‘If we can reattach this strand of muscle to one of these small bones, it might give him some movement later,’ Sam added. ‘Enough to make prosthetic toes work.’
The pair worked swiftly, Meg enjoying the rhythm of theatre work as she slapped instruments into waiting hands and dropped soiled swabs into the bin.
Finally, Sam tucked the skin he’d managed to save around the man’s truncated foot and sewed it neatly, leaving Kristianne and Meg to dress it.
‘Your car keys are in my jeans pocket in the changing room,’ Meg called after him, thinking he might now—it was four in the morning—be going home.
He turned back and shook his head.
‘You take the car. I’m staying.’
As he walked away, Meg could feel Kristianne’s eyes on her and looked up to see questions in them.
‘He lives next door—we went to the wharf in his car,’ she explained briefly, and the woman’s blue eyes brightened perceptibly.
‘That’s all?’ she persisted, as Andrew and an orderly wheeled their patient away.
‘Pretty much. He grew up here, so I knew him from before.’
‘Hmm!’
‘You interested?’ Meg had to ask, and Kristianne laughed.
‘What woman under a hundred wouldn’t be?’
‘But you’re leaving in a month or so,’ Meg protested, aware she was liking this conversation less and less.
‘So? I can’t have some fun for a month? Actually, it’s six weeks. Six weeks with sexy Sam! Has a good ring to it, don’t you think?’
Actually, Meg didn’t, and she wasn’t entirely sure that now she’d turned down Sam’s ridiculous proposal he wouldn’t take Kristianne up on whatever she might offer.
It was another example of how little they knew of each other.
Just thinking about it made her feel sick! But as soon as she’d helped the other nurse clean up the theatre and had the instruments in the autoclave, she grabbed her grubby clothes and, still in her scrub suit, drove Sam’s car home so she could shower and change.
Pride?
She didn’t want to think about it, any more than she wanted to think about Kristianne making moves on Sam. She was back within three quarters of an hour, showered and in uniform, and if she was wearing just a touch more make-up than usual, who was to know?
Leaving Sam’s car in the car park, she walked through the hospital, starting with the A and E rooms, checking who was still held there, checking staff numbers and who should be sent off duty, who called in to deal with the extra patients.
Doing her job and doing it well—she had been promoted to DON last year—were the things that had brought her satisfaction in the last four years, but today a little devil in some dark corner of her mind was prodding her with his pitchfork and asking if it would be enough for ever.
Of course not, but medicine will be, she told him firmly.
‘Lips still moving when you read?’
Sam’s voice startled her as she bent over the duty roster in the A and E office. She glanced up and saw the gleam in his eyes. Appreciation that she’d changed?
Or something else?
She didn’t have to wait long for clarification. A smile made the gleam seem brighter as he asked, ‘Did you have a particular storeroom in mind?’
She had to laugh but the excitement that zoomed through her body and sprinted along her nerves wasn’t a laughing matter, but she hid her reaction and said calmly, ‘There’s a nice one in the corridor next to where the crash cart is kept, but I thought you’d put the kibosh on an affair.’
Had she spoken loudly, that Sam looked around to see if anyone had heard?
But when he said, ‘It will not be an affair,’ in a very firm voice, she realised he’d looked around to protect his words, not hers. ‘That discussion is not finished.’
A squawk from the radio suggested it was—an ambulance was calling in to say they had a young woman in labour on board. ‘No obstetrician, no regular doctor, no check-ups along the way, thinks she might be about six or seven months. ETA seven minutes,’ the driver finished, and Meg reached for the phone, calling the consultant obstetrician and checking she had a midwife on duty in the labour ward, warning staff there of the new arrival.
‘Do you handle most local births?’ Sam asked.
‘Nearly all of them,’ Meg told him. ‘Some young women who haven’t lived here long might go home to where they grew up to have their first baby, but after that—and with all the locals—they come here. We’ve good staff, and fathers can live in if the wife needs to stay for more than one night. We’ve a good home follow-up routine going as well, hospital staff doing home visits for the first three months.’
The patient was little more than a girl—undernourished and grubby-looking—with, to Meg’s horror, needle tracks and keloid scarring from needles up both arms.
She was also totally spaced out.
‘Was anyone with her? Who called you guys?’ Meg asked the attendant who wheeled her in.
‘We got a triple zero call from a mobile phone that’s got a number block on it, and she was alone when we got there. She was in that old guest house building at the southern end of the Esplanade—the one the developers are pulling down shortly to build the big hotel.’
Meg knew the building and knew it was used as a squat for young people drifting into the Bay, finding life on the streets more comfortable in a place that was both warm and had any number of derelict buildings.
‘And a ready supply of drugs apparently!’ Meg muttered to herself as Sam followed the patient into the trauma room.
Sam was talking gently to her, asking how far apart the contractions were.
She lifted her thin wrist to show she wasn’t wearing a watch and shook her head. Meg nodded to the nurse to start timing them and asked her to strap a foetal heart monitor around the girl’s belly. Then, while Sam talked on, inserting a catheter and taking blood for testing, Meg began to take note of the young woman’s status.
