His Secret Love-Child

CHAPTER NINE

WHAT was she doing out on a river, looking for crocodiles, when it was her last day ever close to Cal?

He didn’t want her.

Gina sat in the bow of the boat and listened to Bruce chat to CJ about the mating habits of crocodiles. Bruce really was a nice person. He had three other tourists in the boat, an American couple and their teenage daughter, and he was including them all in his chat. He was making them laugh, making sure they all had fun.

He was very interested in her.

She knew it. She knew it in the way he watched her, the way he touched her.

She wasn’t the least bit interested.

Cal…

He had to unbend. He had to.

He wasn’t.

She was going home.

The day stretched on. It was the quietest of days, there was no trauma at all.

Cal was almost longing for the radio to burst into life, bringing action, bringing something to keep his thoughts occupied.

Nothing.

In the nursery Em was sitting by Lucky’s incubator and he knew she was feeling exactly as he was.

‘He doesn’t need specialling,’ he said gently, and Em flashed him a look of anger.

‘He needs someone to love him.’

‘We’ll find his mother.’

‘Yeah, right. And meanwhile I’ll love him for her.’

She’d fallen for Simon, he thought bleakly. This was the consequence.

Gina would never treat him as Simon had treated Em.

Cut it out.

Jill was in the nurses’ station. Rigid, uncommunicative Jill, who took her job as director of nursing with all care but as little humour as possible. He walked in to look up patient notes before doing a ward round, and she met him with a rueful smile.

‘This place is like a tomb.’

This, from Jill? Things must be really bad.

‘Too much has happened too fast,’ he said softly. ‘All these deaths. And Simon and Kirsty…’

‘Em still doesn’t believe he’s not coming back. Even though Kirsty told Mike what the situation was.’

‘I think she knows in her heart,’ Cal said. ‘She’s hurting.’

‘And how about you, Cal? Are you hurting?’

He sighed, dug his hands into the pockets of his coat and glowered. ‘Jill, I thought I could depend on you to butt out of what’s not your business.’

‘It’s my business if everyone in my hospital is going around with a face as mournful as that stupid dog of yours. Speaking of which, Rudolph is now draped across the entrance to the kitchen. Will you ask him to move?’

‘Sure.’ A marrow bone should do it, he thought. He and Rudolph had rather enjoyed sitting on the back step and communing over a marrow bone at three that morning.

She eyed him with caution. ‘So you’re going to keep him?’

‘CJ wants me to.’

‘CJ won’t know anything about it when he goes back to the States.’

‘Jill?’

‘Yes?’

‘Leave it.’

‘Sure,’ she said, and smiled, which for Jill was unusual all by itself. ‘I’ll leave it. But do cheer up.’ She shoved a clipboard at him. ‘This’ll help.’

He stared down at the name on the chart. Albert Narmdoo. Mild coronary. Father of one of the boys who’d died.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Great. What’s happening?’

‘Nothing.’

He raised his brows in query.

‘Just nothing,’ Jill repeated. ‘He’s not eating. He’s just staring at the ceiling. His wife came in this morning and the rest of his kids, but he didn’t even speak to them. He’s just…lost.’

His heart sank. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Of course you will,’ she told him. And then, before he could begin to imagine what was coming, she leaned forward and hugged him. Jill. Hugging. Unbelievable.

‘Go on, Cal,’ she said softly. ‘Let go. There’s a life out there, just waiting.’

As Jill had said, Albert was motionless. He was a big man, one of the elders of his community, his skin so dark his face seemed almost a chasm on the pure white pillows.

Cal walked forward and touched him on the shoulder, but the man didn’t register.

‘Albert?’

Albert turned eyes that were dulled with pain toward him, and the pain behind them made Cal’s heart wrench in pity. ‘The kids say you’re going to build us a swimming pool,’ he whispered.

‘I’m going to try.’

‘Won’t bring…anyone back.’

One of the hardest parts of the indigenous culture was the rigid rule that the names of the dead were no longer spoken. Cal gripped Al’s shoulder and watched the agony on his face, and thought they should be able to speak of his son.

He was right. This was what loving was all about, he thought bleakly. Loss. He watched the raw pain on Albert’s face and he thought, no, he was right, it was better to do as he’d learned to do. Not to love…

But as if he’d spoken the words out loud, the man reached up and gripped his hand. Hard.

‘I’ve had so much,’ he whispered. ‘Six kids. Six kids and their mother, and this is the first I’ve lost. It wrenches you apart, losing, but I’ve been lying here thinking what if I hadn’t had him. You know, when I was a young ’un I didn’t want any of it. I wanted to be by myself.’

‘You would have missed out,’ Cal said, seeing where Albert was headed, seeing where he wanted to head.

