Children's Doctor, Meant-To-Be Wife

by Meredith Webber

  ‘So, are you free until then? Would you like a lift back to the hotel? Sam would come for a drive, wouldn’t you, Sam? Or would you like to have a look around, see the camp and meet some more of the staff and kids? You could stay to dinner.’

  Was she mad, suggesting this? Finding ways to keep him there, when every minute, every second with him reminded her of what she’d lost?

  ‘I’d like to see the camp. Do I need my shoes?’

  She looked down at his feet, narrow and white—feet quite unused to walking barefoot around an island, walking barefoot anywhere.

  Aristocratic feet, she’d always thought.

  As if aristocratic feet would look any different from ordinary feet! Feet were feet.

  ‘Share the joke?’ he asked, and Beth realised she must have been smiling at her foolishness.

  ‘I was thinking about feet,’ she offered, but didn’t add whose feet, hurrying on to say, ‘You should be okay barefoot. I get around that way all the time, except at work, of course. I doubt the patients would appreciate a barefoot doctor.’

  Aware she was prattling, she led him towards the camp’s main buildings, the dormitories, dining room and hall where discos, concerts and general fun took place, Sam darting ahead, then dashing back behind them, always on the move.

  ‘Where is everyone, Sam?’ she asked, taking his hand to stop the dizzying movement so now the three of them walked along the path.

  ‘Hall! Listening to music, silly music—some old fellow who’s dead. And watching some slides of the birds.’

  ‘After lunch is quiet time,’ Beth explained to Angus. ‘They can go to their rooms or dormitories for a rest, or to the hall where they loll around, look at movies, listen to music or someone reads a story.’

  She sighed.

  ‘Poor kids—this is supposed to be a really fun time for them, going out on the reef, walking through the rainforest at night, spotting the night animals—they came here for an adventure, not to get sick.’

  ‘Those who are well can still enjoy the programmes surely,’ Angus said, removing from Sam’s hands a stick he had picked up before he could behead a bright flower from a shrub beside the path.

  ‘Yes, they can,’ Beth agreed, but she still felt the fun had been blighted—the joy of camp diminished somehow.

  ‘Obviously there are competent support staff,’ Angus said, poking his head into one of the older huts now used for arts and crafts. ‘How many do they have? And who provides them?’

  ‘The organisation sending the kids sends one person—we’ve got Miranda, who is a respiratory physician, with the chest group, and Benita with the cancer kids. Then Crocodile Creek Hospital supplies more support staff—Susie, our physio, and usually an occupational therapist as well. On top of that are local volunteers, people from Crocodile Creek who’ve been involved since the beginning—a guy who’s a crocodile hunter—’

  ‘Bruce, he’s my friend and he’s going to take me crocodile hunting before we go home,’ Sam said, jumping up and down in anticipated excitement.

  ‘A crocodile hunter? Surely crocodiles are protected,’ Angus protested, and Beth flashed him a smile, shaking her head to warn him not to spoil Sam’s fun.

  ‘They are, but if you’re a tourist from overseas and you want to see crocodiles in their natural habitat, do you want to go out in a boat with a guide or with someone who calls himself a crocodile hunter?’

  She spoke quietly, but Sam had dashed ahead again, maybe in search of Bruce, entering a hall not much farther along the track.

  Angus returned Beth’s smile, reminding her of the folly of being close to him any more than was absolutely necessary. But it also made her feel warm and happy inside—almost complete…

  And she’d missed him so much…

  ‘So Bruce—that’s hardly the name for a crocodile-hunter hero, is it?—is a volunteer, and I suppose the others are equally unlikely.’

  ‘They are. There’s the mayor and sometimes the CEO of the sugar mill—his son Harry is in charge of the local police station. Harry’s married to Grace, the nurse you met at the hospital this morning.’

  ‘And I’ve met Harry as well. He flew in this morning to ensure the quarantine order is carried out—he’s the official heavyweight, from what I can gather.’

