The Surgeon's Second Chance
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Meredith Webber
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CHAPTER ONE
WITH an umbrella that was proving useless against the deluge from the heavens, Harry picked his way through the mud, slush and landscaping debris in front of the new hospital building, finally skidding to a halt in the sheltered entrance.
The wide glass doors slid efficiently open, and he entered the foyer, stepping carefully on mats spread over the thick plastic protecting the new carpet. Plastic pathways led in various directions, but he’d been told where to go and took the one leading to the left, which fetched up at a door marked CHIEF ADMINISTRATOR’S OFFICE.
The man who bade him enter wasn’t the new chief administrator but the real power behind the hospital—the man who’d built and owned it, Bob Quayle.
‘Harry! Good to see you, my boy!’
Bob, smooth, sleek and silver-haired, rose from behind the desk, and came around it, hand outstretched, to shake Harry’s, then throw a friendly arm around his shoulders.
‘So, you’ve finally returned to the best country in the world, and rumour has it you’ll soon be the most sought-after plastic surgeon in Queensland.’
‘I don’t know where you heard that rumour, Bob.’ Harry deflected the praise with ease. ‘Starting up a practice takes time. I have to meet and gain the confidence of the local GPs for referrals, and to do whatever public hospital work I can get, so my name becomes known in the local profession.’
‘Ah, but once people know you’ve exclusive rights to practise in the newest, most up-to-date private hospital in the whole south-east region, you’ll have referrals flocking in,’ Bob assured him. ‘Summerland’s become more than a holiday destination these days, it’s one of the fastest-growing cities in the state. And with more and more wealthy people retiring to the new secured estates along the ocean front, you’ll have a continual flow of potential customers.’
Harry thought of explaining, again, to Bob that elective cosmetic surgery was only a very small part of his work, but, knowing the older man wouldn’t listen, he swallowed the protest.
‘The thing is,’ Bob continued, ‘as you saw when you came in, the rain has set us back a few weeks.’
He hesitated, then said, ‘It will be a month before anyone can start work in the new specialists’ suites, and probably some weeks after that before the hospital becomes fully operational.’
Harry wasn’t surprised by this news. He’d guessed it was why Bob had asked to see him.
‘That’s OK with me,’ he assured the older man. ‘I’ve only been back in the country a couple of days and I need to find a flat, unpack, then organise furniture, equipment and staff for the rooms. A month’s delay won’t bother me at all.’
‘Well, maybe I can help you with the flat,’ Bob said expansively. ‘I’ve a couple of apartments I keep for visiting friends and relations—all furnished, of course. Why don’t you take one of them for, say, three months? That’d give you time to get to know the place a bit better and decide where you might eventually like to live.’
Harry studied his benefactor. Although he didn’t know Bob Quayle the businessman all that well, instinct told him this man didn’t give much away.
But accepting the offer would save him looking for a place—and finding furniture—and he couldn’t think of any really impossible strings Bob might attach to the offer.
‘Sounds good. I’d be happy to pay rent,’ he said, but Bob waved his offer away.
‘Nonsense! I think of you as family—you know that!’ he said, his voice suddenly gruff.
Does he? Harry wondered, thinking of the man’s real family—his son, Martin, who’d been one of Harry’s two best friends at university. He and Martin and Steph—a tightly bound threesome from the time they’d met in a lecture theatre on the first day of their medical course, when their surnames had linked them into a study group…
‘Besides, you could do me a favour at the same time.’
Bob paused and looked directly at Harry.
‘One good turn deserves another and all that. I don’t mean the flat, that’s nothing, but the bed you negotiated as part of your tenancy at the hospital. I’m still not sure how you talked me into that.’
Harry shifted uneasily. When he’d first asked Bob about the possibility of the free use of a theatre and an occasional free bed in the new hospital, Bob had seen the potential of the good publicity special charity cases could generate, but it had still been a struggle to convince him it was worth agreeing.
Was this payback time?
‘The apartment I have in mind for you is on the twelfth floor of Dolphin Towers,’ Bob continued smoothly—certain he’d got his message across. ‘It’s one of the first buildings I built in Summerland, on the main road in the centre of the tourist strip. There are shops and offices on the first three levels, and a twenty-four-hour medical clinic, catering mainly to tourists, on the ground floor.’
He paused and his keen grey eyes studied Harry for a minute.
‘It’s the clinic where you could do me a favour. It ran into a bit of financial trouble recently, and I ended up buying out the owner. My accountants assure me it should be a viable concern, but though they’re clued-up about hospitals now, they know nothing about how medical practices run. I wondered, as you’ll be without rooms to practise from for a month, if you’d mind taking a look at the clinic for me. Maybe spend a couple of days there so you get a feel for the place and see how it works—staff rosters, patient flow-through, things like that. I’d pay you, of course, and throw in the apartment.’
Ah! Harry thought as the words confirmed his instinct that Bob Quayle gave little away.
