Australia: Handsome Heroes: His Secret Love-Child

‘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, he’s my son.’

She thought about that while a mile—maybe two—disappeared under their wheels.

‘Yes, Cal, he is,’ she said at last. ‘But you need to think of the whole picture. CJ’s happy thinking Paul is his daddy. Are you sure you want to change that?’ She hesitated. ‘And I don’t want to upset what’s between you and Emily.’

‘There’s nothing between me and Emily.’

She sighed. ‘Of course there’s not.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘There’s nothing between you and anyone.’

‘You and I—’

‘Were lovers,’ she said flatly. ‘But we weren’t committed.’

‘Because you ran.’

‘I had no choice and you know it. Don’t play the abandoned lover on me, Cal. You know you don’t need me emotionally. You never have and you never will. And CJ…’

‘What about CJ?’ He was practically glowering.

‘If you acknowledge him now, then you need to do commitment. There’s no way you can say proudly you’re his daddy and then not see him again.’

‘You think that’s what I want?’

‘I don’t know what you want. Do you?’

No answer.

Cal needed to concentrate now. They were approaching a rocky outcrop and the road was no longer clear. The country was growing rougher.

Kids were drag racing here? Gina thought, flinching inside at what lay ahead.

‘Little fools,’ Cal muttered, and she knew that his thoughts had veered back to what lay ahead as well.

‘Locals, do you think?’

‘Nothing surer,’ he said grimly. ‘There is a settlement just inland from here. Many of the local indigenous people are tribal—they live as they’ve lived for thousands of years. But the ones in the settlements…’

He broke off and concentrated on another corner. But then he started again.

‘They’re so disadvantaged,’ he said savagely, and all at once his hands were white on the steering-wheel. His voice was passionate. ‘Loss of their culture has left them in no man’s land. There’s nothing for them to look forward to, nothing for them to hold to. And they’re self-destructing because of it.’

‘I know,’ she whispered.

‘Yeah,’ he said roughly. ‘I remember that you do. When you were in Townsville you had such plans. You seemed to care so much. But off you went, back home to be a cardiologist.’

‘That’s not fair.’

But he wasn’t listening. ‘You know, your breakfast group disintegrated as soon as you left. The medics were stretched as far as they could go already. There was no funding and no enthusiasm for taking it forward.’

‘You’re blaming me that it ended?’

‘You never should have started it.’

‘Maybe I shouldn’t have,’ she said through gritted teeth.

It had been a small enough thing that she’d done. She’d taken a group of teenage girls—some pregnant, all in danger of being pregnant—and she’d invited them for breakfast. They’d met in a local café down by the river twice a week. Boys had been excluded. They’d swum, they’d eaten the huge breakfast Gina had managed to scrounge from local businesses—a breakfast of things the kids hardly saw for the rest of the week, such as milk and meat and fresh fruit. Then they’d played with cosmetics and beauty products, also provided by the businesses Gina had badgered. She’d worked really hard to keep their interest, inviting guests such as hairstylists, models, cosmeticians—anyone the girls would have thought cool.

She’d also sneaked in the odd gynaecologist and dietician and welfare support person, all selected for their cool factor as well as for the advice they’d been able to give.

The girls had thought it was wonderful—an exclusive club for twelve-to sixteen-year-olds. It had been working brilliantly, Gina thought. Too brilliantly. Only Gina knew what a pang it had cost her to walk away.

But she hadn’t been alone in her enthusiasm. ‘You had a boys’ group,’ she said softly. ‘Did you walk away, too?’

‘I moved up here.’

‘You mean you did walk away.’ She bit her lip. ‘Cal, I had an excuse. I was going home to care for Paul. What about you?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘No,’ she whispered. She stared out into the darkness, thinking of what she and Cal had started. What they could have achieved if they’d stayed together.

Maybe Cal was right. Don’t get involved.

‘These kids in the crash,’she said tentatively into the silence.

‘I know who’ll they’ll be,’ he told her. ‘The younger teenagers on the settlement up here are bored stupid.’

‘So bored they kill themselves?’

‘They drive ancient cars. Wrecks. They get them going any way they can, and they drive like maniacs. This won’t be pretty.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’

‘I think we both know it.’

It wasn’t the least bit pretty.

They rounded the last bend and knew at once what they were in for. Two cars had smashed into each other, with no last-minute swerve to lessen the impact. The vehicles were compacted, a grotesque accordion of twisted metal.

They’d have been playing chicken, Gina thought dully. She’d seen this happen before. Two carloads of kids driving straight at each other, each driver daring each other to be the last to swerve.