  They’d reached the hall, carefully constructed to withstand future cyclones but looking as if it had grown among the palm trees, a building at one with its surroundings.

  ‘The dormitories, girls’ and boys’, are over there.’ Beth waved her hand to the two equally well-designed buildings. ‘And the dining room is behind them. The paths here, as you can see, are compacted sand to make wheelchair access easier. I’m sorry, I’d forgotten that—is the surface rough on your feet?’

  Angus heard the anxious note in her voice and wanted to shake her—gently—to tell her she had to stop worrying about other people quite so much. But that was Beth and nothing would change her, and his urge to shake turned into an urge to hug.

  But hugs would lead to other urges that were already causing some concern, not in his body which was revelling in this contact with his ex-wife, but in his head, where images of Beth he thought he’d excised years ago were now flashing on a memory screen.

  Beth serving him a hot, delicious meal at midnight when he’d come in from work so tired and frazzled the last thing he’d wanted to do was eat. Yet he’d known he had to so he’d sat, and while he’d eaten, she’d massaged his shoulders and neck, her fingers easing out the knots of strain until, well fed and more relaxed, he’d been able to take her on his knee and feel the rest of the frustration of the day disappear from his body, lost in the softness that was Beth.

  He watched her as she walked through the open door into the big hall, its walls decorated with huge posters showing coral and bright fish, reminders everywhere that they were in a national park and not to touch animals or plants in the water or on the land.

  Inside, children and teenagers sat or lay in groups on the floor, some talking, some listening to stories. No dead person’s music that Angus could hear, although Sam had attached himself to a man in a battered hat—so battered Angus suspected it had holes poked in it by a sharp knife to represent a tussle with crocodile teeth.

  One of the older camp kids, a teenage boy with the blond-streaked hair of a surfer, saw them come in. Angus saw him prod the girl beside him, a pretty teenager, the baseball cap backwards on her head suggesting recent chemo.

  ‘Here’s Beth,’ the lad called out. ‘Dance for us, Beth.’

  The girl clapped her hands, starting a movement that ran around the room.

  ‘Dance, Beth, dance, Beth!’ The kids clapped and chanted and though Beth smiled it was forced, while the look she sent to Angus was one of pure, anguished apology.

  ‘I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come here—this is silly—but I can’t say no, you can see that. The kids…’

  Her shoulders lifted in a rueful shrug, and with a final tormented smile at Angus she made her way to the front of the hall, where Sam, deserting his mate, now joined her, a toy dog in his hands.

  Without looking at it, Angus could have described the toy—a brown dog, dressed in a top hat and tails, its front paws holding drumsticks, a drum in front of it. And as Sam pressed the button to start the music, Angus felt his heart contract into a hard, tight lump. The first time he’d seen Beth she’d been in the children’s ward at the hospital, dancing to the beat of a similar drumming dog, singing along with it. A year later he’d surprised her by buying another copy of the toy for Bobby and it had become his favourite, so he’d gone to sleep each night to the dog beating out the toe-tapping tune, ‘Putting on the Ritz’.

  Had Beth bought this particular toy for the kids’camp? Angus suspected she had, for it certainly wasn’t Bobby’s dog. Bobby’s dog was—

  ‘Start the music again, Sam,’ Beth was saying. ‘I’ll only dance if all of you who know the steps get up with me,’ she said, and a knot of small children scampered ou
t to join her.

  ‘Go on, Star,’ the surfie-looking lad said to the girl beside him.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I will eventually because Beth’s so patient, just not yet.’

  And to Angus’s surprise, the young lad reached over and took the girl’s hand, whispering, though loudly enough for Angus to hear. ‘I know you will!’

  But familiar music at the front of the room diverted Angus’s attention from the young couple.

  And as Beth tap-danced across the front of the room, her hands clapping to produce the taps her bare feet couldn’t, he understood her fractured sentences earlier and the worry that had stained her voice, but, watching, he thought not of Bobby but of the day he’d met Bobby’s mother…

  The day she’d tap-danced her way into his heart.

