Outback Doctors/Outback Engagement/Outback Marriage/Outback Encounter

by Meredith Webber

  He deposited the box on the ground in front of them and held out his hand.

  ‘Ted Cummins, Careela.’

  ‘I’m Cal Whitworth, Ted, and this is Blythe Jones, and your missus was right—I’d kill for a hot drink.’

  Ted nodded to Blythe and began to unpack the box, setting out a Thermos and cups then delving in again, producing sandwiches that smelt as if they’d been made with newly baked bread.

  ‘I’m so hungry I’d have eaten a rag doll,’ Blythe said, accepting a sandwich and nodding yes to coffee. ‘But these are delicious. Does your wife make her own bread?’

  ‘Have to make your own everything, just about, out here,’ Ted told her. ‘Easier these days with electricity and fancy machines. When my mother first came here, Dad built a roof to shelter them from the sun and keep the bed and provisions under, and Mum cooked over an open fire. When the rains came, they hung tarpaulins down the rainy side to stop it blowing in.’

  He nodded towards Cal.

  ‘Though the real pioneers were the women like the doc here’s great-grandmother. She’s part of history, she is. One of the first white women in the Northern Territory.’

  Blythe stopped eating long enough to smile at Cal.

  ‘Lileth’s great-grandmother?’ she said, and saw his eyes light up as he appreciated the joke.

  But he nodded to Ted, then explained, ‘But for all her hardships, she lived until she was nearly ninety. Said it was hard work kept her going. I remember, as a child, listening to her stories. Her biggest regret, she used to say, was when the bullock wagon bogged after an unexpected downpour. Apparently, my grandfather needed something to put under the wheels of the wagon so the bullocks could pull it free, and he chose what he considered the least necessary items they were carrying. These happened to be several sets of silver cutlery his wife had been given as part of her trousseau. They were packed in solid wooden cases—things like cake forks and carving sets as well as normal cutlery.’

  Ted was already laughing but Blythe failed to get the joke.

  ‘So what happened?’ she demanded.

  ‘Oh, they were just right for the job. The wheels caught on them and came free, my great-grandfather led the bullocks onto less treacherous ground, and that was that.’

  ‘He did go back for the cutlery, didn’t he?’

  ‘No way he could.’ Ted answered for Cal. ‘Once he had those wheels moving he wouldn’t have wanted to stop and bog down again. Besides, that black soil when it’s wet—it’d swallow a bullock in no time flat. He’d never have found those boxes.’

  A clattering noise, at first far off but coming steadily closer, stopped the conversation. Blythe finished her coffee and took another sandwich, while Ted hurried over to his ute and brought out a roll of bright blue plastic.

  ‘He’ll spread it so the pilot can see where to land,’ Cal explained. ‘In most places, you’d spread something white, but against the salt it might not stand out, so blue’s good.’

  ‘And people have the right colour plastic hanging about their houses, ready to spread should an emergency arise?’ Blythe shook her head. ‘That’s harder to believe than your ancestor leaving his wife’s silver cutlery behind.’

  Cal chuckled.

  ‘Ted probably has a dozen uses for the plastic,’ he said. ‘Lining feed bins, keeping rain off an injured animal, or off himself if he’s working on a borehole pump in the wet season.’

  ‘I don’t even know what a borehole pump is!’ Blythe muttered, but the helicopter was coming down and the words were drowned out by the noise it made.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ONE week later, Blythe lay on the deck by the small, above-ground pool in the back yard of the ‘Doctor’s House’, as the rambling old wooden building was known.

  Sunday was the doctors’ official day off—no surgery and no hospital round unless requested by staff. She was on call for emergencies but Cal had assured her the locals tried hard not to have emergencies on Sundays.

  She could, had she wanted, have taken herself off to Derryville, but she’d seen Derryville the previous Sunday when the rescue helicopter had deposited her and Cal at the hospital there, and, though a larger town than Creamunna, it shut down on the Sabbath just as comprehensively.

