by Andrews, Amy
In fact, having Harry back with the team had been indescribably joyous, but he knew the ending and it was a real let down.
‘Way to go, fool,’ said Katya in her usual blunt fashion. ‘Chose a lung over your woman. When she leaves you again, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
Gill knew Katya was only joking but the reality of the situation hit and he felt a wave of regret. She was leaving. And this time she wouldn’t be coming back.
‘Worst...well, there have been a few of them just today. The news of my grandfather was pretty bad, so was Nimuk.’ And then there were the papers that he had signed that morning. He looked at Harriet and noted the tense line of her body. Did she think he was going to air that here?
‘And I get the whole beer thing, too, but I think my very worst is breaking up.’ He heard Harriet’s swift intake of breath and met her eyes as she gave him a searching look. ‘Breaking up is hard to do,’ he said, looking at Harriet intently.
Then, remembering the rest of the group, he returned his gaze to them. ‘It’s good to have a break and go home but
I’ll miss you all.’
‘Amen to that,’ said Joan.
Harriet looked around at the group, all nodding their heads sagely. They seemed to have missed the undercurrent between Gill and her. Except Katya, her eyes narrowed a little as she returned Harriet’s stare.
‘And yours, Harry?’ she asked.
Harriet had the dreadful urge to tell all under Katya’s astute gaze. She was closer to this group of people in lots of ways than she was with any of her girlfriends. She wanted to say there was no best, because the worst was that Gill had just signed the divorce papers and he didn’t want a baby, and that she wasn’t coming back because she needed a job where she could find someone who did want to have a baby with her.
And she should never have come back for these two months because leaving them all had been hard enough the first time.
But she didn’t.
Everyone had made a concerted effort to keep things light and she wasn’t going to buck the trend. ‘Being back has been so wonderful,’ she said, desperately trying to eject the husky note from her voice. ‘Seeing all your faces again...I missed you guys so much. That’s definitely been my best.’
She paused for a while over her worst. Nimuk and the divorce were fairly good candidates but she cast around for something that would keep it light. ‘I know, those two days right at the beginning where I had that V and D bug. That was terrible.’
Everyone laughed. She couldn’t remember ever vomiting so hard and had certainly never slept on the floor outside her toilet because the diarrhoea had been so violent.
‘You did look terrible,’ said Helmut.
Harriet laughed. He was right — she had. She’d looked really bad and had felt so wretched she had just wanted to die. ‘Thanks a lot.’
Harriet breathed a sigh of relief as everyone added their own colorful descriptions of her physical appearance while she’d been ill, teasing her mercilessly. The mood was light. Everyone was up again.
She took a mental snapshot of the scene because in seventeen hours this chapter of her life would be closed for ever.
CHAPTER NINE - 1500 HOURS
Harriet was in her room, packing, when Gill knocked softly on the door and opened it.
‘An aid helicopter carrying medical personnel has been shot down not far from here.’ He leaned into the door frame. ‘There were six on board. Kelly’s gone out by road. We’re preparing to accept casualties.’
‘What?’ She sat on the bed. ‘That’s awful. I hope everyone’s OK.’
Harriet knew the chance of fatalities was strong and depended on many variables like if the helicopter had been taking off or landing or at altitude but, she could hope, right? Gill nodded in silent agreement, but his face conveyed his pessimism.
Today had been a shitty last day and it wasn’t over yet.
Harriet wondered what had gone through their heads as they had plummeted to the ground. A few years ago in a different war
the team had been in a chopper that had come under heavy fire and it had been a terrifying experience. She had shut her eyes and gripped Gill’s hand and watched a slow motion replay of her life.
It had only been five minutes but it had felt like hours.
‘Didn’t they see the bloody great big medical aid symbol?’
she asked him.
The question settled into the silence. He didn’t answer her and she didn’t expect him to. She already knew the answer. Probably. They just hadn’t cared. It was a stark reminder that their job was dangerous, and Harriet felt a rush of bile into her throat at the thought of Gill being at risk.
‘You will be careful, won’t you, Gill?’ she asked. Her
association with him was coming to an end, and that was going
to be hard, but she could deal with it as long as she knew he
was safe somewhere in the world.
‘Of course, Harry,’ he said, as he came into the room and
squatted before her. ‘I’m always careful.’
Harriet snorted at him in disbelief. She had seen him take
some incredible risks in their time together. ‘Oh, like that
time that soldier held a gun to your head to make you operate
on his friend first and you turned your back on him?’
‘He was a boy.’ He shrugged dismissively.
‘With a gun.’ The worst type, as far as Harriet was
concerned. Drunk on power and too young to understand how to
wield it.
‘He was frightened.’
‘Helluva way of showing it.’
‘I’ll be fine, Harry.’
He said it with exaggerated patience, as if he was talking to a child and Harriet saw red. ‘There’s a helicopter full of people just like us that’s now a burning wreck. They were doing their job. Going about their business. Trying to help this messed-up situation. Don’t tell me you’ll be fine. Bet they thought they were going to be fine, too.’
