by Fiona Lowe
Ian ruffled her hair. ‘Is it, now?’
‘Yes. Charlie says pterodactyl is a made-up word for the movies.’
Charlie threw Ian an apologetic look but the big man just laughed. ‘In that case, we’re lucky that Charlie knows his dinosaurs. Can you stay for dinner? It’s just me and Shaylee, so we’re cheating and having fish and chips.’
‘Say, yes, Charlie. Please,’ Shaylee begged.
Charlie didn’t spend a lot of time with kids but over the last few weeks he’d enjoyed the occasions he’d spent with Shaylee. Even though Lauren said the little girl had her problems, given everything she’d been through, there was something about her indomitable spirit that made him yearn for the time he’d faced each day with enthusiasm. ‘Why not? Gran’s got her book club tonight so fish and chips sounds great.’
‘Did someone say fish and chips?’ Lauren walked in, looking tired but smiling.
‘Hello, love. You okay? You’re a bit pale.’ Ian leaned in and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
Charlie half rose, intending to do the same thing, before realising he couldn’t kiss her in front of her father and that shaking her hand would just look stupid. He slumped back into the chair. ‘Family planning finished early?’
‘The last patient cancelled. Apparently, mother nature resolved her urgency to see me,’ she said cryptically to protect Shaylee. ‘My order’s flake and two potato cakes, please.’
‘Yay!’ Shaylee clapped. ‘Can we play UNO after dinner, Ian? Please?’
‘Sure.’ Ian winked. ‘You beating Charlie and Lauren instead of me will make a nice change.’
‘Hey!’ Lauren objected. ‘When it comes to UNO, I’m star talent.’
Charlie listened to the easygoing banter between father and daughter and the obvious love that flowed between them. His contentment—generated by minding Shaylee and sloshing around in papier-mâché—dribbled away, leaving a hollow cave inside him.
Before Harry’s accident had changed his family for ever, his relationship with his father had been pretty standard. First came his childhood hero-worship of a man he’d deemed infallible. It had been followed by teenage cynicism, and the need to stretch his wings and break away. After his twenty-first birthday and during his hospital placements, he’d seen his father in a new light—a source of information about medicine and life. He’d been enjoying a more adult relationship with Randall when everything had gone to hell. The chances of that more equal relationship ever happening again were less than zilch.
* * *
The late afternoon sun poured through the office window and Lauren’s eyelids started to flutter and close as she checked the pathology reports. It was incredibly tempting to put her head down on the desk and grab a power nap but she yawned and stretched instead. Her ribs no longer bothered her, not even the occasional pinch, but perhaps healing bones took more out of a girl then she thought, otherwise she couldn’t think of a reason why she was so tired. With Charlie still keen to work, she wasn’t yet back to full time and at night she slept like a top so technically she should be jumping out of her skin. She stifled another yawn and jumped to her feet a little too quickly. The room spun and, used to suffering from postural hypotension, she immediately sat down again. Her intercom buzzed.
‘Yes, Lexie?’
‘Anna Ainsworth’s on the phone and she wants to talk to you. She sounds upset.’
It was a worry when any patient called in distressed but the fact that it was Anna, who was of a generation that kept their emotions very much in check, made it more concerning. ‘Put her through.’
The line clicked and she heard Lexie say, ‘Dr Fuller can talk to you now.’
‘Hi, Anna, it’s Lauren.’
‘Oh, Lauren. Thank goodness. I’m in Melbourne and something’s... I need to talk to Charlie urgently. He’s not picking up his phone. Do you know what his plans were after he left the clinic?’
She did. The two of them had met for lunch at the cottage, although they’d indulged in each other rather than food. Usually, Charlie fell asleep straight after sex and she was the one wide awake but today he’d been full of energy and she’d been the one wanting to snuggle down and give in to the sweet siren call of sleep.
‘I got the better deal today,’ he’d said, his blue eyes dancing. ‘You have to go to work this afternoon and I’ve got sunshine and a blue-sky day.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I reckon I’ll dust off the surfboard and catch some waves.’
