Authors: Meredith Webber,Alison Roberts
‘This is my job,’ she said softly. ‘We’ve had the risk-taking conversation, Harry, and while you mightn’t like me talking about it you have to admit, as part of your job, you do it all the time. So you should understand I can’t just get in the truck and go back to town, leaving this young woman with no one.’
‘
I’m
here!’ Harry said, moving his arm so her hand slid off—squelching the warmth.
It had been such a stupid thing to say Grace didn’t bother with a reply. She checked the oxygen flowing into the mask that was once again covering the young woman’s mouth and nose, and kept a hand on the pulse at her wrist.
Harry stood up and walked away, no doubt to grump at someone else. But who else was still here? Grace had no idea, having seen the last of the SES crew heading down the road towards their truck. The first truck had taken a lot of the less badly injured passengers back to the hospital to be checked under more ideal conditions than an inflatable tent and arclamps in lashing wind and rain. The team leader of that truck would then assist in finding accommodation for those not admitted to hospital, while the other members would begin preparations for the arrival of Willie, now on course to cross the coast at Crocodile Creek.
‘That you, Grace?’
She turned at the shout and saw two overalled figures jogging towards her.
‘Mike! Not on your honeymoon, then?’
Mike Poulos, newly married helicopter pilot and paramedic, reached her first and knelt beside her patient.
‘Could hardly leave without Em, who’s in Theatre as we speak, so I decided I might as well make myself useful. I can’t fly in this weather but I still remember how to drive an ambulance. Who’s this?’
‘We don’t know,’ Grace told him, watching the gentle
way he touched the young woman’s cheek. ‘Maybe a young backpacker—there were quite a few young people among the passengers. No one seems to know for certain who was on the bus.’
‘Mainly because the driver was killed and we can’t find a manifest in the wreckage.’ Harry was back, nodding to the two paramedics as he explained. ‘This patient’s the last, but we need to take the driver’s body back to the hospital.’
‘She’s unconscious?’ Mike asked Grace, who nodded.
‘And though there are no obvious injuries, she’s very unstable. She stopped breathing after she was brought up from the bus,’ Grace told him.
‘I hate transporting a dead person with a live one, but the bus driver deserves the dignity of an ambulance,’ Mike said. He looked towards Harry.
‘If we take the bus driver, can you take Grace?’
Harry looked doubtful.
‘As against leaving me up here all night? Taking two patients means I won’t fit in the ambulance,’ Grace snapped at him, aggravated beyond reason by this stranger in Harry’s body.
‘I’ll take Grace,’ he conceded, then he led the two men away to collect the driver’s body, before returning for Grace’s patient.
Grace walked beside the young woman as the men carried her to the ambulance, then watched as she was loaded, the doors shut, and the big four-by-four vehicle took off down the road.
‘My car’s this way,’ Harry said, and strode off into the darkness. He was carrying the last of the lights and the tarpaulin they’d used as a shelter, and though he
looked overladen he’d shaken his head when had Grace asked if she could carry something.
Still puzzling over his strange behaviour, she followed him down the road to where it widened enough for a helicopter to land
—when
weather permitted. His was the only vehicle still there.
She waited while he stacked the gear he’d carried into the back, then she made her way to the passenger side, opened the door—no chivalry now—and climbed in.
‘What is with you?’ she demanded, as soon as he was settled into the driver’s seat. ‘Is your leg hurting? Should I have a look at it?’
He glanced towards her, his face carefully blank, then looked away to turn the key in the ignition, release the brake and start driving cautiously down the wind-and rain-lashed road.
‘My leg’s fine.’
Grace knew that was a lie—it couldn’t possibly be fine—but she wasn’t his mother or his wife so she kept her mouth shut.
Between them the radio chattered—the ambulance giving the hospital an ETA, a squad car reporting on more power lines down. Yet the noise barely intruded into the taut, chilly atmosphere that lay between the two of them as they crawled at a snail’s pace down the mountain road.