This day was already turning out to be too much. She could
hear the edge of hysteria in her voice and never realised
before just how much safety issues weighed on her mind.
‘OK, OK.’ He held his arms up, surprised by the vehemence
of her reaction. ‘I promise I’ll be careful.’
‘Just play it safe, Gill. That’s all I’m asking.’
He nodded at her and picked up her hand off her lap, giving
it a squeeze. ‘I will. Safe as houses. Now, come on.’ He
pulled her up off the bed as he stood. ‘Let’s think positive
and get everything ready for six alive aid workers.’
The team adjourned to the lounge after their preparations
to await news. They were tense, their conversation sporadic
and stilted. They were riding the adrenaline surge that always
preceded an incoming wounded situation, but the thrill of
high-pressure medicine, which they all thrived on, was
tempered by the knowledge that they would be operating on
their own.
‘How much O blood do we have?’ Joan asked.
‘Twenty bags,’ Siobhan confirmed, not even looking up from
the magazine she was feigning an interest in.
They lapsed into silence again. The ticking of the wall
clock and the rustling of pages were ridiculously loud.
‘Have you heard any more about your grandfather?’ Helmut
asked into the taut silence.
Gill shook his head. ‘No. Not yet. I’ll wait till I know
what’s happening with this first. If we’re going to operate,
I’ll ring my father beforehand.’
Harriet had almost forgotten about Henri for a moment. She
glanced at Gill guiltily. Poor man. He had enough on his mind
without Henri’s health to worry abo
ut.
Fifteen minutes later — almost an hour after Gill had
received the news — Kelly walked into the room. She looked
haggard and her scrubs were dusty with a smear of blood down
the front. She pulled up a chair and raked her fingers through
her hair.
‘There were no survivors,’ she said blankly, staring at the chipped linoleum table. ‘It was Peter Hanley.’
‘Damn it,’ swore Gill, as an audible gasp echoed around the
table.
The team had worked with Peter a few years back. He was
a quiet, affable Englishman. A very experienced doctor who had
worked for the aid organisation for twenty-five years. He had
a wife and two children.
‘Bloody idiots,’ said Katya, scraping her chair back.
‘Bloody stupid wars.’ Her accent sounded thicker, more
guttural as her emotions spilled over. That was Katya. She got
mad and let it out. As she banged around the kitchen, everyone
stared at their hands and let her vent her anguish.
‘Let’s just give them all guns so they can kill each other
and get it over with.’ She plonked a cup of coffee in front of
Kelly. ‘The baddies can all kill each other then we’ll just be left with the rest of us. The sensible peace-loving people who just want to get on with their lives.’
At another time they all might have laughed at the
simplistic plan but right at this moment it seemed highly
sensible. One thing Harriet had learnt from years of living in
war zones was that it never made any sense. Whatever the
reasons or the motives, it all still boiled down to one thing —
too many senseless deaths.
The phone rang and everyone started. Their nerves had been
stretched tight and the harsh mechanical noise had been
unexpected.
‘I’ll get it,’ said Gill to Joan, who had half risen. ‘It
might be for me.’
Joan nodded and sat back down.
‘Hello, surgical building, Dr Guillaume Remy.’
Harriet knew immediately when Gill slipped into French that
it was his father on the other end of the phone. Everyone
waited with bated breath, eavesdropping unashamedly but mostly unable – apart from Katya and Helmut - to follow the one-sided conversation.
‘He’s stabilised,’ said Gill as he hung up.
Before she could check herself, Harriet was out of her
chair and folding her arms around him, lying her head against his chest. ‘Thank God,’ she said.
He hugged her to him and squeezed her close, his lips brushing lightly on the top of her head. And it didn’t matter right now that this closeness was a farce and they were getting divorced, only Henri mattered.
Only Gill mattered.
‘When are they taking him for angiography?’ Liz asked.
‘In the next few hours,’ he said, running his chin absently
back and forth through Harriet’s hair as if he was reluctant to let her go and she sighed.
At least there had been a glimmer of good news on this
horrible, horrible day.
CHAPTER TEN - 1600 HOURS
Harriet returned to her packing. They never brought much with them, just what could fit in a backpack. They wore scrubs all day and then got into their pyjamas. A few pairs of Civvies — usually jeans/shorts and T-shirts — their underwear and toiletries were all they required.
Harriet always shouted herself to a few nice outfits when
she hit London. After two months of blue scrubs she needed
trendy and colourful. Something in the height of fashion and
completely frivolous. This time tomorrow...watch out, Knightsbridge!
Everyone else had adjourned to their rooms as well. The
atmosphere was still heavy and they hadn’t felt much like
conversing. The mood was different to most last days. They wanted to be happy, they had something to celebrate, but given the circumstances it just seemed wrong to be laughing and joking and fooling around as they would normally have done. The death of Peter and the other aid workers was a far too depressing reality.
