by Amy Andrews
Her gaze met his and for a moment he felt as if she was thinking the same thing. No more nudity. No more Bondi. No more mangoes or barbeques or escargots. At least, not together. Did she feel that loss as keenly as he did or had she had time to get used to it? After all, in their year of separation he had never seriously believed that either of them would make it permanent. But she’d obviously thought about it a lot.
‘What are the chances, do you think,’ Katya asked in her accented English, ‘we will get out of here before any more casualties arrive?’
‘Zero,’ said Helmut, pessimistic as always.
The turn in conversation brought Gill out of his trance and he reluctantly broke eye contact with Harriet. Their flight left at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning. It wasn’t unknown to go twenty-four hours without incoming wounded, but it was the exception rather than the rule.
He found himself in a perverse kind of way hoping there would be. Not that he wished any of the locals ill, he just knew from the last two months that the human carnage was showing no signs of abating, the civil war gathering momentum if anything, and that it was never long between skirmishes. If it was going to happen, just bring it on, he thought. He needed to keep busy today so he didn’t have to think about Harriet and the divorce and how badly his life was going to suck without her.
CHAPTER FOUR
1000 HOURS
ON THEIR way to the morning triage meeting, Katya caught up with Harriet.
‘One more sleep, Harry,’ she said.
Harriet laughed. Katya was the youngest of the three nurses that formed their surgical team and had been with MedSurg Aid Abroad for four years. Harriet loved to listen to her talk. Her grasp of the English language was superb and her accent very easy on the ear, adding a husky quality to what she was saying.
She especially liked it when Katya, the most volatile of the group, lost her cool, which happened from time to time in the presence of such senseless carnage. She would slip back into her native Russian every third or fourth word and especially when she couldn’t think of an insulting enough English word.
Katya always said that Russian swear words were much more poetic than English. And listening to her in full flight, Harriet had to admit she was right. It was as if Katya was reciting Tolstoy, the frown on her pretty animated face a reminder that her words weren’t really high literature at all.
‘You do know how happy we all are that you and Gill are back together.’
Harriet’s step faltered briefly. A denial rose to her lips but looking at the joy on her friend’s face she didn’t have the heart to speak the truth. What was the point? Their mission was over tomorrow. Why not part with everyone thinking she and Gill were going to live happily ever after? This fine group of people wanted so badly for them to be happy, for it to be like it had been. They would all know the truth soon enough.
Harriet smiled and nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’
Katya grinned back at her and not for the first time Harriet thought what a good match Gill and Katya would make. In fact, she half suspected that they would have hooked up in her absence. The blonde, petite Russian nurse was very pretty in a perky kind of a way and there had been a time when Katya had first joined their team that she’d had a huge crush on Gill.
Not that Harriet had ever felt threatened by it. If anything, it had been amusing and Katya had been far too young and innocent to take seriously. Gill and the group had been patient and allowed her to get over her hero-worship without an embarrassing confrontation.
But there didn’t seem to even be a whiff of anything having happened. No awkwardness between them, no hushed, secretive conversations, no vibe that they knew each other intimately. Just the same friendly banter that had always existed between them. That the whole team thrived on. That gelled them all together.
She’d hoped Gill had found the idea of casual sex during their separation as abhorrent as she had. That their separation had devastated him as much as her. That sex with someone else just didn’t rate. But he was a virile man with appetites and she didn’t fool herself for a moment that men and women thought the same way about matters relating to sex.
And a year was a long time. A year of living apart, working apart. Harriet had stayed with MedSurg but had joined another surgical team that had gone to different hot-spots and had worked the opposite rotation to Gill’s. So when Gill’s team had been flying home for a month’s R and R, Harriet’s team had been flying elsewhere to start their two-month stint.
Communication between them had been complicated by their work assignments. The places they went to and the conditions of the local infrastructure often meant phone or mobile contact was not possible. MedSurg comms centre had enough on their plates, dealing with casualties and air evacuations and managing their ground-level programmes, without being a message centre for idle chit-chat. Only emergency calls for staff were allowed.
Email had been their most efficient communication tool. Separation via electronic mail. Harriet had hated it. She wondered now as they filed into the triage meeting if they would divorce via the internet as well. Would they split up their assets, argue about which books, which CDs belonged to whom?
She imagined her email to him when the decree nisi arrived. Dear Gill. It’s official. We are no longer joined in marriage. You should be receiving the paperwork soon. Have a good life. Harriet shuddered. She felt so empty thinking about it, but the alternative Gill had suggested this morning made her emptier.
A part-time father who’d rather fly around the world, fixing other people’s problems, than be with her and their baby. To have to watch his detachment when he came home and live with him, knowing he had one eye on the calendar. Harriet knew as surely as she knew that she loved him that she’d be more miserable with half of Gill than none of him.
‘Oh, great,’ muttered Katya beside her as she slipped into the seat next to Harriet. ‘Just what I needed on my last day. Casanova.’
Harriet smiled to herself. Sitting opposite them was another reason why Gill and Katya would probably never hook up. Count Benedetto Medici the third. Italian aristocracy, wealthy playboy and MedSurg’s newest surgeon. It was standard operating procedure for MSAA to send two full teams to any mission, and unfortunately casualty numbers more than justified it.
