‘So you know that for sure?’ she said carefully. ‘You seem to be taking care of me, but people are deferring to you. You’re some sort of leader in all this. Can you tell me for sure that there are no plans to declare this island unfit for habitation?’
She waited. She kept driving.
There was no answer from beside her.
She’d expected none.
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ she said grimly. ‘Well, it’s not going to happen. We won’t all leave.’
‘If there are no services…’
‘If there’s no services, most of the townspeople will leave,’ she told him. ‘Of course they will. They have no choice. Even the people like Hubert. I dare say if you removed his pension and took away all support, then maybe he’d be forced to go, too. But not the Kooris.’
‘Do the Koori need our intervention?’
‘No,’ she snapped. ‘Of course they don’t. They don’t want us helping in any way, shape or form. They’ll tell you that over and over. So do you believe them? You’d leave them to fend for themselves.’
‘If that’s what they want.’
‘You don’t know anything about what they want,’ she said dully. ‘You know nothing at all. Just shut up, Grady. Help me if you can, but shut up about the future. I need to focus on putting one foot in front of the other and that’s all I want to do. And as for you and me… Ha!’
He said nothing.
It was like he was stepping on eggshells, he thought. Try as he may, he was about to crush things he had no wish to crush.
And he wasn’t at all sure what it was he was crushing.
He didn’t understand. He knew nothing. That was what she’d accused him of, and she was right. He had no understanding of this small community, of the dynamics that held it together and why its hold on Morag was so strong.
And behind everything… The thought nagged.
There’d been an alternative for Robbie. Robbie had an Uncle Peter and an Aunt Christine and a cousin Lucy, and maybe even still a cousin Hamish. Four years ago Morag had implied there was no one for the boy. That was why he’d let her go.
No. No one let Morag go anywhere, he thought as he watched her heave her gear from the back of the truck and turn to welcome the two old Koori men who’d appeared to greet her as the truck had drawn to a halt. She was her own woman. She did what she wanted.
She hadn’t wanted him.
Of course she had, he told himself. She’d wanted him as much as he’d wanted her, but she’d wanted this community more. And it wasn’t just her wishes that were holding her here. She was tied by the community’s needs.
For Grady, who’d been raised with immense wealth but with no commitment to anyone, this was a concept he found almost impossible to comprehend. Commitment to people. Love, not for just one person but for five hundred…
Hell. He was too confused to think this through any further. All he could do was watch.
The cove where they’d parked the truck was as far from the township as it was possible to be. There were no visible buildings. A band of palms surrounded a broad sweep of beach. Wide strips of rock ribboned the sides of the cove, and even from two hundred yards away he could see white crusting that spoke of generation upon generation of oysters, building on the remains of their past.
The cove itself… It must have been beautiful yesterday, he thought, but the wave had ripped it apart. Some of the smaller palms had been uprooted and a mass of mud, leaf litter and assorted debris coated everything. In the shadows of the palms he could make out the flitting figures of dark-skinned people, fading back behind the trees as if scared of these people appearing from another world.
Morag was ignoring him. She was speaking to the two men, urgently, in a dialect he didn’t recognise. Their language? It must be.
The men were elderly, white-haired, with deep, brown skin that was covered only between their waist and their knees. One of the men had a jagged wound running down the side of his shoulder. He put a hand to it occasionally, as if it hurt.
Morag looked as if she hadn’t noticed.
They spoke for a good five minutes, the old men softly spoken but obviously hugely distressed. As they spoke they paused every so often to glance across at him with a look that said they were deeply distrustful.
Distrustful. Great. He tried very hard to merge into the pile of medical supplies and look harmless.
How did you look harmless?
But finally they broke apart, and Morag led the men across to where Grady stood.
‘Dr Reece, this is Yndilla and Nargal. Yndilla, Nargal, this is Dr Reece.’ She was speaking slowly, giving the men time to understand a language they were clearly not comfortable with. ‘We want to start work now,’ she told the men. ‘Will you bring us those you believe we can help?’ She hesitated. ‘But, please…remember that wounds from coral or oyster shells get infected fast, and remember that we can help stop that infection.’ Then, as their expressions again became uncertain, she reverted again to their language.
Once again, Grady could do nothing but wait.
Finally the two white heads inclined ever so slightly. It seemed permission had been given.
‘What’s happening?’ Grady asked, as the men disappeared into the shadows to talk to their people.
‘They’ve lost seven of their own,’ she told him, gazing after the elders with a worried look. ‘A lot of the kids ran to the beach when the water was sucked out, and they were hit hard. But most of them survived. These people live in the water. They knew enough to let themselves be washed out and then swim in after the first rush. The deaths will have been caused by injury. Two elderly men. One woman, two babies and two little girls.’
He winced. And then he moved to organisational mode. This was, after all, work he was trained for. ‘OK. We need to transport the bodies to town. Can I call someone?’
She shook her head. ‘They’re already buried.’
‘But the coroner-’
‘The coroner accepts the judgment of the tribe elders,’ she told him. ‘So do I. Yndilla and Nargal have agreed to let us see the urgent medical cases, and for that I’m grateful.’
‘Yndilla has a gash that needs stitching.’
‘No.’ Once more she shook her head. ‘He won’t let us stitch it. He says he hit it on a rock, and he’s cleaned it.’
‘It’ll scar.’
She smiled. ‘Yeah. Right. Did you see his chest?’
He had. The old man’s chest was crossed with scars that were obviously part of some tribal ritual, and there was no doubt that the scars were worn with pride. A slash across the old man’s shoulder was hardly likely to have him cringe with self-consciousness.
She was still smiling and the corners of his mouth curved involuntarily in response. He liked it when she smiled, he thought. He…
He nothing.
Hell. Back to work.
‘What else?’
‘There’s a couple of suspected fractures that probably need setting,’ she told him. ‘Kids. We’re permitted to give pain relief while we set them.’
‘But X-rays…’
‘No X-rays unless there’s a real call for it.’
‘Like if we think it’s broken?’
‘No. These people live rough. There are fractures all the time. They won’t tolerate me taking kids into hospital for a greenstick fracture.’
He stared. ‘Hell, Morag…’
