legs were so heavy. She couldn’t do this for much longer, she decided, but she’d cope as long as she could.
‘Josh is my ex-husband,’ she said, more to distract herself than anything else. Doctors didn’t reveal their personal lives to their patients, yet down here the lines between professional and personal were blurred. Two days? Please not.
‘He’s a trauma specialist with Cairns Air Sea Rescue,’ she said, and the words seemed a comfort all by themselves. ‘He’s texted. He’s on his way.
‘Because of you?’ Malu’s words were slurred, but strong enough to reassure her.
‘It’s his job.’
‘So not because of you.’
‘We’ve been divorced for five years.’
‘Yeah?’ Malu must be using this as a means to distract himself from the pain, from the fear, from the difficulty breathing, she decided. It was so hard to talk through the dust.
She couldn’t tell him to hush and conserve his energy. Maybe she needed distraction, too.
‘So he’s not the dad?’ Malu asked.
‘No.’ She wasn’t going there and it seemed Malu sensed it.
‘I can’t imagine being divorced from my Pearl,’ Malu managed, moving on. ‘So … five years ago? What happened? Wrong guy in the first place? He play fast and loose?’
‘I guess … first option. He was always the wrong guy.’ She thought about it for a bit and then suddenly she found herself talking. Talking about Josh. Talking, as she’d never spoken of it to anyone.
‘Josh had it tough,’ she said, softly into the dark. ‘He had a younger sister, Holly. His parents were worse than useless and that the two of them survived at all was a miracle. They were abandoned as kids and went from foster home to foster home. Sometimes they were separated but Josh fought battle after battle to keep them together. To keep his sister safe. Their only constant was each other.’
‘B-bummer …’
‘Yeah,’ she said softly. ‘It was a bummer. But Josh was tough. He got a scholarship and made it into medicine, then worked his way through university, supporting Holly while he did it.’
‘Where’d you meet him?’
‘Just after I finished university. I was a first-year intern. We became friends and … well, one thing led to another.’
‘To marriage.’
‘That’s right,’ she whispered, thinking back to the precious months before that nightmare time. Lying in the dark, holding Josh. Feeling him hold her. Feeling his love unfold, feeling that they might have a chance.
‘B-but?’ He coughed and coughed again and then moaned, and she did a recalculation of morphine dosages and figured she could give him more in half an hour. She daren’t give it sooner. She couldn’t drug him too deeply, not with this amount of dust in the air.
So distract him. Tell him … the truth?
‘I’m still not sure the reasons for marriage were solid,’ she told him. ‘My mum … well, maybe you already know? I told Pearl about her when she asked why I don’t stay on Wildfire all the time. My dad took off when I was six. I’m an only child. We were incredibly close—and then she had a stroke. Major. She’s unable to do anything for herself. She’s permanently damaged. Anyway, as I said, Josh was my colleague and my friend, and when the stroke happened he was amazing. He cared for me when I was gutted. He cared for Mum—in fact, I think sometimes he still visits her. He did … everything right. And I thought … well, I fell so deeply in love I found myself pregnant.’
‘Hey, that happens,’ Malu whispered. ‘Like me ‘n Pearl. Never a better thing, though. So, your Josh. He was happy about it?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she whispered. ‘He told me he was. But there’s one thing Josh is good at, and that’s hiding his emotions. All I knew was that he seemed happy about the baby, and he said he loved me. So we married. He still felt a bit … distant but I thought … maybe …’
‘So what happened to the baby? What broke you up?’
‘Knowledge,’ she said bleakly. ‘Learning Josh knows how to care, but not to share. Do you really want to listen to this?’
‘Pearl says I’m a gossip,’ Malu whispered, and grabbed her hand and held on. A link in the darkness. ‘Tell me.’ And then, as she hesitated, his grip tightened. ‘I know it’s not my business, but honest, Maddie, I’m scared. You could tell me it’s all going to be fine but we both know that’s not true. Distract me. Anything that’s said in the mine stays in the mine.’
She almost smiled. ‘That seems a really good arm twist to give you more gossip.’
She sensed a half smile in return. She was friends with his wife, but she barely knew Malu. Though maybe that was no longer true, she decided. There was nothing like hurling you down a mine and locking you in, with the threat of rockfalls real and constant, to make you know someone really fast.
And what harm to talk about Josh now? she asked herself. Somewhere he was out there, worrying. Caring. Caring was what he was good at, she thought.
Caring wasn’t enough.
Tell Malu? She might as well. He needed distraction and she … well, so did she.
‘They say troubles come in threes,’ she said finally into the dark. ‘So did ours. Mum had her stroke. We got married, which was the good bit, but there were two more tragedies waiting in the wings. We lost the baby—Mikey was born prematurely—and then Josh’s little sister died.’
‘Oh, Maddie.’ What sort of doctor–patient relationship was this? she asked herself. It was Malu doing the comforting.
As Josh had comforted.
‘You know, if it had been my sister and only my baby, like it was my mum, I’m guessing Josh would have coped brilliantly,’ she said, and now she was almost speaking to herself. Sorting it out in her mind. ‘But it was Josh’s pain and he didn’t know how to cope with it. It left him gutted and his reaction was to stonewall himself. He just emotionally disappeared.’
‘How can you do that?’
‘Normal people can’t,’ Maddie said slowly. ‘But Josh had one hell of a childhood. He never talks about it but when I met him his sister was doing brilliantly, at uni herself, happy and bubbly. She told me how bad it had been but Josh never did. He used to have nightmares but when I woke him he’d never tell me what they were about. Sometimes I’d wake and hear him pacing in the night and I knew there were demons. And then came baby Mikey, too small to live. And Holly. One drunk driver, a car mounting the footpath. So after all that, Josh’s care came to nothing and he went so far into himself I couldn’t reach him. He finally explained to me, quite calmly, that he couldn’t handle himself. He didn’t know how to be a husband to me any more. He had to leave.’
She shook her head, trying to shake off the memory of the night Josh had finally declared their marriage was over.
There was a long silence, for which she was grateful. And then she thought …
These are cramps. Stomach cramps.
Back cramps?
And that thought brought a stab of fear so deep it terrified her.
She was lying on a rock floor, supporting Malu’s legs. Of course she had cramps.
Of course?
Please …
‘I can top up the morphine now if you like,’ she managed at last, and at least this was an excuse to turn on the torch. She needed the phone app torch, too, to clean the dust away and inject the morphine. She held the phone for a bit too long after.
The