Harry St Clair: Rogue or Doctor?

by Fiona McArthur

  But seconds later he’d seen the old man’s shake of the head and Bonnie had looked up in desperation as she’d been left to her own resources again. Finally he’d been able to break the hold on his limbs and thrust himself forward. He hoped he wasn’t too late.

  Bonnie felt panic rising again as the little girl continued to lie flaccid beneath her. Then suddenly Harry, of all people, dropped down beside her to help. ‘I’ll do the compressions. I know what I’m doing.’

  He compressed the toddler’s chest. There was no hesitation, exactly a third in depth, no over-or undercompensation, which spoke of years of practice, and she shelved the questions that surfaced bitterly until she had time. Please, God, such precision would squeeze the little heart to force oxygen to the child’s brain. In that captured moment, with the shock of the threat of death for this child a reality, for a split second in time as he cradled the child’s chest Bonnie was struck by the snapshot of Harry’s hands, hands she hoped she could trust with a child’s life.

  She breathed two breaths as the thirty-second mark came around again. ‘Are you medical?’

  ‘A doctor.’ He didn’t look at her. ‘You must have seen her fall in. How long was she under for?’

  ‘Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.’ Bonnie paused, breathed twice, the little chest rose and fell, and Bonnie looked up at the old man. ‘How’s the time, please?’ She started again.

  ‘One and a half minutes.’ How long had he been there? But that wasn’t important. Why wasn’t the little one responding?

  The next half a minute dragged with aching slowness, thirty chest compressions, two breaths. Then another thirty seconds.

  ‘Come on,’ Harry muttered after Bonnie’s next breaths and he compressed again, and as he finished speaking the tiny girl blinked slowly and finally screwed up her face before she coughed and began to cry weakly.

  Bonnie felt a sob catch in her throat, the sudden heat of tears mixed with the swimming-pool water that still trickled down her face from her hair, and a huge shudder rippled down her back. She looked at Harry and no doubt her own relief was reflected in his eyes as he stared back at her.

  Then raw ache at the back of her throat as she held back the sob continued to grow in size like a sharp rock in her neck and she pulled back out of the way as Harry rolled the little girl onto her side and into the recovery position.

  She heard him say, ‘Thank God,’ as she inched further away. It had been him she’d seen. Why had he waited? Then the traumatised mother threw herself down beside her daughter and burst into tears. The sound of a distant ambulance siren drifted across the pool area.

  Bonnie kept retreating until she could slip unnoticed back to her chair to retrieve her handbag. Her sarong had ripped, the wet fabric ungiving as she’d flung herself down, and she just wanted to hide somewhere and curl up after the near horror. She bit the skin of one hand to stop the chatter of her teeth as she felt shock well inside her.

  A Balinese waitress approached diffidently and held out her wet sunglasses.

  Bonnie met her eyes. There, too, huge tears trickled in mutual horror and dawning relief of the child regaining consciousness. ‘Thank you.’ The little waitress could barely make her words form. ‘To lose a child would harm our souls for ever.’

  Bonnie sucked in air. ‘We’re all very lucky.’

  The little waitress inclined her head. ‘Fortunate to have you, and the doctor.’ They both looked across to where Harry’s face was like granite as he stood with the little girl in his arms. He glanced up as if saying that had been too close.

  The anguish in his face made the rock in her throat return. It had been him she’d glimpsed at the start. But surely not? However, when she replayed in her mind that image she knew it was true. Why hadn’t he come straight away? Why had he left her alone when she’d needed him? Why had he not mentioned he was a doctor in the last two days? A man she’d shared special time with, a birth with, made love with. That was what liars did.

  ‘I need to go to my room.’ Bonnie tried to smile at the waitress but all she could think of was that she needed to get away before she broke down.

  She saw him glance her way, saw him read the distress in her eyes. Harry was hurting too but she didn’t care. He’d left her to cope on her own. He’d lied to her from the moment they’d met. The picture burned in her brain as she walked blindly to her room.

