaky glance she shot him and the slight flush on her paint-smudged cheeks.

  He felt his anger stir again. Not only was she here without permission, and keeping drugs on the premises, but she’d obviously invited someone to join her.

  Probably a boyfriend.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to let whoever it is in?’ he demanded.

  She set the roller down in the paint tray, straightened up, then crossed the room towards the door, halting midway to turn towards him again.

  ‘You won’t yell at them?’

  ‘Why the hell would I yell at anyone?’ The words were a little loud but he certainly wouldn’t have called it a yell.

  ‘Because you don’t seem very happy about this project, but these kids, if it’s who I think it is, just want to help.’

  ‘Kids? You’ve got kids coming in to help?’ He waved his arms in the air. ‘As if adults aren’t making enough mess?’

  ‘Coming,’ she called as the knocking came again, adding to Mike, ‘They’re big kids. Self-sufficient.’

  With that—and with no thought, apparently, for her own safety should it be a knife-wielding drug addict outside—she unlocked the door.

  ‘Hi, Jacinta! Told you we’d turn up. We worked extra hard at Ellerslie House yesterday so we could get here today. And, look, Dean managed to scrounge some material from the oddments place near McDonald’s, and Fizzy thought we might be able to drape it over the chairs. Make them look better.’

  Scrounge or steal? Jacinta thought but, with Michael Trent glaring disapprovingly not only at her but at the three teenagers as well, she wasn’t going to ask.

  ‘That’s great, Will.’ She shut the door behind them, and smiled at their expressions of approval for her new colour scheme.

  ‘Who’s the guy? Your boyfriend?’

  Jacinta shook her head, then led the youngsters forward.

  ‘Dr Trent owns this place. He’s helping out.’ Let him deny it if he wished. ‘Dr Trent, meet Fiona, known as Fizzy, Will and Dean. They’re the Abbott Road Clinic support group.’

  She hoped he hadn’t heard their muttered comments when she’d mentioned who he was, and was proud of them when they stepped forward in turn and held out their hands to acknowledge her introduction.

  Surprised, too, when he said, ‘It’s Mike, not Dr Trent.’

  Mike—a short, no-nonsense name. S
omehow it didn’t sound at all like the millionaire owner of a string of medical clinics and sundry business interests which, she’d read, included film production companies and tourism ventures.

  Not that the kids knew that.

  With the formality of meetings and greetings out of the way, they backed off. Then, with their usual bursts of speed, went for the paint.

  ‘I’ll do the roller,’ Will, the natural leader of the group, announced. ‘Dean, you grab that other brush and help the doc cut in around the doors, and the girls can fiddle with the material on the chairs.’

  As her arm was aching from her efforts with the roller, Jacinta didn’t argue, simply taking the plastic bag Dean handed her and motioning Fizzy to join her at the far end of the waiting room—away from the paint.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked the girl, casting a professional eye over the teenager’s pretty face and seeing signs of strain.

  ‘I get tired all the time. I’d like to stay longer at the shelter—sleep in a bit—but they’ve got rules about being out by nine so I can’t.’

  ‘It’s not an answer because I can’t offer it every day, but why don’t you go and lie down on the examination couch in my office? It’s not the most comfortable bed in Australia, but you can rest even if you can’t sleep.’

  Fizzy’s blue eyes filled with tears.

  ‘You don’t mind?’ she whispered, and Jacinta, ashamed that such a simple offer could mean so much to this child-woman, put her arm around her shoulders and hugged her close.

  ‘Of course I don’t mind, you goose. The door’s unlocked, so off you go.’

  She tipped the fabric Dean had ‘scrounged’ onto one of the chairs, then realised loose covers wouldn’t work. But she could cut the cloth so it wrapped around the seat part, and use upholstery tacks, hammered in underneath, to secure it. The city businesses were closed on a Sunday, but she’d find an open hardware shop in a nearby suburb.