Patrick’s lips began to tremble, as if remembering brought on a panic he hadn’t been able to exhibit earlier when Kal’s life might have depended on him staying calm.
‘He just collapsed, Mum. He’d said earlier he had a headache and I asked why he didn’t take something for it, and he said he’d rather wait and see if the desert air cleared it. He said the city often gave him a headache. Then I said I’d do the barbecue and when I brought the meat across he was lying there.’
‘And you drove him back—how?’ Nell demanded, although her heart was full of fear for Kal. A sudden collapse—a stroke? A brain tumour? Possible diagnoses raced through her mind, but Patrick needed her now—needed to talk through the trauma he’d experienced.
He was explaining how Kal had taught him to drive that morning, and how he’d practised on the sand hills.
Nell hugged him again, praising his courage and his good sense in getting help as soon as he’d got close to the city. Then, as she released him, she saw a group of people sweep through the doors into the ER. A tall, imperious-looking man in a white robe led the way, a small, veiled woman clinging tightly to his arm. Behind this pair were other white robed figures and a gaggle of black-robed women, their faces masked behind the fine veils that fluttered around their heads.
Hospital staff appeared from nowhere, greeting the new arrivals with reverent salaams.
‘Let’s go, Mum,’ Patrick said, and Nell heard panic in the simple words.
She put her arm around his shoulders and led him back the way she’d come in, so he didn’t have to pass these people, who were obviously members of Kal’s family.
‘They will want to see you some time,’ she said carefully. ‘If only to thank you.’
‘Maybe, Mum,’ Patrick said, the break in his voice showing the strain he’d been under. ‘But I’ve just got used to having a father—I don’t think I’m ready for more relations. And Kal might not have told them about me. He told me he’s not married any more, and hasn’t any other children, but whether…’
Nell knew exactly what the ‘whether’ was—Kal had mentioned introducing Patrick to his family but Nell doubted it would happen any time soon…
Although if they were to get married…
We’re not, she reminded herself as they made their way back to the apartment.
‘What could be wrong with him?’ the boy asked, as the elevator rose towards their floor.
‘I don’t know, but he’s in the best place and in good hands.’
‘But you’ll find out how he is, won’t you, Mum? You’ll find someone to ask?’
Nell promised she would, but once inside the apartment she realised Patrick hadn’t eaten so she phoned down to order food, then for the first time it struck her that all her son was wearing was a pair of shorts.
‘I’d been wearing a kandora—the white gown thing they wear,’ he explained. ‘But I took it off to wave it at the cars. Must have left it by the road. It’s one of Kal’s. I hope he won’t be angry.’
‘I’m sure he won’t,’ Nell soothed. ‘But maybe while we wait for dinner, you could have a shower and get into your pyjamas. You’ve had a big day, one way and another.’
So Patrick was in the shower when the knock came on the door. Nell opened it, thinking it was their meal, to find the tall man in the white robe she’d seen earlier in ER.
He had a string of amber worry beads in one hand and she heard the clicking noise they made as he moved them through his fingers. Apart from that, she could only stand and stare, sure this was Kal’s father—an important man, a ruler—unsure what he wanted of her.
‘I thought you would like to know Khalil has regained consciousness. It seems he has a recurrence of a fever not unlike malaria which he picked up in Africa some years ago. But thanks to the boy’s prompt action he was able to be treated swiftly, and though he is very weak and will be kept in hospital for a few days, he will recover.’
Relief from a terror she hadn’t fully realised she’d been feeling flooded through Nell.
‘Thank you for coming. For telling me,’ she said, uncertain whether to ask the man in or not—uncertain what he knew and didn’t know.
But the man didn’t seem discomfited by her silence. He stood there, clicking through the beads, staring at a point somewhere behind her, his eyes thoughtful. Then finally his gaze turned back to her.
‘He is Khalil’s son, this boy?’
Oh, hell! Did Kal want his family to know?
Did it matter what he wanted?
Yes, it did, but so did Patrick’s birthright.
Nell nodded and the man nodded back at her.
‘He told me he had things to discuss and that he would do it soon. I knew of you, of course, from long ago, but not that there was a child.’
There was no reproach in this gently spoken statement, and the lack of it made Nell feel weepy. She swallowed hard, and did her best to explain.
‘Kal didn’t know either,’ she said. ‘I knew he was to marry—it seemed unfair to tell him and spoil something that had been arranged and to which he was committed. I knew how much his marriage meant to his family—and how much his family meant to him—so how could I tell him and cause a rift between them?’
‘You chose a hard road, but for the boy to have done what he did today, you have raised him well.’
Nell shrugged, not sure she could take too much more of this extraordinary conversation. At that moment Patrick erupted out of the hallway, asking her if she had a spare toothbrush as his was in his bag back in the desert. He stopped when he saw her visitor, hesitated for a moment, then came more quietly towards her.
‘Have you heard how Kal is?’ he asked, nodding to the visitor but directing the question at his mother.
‘He’s regained consciousness,’ Nell told him, ‘and is getting all the treatment he needs. Apparently it was a sudden recurrence of a disease he picked up in Africa some years ago.’
