‘Are you feeling sick again?’ he asked, and the anxiety in his voice caused pain in Harry’s chest.
‘I’ll be better soon, lad. Now, why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing? Save me talking.’
‘Perhaps I could tell you what we plan to do,’ Harry suggested. ‘Dr McPherson tells me you know the town better than anyone. You don’t have to talk, just nod if I get it right and shake your head when I go wrong. I’ve been working off contour maps but they’re not always accurate.’
Was he imagining it, or had the old man’s eyes brightened at the suggestion that he could be of use?
Harry began to explain, but soon realised words weren’t enough.
‘You must have paper and pencils or crayons somewhere,’ he said to Anthony. ‘How about you run off and get some for me so I can show your grandfather what I mean?’
Anthony obeyed so promptly that Harry realised a few minutes of sitting still was probably all he could manage.
‘He seems a good kid,’ he said, to fill in time while they waited.
The old man nodded and shifted his mask enough to say, ‘He’s why I need to stay alive. For a while longer, anyway.’ He reached out and touched Harry’s hand. ‘Thanks for digging me out today,’ he said, then he replaced his mask, closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.
Harry left the room, anxious to intercept Anthony on his return and stop him waking the patient.
‘You still here?’ Kirsten asked, meeting him in the passage.
‘I’m just leaving,’ he told her, feeling edgy because he knew he shouldn’t be here—shouldn’t have allowed himself to be diverted first by personal emotions, then by a small boy. ‘Could you catch Anthony when he comes back and tell him—?’
‘You can tell him yourself.’ Kirsten touched his arm and pointed towards the front foyer just as Anthony flew off the forbidden banister and landed on the tiled floor. ‘When I’ve done roaring at him for his disobedience.’
Kirsten flung the final words at Harry as she raced towards the child, but Anthony was on his feet and laughing with the sheer exhilaration of his ride before she reached him.
‘I should tan your hide, young man!’ she scolded. ‘You know the rule about not sliding on the banister.’
He turned his meltingly innocent eyes up to hers and said, ‘But I was in a hurry. Getting pencils and paper for sir.’
Kirsten surveyed the scattered papers on the foyer floor, then faced the major who was gathering them up.
‘I suppose he’s too young to recruit?’ she asked plaintively.
Harry straightened and smiled at her, making her remember how his body had felt when he’d held her close. How her own had responded. The quivery tremor returned.
‘Just a tad,’ he said, ‘but I’ll take him off your hands.’ He turned to Anthony. ‘Your grandad’s gone to sleep so we’ll talk to him later. Right now, I’ve got to drive down town to check on the levee banks. You want to come?’
Kirsten had to bite back an exclamation of surprise. She was certain it would be against army regulations to have a child tagging along on reconnaissance missions, but Anthony looked so delighted she hadn’t the heart to spoil things by mentioning it.
Perhaps Harry Graham wasn’t as rule-bound as he’d at first appeared.
She didn’t see him, or Anthony, again that afternoon, although Bella reported that Anthony had eaten his dinner and gone straight to bed, a sure sign the extra activity had tired him out.
By nine o’clock, all the patients were settled for the night, most of them asleep. Mrs Mathers, evacuated earlier from her house, had been given a room in the east wing, and had instructions to keep Whitey, her raucous cockatoo, covered.
Joan Ryan, the nurse who shared the night duty with Kirsten, was filling out a drug requisition form, using patient files to check off usage against what had been taken from the dispensary.
‘You always get the paperwork these days,’ Kirsten said, poking her head into the little cubby-hole where the dispensary was housed.
‘I like it,’ Joan assured her. ‘And you know I like night duty, so don’t fuss.’
But Kirsten knew she should fuss. Joan had been doing the night shift since the evacuation of the bulk of the town’s population ten days earlier. While she hadn’t been rushed off her feet and had been able to sleep most nights, it was still a bad policy to allow staff to miss days off.
Not that there was anything to do on days off—just walk down to look at the water, or hang around the building—so even the day staff had opted for a regime of working when there was work to do, and resting, reading or watching TV, thankfully still available via satellite, when there wasn’t.
Noises from the kitchen suggested they were all in there, gathered, as they were most nights, for a late supper and a bit of socialising before they went off to the little cell-like rooms they’d made their temporary homes since the decision had been made for the staff to live in during the emergency.
Should she go and join them? She usually did, if only for a short time. But tonight a restlessness sent her feet in the opposite direction, out through the foyer to stand under the portico and breathe fresh air.
‘At least the rain’s stopped.’
The male voice startled her, and she spun around to see Harry leaning against one of the pillars.
‘I suppose that’s something,’ she said. ‘It will make it slightly less difficult for your men if we get some fine days.’
‘It would also make it easier to move your patients,’ he reminded her.
She smiled in the darkness, for his words lacked their former conviction.
‘You don’t sound nearly as determined about that as you did earlier. Is it because you can’t get the transport, with your fuel problem, or that you’re having second thoughts?’
He didn’t answer and she searched the shadowy outline of his face but couldn’t read anything in the darkness.