The smooth charm of the affluent newbie had well and truly rubbed Katya up the wrong way, her poor-as-dirt background giving her a healthy dislike of men born with silver spoons in their mouths. It was obvious to all but Katya they were hot for each other.
‘Morning, Katya,’ he said across the table, sending her a smouldering smile.
‘Ben,’ she said shortly, and Harriet admired her withering dismissal.
She glanced at Gill, who winked at her, and for a second she forgot that they’d be nearly divorced by the time Gill returned to the team next time. The memory of their joining this morning was still fresh in her mind and for a few seconds she remembered how much she loved him and how their romance, too, had blossomed in the diverse melting pot of an MSAA mission.
Gill also remembered. He’d been entering his fourth year with the organisation and had been a little apprehensive about the new RN taking over from Liesel, who was going back to Sweden to get married. It was always a little stressful when someone new joined an already established team.
Would they fit in? Would they complement the existing members, would the fit be seamless or would their presence cause ripples and potentially be disruptive? Would the unity of the team be irreparably damaged? Did they have a sense of humour? Were they willing to fit in with the routines and procedures of the group?
What had been their motivation to join the organisation in the first place? Was it for a genuine humanitarian reason or were they running away from something or dropping out of society? Gill had been around long enough to see the effect one ill-suited person could have on the harmony of a team.
So all these things had been careening through his mind the night he and the rest of the team had met Harriet
at a London restaurant, and had been banished in an instant. She had been gorgeous and had fitted in instantly, and they had both known without a single word being spoken that their destinies were entwined.
When they’d left together a couple of hours later there had been no question of saying goodbye at the door. The only question had been which hotel room—his or hers. They’d settled on hers because it had been the closest. And despite knowing that they were heading into the world’s latest war zone the next day, they had been up all night.
He remembered how Harriet had been worried the next morning about the consequences. How would the rest of the team feel? Would they judge her? Would they resent her? Should they keep it quiet? So they’d agreed to do that but they’d been so besotted with each other it had been hopeless and they’d given the game away within the first week.
And now here they were, seven years later, weeks away from divorce.
‘So,’ said Ben. ‘Shall we begin?’
Gill reluctantly broke eye contact with his wife. Ex-wife. Better get used to that, he thought. Ex-wife. Ex-wife.
The daily triage meeting was held with as many staff present as possible. Obviously if they were operating it was postponed, but otherwise 10:30 every morning—like clockwork.
Triage was a bit of a misnomer, really. Yes, decisions were made on a case-by-case basis as to which patient got the next available helicopter to a major centre, but it was also a forum to debrief, air problems and talk about more mundane things such as supplies, equipment and procedures.
‘Three of my patients stayed in the HDU overnight. The liver lac has priority. His drain losses haven’t slowed and I’d like to get him out of here first,’ said Ben.
Gill nodded. He had two patients they hadn’t been able to evacuate last night and neither would take priority over the liver. One had been lucky and had taken minor shrapnel damage to his gut and the other had a penetrating eye injury that, while serious, was not life-threatening.
These were the decisions they made every day. Who couldn’t wait, who had to. Patients triaged in the field as requiring medical or surgical intervention were choppered to the MSAA facility. The objective of the surgical teams was to operate so the immediate threat to the patient’s life was alleviated and then evacuate as soon as possible to the most appropriate major centre.
Usually there were a couple of cases that, due to stretched resources, had to stay behind post-op. In this situation the least critical stayed and were nursed in their limited high-dependency unit. This had five beds and two nurses, with back-up from the surgeons and anaesthetists.
‘Comms from HQ this morning has confirmed they can evac everyone,’ said Ben.
‘Good.’ Gill nodded. ‘We’ll do your liver first then the three abdo traumas then the eye.’
Harriet watched as everyone nodded in agreement. No one batted an eyelid that the patients were recognised by their body parts rather than their names. This had been the hardest thing for her to come to terms with in this field of medicine. Maybe it was the nurse in her but it just didn’t seem right to not know a patient’s name.
To be fair, a lot of this had to do with the language barrier and the fact that the majority of their patients were in no condition to divulge their names. Seventy-five per cent of their workload were unconscious, and with no IDs their names were impossible to know. But surgeons did have a nasty habit of referring to their patients as a bunch of body parts and it was so dehumanising Harriet knew it was one part of this job she wouldn’t miss. But, then, nothing was more dehumanising than war.
‘I have an update on yesterday’s casualties,’ said Theire, the translator, in her soft, heavily accented voice. Now, that was something she would miss. The accents. Every working day she was surrounded by the music of other languages. From the people she worked with to the locals who were unfortunate enough to end up on their operating tables, it was like living in an opera composed by the UN.
She hadn’t realised just how deeply it had become a part of her subconscious. Her ears didn’t hear it any more but the thought of no longer hearing a mish-mash of foreign tongues was depressing.
