Australia: Handsome Heroes. Alison Roberts
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asked Mrs Grubb to come across and look after the littlie,’ he told her. ‘If that’s OK, then that leaves you free.’
‘Who else is available?’ Cal asked.
‘Mike and Christina have taken the chopper out to pull a suspected heart case off a prawn trawler,’ Charles snapped. ‘It’s probably a false alarm but we have to check. That’s where the chopper is. Hell, Cal, weren’t you listening at dinner?’
‘Maybe I wasn’t.’
But Charles wasn’t listening now. He was focussing on Gina.
‘I know we have no right to ask more of you than you’ve done for us already,’ he told her. ‘But we’re desperately understaffed and we need you. Can I ask you to help?’
There was only one answer to that. ‘Of course I’ll help.’ She was already moving toward CJ’s bedroom door. ‘I’ll explain what’s happening to CJ and come straight away.’
‘He won’t mind?’
‘He’s learned not to mind,’ she said, and if her voice was bleak, who could blame her?
The ride south was at a speed which would normally have made Gina’s hair curl all by itself.
Cal was driving. The first ambulance had left the moment the call had come through, the two available paramedics leaving Cal and Gina to follow. So now they followed. The siren screamed, Cal rode the corners like a racing driver and Gina gripped her seat and held on for dear life.
‘Um…I have a son,’ she said over the sound of the siren.
‘I’m taking no risks.’
He wasn’t. He was an excellent driver. He had to be. Training for remote medicine meant everyone had to be multiskilled, and the longer you stayed in the job the better you got. Cal was fantastic.
Just at the job, she told herself fiercely. Just at the job.
Charles’s voice crackled from the radio. ‘Cal? Gina?’ Cal nodded to the receiver.
‘Press the button to speak.’
She knew what to do. She’d worked with Remote Rescue before and she’d loved it. If she was to stay here there was so much she could do, she thought, and then gave herself a fast mental slap. She wasn’t staying here. Why would she?
‘Charles?’ Back to medicine.
‘The first ambulance has reached the crash site,’ Charles told her, and by the tone of his voice she knew the situation was appalling. ‘Two dead, seven injured, some still trapped in the wreck, and the injuries sound major. We’re calling in everyone we can, but essentially you’re the only two doctors available.’
‘OK.’ She glanced across at Cal and saw his face setting in lines of grim determination. They both knew what lay ahead.
‘One of the local farmers will stay with the bodies until we can get them brought in. We’ll send the chopper out as soon as we can but meanwhile use the ambulances for casualties. Let me know if I need an evacuation team from Brisbane.’
‘Will do.’Any patient with trauma requiring complex intervention—such as major burns—would need to go straight to a city hospital, Gina knew. ‘But you have great Theatre facilities.’
‘By the sound of the injuries they may not be enough. And Cal’s our only surgeon. You’ll help if needed?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good luck, then.’
‘Thanks, Charles,’ she said, and replaced the receiver with a sinking heart. She glanced across at Cal again but she didn’t say anything and neither did he.
He tried so hard not to care, she thought, but it didn’t work. His armour was eggshell thin.
They went round a corner and she thought about where she’d left her stomach for a bit. Then they straightened and she thought about Charles. She needed some sort of diversion. Anything.
‘Charles must hate that he can’t come on calls like this,’ she tried.
‘Yeah.’ Cal was concentrating fiercely on the road but it had straightened now. They were out of town, heading into flat hinterland.
‘Tell me about him.’Anything to get rid of this tension, she thought, and Cal flashed her a sideways glance. He understood exactly she was doing, she realised. Maybe he even agreed with her.
‘Charles is a great doctor,’ he told her. ‘The best. Charles’s family—the Wetherbys—own a station near where you were today. Wetherby Downs. They endowed the hospital. Charles was injured when he was about eighteen—his best mate’s gun went off when they were pig-shooting. Charles went to the city, learned to be a doctor and has come back and put everything he knows into this place. He’s built up the best rural medical centre in Australia. The flying doctor base, the helicopter rescue service, the hospital—he runs it all and he has a mind like a steel trap.’
He hesitated for moment and Gina thought he might stop—but then his voice continued. He was staring out into the night, staring out at the road, and Gina knew he was seeing far more than the dusty track ahead.
‘But I suspect on a night like tonight, Charles would change that all if he had a body that’d take him into the heart of the action,’ he said slowly, reflectively. ‘To be stuck back at base, waiting…’
‘At least he can do something. To be injured like that, but to still go on and do something you’re proud of…’
‘Paul couldn’t?’ He asked the question gently, as if unsure that he had the right to ask, and it was her turn to stare ahead.
‘The only good thing that Paul could do for the last few years was to raise CJ,’ she said at last. ‘Be with CJ. I kept working to support us all, but Paul was never lonely. We paid a nurse to stay during the day—but the nurse looked after Paul and CJ. If you know how much that helped…’ She hesitated. ‘Cal, that’s why I’m here. It’s most of the reason I’ve come. To tell you how grateful we both are.’
There was a moment’s silence—and then a blaze of anger. She could feel it before she heard it. ‘So even your husband was grateful to me. How’s that supposed to make me feel?’
‘I don’t have a clue,’ she told him honestly. ‘I’m in uncharted territory. I don’t even know whether I’m doing the right thing—admitting to you that CJ exists.’
‘How can you question that? You should have told me five years ago.’
‘You didn’t want him.’
‘No, but now he exists…’
She felt a tiny flare of panic. ‘But now he exists, what?’
‘He’s my son.’
‘No more than if you were a sperm donor.’
‘You know it was far, far more than that.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded and only she knew that her hands were clenching on her lap. Her fingernails were digging into her palms and they hurt. ‘Of course I know that.’
Silence. Then. ‘You’re planning on staying for how long?’
‘Until tomorrow.’
‘You need to stay longer.’
‘Cal, let’s not…’
‘Let’s not what?’
‘There’s no obligation on your part to care for him.’
‘He looks like me.’ It was a flat, inflexionless statement of fact but there was pain behind it. She could hear it.
‘That’s still no reason for you to be involved.’
‘Dammit, Gina,