He didn’t need to.
Miranda loved his moments of honesty and flawed humanity. People weren’t perfect. They gave her the jitters when they tried to be, because it wasn’t natural. It was one of the things she’d hated about her childhood—the fact that her loving parents had tried too hard, had sheltered her too much, had made everything too safe and nice.
Of course Nick wanted another week with the son he was only just getting to know on a genuine, day-to-day level. She wouldn’t say no to an airline refuellers’ strike herself if it gave her another week of Nick’s company.
By day and by night.
And if he was so unequivocal in not wanting Anna to come up, then surely he couldn’t still have feelings for her.
Slathering herself with insect repellent in preparation for an evening of wildlife spotting later on, with Wallaby Island park head ranger Ben Chandler and his two junior staff, Miranda knew she’d have to fight the temptation to eat beside Nick and walk with him later, too, instead of parcelling out her time to patients and parents.
He understood, though. When she raised the subject as they lined up for spaghetti, he told her, ‘I’ll stick with Josh. You go wherever you need to go. Maybe later in our cabin…?’
‘Definitely later in your cabin.’
But what was that saying about the best-laid plans…?
Josh was wildly excited about going out at night wearing a head torch and tramping through the bush. ‘Where’s Lily?’ he asked, as he held out his plate to receive his meal. ‘Isn’t she coming? She has to come!’
‘No, Lily isn’t feeling well. She won’t be coming tonight. And Garf would scare all the creatures, so he has to stay in camp, too.’
Nick had found out a little more about Lily. Charles Wetherby and Crocodile Creek Hospital’s Director of Nursing Jill Shaw were acting as foster-parents, and her permanent future was still up in the air. He had the impression that Charles wasn’t sure about his future with Jill either. They had marriage plans, apparently, but their relationship seemed to have been cobbled together for Lily’s sake, which didn’t sound like the healthiest of foundations.
‘Couldn’t she have her inhaler?’ Josh was saying. ‘Then she’d be OK.’
‘Not asthma, Joshie.’ He tended to assume that his own illness was a universal phenomenon. ‘She has a cold.’
‘Oh, OK.’ He hopped back and forth from foot to foot and the tangle of spaghetti almost slid off the plate.
Nick had to anchor him in his seat over the meal with some stern words. ‘Eat, Josh. Sit properly on your backside, please, and eat.’ He hated saying it because it reminded him too much of his dad, and all those meals choked down stone cold, as a child, because he wasn’t allowed to leave the table without presenting a thoroughly cleaned plate.
He hated saying it, too, because he hadn’t seen fear and uncertainty in Josh’s face in three days now, and if the sternness brought the fear back…
It did.
Not looking at him, Josh hunkered down over his plate and managed a few more reluctant mouthfuls of spaghetti bolognaise, but then he started only pretending to eat, pushing the strands of pasta around the plate and out to the sides and mashing them into shorter lengths so they would look like inedible scraps instead of real food.
Nick’s father’s attitudes were hard to shake, even after so many years. Kids did waste too much food. Perfectly good plates of nutritious dinner got scraped into bins to leave room for piled-high dessert. Parents became worn down by the constant need to say no to junk food and grew too soft.
‘OK,’ he heard a mother sigh at the next table. ‘That’ll do. Yes, go and get your ice cream…’ She added half-heartedly, ‘But have some fruit salad, too.’
The meals were good here, but it was hard to undo bad habits in a week or two. If getting kids to eat well had been hard in Nick’s father’s day, it was much harder now.
Hard to build a whole new relationship, too. ‘Good grief, you’re not really eating it, Josh,’ he said in the end, far more sharply than he’d intended. ‘So stop pretending. You’re done.’
Josh put his fork down. After several seconds—building up his courage?—he asked in a small voice, ‘Can I have dessert?’
There was half a meal still there on his plate!
‘No, I’m sorry, not tonight,’ Nick made himself say. ‘If you’re not hungry for spaghetti, then you’re not hungry for ice cream.’ Even though it was ridiculously tempting to agree to the ice cream just for the pleasure of seeing Josh’s face light up.
‘Yes, I am,’ he insisted innocently. ‘Mummy says I have two stomachs. My dinner stomach is full, but my dessert stomach is still empty.’
‘Well, I’m afraid it’s going to have to stay that way.’
Nick thought it was the right answer, but saying it was hard when all around them kids were coming back to the table with bowls of ice cream, fruit salad and jelly. He felt his non-custodial parent status like a dead weight—it was such a lonely role sometimes—and his deepening relationship with Josh like a fragile flower cradled in his hand.
What would he have to do to crush it? Not much.
‘Does that mean I can leave the table?’ Josh was too excited about the night walk to mind very much about dessert.
He wasn’t a huge eater at the best of times, and his size and his asthma and his lack of appetite formed a triangle of cause and effect that Nick hadn’t fully fathomed yet. If he ate better, would he fight the asthma more easily? If his lungs were clearer and bigger, would he feel hungrier?
‘Yes, OK, you can leave. Scrape your plate and put it on the trolley with the others.’
