She sat up in her chair, back straight, hands on her lap as if in the classroom again and ready to recite a string of correct answers.
‘Name: Caitlin Wynter—and didn’t the boys at school have fun with names like Frosty the Snow Girl and Ice Queen because I didn’t sleep around. At least that name was preferable to Amber Anti freeze … she’ll get your motor going.’
Alex clearly liked that.
‘I’m thirty-eight-and-a-bit and a Libran. I wear glasses, and next time you see me I’ll be wearing them, because the dust is playing havoc with these contacts.’ She didn’t add that she no longer had to impress him, which felt surprisingly good. ‘I wasn’t sure about coming back to Calingarry Crossing—however, so far so good.
‘I love Karma, both the dog and the philosophy, and hate big fat steaks, so thank you for not ordering one tonight.’
‘Hey, I’m a cow lover. What can I say? What else, Dr Wynter?’
‘My mother has never forgiven me for not having children, the only expectation I haven’t fulfilled like a good daughter. I help run my family’s medical business.’ She decided to leave out the bit about the Dr Wynter Wellness Centre franchise being worth a small fortune since her brother listed the company on the stock exchange a few years back. ‘And I dabble in sports medicine to keep my hand in, despite my father’s opinion that tending to the self-inflicted injuries of football buffoons and prima donnas is not real medicine.’ She sucked in a mouthful of air and let it out again triumphantly. ‘There you have it.’
‘So your dad was a stickler for tradition then?’
‘No, not a stickler. In fact, he and his father had both been trail-blazers in a sense. Around the mid-1930s, Grandad was a clinician with the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and in the late eighties Dad became the visionary behind a regional program, a forerunner to the Rural Doctors Program. My brother—we’re twins—seems to have inherited the Wynter family genes. Not sure I did so much. I love medicine, certain aspects of it at least, but being a doctor was never my number one preference. It was expected.’
‘And you always do what’s expected. You said that.’
Cait nodded and drained her glass. ‘Except live happily ever after with babies.’
‘So no hubby back in Sydney?’
‘Got out of that a couple of years ago.’
‘Did you break his heart?’
‘Not possible. I discovered the man I married didn’t have one. When I said to love, honour and obey till death us do part, he said to love, pursue and bed as many nurses as possible in the meantime.’
‘You’re pretty hot yourself. I bet there’d be plenty of doctors happy to bed you.’
‘Oh, please, you’re scaring me. That’s what my mother says, although maybe not the thing about bedding me.’ Caitlin instinctively patted both cheeks with open palms, hoping to thwart the predictable blush she could visualise rising steadily from her chest. ‘My mother was so desperate for grandchildren I had to keep checking for a singles advertisement on the notice board in the doctors’ lounge,’ she joked. ‘Mum just doesn’t get that I’m not interested in repeating the mistake.’
‘No more doctor husbands?’
‘No way. Just because she and Dad stayed married—notice I didn’t say happily—for years, and my brother married a paediatrician, doesn’t mean zippo. I’ve gone along with their every expectation all my life. I draw the line at marriage and babies. Besides, he and I brought out the worst in each other.’
‘You don’t find babies cute?’
‘Bert’s foal did melt my heart. Does that count?’ She smiled.
‘So what was your number one career choice then, if it wasn’t doctoring?’
‘Promise you won’t laugh.’
‘No, but tell me anyway.’
‘Truth is …’ Cait leaned forward as if disclosing a secret. In a way it was. Speaking about it, saying it aloud, brought the notion to the front of her mind for the first time since she was a kid. ‘Well, I would have been happier working a farm, or maybe looking after those creatures that aren’t able or aren’t smart enough to look after themselves.’
Alex threw himself back against the chair and grinned. ‘You’re not talking about footballers again, are you?’
‘Ha, ha. No, I’m talking about animals. I seriously considered veterinary science. You know how most kids play doctors and nurses?’
‘Or any variation on the theme, yes.’ He winked.
