my grandfather’s escargots,’ said Gill.
Hmm, thought Harriet. Now, that she could relate to. Henri cooked the best snails. They were addictive.
‘The zoo. And frozen cobwebs,’ said Helmut.
Well, living in Sydney, she didn’t see too many frozen anything but she understood the sentiment. In this place it didn’t even get cool overnight. Just the same oppressive heat. No wonder the locals were so crazy. If she had to live here permanently, she’d want to kill somebody, too.
‘Ice-skating and vodka. The proper stuff,’ said Katya. Everyone laughed, no doubt remembering the time they’d all got merry together at an airport stopover a few years back on Katya’s vodka when their plane had been delayed.
‘The Mersey and British Rail,’ said Joan, and laughed at her own joke.
‘Well, I’m going to say shopping in the high street and the smell of peat fires,’ said Siobhan in her lilting Irish accent.
Harriet and Gill had stayed a few days at Siobhan’s family’s farm deep in the Irish countryside five years ago, and she’d loved the earthy smell of burning peat as well. Harriet smiled fondly at the memory and it took her a few seconds to register that they were waiting for her contribution.
She glanced at Gill and quickly looked away as she met his steady grey gaze. What she missed most about home was the beachfront apartment she and Gill lived in at Bondi, and how they would make love all night and sleep till noon, then stroll along past all the cafés and eat pasta at their favourite Italian one. She missed that a lot.
‘Mangoes.’
She smiled as an unbidden memory of Gill feeding her mango in bed rose in her mind. He had trailed the seed over her breasts and then thoroughly removed the sweet, heavenly juices with his tongue. She blinked. ‘And…um…sun-baking.’
Gill had the same mango image in his mind and felt his mouth water. He looked at her when she mentioned sun-baking and remembered how she liked to go nude on the beach so her olive skin wasn’t marred by white strap marks.
He smiled to himself. Once a hippy, always a hippy. Harriet had been brought up by alternative lifestyle parents who still lived a communal existence in the hinterland of the mid New South Wales coast. They had instilled in her a wonderful sense of justice and fairness and doing unto others, and he knew they had made her the wonderful humanitarian she was today.
And because of this lifestyle he didn’t think he’d met anyone quite as at ease with their body or nudity as Harry. At home she barely wore clothes and every opportunity she got to disrobe she took gleefully. And, dear God, what a body it was. As far as he was concerned, she could be permanently naked. But unfortunately…he’d just signed away any rights to seeing her naked ever again.
Her gaze met his and for a moment he felt as if she was thinking the same thing. No more nudity. No more Bondi. No more mangoes or barbeques or escargots. At least, not together. Did she feel that loss as keenly as he did or had she had time to get used to it? After all, in their year of separation he had never seriously believed that either of them would make it permanent. But she’d obviously thought about it a lot.
‘What are the chances, do you think,’ Katya asked in her accented English, ‘we will get out of here before any more casualties arrive?’
‘Zero,’ said Helmut, pessimistic as always.
The turn in conversation brought Gill out of his trance and he reluctantly broke eye contact with Harriet. Their flight left at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning. It wasn’t unknown to go twenty-four hours without incoming wounded, but it was the exception rather than the rule.
He found himself in a perverse kind of way hoping there would be. Not that he wished any of the locals ill, he just knew from the last two months that the human carnage was showing no signs of abating, the civil war gathering momentum if anything, and that it was never long between skirmishes. If it was going to happen, just bring it on, he thought. He needed to keep busy today so he didn’t have to think about Harriet and the divorce and how badly his life was going to suck without her.
CHAPTER FOUR
1000 HOURS
ON THEIR way to the morning triage meeting, Katya caught up with Harriet.
‘One more sleep, Harry,’ she said.
Harriet laughed. Katya was the youngest of the three nurses that formed their surgical team and had been with MedSurg Aid Abroad for four years. Harriet loved to listen to her talk. Her grasp of the English language was superb and her accent very easy on the ear, adding a husky quality to what she was saying.
She especially liked it when Katya, the most volatile of the group, lost her cool, which happened from time to time in the presence of such senseless carnage. She would slip back into her native Russian every third or fourth word and especially when she couldn’t think of an insulting enough English word.
Katya always said that Russian swear words were much more poetic than English. And listening to her in full flight, Harriet had to admit she was right. It was as if Katya was reciting Tolstoy, the frown on her pretty animated face a reminder that her words weren’t really high literature at all.
‘You do know how happy we all are that you and Gill are back together.’
Harriet’s step faltered briefly. A denial rose to her lips but looking at the joy on her friend’s face she didn’t have the heart to speak the truth. What was the point? Their mission was over tomorrow. Why not part with everyone thinking she and Gill were going to live happily ever after? This fine group of people wanted so badly for them to be happy, for it to be like it had been. They would all know the truth soon enough.
Harriet smiled and nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’
Katya grinned back at her and not for the first time Harriet thought what a good match Gill and Katya would make. In fact, she half suspected that they would have hooked up in her absence. The blonde, petite Russian nurse was very pretty in a perky kind of a way and there had been a time when Katya had first joined their team that she’d had a huge crush on Gill.
Not that Harriet had ever felt threatened by it. If anything, it had been amusing and Katya had been far too young and innocent to take seriously. Gill and the group had been patient and allowed her to get over her hero-worship without an embarrassing confrontation.
But there didn’t seem to even be a whiff of anything having happened. No awkwardness between them, no hushed, secretive conversations, no vibe that they knew each other intimately. Just the same friendly banter that had always existed between them. That the whole team thrived on. That gelled them all together.
She’d hoped Gill had found the idea of casual sex during their separation as abhorrent as she had. That their separation had devastated him as much as her. That sex with someone else just didn’t rate. But he was a virile man with appetites and she didn’t fool herself for a moment that men and women thought the same way about matters relating to sex.
And a year was a long time. A year of living apart, working apart. Harriet had stayed with MedSurg but had joined another surgical team that had gone to different hot-spots and had worked the opposite rotation to Gill’s. So when Gill’s team had been flying home for a month’s R and R, Harriet’s team had been flying elsewhere to start their two-month