  Though the hospital staff there had been wonderful, fussing over Cal as X-rays had confirmed the broken clavicle but ruled out a broken ankle—badly sprained was the hospital doctor’s opinion.

  So, she was lying by the pool and wishing for company. Any company, even Mrs Robertson, with her interminable chatter about people Blythe didn’t know, would have done. She knew better than to hope for Cal’s company. Within twenty-four hours of arriving in the place, she’d realised he was a workaholic and, though not able to do much doctoring, he would sit at the computer for hours on end.

  Catching up, he said, but on what, he didn’t say.

  In fact, he didn’t say much at all. Ever.

  He’d sat in on her initial consultations, but after the first morning, which had been awkward for both doctors and the patient, he’d left her on her own.

  Actually, now she thought about it, a little praise wouldn’t have hurt…

  ‘You’ll get burnt if you lie there for longer than half an hour.’

  ‘So?’ Blythe snapped, forgetting she’d been wanting company and lifting her head to glare at it now it had arrived.

  ‘So then we’d have two crocks for doctors. Not fair on the patients.’

  ‘Bugger the patients,’ Blythe muttered, but she rolled over to expose her front side to the sun, knowing the man was, as annoyingly as ever, right.

  She closed her eyes to shut out the sun, and assumed Cal had walked away—back to the computer, no doubt—so was startled when she heard a chair creak as if weight was being lowered into it.

  ‘What don’t you like about the town?’ Cal asked, and she had to open one eye so she could squint at him.

  ‘What do you mean, what don’t I like about the town? Did I say I didn’t like the town? What gives you the right to make these assumptions?’

  ‘A little tetchy today, are we? Too much wine last night?’

  Blythe closed the eye again, and bit back a groan.

  She had had too much wine the previous night, but Cal’s suggestion that he open a bottle to have with their dinner had made her feel as if it had been a special occasion. Then she’d realised that thinking of ‘special occasion’ and ‘Cal’ in the same sentence wasn’t good, so she’d gulped instead of sipped.

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way—that you didn’t like the town.’ He must have realised she wasn’t going to answer him. ‘I know it’s only been a week, but I’d really like to know how you feel about your introduction to rural medicine. What made it hard? What might have made it easier?’

  You being here.

  You not being here.

  Blythe’s head supplied the answers to his questions, but she didn’t pass them on. The man was egotistical enough—it came through in the assured way he moved, even with a walking stick, in the way he spoke, in his certainty about things. And a week of seeing disappointment on the faces of women when they’d realised Blythe was to be their doctor confirmed her guess that the women of Creamunna had added to his ego problem rather than detracted from it.

  She closed her eyes more tightly as she silently acknowledged her outrageous conversation by the fire the previous week would probably have inflated it as well, then tried to blank the memory out again.

  She spent a lot of her time at Creamunna doing that—blanking out memories. Of conversations. Of how she’d felt, lying with his arm around her while he’d told her stories…

  ‘It’s important to know,’ he persisted, breaking into her straying and as yet unblanked-out thoughts. ‘Of course, it would have been better if you were my wife—that’s really the perspective I need to get—but a woman doctor—that’s good too.’

  Blythe gave up ignoring him—and the blanking business. She sat up and turned to face h
im, adjusting the top of the quite classy black bikini she’d been surprised to find in Creamunna’s one and only clothing store.

  ‘It’d be better if I were your wife? What are we talking about here, Dr Whitworth? Your wife?’

  Her voice had got a bit shrill by the last bit of her contribution to the conversation, but what could you expect?

  ‘It’s nothing personal,’ he said, looking not at her but across the back yard to where a couple of rainbow lorikeets were picking up grass seed. ‘I think I told you I’m interested in rural medicine and in encouraging medical personnel to work in rural areas. This began before I became a doctor, but the interest has continued. It’s really why I’m at Creamunna. I need to experience rural practice in order to understand how to make it more attractive to potential employees. So a wife’s perspective would have been handy. Maybe Lileth will come and even if she only stays a short time, I could ask her.’

