by Fiona Lowe
Tom’s arm, which had been resting casually across her chest, tightened against her and he nuzzled her neck. ‘Come back to my place.’
She turned and pressed her lips to his, loving that she could do that whenever they were alone. ‘Later. First I have to do another three hours of study and then you’re my treat for working hard. Will you be home about seven?’
‘Tonight, yes.’ He stroked her hair. ‘It seems I’m surrounded by people who are studying.’
‘How’s Jared going?’ She’d enjoyed helping the young man with the chemistry and had appreciated his rough but honest manner.
‘He’s working hard.’
It was the perfect segue to ask the question she’d long pondered. ‘How did Jared go from being your patient to your friend?’
The edges of Tom’s mouth tightened a fraction. ‘I don’t really know, but it was probably because he wouldn’t go away and now I’m stuck with him.’
But although he might think he sounded resigned and put upon, she saw his affection for the young man shining clearly on his face. ‘What’s the real story?’
The doctor moved to front and centre. ‘I clipped an aneurysm in his brain two months before I left for Perth. He came through Outpatients as a public patient and he was a bright kid, but, like a lot of kids from the western suburbs, life wasn’t easy and he had a massive chip on his shoulder. I don’t think I got more than grunts out of him before the operation.’
She smiled. ‘And let me guess, you chatted to him just like you talked to Gretel.’
Two deep lines carved into a V at the bridge of his nose. ‘I talked to him like I talk to all my patients.’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe you think you did, but I find some patients are easier to deal with than others. You might not realise it but you have a knack with young people.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yeah, you do. Look at the medical students. It’s standing room only at your guest lecture spots.’
‘Only because they’ll be failed if they don’t turn up.’
She dug him in the ribs with her elbow—half joking and half serious. ‘That’s not the only reason and you know it. You’re a good lecturer because you speak to them, not at them.’
A muscle twitched in his jaw. ‘I’d rather be operating.’
She flinched, absorbing the hit of his pain, but then she took the reality road—a path she’d always taken with him because she knew the ‘if only’ road was a dead end filled with unrelenting despair. ‘I know you’d rather be operating, but you can’t so why not embrace this avenue of medicine? You enjoy young people’s company, you must or you wouldn’t have Jared over at your place so often.’
His shoulders rose and fell. ‘I think I must have seen something in Jared that reminded me of myself at a similar age. That and the fact he lives five streets away from where I grew up.’
She recalled the comment he’d made about her Northern Beaches upbringing. ‘And that wasn’t the Northern Beaches?’
His laugh was harsh and abrupt. ‘As far from there as you can possibly get.’
She wanted to know. ‘Where?’
‘Derrybrook Estate.’
She’d heard of it, but had never been there. ‘What’s it like?’
‘It’s got the highest unemployment rate in the city, is a hub for crime and drugs, and most kids drop out of school by sixteen.’
She thought about his polished veneer and how whenever he was angry or stressed it cracked, exposing the rough edges he’d obviously worked hard at smoothing over. Now it all made sense. She found herself imagining a struggling family with a bright son. ‘Studies have shown that no matter the economic circumstances, if a family values education that’s the one thing that makes the difference.’
He flinched and his high cheekbones sharpened. ‘I wouldn’t know about that. The fact I stayed at school had absolutely nothing to do with my family.’
His words stung like a slap. ‘Oh. I just assumed that—’
‘Yeah, well, don’t.’ He flattened his spine against the tree as if he wanted to move away from her.
‘I’m sorry. Obviously, though, you not only finished school, you went on to have a brilliant career.’
‘Had.’
‘Do.’ She didn’t realise she could sound so much like a school teacher. ‘The fact it’s different doesn’t make it any less.’
‘If you say so.’
She knew he didn’t believe her and she ached for him because for some reason he didn’t seem to recognise that he was a great teacher. ‘Can you just answer my original question, please?’
