Who the hell was this interloper from the east coast? She had contacts and she’d find out because learning about the enemy was a vital part of the strategy of winning.
But as the final strips of paper floated to the floor, her anger faded almost as fast as it had come and uncharacteristic tears of frustration and devastation pricked her eyes. Suddenly she was whipped back in time to when she had been a gangly ten-year-old girl valiantly trying to hold back tears after a drubbing in the first set of a tennis final, one of the few matches her father had actually turned up to watch.
He’d crossed his arms and stared down at her, his expression filled with derision. ‘Don’t be such a girl. Do you think boys cry? They don’t. They just go out there and win.’
Shaking her head as if that would get rid of the memory, she stomped into her bedroom and hauled a suitcase out of the wardrobe. If Bundallagong Hospital needed a surgeon then, by God, they were getting one, and the staff there wouldn’t know what had hit them. She’d clear the waiting list, reorganise the department, overhaul the budget, meet every target and make William and the board sit up and take notice. Nobody put Poppy Stanfield in a corner.
Dr Matt Albright was on an island beach. The balmy tropical breeze skimmed over his sun-warmed skin and a book lay face-down on his naked chest, resting in the same position it had been for the last half-hour. ‘Daddy, watch me!’
He waved to his daughter as she played in the shallow and virtually waveless water, then he rolled onto his side towards his wife, who lay next to him, reading. At that precise moment he knew his life was perfect in every way.
She glanced up and smiled in her quiet and unassuming way.
He grinned. ‘You do realise I’ve loved you from the moment you hit me with play dough at kinder.’
Her tinkling laughter circled him and he leaned in to kiss her, knowing her mouth as intimately as his own. He reached out to curve his hand around her shoulder, trying to pull her closer, but his fingers closed in on themselves, digging into his palm. He tried again, this time cupping her cheeks, but they vanished the moment he tried to touch them.
‘Daddy!’
He turned towards his daughter’s voice and saw her evaporating, along with the water that tore all the sand from the beach. Panic bubbled hot and hard in his veins and he sat up fast, hearing the sound of his voice screaming ‘No!’
His eyes flew open into darkness, his heart thundering against his ribs and sweat pouring down his face. His hands gripped something so hard they ached and he realised his fingers were digging deep into the edge of the mattress. He wasn’t on a beach.
He was in a bed.
Slowly his eyes focused and he recognised the silhouette of his wardrobe, and he heard the thumping and scratching of the goanna that had at some point in the last few months, without any protest from him, moved into the roof.
Bundallagong. He was in Bundallagong.
He fell back onto the pillow and stared blindly up at the ceiling. His heart rate slowed and the tightness in his chest eased and for one brief and blessed moment he felt nothing at all. Then the ever-present emptiness, which the dream had momentarily absorbed, rushed back in. It expanded wide and long, filling every crevice, every cell and tainting every single breath.
Sleep was over. He swung his legs out of bed, walked into the lounge room, stared out into the night, and waited for the dawn.
‘And how long have you had this pain, Sam?’ Poppy pulled the modesty sheet back over the young man’s abdomen.
He shrugged. ‘Dunno. I think I saw Dr Albright about a month ago but then it just went away.’ ‘And is today’s pain worse than a month ago?’
‘A lot.’
‘The nurse tells me you’ve been vomiting?’ ‘Yeah, sorry about that.’
Poppy tried not to smile. Dressed in tough mining workwear, and looking like not even a bullet could take him down, Sam’s politeness and air of bewilderment reminded her of a young boy rather than a strapping and fit man of twenty.
‘I’ll be back in a bit, Sam.’ Poppy pulled the screen curtains shut behind her as she stepped out into the compact emergency department, running the symptoms through her head—fever, high white blood cell count, rebound tenderness and an ultrasound that showed nothing unusual, although that in itself wasn’t unusual. The process of diagnosis soothed her like the action of a soothing balm and she relaxed into the feeling.
The shock of landing two hours ago on the Marsscape that was Bundallagong still had her reeling. The green of the river-hugging suburbs of Perth had not prepared her for the barrenness of the Pilbara. When she’d exited the plane, her feet had stuck mutinously to the roll-away airport stairs as her gaze had taken in the flat, red dust plains that stretched to the horizon in three directions. Then the ferocious dripping heat had hit her like an impenetrable wall and it had been like walking into a raging furnace with an aftershock of wet, cloying steam. The irony wasn’t lost on her—William had sent her to hell.
The only way to reduce her ‘sentence’ was to start work so she’d asked the taxi driver to take her directly to the hospital. The fact it was a Sunday afternoon mattered little because the sooner she started her rotation, the sooner she could finish. She’d planned to spend a couple of hours studying medical histories and drawing up her first week’s surgical list but as she’d arrived, so had Sam. The nurse on duty had happily accepted her offer of help with a smile, saying, ‘Thanks heaps. It’ll give the on-call doctor a break.’
Now Poppy walked briskly to the nurses’ station and dropped the history in front of Jen Smithers, whose badge read ‘Nursing Administrator’. ‘Sam’s got appendicitis so if you can arrange everything, I’ll meet him in Theatre in an hour.’
The nurse, who Poppy guessed was of a similar age to her, looked up, a startled expression on her face. ‘So it’s an emergency case?’
‘Not strictly, but he’ll be better off without his appendix and there’s no time like the present.’
‘Ah.’ Jen spun a pen through her fingers, as if considering her thoughts.
Poppy rarely took no for an answer and the ‘Ah’ sounded ominous. She made a snap decision: she needed the nursing staff on her side but she also needed to show she was the one in charge of the team. ‘Jen, I call a spade a spade and I don’t play games. I’ll be straight with you and you need to be straight with me. I want to operate on Sam this afternoon and I expect you to do your job so I can do mine.’
Jen nodded, her demeanour friendly yet professional. ‘Fair enough. I can get nursing staff in to staff Theatre and Recovery, but that isn’t going to be enough. It’s the anaesthetic registrar’s weekend off and he’s not due back from Bali until this evening’s flight.’
Gobsmacked, Poppy stared at her, not knowing whether to be more stunned that a person could fly direct to Bali from the middle of nowhere or the fact that it left the town without an anaesthetist. ‘Surely there’s someone else?’
‘Well, yes, technically there is, but …’
A tight band of tension burned behind Poppy’s eyes. Hell, she really had come to Mars. She didn’t have time for staff politics, especially if they got in the way of her doing her job and proving to William that she