‘Funny you should say that, because my variation was playing vet nurse—well, vet doctor. I’d tend to animals—stuffed and real—checking them over, bandaging them up. Do you know how many bandages from my father’s practice it took to mend Ruby the pony’s pretend sore leg?’
‘Not a happy daddy?’
‘You can say that again. In the world according to Joseph Wynter, working as a vet was an unacceptable career choice for his daughter.’
‘And again, you always do what’s expected.’
‘By the time I was old enough to think for myself I had a degree, I was married—to a doctor—and it seemed too late to do anything else.’
‘You don’t think it’s time to change that, start doing the things that make you happy? I can tell you from experience, until you’re prepared to make choices, even those not popular or acceptable by others’ standards, you’re missing out. Why not give it a try? You can always change your mind if it’s not for you.’
‘So you’re Calingarry Crossing’s advice columnist too?’
‘Take it or leave it. And how about this? While you’re here and not working on humans during the week, you can tag along with me as much or as little as you like. I have a cow to see tomorrow out on the Holliman property.’
‘I was thinking more along the lines of small domestic animals. The type with bums you stick a thermometer in, not your whole blasted arm.’
Alex’s phone rang. He answered it smiling. ‘Yep. Yep. Yep. Okay.’ He hung up, the smile gone.
‘Is something wrong?’
‘One of the WIRES wildlife rescue volunteers. A young koala’s not looking too happy. They’re waiting outside my clinic. Sorry to cut the evening short, but you know what they say. You can’t keep a koala waiting.’
‘I didn’t know they said that.’ Cait smiled. ‘Can I come?’
‘Sure.’
*
The WIRES volunteer looked more feral than the koala. If Cait had seen her in the streets back in Sydney, the last thing she would have imagined—while frantically dialling the police—was that the girl was doing something as wonderful as volunteering for WIRES. Dressed in all black with dreadlocks dangling from under a dark beanie, she had so many body piercings she looked like she’d tangled with a barbed wire fence.
Don’t judge a book by its cover seemed to be a recurring theme tonight.
The girl reached inside the car window and the spotlight mounted above the passenger door momentarily blinded Caitlin. She flinched and shielded her eyes with one hand in order to watch Alex examine the animal.
‘She looks free,’ Alex said.
‘Free?’
‘Chlamydia-free,’ he explained. ‘Runs a close second to feral dog attack when it comes to koala deaths in the wild.’
‘Oh,’ said Cait.
Alex folded the towel he’d taken from the back of the ute and rolled it into a tight log shape. ‘Here, hold this against your chest. The koala will use it as a substitute mother.’ He thrust the rolled towel between Cait’s breasts, followed by the koala, the tiny, terrified creature immediately sinking its claws deep into the towel before looking up at Cait with a look that pierced her heart.
‘You precious thing. How young is it?’
‘Weight would indicate a juvenile. I’d say close to three kilograms.’ With both hands now free, Alex picked up each paw, one after the other. ‘Should be weaned off Mum—just. Probably capable of looking after itself. There appears to be some sensitivity here. There’s a claw missing, torn maybe.’
‘Will it be all right?’
‘Can’t release a koala until it can use that claw to climb and grip. It’ll need time to heal. Koalas don’t live too long on the ground. Best thing is to keep it in care for a while, make sure it can eat and that what goes in comes out like it should.’
‘Whoa! Too much information,’ said feral girl. ‘I’ll leave her with ya, Doc.’
‘Yeah, no worries, Nikki, thanks. I’ll let you know how it all goes, minus the poo detail, of course.’ Alex winked at Cait as the girl piled back into her old petrol-guzzling V8 car with the multitude of environmental messages plastered on its bumper and rear window.
Cait was scanning the stickers—Stop the Whaling, Save the Franklin, Plant a tree—when the girl drove away, leaving a choking plume of exhaust smoke behind.
After a couple of exaggerated coughs to clear her lungs, and a shared eye roll with Alex, Cait asked, ‘What do you do with it now?’
‘Find a carer. Someone with space, a cage and time. You, maybe.’
‘Me?’