‘Everything up,’ she was able to tell Matt when he arrived. ‘Pulse 110 beats a minute, respirations 22 a minute, temperature 99.8, blood pressure 140 over 95. The foetal heart rate is good—158 beats a minute—and she’s having contractions…’
Meg looked across at the nurse.
‘Seven minutes between them.’
‘Do you know when the baby is supposed to be due?’ Matt asked, his voice so gentle Meg knew why women loved him as a doctor.
‘I think at Christmas. Or some time then,’ the young woman said. ‘But if it comes now, it’ll die, won’t it?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Matt told her, while the medical staff in the room all mentally computed the woman must be about thirty weeks pregnant.
‘Better it dies,’ the woman said. ‘It’ll be all screwed up with drug addiction. Not much chance for the poor little thing.’
Meg stared at the young woman, at the good bones in her face that showed she had been pretty before drugs and disease had taken their toll.
‘There’s no such thing as no chance,’ she protested, while Matt explained he was going to give her something that might stop the pre-term labour.
‘The longer you can go in your pregnancy, the more chance the baby will have of survival.’
‘But I don’t want the baby!’ the girl, Melody, protested. ‘Who’ll look after it?’
Matt, ignoring her protests, was hooking up a drip to the cannula the ambos had inserted in her arm.
‘You need fluid anyway, and maybe some methadone. Have you been on a programme?’
Melody nodded.
‘Got hooked on that just as easy, and with the fuss you have to go through to get it, might just as well stick to H.’
‘Do you want to get off it? Want us to help you?’
Sam spoke so gently tears filled the girl’s eyes.
‘It’s no use,’ she said. ‘My mum tried to help, and if she couldn’t do it, why should you be able to?’
‘We could try,’ Meg offere
d. ‘And if you like, we could contact your mum. Maybe she’d like to be with you.’
The tears spilled over then and rolled in steady streams down the emaciated cheeks.
‘She doesn’t know about this,’ Melody finally managed, but the careful way she cupped her hand around her swollen belly and rubbed it gently suggested she wasn’t nearly as uncaring about this unborn babe as her tough talk had suggested.
Sam wheedled her mum’s phone number out of her and left the cubicle, while Meg waited until Matt had finished his examination then arranged for Melody to be shifted to a single room.
‘I think she’s had a shot recently—you might have trouble as she’s coming off,’ Matt told Meg as the girl was wheeled away.
‘We’ve handled it before. We’ll manage,’ Meg said, sure that if Sam had had A and E experience in a big Sydney hospital he’d know even more than they did about heroin addiction and how to handle it in a hospitalised patient.
‘Her mum’s in Brisbane. She’ll drive up and, giving her time to pack and get the cat to the cattery, she should be here in about six hours.’
‘Mum sounds like a very efficient woman,’ Meg said, smiling at Sam because she was relieved Melody would have family support—and also because he was Sam!
She asked him about his experience with drug-addicted patients, explaining they’d had a doctor at the hospital who knew a lot but he’d gone back to England, and since then they’d gone on textbooks and help from the drugs hotline in Brisbane.
‘I’ve seen more of it than I would have thought possible,’ Sam said, his face looking tired and drawn. The memory of kids he hadn’t been able to help or the result of a night without sleep? Or both? ‘I’ll keep a special eye on her.’
Meg told him where Melody was and returned to the rosters she’d been checking. It was nearly change of shift for those working a split shift and she still had no idea what nursing staff members were on duty or how many she might need for the rest of the day.
By five o’clock the hospital had settled down. The man with the amputated foot had been transferred to Brisbane as he came from there and had family support, as well as specialists who could help his rehabilitation.
Melody’s mother had arrived so Melody was now clean and clad in a beautiful silk nightdress while the tocolytic drug—to prevent the premature labour—seemed to be working. She couldn’t be said to be stable but she was talking more positively about kicking her habit and was responding to the drug regime recommended by addiction specialists Sam had contacted in Sydney.
So when the man in question poked his head into the office and said, ‘Come on, let’s go home,’ Meg didn’t argue, although she knew the ‘going home’ thing would be taken literally. They were both too tired to think of anything but sleep.
‘We’ll catch up,’ Sam said, as if he’d read her mind. He slung an arm around her shoulder and guided her out of the hospital towards the car park.
‘Will we?’ she said, too tired to stop her thoughts becoming words, worrying that the more physical contact she had with Sam—more physical pleasure and delight—the harder it would be to keep saying no.
Though he mightn’t ask her again…
‘Of course. For a start, there’s a whole conversation of yours I must have missed, looking at the way your hair fell, and your eyes sparkled in the moonlight. I’m not taking your no for an answer without hearing the reason.’
So what was the reason?
It was to do with love. Not her love for she did love him, and she was pretty sure it was the grown-up Sam she loved and not a hangover from the past.
More to do with Sam and love…
And telling him she loved him would give him too much power—way too much—on top of all he already had with his ability to make her bones go weak and her nerves tingle whenever he was in her vicinity.
She climbed into the car and asked if he’d put down the top then drive the long way home so the wind could blow in her hair all the way along the Esplanade.