  Except that he hadn’t realised that’s where she had been until it was too late and both she and Bobby were gone.

  And he had been left with his work…

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HE WALKED out of the hall, making his way back to the beach, not wanting to see Beth—not wanting her to see him and divine the emotion the silly drum-beating dog had aroused in him.

  A dead bird lay in the centre of the path, and he felt the scrunch of panic in his chest. It was well within the boundaries of the camp. What if one of the children had picked it up?

  He felt in his pocket, sure there’d be a plastic bag, but, no, he was on a holiday island—at a conference—so why would he be carrying plastic bags? The dining room must be close—Beth had said it was behind the dormitories—but in the meantime there was the bird.

  ‘Ah, another one.’

  He turned to see an elderly man behind him. The man was dragging a large garbage bag and carrying a tool road-cleaners used to pick up rubbish from the verges. He pressed the handle so the jaws at the end of the long tool opened, then clamped them around the bird and dumped it into his bag.

  Angus watched with a mix of horror and relief.

  ‘The rangers are supposed to be collecting the dead birds,’ he protested. ‘And they’re supposed to be wearing protective covering and masks. You should be, too, if you’re picking up dead birds.’

  ‘It’s not bird flu,’ the man said, and he sounded so sure of himself Angus was inclined to believe him, though for no scientific reason at all. ‘They’re falling out of the sky, the birds. I’ve been watching. It’s not the birds that got here safely that are sick, but the ones still coming in. The fishermen out on the reef have seen it, too. Now, I’m no fancy scientist but it seems to me birds sick with bird flu would have died before they got this far. Say they got sick in China on the way, they wouldn’t have had the strength to fly for another week to get here, now, would they? I reckon these birds aren’t sick, they’re exhausted.’

  Again the memory of hearing something about birds and exhaustion tickled in Angus’s head but he still couldn’t grasp the significance of it. In the meantime, this man seemed to know what he was talking about.

  ‘Do you live here on the island?’ he asked, and the man shook his head, then extended his hand.

  ‘Grubb’s m’name but people call me Grubby—don’t mind that they do. The wife and I, we work at the hospital over on the mainland—have done for more’n forty years. Met there when we were youngsters, got married forty years ago. Charles, he reckons we should celebrate the anniversary, gives us time off, and there’s nothing for it, Mrs Grubb announces, but that we come over as volunteers for the kids. She loves the kids.’

  Angus stared at the man who’d imparted a lifetime of information so succinctly, then backtracked.

  ‘But you know something about these migratory birds?’

  Grubby twisted the top on the plastic bag before answering. ‘Been coming to the island for holidays since I was a kid. Was here when the university fellas tagged all the mutton birds and tracked them all the way back to Siberia in Russia—did you know that’s where they go when they’re not here? Funny, that, from a tropical place to snow. Course, people coming to the posh resort don’t take kindly to a bird named common like a mutton bird, so they call ’em by their right name—shearwaters—now. But mutton birds they are here and always will be. Used to be a plant here that boiled them down for oil. Powerful stuff, mutton-bird oil used to be considered. Easy to catch because they burrow, you see.’

  Hardly comforting news, Angus decided as Grubby departed, the sack now slung over his shoulder. How many dead birds might be hidden in the burrows? And just where was Grubby going to despatch his dead birds?

  Hurrying after the man, Angus discovered he was going to the medical centre.

  ‘I put ’em in the hazardous waste drums, seal ’em up and shove them in the freezer with the other contaminated hospital waste. Fly it out once a week because they’ve only got a small freezer unit here, and it’s collected from the hospital on the mainland once a month.’

  ‘Can you wait while I get my shoes? I’d like to see the process,’ Angus said.

  Grubby rested his sack on the ground by way of reply and waited until Angus returned, neatly shod and with his trousers rolled back down.

  By the time he’d had a tour of the medical centre’s disposal facilities and spoken to Charles about plans for the arrival and placement of the mobile units, it was late afternoon.