‘Sure, why not? A koala is small, not too needy, easy to care for. You have the space, the spare aviary out back, and the time. Not that something like this needs a lot of that.’ Alex looked directly at Cait. ‘You have flooded gums.’
The observation stopped Cait smiling. She pressed four fingers to her mouth, while underneath her tongue toured back and forth over the front of her teeth. ‘You mean I have tonight’s pesto all over my teeth?’
‘What?’
‘You said I had flooded gums,’ she explained.
Alex roared, almost collapsing with laughter. ‘A flooded gum is a species of gum tree. Koalas love them and your Dandelion House has a forest filled with them.’
‘Well, there you go. Maybe I’m not the best person to care for a koala.’
‘I’ll hang on to her here tonight and bring her over in a couple of days. For now I should let you get home.’
Cait was tired. In the last twenty-four hours she’d driven to Calingarry Crossing, helped birth a foal, caught up with Will, had dinner with a disturbingly handsome gay man, discovered she was mother to twin lambs, and would soon be a carer for a motherless koala.
Tomorrow she would have to check in with Doc Davis and become the town’s doctor.
Phew!
42
‘My, my, you are the image of your mother, Cait. Lovely, just lovely.’ The stout, moon-faced man with the comb-over and pince-nez glasses was as wide as he was tall and what he lacked in hair on his head was in abundance on his arms and neck. He shuffled across the waiting room, kissed her cheek and stepped back. ‘Look how grown up you are. It makes an old man feel even older.’
‘You’re looking spritely enough to me. It’s nice to see you, Doc. I’ve been looking forward to this.’
‘Ah, not as much as I have, young Cait. And certainly not as much as Mrs Davis. She’s packed five times in the three months since finding out you’d be here.’
‘You mentioned hiring a Winnebago and touring a few golf resorts when we last spoke.’
‘Mmm, yes, yes. A man can dream.’ He sighed. ‘It seems two weeks cruising the Pacific Ocean is the thing to do. Six deserted islands in ten days, although I’m not sure I understand the logic behind a deserted island paradise with two-thousand strangers delivered by ship. Surely the island is no longer such a paradise nor deserted, in my humble opinion.’ The twinkle in his eye as he peered at her over the little half-glasses suggested a wicked wit Cait had been too young to recognise or appreciate last time they had met. ‘My only consolation is the golf driving range on the ship’s top deck. A man must sometimes make do with small mercies. Come in, come in.’ He waved his hand, inviting her into the office before closing the door. ‘Sit. Sit.’
He pointed to the consultation chair, then poked at his pince-nez, an annoying quirk that, when combined with the way he repeated his words, had provided Cait and her brother with hours of amusement mimicking him at home, although never in front of their father.
‘I was sorry to hear about your father’s passing. Very, very sad. He was a great man. A great, great man. One born ahead of his time.’
‘He did like a challenge.’
‘And to make a difference. He achieved so much. You and your brother are following in his footsteps.’
‘Not sure how much I’m following. Sometimes I feel like Ben and Mum are dragging me around behind them. To be honest, I’m so glad to be here. Just breathing fresh air feels good.’
‘I don’t think we’ll exhaust you too much. Viv does a stellar job with the appointments and supplies. Anything you need, any questions, Viv knows. And if she doesn’t know, she’ll find out.’ He pulled a face over his pince-nez and said, ‘Viv has a vay of finding out everything.’
‘I’ll remember that.’ Cait smiled and felt the slow unwinding of the spring that had been her body ever since deciding to leave city life behind and get back to her country roots.
‘Oh, and should you stand still for too long, she’ll vacuum right over you. Speaking of cleaning, we found something during our last little tidy-up. You’ll find a box in your consulting room next door. Let me show you.’ He kept talking as they walked down the short passageway of the old house-now-surgery, once a second playground for Caitlin and her brother. ‘Viv decided we had to tidy up the old storeroom before you arrived. Goodness knows why, when the same boxes have sat there quite happily all these years. I did tell her it’s a storeroom. As indicated by its very name it’s a room that stores boxes quite effectively, and without too much human intervention. Alas, just as my dear wife thinks islands should be deserted, Viv seems to think a storeroom should also be deserted. Good lord.’ He sighed again. ‘What chance does a doddering old man like me have with all these women hen-pecking him?’