‘Is it the bus driver? I know there’s nothing worse than losing a life at an accident, but he’d have been dead the moment the bus rolled on him, poor guy. There was nothing anyone could have done, and from what the rescuers were saying, he did all he could to save the bus
from being more badly damaged—all he could to save more lives.’
‘So he dies a hero. Do you think that makes it better for his kids? His name was Peter. He had two kids. Photo in his wallet.’
Making him a person in Harry’s eyes. No wonder he was upset.
‘Someone’s father,’ Grace whispered, feeling the rush of pity such information always brought, but at the same time she wondered about Harry’s reaction. She’d seen him bring in dead kids from car accidents without this much emotional involvement. ‘No, I’m sure, at the beginning at least, the hero stuff won’t make a scrap of difference to two kids growing up without a father. But all we can do is help the living, Harry. We can’t change what’s past.’
Harry sighed.
‘You’re right, and if I think rationally about it, the simple fact of having a father is no guarantee of happiness,’ he said glumly. ‘Georgie’s Max—his father’s just a nasty waste of space—and yours doesn’t sound as if he brought you much joy.’
‘It might not have been all his fault. I kind of got dumped on him,’ Grace told him, defending blood ties automatically. ‘I didn’t ever know him as a small child, then, when I was seven, my mother died and my aunt got in touch with my father, who’d emigrated from Ireland to Australia, and I was sent out here.’
She paused, remembering the small sad child who’d set off on that long journey, scared but somehow, beyond the fear, full of hope. She’d lost her mother, but ahead had lain a father and a new family, a father who’d
surely love her or why else had he sent the money for her ticket?
‘What number wife was he on at that stage?’ Harry asked, and Grace smiled.
‘Only number two, but, looking back, I think the marriage was probably teetering at the time and my stepmother had only agreed to take me because she thought it might keep my father with her. Poor woman, she was kind, but she was stuck with me when he took off again, so to her I always represented a terrible time of her life. And the little boys, my stepbrothers, well, I can’t blame them for hating me—I arrive and their father leaves. In their young minds there had to be a connection.’
‘No one could have hated you, Grace,’ Harry said, but although the words were kind his harsh voice suggested that there was more than the dead bus driver bothering him.
She listened to the radio calls, not knowing what to guess at next, but certain she needed things sorted out between them because the success of both the preparations for, and the work after, Willie’s arrival depended on them working harmoniously together.
With a sigh nearly as strong as one of the wind gusts outside, she tried again.
‘Is that all that’s bothering you? The bus driver? His kids?’
He turned to look at her and even in the dimly lit cabin she could read incredulity.
‘We’re in a serious situation here,’ Harry said, spacing the words as if he’d had to test each one in his head before letting it out.
‘We’ve been in serious situations before, Harry,’ Grace reminded him, ducking instinctively as a tree-fern frond careened towards her side of the car. ‘Remember the time we went out to the reef in a thunderstorm to rescue the diver with the bends? That wasn’t serious?’
No comment.
Grace sighed again.
Was she becoming a sigher?
Surely not. And if she considered it, being at odds with Harry could only help her getting-over-him decision. A sensible woman would welcome this new attitude of his and get on with her life. But this was, as Harry had just pointed out, a serious situation and Grace knew she wouldn’t give of her best if there was added tension between the two of them.
She knew too that they’d be in some dangerous situations in the future, and if they didn’t have one hundred per cent attention on the job, a dangerous situation could become a disaster.
She had to sort it out.
But how?
Bluntly!
There was only one other thing that had happened this evening that could explain his attitude.
Or maybe two things.
‘Are you still annoyed about me nagging you to be careful?’ she asked, thinking it was easier to bring this up than to mention the kiss.
‘I apologised for that.’
More silence.
That left the kiss.
Grace’s last remnant of hope that the kiss might have meant something to Harry died.
For sure, he’d started it, but the worst of it was, she’d kissed him back.
She knew it had been a mistake from her side of things, but had it also worried Harry? Had she revealed too much of how she felt?
Was that what was bothering him?
If so, she had to get around it somehow. Act as if it had meant nothing to her—pretend it had been nothing more than a casual smooch in the darkness.
More pretence!
She took a deep breath, and launched into the delicate conversation.