  He should, by rights, return to the hotel and join his colleagues for dinner, but he found he had no desire at all for theoretical conversation when the containment of a possible epidemic was happening right here and now. He was also drawn to return to Beth’s little hut, sure she’d be there now.

  But that might look needy, and needy was a weakness his father had ruthlessly eliminated from Angus’s nature. A man should be complete within himself, using the intelligence he had been given to programme his life to perfection. Yes, there were physical needs genetically wired into us for the survival of the species, but these could be satisfied by mutual agreement between a man and a woman. They did not have to be romanticised, or emotionalised—that way lay disaster.

  Angus shuddered as his father’s edicts rang so clearly in his head. How had he, Angus, an intelligent man, allowed himself to be so brainwashed?

  Although he couldn’t entirely blame the brainwashing. Hadn’t he learned the truth himself, that day, aged seven, when he’d whispered those fatal words, ‘I love you, Mum,’ to his mother as he’d left for school, returning in the afternoon to find her gone…

  He pushed away the memories, not wanting them hanging like a black cloud around his head, thinking he’d visit the little boy and the thick black clouds might be visible to a child.

  Robbie…

  The name was nothing more than coincidence, but when he entered the room and found Beth beside the little boy’s bed, he knew she, too, felt the tie.

  She turned at his entry, her eyes, above the blue mask she wore, dark with worry.

  ‘No good?’ Angus murmured, lifting a second chair and setting down noiselessly beside Beth’s, lifting the mask that hung around his neck and fastening it into place.

  ‘No good at all. He’s lapsing in and out of consciousness, and then Danny, one of the other children who’d been isolated, has been admitted following a seizure. Then there’s Lily—Alex, the guest who’s a neurosurgeon, did a lumbar puncture on her yesterday afternoon.’

  Robbie was tossing and turning on the bed, at times muttering feverishly then quietening, before the muttering began again.

  ‘The earlier test results not back?’ Angus asked, and Beth shook her head.

  ‘Apparently there was some mix-up and they were sent to Brisbane rather than being done locally, then the containers were lost at the lab.’ The words were muffled by the mask but the story familiar enough. Why was it always the important specimens or slides that went missing? ‘Charles has spent hours on the phone this afternoon, trying to chase them down. I think he’s found where they are and is pushing for a result asap. On top of that, he’s desperately concerned about Lily.’

&nbs
p; ‘Depending on the facilities in this mobile lab they’re sending, I could do the tests here tomorrow.’

  He sounded quite cheerful about it, but Beth couldn’t help feeling guilty. She was feeling a lot of other things as well, with Angus so close, but guilt was the only one she could consider right now.

  ‘I’m sorry I got you into this,’ she said. ‘But you don’t have to stay involved. I know Charles must have been enormously grateful to have someone like you to back him up over the steps he had to take, but now things are all under way, you could go back to your conference.’

  Angus was watching Robbie, stroking the little boy’s arm with the tip of his gloved forefinger. Beth waited for him to turn, to look at her, but when he answered, he kept his eyes on the sick child in the bed.

  ‘I’ll be needed here tomorrow when the lab arrives,’ he said. ‘So I may as well stay. Problem is, Charles tells me accommodation on this side of the island is fully booked. Am I right in thinking that old couch of yours folds out into a bed?’

  Beth heard the words—and none of them were complex or difficult to understand—but taken together they didn’t make a lot of sense.

  Well, they did, but the sense they made filled her with apprehension.

  ‘You want to stay here? On this side? It’s only fifteen minutes in a cart from the resort where you’ve got a comfortable bed, yet you’d sleep on my old couch?’

  ‘I’d rather be close to the action,’ he said, still not looking at her, but Beth could feel it now, the physical attraction that had stirred between them from their first meeting. It was filtering beneath her skin, and teasing alert the hairs on her arms. It was heating tissues deep inside her, and making her breasts ache with wanting.

  ‘Just close to the action?’ she whispered, accenting the final word only slightly.

  Now he looked at her, his hazel eyes meeting hers, a slight flush on his cheeks.

  Sun-kissed from his walk on the beach or something else?