‘Second, third and fourth thoughts,’ he admitted. ‘Tell me why it’s so important for you to stay.’ He moved closer to her and took her arm to steer her towards an old wooden garden seat, left behind by the previous tenants.
‘It keeps coming into conversations,’ he added as they both sat down. ‘As if evacuation was equated with closure of the hospital.’
Kirsten turned from her survey of the flood waters—silver in the hazy moonlight, stretching as far as she could see—and studied the man beside her.
‘It is,’ she said bluntly. ‘After the second flood, the Health Department decided it would be more economic to close the hospital altogether than to rebuild. I don’t know how much you know of the dynamics of a country town, but closing the hospital is like a death sentence. It’s the beginning of the end for a town like Murrawarra.’
‘But Vereton is only a little over an hour away—when the roads are open. Many city people have to travel a couple of hours to reach a hospital.’
Kirsten sighed. It was an argument she’d heard often enough but it never failed to irritate her.
‘But they probably have a doctor in their local shopping centre, and X-ray facilities in a nearby mall, not to mention pathology labs, access to a variety of therapists, natural health clinics and ancillary services from paediatric to geriatric. Out here, all that comes with the hospital. It goes, the doctor goes—’
‘You’re fighting for your job?’
Irritation sent Kirsten to her feet. It was that or poke him in the chest again, and she had a feeling that the less close she was to him the better she could think—and argue.
‘I can get a job anywhere,’ she told him huffily. ‘But not in Murrawarra, so one person leaves town. Normally, we’ve a staff of thirty full or part time connected with the hospital, and if you add up their dependants that’s another sixty-eight people who would be directly affected by the hospital closure. If they leave town to find employment elsewhere, they take twenty children from the school and that’s one teacher less it requires.’
‘
So it’s a domino effect, with every family leaving town reducing the need for services.’
Kirsten was pleased he understood but she was too wound up to stop now.
‘And that’s before you get to the people who leave because they need the hospital,’ she told him. ‘The elderly who can’t travel, young families with children at risk, people who suffer from unpredictable conditions like asthma or diabetes or epilepsy.’
‘But surely you can’t keep the hospital open without government funding? If the bean-counters have decided it’s to close, aren’t you fighting a losing battle?’
His reminder of the reality of the situation stopped Kirsten’s feet and she glared at him.
‘You’re suggesting we just give in? Lie down and let them steamroll right over us? Is that the way the army plans its campaigns? Do you say, oh, we can’t win this little war, so we won’t fight it?’
He stood up and grasped her shoulders.
‘Hey, calm down,’ Harry said, then he smiled. ‘Yes, we would go into a battle that might look impossible, but not before we’d considered a strategy to limit the odds against us. Not before we’d studied the opposition, summed up its strengths and sought out its weaknesses, and worked out what plan of attack would give us the best chance of success.’
Kirsten looked into his face, less shadowed now they were in the cloud-filtered moonlight. His dark eyes looked intently into hers, and somewhere in her brain she knew his words were making sense—telling her something important.
But she couldn’t grasp the essence of it because other thoughts, born of sensation, were jostling it away. She stepped backwards, out from under the hands that had remained, resting lightly, on her shoulders. She dragged air into her all but paralysed lungs, and told herself attraction didn’t work that way. Not so quickly and completely.
Not real attraction.
It must be physical, this thing she felt.
Possibly the result of too long without a significant other in her life—
‘You said if the hospital closed and you had to leave town, that was one person gone.’ Harry’s voice jolted through her denial. ‘Does that mean you’re single—no significant other in your life?’
‘Snap!’ she muttered to herself, and she turned away from him, wanting to run back inside, to seek refuge in her room—though she suspected a different environment wouldn’t provide a refuge from her thoughts.
‘Why?’ Kirsten asked out loud when she’d rejected running like a scalded cat.
‘Why what?’ he asked, stepping close again—looking puzzled.
‘Why ask about significant others?’
Harry frowned down at her.
‘Did I ask that?’ he demanded, and she began to think he was as confused as she was.
Perhaps a change in conversation would help them both.
‘The staff have supper in the kitchen each evening if your men would like to join in,’ she said.
‘They have a mess but, yes, some combined activity might be beneficial. We could be here for a month after the water recedes, depending on the damage.’
A month after the water recedes?
Her thoughts flitted like a moth from this revelation, to touch down lightly on attraction, bypass drawing up battle plans to save the hospital and finally settle on a very large mental warning sign some still sane part of her brain had erected.
Fortunately, at that moment she heard a bell ringing inside.
‘They’re playing my song,’ she said, pretending a lightness she was far from feeling. ‘Chipper, I’d say. He falls asleep and gets tangled in his weights and pulleys.’
She walked towards the door as she delivered this explanation, but escape evaded her for Harry walked right alongside her.
‘How did he break his pelvis—a fall of some kind?’
Kirsten chuckled as the reminder of Chipper’s accident brought her back down to earth.
‘Would you believe rough riding?’ she asked as they entered the shadowy foyer. ‘He was a professional rodeo rider at one time and the silly old coot was trying to explain to a new chum how to hook his fingers around the rope. The youngster couldn’t follow the instructions so Chipper climbs onto the bull—it’s still in the chute—to demonstrate. Someone opens the gate, the bull roars out and throws Chipper straight into the air. He was so astonished he forgot to hold on, and came down hard on his backside—one broken pelvis.’
