would you mind looking at Felix Runnard? He’s been listless all day and now he’s developed a fever. His mum’s not due to pick him up until eight tonight and her boss gives her a hard time if she has to leave early. We’ve popped him into isolation but...what do you think? Should we ring his mum?’ Margie Lane, the childcare supervisor, was a sensible woman who didn’t fuss but she’d sounded worried.
So Beth had put aside her longing for home and sat down with the little boy on her lap.
A slight fever? The staff had taken his temp an hour ago but now he was burning. He was also arching his head and crying when she touched his neck.
Fever. Sore neck. No sign of a virus. Alarm bells had rung.
‘Check his tummy for me,’ she’d told Margie as she cradled him, and Margie had lifted his singlet and removed his nappy.
The beginnings of a rash.
Meningitis?
The childcare centre was in the shopping plaza, as was the clinic Beth worked from. She sent someone to the clinic for antibiotics and injected a first dose straight away. She could hope her tentative diagnosis was wrong, but she couldn’t wait for confirmation. If she was right, immediate antibiotics could make all the difference.
An hour later Felix and his parents were in the med. evacuation chopper on their way to Sydney. Meningitis hadn’t been confirmed but Beth wasn’t wasting time doing the tests herself. If the infection was moving fast, Namborra wasn’t where he needed to be. It was better to bail out early, maybe even terrify his parents unnecessarily, than risk the unthinkable.
Even after he’d left, there’d been things to do. She’d cleaned herself with care, then organised for parents to be contacted, with antibiotics ordered for anyone who’d been in contact with Felix. Finally she’d stripped again—one thing a country GP always carried was a change of clothes. She’d then hugged her own little Toby and carried him out through the undercover car park.
He was whinging because he was tired. She was also tired, but Toby didn’t have meningitis and right now she felt the luckiest mother in the world.
‘Let’s have spaghetti for tea,’ she told Toby, and his little face brightened.
‘Worms.’
‘Exactly. How many worms would you like?’
‘One, two, a hundred,’ he crowed, and buried his head in her shoulder.
She hugged him tight and headed toward the entrance. Doug, her next-door neighbour, would be waiting to pick her up. Bless him, she thought, not for the first time. Doug was in his seventies, a widower who spent his days making his garden and his car pristine. When she’d first started working at Namborra he’d noticed the number of taxis she was using and tentatively made his offer. At first she’d been reluctant—her hours were all over the place—but she’d finally accepted that Doug’s offer filled a need for him as well as for her.
Giving was lovely. She’d realised that a long time ago. It was the taking that was the hardest.
So now...she’d kept Doug waiting for over an hour but she couldn’t hurry. The light was dim and she had trouble making out the pillars. Grey on grey was her worst-case scenario.
Sometimes she even conceded a cane would help.
‘Yeah, a toddler in one arm, a holdall and briefcase in the other plus a cane...where? Not going to happen...’
And then she paused.
There was a roaring from above, the sound of a plane.
The town’s small airstrip was close. It wasn’t so unusual for planes to fly overhead, but the approaching roar was so loud it was making the building vibrate.
What the...?
She had a fraction of a second to clutch Toby tighter and duck because that was what she always did when she sensed trouble. Keep your head out of the firing line...
All of her was in the firing line. So was all of the Namborra Plaza.
* * *
Luc had finally found something to do. A kid playing hockey after school, no shin pads and a ball hit with force. He’d been bleeding impressively as his teacher had tugged him through the emergency doors. The dressing they’d hopefully taped to his lower leg wasn’t doing it.
The kid was ashen and feeling nauseous, mostly from the sight of blood rather than the pain, Luc thought, but eight stitches, a neat dressing and a promise of a scar had him restored to boisterous. ‘You’re sure it’ll scar?’ he demanded.
‘Just a hairline,’ Luc told him.
‘You can’t make it bigger?’
Luc grinned. ‘You want me to re-stitch, only looser?’
The kid chuckled. A nurse appeared with soda and a sandwich and the kid attacked them as if there was no tomorrow.
‘Shin guards from now on,’ Luc told him, and then the beeper in his pocket vibrated.
The hospital used his phone—or the intercom—to page him. The vibrating pager was used for members of the Specialist Disaster Response.
Three buzzes, repeated.
Code One.
Yes!
Or...um...no. He shouldn’t react like this. Code One emergencies meant the highest level of need. It meant that somewhere people were in dire trouble. He should hate it, and a part of him did. After a multiple casualty event, he made use of the SDR’s debriefing service and sometimes even that didn’t stop him lying awake in the small hours, reliving nightmare scenarios.
But this was what he was trained for, and in a way it was what he needed.
One of the team’s more perceptive psychologists had had a go about it once, and for some reason—the nightmares must have been bad—he’d let her probe.
‘Your childhood was traumatic and your mum depended on you?’ In typical psych. fashion she’d put it back on him. ‘How did that make you feel?’
And for some reason he’d let himself think about it.
His mother had walked out on his father when he’d been a toddler. She’d gone from one tumultuous relationship to another, one crisis to another. His earliest memories... ‘Is there anything in the fridge? Go next door and ask Mrs Hobson for something. Tell her I’d kill for a piece of toast. And aspirins. Go on, Luc, Mummy will hug you if you get her an aspirin...’
More dramatically, he remembered a drunk and angry boyfriend tossing them out at midnight. He remembered his aunt arriving and scolding him. ‘What are you doing, boy, standing round doing nothing? Go back inside and demand he give your mother her belongings. Go on, Luc, he won’t hit you. Can’t you see your mother needs you? You’re no use to anyone if you can’t help.’
He’d been seven years old. Somehow he’d faced down his mother’s bullying boyfriend. He’d pushed what