‘Too right I would have missed out.’ His face twisted. ‘You know, two days ago, me and…well, we went outback to where we buried his grandfather. Spent the night out there. We woke at dawn and we sat and watched the sun rise over the ranges, just him and me…and it was…well, it was worth everything. And now there’s death and my ticker’s playing up and maybe it won’t be long for me either, but that moment… Hell, to have lost that… If I’d had my way and not had him…’ There were tears streaming down the man’s face and he gripped Cal’s hand, hard. ‘You just grab it, boy,’ he told him. ‘You just never know…but you just grab it now, ’cos the pain will come regardless, but those moments…no one can take them away from you, ever. Me and my boy, that morning. It’ll stay with me for ever and it’s my gift and I’ll love him for life.’

Enough. He released Cal’s hand and he turned his face into the pillow. Cal stood, motionless, his hand on the man’s shoulder. He stood until Al’s face eased a little. He checked the chart, he wrote up medication and then he hauled a chair up beside the window and sat.

‘No need for you to stay,’ Albert said.

‘I’d like to, if you don’t mind,’ Cal said. ‘I can see the sea from here.’

‘Got your own thinking to do?’

‘I have.’

He could go down to the beach and do his thinking, he knew. But he wanted to be here.

He needed company.

He needed…

The afternoon was hot and humid and there were no crocodiles. They drifted slowly down the river. The Americans were talking to Bruce, swapping yarns, intent on outdoing each other in travel tales. CJ had Bruce’s binoculars, checking out every floating log, every mound in the mangrove swamps on the riverside. Imagining jaws.

Gina let her mind go blank and she drifted.

Tomorrow she’d leave.

For ever.

She was empty, desolate and she was turned into herself so she didn’t hear the boat until it was almost on them. A speedboat, blasting along the river far faster than was legal or safe. A group of people on board with beer cans waved in greeting, yelling, yahooing, blasting past them with a wash of white water in their wake.

Bruce shouted a warning and she swerved around, reaching automatically for CJ. But CJ was rocking, falling. He clutched the side and held on, and she thought he was safe, but his hat, his dratted hat, fell overboard.

With a gasp of distress he was up, leaning over, trying to hold it.

She grabbed for him but the second wave of the speedboat’s wake hit, knocking her sideways.

Her hand just touched CJ-just touched, but couldn’t hold him. Her fingers closed on thin air and her son was gone.

Cal was in the radio room when the call came through. He’d been sitting with Albert until he’d drifted off to sleep. Longer. He’d sat and stared out the window until he’d lost track of time, until his mind had told him it was time to move forward.

Where to?

He still wasn’t sure. He needed to find Gina, he thought, and he went to find Charles first to tell him he needed the rest of the day off. But he walked in the door as the call came.

‘Crocodile Creek Rescue Response.’ Charles himself was taking the call. ‘Harry. What’s the problem?’

Harry. The local police sergeant. Maybe they’d found Lucky’s mother, Cal thought, and he sent a silent prayer that that was the case.

But it wasn’t good news. He watched Charles’s face and he knew this was trouble.

‘The chopper will be in the air in minutes,’ he snapped. ‘Hell, Harry, you know that river…’

But the line was already dead. Whatever was happening, Harry was moving fast.

Charles spun round. Then he saw Cal and his face froze.

‘You.’ And something about the way he said it…

‘What?’

Charles took a deep breath, regrouping. Or trying to regroup.

‘Harry’s just had a call,’ he told him. ‘From the northern reaches of Crocodile Creek. Faint call, just about out of range, from an American tourist who’s out with Bruce Hammond.’

With Bruce Hammond. The croc hunter who’d taken Gina and CJ out.

‘What?’ he asked, and his voice sounded disjointed. Strange. Like someone else was speaking, not him.

‘It might be nothing,’ Charles warned. ‘Harry can’t get back to them. No one’s answering.’

‘What?’

‘The boy’s been washed overboard,’ Charles said bleakly. ‘That’s all we know. CJ’s missing.’

It was a ten-minute flight but even so it was the longest flight Cal had ever known. Mike was at the controls. Cal was beside him, straining the machine to go faster, and Hamish was in the back.

‘Because I want a doctor there who’s not emotionally involved,’ Charles had said.

‘Don’t send me, then,’ Hamish had said. ‘I’m emotionally involved.’

‘Just go, the lot of you,’ Charles had snapped. ‘And bring CJ home.’

Charles was emotionally involved himself. CJ had been at the base for a whole two days and already he’d wriggled his way into everyone’s heart.

Bring CJ home. The words rang over and over in Cal’s head.

Home.

Home was here. Home was with him. He had to find him. He had to bring CJ back to Crocodile Creek. They needed to stay here. They needed…

It wasn’t working. The line he’d been using all this time to try and persuade Gina to stay was ringing hollow. CJ might well not need him at all.

His son might be dead.