Harry chuckled his delight, the sound so seductive it undid all the good telling him about Chipper had done.
‘I’d love to have been there,’ he said weakly when he’d regained control.
‘So would half the town,’ Kirsten told him, walking down the passage towards Chipper’s room.
She was about to grasp the doorknob when it swung away from her and Joan stood in the light thrown by Chipper’s bedside lamp.
‘It’s not Chipper,’ Joan explained. ‘I pressed his bell to get you here because I didn’t want Mr Graham fretting. I don’t like his colour and his breathing’s very raspy.’
‘Delayed shock?’ Kirsten thought aloud. ‘Not to mention the dust he must have inhaled. Thanks, Joan. I’ll go in and see him.’
‘What exactly’s wrong with him?’
Kirsten spun around, belatedly realising Harry was still with her.
‘He has permanent and irreversible damage to the alveoli, the little pouches in the lungs where the exchange of gases from the lungs to the bloodstream takes place. We can get oxygen in by increasing the percentage of oxygen in the air he breathes, but it’s getting the carbon dioxide out that causes problems.’
She tapped on the patient’s door as she finished this explanation and pushed it open. The blueness around the old man’s lips told its own story.
‘Not too good?’ she asked gently, and saw his rueful grimace.
‘I’d like to put you on the respirator, if only overnight,’ she said, and realised how bad he must be feeling when he nodded his agreement.
She left the room, passed Harry in the passage and walked to the storeroom where the respirator was kept.
‘What’s it for?’ Harry had followed her again.
‘It will essentially breathe for him. We have another machine that provides intermittent positive pressure, cutting off when the set pressure in the lungs is achieved and allowing him to exhale through a valve, but that’s used more for short periods of time to help clean out the lungs. Because his experience today has left him weak, I’d prefer he went on the respirator for the night.’
‘Why doesn’t he use it all the time?’
Kirsten closed her eyes then opened them to ask, ‘Does the army teach you to question everything? Or are you mechanically minded that you have to know? Mr Graham doesn’t like using it because he believes it would worry the children to see him hooked up to a machine.’
‘That’s stupid. Everyone knows children are adaptable,’ Harry growled at her.
‘You’d know, would you?’ Kirsten asked, disturbed by the trend of this conversation. ‘Have some of your own?’
‘No, I don’t, but I read that somewhere,’ the major asserted.
She refused to acknowledge the flutter of relief she felt, and wheeled the pump and the oxygen tank that fed it into Mr Graham’s room. Then she plugged it in to the power socket and set the dials. Joan came in with a tray containing a mild topical anaesthetic, a lubricant and a choice of endotracheal tubes.
‘I’ll connect it to a nasotracheal tube,’ Kirsten told Mr Graham. ‘You’ll be more comfortable that way.’
More comfortable than what? she thought as she prepared the tube then slid it into place. Once it was down, she listened to his chest to check it was properly positioned, then taped it into place, before connecting it to the respirator.
‘Will you stay with him, Joan?’ she asked the nurse. ‘Check the patency of the tube in thirty minutes, BP every hour and suction his trachea every hour as well. Actually, I’ll be back by then so I can take over.’
She
left the room and turned towards her office, wanting to check an article she’d read in a recent magazine about intermittent positive pressure breathing versus the volume respirator. Perhaps by morning she could take Mr Graham off the respirator and use the IPPB unit for fifteen minutes at intervals during the day.
‘Will he be all right?’
The question was asked in a harsh whisper but still startled Kirsten enough to cause panic heartbeats.
‘Don’t you ever go to bed?’ she demanded in an infuriated undertone. ‘Or, having failed to get us airlifted out, have you decided to frighten us all to death?’
‘I’d been outside, checking the camp, and was coming back in when I saw you coming out of his room.’
Harry seemed genuinely concerned, perhaps because he’d been involved in rescuing the old man, and Kirsten relented.
‘Come in,’ she said, pushing open the door, ‘but you’ll have to work for your information this time. There’s an electric kettle over there on the cupboard. I’ll have a black coffee, two sugars, and help yourself to what you want while I look something up.’
He was no sooner in than she regretted her invitation. The room was large enough, but it was her bedroom as well as her office and the man seemed to impose his presence on it in a way none of the staff ever did.
Ignoring the stupid fancy, she riffled through her pile of half-read professional journals and papers until she found the article she wanted. Then she turned on the desk light and sat down to refresh her mind on the outcome of some tests carried out on the far side of the world.
‘Therapeutic IPPB,’ she mumbled to herself, pleased to find she’d remembered correctly. ‘For up to thirty minutes four times a day. Use a mouthpiece and nose clip to ensure optimum results.’
‘Coffee.’
The cup of coffee landed on the desk and was pushed tentatively towards her.
‘Did you find what you wanted?’
She looked up at Harry and smiled.
‘Yes, I did, and thanks for the coffee. Sorry to treat you like that but something was nagging at me.’
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