Either Viv’s cleaning bee or the more modern halogen-style lighting had made the surgery seem brighter than Cait remembered. Her recollection of the old house was just that—an old house making do as a medical practice. The small windows did little to capture natural light throughout the seasons, while the doors and architraves of the pokey rooms, thick with a century of paint, had that stale, sticky air of rising damp.
As Doc Davis opened the door to her father’s old rooms, a melancholy bubble from the past floated up. She was reacting not so much to the appearance as to the smell—one that could only come from having the same solid wood desk and bookcases that her dad had made from trees he’d helped fell on a neighbouring property.
‘I’d forgotten all about that desk.’ Cait eased into the chair and heard the well-worn leather cushion breathe under her weight. If she’d closed her eyes, she could have heard the way her father’s sigh always followed after a long day.
‘There was no budging that beauty,’ said Doc Davis, ‘not even to lay the new carpets, as you can see if you look closely. They certainly don’t make them like they used to—desks or your dad. Ah now, here are those papers.’ He raised a hand as if anticipating Caitlin’s attempt to lift the box for him. ‘It’s not heavy. Not a lot to it at all. Found it pushed to the back of the old archives cupboard. That’s definitely your father’s handwriting. I’d recognise his scrawl anywhere. If you hadn’t got in touch with your lovely offer of help, we may never have found it—and my storeroom wouldn’t be so tidy either. So there you are; your coming home has been a positive thing already. The box is marked “DESTROY”. See here?’ He ran a hand over the marker pen scribble and specks of dust wafted into the air, dancing in the small slice of sunshine streaming through the window behind the desk. ‘But I’ll leave you to decide its fate.’
‘I’ll take a look sometime. I doubt it’s too important. Dad was a stickler with his filing. He’d lose himself for hours scribbling ideas in notebooks and drawing up plans. He had a filing cabinet full of I don’t know what.’
‘I remember. Entrepreneurs like your dad often do. Now then. I have a patient.’ They walked back towards the waiting room, where a woman sat reading a magazin
e. ‘I’d like to show you around some more tomorrow.’ He lowered his voice to a waiting-room whisper. ‘I’ll fill you in on the good, the bad and the lonely.’
‘The lonely?’ Cait enquired in a similar whisper.
‘The patients who need nothing much more than a chat and a cuppa to feel better.’ He jerked his chin towards the woman, her face familiar. ‘If you want to wait now I can take you for a cuppa after I’ve seen Mrs Bailey. I do like to indulge in a little treat at Will’s café. I do. I do. Our Will is one of the good ones, by the way.’
Mrs Bailey.
Amber’s mother.
Wow.
She looked so different. Cait wondered if Amber’s visit had been a successful one. Maybe she’d find out.
She declined and thanked Doc Davis for the offer of tea and asked if she could come in tomorrow for a couple of hours to organise her rooms, then she headed back to the house.
*
Alex was waiting, complete with recuperating koala.
‘I’ve checked with the koala coordinator in Saddleton. This little one just needs a cage for a while. We can use yours. I’ve already started setting it up. I’ll show you. You two stay.’ His last comment was directed to the two dogs, who seemed too busy chasing each other to be bothered following anyway.
Caitlin fought her way under a leafy callistemon bush providing shade to the old aviary and examined the set-up.
‘I’ve cleaned everything down and secured these branches to the side of the cage. She’ll happily wedge her cute little backside in this tree fork here. Those branches are from the flooded gums and tallowwood trees you’ve got growing in the forest, and I’m using that old terracotta pot plant base for water.’
‘I suppose if I was a koala I’d be quite happy with my new digs. What happens now?’
‘You just need to add fresh eucalypt branches daily and change her water. She’s that easy to please.’
‘As am I with a cuppa.’ Caitlin grinned. ‘Want one?’
‘Give me five to finish up here.’
House for All Seasons Page 40