CHAPTER NINE
‘I WAS going to drive this way anyway,’ Sam said, as they turned onto the southern end of the Esplanade. ‘Can you show me the building where Melody was squatting?’
So much for romantic, wind-in-the-hair type drives!
‘Next block,’ she told him. ‘It used to be called Sea-Spray when it was a guest house, and I think the developers are keeping the name for the new building when it goes up. There!’
She pointed at the chunky, art deco style building on a rise that gave it views across the bay.
Sam slowed the car.
‘Do you think many people use it as a squat?’
Meg sighed, more helplessness than tiredness in the soft sound.
‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘It looks solid and is probably dry and the Bay has its own share of runaways as well as people who drift in.’
‘Are there shelters? Places they can get a bed, go for a meal?’
‘Not as such.’ He eased the car back onto the road as Meg explained. ‘The problem’s fairly recent. I mean, for years the Bay has been seen as somewhere to retire, a place where oldies go. It didn’t exactly ring bells for generation X or Y or whatever they’re up to now with alphabetical generations. But since the island became world heritage listed and the whale-watching boats started taking tourists out to see the whales, backpackers’ hostels have been set up to accommodate young people from all over the world. I guess it was inevitable other young people would follow.’
‘But because it’s a recent phenomenon it doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t be helping,’ Sam protested, turning onto their stretch of the wide road that followed the winding shoreline.
‘People are helping. There’s a church group takes a coffee van out on the streets late at night—late here being about ten o’clock—and offers to find accommodation for people who have nowhere to go. That’s not ideal because during the whale-watching season there’s virtually no accommodation, and as that coincides with winter down south, we have more drifters than usual here at that time.’
‘So,’ Sam said as he pulled up outside the cottage, ‘we need more accommodation for old people with no money and some accommodation for young people with nowhere to go. Probably a multi-faceted drug programme as well…’
Meg turned and stared at him.
‘What’s this? One man’s campaign to save the Bay?’
Sam didn’t answer, but she saw the determination in his face.
Had he hurt his mother so badly he was going to dedicate the rest of his life to making up for it?
He didn’t answer, though he turned to look at her and touched his fingertips to her cheek.
‘I’m too pooped to get out and open the car door for you, so forgive my manners and go get some sleep.’
The end bit had sounded like a gentle order, but the rest? Something had changed between them. Because she’d asked too many questions?
But had she?
She heard the quiet engine move the car forward to his place as she walked towards her cottage.
The answer to that question was easy. She hadn’t asked nearly as many as she wanted to ask—would ask if she got the chance. That was the whole point of saying no to his proposal—well, that and her own plans—but they really didn’t know each other and how else to get to know than through questions?
If they were answered…
So many things were rattling around in Meg’s mind she doubted sleep would come, but she’d no sooner closed her eyes than oblivion took her, or so it seemed when she woke at midnight, hungry and disoriented. Pulling on her robe, she stumbled into the kitchen, where the cat was sitting on the bench, looking out the window. His water bowl still had water in it, but his dry food bowl was empty. She opened a tin of salmon she bought very occasionally as a special treat for both of them, spread half of it on toast for herself and gave the other half to him.
‘I know in some intrinsic way I love him,’ she said to the cat, who, now fed, deigned to wind
around her calves. ‘Could he feel the same about me, but be covering it up behind the bland practicality of statements like “I think we should get married”?’
Meg didn’t know, but she did know marrying without love would be accepting second best—like being a nurse when what she really, really wanted was to be a doctor. It wasn’t that nursing wasn’t a wonderful profession or that she didn’t find it deeply satisfying, it just wasn’t her dream.
Any more than marrying without love—the heady, intoxicating, to-hell-with-the-rest-of-the-world feeling she had experienced just once before—would be right for her.
Not again.
She explained all this to the cat, who had taken up his post on the bench again, keeping watch for night intruders in her back yard, then went back to bed. But this time sleep didn’t come, and in the end she got up, pulled on an old swimsuit, grabbed a towel and went down to the beach.
Midnight swims had been daring, sneaky adventures when she’d been young, but now she often took to the water after dark, knowing the exercise would tire her out. She kept to the shallows for safety’s sake.
Sam was waiting on the beach when she came out, water streaming from her exhausted body.
‘I thought from all the splashing it was you. Long, clean swimming strokes, Megan, and try not to break the water with your kick.’
She stared at him.
‘Were you swimming when I came down?’ she demanded. ‘I didn’t see you.’
‘I swam out, not along the shoreline.’
‘Swimming out is stupid—especially at night when there’s no one around. What if you got a cramp?’
‘Would anyone care—even notice—if I didn’t come back from a swim?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, what’s this? Self-pity, Sam? Asking for a little comfort? For an assurance that your life matters? Or are you being seventeen again, taking risks for the thrill of it?’
Meg snatched up her towel from where it lay beside him and stepped away to shake the sand out of it before wrapping it around her shoulders as the night air made her shiver.
‘Or to hurt your mother?’
The answer struck her so suddenly she could only whisper it as she sat down on the sand beside him.
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