Christmas at Coorah Creek (Choc Lit) (4 page)

‘Candy, old friend. Do you remember me?’ Scott dropped to a crouch and reached his hand through the bars of the gate. The dog lifted her head as if to bark, and then hesitated. She lowered her nose to sniff Scott’s outstretched fingers. Slowly her tail began to wag and she licked his hand.

Scott felt tears prick his eyes. His few good memories of Coorah Creek all seemed to involve his dog. Abandoned as a boisterous half-grown pup by some passing vehicle, she had come into a lonely boy’s life and made it just that little bit less lonely. She had loved him – unconditionally as dogs too. And he had loved her back because there was no-one else to love. Leaving her behind when he left had almost broken him. But taking her had been impossible.

He’d never expected Candy to still be here. To still be alive after all these years. Her eyes were foggy and her muzzle was almost completely grey, but for such an old dog, she looked quite well. She’d obviously been cared for.

And she remembered him.

‘So, are you just here to see the dog, or were you planning to come to the house?’

Scott closed his eyes for a few seconds, as if by doing so he could still avoid this confrontation. The familiar voice was not as strong as it had once been. But the anger was still there. And he felt an answering echo of anger in his own heart. Some things that he had hoped might change obviously had not. Slowly he got to his feet.

The man standing in
front of him had aged too. His hair was grey and his skin dry and wrinkled after years of exposure to the harsh outback sun. Ed Collins was fifty, but he looked like more sixty. His eyes, though, had not changed. Not one bit. They were still hard.

‘Hello, Dad.’ It seemed such a banal thing to say, but he could think of nothing else.

‘So, you’re back then?’

Not for long, Scott thought. In fact, right now he wanted nothing more than to just get in his car and drive away. But he’d come all this way with a purpose. He couldn’t leave without at least trying.

‘It’s been a long time,’ he said.

His father said nothing. The old man was staring at him, his face fixed and unreadable. Scott knew that look. He also knew that his father’s hands would be clenched into fists. He had strong hands, permanently stained with grease and oil. Large strong hands and powerful fists.

This was so much harder than Scott had thought. The memories were tumbling around in his mind. Memories that time had faded to black and white were flaring in brilliant colour, and the pain was as real as it had been all those years ago. He felt seventeen again.

Sitting between them Candy whined. Maybe the old dog remembered this too … father and son facing each other down. The air full of anger.

‘Did you ever find her?’

After more than eight years, this was all his father had to ask him. Not how are you son? Or what have you done with your life? Not even if he was married or had a family. The bitterness was so strong Scott could taste it.

He shook his head as he turned away.

‘No.’ He didn’t care if his father heard the answer or not.

He was walking away again. This time he didn’t have the excuse of youth and anger, but that didn’t matter. The desire to get away from that house and his father was equally as strong. And now, as then, he really didn’t have any place to go, so once again he walked across the road and into the pub.

The first thing he saw was the tree. He could hardly miss it – covered as it was with flashing lights and tinsel and shining balls of red and silver. Christmas. He’d forgotten all about it. Not that Christmas had meant much to him for a very long time. Not since the day his mother walked out of the house behind the garage. He’d been just eleven years old. The next few years had been dark and unhappy – until the day a seventeen year old boy and his father had traded blows – and he’d walked away.

His fists still tingled with the memory.

The holiday meant nothing to him except a chance to earn double time at the various jobs he’d held. He’d never planned to come back at Christmas. He’d never planned to come back … ever. But plans change.

‘G’day. What can I get you?’ The man behind the bar was a few years older than Scott. He was unfamiliar. Perhaps the elderly couple he remembered had sold the pub and moved on.

‘Beer thanks.’

Scott sat down on a bar stool. He was the only patron in the pub – not surprising as it was barely five o’clock. If someone had asked him to describe this place yesterday, he would have said he didn’t really remember. But now that he was here, he remembered it all. The long polished wooden bar. The big windows open to catch any hint of breeze. The fans turning slowly overhead because there never was any breeze. The glasses neatly lined up on shelves behind the bar were also there in his memory.

