by Sue MacKay
It had sounded fascinating to her—the chance to learn something new at his exclusive private island clinic—and she hadn’t hesitated to hand in her notice at the London hospital.
Indonesia was surely bound to be a far nicer setting than an overwhelmed city hospital or a military hospital in the Middle East. She was done with all that. She’d come for something completely different—a new focus, a change of pace, even if it was only temporary.
She couldn’t even recall what Dr Sebastian Becker looked like, or the name of the TV show he’d so briefly starred in. She’d never had much time for TV, and she didn’t ever bother with social media. Hopefully the man was agreeable, at least; they’d be working in pretty close proximity.
Mila smoothed her red sundress and held her hair back as the wind wrestled with it. She wished she could have asked Annabel what to expect from this place beyond the gorgeous guy she’d met when she had been here. What had she said his name was? Bas...or something like that?
* * *
Sebastian Becker hauled the last remaining tank out of the water and eyed the speedboat heading his way. He reached down to help the first of his dive group back onto the boat. Getting them all on board before the next intake of tourists whipped up the water was imperative if he didn’t want his students flailing in opposite directions within seconds.
‘Give me your hand.’
Gabby, a British woman in her early twenties, pushed her mask down to her neck and grinned up at him from the water. ‘I’ll give you whatever you need.’
He helped her up the ladder and she fell against his chest, heavy and wet in her tank and vest.
‘Sorry,’ she muttered, so close to his face he could feel her breath on his skin.
She wasn’t sorry. This girl had been flirting with him all morning.
He helped the others up. Checking his students were seated and had disposed of their flippers in the right place, he yelled, ‘Ketut, start the engine!’ and bounded up the three metal rungs to the roof.
Alone, he unzipped his wetsuit, letting the thick wet fabric unfold around his middle. The sun sizzled on his skin.
Maybe tonight, when the last scheduled surgery was done, he’d take Gabby out for a drink, somewhere with candles and a sandy floor. She’d be gone in a day or two. Why not give her something to talk about, once her plane deposited her back into her boring existence?
Those had been her words this morning, not his.
‘My life is so boring compared to yours. I should stay here and just go scuba diving all day with you...what do you think?’
He hadn’t encouraged her. Why tell a stranger that he wasn’t only a scuba diver, either? Why tell a tourist he would never see again that he was actually living here because he’d pioneered a way of operating on the facial scarring of accident victims which minimised their scars often to near invisibility?
He thought back to last week, satisfied. Lasers were incredible things. Trevor Nolan, a forty-two-year-old wedding singer from Dakota, had grappled with his young son to prevent a firework going off in his face and the poor guy had taken the hit himself. After six months of surgery and a month of crowdfunding by his friends he come to him at the MAC for what all the medical journals were calling ‘revolutionary treatment.’
Trevor had left with his chin almost the shade of the rest of his face, instead of raw red and stretched in scars. Best of all, he could sing for people again without it hurting.
‘Mr Diver Man, come down here!’
Gabby was calling him from below. He stayed put. The sun at this time of the day was perfect. Not too hot. He liked to soak it up while he could, before he put his hospital scrubs back on.
Sebastian assumed most people visiting the island’s clubs and bars and dive shops didn’t even know the MAC was on the other side of it, and if they did most of them didn’t know what happened there.
He always let word of mouth bring his clients in now. He wasn’t famous on Gili Indah. He wasn’t followed and he was barely recognised. It was too small an island and he was too out of context, he supposed—a world away from the Institute in Chicago and all those cameras.
He still had to be careful on the mainland of nearby Bali, though.
He’d left the hugely successful Faces of Chicago show back home. He’d left Klara behind, too, he told himself, furrowing his brow at the horizon. Now all that mattered was his team, and having his patients walking away looking and feeling better than when they’d arrived.
The speedboat was close now. A few faces stood out—locals, friends. And lots of new arrivals. But none for the MAC. His staff came in on his boat.
All but Dr Ricci, he remembered suddenly, raking a hand through his hair. She’d missed her transfer, which wasn’t uncommon—the traffic on the mainland was a nightmare.
He stood, scanning the other boats around the bay. He’d been too swamped at work to search online and put a face to the name of his latest employee, but he knew she’d worked in trauma on deployment with the Army in Afghanistan, so she was likely looking to add a new scar treatment string to her bow.
He considered what it must be like to spend months in a war zone, seeing soldiers with their limbs blown to shreds. All those gunshot wounds, severed bones and bombs exploding...
Some of the things he’d had to fix himself had been far worse than Trevor Nolan’s chin after his battle with a rocket in his backyard. But to be in a war zone—that was something else.
The boat jolted and he heard a tank flip downstairs. He shot back down the ladder. This woman, Dr Ricci, must be some kind of special breed. What was she looking for, exactly, here on such a remote island?
He set the tank upright again and watched Gabby make a show of resting her bare pink toes on it to keep it in place. Ketut threw him a look from behind the wheel, and Sebastian took a seat as far away from her as he could.
