Desert Doctor, Secret Sheikh

by Meredith Webber

  And none of it was reassuring. Especially as the touch of her hand as she’d led him up the hill had distracted him again and he felt torn between his duty and this sudden and inexplicable attraction…

  They returned to the food tent where he took a glass of tea, and ate cereal and yoghurt for his breakfast, pleased the organisation had scrounged spoons from somewhere so he didn’t have to eat it with his fingers. They were sitting near the edge of the tent to get the breeze and his companion ate in silence for a while, then looked up at him.

  ‘About Akbar, I didn’t ask, was his blood pressure better this morning?’

  ‘Much better, so if there was internal bleeding it seems to have stopped.’ Kam thought this good news but his companion was frowning.

  ‘But should we still take him down to the city for an ultrasound? You said you’re here to look around and see what’s needed—would you take him when you leave?’

  ‘Let’s wait and see,’ Kam suggested. ‘I don’t need to return immediately, and if we keep an eye on him…’

  Kam knew it was his own voice he was hearing, but what was he saying?

  That he could stay in the camp indefinitely? Of course he couldn’t—there was far too much to see and do.

  And why would he be thinking it?

  He was looking at one possible answer, who was looking back at him with a puzzled expression on her face.

  ‘But the well? The clinic?’

  Kam waved his hand to dismiss her worries—and his own reservations.

  ‘I can radio someone about them. I have a brother in the city—he’ll find the right people to talk to about these things.’

  Jenny grinned at him.

  ‘If you still have a radio,’ she teased, and Kam realised that although he’d been out to the car to get some gear, he hadn’t thought to check.

  ‘It had better be there,’ he muttered, while his companion continued to smile, which infuriated him.

  ‘And you should have one, too,’ he growled. ‘It’s stupid to just accept that they are stolen and do nothing about it. What if something happened and you needed a radio in an emergency?’

  ‘I think if it was life and death, a radio might magically reappear. There is no way on earth I’d show a lack of trust in any of these people by asking if they know where the radios have gone, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of them is in the camp.’

  ‘And you just accept that? Accept the people you are helping would steal from you?’

  Her smiled widened, lighting up her eyes, though there was sadness in it as well as she explained, ‘They have so little, Kam, and have lost so much. If having a radio hidden in the corner of their tent makes up for even a millionth of the unhappiness they’ve suffered, I’m pleased for it to be there.’

  He shook his head—he seemed to be doing it all the time, but every new thing he learned about this woman generated disbelief, while every new thing he learned about his country added to his sense of shame and frustration.

  Of course he couldn’t stay here for long, there were other outposts he needed to visit, camps along the northern wadi, small villages and towns. He had to learn about all the problems of his country, not just this corner of it.

  But his body was remembering the kiss, weakening his resolve, although he knew full well it couldn’t happen again. The very last thing he needed right now was a distraction and this woman, he suspected, could prove to be the distraction to end all distractions.

  ‘I’ll go and check I’ve still got a radio then have a look around the camp,’ he said, as the little girl, Rosana, crawled into the tent.

  But although Jenny picked her up and gave her a kiss and a cuddle, she then handed her over to one of the women who ran the food tent.

  ‘I’ll come with you as far as the car. We might meet a couple of my little boys on the way, boys you could trust to keep an eye on the car for you. If you explained to them you need the radio to let the people in the city know what is needed in the camp, I’m sure word would get around not to steal it.’

  They left the tent together, but once outside Jenny paused, as she always did, looking towards the mountains that rose up behind the camp, rough red and gold and ochre rock contrasting so magically with the vivid blue of the sky. She had come to love this particular view, and to feel connected to the mountains, so these quiet moments at the beginning of each day had become precious to her.

  She breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the crisp desert air, so clean and fresh and unpolluted it seemed a privilege to be able to breathe it. It was at times like this that she wondered if she could, perhaps, stop her wandering. If she could settle in a place of beauty and let beauty complete the healing process…

  Kam had walked ahead, then had apparently realised he no longer had a companion and had turned back towards her.

  ‘Are you coming?’ he asked, breaking into her silent communion with the morning.

  She hurried towards him, hoping he wouldn’t ask what had kept her—she’d feel stupid explaining how she felt.

  The little boys she knew joined them, appearing, as always, from nowhere. They greeted her by name and held her hands and danced around her, happy, trusting children whose lives had been ripped apart by war but who had adapted with the resilience of childhood to a different life where fun and happiness were still possible as they played with their friends.

  Kam was talking to them, perhaps asking them to guard his car, and they listened and chattered to him, abandoning her now for the far more important male.

  ‘I think you’ve got it sorted,’ she said to Kam as he opened the door of the dusty vehicle then nodded to her to show the radio was still there. ‘After you’ve radioed, a couple of the boys will be happy to show you around the camp—in fact, they’ll probably fight for the privilege. I’ll get back to the clinic.’

  She turned away but heard something in his words ‘I’ll see you later?’ that made her swing back to face him.

  Not desperation but some emotion—not the usual casual, offhand remark.

  Or was she reading too much into it—was she letting memories of the kiss affect her thinking?