  ‘And do what with the information?’

  Blythe’s reply was so abrupt Cal was forced to look back at her, though he’d been trying not to since his earlier sighting of all the creamy skin not covered by the black bikini had alerted his libido to its recent lack of action.

  Throwing a blanket over her would help, but it would be hard to explain such an action.

  If only she hadn’t suggested she’d been interested in him—purely for sex, of course…

  He focussed on his work.

  ‘I’m compiling data. Actually, I’m not the only one—there are other members of the rural medicine committee who are also looking into this. Then, once we have a reasonably large survey group, we can look at the answers and if we identify a problem, we see what we can do to remedy it.’

  Blythe frowned at him as if his explanation lacked something so he launched into an example.

  ‘Take shopping. In an early survey, access to department stores was one of the things women really missed when they came out here. The committee liased with a couple of big firms and women can now shop on-line.’

  ‘Wow! Trying on a dress on-line—that would be interesting.’

  At times like this, when she made him want to grind his teeth, Cal wondered why he’d persuaded her to stay! But he bit back his own caustic comment, and continued.

  ‘It’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing. The problem then was that a lot of people weren’t internet savvy, so the committee organised a technology support person to travel around, giving lessons in everything from basic computer skills to setting up your own website.’

  ‘That’s good, practical help,’ his guest admitted. ‘I’m not a shopaholic myself and I was amazed at the range of clothes I found in Mrs Warburton’s emporium, but I can understand some people might like more options.’

  She paused then smiled at him—the cheeky, luminous grin she gave because she must know it infuriated him.

  Or his reaction to it infuriated him…

  ‘You’ll notice I said ‘‘people’’, not ‘‘women’’. I know men who spend more time in shops than most of the women I know. A male shopaholic is far worse than the female of the species.’

  Cal shrugged. He didn’t know how it happened, but he was always getting into this kind of conversation with Blythe—as if they couldn’t talk without arguing over something.

  ‘I’m not normally an argumentative person,’ he complained, then realised he was continuing his thoughts, not the conversation.

  And she was grinning at him again, as if she knew exactly what he’d been thinking.

  The phone saved him from further embarrassment, Blythe lifting the handpiece from beside where she sat and answering it with a cool, ‘Blythe Jones speaking.’

  ‘Yes. Yes?’

  She cocked her eyebrows enquiringly at Cal.

  ‘Yes, OK, we’ll be there.’

  She thumbed the button to end the call, then said, ‘Buck-jumping at a place called Whitestone? Ring any bells?’

  ‘Oh hell, I’d forgotten all about it. What time?’

  ‘Two-thirty. How far away is it?’

  ‘Less than an hour. We’ll make it.’

  ‘Just!’ Blythe was already on her feet and heading towards the house.

  ‘You don’t have to come,’ Cal called after her. ‘The ambulance will be there, and I can drive so I’ll go out and can give advice if it’s needed.’

  ‘I guess you could drive at a pinch but you’d be a danger to yourself and all other road-users,’ she said, swinging back to give him a genuine smile. ‘Anyway, I’ve never seen buck-jumping. I don’t even know what it is, but if it’s part of the country experience, then I’m in.’

  She hurried off, reappearing in an incredibly short time, the creamy skin demurely covered in jeans and a brightly embroidered top that looked like something women in Eastern Europe might wear as part of a national costume.

  ‘I like the way you country folk give distances in time,’ she said, lifting the car keys from the hook and heading out the door, leaving him to hobble after her as best he could. ‘I didn’t understand it until I went out to Mr Crichton’s on Thursday. Though it can’t be more than thirty k’s, the road’s so bad once you leave the bitumen, it took an hour.’

  Cal frowned at the bottom swaying seductively along in front of him. She’d been virtually dragooned into helping out for a few weeks, and, though she argued non-stop with him, she seemed to find everything else in the ‘country experience’ fascinating and absorbing and delightfully interesting. She was obviously the wrong person to have asked about what she didn’t like…

  ‘Here, you slide in and I’ll take your stick.’