No one had swerved.

The first ambulance was already there and more cars were pulling up beside it. People were clutching each other, staring in horror as they stumbled out of their cars to face the crash. Bad news travelled fast. Parents would have been wrenched out of their quiet evening and were now staring at tragedy.

Two dead? There were two shrouded bundles by the roadside. A young policeman was trying fruitlessly to keep people back. Voices were already keening their sorrow, wailing distress and disbelief.

‘Cal!’ The older of the two paramedics who’d come with the first ambulance was running over to meet then. ‘There are two still trapped in one of the cars and I’m scared we’re losing them. And there’s a kid on the roadside with major breathing problems. Plus the rest.’

‘You take the breathing,’ Cal told Gina. ‘I’ll take the car.’

He was bracing himself. Gina could see it. His eyes were withdrawing into the place he kept his pain. He’d do his job with efficiency and skill, and he’d care while he worked, but he’d not let himself become involved.

‘I’ll do whatever needs doing,’ she said, in a voice that wasn’t too steady. ‘But maybe I’ll feel pain along the way.’

‘And I won’t?’

‘Who knows?’ She was hauling on protective gear with speed. ‘I knew this job once, and I thought I knew you. But we’ve come a long way. How thick have you grown your armour now, Cal?’

She didn’t wait for an answer.

It was a night to forget.

Gina worked with skills she’d almost forgotten, but her skills returned because if they didn’t then kids died.

The girl with breathing problems appeared to have fractured ribs, with a possible punctured lung. She was Gina’s first priority. Gina set up oxygen and manoeuvred her into a position where she seemed to be a good colour with normal oxygen saturation. She left her with the younger paramedic—Frank—and moved on to the next priority.

There were fractured limbs, deep lacerations, shock…That was bad enough, but Cal had allocated himself the true horror. Two kids still trapped.

One of them died under his hands five minutes after they arrived.

There was a moment’s appalled silence—a moment where she glanced across and saw Cal’s shoulders slump in defeat and despair—and then they all had to keep working.

How thick was his armour? she wondered. Not thick enough.

Head-on smash. Three dead now. One dreadfully injured. Three more with severe injuries, some of those injuries requiring skills that weren’t available in Crocodile Creek. One in such deep shock that she wasn’t responding.

There was a girl still trapped in the car. Cal was in the car with her, somehow inching his body into the mass of tangled metal, and he was fighting with everything he had.

All the emergency services had arrived now and machinery was being prepared to slice the cars apart. When floodlights lit the scene Gina saw that Cal was holding a tracheostomy tube in place. The second paramedic, Mario, was helping. IV lines had been established. A tow-truck driver had been co-opted into being a human intravenous stand.

She worked on. She had too many troubles of her own to be distracted by what Cal was doing.

‘Dr Lopez?’ Gina was splinting a compound fracture that was threatening to block blood supply when suddenly Mario was kneeling beside her. The too-young paramedic had the horror of the night etched on his face, but he was competent, moving swiftly to take over.

‘I can do this,’ he told her. She had the boy’s leg in position and was about to start binding. ‘Dr Jamieson needs you over at the car. Can you go?’

‘Sure.’

Do what comes next, Gina thought bleakly, trying not to flinch as she approached the wreck. Do what comes next.

Cal’s patient—Karen, a girl of about fourteen—was still firmly trapped and she wasn’t moving. The guys with the cutting machinery had paused.

Why did Cal need her?

She did a fast visual assessment of what she could see. Massive facial damage. What else?

‘Her leg,’ Cal told her as she reached him. ‘I can’t reach and I can feel blood. It was oozing, but we shifted her a bit when we tried to free her and now it’s spurting. Mario tried to get in but he can’t reach under me and I can’t move. You’re smaller. If we don’t get the bleeding stopped…’

She didn’t answer. She was already bending into the mass of twisted metal, crawling under Cal’s legs.

Someone—Frank?—handed her a torch.

‘There’s a tear.’ She could see it. ‘It’s pumping. I want pressure.’

Frank pushed a pad in her hands.

‘Can you stop it?’ The fear in Cal’s voice was unmistakable. Armour? He didn’t have any at all, she thought. It was all a façade.

She was right underneath him, her body somehow under his legs. There were pieces of metal digging into her from all sides as she bound the leg as best she could, hauling the jagged sides together and dressing it so the worst of the bleeding eased.

But had the bleeding eased because of what she’d done—or because the girl’s blood pressure had dropped so far the bleeding would have eased anyhow?

She wriggled back out, but she didn’t ask the question.

