The Doctor’s Special Touch

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BY THE time she fell into an uneasy doze it must have been past three, and when she woke the clock said eight-thirty.

Her mother was cooking bacon. The smell was all around the little room and Ally stared up in astonishment. Then she stared at the clock. She yelped.

‘Help!’ What had happened to her alarm? ‘I have clients booked at nine.’

‘I know,’ her mother said serenely. ‘I looked at your appointment book. It’s almost full.’ She beamed down at her daughter. ‘You’ve done really well.’

Ally blinked. This was so unlike her mother that she could hardly believe it.

‘I’ll cancel them,’ she said, and Elizabeth shook her head.

‘Why should you? You have half an hour. I’ve cooked breakfast. Eat, shower, massage. In that order. There’s no problem.’

‘But you-’

‘I have things to do, too,’ she said serenely. ‘If you’ll tell me where Jerry’s people are…’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Why should you come with me?’ Elizabeth asked, as if such an action was ridiculous.

‘I could introduce-’

‘I’ll introduce myself. Now, one egg or two?’

Eggs. She had eggs, thanks to Darcy. Ally’s thoughts were wildly tangential and they swung now to Darcy. Darcy had brought far too much breakfast for one morning.

Darcy loved her?

‘Um…one.’

‘You know, if you intend to start work at a reasonable hour, maybe you shouldn’t stay on the telephone at all hours,’ Elizabeth said, and Ally stared. She’d heard?

‘I’m asking no questions,’ her mother said, and a tiny smile hovered around the corners of her mouth. ‘Not a question at all. But that’s why I turned off the alarm. You had to sleep some time. And…did you know, when I tried to wake you just now, you called me Darcy?’

Work started dead on nine.

This was why she’d come, Ally reminded herself as she welcomed her first client. Setting up as a massage therapist anywhere but here would have entailed a long wait while the locals came to trust her. Here there was curiosity and good-will-and eagerness to beat neighbours in saying they’d been to have a massage with ‘our Ally’.

Our Ally.

She couldn’t be our Ally, she thought, and her tangential thoughts were becoming desperate. Not if it involved medicine. Medicine had propelled her mother to suicide. How could she go back and risk that again?

‘Can you give my neck a bit of an extra rub?’ Doris Kerr was her first client for the morning. She’d come in for her own massage and was practically purring on the table. ‘Don’t bother with my legs. Legs are good but, oh, my neck…’

‘You’ve got real tension knots,’ Ally told her, kneading gently through the layers of tight muscles. ‘You said you damaged a disc?’

‘I fell over my dog,’ Doris told her. ‘Ten years back. We didn’t have a doctor here then and I was in such trouble. I lay in bed for a week before my husband finally took me to the city. Then they put me in the orthopaedic ward. I lay in traction for three weeks with all these people who’d had car crashes or diving injuries or skiing accidents. Everyone kept asking what I’d done and I’d fallen over the dog. My poodle! Talk about humiliating.’

‘I’ve seen people in real trouble with damaged discs after they sneezed too hard,’ Ally told her, and Doris sighed again and sank into the kneading process with pleasure.

‘That’s what Dr Rochester said. He’s been so comforting. For a while I travelled up to Sydney to see a physiotherapist, but now…’

‘There are many things physiotherapists can do that I can’t,’ Ally told her.

‘Yes, dear, that’s what Dr Rochester told me when I asked if I should come to you.’

‘Did he?’ Ally asked slowly, and she had to force herself not to interrupt the gentle rhythm of her kneading.

‘But he still said I should come,’ she told her. ‘He said it’d do my neck good to get the muscles warmed and mobile. I do tend to get a stiff neck. If it hurts then I don’t move it, and it makes it worse.’

‘He said I could help?’

‘Well, of course he did,’ Doris told her, as if the suggestion that he wouldn’t have was astonishing. ‘I mean, you’re two professionals, aren’t you? If you can’t support each other, who can?’ She wiggled on the table and gave another sigh of pleasure. ‘Oh, my dear, that feels so good. Now…Henry says your mother arrived on the bus last night. Is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, isn’t that just perfect?’ Doris gave another happy wiggle. ‘And they’re saying you can have Elspeth’s wee house, and then…’ She stilled as if wondering whether she dared say something and then decided to go ahead anyway. ‘They’re also saying Dr Rochester is sweet on you. Already. Now, wouldn’t that be something? If you could all live happily ever after.’