  She was holding the car door open for him now and, though he hated to be so dependent on anyone, he had to admit she did things like this with a minimum of fuss. Maybe she knew his frustration levels—with the injuries, not libido this time, though there was that as well—were so high, any unnecessary fussing might have driven him to violence.

  ‘We go out along the Western Highway,’ he told her, as she backed the car competently out through the front gate.

  ‘So, tell me more about the rural medicine committee,’ she suggested, when they were low-flying along the deserted highway.

  Cal, always nervous when someone else was driving, leaned across to check the speedometer.

  ‘Only five k’s over the limit,’ his chauffeur assured him. ‘Stop panicking.’

  But he felt the slowing as she lifted her foot—marginally, he guessed—off the accelerator.

  ‘There are government agencies and organisations involved in encouraging doctors to practise in isolated areas, but this committee is more a practical thing, made up of people both inside and outside medicine with an interest in making sure there are services on the ground.’

  ‘People like you were when you first became involved—back when you were a cattle baron, not a doctor.’

  ‘Hardly a baron,’ Cal corrected dryly, ‘but, yes, people like me, as well as doctors, nurses and therapists who have worked, or are still working, in rural communities.’

  Blythe nodded her understanding, wondering again about this man’s past and the journey that had led him to the strong commitment he obviously had to rural medicine.

  She considered asking, but guessed he’d fob her off, as he did whenever her questions verged towards the personal, so she asked about buck-jumping instead because, given the strange tension that always seemed to stretch between them when they were together, not talking wasn’t an option.

  ‘Been to a rodeo?’

  He often answered her question with a question, a little habit that now made her smile.

  ‘Not a lot of them happening down in the city,’ she reminded him. ‘But I know about them. Foolish youth ride wild bulls—isn’t that the idea?’

  ‘Partly,’ he agreed, ‘though they’re not all youths and certainly not foolish. It’s sport that takes a lot of stamina as well as guts.’

  ‘Spilling everywhere no doubt.’

  Cal chuckled, the sound caus
ing pleasant tremors on Blythe’s skin and a spurt of satisfaction in her mind. He laughed so rarely she now treated making him laugh as a challenge, giving herself a mental pat on the back when she succeeded.

  ‘Buck-jumping is part of most rodeos. It’s done on horses, not bulls, and as well as being included in rodeos, there’s a buck-jumping circuit as well. Most weekends there’ll be a buck-jumping competition somewhere, and riders and horses travel to compete.’

  ‘The horses travel to compete? Do people try to get bucked off their own horses?’

  A smile this time—no pat on the back for it, though, as it was his condescending ‘poor city girl’ type of smile.

  ‘The horses are kept especially for buck-jumping. A good bucker is worth big money, because everyone wants to ride him.’

  ‘Everyone wants to ride him?’ Blythe repeated. Forget condescending smiles, she was a city girl and way out of her depth here. ‘If I had to ride a bucking horse, I’d far rather have one without a buck left in him—or maybe one little buck, just for show.’

  Another smile, this one more genuine than the first.

  ‘The riders score points,’ Cal explained, ‘firstly for staying on the required time, and secondly for how well they ride. That depends on how well the horse bucks. If it ambles out and pig-roots a couple of times, it’s not much of a ride so you don’t get a good score, which is why all the riders want a good horse—one that will buck the hell out of them.’

  ‘I am going to assume this is a male thing—beyond the comprehension of female minds,’ Blythe muttered, but was swiftly corrected.

  ‘No way. You get women riders as well. There’ll be at least two out at Whitestone today.’ Alerted by something in his voice, she glanced his way and caught the twinkle in the eyes that were watching and waiting for her reaction. ‘In fact, you know one of them. Janet Speares.’

  ‘Janet Speares, the Director of Nursing at the hospital?’ No wonder he’d been alert for her reaction! ‘She rides wild horses that try to buck her off?’

  ‘She does, and does it well. In fact, she was the women’s buck-jumping champ at Derryville Rodeo this year.’