  Like the last man she’d dared to care about.

  Yes, she’d been very glad he’d been there at the end but would never understand his hesitation. He was a doctor and he’d lied over and over again to her.

  By the time Harry walked out of the hospital in Denpasar an hour and a half later, the pain lashed him in a hundred places he’d forgotten—and none of them were physical.

  He’d stayed fairly immune during the drive in the ambulance. The little girl, Ginger, had been awake and croakily stable but he’d been unable to leave her until she was safely in hospital and monitored by experienced personnel.

  But walking out that hospital door into the stickiness of the Balinese heat, the memories hit him like a car full of tourists.

  He’d done okay today, thanks mostly to Bonnie, but how was he to live with the crushing guilt of his delay in response?

  It had happened in his first emergency after Clara had died. His colleagues had told him it was only natural, to give himself time, but he’d backed away in horror. A man not to be trusted. A doctor unable to deal with emergencies. A man ashamed of a vocation that had been his life. So he had run to Bali.

  Avoided any contact with medicine. And drifted. Drifted until a determined little midwife had dragged him into the very situation he’d been running from.

  That was why he’d vowed he didn’t want people’s lives in his hands. Especially those of babies. Imagine if the little one had died.

  That was why he stayed here. In the furore he hadn’t apologised to Bonnie for not helping earlier. Being catatonic with fear, allowing others to do what he could have done better, was no excuse, and no doubt she despised him. Well, that was okay. He despised himself. He knew he was far from perfect. He just hadn’t realised how far.

  But there, in the back of his tortured mind, was the glimmer of a chance to explain. He could probably catch her at the airport if he left now but he didn’t know what to say to her if he found her. But could he let her fly away without telling her why? And she’d need to debrief, if only a little. He was an expert in what happened if you didn’t do that.

  In the end it was Bonnie who found him. He’d been leaning up against a pylon in the departure hall when she’d walked past, dragging her suitcase.

  She glanced sideways, saw him, jerked her bag a little as if to decide whether to stop or not, when Harry straightened.

  ‘Hello, Bonnie.’ Lord she was beautiful to him. She looked stressed, which wasn’t surprising; she looked upset, which was his fault; and she looked confused about whether she was glad to see him or not. He supposed he could be thankful for that small mercy.

  He met her eyes. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  She tightened her hand on the bag. ‘Luckily that’s your problem, not mine, Harry.’

  He ran his hand through his hair and sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Bonnie.’

  She lifted her head. ‘For which thing? Lying for the last two days or not helping me save a child’s life until it was almost too late?’

  He deserved that. ‘All of it. And there are reasons for both.’

  She shook her head. A physical denial. ‘Well, don’t try to explain because the excuse won’t be good enough.’ She glanced up at the clock. ‘I have a plane to catch and I’m already late.’ She put her hands up to her neck and undid the clasp on the necklace. ‘I’d rather not keep this.’ She dropped the little silver baby on a chain into his hand and jerked her bag. Then the words flew out as if she couldn’t prevent them. ‘How dare you lie to me? All this time.’

  He closed his fingers over the charm and sighed. ‘I lost my wife.
My unborn child. I can’t do medicine any more. I can’t talk about it.’

  She tossed her hair. ‘Maybe you should because I can’t see hiding it is doing you any good.’

  ‘My choice.’

  Brittle emerald, her eyes were like temple stones as she glared at him. ‘I don’t think you should have that choice. Lives are lost, Harry. Medicine isn’t run by God. We do the best we can and sometimes our best isn’t good enough.

  ‘It’s hard, but if every skilled doctor, every trained practitioner reared away from that reality, if they all turned their backs selfishly on their vocations like you have while you were buried here, how many more families have to feel that same sense of loss before you help?’

  She tossed her hair and he could read the hurt in her face. ‘There was almost another family today. How do you feel about that?’

  He shouldn’t have come. This wasn’t doing either of them any good. ‘It can’t be my problem. I can’t be calm like you were.’