Was Dr Ricci running from the horrors of war and looking for peace, like he had been? But he’d been running from the media explosion after starring in the TV show and from the guilt that had racked him over what had happened to Klara. Hardly the same thing.
Sebastian realised he was scowling at the horizon, thinking about Klara again.
He couldn’t have known what would happen after filming started. No one could have anticipated so many photographs, so many camera lenses zooming in on his every move, in and out of surgery. All those headlines and sub-headlines...the crazy stories people had sold or made up about them just to get their clicks in.
Letting cameras into his surgery had invited the whole damn media circus in—which had squeezed every last remaining shred of joy out of his relationship with Klara.
All she had ever wanted to do was be with the kids at her kindergarten school and live a simple happy life with him. She had been so broken by the invasion of her privacy, and everything people had said about them both as a couple, that at the end she’d left without saying goodbye.
He put a hand down to the ocean spray and let his thoughts about her go—like he did every time he went diving. Diving was a workout for his brain...a place to switch off from other thoughts. It was only when he was on the surface that the memories came back.
He knew Klara wasn’t in Chicago any more. She’d already got married—someone she’d met in Nepal. He didn’t know where she was now, but he was happy for her. Sometimes.
Right now he would much rather be living here, somewhere beautiful, fixing Trevor Nolans and kids with burns the size of basketballs on their cheeks, than go back to having camera flashes and the paparazzi’s car tyres screeching in his wake, and performing endless boob jobs in Chicago. Although he wished he could see his family more often—especially his brother Jared and Charlie... He smiled thinking of his nephew.
The tourist boat slowed. A line of excited people craned their necks from the roof to the turquoise shallows. Everyone was in awe of the colo
ur of the water here.
A slender woman in a bright red sundress had her hand on her brown hair, trying her best to tame it, and a memory flickered across his mind.
He lifted his sunglasses and squinted to see better.
She was leaning on the railings now, elbows out. Her sundress was catching her ankles in the wind. He gripped the side of the boat even as Gabby tickled his calf with her toes. It looked exactly like her. Must be six or seven years ago now... A British woman dancing drunken pirouettes on the sand, back when he’d been here for the first time—long before he’d even had the idea to build the MAC.
What was she doing back here?
* * *
Mila’s eyes followed the diver right until his boat rocked out of sight. His abs were like a digitally enhanced ad for a diving school. She’d seen men like that at military hospitals, trained for fighting but battered and blue. Never this colour. The diver’s skin was a warm shade of caramel—as if he’d earned that tan with a life outdoors over a long, long time.
Her boat bobbed in the shallows as people leapt from the sides onto the sand. Mila followed, taking the ladder down. She hoisted her sundress further up her legs as an eager Indonesian boy no older than eight or nine helped her down into an inch of crystal-clear water.
‘Terima kasih!’ she told him. She’d already mastered a few basics.
The warmth of the sand rose to meet her toes in her flip-flops and she breathed in the scent of the air. Flowers...maybe jasmine...or was that an incense stick? The local market on a dusty path ahead told her she wasn’t exactly in Robinson Crusoe territory.
Mila stood still. When was the last time she’d stood in the ocean? Probably back in Cornwall, about twenty years ago. She’d been with her mum and Annabel, and they’d bought Cornish pasties and prodded jellyfish in the sand. That had been a good day.
‘Can I help you, miss? You need room?’
The kid in front of her now looked about seventeen, and he seemed to want to deny her the pleasurable personal moment of feeling her feet in the ocean for the first time in twenty years. He waded over purposefully and helped drag her case away from the shore.
She studied his tattooed wrists as he flashed a ring binder at her, showing coloured photographs of accommodation options. ‘Oh, no, thank you. I have a hotel for tonight.’
‘I have better one!’ He flicked to a page with a photo of a shack on it. It looked basic, to say the least.
‘Tomorrow I move to the MAC,’ she explained, wading onto the beach. Tiny bits of coral prodded at her heels and toes.
Mila took her case back quickly. She had probably divulged too much information already. It was never good to trust strangers on a first encounter unless in a medical situation. Besides, she already knew Dr Sebastian Becker kept a low profile.
He encouraged his staff to do the same.
For protection, when it comes to our clients’ anonymity.
He’d written that in a welcome email.
‘Taxi?’ she said in vain as a horse and cart trotted past her on the dusty street.
‘Watch out!’
The teenager was back. He caught her elbow and yanked her to the side of the path just as another horse and cart rattled past at full speed. It almost struck her.
‘Thank you, I’m fine.’
She picked up her fallen sunglasses. She wanted to tell him she could take care of herself but she refrained. He was only being chivalrous and she had been caught off-guard. She hadn’t slept in almost two days.
Frazzled and sweating, she wheeled all her worldly belongings along the thick, dusty, potholed concrete that constituted a street.
Street food vendors were mixing noodles and jabbing straws into coconuts. Girls were swigging beer, pedalling bicycles in bikinis. The salty air was already clinging to her forehead. No one else offered to help her but that was OK. She’d done this before, in worse places. She just hadn’t imagined the island would be this crowded...