She took in his happy and relaxed demeanour and her heart turned over with joy. Perhaps she’d been catastrophising for all these weeks and worrying about him for no real reason. Had he been right when he’d insisted all he needed was a proper rest?
‘Crikey! Don’t tell me you’re going to recklessly relax and enjoy your holiday?’
‘Shocking, isn’t it?’ He’d grinned down at her and stolen a kiss before jumping out of bed. ‘Some days are great days. After work, do you want to bring Shaylee and meet me at the beach? She told me the other day she loves body boarding.’
His enthusiasm had been infectious. ‘Sounds like the perfect plan.’
‘Anna, he told me he was going surfing, which is why his phone’s probably off. Do you want me to go to the beach and find him?’
‘Oh, dear, would you? That would be wonderful.’
Lauren could hear the low rumble of voices in the back ground. ‘How does he reach you? And what do you want me to tell him?’
‘I’ve got my mobile turned on. Tell him it’s Harry. He’s got pneumonia and you know what that means. How serious it is.’
Yes and no. Granted, pneumonia was a serious illness, but in a fit young person and with the right antibiotics, recovery was generally swift. Then again, Lauren knew nothing about Harry and, listening to the anguish in Anna’s voice, now wasn’t the time to ask for details.
‘Tell him to come straight away and, Lauren...can I ask you a favour?’
‘Of course.’ Her mind immediately went to all things diabetic, anticipating Anna might need insulin or something for her pump.
‘Come with him to Melbourne. He’ll tell you not to, but insist. He’s going to need you.’
* * *
Charlie lay on his board just beyond the breakers, taking a breather before trying his luck at some more waves. Surfing might be like riding a bike but it had taken more than a few dumps and the occasional mouthful of water before he’d found his balance. When he finally caught a wave, riding it into shore, the power of the water under him and the board was exhilarating. Almost as energising and amazing as sex with Lauren. He laughed out loud with sheer delight and realised that for the first time in a long time he was happy.
Just like that long-ago summer, Lauren made life sparkle. If he didn’t have to go to counselling or endure the upcoming weekend, this enforced break would be perfect. Thinking about the weekend dented his buzz. He hated that Gran insisted he be at dinner on Saturday night. He had no qualms at all in refusing his parents’ requests, but he struggled to say no to Gran, especially when she’d welcomed him with open arms and made few demands on him. Although dinner was a big demand. His usual modus operandi on the anniversary of Harry’s accident was to drink himself into oblivion. Unless anything had changed, his mother would be happy to join him—she drank to drunkenness most nights, or he assumed she still did. There had been no reason for that to change.
He gave himself a shake. It was only Thursday. Why ruin two perfectly good days obsessing about Saturday, especially when he had waves to catch and the anticipation of a beach picnic with Shaylee and Lauren? He paddled forward in preparation for another crack when a bloke on a board called out, ‘Hey! Are you Charlie?’
‘Yep.’
‘Your old lady’s on the beach. She wants you to go in.’
He peered towards the shore and saw Lauren wav
ing. Perhaps she’d finished early again, although he’d seen her list and it had been full and long. Still, it was sunny and people often forgot their ills. Glancing behind, he saw a wave rising and, determined to show Lauren he still had some skills, he focused on his body, the board and the wave. In a moment of pure providence, his feet were balanced, his rise fluid and he rode the wave, executing a perfect bottom turn before returning to ride the crest again. He was still standing when the wave deposited him gently in the shallows.
Picking up the board, he jogged up to Lauren. Even though his eyes were stinging with salt he noticed she was dressed in her work clothes. ‘You’re early. Where’s your gear?’
She passed him his towel and as he dried his face she said, ‘Anna called. She wants you to go to Melbourne as soon as possible.’
His head shot up. Part of his grandmother’s ritual in the week before the anniversary was a visit to Melbourne and she’d driven up yesterday morning. ‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘It’s your brother. Harry’s got pneumonia.’
The rumble and crash of the surf was positively soundless compared with the roar of his blood in his ears. For a long moment he didn’t feel anything. Then relief rolled through him but it was immediately kicked hard to the kerb by guilt.