The stubble on his now drawn-in cheeks made him look thunderous and she wondered if he was going to say anything more. She’d just about given up when he spoke.
‘You’re not going to stop asking, are you?’
‘No.’
He sighed. ‘At fourteen, I hated school. I was bored by every thing and I was heading straight toward the juvenile justice system. Ironically, the fact I was acting out saved me.’
She wanted to know everything but all parts of her screamed at her to go slowly. If she rushed him for information, he’d clam up. As hard as it was to stay silent, she managed it, but only just.
His haggard expression softened. ‘One night the football coach caught me on the roof of the school with cans of spray paint in my hand. I was seconds away from graffitiing the windows. It wasn’t the first time I’d been in trouble, but instead of calling the police, he held it over me and made me go to training. I hated him for it, but at the same time part of me wanted to go. I hated being there but I missed it when I wasn’t, and it confused the hell out of me. The fact Mick put up with my smart mouth and gave me more than one chance was a miracle and once I started to achieve in footy, I started to settle at school and attended regularly.’
‘But I don’t understand. With your brain, why were you bored by school?’ The question slipped out before she could stop it.
He snorted. ‘You went to an all-girls private school, didn’t you?’
His accusatory tone bit into her. ‘I did but—’
He held up his hand. ‘Don’t give me “buts”. You had teachers who cared, parents who valued education and facilities that weren’t broken or falling down around your ears.’
She sat up straight, propelled by a mixture of guilt and anger. He made her childhood sound idyllic and what it had been was so far from that it didn’t bear thinking about. ‘By the sounds of things, you had a teacher who cared.’
‘Yeah. I had a couple.’ He sighed. ‘Mick’s wife, Carol, was a maths and science teacher. Looking back, I now see what they really did for me. What I thought was a casual invitation of “come home for dinner” after footy training was really “we’ll give you a healthy meal, a quiet place to study and any help you need”. They’re the reason I passed year twelve and got into medicine. That, and a burning desire to prove the bastards wrong.’
His pain swamped her and she instinctively pressed her hand to his heart. He’d not once mentioned his parents. ‘Which bastards?’
The set of his shoulders and the grimness around his mouth reminded her of the first time she’d met him when he’d been practising navigating around the hospital. ‘Everyone who ever told me I wouldn’t amount to anything because my mother was drunk more than she was sober. Her drinking started when my father took off, leaving her a single mother at seventeen and gradually got worse after every other man she’d tried to love did the same thing. Everyone who’s still telling kids from the estate the same thing.’
‘I bet Mick and Carol were really proud of you.’
He swallowed and seemed to force the words up and out from a very deep place. ‘Mick never saw me graduate. He died when I was in fifth year, taken out hard and fast by a glioblastoma, the most aggressive type of brain tumour a person can have.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ But she suddenly understood. ‘And that’s why you drove yourself to be a neurosurgeon.’
; He nodded as if he was lost in the clutch of memories and then his lips formed a quiet smile. ‘For Mick first and then for the Ferrari.’
She smiled and slid her hand into his. ‘Proving the bastards wrong?’
He gripped it hard. ‘Hell, yeah.’
Her own heart swelled as she glimpsed the man’s giving heart that he seemed to want to hide more often than not. ‘So now you’re paying it forward and giving Jared the same sort of support that Mick and Carol gave you?’
He shook his head. ‘Carol was born to help, but I’m no saint, Hayley. I didn’t seek Jared out or offer to mentor him, like Mick did for me. Jared tracked me down in Perth and then refused to go away.’
‘But now you’re helping him. He probably tracked you down because of how you related to him when he was sick.’
The admiration in Hayley’s voice couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, but Tom didn’t want to hear it. Their conversation had taken him far too close to the memories of his mother. Hell, he hated thinking about her because it took him back to a place he’d fought so hard to escape. Hayley had no clue about the eroding nature of abject poverty. How it slowly ate away at self-esteem and corroded hope, making the seduction of alcohol and drugs so tantalising as a temporary escape.