‘Is this because we kissed? Has one kiss turned you into some kind of cold robot? If so, that’s ridiculous. It was a mistake so let’s get past it. We’ve been friends for more than two years, Harry, and friends talk to one another. We can talk about this. Isn’t that easier than carrying on as if we’ve broken some immutable law of nature? I mean, it was a nice kiss as kisses go, but it’s not likely that we’ll ever do it again.’
As the flippant words spun around the cabin of the vehicle, mingling with the radio’s chatter and the wind that whirled outside, Grace felt her heart break.
But this was how it had to be. She didn’t want Harry thinking the kiss meant any more to her than it had to him.
He glanced her way, his face still betraying nothing.
‘
Do
we talk to one another?’ he asked, delving so far back into Grace’s conversation it took her a moment to remember she’d made the comment.
‘Yes,’ she said, although doubts were now popping up in her head.
They did talk, but about their work, their friends, the hospital, the town, the price of sugar cane—Harry’s father being the owner of the local mill—the weather, and just about everything under the sun.
‘Not about ourselves,’ Harry said, still staring resolutely through the windscreen, although, given the debris flying through the air, that was a very good idea. ‘Today’s the first time I’ve heard you mention a father.’
‘Everyone has one,’ Grace said glibly, but the look Harry gave her told her flippancy wasn’t going to work.
‘OK, you’re right. We don’t talk much about ourselves,’ Grace admitted, though she wasn’t sure what this had to do with the kiss, or with Harry’s mood. ‘But talking’s a two-way street, Harry. Talking—really talking—means sharing small parts of yourself with another person, and it’s hard to do that if the other person isn’t willing to share as well. Sharing that kind of talk leads to intimacy in a friendship and intimacy leaves people vulnerable. You treat everyone the same way probably because you don’t want that intimacy—don’t want anyone coming that close to you. The last thing in the world you’d want to seem is vulnerable.’
Harry glanced her way, frowned, then turned his attention back to the road, slowing down as the branch of a blue fig tree crashed onto the road right in front of them. He manoeuvred the car carefully around it.
‘So you start the talking,’ he finally said, totally ignoring her comments about his behaviour. ‘Is it just because of your father you don’t like weddings?’
It was the very last conversational gambit Grace had expected.
‘Who said I don’t like weddings?’
‘You were so tense you could have snapped in half in there this afternoon.’
Because it
was
a wedding and I was sitting next to you, and it was hard not to indulge, for just a wee while, in a pointless daydream.
Grace was tempted to say it—to tell him of her feelings. The way the wind was blowing, literally, and sending tree limbs onto the road, they could both be killed any minute.
Would it be better or worse if Harry died knowing she loved him?
The thought of Harry dying made her heart squeeze into a tight little ball, while memories of the one time she
had
told a man she loved him made her cringe back into the seat.
She could still hear James’s voice—his snide ‘Love, Gracie? How quaint! What a sweet thing you are! Next you’ll be telling me you’re thinking of babies.’
Which she had been.
No wonder she could still feel the hurt …
‘Well?’ Harry persisted, and Grace had to think back to his question.
‘It wasn’t the wedding,’ she managed to say, as Harry slammed on the brakes and his left arm shot out to stop her forward momentum.
‘Thank heaven for traction control,’ he muttered as the car skidded sideways towards the edge of the road then stopped before plunging off the side of the mountain. ‘What was it, then?’
Grace shook her head.
‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,’ she said. ‘Any minute now a tree’s going to land across us and you’re worried about why I was tense at the wedding.’
She paused, then added crossly, ‘Anyway, this conversation isn’t about me—it’s about you. I didn’t change from a friend to a frozen robot in the time it took to drive from town up the mountain.’ She peered out through the windscreen. ‘Why have we stopped?’
‘I don’t like the look of that tree.’
Harry pointed ahead and, as Grace followed the line of his finger, the huge forest red gum that had been leaning at a crazy angle across the road slid slowly downwards, the soaked soil on the mountainside releasing its tangle of roots so carefully it was only in the last few feet the massive trunk actually crashed to the ground.