  That sobered the fury in her head. He saw it drain away and be replaced by pity. Pity he didn’t want. ‘You missed the nausea episode in my room that followed after I left the pool area. I wasn’t so calm then.’

  He heard her but it wasn’t the same. She’d responded instantly to the situation. He didn’t have that faith in himself. ‘You were calm when it mattered and that’s a big part of why that mother still has her child.’

  Then he saw it in her eyes. Her own doubt and fear about a situation that wasn’t so different from his—except she hadn’t given in to it.

  It was a lightning bolt of perception. Bonnie could choose not to admit the fear if she was unable to save the child, not give in to the helplessness of being alone in that emergency. The way he had. He never used to be like that. He’d been the first on the scene, the fastest with treatment. The golden boy of the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

  Now he’d let her down. Continued to let himself down.

  Then she lifted her head. ‘Do you know how the little girl is?’

  Her most important question. At least he could answer that for her. ‘No ill effects so far. I just left the hospital.’

  ‘Good! ‘ She even smiled, not at him but into the air with relief, and he was glad about that. In itself it was validation of standing here feeling like hell. That smile made it worth it.

  ‘Now I’m going,’ she said, and he felt a slam of desolation he hadn’t expected. At least he’d tried to explain. She pulled the bag forward a few inches and then stopped. ‘You should give medicine another go, Harry. You might find salvation instead of hell. You never know. But if you ever want to talk about it, don’t come and find me.’

  Harry watched her disappear into the departure area and then turned away, but her accusations haunted him. Accusations he didn’t want to think about. Was he egotistical and self-absorbed? He would have said self-protective. Or was it just the thought of practising medicine that jerked him into denial?

  It was as well he hadn’t had more time before her flight left because he didn’t know what he would have been capable of to try and talk her into staying just a little longer. To try to explain.

  What was she saying? What did she mean? That someone else could have been there to help him when he’d lost his own baby? Someone like him, turning his back? Like Steve and that short-term job at the Rock and his own refusal to go?

  He couldn’t do it. Or could he? He’d managed with the baby but that had been a close thing. Could he go back to diagnoses and the mistakes that left him open to self-recrimination?

  Then again, could he not? Life was looking pretty damn empty right at this moment.

  During the drive back to Ubud, Harry noticed things he hadn’t seen for a long time. Things Bonnie had pointed out to him with excitement.

  He saw the families, crammed on motorbikes, children sitting on bags of grain behind their fathers, mums balancing their two-wheeled pick-ups as if it was the most normal thing in the world to carry a table on a motor bike.

  It had always been this way as the motorcycle could be afforded and the car not, and suddenly to Harry it seemed incredibly alien to see babies, cradled by their precariously squashed mothers, jammed onto scooters between husbands and other children.

  The small trucks packed with workers in the back; the Indonesian signage and waving palm trees were suddenly more visible. And here he was, pretending to be a part of it all when, in fact, he was really a bystander. An isolated one too scared to be involved in his own world where he belonged.

  Harry’s world was in turmoil and Bonnie had done it. Bonnie and a little girl now safe in her mother’s arms.

  Bonnie had been there when he’d been screaming inside, This baby’s going to die too, the scene fraught with emotion. An unwanted return to a situation he’d chosen to avoid, and now where was he? Apart from profoundly appreciative of her calm in an emergency, maybe it was the frailty of a toddler’s breathing and the fact that he and Bonnie had skills to save a life that had him thinking.

  Or maybe it was just Bonnie who was attracting these medical disasters. He’d managed to avoid them for the last year. He’d known her three days and they’d had two already.

  He saw his life, drifting from one leisurely Balinese day to the next, focused on the small issues, never thinking of the large ones in case it made him aware of what he’d chosen to discard in his fear of being hurt again.

  Maybe he did need a dose of Bonnie McKenzie’s reality to kick him back into gear. Bonnie would certainly give him that but he couldn’t face the thought of a hospital, even the slightly slower paced one in Darwin, impersonally rushing from one patient to the next. And he wasn’t ready for the commitment of general practice.