Only it wasn’t an escape at all. It was an extension of the poverty trap, which then gripped people like his mother permanently until death claimed them. Her death had been her release and he ached that she’d wanted death more than she’d ever wanted him.
He shivered as he pushed the memories away and then realised the wind had changed. He reached out his hand for his cane. ‘Feel the cold in that wind? What does the sky look like?’
‘Gunmetal.’ She shivered. ‘Oh, it’s really spooky.’
He heard her tossing things into the picnic hamper as the sun vanished. The temperature plummeted and the south-buster wind picked up speed. Dust made his eyes water and he could imagine the leaves and any debris being tossed every which way by the ferocious wind that howled around them.
He stood up and wished he knew the area better. ‘We need to find shelter.’
‘My place is less than two blocks away.’
He shook his head. ‘I know storms like this and we don’t have that much time.’
As if on cue, huge drops of rain started falling, but the violence of the wind blew them horizontally, stinging his face.
‘Ouch.’ Hayley caught his hand. ‘Since when does rain hurt?’
‘When it’s sleet. I was here in 1999 for Sydney’s most expensive hailstorm ever and this feels like the start of that.’ He yelled to be heard over the wind. ‘Get us to the nearest shelter. Now.’
Thunder cracked around them and Hayley squealed. ‘Sorry.’ She jammed his hand on her shoulder. ‘There’s a bandstand a hundred metres away.’
As they started walking, the sleet became hail—stones of ice that dive-bombed them with sharp edges, and stung, bruised and grazed any uncovered skin. It was the most painful hundred metres he’d ever walked and he hated that his blindness meant Hayley had to endure it too instead of being able to run to safety.
‘Three steps,’ Hayley yelled over the noise of the hail on the bandstand’s tin roof.
He navigated the steps and he knew he must be inside the bandstand, but they were still being pummelled by hail. Bandstands generally had only hip-height walls, which gave scant protection when the wind was driving the hail in at a thirty-degree angle. ‘We need to get down and huddle.’
‘We can sit on the ground wedged in against the seat. That puts us lower than the height of the wall.’ She moved his hand and he felt wooden slats before he lowered himself down and sat cross-legged on the wet and icy concrete.
Another crack of thunder seemed almost overhead and Hayley’s arms wrapped around his head so tightly he risked neck damage. He reached out and wet strands of her hair plastered themselves against his palm. ‘I gather you don’t like thunder.’
She shivered against him. ‘I think I must have been a dog in a previous life.’
‘Get the picnic rug out and we’ll use it as extra protection.’
‘Okay.’ She sounded uncertain but she pulled away from him.
He heard her cold fingers fumbling to untie the toggles, followed by the emphatic use of a swear word he’d never heard her say. In fact, he’d never heard her swear, not even in the OR when she’d been operating on Gretel. She really was scared. The next minute she scrambled into his lap and her whole body trembled against his as she wrapped the rug around their shoulders. ‘I hate this.’
‘I’m getting that impression, but usually storms like this are over quickly.’ He stroked her wet back as an unfamiliar surge of protectiveness filled him and then he pulled the rug over their heads to protect their faces.
Her fingernails instantly dug into his scalp as sharp and as tenacious as a cat’s claws. ‘Hell, Hayley, what are you doing?’
But she didn’t speak. Instead, her chest heaved hard and fast against his and the next moment she’d torn back the rug and was panting hard.
He reached out his hand, trying to feel the rug. ‘We need the protection.’
‘You have it.’ She threw the rug over his head and he immediately blew it away from his mouth. The instinctive action made him think. ‘Are you claustrophobic as well as scared of the dark?’
There was a moment’s silence before she said, ‘It’s easing. The hail’s turned into rain.’ She grabbed his hand. ‘Let’s go to my place. Please.’
The pleading in her voice both surprised him and propelled him to his feet. ‘Lead the way.’