‘Well, look who we have here. Scott Collins. I wasn’t expecting to ever see you sitting at my bar again.’

He remembered the woman who had just entered the bar. Her face was a little more lined and her hair a lot more grey. But her eyes were alive with interest.

‘Hello Mrs Warren.’

‘It’s been what – seven or eight years?’ Her smile was tentative. ‘Hopefully this visit will be a better one than last time you were here.’

      
‘Well, better for me. I got my beer this time.’

‘This time you’re not seventeen.’

Or fighting mad, he wanted to add. Mrs Warren had refused to serve him that day when he’d stormed in here nursing bruised knuckles and looking for a ride out of town.

‘It’s a bit late, but I’d like to apologise for the window, Mrs Warren.’

‘Apology accepted,’ Mrs Warren moved behind the bar. ‘Just don’t do it again. Your father covered the damage last time. I don’t imagine he’d do it a second time.’

His father had paid for the broken window? That was unexpected.

‘So, you’re back for Christmas then?’

The woman he remembered was always on the lookout for some juicy gossip, and he was afraid he was going to be the subject of that gossip whatever he said or did.

‘I need a room,’ he said, avoiding the question.

‘We have rooms,’ Mrs Warren replied. ‘The pub is pretty much empty now. Not many people come out here at Christmas. More likely to head east to the coast. I’ve never been one for the coast, mind. I don’t like swimming in the sea. And I’m too old now to be a beach bunny.’

Trish Warren had always talked a lot. That certainly hadn’t changed.

‘I can pay up front if you like,’ Scott said. ‘As I have a bad record with you.’

There was no answer. Scott found himself being scrutinised by a pair of very sharp eyes. Mrs Warren gave him a very thorough once over before looking him straight in the face. He held her gaze for a few seconds, then she nodded, as if making up her mind about something.

‘That’s all right,’ she said as the phone at the end of the bar suddenly rang. ‘I guess I can trust you.’

‘Thanks Mrs Warren.’

‘You’d better start calling me Trish.’

While Trish answered the phone, Scott looked down at the beer in his hands. He could still see the small scar on his forearm from the last time he’d entered this bar. Mrs Warren – he would never have called her Trish back then – had refused to serve him a beer because he was underage. He’d just stormed out of his father’s house, laden down with a rucksack with all his possessions and a whole heap of anger. He stormed out of the pub too, but on the way he had put his fist through a window. Only some remarkably good luck had saved him from doing permanent damage to himself.

And his father had paid for the window. Scott wasn’t quite sure what to make of that.

Trish’s voice dragged him out of his reverie. She had hung up the phone and was now talking to the barman he’d seen earlier.

‘… at the hospital by herself. Adam needs someone to go over there.’

‘It that Katie you’re talking about?’ he asked.

‘Yes. The new nurse.’ Trish’s eyes narrowed. ‘I hear she got towed into town by a stranger today after her car broke down. I guess that was you, wasn’t it?’

‘I guess so.’ He would be a stranger to most of the residents. ‘I dropped her at the hospital to wait for the doctor.’

‘That was him on the phone. He’s not going to get back tonight. He wanted someone to tell her and make sure she was all right. Jack can run over …’

‘I’ll do it,’ Scott interrupted her.

Trish turned and raised an eyebrow. He knew why. The kid he’d once been hadn’t been one for offering a helping hand.

‘It’ll be better if I do it. She knows me,’ he explained. ‘Or at least, she’s met me. A familiar face might help. She’s probably feeling a little lost and maybe a little scared.’

He knew only too well how that felt.

To his surprise, Trish nodded.

‘You’re probably right. But just stay there and finish your beer. I’ll give you some food to take over for her. I know Jess – that’s the doctor’s wife – stocked the fridge in the flat, but it’ll be easier if I send something over she can just re-heat. There’ll be enough for two, if she wants you to keep her company.’

‘All right. Thanks.’`

‘Don’t get too carried away.’ Trish smiled. ‘I never got you to pay for that broken window, but you will be paying for dinner for two tonight.’