More of the same.

Followed by more of the same and more of the same.

The locals knew everything.

Betty must have overheard their conversation back at the refuge last night, Ally decided, and Betty had talked. As the morning wore on, more of her clients disclosed more about what was happening until she was almost ready to scream.

And then the phone rang.

While she’d been massaging she’d turned her phone over to the answering-machine. Now it was almost one and she’d finished for the morning. She washed the oil from her hands, listened to her messages and was just about to turn the machine back on so she could find some lunch-and find her mother!-when it rang.

‘Ally.’

It was Elizabeth, and with that first word Ally knew something was dreadfully wrong.

‘Mum…’

‘You need to go to the police station.’ Her mother was almost incoherent, and without thinking Ally switched into doctor mode. How to get information from someone who was panicking.

‘Three deep breaths,’ she ordered. ‘Now.’

‘I-’

‘Breathe. Calm yourself down and then talk to me.’

There was a tiny hesitation and Ally could hear the breaths being taken. ‘Sorry.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘It’s Jerry.’

‘Jerry?’

‘Kevin stabbed him.’

Ally was already shoving her feet into her outside shoes and was reaching for her keys with her spare hand. Now she paused, shocked into stillness. ‘But Kevin’s in hospital. Jerry’s in jail.’

‘That’s just it,’ he mother wailed. ‘We’re at the refuge. Dr Rochester was here. Ally, he’s so nice. But someone just ran in from the police station next door. The policeman’s wife. She’s still here. She’s so upset. She rang the hospital and they said the doctor was here and she just ran.’

This wasn’t making sense.

‘Is Jerry dead?’ Ally demanded, and it was a learned shock tactic that worked.

‘I don’t know,’ her mother whispered.

‘So what’s happened?’

‘Kevin’s supposed to be going by ambulance to Melbourne this afternoon.’

‘I know that.’

‘Yeah.’ Her mother choked and Ally could hear the sound of a woman sobbing in the background. ‘I… Anyway, while Dr Rochester was here looking after the kids, Kevin apparently headed over to the jail and said he desperately wanted to say goodbye to Jerry. The sergeant was out, but his wife let him into the cells. Just…to stand on the other side of the bars, she said. But as soon as Kevin got close he produced a knife and he started stabbing. Ally, the policeman’s wife says Jerry’s bleeding to death. Dr Rochester’s gone to help, but by the sound of it he’s got more than one stab wound. You have to go, too. You have to do something.’

But… This was Jerry! And her mother was weeping.

‘You still care,’ Ally breathed, appalled beyond belief. ‘After all this time.’

The hiccuping sobs stopped. Immediately. There was a harsh gasp and then a change of tone that was unbelievable.

‘What do you mean, I still care?’ Her mother was suddenly yelling. ‘Sure I care. I care that he goes to court and he gets convicted of every single crime he ever committed. Don’t you dare let him die, Ally.’

‘I’m not a doctor.’

‘Of course you’re a doctor,’ her mother yelled. ‘You’re the best doctor I know. Now stop wasting time and get down to the police station and save that low-life’s life. Now!’

It was only a block and a half and her ancient panel van took valuable moments to start. She ran and she reached the station in minutes.

Nothing. No cars. The door was wide open as if everyone had left in a hurry.

They must be at the hospital. She nearly didn’t go in but there was a sudden harsh expletive from the back.

She went in-and the sight that met her made her flinch.

The cell door was wide open. There was a bunch of keys lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

Darcy was in the cell. He was bent over a crumpled form-Jerry-but he was glancing back over his shoulder. Talking. ‘He’s dead, Kevin,’ he was saying. ‘Leave it, mate. He’s dead.’

Stop, she told herself. Take in the whole scene.

Kevin was crumpling back into the corner of the outer office. He was whimpering and his knees were drawn up to his chin. Still in his hospital pyjamas, he was blood-spattered and desperate.

He looked up at her now as if she was a spectre. ‘I had to do it,’ he whispered. ‘I had to.’

He was holding a long, thin knife.

