would ease her pain, he thought, but he also knew that the longer the shoulder stayed dislocated, the higher the chance of long-term damage.
In the Middle East he’d had a mate who had...
Um, no. He wasn’t going there.
He did a further tour and found the radio in a truly impressive study. Claire had been right: there was no transmission. He headed outside and saw a wooden building blasted to splinters. A huge radio antenna lay smashed among the timber.
No joy there.
‘You’re on your own,’ he muttered, and pushed away the waves of exhaustion and headed back to the living room.
She was still lying where he’d left her, but her rigidity seemed to have lessened.
He knelt beside her. ‘Better?’
‘Better,’ she whispered. ‘Just leave me be.’
‘I can’t do that. Claire, we’re going to have to get that arm back into position.’
‘My arm wants to stay really still.’
‘And I’m going to have to hurt you,’ he told her. ‘But if I don’t hurt you now you may have long-term damage.’
‘How do I know it’s not broken?’
‘You don’t. I don’t. So I’m using basic first aid, and the first rule is Do no harm. We were taught a method which only sometimes works, but its huge advantage is that it won’t hurt a fracture. If there’s a fracture the arm will scream at you and you’ll scream at me and we’ll stop.’ He hoped. ‘Claire, I need you to lie on your front and let your arm hang down. We’ll put a few cushions under you so your arm is high enough to hang freely. Then I’m going to gradually weight your arm, using sticking plaster to attach things like cans of beans...’
‘Beans?’
‘Anything I can find.’ He smiled. ‘In an emergency, anything goes. My first-aid trainer said if I ask you to grip the cans then your arm will tense, so I just need to stick them on you as dead weights. Then we’ll let the nice drugs do their work. You’ll lie back and think of England, and the tins of beans will tug your arm down, and if you relax completely then I’m hoping it’ll pop back in.’
‘Think of England?’
‘Or sunbeams,’ he told her. ‘Anything to take your mind off your arm.’
She appeared to think about that for a moment, maybe choosing from a list of options. And then she opened her eyes and glanced up at him, taking in his appearance. From head to toe.
‘Nice,’ she whispered. ‘I think I’ll think about you. If you knew how different you look to Don... Don fills his T-shirt up with beer belly. You fill it up with...you.’
‘Me?’
‘Muscles.’
Right. It was the drugs talking, he thought. He needed to stop looking into her eyes and quit smiling at her like an idiot and think of her as a patient. As one of the guys in his unit, injured in the field. Work.
Nothing personal at all.
But he needed to get her relaxed. He knelt beside her and pushed a damp curl from her eyes. She was little and dark and feisty, and her freckles were very, very cute. Her hair was still damp from her soaking. He would have liked to get her completely dry, but he was working through a list of imperatives. Arm first.
‘H... How does this work?’ she muttered.
‘The socket’s like a cup,’ he told her. ‘I think your arm’s slipped out of the cup, but it still has muscles that want it to go back in. If we weight it, and you’re relaxed, then your muscles have a chance to pull it back into place.’
That was the theory, anyway. If it worked. If the arm wasn’t broken. But the weighting method was the only safe course of action. To pull on a broken arm could mean disaster. Gradual weighting was the only way, but she had to trust him.
And it seemed she did.
‘Do it,’ she said, and smiled up at him. ‘Only we don’t have baked beans. How about tins of caviar?’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘No. But there are tinned tomatoes as well.’ Then she appeared to brighten. ‘And we have tins of truly appalling instant coffee. It’d be great if they could be useful for something.’
She smiled up at him and he thought of the pain she was suffering, and the sheer courage she was showing, and the fact that she was smiling to make him smile...
And he smiled back at her and backed away—because a man had to back away fast from a smile like that—and went to find some truly useful cans of coffee.
* * *
Somehow he stayed businesslike. Professional. Somehow he followed the instructions in his head from first-aid training in the field. He taped on the weights. He watched for her to react from too much pain, but although she winced as he weighted her arm she didn’t make a murmur.
He put on as much weight as he thought she could tolerate and then he sat beside her and waited.
‘What do we do now?’ she asked.
‘Relax. Forget the arm. Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you a story.’
‘What sort of story?’
He thought about it. He needed a story that would make her almost soporific so the arm would totally relax.
‘How about Goldilocks and the Three Bears?’ he suggested, and she choked.
‘Really?’
‘Has anyone ever read it to you?’
‘I guess...not for a very long time.’
‘Same for me,’ he told her. ‘So correct me if I get the bears muddled. Okay, here goes.’
And he sat by the couch and stroked her hair and told her the story of the three bears. It was a simple story—not long enough—so he had to embellish it. He had Goldilocks as a modern-day Bond girl, escaping from villains. He had his bears trying to figure the villains from the good guys, and he put in a bit of drama for good measure.
In other words he had fun, blocking the fuzziness in his own head with the need to keep her attention. And as Baby Bear found Goldilocks, and good guys and baddies were sorted, and baddies were dispatched with buckets of Mama Bear’s too-hot porridge, and they all settled down for toast and marmalade, Claire’s arm did what he’d desperately hoped it would do. It clicked back into its socket.
In the silence of the room, between breaks in the very exciting narrative, they actually heard it pop.
The relief did his head in.
It was almost as if he hadn’t realised what stress he’d been under until the arm clicked back into place. The sound was like an