She was aware she was repeating, parrot fashion, what her visitor had said, but although she guessed the man was Kal’s father he hadn’t introduced himself so she couldn’t introduce him to Patrick.
Fortunately he took the matter out of her hands, bowing low to Patrick and touching his hand to his forehead.
‘I am your grandfather,’ he said in his precise English. ‘I am sorry it has taken us so long to meet.’
Patrick, much to Nell’s surprise, bowed back, but lower, as if aware of some distinction in obeisance.
‘I am Patrick,’ her suddenly mature son said. ‘I am honoured to meet you, sir.’
And with that he came forward, his hands together, and the other man grasped his shoulders and drew him close, touching his nose to Patrick’s nose in what Nell knew was a traditional greeting between male relatives and close friends.
‘You did well to get Khalil back to the hospital. Do you drive so young in Australia?’
Patrick grinned at this new relation.
‘No, but Kal gave me some lessons this morning and the car’s an automatic—it could have driven itself. I’d have been lost without the lights of the city, though. Kal had shown me the GPS but I didn’t really know how to work it.’
‘You did well,’ the man repeated, his voice deeply sincere. Then he turned back to Nell.
‘I thank you for the gift of this boy. I will return in the morning.’
And with that he walked away, his back ramrod straight, everything about his bearing betraying his rank.
‘Wow!’
Patrick put Nell’s reaction into words, but as she was about to close the door she saw a member of staff coming down the corridor, wheeling a trolley she knew would hold their meal.
Patrick was still asleep when Nell was ready to leave for the ward the next morning, but his overnight bag had been delivered and was just inside the door of the apartment. She checked inside to make sure his tablets were there and left him a note, reminding him to take them and giving him the phone number where she could be reached.
/> ‘Phone me when you wake up,’ she added as a PS on the note, then she took it into his bedroom and left it on the floor just outside his door, where he couldn’t fail to see it when he came out. She stood and looked at him for a moment, his gangly, adolescent frame flung with such abandon across the bed.
Weird that she’d come here to get Kal to help Patrick should help be needed, yet it had been Patrick who’d helped Kal.
This would strengthen the bond between them, she knew, and as she left the apartment and saw Kal’s father coming towards her, she felt a quailing in her heart. Another bond—another person tying Patrick to this country…
‘You are well?’ the sheik enquired politely.
‘I am well,’ Nell responded, ‘but Patrick is still sleeping.’
‘I have spoken with Khalil this morning and know of Patrick’s illness. He will be tired after the excitement of yesterday. With your permission, I will sit in your apartment until he wakes up. Khalil tells me you are needed in the hospital and the boy is his responsibility. I will take that on. He will be safe with me. You need have no fear.’
Nell had no fear—neither did she have a clue how to respond. All she could manage was a feeble ‘That’s very kind of you’, then she rallied and added, ‘But there’s no need for you to put yourself out. Patrick is used to taking care of himself.’
‘Khalil tells me the boy wishes to learn to read and write in Arabic—it will be good for me to be a teacher. You have no objection if we drive? He will learn to read more quickly if he sees road signs and billboards with words he recognises.’
Khalil says—Khalil tells me! It was Patrick all over again. Nell agreed it would be all right and excused herself with the explanation of being needed on the ward, but what she really wanted to do was find out where Khalil al Kalada was and rip his head off. He knew she didn’t want this arrangement between him and Patrick to be anything other than a ‘getting to know your father’ one—not that she’d wanted that!—but even from a hospital bed Kal was weaving a web that was entangling Patrick and drawing him closer and closer into his family.
Patrick should know this other family, conscience reminded Nell, but she was too mixed up to listen to that namby-pamby voice.
Though she’d have to leave ripping off Kal’s head until later. She’d left the unit office last night before finishing the jobs that needed doing and would have to get them done now. She also needed to liaise with the Spanish team and make sure the post-op treatment they wanted for their patients was taking place.
Down in the ward, Yasmeen greeted her with the news that Khalil was deathly ill in this very hospital, and Nell nodded, hoping he wasn’t really deathly ill while she was feeling so uncharitable towards him. But knowing Yasmeen’s opinion of Kal was close to god-like, she decided her friend was probably exaggerating, though as she worked through the morning she was aware of a nagging concern for the man nibbling away at her anger and her determination not to have anything more to do with him.
So at six, after a phone call from Patrick—the fourth of the day, each reporting on where he was and what he was doing—to say he was having dinner with his grandfather, Nell casually asked around and discovered Kal was in a private room on the top floor of the hospital.
‘It’s all private rooms up there,’ the young nurse added, with the kind of wonder usually reserved for talk of heaven.
Nell thanked her and departed, then was foiled as the elevator wouldn’t take her to that floor, needing a code of some kind to get her past the penultimate one.
She thought for a moment, remembering Kal’s office had been on the top floor. She’d watched him key in some numbers and had thought nothing of it at the time, but now she closed her eyes and tried to recall his actions.
One seven zero nine—her birthday, now she thought about it. She smiled to herself as the elevator rose obediently up to that final floor, although it was hardly likely Kal had even set the code—and if he had, why choose her birthday?