  The Royal Flying Doctor Service was always looking for staff but even in the state he was in he could see how frustrating it would be to fly everywhere wondering when next he’d get to Uluru and a certain straight-talking midwife.

  That was the crunch. He needed to see if what he suspected was true. Needed to see if Bonnie was the key to a normal world. Nothing more than that because he wasn’t doing the family thing again. Wasn’t going there. But it still left a lot they could share. If she was interested.

  But would she be happy to see him drop out of the central Australian sky into Uluru? He knew Steve would. If he hadn’t found a replacement yet.

  The acceleration as the wheels left the ground pushed Bonnie back in her seat. She closed her eyes then opened them again to watch the land fall away beneath her. Better to face reality after all her harsh words to Harry to do the same.

  She looked out. That would be Jimbaran Bay there and she could almost smell the smoke from the barbecues on the beach.

  Harry St Clair. Another liar. A doctor hiding from the world in a web of lies. She couldn’t believe she’d allowed him into her heart.

  And she’d done that for sure. How could it ever have seemed inevitable at the time? But she couldn’t deny, at unexpected moments, there’d been a real connection between them. But she would not give her heart to a man she couldn’t trust and he’d wiped out that possibility for ever. She’d have her heart back if it killed her.

  The Harry St Clairs weren’t ready for the world and she was.

  Now she had to let their time recede like the island somewhere below the aircraft wing. Bali would always be a place of memories and moments of gold and a man who wasn’t who she’d thought, and she doubted she’d ever forget him. But she’d never go back.

  Enough. It was time to do what she was good at. Getting on with life.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BONNIE drove into Uluru an hour before darkness fell. All the other cars seemed to be heading out of the township in a mass exodus, off to see the sunset, like the tourists did when they hit the beach in Bali. Of course, thinking of sunset swamped her with the uncomfortable memory of a certain tall widower and that last sunset in Ubud. Had it only been two days ago?

  She dragged her mind a
way from Indonesia and remembered her friend in Darwin telling her about the ritual of sunset at Uluru.

  A motorbike pulled out in front of her and she swerved to miss the suspiciously young Aboriginal couple running late for nature’s best show. The boy waved and grinned and she saw his girlfriend was pregnant, heavily so, and that too reminded her of Bali. A precariously loaded motorbike and cheekily happy faces.

  ‘Slow down, buddy, or you’ll miss more than the sunset,’ she muttered, but her mind was stuck like a piece of grass stuck in a Balinese water buffalo’s hide.

  She’d promised herself she wouldn’t regret immersing herself in the Harry St Clair experience but that hadn’t happened. She’d been in way over her head and spent the flight back trying to place at what moment good sense had escaped her. Hadn’t she learned her lesson? The men she seemed attracted to were not to be trusted. She must have a homing device that attracted compulsive liars.

  On the positive side, she hadn’t once felt that inertia and sadness she’d felt since Jeremy’s desertion and deceit. She was too angry.

  Even though she’d found another man to let her down, somewhere in the mix, maybe a little to do with the Balinese beliefs, she did feel alive. Angry, but alive.

  Harry’s main deceit was to himself and until he addressed that he’d never be whole. She couldn’t help him and she needed to concentrate on helping herself.

  Her car eased slowly along the curved road past the hotel and she slowed as her eye was drawn to the uninterrupted views across the red sand hills to the great monolith in the distance.

  Like a sleeping dinosaur, but millions of years older, Uluru showed its age in wrinkles of stone that caught and held the last of the sun’s rays in textured lines of light and dark orange, and she could feel the rise of goose flesh in an unexpectedly primitive response to nature’s spiritual beauty.

  She hadn’t expected that.

  It was as if she suddenly began to feel the earth beneath her feet again, to be able to enjoy the beauty of her first sunset and each new place in a way she’d been too stressed and rushed to do in the last year while she’d dealt with Gran’s slow death.