  ‘Hard to avoid it,’ she said lightly, ‘when we share a patient.’

  Returning to the clinic tent, she was surprised to find only Lia in attendance on her husband, who was lying on his side, so his face was turned away from his wife. Thinking Akbar must be sleeping, Jen intended slipping quietly past him, heading for the corner where people were already lining up to have their TB tests or get their medication.

  But even in the dim light in this ‘hospital’ corner, she picked up the sheen of tears on Lia’s face. Angry with herself for not knowing the language, she hurried to the testing area and took Aisha to one side.

  ‘Lia is crying—do you know what’s wrong? Are Akbar’s friends not willing to sit with him? Visit him?’

  Aisha’s dark eyes glanced towards the rug that separated off the area where Akbar lay.

  ‘He doesn’t want his friends, he wants to die,’ she said quietly, virtually repeating what Kam had told her during the night, although she’d put Akbar’s outburst during the night down to his pain and possibly the effects of the drugs. ‘He is angry with his wife, and with the men who carried him back here—probably with you and the other doctor as well. He should be dead, he says.’

  ‘He said this to you?’ Jen asked, unable to believe Akbar still felt that way.

  ‘No, he yelled it at his wife when you and the other doctor went to breakfast. He yelled and yelled, told her not to bring his friends, he had no friends. He told her to let him die.’

  Jen knew that cultural differences often created far wider chasms between nationalities than language difficulties.

  ‘Do you understand this?’ she asked Aisha.

  She first shook her head, then answered with a rather vague, ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe?’ Jen prompted gently, guessing that Aisha might be embarrassed talking about the reason for Akbar�
��s behaviour.

  ‘Maybe he feels shamed that he didn’t save his son. Maybe his—his value as a man is diminished by this failure, and he would not want to live that way.’

  Aisha’s dark eyes looked pleadingly into Jen’s, as if the other woman was begging her to understand the situation without the need for more words.

  Jen nodded her response to those pleading eyes. She thought she understood—at least some of it. The man was the strength of the family in this land, the guardian and protector, so it would be natural for Akbar to feel diminished by the loss of his son, and even more devastated by failing to get the boy back.

  ‘We have to get him back,’ she said, and Aisha frowned at her.

  ‘Akbar?’ she said.

  ‘No, the boy. Hamid. We have to get him back. Surely there’s some way—someone we could talk to who has contact with the tribes across the border. Do you know anyone?’

  Aisha shook her head, while the shocked look on her pale face suggested she didn’t want to know—not anyone or anything—about such a crazy scheme.

  Not that Jen was so easily put off.

  ‘Kam knows people in the city,’ she said. ‘Maybe he will know someone who can inter-cede for us.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Aisha said, repeating a word already used too often in this conversation, although this time when she said it, it was full of doubt.

  But as Jen worked through the day, her determination to do something about getting the boy back grew, so when she met up with Kam much later, as she walked towards the rock where she went to watch the sun set over the desert, she couldn’t help but bring up the subject.

  ‘If you know people who can drill a well for water, surely you know people who could negotiate for the return of the Akbar’s son,’ she said, plunging straight into the subject that had been on her mind without a greeting or enquiry about his day. ‘Akbar just lies there. His condition isn’t critical, and the pain must be easing, yet he has no will to live. In fact, he looks very much as if he’s trying to will himself to die.’

  Kam studied her for a moment, then waved towards the setting sun.

  ‘Doesn’t this beauty steal all other thoughts from your head?’ he asked.

  Jen looked towards the west, where vermillion and lilac stripes shot through the orange glow.

  ‘Usually it does,’ she admitted. ‘It’s why I come here at this time. But seeing Akbar as he is, seeing Lia’s grief at his condition, I can’t help but think there has to be something someone can do. Surely a man’s life takes precedence over sunsets.’

  Kam came towards her and took her hand, leading her onto the flat rock then exerting gentle pressure as he said, ‘Sit.’

  Jen sat, as much to escape the touch of his hand as from obedience. Memories of their kiss fluttered uneasily in her body, and she clung desperately to thoughts of Akbar and the grieving Lia to keep those memories at bay.

  ‘Now, breathe in the cooling night air and watch the sunset,’ Kam ordered. ‘Akbar isn’t going to die in the next ten minutes, or even the next half-hour. Maybe when the beauty of the desert creeps into your soul, it will ease a little of the anguish you are feeling for the couple.’

  I don’t want the beauty of the desert creeping in, she wanted to say. It is too seductive, too all-encompassing.

  Too romantic!

  There, it was said, if only in her head, but it worried her that she’d sat here every night since she’d come to the camp and enjoyed the beauty without a thought of romance, although she’d often thought of David and wondered what he would think of the nomadic life she led now, so far removed from the house in the suburbs and the little family that they’d planned.

  The Jenny whom David had known had been a very different person, not better, or less good, just different…

  ‘You are still thinking of Akbar.’

  Kam’s accusation broke into her thoughts and she turned towards him, wondering why he thought that.

  ‘Actually, I’m not,’ she said, and thought that would be the end of it but, no, he was apparently a persistent man.