Was she first on the scene apart from Darcy? How fast had her mother called her?

Triage.

Ally glanced across at Darcy. Darcy looked up at her, and then at Kevin. His hands were pushing down hard on Jerry’s chest.

He’s dead, he’d said. But he was applying pressure.

The knife.

Darcy didn’t move. At a guess, he couldn’t. By the amount of blood, a major blood vessel was ruptured.

Was Jerry dead? Ally didn’t think so. Her eyes moved again to the knife.

She walked across and knelt before Kevin.

‘You’ve killed him,’ she said softly, and she was carefully blocking his view of Jerry and Darcy. If Jerry moaned…

‘I… Yes,’ he whispered. ‘He’s dead. He says he’s dead.’

‘Then it’s over,’ she said. Still gently. Still feather-soft. ‘It’s over, Kevin. All the awful things that have happened are finished. You don’t have to do anything any more.’

‘But-’

‘We’ll look after you now,’ she said. She put a hand on Kevin’s bloodstained arm. ‘You know it was me who had Jerry arrested. Let me take over now. Give me the knife, Kevin.’

He looked up at her with eyes that were blank with incomprehension-but then, like an obedient child, he held out the knife.

Dear God.

It was a vicious weapon. Some sort of filleting knife? He must have found it in the hospital kitchen, Ally thought. The knife had a long, vicious blade, with blood still thick along its length. It was pointed straight at Ally.

She swallowed-and then reached behind its point to take it by the handle.

He let it go.

Still she didn’t move. If she moved, he’d be able to see Jerry, and if Jerry moved…

There was no sound from Darcy. She could hear him moving-he’d be frantically trying to stop blood flow-but he’d guess what she was doing.

He wouldn’t mess it up by talking.

And then, blessedly, there was the sound of a car screeching into the main street, siren blaring. A skid of brakes.

Ally’s eyes held Kevin’s. She was ready to back away with the knife-to run-but she had a better chance of holding him with her eyes.

‘We’ll take care of you,’ she told Kevin. ‘Trust me. Jerry can’t hurt you any more.’

A car door slammed. Feet against gravel, moving fast. A man’s gruff voice, calling out. Sergeant Matheson.

She rose on feet that were decidedly wobbly, with the knife behind her back. She didn’t take her eyes off Kevin.

‘We’re through here.’

‘Kevin’s killed Jerry,’ she told the sergeant as he stopped in the doorway, appalled. She kept her voice carefully neutral, and behind her back and out of Kevin’s view she held out the knife toward him. ‘I think Kevin needs to go back to hospital now. Can you take him, Sergeant?’

He was good. His eyes swept the room, taking in the scene before him, but even before he was done he had the knife from her and it was pushed into a recess behind the desk. Then he went to kneel before Kevin.

‘Help the doc,’ he told her, glancing over to where Darcy was pushing desperately downward. ‘I have this.’

It took the next three hours and all their combined skill to save the man Ally hated most in the world.

Kevin’s first stab wound had been to Jerry’s chest. Instead of backing away from the bars, he’d slumped against them, and Kevin had stabbed wildly at everything else he could. Luckily Jerry had fallen with his head out of reach, but his legs were a mass of deep lacerations, any one of which could have been fatal.

They almost lost him. Darcy had shoved a chair under his legs to raise them above the level of his heart, trying to stop the pressure of the blood surging out onto the floor.

For those first few minutes Ally worked with him. They put pressure pads on every spot they could find, fighting desperately to stop the bleeding.

It seemed an age, though in truth it was only three or four minutes, before back-up arrived, in the shape of Betty, driving her own car but carrying bags of saline and more dressings than Darcy’s meagre doctor’s bag provided.

The three of them worked on.

Sergeant Matheson took Kevin away but they didn’t notice. Did Kevin realise that Jerry wasn’t dead? Ally wondered, but it didn’t matter.

He could still die. His blood pressure was dropping and dropping.

But somehow, somehow he lived on. To lose this much blood and live was almost miraculous.

Still they worked.

Finally Darcy sat back. The last of the spurting sources of blood had been quelled. Maybe there was a hope. The fluids were pouring in now, the IV line set to maximum. He had a chance.

Or did he?