‘We’ll be getting you out of here now,’ Cal was murmuring to the girl, holding her as he supported the tracheostomy tube, his arm around her shoulders, willing her to hear him. She seemed unconscious but both of them knew there was no way they could assess her level of consciousness here. She might well be able to hear every word.

Gina stepped back, but her eyes stayed on Karen’s face. Was this a winnable battle? From what she could see, no.

But Cal wasn’t giving up.

‘OK, guys,’ Cal was saying to the men working around them. ‘Now Gina’s fixed the bleeding, there’s nothing stopping us cutting her out. Karen, we’re with you every step of the way. Gina and I won’t leave you.’

Gina and I.

Gina backed, moving out of the way of the men with the machinery, but the image of the girl Cal was treating stayed with her. The girl’s pupils weren’t responding to light. Her face was badly damaged, and there was a deep indentation behind her ear. Fractured skull. What damage was underneath?

Cal wasn’t moving clear. The cars were having to be wrenched apart to get her out. There’d be splintering of metal; there was danger in him staying where he was. It was probably a hopeless task—but he wouldn’t leave.

Gina and I.

She loved him. He was so desperately needful and she loved him so much, but he wouldn’t see it.

Numbly she went back to the kids who still needed her. Her girl with the punctured lung seemed to be stabilising. The boy with fractured legs was drifting into unconsciousness but part of that might well be the morphine she’d administered. The girl who seemed to be in deep shock wasn’t taking anything in, and Frank called her over to help. She went, but a part of her stayed achingly with Cal holding the girl to him, fighting against all odds.

Cal battling the odds as he’d done all his life.

Medicine. Concentrate on need.

‘The chopper’s on its way,’ one of the policemen told her.

That meant she could arrange to get the girl with the punctured lung and the one in shock into the road ambulance. She sent them off with the two paramedics. They’d need the helicopter for Karen. If…

If.

The vast pliers-like equipment nicknamed the Jaws of Life was working now, the noise blocking out any other. It stopped for a minute and she heard Cal.

‘Breathe for me, Karen. Come on, love. Breathe.’

Love. He was fighting with love, she thought, and he didn’t even know he was doing it.

She needed time to think things through.

There was no time here.

Then the helicopter landed, and Gina was so busy she hardly noticed. One of the boys was vomiting and it took all her skill to stop him choking. She had him on his side, clearing his airway, and when Cal’s hand settled on her shoulder she jerked back in surprise.

He was clear of the wreck, but she glanced up and saw that he wasn’t clear. Karen…

Not dead. Not yet.

Cal was looking at the boys she was treating, doing fast visual assessment, trying to figure priorities.

‘I’ll take Karen back to base in the chopper,’ he said, briefly, dully, as if he was already accepting the outcome. ‘Her parents will want to come with us, and by the look of…things, I think that’s wise.’ He stooped to feel the pulse of the boy who’d just vomited. Both boys were seriously injured but not so seriously that their lives were in immediate danger. But both of them needed constant medical attention. It wasn’t safe to leave either without a doctor.

Which left them with a dilemma. Only one of these kids could fit in the two-patient chopper, but if one of them went, Cal’s attention would be divided. Or Gina would need to go, too, leaving one boy untended.

Impossible. They’d have to wait.

‘I’ll send the chopper straight back,’ Cal told her, and she understood.

‘Fine.’

Fine? To be left on the roadside with three dead kids and two seriously injured kids and so many distraught relatives?

‘No one else can stay,’ Cal told her helplessly. ‘Damn, there should be another doctor. We’re so short-staffed.’

‘Just go, Cal,’ she told him. ‘Move.’

‘I’ll send someone back to cope with the deaths,’ Cal said. There were adults keening over the bodies and the scene looked like something out of a nightmare. Worse than a nightmare. ‘Charles said he’d send back-up. Where is it? But, Gina, I need to go.’

‘Of course you do. Go, Cal. I’ll manage.’

He touched her hair, a fleeting gesture of farewell—but then, before she could begin to guess what he intended, he bent and kissed her. Hard. It was a swift kiss that held more desperation than tenderness. It was a kiss of pure, desperate need.

Maybe it had been intended as reassurance for her, she thought numbly as she raised a hand to her face, but it had ended up being a kiss for himself. For Cal.

Cal had never kissed her as he’d just done then.

But he was already gone, stepping away from her. Stepping away from his need.

Into the chopper, back into his medicine, and away from her.