As they reached the bottom of the bandstand’s steps, Hayley said, ‘I can’t believe some hailstones are the size of cricket balls.’
‘I’ll trudge, then.’
After navigating flooded gutters and hail-covered footpaths for five minutes, Hayley said, ‘We turn left and then we’re home. It’s a tiny cottage and nothing like your penthouse.’
The rain was now trickling down Tom’s collar and the cold seeped into his bones. So much for mild Sydney winters. Still, perhaps the storm wasn’t all bad. He now had the perfect excuse to entice Hayley into bed—he needed to keep warm while his clothes dried in front of her heater. Then he’d go home and leave her to her study.
With a loud gasp Hayley suddenly stopped and he crashed into her as water flowed over his feet. ‘Is your house flooded?’
‘I don’t think so. The water hasn’t quite reached the front door.’
‘You might want to make a bit of a levee between the front door and the road, then.’ He kept his hand on her shoulder, following her, all the while trying to tamp down his rising frustration that he had no idea what she was seeing and that the only help he could give was advice. He heard her slide a key into a lock and then the grating squeak of a door swinging open.
‘Oh, God.’ She pulled away from him and the sound of her running feet against bare boards echoed around him, leaving him with the impression he was standing in a long corridor. Her wail of despair carried back to him.
‘Hayley?’ Using his cane, he tapped his way along the corridor. ‘What’s happened?’
‘My roof’s collapsed, my windows are almost all broken and I have a house full of hail.’ She sounded utterly defeated.
Tom instantly recalled the billion-dollar damage that the huge storm of 1999 had inflicted on the city. He pulled out his phone. ‘Show me where I can sit down and I’ll call the State Emergency Services to come and tarpaulin your roof, and then I’ll wait in the phone queue of your insurance company. They’re going to be inundated so it might take a while and you can sweep up the hail.’
‘I don’t even know where to start.’ Her voice rose with every word. ‘There’s more plaster on the floor than on the ceiling and I can see sky!’
Seeing sky wasn’t good. He ran his hand through his hair. ‘You can’t stay here, then, even with a tarpaulin.’
He heard a chair being pulled out and a thud. ‘W
hat a mess. I really don’t need this with my exams looming. My parents live too far out for me to get to the hospital when I’m on call so I guess I’m going to have to find a motel.’
Tom didn’t like her chances. ‘You’ll be lucky to find a place if every house is as badly affected as yours.’
‘Are you trying to cheer me up?’
He could imagine the mess she was sitting amidst and his heart went out to her. Before he’d thought it through he heard himself saying, ‘Go pack up your textbooks and computer, throw some clothes in a bag and come back to my place.’
What the hell have you just done? You live alone. You’ve always lived alone. More than ever you need to live alone.
I can’t just leave her here and it will only be a few days. I can handle a few days.
Her hand touched his cheek and then her lips pressed hard against his mouth. ‘Thank you. I’m so glad you’re here bossing me around because I’m not sure I would have known where to start.’
‘Bossing people around is what I do best.’ He dug deep and managed to muster up a smile to cover how useless he felt and how he hated it that he couldn’t do more. Once he would have been on the roof, lashing down the tarpaulins, or wielding a broom and sweeping out the mud and muck left by flood waters or removing sodden plaster. Now all he could offer in the way of help was phone calls and letting her stay for a bit. It was a poor man’s offer and it didn’t feel like he was contributing at all.
Finn Kennedy gripped the silver arm of the pool ladder with his left hand as every muscle in his body frantically tried to absorb the lactic acid his obsessively long swim had just generated. He’d started swimming soon after the hail storm, ploughing up and down the Olympic pool, willing his neck pain away. Or at least giving the muscles in his neck some rest by supporting them in warm water. He’d rather swim for an hour than wear the damn cervical collar Rupert Davidson forced on him. It was bad enough that the staff at The Harbour were whispering about him and giving him furtive glances. He sure as hell wasn’t giving them an obvious target like a soft collar so they felt they could ask him questions.