‘His trachea has moved,’ Darcy said. He’d hardly looked at Ally. There’d been no time. The three of them had worked as a solid medical team, as if they’d trained together for years and were working in the emergency ward of some huge city hospital instead of in a lake of blood on the floor of the number one cell of Tambrine Creek police station. Now, though, Darcy had time to sit back and assess the whole situation.

His trachea had moved?

Ally finished taping a pressure bandage to Jerry’s groin and looked up at Jerry’s throat. The man was seriously overweight, his neck was pudgy but she put her fingers down and felt, and she could feel what Darcy meant.

Jerry’s trachea felt as if it had shifted slightly to the left.

‘His lung.’ Darcy grabbed a stethoscope from the pile of equipment Betty had brought, and his face tightened as he listened.

‘Tension pneumothorax?’ Ally asked, and he nodded.

‘It has to be. That first wound was to the lung. I could hear the pneumothorax before but didn’t realise… The air’s going straight out into the chest wall.’

Dear God. They all knew what that meant. A punctured lung causing a pneumothorax was serious, but a tension pneumothorax was far, far worse. The air that Jerry was managing to get into his injured lungs wasn’t being exhaled. Neither was it escaping through the track of the wound. Part of it was escaping into the chest wall.

The pressure was building, shifting the trachea. Soon it would compress the heart and the other lung, causing it to collapse. And then…

Then death.

The ambulance officers were there then-two volunteer officers who were standing back in dismay, waiting to see whether they’d be transporting a corpse or a patient.

‘Let’s get him to hospital,’ Darcy said grimly. ‘I need to get a tube in there.’

‘Can you?’ Ally practically gaped. Inserting a cannula into a chest wall was a job for a surgeon, and a good one at that.

‘I don’t see that I have a choice,’ Darcy said grimly. ‘I’ve seen it done. Once. What do they say? See one, do one, teach one. Teaching’s for tomorrow. For now… Are you assisting-Dr Westruther?’

There was only one answer to that.

‘If you’re going to be a hero, you need a heroine,’ she said, and flashed an uncertain smile at Betty. ‘How about you? You want to be a damned-fool heroine, too?’

‘Who, me? I’m just here ’cos I like blood.’ Betty grinned, and the awful tension dissipated for the moment. ‘And I love watching heroes and heroines. My very favourite thing.’

The surgery Darcy performed was the stuff of nightmares. Injecting lignocaine. Using a cannula with trochar, inserting it carefully, painstakingly carefully through the chest wall. Hearing the rush of air. Connecting the cannula to an underwater seal and watching the water bubble. Knowing the air couldn’t flow back up the tube.

Described like that, it almost sounded easy, Ally thought, but it was the finest piece of surgery she’d ever seen performed by a non-surgeon. That it had been done by a family doctor who’d last seen the procedure five years ago was unbelievable.

She couldn’t believe Darcy had succeeded, and years later when he recalled doing it Darcy still shook his head in disbelief himself.

They didn’t stop there. The slashes were deep and serious and no amount of pressure would stop some of them from seeping. Some of the slashes were down to the bone. The suturing took hours, and some would require further work from a plastic surgeon. Maybe he’d even need vascular surgery if he wasn’t to lose a hand. But they managed to establish a blood supply of sorts, and when Darcy finally dressed the hand Jerry’s fingers were encouragingly warm.

Finally they’d done all they could-and he was still alive. Ally could stand back from the table, push away her mask and think that maybe he had a chance of long-term survival.

‘The helicopter’s coming in now,’ Betty told them in a voice that was far from steady. ‘Medical evacuation’s been arranged.’

‘They’ll have to fly low,’ Darcy told her. ‘The air pressure…’

‘Do you want him to stay, then?’ Betty was a fine nurse. She’d reacted with composure through everything. ‘I didn’t even ask-I just had Joe get them to come.’

‘He needs to go,’ Darcy said. He looked down at Jerry for a long minute. ‘The lung needs an expert. The blood supply to the hand is none too stable. And the wound in his groin…he may well need a vascular surgeon to repair the damage if he’s not to lose feeling. Let’s get him out of here now.’ He hesitated. ‘What’s happening to Kevin?’