Somehow she organised order from the chaos at the roadside. She couldn’t work miracles—there were still three dead kids. But she sent relatives to start the drive into town so they could be at the hospital when the kids were brought in. She worked with the police sergeant who’d come to assist the white-faced officers who’d been first on the scene, getting details from shocked relatives. The bodies had to stay where they were until the coroner arrived.

She worked.

Finally the helicopter returned and by the time it did, she had her two remaining patients ready to go. She’d hauled the stretchers from the road ambulance she and Cal had come in, so the moment the chopper landed she had them ready to carry on board. Mike was the pilot. He swung out to help her. There was another paramedic or doctor in the back, receiving the patients, but there was no time for introductions.

‘Let’s go,’ Mike told her.

She glanced one last time at the mess left for the police to handle—the detritus of wasted lives—and then she concentrated on the living. She climbed up into the chopper herself. Moving on.

If only it was that easy.

Someone—a big man with a Scottish accent that was apparent the moment he opened his mouth—was organising the securing of the stretchers. He talked over his shoulder to Gina as Mike fastened himself back into the pilot’s seat.

‘You’ll be Gina,’ he said briefly, hanging the boy’s drip from the stand built into the side of the chopper. ‘I’m Dr Hamish McGregor. Call me Hamish.’

‘William’s IV line’s not stable. And his leg…’

‘I’m noticing that, and it’s my problem.’ Hamish was making a calm assessment of each patient. And of her. ‘You look like death and I’m taking over. If I need you, I’ll say so. Meanwhile, sit back and close your eyes.’

‘But—’

‘Just do it.’

She did. She buckled her seat belt and closed her eyes, and suddenly nausea washed over her in a wave so intense that she needed to push her head down between her knees to stop herself passing out.

Hamish eyed her with concern but he left her to it. Every doctor in the world had these moments. They came with the job.

So for a while Gina simply concentrated on not giving way to horror. On not letting the dizziness take over.

Finally, though, the nausea passed. She took a few deep breaths and ventured—cautiously—to open her eyes again. The helicopter was in the air. The two kids seemed settled and Hamish was focussing on her.

‘So you’re Cal’s Gina,’ he said softly.

‘I…No.’

‘No?’

‘I’m just a doctor tonight,’ she said wearily, and then, because she couldn’t think of what else to say, she added, ‘Where’s Cal?’

‘Last time I saw him he was about to drill a burrhole to try and relieve raised cranial pressure,’ he told her. ‘It’s desperate surgery he’s doing. We’re damnably short-staffed. Every doctor at the base is doing two jobs or more tonight.’

‘So where did you come from?’

The big Scot managed a lopsided smile. ‘I’m supposed to be on leave,’ he told her. ‘However, I made the mistake of telling people where I was. Charles radioed the skipper of the game-fishing boat I was on and they hauled me back to town with the boating equivalent of red lights and sirens. To be met by this.’

‘So you’re another doctor with the Remote Rescue Service.’ She frowned. ‘Hamish. The paediatrician?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘Or I’m the best we can supply in the paediatric department. I have a post-grad qualification in paediatrics, as well as my accident and emergency training.’

Great. That was another small weight lifted from her heart. All the time she’d been out here she’d been conscious of the tiny baby she’d left back at base, and now they had someone with paediatric training to take over. ‘You’ve seen Lucky?’

‘I have,’ he told her. ‘He’s looking stable. I’ll be heading back there fast to spend some more time with him. But you and Cal and Emily seem to have done a fine job. He has a fighting chance.’

‘I would have thought you’d have stayed while Em came out,’ she said, puzzled, and he grimaced.

‘Em’s in Theatre with Cal. He needs the best anaesthetist we have. Christina and Charles are with the two kids who arrived by road. That means we’re right out of doctors—apart from Alix, our pathologist, who’s just recovering from chickenpox. And we’ve even pulled her out of bed. So we had to take a chance on Lucky. Grace is specialling him. I came here. Sometimes in this place there’s not enough skill to go around and you need to make a hard call.’

‘I guess,’ she said, thinking bleakly of the number of times she’d had to leave her own son as she was leaving him now. As she’d have to walk away from Cal. So many choices…

Think of something else, she told herself fiercely. Anything.

‘Do you know Cal well?’

‘Cal’s a friend.’

‘I didn’t think Cal had friends.’ Why was she asking this, she wondered, in the midst of this horror? But the boys they were transporting now were the least injured. They were heavily sedated and they both had parents gripping their undamaged hands, as if that link alone could keep them safe. There was time and space for the two medics to talk.

And surprisingly Gina found she wanted to talk. In truth, she was desperate to talk. Anything but face the horrors of the night.