Chapter Six

It was too quiet. The silence was almost a physical thing. Katie stood on the steps of the hospital and gazed out into the deepening twilight. In the west, the sun was very low on the horizon, a ball of molten gold beneath a sky totally devoid of any clouds. The brilliant blue sky of the afternoon was slowly turning a deep royal blue as the first stars began to appear – like diamonds on soft velvet. It was quite beautiful and unlike any sunset she had ever seen before.

But it was so very very quiet.

She was a girl from London. The city was always full of sound. The rumble of cars, or buses or trains.
At any hour of the night or day, you could hear people.
The voices of late night travellers. Televisions in living rooms or music floating through an open window. There were dogs barking and street lights. In London you were never alone. There were thousands – millions – of people close by, and at times it felt as if it was a battle just to have enough space to breathe.

But out here, she was terrifyingly alone.

From where she stood, she couldn’t see any other houses with lights. In fact, she couldn’t see any other houses at all. She might have been the only person left on the planet. She knew the road was just a short distance away, but there were no cars. There were no voices … just … she stopped and listened. Suddenly the night was not as silent as she’d thought. There were noises. Creaks and groans from the building behind her. A sudden rustling of leaves in the big gum tree by the car park. The screech of some sort of bird. It was all so alien. How she longed for the comforting rumble of an Underground train.

Casting a nervous glance over her shoulder, Katie walked back into the hospital. That was no better. The hospital was as empty and as strange as the rest of Coorah Creek. There were no patients in the rooms. No other staff. No nurses hurrying about their work, or doctors doing their rounds. There was just her.

A few weeks ago, she would have welcomed the peace. All her life, the only thing she had ever wanted was to be a nurse. To help people. But the reality of her job was not what she expected. She loved the work and caring for her patients brought her enormous satisfaction. Helping someone through a difficult time was a source of joy, and her recent move into A&E nursing had been a reward for a lot of very hard work. Day after day, the long hours left her teetering on the edge of exhaustion, but that wasn’t the part that had so nearly destroyed her calling.

As a student nurse, it had not occurred to her that a hospital would be a seething bed of rivalries and politics and unspoken rules. She had withered under restriction, both official and unwritten, that had sometimes prevented her doing what her heart told her she should. She hated the doctors who seemed to consider the nurses as some sort of private harem. And equally she hated the doctors who treated the nurses as if they were nothing more than servants. This wasn’t the medicine she wanted to practice, but in the great overstretched bureaucracy that was the National Health Service, it was the only medicine she seemed likely to ever know.

After one particularly long and fraught shift that lasted almost twenty-four hours, she had looked around and realised her heart was no longer in her job. She was dragging her feet each day as she made her way to work on the Underground. She had to make a change.

This job at a small outback hospital had seemed the answer to a prayer – a chance to get away from the daily grind of a big London hospital. It was a chance to get away from the long hours and the exhaustion and be able to give get more than a few moments to help each person. She wanted to answer a call for assistance as soon as she heard it, and not to have to put one person ahead of another. In a smaller community, she could really make a difference. She hoped that here in this small town, she could recapture her love of her job. She would be working with an air ambulance too. That sounded amazing. Not to mention the excitement and adventure of living in the Australian outback. It hadn’t taken her long to get her paperwork in order and book a flight.

It had all sounded perfect – but looking around her now – Katie was starting to wonder if she’d been terribly wrong to come here.

The only lights were in the hallway and in her flat at the rear of the building. The glass doors swung shut behind her. Should she lock them? It didn’t seem right to lock the door to a hospital, but if she was the only one there, what was to stop anyone just walking in and stealing something? Or … worse. She examined the door. There didn’t seem to be any sort of lock. That settled that, but she would be sure to lock the door to her flat.

She couldn’t do that either. When she walked back into her quarters, she discovered her door had no lock either. Did no-one in this town ever lock their doors?

Feeling bewildered and a little bit anxious, Katie walked over to the television and turned it on. The sound of voices filled the empty space around her. That helped, but it did not completely chase away her restlessness.