‘Ally told one of the nurses to give Kevin five milligrams of diazepam IV,’ Betty told him, and he threw Ally a curious look.

‘That’s a lot of diazepam for a massage therapist to prescribe,’ Darcy said with a wry grin.

‘You’re just lucky the massage therapist didn’t take the whole lot herself,’ Ally retorted. ‘Though if there’s any going now, I wouldn’t mind at all.’

Finally, while Darcy assisted in loading Jerry into the ambulance for transfer to the helicopter pad, Ally went outside and spent five minutes just deep breathing. Nothing more. She couldn’t believe what had happened.

She’d helped save Jerry’s life.

Her mother had ordered her to do it.

Elizabeth.

She had to find her. All she wanted was to find herself a bolt hole and try and come to terms with what had happened, but the thought of what her mother must be going through steadied her. A bit.

Reluctantly she cleaned herself up as best she could and went to find her.

But Elizabeth wasn’t at the refuge. Ally had to field a thousand questions before she could get away, but no one knew where Elizabeth had gone.

She wasn’t back at the massage rooms. By the time Ally got there, her stained clothes were starting to disgust her. She showered and changed. That made her feel normal-almost.

She kept on searching.

Where?

Where would she go herself?

Acting on instinct now, she walked down through the harbour. And there in her favourite spot in the whole world-on the bow of the oldest boat in the fleet-was Elizabeth.

Just sitting, hugging her knees as her daughter had done a thousand times before.

‘I thought I might find you here,’ Ally said, and her mother turned and smiled as if she’d been expecting her.

‘You’ve been a while. Is he still alive?’

‘He may well live.’ Ally stepped across onto the boat and sat down beside her. They hugged their individual legs and stared out to sea.

‘And Kevin?’ her mother asked, watching the sea.

‘He’s tranquillised to the eyeballs. The police helicopter will take him to Melbourne. He needs a far better psychiatrist than we can provide here.’

‘Poor Kevin,’ Elizabeth whispered. And then she added a rider. ‘He should have had a daughter.’

There was absolute silence at that. Ally could find nothing to say.

Finally she worked up courage, though. The question had to be asked.

‘Why did you ask me to save him?’

‘I thought I said. He has to go to trial.’

‘But to ask me to be a doctor again…’ She hesitated. ‘I thought you loathed my medicine.’

Elizabeth turned and gazed at her in astonishment. ‘Why would I loathe your medicine?’

‘You tried to suicide. When I passed my specialist exam you tried to kill yourself.’

‘That had nothing to do with your medicine.’

‘Didn’t it?’

There was another long pause. Elizabeth stared some more at the harbour mouth. There were swallows, swooping down in the failing light, doing aerobic feats among the mooring ropes as they searched for the twilight insects. The night was still and warm. Indian summer.

It couldn’t last, Ally thought, and she hugged her knees tighter. Soon it would be winter. Soon…soon what?

Still she waited. She didn’t push her mother. She’d learned a long time ago that Elizabeth kept her own counsel. She said what she wanted to say and nothing else.

‘It was the touch,’ Elizabeth whispered at last, and Ally tried to think about it.

‘The touch?’

‘Did you know,’ Elizabeth said softly, ‘that after my mother died no one touched me? She died when I was six years old. My father never hugged me. He never so much as held my hand. I was fifteen when I met your father. He told me I was beautiful. He hugged me. Of course I fell into his arms.’

‘Oh, Mum.’

‘Then at the commune there was nothing. No affection at all. Touch was sexual and there was nothing else. I lived in a vacuum for years.’

‘Mum-’

‘Then, when you had Jerry arrested, I fell apart,’ she whispered. ‘You were twelve years old and you stood up to him. You stood there that day looking like a little avenging angel, and I’d let you go. You were my daughter and I hadn’t fought for you. I’d given you to my father and I knew you’d never been hugged either. I just folded. I’d failed. Nothing seemed to matter. It was crazy, but for me the next few years didn’t exist. Even when you came to find me-when you took me to live with you-I wasn’t aware.’

‘You seemed dead,’ Ally said gently, and her mother nodded.