Josh did so, looking too small as he stretched on tiptoe beside the scrap bin. Seconds later, he had joined a group of shrieking kids outside the dining room. One of them had a head torch on and was treating its beam like a light sabre, while the others ran back and forth in the darkness. ‘I caught you, Josh! I caught you in the beam! And you, too, Danny!’ Danny’s round head, bald from his recent chemo, shone pale in the light.
One parent said, ‘Shouldn’t we get them to be quiet and stop running?’
Someone else answered, ‘They’re kids! It’s what kids do. And I can’t remember the last time my guy felt good enough to run!’
Miranda was eating at another table tonight, after she’d warned Nick that she needed to spend more of her public time with the other parents. ‘I’d hate it if people began to make comments.’
As would he, but he missed her talent with his son. No, forget Josh, he just missed her—her company, her smile, the way she smelled.
And she would somehow have managed to deliver the no- dinner-no-dessert message without his own sternness, Nick felt. She’d have smiled as she said it, with a mix of firmness and cheerfulness that he couldn’t deliver naturally and couldn’t fake either.
The mild father-and-son altercation was over now, but it had left an eddy of uncertainty that stayed with him as the park rangers drove up, introduced themselves, handed out extra torches and divided the night-walk participants into three groups. He and Josh ended up in Miranda’s group mainly because that was the direction Josh ran in when the kids were finally asked to settle down.
Settling down was a bit of a stretch. Josh wasn’t the only kid to be over-excited. There was shrieking and scuffling and giggling and hopping up and down.
‘So do you want to see some animals tonight?’ Ranger Ben asked.
A loud chorus of, ‘Ye-e-s!’
&nb
sp; ‘Tree kangaroos?’
‘Yes!’
‘Sugar gliders?’
‘Yes!’
‘Crocodiles?’
‘Yes!’
‘Well then, you’ll have to…be quiet!’
At which point Josh and some of the other littler ones tried so hard to stifle their giggles and still their restless feet that they almost forgot to breathe.
Ah, yeah, breathing…
Fifteen minutes into the night walk, the attack built with a speed Nick hadn’t seen at first hand since before his and Anna’s separation. They were on the beach about half a kilo¬ metre from the main camp and just about to turn away from the water onto a forest trail when he first discovered Josh was having problems. He’d been darting around with a cat’s curiosity, examining everything he found, trailing a piece of driftwood through the sand, and it was great, but then…
Ben was telling them about shearwaters nesting in the sand dunes. ‘Some people call them mutton-birds because the early settlers used to think they tasted like mutton.’
Several of the kids still had to be shushed from time to time, and a couple of them were panting after running along the beach in loopy circles like puppies instead of listening to Ben. Others milled around on the edges of the group, stopping to examine a shell or wandering up towards the dunes at the top of the beach to kick up the loose sand.
Inevitably, Nick drifted into Miranda’s company. They weren’t talking much, but even just to walk along a beach beside her in silence gave him a unique, multi-stranded pleasure that he couldn’t quite believe…and a kind of vertigo when he considered the implications. Forget those. He loved the smooth sheen on her bare legs in the moonlight, the casual swing of her ponytail, the way she broke the silence with a murmured comment meant just for him.
Josh appeared out of the darkness. ‘Dad, I want my inhaler.’ He’d circled back from another short foray up the beach, and his voice sounded strained and thick. The front of his shirt was speckled with something that Nick didn’t have time to examine.
‘Right here, Joshie.’ He took off the daypack he was wearing and crouched down on the sand at Josh-level while he unzipped it. ‘You OK?’
He wasn’t. Why even ask?
‘I think I ran too much. And then I was—’ wheeze ‘—trying too hard—’ wheeze ‘—to be quiet.’
‘No problem. Here we go.’ Nick pushed the mouthpiece of the inhaler into the rubber sleeve on the spacer.
‘And then…’ Josh added slowly, then stopped. He appeared to be gathering his courage.
‘What happened, Josh? Don’t be scared to tell me. Please.’ So it was still there, then, the fear and reluctance, beneath the bond they’d begun to establish this week…
Nick felt a spurt of self-disgust at his own naivety. Of course it was still there! You couldn’t defeat five years of damaged history in a few days, and when you were the parent, it was up to you to keep pushing. With Miranda nearby, at least he didn’t feel as if he was pushing totally alone.
‘Come on, Joshie.’ He gentled his voice and touched his son’s shoulder.
‘I found…someone’s fire still warm…’ Josh wheezed, ‘and I was poking…in the ash…with a stick. It all came up suddenly…in my face…and I breathed.’
‘Oh, hell,’ Nick muttered. That was the speckled stuff on his shirt. White ash. It dusted his face and hair, too, and even his eyelashes. Oh hell…hell! ‘Why on earth did you—?’ He stopped and bit his anger back, mentally coaching himself.
Let it go. Don’t mess this up.
There was no point in issuing recriminations. Josh was only five. Sometimes kids didn’t think.
And Nick hadn’t even seen. Not the fire, or Josh going near it. He’d been looking at Miranda instead. Now, too late, he saw the ring of stones and heap of grey ash and black coals up the beach behind them towards the dunes. A couple of beer bottles, too, and the discarded piece of driftwood Josh had used to poke the ash.
