Summer in Sydney. Fiona McArthur
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She lifted her eyes and looked at the one person that she had told and couldn’t fathom why she’d chosen to reveal it to him.
‘I hate it, Cort,’ Ruby admitted. ‘I feel sick walking to work.’ She waited for his reaction, for his eyebrows to rise, for him to frown or dismiss her, but he just sat there, his lack of reaction somehow encouraging. ‘I spend the whole time I’m there dreading that buzzer going off or the emergency phone ringing … I was going to run off yesterday before we spoke to the relatives …’
‘But you didn’t.’ Cort tried to lift her up.
‘I wish I had.’ Ruby was adamant. ‘I wish I had, because then I wouldn’t have gone back, then I’d never have seen what I did today.’
‘What do you think your friends would say?’ Cort asked. ‘If they knew just how much you’re struggling right now?’
‘They’d be devastated,’ Ruby said, and that was why she felt she couldn’t do it to them. ‘I don’t want to burden them, I don’t want …’ She didn’t want to talk about it and luckily the waiter came with their tortellini and did the cheese and pepper thing, and by the time he’d gone, thankfully for Ruby, Cort had changed the subject.
‘Are you Adam’s sister?’
Ruby nodded and saw his slight grimace. ‘He bought the house and I guess I’m the landlady.’ She grinned at the thought. ‘I rent it out for him, drive his car now and then, he comes back once in a while and …’ Her voice trailed off. She’d been about to make a light-hearted comment about how every time Adam returned and didn’t notice Jess he broke her heart all over again, but that would be betraying a confidence, a sort of in-house secret, and she looked over at the man who had taken her out for dinner on the worst of nights, and wondered how he made it so very easy to reveal things she normally never would.
‘What’s he doing now?’
‘He’s doing aid work.’
‘Still for Operation New Faces?’
Ruby nodded. ‘He’s in South America, I think. Don’t worry, I’m not going to say anything to him about what happened.’ She smiled at his shuttered features. ‘Anyway, you’ve treated me very well. We’ve been out for dinner and everything …’ There was almost a smile now on his lips. ‘He’s hardly an angel himself.’
‘Still,’ Cort said, and then looked at her lovely red hair and remembered something else. ‘I worked once with your dad.’
She winced for him.
‘Before I moved to Melbourne I did a surgical rotation. I worked with him in plastics—he was Chief.’
‘He’s Chief at home too.’
It was a shame he didn’t have a steak because he’d have loved to stick his knife into it, because he could suddenly well remember the great Gregory Carmichael, holding court in the theatre, throwing instruments if a nurse was a beat too late in anticipating his needs. He remembered too how he had regaled his audience as he’d worked with the dramas in his home life, the wild teenager who answered back and did everything, it would seem, any normal teenager would, just not a teenager of Gregory’s, because, as he told his colleagues, he was once and for all going to sort her out.
‘What does he say about you doing nursing?’
‘He doesn’t like it, especially that I want to go into mental health. I used to work in a little shop on the beach, selling New-Age stuff …’
‘He’d have hated that.’
‘Not really,’ Ruby said. ‘They had no problem with me working at the shop, they gave me an allowance as well.’
‘It’s nice that they can.’
‘It’s all or nothing with them. I had to follow in his grand footsteps or have a little job while I waited for a suitable Mr Right. A psychiatric nurse isn’t something he wants me doing.’
‘Are you talking?’
‘Of course,’ Ruby said. ‘We didn’t fall out or anything. We talk, just not about what I do.’
‘So I’m guessing you can’t discuss with him the problems you’re having.’
She gave a tight shake of her head.
‘What about your mum?’
‘She’ll just say I should have listened to my father in the first place.’
‘What if I keep an eye out for you.’
‘How?’ Ruby said, because she knew it was impossible. ‘Can you imagine Siobhan if she gets so much as a sniff …?’
‘Why don’t you tell your friends?’ Cort suggested. ‘And you’ve got Sheila having a think … Don’t give it up, Ruby.’
They didn’t talk about it again, not till his car was approaching the turn for Hill Street.
‘Drive me down to the beach.’
‘It’s time to go home, Ruby.’
‘It’s two hundred metres,’ Ruby said, but she knew it wasn’t going to happen. He was a senior registrar and didn’t park his car by the beach like some newly licensed teenager, so he took her home instead.
‘Are you going to come in?’
‘No,’ Cort said, and his face was the same but had she looked at his hands she would have seen that they were clenched around the wheel.
‘Please,’ Ruby said, because, well, she wanted him to.
‘I’m not going into work in these trousers again,’ Cort said, because he knew she wasn’t asking him in for coffee. He thought of her room and the little slice of heaven they’d shared there last night, and then he told the truth, because aside from work, aside from the age difference, a relationship between them was the last thing he could consider now. There was so much hurt, so much blackness in his soul, he couldn’t darken such a lovely young thing with it. ‘We’d never work.’ He turned to her.
‘I know,’ Ruby said, because, well, they couldn’t. ‘You’re going to stop for a burger on the way home, aren’t you?’
‘Probably.’ Still he looked at her. ‘Are you going to go in tomorrow?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ruby admitted.
‘Try talking to your friends,’ Cort said. ‘You don’t always have to be the happy one.’ He saw her rapid blink. ‘If they’re real friends—’
‘They are,’ she interrupted.
‘Then you can turn to them. Go on in,’ he said.
‘Don’t I get a kiss?’
‘Ruby, please …’
‘One kiss,’ Ruby said. ‘Just one …’ And she made him smile. Not a big grin, but there was lightness where there had been none. ‘Then you can go back to ignoring me.’
‘I’m ignoring you now,’ Cort said, and went to turn on the engine.
‘Just a kiss on the cheek.’ Ruby’s hand stopped him. ‘End it as friends.’
He leant over and went to give her a peck, just to shut her up perhaps, but his lips had less control than he did and they lingered there. He felt her skin and her breath and she felt his, felt the press of his mouth on her cheek and then his lips part and he kissed her skin, traced her cheek with his mouth and traced it again. He held her hair and then removed his mouth and kissed her other cheek till she was trembling inside and her mouth was searching his cheek. If her friends were kneeling up on the sofa, watching, they might wonder why they were licking cheeks like two cats, but it was their kiss and their magic and she wanted his mouth so badly that torture was bliss.
‘‘Night, then,’