  ‘Then why the frown?’ he asked. ‘A sunset cannot make you frown.’

  Jen put her hands up and wiped them across her face, hoping to clear it of all expression.

  She must have failed for his quiet ‘Tell me,’ was a command and suddenly Jen knew she would.

  ‘I lost my husband in the accident I had, my husband and my unborn son. This agony of Akbar’s brings it back, although his son is still alive…’

  She felt him move so his arm drew her closer, easing them both into the shadow of the rock.

  ‘Is this why you travel? Why you can’t stay still?’ He had slid her scarf back off her hair and was dropping kisses on the top of her head. ‘Is it the pain of loss that keeps you moving?’

  The kisses were more of a problem than the questions. In fact, the questions were easily answered.

  ‘The pain goes away, you know,’ she managed, ‘in time. You don’t forget but it doesn’t hurt each time you breathe. Then it doesn’t hurt when you look at happy couples, and finally you can hold a child in your arms and while there’s a hollow deep inside, it’s not an ache.’

  How could such quiet words hurt him so badly? Kam wondered, tightening his arms around the woman while emotion squeezed his heart. It seemed natural to kiss her, to move his lips from hair, to cheek, to chin and then to lips, and if her fierce response was born in memory, at least he knew enough to tell she was responding to him, not to a ghost from the past.

  His was the name that trembled on her lips as he lifted his head the better to see her face in the dusk light, his the name she whispered as she leaned into him and raised her mouth to his again.

  He captured it, that mouth, with its lush lips, and explored its depth and hunger, marvelling that life should so unexpectedly provide him with such a sweet surprise. All thought of the work he had to do, the wrongs he had to put right, were washed from his mind by fascination and desire.

  The kiss they shared was different to anything she’d ever experienced, Jen realised as she drew in a deep breath to replenish the air Kam had stolen. It was as elemental as the night and the desert that lay before them, man and woman giving and receiving pleasure, although the heat building inside her suggested kisses would soon not be enough for either of them, and with prayers finished she could hear people moving around the camp, quiet voices calling to each other.

  She dragged herself out of Kam’s strong embrace, putting a little space between them.

  ‘We were talking about work,’ she reminded him. ‘About Akbar…’

  Kam released her, but she thought his hands moved reluctantly off her shoulders.

  ‘We were talking about you,’ he reminded her, his voice so husky she wondered if he’d been as deeply affected by the kisses as she had.

  Not that she could admit it…

  She shook her head.

  ‘Before that,’ she reminded him. ‘Akbar, our patient, and Hamid, his son.’

  Kam turned away from her and she heard a deep sigh.

  ‘OK, but I refuse to discuss it out here. Later, in the tent—in the hospital if we can think of it that way—there we will talk. For a start you do not know who has the child, which of the warring tribes. This isn’t something you can go into—is the expression half-cocked?’

  Jen nodded absently, more or less agreeing with what he was saying but thinking more that the beauty of the sunset was seeping into her soul and working the magic it usually worked, relieving the tensions of the day—the tensions of the kiss—and reminding her of all that was good and beautiful in the world.

  She leaned back against the rock she considered her personal back-rest and stretched her legs out in front of her, relaxing as the dusk crept in, turning the desert sands from vivid orange to pink and blue and purple.

  ‘Such a beautiful place,’ she murmured, but even as she said it, some echo of Kam’s conversation rattled in her head. Is the expression half-cocked? he’d asked. W
hy? Was it an Australian expression, not an English one?

  Not that he’d said he was English, had he?

  The suspicions she’d harboured the previous day about Kam being a spy had sneaked beneath her defences, worse now because she’d kissed him. But though she studied him in the dimming light, she didn’t mention these sudden and disturbing doubts, asking instead about his day and what he’d seen.

  ‘The boys took me everywhere,’ he said, and maybe because of her reawakening suspicion she began to worry whether taking him ‘everywhere’ in the camp had been such a good idea. What if he was a spy, not for the government or Aid for All, but for one of the warring factions? What if he was checking out the camp to see the best way to attack it?

  And she’d been kissing him!

  Forget kissing. What if she’d put the refugees at risk by being so obliging to him?

  The questions made her queasy, and she shifted against the rock. There was one way to find out, but would he tell the truth?

  ‘Are you really working for Aid for All?’ she asked, when the queasiness threatened to overcome her.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ he parried, which increased both suspicion and queasiness a hundredfold.

  ‘That’s not an answer,’ Jen snapped, remembering the kiss again. Had she kissed a traitor?

  ‘But who else would I be working for?’ he asked, still avoiding a straightforward yes or no.

  ‘The government, the warring tribes, who knows? You could be a spy—even working for Aid for All you could be spying on me, Aisha and Marij, reporting back to someone. I don’t know. It just seems strange that after all these months someone appears out of the blue to offer help and wells and clinics. You might be promising these things to distract us from what you’re really doing here—how would we know?’

  Kam stood up then reached out his hand, silently offering to help her to her feet.

  ‘You have to trust,’ he said, and she wasn’t sure whether he meant trust in taking his hand or in believing him.

  She didn’t take his hand just in case, although that was more to do with the dangers of touching him than trust.