Damn! This was his fault!
The fact made him feel even worse about how close he’d come to yelling at his son in the middle of an asthma attack, with his son’s doctor standing right by. Miranda. Where was she? Still with the group, he saw, answering a question from a parent. Hell, he couldn’t claim her now…
At the edge of his awareness, he vaguely heard Ben say, ‘We’re going to head into the rainforest next.’
And one of the other rangers was telling a child, ‘No, hey, don’t touch that, it’s dead.’
And he didn’t care if the group left them behind.
‘OK, ready, Josh?’ he said.
But Josh took the mouthpiece of the spacer away when Nick tried to put it to his lips. ‘I feel sick. I breathed ash.’
‘I know, but let’s try your inhaler before we think about that.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Joshie, we have to.’
He gave a small nod, but again waved the spacer away when Nick tried to put it to his mouth. ‘Not yet.’ They sat there for a moment, the sea washing in the background, while Josh struggled against nausea, and breathed and wheezed, still insisting every time Nick tried to get a dose of bronchodilator into him, ‘I can’t.’ Finally, he managed several ineffectual puffs, but they had no visible effect.
Nick found a bottle of water in his daypack. ‘Try this.’ He gave Josh the bottle. ‘Can you taste the ash in your mouth— is that the problem? Is that what’s making you feel sick and making your breathing go tight?’
Josh nodded. ‘Tastes bad.’ He took some water and spat it out, took some more and gulped it down, pausing twice between mouthfuls to breathe. His condition was getting worse, his reactions more panicky. He had to accept the inhaler, even if he didn’t want to. ‘Just do it, Josh! Come on!’ The sharp words came more from fear than anger, but his son couldn’t know that.
Josh tried, then leaned over the sand and lost the small amount of dinner he’d had an hour earlier. Nick’s stomach knotted tighter with guilt. Should he have listened to Josh and waited longer to try the inhaler, or had he been right to push? Whatever the case, he shouldn’t have yelled about it.
Suddenly, Miranda was there. ‘I saw you drop back from the group. I’m sorry, someone was talking to me and I couldn’t get away.’
Nick looked up the beach and discovered the others disappearing behind the dunes and into the forest. ‘Have we been sitting here—?’
‘A few minutes, that’s all. Six or seven, I guess. I told Ben not to wait. The other kids have settled down now. Ben is good with them. One of them just found a dead shearwater. Josh, how are you doing, sweetheart?’
‘Joshie, we have to try again with the inhaler.’ Nick looked up at Miranda again. ‘He breathed in a whole lungful of ash. Someone had a fire here this afternoon.’
‘Without a permit, I would think.’
‘Apparently.’ He fingered some of the stuff on Josh’s shirt. ‘It’s so fine, finer than dust. Hell!’
Josh nodded at Nick and this time reached willingly for the inhaler, whether because the nausea had now subsided or the squeezed chest had grown worse, Nick couldn’t tell. He looked as pale as the sand. Paler. And so heartbreakingly little and thin.
‘Remember how we do this, Josh,’ Miranda coached him. ‘You know. Hold it to your mouth, and one, two, three. That’s better…’
But Josh shook his head. His breathing wasn’t better.
Nick saw the accessory chest muscles coming into play with the kind of effo
rt common after heavy exertion—the muscles between the ribs, across the chest and below the sternum. You saw it in runners or cyclists at the end of a long race, but you didn’t want to see it in an asthmatic child at rest.
‘I don’t like sitting on the beach like this,’ he muttered to Miranda. Josh was too strongly focused on his struggle to breathe to listen. ‘We’re, what, ten or fifteen minutes’ walk from the medical centre by now?’
‘About that. And I don’t have much equipment with me. Only my stethoscope, in my daypack. I want to have a listen to him.’ She swung the pack off her shoulders and pulled the stethoscope out. ‘Joshie, let’s try some more puffs to make you feel better, before we get moving.’
More breaths, more counting, more puffs.
But if they had an effect, it didn’t show.
Miranda listened with her stethoscope in several places, her face carefully not telegraphing to Josh what she thought. ‘Medical centre,’ she said. ‘Play it safe. I have my mobile, I’ll call them, see if someone can send one of those golf buggy things.’
‘This seems to be building faster and much worse than the one he had at the airport on Sunday.’
‘I think so, too.’
‘That ash. I should have seen what he was doing. I’ve been trying not to wrap him in cotton wool this week.’ The way Anna did, far too much. Damn it, Anna wasn’t relevant now. ‘But maybe I’ve gone too far the—’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she cut in. ‘Save it. It’s not your fault.’
Anna wouldn’t agree.
Nick knew that as well as he knew his own name, but didn’t have time to think about it. He did think about the fact that she hadn’t phoned yet with news of her plans, then realised he’d left his mobile in the pocket of his other shorts. Hell! Still, the last thing he wanted was to get her on the line now and listen to her litany of recriminations. He’d call from the medical centre when Josh’s attack had begun to settle down.
The Australian's Desire (Mills & Boon By Request) Page 46