Just in this room they had Italian Ben, Russian Katya, German Helmut, Irish Siobhan, Theire, who spoke several of the local dialects, and various English, American and Australian contributions as well. And then there was Gill. He spoke with the careless drawl of a fair dinkum Aussie, but when he spoke French it was like he’d been born there.
She would really miss that. Miss how he would speak French with his parents and grandfather in her presence from time to time, or jokingly ask for an instrument in the language while he was working to crack everyone up, or casually slip into it at home because he knew how much it turned her on. He made love in French, too.
‘I have been in contact with the various facilities that our patients were transferred to.’ MedSurg always employed a local interpreter for each mission. Their services were invaluable.
‘The man with the bullet in his brain did not make it. Nor did the little boy with the traumatic amputation of his leg. The three chest traumas are still in critical conditions but holding their own. The woman with the gut full of shrapnel had to go back for more surgery. They removed an extensive amount of ischaemic large bowel and she now has a colostomy.’
There was silence in the room as they all thought about the people from the day before. Gill had operated on the little boy. The child had lost so much blood, and even as he had been operating to tie off the bleeders and stabilise his condition, he had known deep inside that the child wouldn’t make it.
The wound had been incredibly dirty, dragged through filth and mud as the boy had crawled to safety. It was always going to be a matter of whether his profoundly hypovolaemic state or a massive bacterial infection would kill him first. Gill wanted to punch the table at the unfairness of it all. What had a child of eight done to deserve that?
He looked at Harriet and could see she was affected by the news as well. He suddenly envied her turning her back on all of this. To never have to look into the eyes of another man, woman or child injured through the stupidity of war. For the first time he wondered how long he could do it for. There was always going to be another war. Could he do this for ever? He’d always thought he would but…
She gave him a sympathetic smile and he shook himself out of his reverie. Their divorce conversation had obviously got to him. He just needed a break. Two months of this kind of stuff was tough mentally. But this was what he did. This was who he was.
CHAPTER FIVE
1100 HOURS
‘GILL, can you review your abdo trauma from last night? He’s febrile and tachycardic. His drain losses are increasing as well.’
Damn it! He must have missed something. He’d spent two hours picking shrapnel out of the rebel soldier’s intestines and was confident that they’d removed it all. But as thorough as he’d been, Gill knew that the chances of missing a little hole somewhere, caused by the trajectory of the shrapnel, was always a possibility.
‘I’ll be right there,’ he said, smiling at the HDU nurse.
Harriet rolled her eyes as Megan turned a pretty shade of pink and beamed back at the sexy surgeon. Her husband. For another few weeks anyway. Man, he should be banned from smiling. She couldn’t blame Megan for feeling a little flushed, it made her go positively weak at the knees.
She watched them as they walked side by side and then disappeared into the room that housed the HDU. How was it possible to make a set of plain blue baggy scrubs sexy? She remembered how she had thought him breathtakingly gorgeous that night in London dressed to impress and later how magnificent he was undressed, but equally impressive was how he filled out a set of scrubs.
It was like the minute he donned them he became Dr Guillaume Remy, surgeon. The sense of authority that exuded from him was powerful, virile—almost sexual. The blue theatre cap tied and anchored at the back of his neck just below his hairline made him look even sexier.
If anyon
e were to ask her in years to come what her fondest memory was of their time together, there would be no hesitation. Seeing Gill in his scrubs and cap, laughing his deep, sexy laugh, oblivious to his innate sex appeal. Harriet felt a moment of panic as she stored away the memory. One more day of memories and that was it.
Gill took one look at his patient and knew he was going to have to reopen him. The man was burning up and muttered unintelligibly, the words both foreign and muffled by the face mask. Megan gave Gill the hand-held ultrasound and he could feel the rigidity of the man’s abdomen as the transducer glided through the gel. There was a significant amount of free fluid visible.
‘I’ll mobilise the team,’ he said to Megan.
Gill strode down the corridors, figuring everyone would have adjourned back to the dining area for another cup of artificial stimulant.
Only Harriet and Siobhan were there. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘We have to reopen the soldier.’
The soldier. Harriet shook her head as she stood. He’d looked no more than sixteen and had refused to give Theire his name. What was wrong with the world? Babies fighting wars?
But that’s what they did. This was the organisation’s mission. It didn’t matter how young or old, male or female, civilian or military, goodie or baddie. If you were injured and needed surgery, the doors were always open. There were no moral or ethical judgments—it was just patch ’em up and ship ’em out.
‘I’ll alert the others,’ said Harriet.
‘Where’s Theire?’ he asked.
‘Making some more calls,’ replied Siobhan as they moved past him to go and set up the theatre.
‘I’ll get her to talk to the patient. I’ll also see Ben about evac-ing him out with the liver. See you there in five,’ Gill said.
Harriet and Siobhan located the team in all their scattered locations, which wasn’t difficult, given their close confines. There wasn’t the infrastructure for a paging system so word of mouth was how it usually worked, except when there were mass casualties arriving. Then a hand-operated siren was used by Dr Kelly Prentice, the on-site medical director, who took the call from comms. It wailed mournfully between the two buildings occupied by MedSurg, spreading its bad news like an involuntary shudder to the furthest reaches of the complex.