‘I think I was. But maybe we both were.’ At Ally’s look of confusion she tried to make herself clear. ‘The night you passed that exam and brought your boyfriend back, you were so pleased, but we all just sat there. We drank champagne and we ate wonderful, expensive food and the guy you were with-I can’t even remember his name-raised your gorgeous crystal champagne flute and said “Congratulations”, but he didn’t touch you. Not once. He hardly smiled. It was all so formal. I went to bed and I thought it didn’t matter whether you were sleeping with him or not-you weren’t touching him. And I thought, that’s what I’d done to you. It was my dreadful legacy to my daughter.’

Ally could bear it no longer. She reached out and hugged. Hard. And Elizabeth hugged back.

‘You see, this is the difference,’ Elizabeth whispered. ‘After the suicide attempt, I lay in hospital and you came in and you brushed my hair. You touched my face. I woke and you were rubbing my hands. Stroking. It was like a light had gone on. You were touching me. And I could touch back.’ Elizabeth was still whispering but there was wonder in her voice now. ‘I could hug you like I’m doing now. All at once I wasn’t dead any more. Do you see what that meant?’

‘I guess I do,’ Ally said, a trifle unsteadily.

‘You’ve changed, too,’ Elizabeth told her. ‘Jerry hurt us but he didn’t destroy us. He took a huge chunk out of our lives but we’re moving on.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You with your nice young man.’

That shook Ally out of her misty emotional haze. ‘He’s not my young man.’

‘The whole town says he’s nutty on you.’

‘The whole town?’

‘I’ve been talking to everyone,’ Elizabeth said, and there was wonder as well as pleasure in her voice. ‘All morning. You massaged and I talked. Welcome home, they all said. Welcome home. Doris Kerr came to find me after you finished massaging her this morning, and she took me down to the little house by the harbour.’ She glanced behind her to the cute little house with the sad window boxes. ‘I can’t wait,’ she said, and there was no disguising the eagerness in her voice. ‘I can’t wait to move in. The way I figure it, I’ll spend a lot of time with Jerry’s people, but that’s where I’ll live.’

‘Where we’ll both live,’ Ally told her, but it was her mother’s turn to look confused.

‘I’d imagine you’ll be living in Darcy’s house.’

Ally drew in her breath. ‘You mean Grandpa’s house. Our house. Mum, how could I possibly do that? It has such memories.’

And it seemed that she was right. But memories meant different things to different people. ‘My mother loved that house.’ Elizabeth smiled and linked her hand with her daughter’s. ‘I made the best toast in that house.’

‘Darcy still does.’

‘Well, there you go, then.’ Her mother smiled some more, her smile one of pure and absolute contentment. ‘And speak of the devil…’ She rose and waved and Ally turned to find Darcy standing on the jetty. He’d changed his clothes as well. He was wearing casual trousers and a big fisherman’s sweater. Jekyll and Hyde were at his heels, the spaniels gazing up at him with adoration. And why not? He looked big and strong and capable.

He looked wonderful. Totally adorable.

He looked like Darcy.

‘I’m guessing you two have things to sort out,’ her mother told her. ‘As do I.’

‘Like what?’ Ally was totally flummoxed.

‘Well, for a start, if you think I’m sharing that mattress on your very uncomfortable floor for a single night more, you have another think coming,’ Elizabeth told her. ‘Doris has promised to help me set my new house up and we think I have time to settle in there this very night.’

‘By yourself?’ To say Ally was hornswoggled was an understatement.

‘I’m borrowing Darcy’s dogs,’ Elizabeth told her, and actually chuckled at Ally’s look of astonishment. ‘I have it all arranged. Darcy thought I needed company and we thought that, seeing you and he…’

‘Darcy thought…’

‘OK.’ Elizabeth held up her hands as if in surrender, but she chuckled again. ‘I know. It’s none of my business. But here are my friends.’ Darcy reached out a hand to steady her as she climbed from the boat to the wharf, and she smiled up at him. Her smile was one of pure joy.

‘Thank you for saving Jerry for me,’ she said. ‘None of us wanted his death on our consciences. So thank you for saving him.’

And then she turned and looked at Ally. Her smile deepened, and it was a look of pure love.

‘And now…’ she whispered, and she gave Darcy a slight push toward the boat. ‘Now you go and save my daughter. She’s just sitting there, waiting to be saved. So what are you waiting for?’