kid.
Luke was a self-destructive idiot for even thinking about the kid…
Now, here he was in the post office of this little town an hour north of Crocodile Creek at what the local State Emergency Service had turned into a makeshift medical clinic. So that the citizens of Bellambour who weren’t planning to leave the town could see a doctor if they needed to.
Charles Wetherby had virtually ordered Luke to take some time off that morning. ‘You made it to Mike and Emily’s wedding celebration for, what, twenty minutes, the other night?’ Crocodile Creek Hospital’s medical director had accused. ‘Just long enough to get Alistair Carmichael’s blood up when you danced with Georgie. And you’ve been working nonstop since. You need to get out of this place and breathe some air.’
‘I’m fine, Charles.’ Gritted teeth.
‘You’re not, but I can tell you don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I don’t want any time off.’ Not until Janey Stafford had regained consciousness and he would hopefully be able to see her. Until then, he’d take any distractions he could.
And he wouldn’t think about the kid.
‘Would it help if I sent you on a busman’s holiday?’ Charles had asked.
‘If you’ll tell me what that is.’
‘Hmm, I keep forgetting that anyone under thirty-five only learns American slang. I’ll send you out on a clinic run, so you can at least have a change of scene while you work yourself into the ground. That’s what I’m trying to say.’
‘That’d be great…’ he’d said, meaning it.
‘Check the broken arm out the old-fashioned way, by feel,’ Marcia said now.
‘And then a backslab and a bandage,’ Luke agreed, dragging his focus back. ‘Shouldn’t be a tough case. If it is displaced, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.’
‘If it’s not washed away, like half the other bridges around here.’
He gave a dutiful laugh. It came out rusty, so different from the charm-laden sound he’d once used to such good effect. He sighed. ‘OK, I’ll see him next.’
‘And then the old man, and last of all you can get to the guy who’s doing all the complaining!’
‘You’re punishing him for complaining the most?’
‘I think if there was really something wrong with him, he wouldn’t have the energy left for it.’
‘The Flynn triage system.’ He appreciated Marcia. She was quick-witted and cheerful, the type who used nursing as a ticket to see the world, and good for her, having that spirit of adventure. He liked a woman with energy and spark. She probably wouldn’t stay in Crocodile Creek much longer. ‘Treat the quiet ones first. I like it, Marcia.’
But his heart wasn’t really committed to the conversation, Luke knew. He’d been like this for three days, running on autopilot, locking back into focus when he saw a serious case but at other times not really there. When he looked back on the incredible days of the cyclone and its aftermath in the weeks and months to come, he knew he would probably remember it differently to how everyone else did.
Because of Janey Stafford.
Three days ago in the middle of the night, just hours before the cyclone had hit, hearing Janey’s name in the A and E department when Marcia had turned up some ID, he’d felt an electric prickle of shock all the way up his spine. He’d had to check the woman’s identity for himself, with his own eyes—reach out and take a look beneath her oxygen mask to make sure it was really and seriously the same Janey Stafford, Alice’s sister, not someone else.
He’d recognised her at once. The glossy mid-brown hair, the brown eyes, the freckles, the features that weren’t quite regular enough to make her beautiful, except when she smiled, which of course she hadn’t been doing then, in her unconscious state.
And although he’d played down their past relationship to his colleagues, he’d been thinking about her ever since. Wondering why she was there. Wondering if he was kidding himself that it had anything to do with him. Remembering how steady and sensible she’d always been, unlikely to come to Crocodile Creek on a whim. Thinking of his lost son and—
Stop it, Luke.
You can’t afford this.
The ten-year-old with the iffy arm appeared in the makeshift clinic along with his mum, and Luke snapped back into the pretence of focus—into the cheerful humour that his fellow doctors might think was designed to lighten the atmosphere of disaster and loss all around them, but they were wrong. The humour was really just a way of anchoring himself to the work he had to do.
‘So?’ he said to the scruffy ten-year-old. ‘Circus tricks? Rodeo riding? Jumping off a fence wearing paper wings and trying to fly?’
The kid gave a reluctant grin. ‘Nah. We were cleaning up the mud in the living room and I slipped on it.’ Not a story you were tempted to doubt when he still had a crust of dried mud all down his side, and when dozens of homes around here had fine, flood-washed silt inches thick on their floors. The mother nodded, too.
‘You didn’t consider a bath before you came in?’
‘We’re saving water.’
Ironic, when they’d just had about twenty inches of the stuff coming down from the sky, but Luke understood the situation. The family could have lost their rainwater tank in the storm, creeks were contaminated with debris and dead animals, town mains supplies were cut off or compromised in some other way. The damage and danger hadn’t ended on Sunday with the passage of the storm.
‘How’s your arm now? Does it hurt?’ He went through some standard questions and checks, decided the forearm was fractured but not displaced and so the backslab and bandage would be fine. He’d do it himself because Marcia was still treating some dodgy-looking cuts on their previous patient.
And while he wrapped the bandage, he wondered about Janey.
If she’d been brought out of her medically induced coma.
If she was talking yet.
If she was in contact with her sister.
If he could possibly go and sit beside her hospital bed and wangle anything out of her about Frankie Jay. If she acted cagey, told out-and-out lies, or if she really knew nothing, the way she’d claimed the last time he’d spoken to her by phone from England several years ago.
‘Just a couple of mosquito bites.’
He blinked. The kid with the arm had gone, and here was the old man, playing down the infected bites covering a pair of ancient, skinny, reddish-purple legs which didn’t look as if they boasted very good circulation.
And, of course, Luke was aware that he’d finished with the kid and called the old man in.
Of course he was.
He’d said the right words. Bring him in to the hospital outpatient