A very officious-looking sister came towards her as she walked in what she assumed was the direction of the ward. Kal’s office had been to the left and they certainly hadn’t passed any private rooms, so she’d turned right along the corridor, pushing through some swing doors before seeing the woman.
‘You are looking for someone?’
Nell held up the hospital ID she’d been given on her first day in the burns unit and the woman looked at it and frowned.
‘We have none of your patients here,’ she said.
‘No, I’m here to see Dr al Kalada,’ Nell told her, trying to sound just as officious herself.
But the woman wasn’t swayed by officiousness. She frowned at Nell and said in tones of great disdain, ‘He is seeing only family.’
At that moment a veiled woman in black robes, beneath which a lilac skirt peeped demurely, came out of a room further down the corridor. She said something and the sister turned away from Nell, answering then hurrying to do the woman’s bidding.
Uncertain if it was one of the women who’d accompanied Kal’s father into the ER, Nell moved forward hesitantly. The woman watched her for a while, then ducked back inside the room, returning a few seconds later with a second black-robed figure. This woman came towards Nell, her feet seeming to glide somehow above the floor so smoothly did she move.
‘You are Nell,’ she said, holding out her hands and taking hold of Nell’s in a warm clasp. ‘Khalil is sleeping now, but he has been worried about you and the boy. He begs your forgiveness for not looking after the boy and putting him in danger with the drive back to the city.’
The woman’s face was masked, but her eyes, keen with intelligence and so like Kal’s she had to be his mother, were smiling anxiously at Nell.
‘Patrick is fine,’ she assured the woman. ‘By now it will seem a great adventure, and think how he’ll be able to boast about it to his friends when he returns to school.’
Wrong thing to say apparently, as the smile faded from the warm brown eyes, which now looked puzzled.
But Nell felt tiredness wash over her. Perhaps relief that Kal was all right might have caused it—or lack of sleep the previous night from wondering how he was! Whatever, she couldn’t handle trying to figure out why the woman now looked puzzled, so she asked if she could see Kal, and was led into his room.
Five women sat around the bed, all quiet, although three of them appeared to be praying. Only one wore the trousers and tunic top that was the uniform of a nurse, so the rest must be family. Nell glanced at the masked faces. Was one of them his ex-wife? Would she still have the right to sit by his bed?
Then his mother introduced them. This one was her sister, Kal’s aunt, this one and this one sisters-in-law and the other his mother’s friend, like an aunt but not so closely related. Nell said a weak hello to all of them, her mind more on the figure who lay motionless on the bed.
She looked at the nurse.
‘He is sleeping?’ she asked. ‘It’s not a coma? Have you done brain scans? It’s not something worse than the recurrence of an old illness?’
The nurse beckoned her to come outside, then introduced herself. Her name was Annie, and she was English, working in the hospital because her husband worked here for one of the oil companies.
‘I’m glad you got me out of there even if it’s only for a short time,’ she said. ‘Yes, he’s sleeping naturally. Last night he woke briefly and became so agitated the doctors put him into an induced coma, but just while they did brain scans and got his temperature down. At about eight this morning he came out of that and was alert. It is the old illness, nothing more sinister, but it’s left him drained and he’ll probably sleep for twenty-four hours.’
‘But you’re in there with him—he has a nurse with him all the time? Why, if he’s OK?’
‘The family!’ Annie explained. ‘You do know who they are? They’re a bit like gods around here, they’re so revered, so of course the doctor treating Dr al Kalada has insisted he have round-the-clock nursi
ng care, although the doctor knows his relations will also stay with him. It’s the custom here—but if you’re the Australian doctor working in the burns unit, you already know that.’
She finished her explanation, then looked enquiringly at Nell.
‘I guess you met him through the plane crash,’ she said, but as far too many people in this hospital right now already knew of her relationship to Kal, Nell had no intention of explaining anything. She thanked the woman for the information and walked away, but as she made her way back down to the level where the bridge crossed to the apartments, she regretted not talking more to the English girl…
Anything would have been better than this sense of being very, very alone that she was experiencing right now…
Chapter 10
Patrick’s next phone call was to say he was back at the hospital, but as Kal was now awake he would call in and see him before coming back up to the apartment. And though she assured Patrick that would be all right, for the first time in her life she was jealous of him. That he would be able to see Kal and hear from his own lips that he was feeling better…
To see him with his eyes open, not deadly still and pale…
But to see him with all those people around? What could you say? Tell him you love him?
Yeah, right! And listen to another dissertation on the destructive elements of that particular emotional state…
Nell paced the room, passing and repassing the dinner she’d ordered, unable to eat as the depths of her anxiety about Kal tied her stomach into knots, while her mind began to wonder if perhaps what he was offering—a loveless marriage—would be better than not being with him at all.
No, half a loaf of bread might be better than no bread to a starving man, but hers was an emotional hunger, and she suspected it wouldn’t be satisfied with half-measures.
She had made this decision—for about the hundredth time in the last few days—when a knock sounded on the door. Thinking it was Patrick, she strode towards it and flung it open. It wasn’t Patrick but the small woman she had assumed was Kal’s mother—accompanied by one of the other women, though Nell couldn’t be sure which one.
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