‘Charlie?’ He saw concern etched clearly on her face along with a parade of questions. ‘Do you think Anna’s panicking?’
‘No.’ Resignation cloaked him. ‘I have to go.’
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘No need.’ He picked up his board and made a bee-line for Bide-A-While’s weathered steps.
‘Charlie!’ He didn’t slow but Lauren, unencumbered by a surfboard, overtook him and blocked him at the bottom of the stairs. ‘I’m not sure what’s going on but I get the idea your brother’s got a condition like cystic fibrosis or severe asthma. Something that makes pneumonia dangerous. I heard Anna’s worry and I can see you’re upset.’ Her hand rested on his arm, warm and caring but firm. ‘I’m driving you to Melbourne and that’s that.’
He should argue and fight her on this—refuse her offer and drive to Melbourne alone. This was his family, not hers, and no one deserved to have the Ainsworths inflicted on them in the good times, let alone the bad. This was likely to be as bad as it got. Usually, Gran could temper the worst of his bombastic father and acerbic mother but she’d be too upset to manage them.
An idea struck. His parents didn’t know Lauren, and that gave her power he could harness. Her presence would be a welcome buffer that would delay the inevitable arguments and accusations laced with disappointment.
‘Thank you.’
She stroked his cheek. ‘Any time.’
He swallowed the rising self-loathing that he was about to throw her under the Ainsworth bus.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LAUREN STOOD IN a small, sterile room. The only touches of colour came courtesy of a bunch of yellow gerberas, a red CD player and a blue speaker with a white mobile phone charging in the dock. She squeezed Charlie’s hand and tried hard to absorb the shocking truth. Of all the scenarios she’d pictured on the two-hour drive, she hadn’t come close to this reality.
Charlie had insisted on driving and Lauren had accepted that he needed to divert his anxiety into something tangible, but she’d demanded they take her car. ‘Anna will appreciate you driving her back to the Bay in her car,’ she’d offered as her reason. If she was honest, since Jeremy, she preferred to be as independent as possible.
The trip had been relatively silent apart from desultory comments on the traffic and Charlie’s mutters of ‘moron’ whenever a car had changed lanes without indicating. Lauren had filled the void with music, setting her MP3 player to shuffle. As they’d crossed the Westgate Bridge, a Coldplay tune had come on and Charlie had flinched before thumping the button on the steering wheel to flick the player onto the next track. It killed her not to press him to tell her what the hell was going on, but he was behind the wheel in heavy traffic—probably another reason he’d insisted on driving. Another way to hold her at bay. And yet Anna had said, ‘He needs you.’ Did that mean Charlie had told her about them?
When Charlie had pulled the car into the parking lot of a nursing home—the domain of the elderly—a sharp pain had ripped through her. Now she stared at the wraith-thin man on the bed—the ghost of Charlie. Harry, although slightly darker, had his brother’s intelligent forehead and widow’s peak and a similar shaped nose. Lauren had no idea about the colour of his eyes, because they were closed. A catheter bag was hooked on the side rail of the bed and a parenteral nutrition bag hung high on a stand. A sign inside a Perspex frame on the bedhead declared, ‘Nil By Mouth’.
‘Hey, bro.’ Charlie leaned down and gently brushed his brother’s hair from his forehead before kissing him. ‘Love you.’
Harry didn’t speak, move, flinch, wince or blink. The only movement was the rise and fall of his chest. The only noise was the ominous rattle of each breath and the hiss of the oxygen.
Lauren fought tears. ‘Can he hear you?’
Charlie shrugged. ‘I like to think so but as he doesn’t respond to any painful stimuli it’s hard to believe he does. Even so, I still make a recording each week. You know, a private podcast telling him what I’ve been up to. I try to add a joke and either a funny or interesting story.’ He gave her a wry smile. ‘I told him about the mud rescue. I send it to his phone and the nurses play it to him a couple of times across the week.’
Her heart quivered. ‘How long’s he been in a coma?’
