The Doctors’ Baby

Please, let him not have any internal injuries, she prayed over and over again. His pulse was thready but that might be shock.

She hung on in the dark and there was no answer to her pleas.

If Jonas hadn’t been right there above her, she would have gone quietly crazy.

He talked to her. Over and over. He lay on the planking above her head and he talked her through every stage of what was happening. How they’d decided against drills because of the fear of vibrations in the unstable soil. How they were digging by hand-teams of men-every able-bodied man in the district seemed to be here now, taking turns to dig, to heave soil to the surface, to shore the new shaft, to chop timber for shoring…

It seemed everyone in Bay Beach was here. Lori. Shanni. Erin. Wendy. All her friends. They took it in turns to talk to her-Lori had even brought Bernard, for heaven’s sake, and she described him as frantic. Bernard? Frantic?

‘Well, he’s scratching his butt,’ Lori told her. ‘In Bernard-speak, that’s frantic.’

She smiled, but she couldn’t smile for long.

But always there was Jonas, speaking softly over everyone else.

‘Em, here’s Lori to talk to you. With your weird dog. And Nick. Nick’s been digging-you ever seen a magistrate with mud on his face? Em, Ray’s been here, demanding to dig. How many weeks after a bypass? I reckon he’s crazier than you are. I’ve told him he has to wait until you come up because I need another doctor if he’s going into cardiac arrest again…’

And sometimes there was just Jonas.

‘Em, I’m still here. We’re all still here. We won’t leave you.’

And then an even shorter message as the night grew longer and the darkness deepened. Over and over.

‘I won’t leave you.’

And then… ‘Em, I’ll never leave you.’

The discomfort was unbelievable. Em hung in her harness and kept her increasingly desperate vigil. Her hand ran through the little boy’s hair over and over again, the only contact with him that she dared.

It had been almost impossible to put in the saline drip. He’d jerked once and it had scared the life out of her. So now she monitored the drip, gave him pain relief as he needed it and kept in contact with him by touching his curls.

She was starting to need the contact with Sam as much as he needed it from her.

The walls were closing in on her.

As night fell, the light from the top of the shaft dimmed and died. The shaft seemed to close in still further.

‘Jonas,’ she whispered, and he was there. Of course he was there. He’d promised.

‘We’re down fifteen feet,’ he told her. ‘We’re moving faster than I thought possible. We’ll have you out by dawn, Em.’

She took a deep breath. ‘I need some light.’

‘You have your flashlight. Are the batteries dying?’

‘No… I mean up there. So I can see…you.’

Her voice trailed off but he had it in one. Claustrophobia was impossible to predict, and when it happened it was almost impossible to control.

‘Do you need to come up?’ His voice was harsh with anxiety.

‘No!’ No way. She couldn’t leave Sam. Firstly, to drag her up past that narrow passage would risk debris falling down on him, and to come down again would be impossible.

Her claustrophobia was something she had to control all by herself-and she had to control it.

‘I just need to see…the top,’ she said.

‘You will.’ And then Jonas’s voice rang out, curt with command, and there were suddenly floodlights playing over the top of the shaft. She could look up and see his face-his smile. He was shining the torch over his face so that he was no longer in the shadows, and she could see him clearly, even though he was so far away.

‘It won’t be long, Em,’ he told her, his voice willing it to be the truth. ‘We’re boarding up the new shaft as we go, and that’s what’s taking the time. We can’t move too fast or we risk a tragedy, but we’re going as fast as humanly possible.’

Twenty feet…

She could hear them-muffled shouts, swearing, snapping commands from the top.

Twenty-five feet, Jonas told her.

Thirty feet.

And then, finally, she heard faint, muffled and far-away noises through the dirt and rock by her side, and she knew they’d reached her level.

Still they didn’t come near. They were digging a good ten feet away from the side of her shaft. They would go deeper and then across.

‘It’ll take two more hours,’ Jonas said, and his voice was filled with confidence. It demanded confidence in return. ‘Can you hold on that long, Em?’

What could she give him but confidence in return?

‘Of course I can.’

At last, blessedly, there was the sound of scraping, and falling dirt, and a chink of light played up from under Sam’s chin. Someone was under him.

Em had gone past discomfort. Every muscle in her body had reacted at some time and now she was cramping and tired and desperate to go to the bathroom-but Sam was shifting and he mustn’t move yet.

‘No,’ she said sharply, and her hand held his hair, and stroked down to his chin. ‘The men have reached under us but they don’t have the planking in place yet to stop you falling. It’s still not safe for us to move, Sam, love. Can you hold on for a little more?’

He was drifting in and out of consciousness, but Em didn’t know how much of that was due to shock, how much to internal injuries and how much to the pain relief she’d given him. It’d have to be a combination. But what sort of combination?

Hurry…

‘They’re coming,’ she told the little boy. ‘They’re very near. You’ll soon be with your mum.’

As for Em, she knew what she was aching for.

She’d soon be with Jonas.

‘Got him.’

It was a shout of triumph and it came directly from underneath Sam. To Em’s astonished delight, Sam’s body was raised-not much, but a fraction as his weight was taken into someone’s arms from underneath, just enough for the man on the platform under him to chip away at the rocks wedging him fast.

Finally, Sam’s shoulders released their grip on the rock, but instead of plunging a hundred and fifty feet he was lifted gently into the waiting arms of the man who’d released him.

As the shaft was unblocked below her harness, Em was left staring down in incredulity at the laughing, blackened face of an unknown man, jubilant with triumph.

‘Is it OK if we take your patient, Doc?’ he asked. He hugged Sam to him, careful not to hold him any tighter than he needed, and reached up to take the saline bag from Em. He looped the IV line carefully so the whole arrangement was resting on Sam’s middle.

And that was it. ‘Come on, young man. We’ve made this shaft wide enough to get you out.’

With that, Sam was tenderly manoeuvred out through the side shaft, out of Em’s sight, and there was nothing left but for Em to be raised to the surface.

To Jonas.

Jonas suffered the diggers to help haul her to the surface, but that was all they were allowed to do. As she