Through the jet lag she remembered that she’d come in on a tourist boat, to the tourist side of Gili Indah. The MAC was on the west side. That part of the island was exclusive territory—just for patients and staff. She couldn’t wait to dive into a swimming pool. She just had to wait until tomorrow...
Mila was about to hail the approaching horse and cart when a noise from the shore made her stop in her tracks. A shriek. Someone thrashing in the waves.
Squinting through the throng, her eyes fell on a girl a few metres behind the speedboat. She saw the yellow dive boat she’d seen before, from the water. Something must have happened.
* * *
‘Snake!’ Gabby screamed. ‘It bit me! Ow, it hurts! Sebastian, help!’
‘OK...it’s OK. Let’s get you back to shore.’
Sebastian looped an arm around her waist, turning his head in all directions, looking at the shallows. Where was the snake?
One minute Gabby had been heading back from the boat right next to him, after their second dive, the next she’d been toppling over in her half-undone wetsuit.
He made a grab for her mask and fins before they were swept out of reach, and threw them to another guy in their group.
‘There it is!’ Gabby sounded horrified.
He followed her pointing finger to the thin, yellow and black stripy body of a sea snake. It wriggled past him, heading for the deep beyond the reef.
Sebastian tried to wade faster. Gabby’s face had turned pale. She wasn’t making this up.
‘Where did it bite you?’ He kept his voice controlled, not wanting to panic her. Her head was heavier every time it landed on his shoulder.
‘On my foot...my foot!’ She was sobbing now, barely able to breathe.
‘Ketut!’ he yelled.
Gabby’s legs seemed to crumple underneath her on the sand. He caught her before she could fall and lowered her gently to her back on the sand. She was whimpering now, trying to clutch at his arm. Her face was almost white.
A frenzy of people crowded around. Some were even snapping the scene with their cameras.
‘Get back,’ he ordered gruffly, as the familiar surge of contempt for this kind of privacy invasion consumed him. ‘Ketut!’ he called again.
But someone else was already sprinting over.
‘I’m a doctor—how can I help?’
The lady in red from the boat. The British tourist. It was definitely her...the woman from a few years ago. Speechless, he watched as she dropped to her knees.
‘Snake bite,’ she noted out loud, before he could explain. She put a hand to Gabby’s ankle.
‘Yeow!’ Gabby clamped her hand around his wrist in a death grip.
Easing her fingers away, he helped his new partner adjust the bitten leg and support it on an upturned rock.
‘We need pressure immobilisation,’ she told him—as if he didn’t know.
She started pulling things from her bag. Her sunglasses were pushed high on her head, sweeping back the kind of thick honey-brown hair he’d bet smelled good wet, right after she showered...
He caught himself, racking his brain for her name.
They hadn’t done more than flirt a little back then. If his memory served him right there had been no chemistry between them whatsoever. She’d been a drinker, he hadn’t, and she’d been intent on partying every night until she dropped.
But he never forgot a face. Had she really forgotten his?
‘Do you know what to do?’ she asked him.
Her wide-set eyes were a vivid blue in the sun, over high, freckled cheekbones.
‘There’s anti venom at the clinic,’ he said.
‘At the Medical Arts Centre?’
He lost his voice for a second. Up close, he smelled the coconut waft of her sunscreen.
‘No, the other one—the Blue Ray Medical Clinic on the strip.’
Didn’t she recognise him at all? Was it even her? But, yes, it had to be. Her eyes, her face...they were all so familiar. He just couldn’t remember her name.
‘What will you do to me?’ Gabby cried out.
‘You need to keep as still as you can,’ he said. ‘Stop the venom circulating.’
The Brit...what was her name?...raised an eyebrow. Her blue eyes gave his body a swift appraisal in his wetsuit.
‘You’re a doctor?’
‘You could say that.’ He watched her pull an elastic bandage from her bag. ‘The clinic’s next to the Villa Sunset Hotel. It wasn’t here before.’
‘Before...?’
Her hands worked quickly, wrapping the elastic bandage around Gabby’s leg with deft efficiency, starting from her toes, moving swiftly up to her thigh.
He sprinted to the restaurant right by the harbour. Their fence was made up of pieces of piled-up driftwood—just the right size for a splint.
‘Use this,’ he said, dropping back down next to her.
‘Perfect—thanks.’
She was impressively fast. She looked like the girl he’d met before, but she sure as hell wasn’t acting like her. Her red dress was catching dirt but she didn’t look as if she cared or even noticed as they loaded a sobbing Gabby into the back of a cart. His eyes lingered on the curve of her shoulder as one strap fell down to her arm. She caught his eye and yanked the strap up.
‘Come with me, please,’ Gabby begged him.
The Brit answered instead. ‘I’ll go with you. We need to take the pressure off your leg as much as possible in this cart, though. Can you work with me on that?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘I’ll help you.’
She was good with her patient. Sebastian helped her arrange the leg, waiting for any hint that she might remember him.
‘The driver knows where to go,’ he told her. ‘I’ll follow on my bike. Tell them I sent you.’