The vision of the bereft Albert slammed back into his heart and stayed there.

You just grab it now, ’cos the pain will come regardless, but those moments…no one can take them away from you, ever. Me and my boy, that morning. It’ll stay with me for ever and it’s my gift and I’ll love him for life.

What had he had? Cal thought grimly. One bedtime. He’d read his son one story and now he was gone.

One story was never going to be enough. He wanted more. He wanted so much.

He needed his son.

He needed Gina.

He sat rigid in the helicopter with Mike staring grim-faced ahead, and Cal did his own staring ahead.

What a fool he’d been. What a stupid, hopeless, inadequate fool. So many people had tried to tell him, but he’d done it his way. He’d tried to make himself self-contained, but to do that…it was just plain dumb. He could share his life with Gina and with CJ and with Rudolph and whoever else came along, and he could love them to bits and he could let himself need them, and why not? Because whatever disaster happened in the future, he could never feel any worse than he did right now.

‘For God’s sake, how much longer?’ he exploded, and Mike glanced across with sympathy.

‘Five minutes, mate.’

‘And there’s no news.’ Why was the radio dead?

‘You know there’s transmission dead spots on this part of the river.’

‘Then they should move to where they can transmit.’

And move away from where CJ had fallen in? It was a dumb suggestion. Both of them knew it and Mike was kind enough not to say it.

‘I’ll kill him,’ Cal was saying, directing impotent fury at the absent Bruce. ‘To take my kid on that part of the river…’

‘It’s safe enough. They were in a high-sided boat.’

‘He should have roped him in.’

‘Yeah, I can see CJ agreeing to that,’ Mike retorted. ‘No one gets roped into tourist boats. There’s usually no need. How he fell…’

‘Can’t you make this machine go faster?’

‘We’re almost there,’ Mike told him, and the big chopper swooped down in a long, low dive. They’d reached the fork where the main tributary turned northwards. ‘We’re assuming they’re on the main branch. Let’s just keep our eyes peeled until we see them.’

There was no need for him to say it.

Three pairs of eyes were scouring every inch of the river.

With dread.

Gina heard the chopper first. She glanced over her shoulder and she could just make it out, low on the horizon and half-hidden by the canopy of the boat.

‘That’s the Rescue Response helicopter,’ she said, and everyone turned.

‘There must be another drama along here somewhere,’ Bruce muttered. He was sounding a bit shaken, as indeed they all were. ‘It’ll be that blasted boat, come to grief. They come here doing ten times the legal limit-they’ll have hit a log. They’ll be lucky if they haven’t killed themselves, the fools.’

‘Oh, no,’ Gina whispered, hugging CJ closer. His wet little body was dripping against her, making them both soggy, but she didn’t care. He was still tear-stained and shaking against her, but the worst of his sobs had died. ‘We don’t need any more drama.’

But the corpulent American in the back of the boat was suddenly looking uncomfortable.

‘We might…we might just have a problem here,’ he admitted.

‘What?’ Bruce raked his bare head and looked exasperated. His expedition to show Gina the river wasn’t going to plan. He hadn’t wanted to bring tourists but the Americans were wealthy and prepared to pay a premium if he took them today, so he’d thought he could include them. Now this had happened, and he’d like to be comforting Gina, but he still had to be a tour operator. And on top of everything else, he’d lost his favourite hat!

‘When the little guy fell overboard…’ the man said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Well, everyone was screaming and you guys were real busy trying to haul him in and then Marsha screamed about the crocodile and I saw it and I just… I just…’ He lifted his cellphone and looked sheepish. ‘I knew your emergency code here was 000 so I dialled it.’

‘You dialled the emergency services,’ Harry said slowly.

‘Well, I did.’ The man beamed, recovering. ‘And, of course, after we got the kiddy back…after seeing those great jaws chomp on that hat…but we had him safe… Well, I guess I clean forgot that I’d phoned, but I’d imagine that’s why they’re coming, to look for us.’

‘I guess they are,’ Gina said, and all of a sudden she cheered right up.

The sight of CJ floating downstream on a log, and then the huge teeth rearing up and snapping down on Bruce’s hat wasn’t something she’d forget in a hurry. She was holding CJ tight and he was still shaking, and she’d been thinking she badly wanted to go home. But suddenly the helicopter was overhead and she thought maybe, just maybe, home was coming to her.

Don’t hope, she told herself. It wouldn’t be. It wouldn’t…

But Bruce was winding the canopy back so they could see up, and the helicopter was right above them, the whirling of its rotor blades causing white water. She could see…

Cal.

He was looking down at her and his face-dear God, his face.

What had he thought?

She knew exactly what he’d thought. The expression on his face matched how she’d felt as she’d seen CJ slide overboard.

Well, why wouldn’t he look like that?

He was family.

Home had come to her.