Charlie gripped the cot sides on the bed and closed his eyes as a long breath shuddered out of him. ‘This weekend it will be thirteen years.’
‘But...’ Her stomach rolled, making her feel queasy, and she sat down hard on one of the chairs. ‘That means he was comatose when we first met.’
‘Yeah. Had been for nine months. That was a bastard of a year but our summer together meant so much to me. It gave me respite from the endless questions and pitying looks. I could just be me. Not poor Harry’s brother.’
She wanted to know everything. ‘Is he your only brother?’
Charlie nodded and sat down in the armchair next to her. ‘He’s three years younger than me. Hard to believe, right? He looks decades older than me now.’
She slid her hand into his and his fingers traced the path of the cast across her palm. ‘What happened?’
Charlie’s eyes glazed over as if telling the story was something he did by rote. ‘I was in final year of med school and Harry was at the Conservatorium. He was a hell of a cellist. He inherited the creative gene from my mother’s side of the family.’
He grimaced. ‘The Ainsworths are far too pragmatic for any of that. Anyway, my parents and Gran were in Europe. Dad was giving a paper at some conference and Harry and I were baching. Of course, we threw a party. Looking back on how many drunk people there were that night, it was a miracle no one drowned in the pool or died from aspirating their own vomit. But the worst thing that happened was a broken coffee table and an indelible stain on my mother’s cream carpet.’
He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Like most life-changing events, it happened on a very ordinary day when Harry was doing a very ordinary thing. The Con’s opposite the hospital and while Dad was away we had his parking pass. It was a treat not to have to catch the tram, especially for Harry who schlepped everywhere with a cello. I had an early lecture and Harry was dragging his feet. I was at the base of the stairs, yelling for him to bloody well hurry up or I was leaving without him, when he appeared on the landing, shirt half buttoned, feet shoved into shoes, and lugging that bloody moulded cello case. His last words to me were, “Jeez, keep your shirt on.”
‘I watched it happen but I can’t tell you how it happened. One minute he was rolling his eyes at me for being a slave to time and the next he was at my feet. He tumbled head first down the stairs. A l
ot is a blur. He wasn’t breathing. I did CPR and got him back. He was rushed to hospital and they operated, removing part of his skull to allow for the swelling of his brain. The neurosurgeon said it was grim. Mum and Dad were more than twenty-four hours away by plane and I was the one left making the decisions. My funny and irreverent baby brother was just twenty. I said do everything.’
Lauren didn’t realise she was crying until Charlie reached into his pocket and handed her a snowy handkerchief. ‘You must have been so frightened. Terrified. Overwhelmed.’
‘Yeah.’ For a second, the shutters on his eyes lifted and amidst the guilt and pain she saw a spark of appreciation. ‘He was in ICU for two months without a single sign of any improvement. Every test reinforced this and my father made the decision to remove Harry from life support. We gathered. We said goodbye and we waited. But when everything was withdrawn, Harry continued to breathe on his own. I was euphoric.
‘Hope kept me going for months. He had physio and massage to prevent contractures and to help keep some muscle tone. His Con mates came and played and sang. Like Mum, Harry was sensitive and squeamish, so I’d study by his bed, reading out loud to him all the gory stuff in the hope he’d open his eyes and tell me to bugger off. Gran made sure there were scented fresh flowers from her garden and she did a heap of sensory stimulation stuff.’
It took Lauren a moment to realise that in the list of who’d done what, he hadn’t mentioned his parents. ‘When did Harry move here?’
Charlie rose and poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher a nurse had brought in. ‘The summer I met you. When he was in hospital getting therapy, I could believe he’d wake up one day, but when they bypassed rehab completely and sent him here to God’s waiting room with the old, the frail and the demented...’ He gulped down the water.
His anguish flailed her. ‘That’s why you went to England?’ I never had any intention of returning to Australia to live. But she remembered the overheard phone conversation with his father about buying Harry a CD. She’d just seen him being so gentle with Harry. She’d heard the love in his voice when he’d spoken to him, despite his belief that his brother didn’t hear him. The idea that Harry was keeping him away from Australia didn’t make sense.