Harriet collected a few things from around the room — a nail file on the bedside table, a notepad and pen, her digital camera. She got down on the floor on her hands and knees and put her face down against the floorboards, looking for anything that may have rolled under the bed.
Nothing. Clean as a whistle. The only thing under the bed
was dust and that could most definitely stay. She rubbed her
hands together to brush off the film of dust and sat back on
her haunches, a sudden pain stabbing low in the right side
of her abdomen.
Subconsciously she pressed the area with her hand. The twinge left as soon as it had come, replaced by a vague ache, which she dismissed. She’d had a couple of similar twinges over the last few days which wasn’t unusual given her history of ovarian cysts. If it hadn’t settled by the time she got back to Australia, she’d go and get it checked out.
She got up and picked up the family photos that adorned her
window sill. One was of her parents and the other was Gill with baby Thomas. She smiled at the framed photo as she remembered the day it was taken. They’d had a wonderful family barbeque in
their Bondi courtyard with her parents and her sister Rose and
her husband Paul and, of course, baby Thomas.
He had completely unashamedly hogged the limelight. It had
been a hot summer’s day and they had all walked down to the
beach a few hours later. Gill had been roped into making a
sandcastle with his nephew. Thomas loved his Uncle Gill and
that day he had tugged at Gill’s hand and dragged his reluctant uncle to the paltry mound of sand he’d been constructing.
Gill had made it into a beautiful Renaissance-style château
and a two-year-old Thomas had been in complete awe of it, loving his uncle all the more. She had snapped the shot of them while they hadn’t been looking. Thomas had been sitting between Gill’s legs, a shell poised in one hand to decorate the outer wall, and was looking up at his uncle for advice, and Gill had been pointing to the appropriate place.
Harriet loved the photo. It was hardly professional quality — the background was wrong and they weren’t looking, let alone smiling, at the camera, but it was the type of photo that if her house had been burning down she’d have run back in to save. It held so many nice memories and the look of total admiration and complete and utter trust in Thomas’s eyes was something she doubted any professional photo shoot would have captured.
It had been a totally candid moment and Harriet knew she would treasure it forever.
It wasn’t long after that photo had been taken that they’d
found out about Harriet’s Fallopian tube and the arguments had
started. She felt a twinge again and wondered if it was a physical manifestation of her deep psychological longing for a child rather than an actual pain.
She did some calculations in her head. She’d had her period two weeks ago, not that it had been much of a period, so she was coming up to mid-cycle. It was a little early but by no means unheard of for the cysts on her ovaries to be giving her a hard time.
They could be become quite large and painful. A little while ago she’d had one drained via needle aspiration due to its increasing size.
Harriet placed the frame in her backpack with a sigh. The photo made her feel restless...and sad, and she was already sad
enough after the events of the day.
Pushing open the French doors, she walked out into the afternoon heat and leant against the balustrade. The sun was beginning its descent and the sky was already brilliant shades of r
ed, gold and orange. It was a stunning ochre sunset and it was one of the things she would miss about this land of extremes which could be both beautiful and terrifying at the same time.
She could see the old basketball court in the distance,
where a few hardy weeds struggled through the cracked, neglected concrete. She was sure that in the convent’s heyday the court would have thronged with kids, but now the deserted cement was used as the MedSurg helipad.
A dreadful noise like a siren split the air, and for a
moment Harriet wondered if Kelly had pushed the incoming-wounded alarm. But then a rustle of movement below caught her eye and
she realised it was a human wail. Nimuk’s mother sat on the steps of the med building, Theire at her side, repeatedly slapping her forehead as she rocked back and forth.
The grief-stricken cry rang around the cluster of buildings, announcing Nimuk’s death. There was something so base, so elementally human about the long continuous wail that it tore at the fabric of Harriet’s soul. And yet there was an animal quality about it, too. It verged on demented —like a wounded beast crazed with pain.
It was heart-wrenching, so tragic that hot tears needled the backs of Harriet’s eyes and ran unchecked down her face. Goose-bumps pricked at her arms. A stranger’s grief, it seemed, was the key to unravelling the emotions that had been coiling tightly inside her since that morning.
For once she let them flow, instead of chiding herself for being too involved. She cried for Nimuk and his mother, for Henri and Peter, for herself and Gill and the demise of their marriage, and that Gill would never sit on a beach, making sandcastles with their child.
A few minutes later the noise stopped as abruptly as it had
started and Harriet dried her tears. How many had she shed over Gill and herself these last two years? She’d lost count. It was time to stop lamenting what she couldn’t have. There were worse things that could happen to a person in this world, Nimuk being a good case in point.
What was her grief compared to Nimuk’s mother’s?
‘Everything OK, Harry?’
Harriet hadn’t heard Katya’s approach over her own turmoil and the wailing mother. She shook her head, not trusting her voice, still too overwrought to talk. She swallowed hard against another threatening fog of emotion caused by Katya’s gentle enquiry.