But with a furnished flat provided while he settled into the holiday city, he would have time on his hands…
‘I’d like to help out, Bob,’ he said, ‘but it’s years since I’ve done any general practice, and—’
‘But I don’t want you doing medical work,’ Bob broke in before Harry had properly organised his thoughts. ‘Just take a look at how it’s operating. There’s a part-time office manager you can talk to, and a desk in her office you could use. You’re a clever man, you can’t deny that. And you did work shifts in twenty-four-hour clinics when you first graduated and were saving money to go overseas. You should be able to see where things are going wrong. Discreetly, of course. It’s not public knowledge I’m the new owner, and I’d like to keep it that way. Especially with the staff.’
Harry ran the conversation over in his head, and though a niggling feeling of suspicion lingered deep in his subconscious—maybe because Martin had always talked about his father’s devious streak—he could see no harm in granting the older man’s wish.
‘I guess I can take a look at things,’ he said, ‘though I can’t promise you I’ll find anything. Have you any ideas about its future yourself? Do you want to get into running medical practices as a sideline to private hospitals?’
Bob shook his head.
‘To tell you the truth, it’s a complication I don’t need. But it’s hard to lay off staff these days, with all the problems of workplace agreements and contracts. I guess if I can prove it’s not viable, it would give me a reason to close it.’
Harry nodded. That sounded much more like the canny—probably greedy—businessman he guessed Bob to be. The space could probably be used for something that would bring Bob in a lot more money.
They talked a little longer—about the past, Harry’s friendship with Martin, and about Doreen, Bob’s wife, who’d suffered ill health since Martin’s death. Then Bob gave him the phone number of his business manager, who would show Harry the apartment and the clinic, and generally help him get settled in.
As Harry squelched back through the mire at the front of the hospital, he wondered about the people who hadn’t been mentioned in the conversation—about Steph and her daughter, Fanny.
Martin’s daughter Fanny.
Stephanie Prince tucked her daughter into bed, and bent to kiss her on the forehead.
‘Tell me the story of Daddy falling off the horse when you all went out to Uncle Harry’s farm,’ Fanny demanded.
Steph smiled at the little girl, and gently touched her cheek. Was it because Fanny had never known her father that stories of his deeds and exploits were far more interesting to her than fairy-tales?
‘It was a long time ago,’ she began, ‘not long after Daddy, Uncle Harry and I first met.’
She’d told it so often the words came out automatically, while in her head she was remembering those days. She, Harry and Martin—brought together by the accident of surnames—Prince, Pritchard and Quayle. But against all odds, Martin, the spoilt darling of a wealthy family, she herself, the girl from the wrong side of the tracks, and Harry, who claimed he came from so far west there were no tracks, had become friends, and then an inseparable threesome.
In the later years of their medical course, clinical rotations had often separated them for months, and during their intern year they’d seen even less of each other. But the bond had always been there.
Until—
She shook off the shadows of the past, and concentrated on the story.
‘So Daddy’s sitting on this horse, and pretending he knows all about riding, when Uncle Harry flicked his fingers to his dog, and the dog barked right behind the horse’s hooves. The horse reared up and Daddy, who’d got such a fright he’d let go of the reins, slid off the saddle and right back down over the horse’s rump and tail and, bump, landed on his backside on the ground.’
Fanny, who at four thought backsides irrepressibly funny, laughed and laughed, and Steph, who’d been finding life far from funny lately, felt her heart swell with love for this darling daughter who was all that remained to her of that other, carefree, happy existence.
Except her surname, of course, which she’d determinedly kept for professional reasons back when she’d married Martin, and since his death had used solely for personal reasons…
‘Now, off to sleep, Fanny mine,’ she said, smoothing back the blonde curls from the small, flushed face. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
Fanny gave her a final hug, then, clutching the ragged bear who was her favoured bed-mate at the moment, turned over and closed her eyes.
She is secure, Stephanie reassured herself as she left the room. An insecure child wouldn’t go off to sleep so happily.
But worry had been her constant companion lately, so the reassurance didn’t do much to banish her guilt that in another hour she’d leave her sleeping child and go to work.
‘You would hear her if she woke in the night, wouldn’t you?’ she asked, directing her question at the young girl who sat, head bowed over a book, in her living room.
Tracy looked up and grinned at her.
‘Do you know, you ask me that every night?’ she teased. ‘And every night I tell you I would hear her. In fact, a week or so ago, she lost Adeline—you know, that incredibly ugly doll those grandparents gave her—out of bed and yelled for me to come and find her. She went straight back to sleep afterwards.’
Steph nodded, knowing Tracy was telling the truth but finding little comfort.
‘Look,’ Tracy said, with all the confidence of eighteen years, ‘your mother was a single parent and you turned out all right.’
‘But my mother didn’t go out to work. She worked from home. I should have been something I could do from home.’
Tracy sighed and Steph recovered a remnant of her sense of humour.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘I’m obsessing. I’m sorry. Especially as it makes it seem as if I don’t trust you.’
She reached over the back of the couch and gave her cousin a warm hug.
‘You’re the best thing that could possibly have happened to Fanny and me,’ she said. ‘I think it’s just that I’ve worried for so long that now things seem to be working out, I keep waiting for something bad to happen.’
The foreboding hovered on the fringe of her conscious mind as she prepared for work, showering then shaking her super-short hair into place and pulling on jeans and a T-shirt, comfortable garb to wear under a white coat.
A final peep at Fanny, sound asleep, then she was off.
‘See you in the morning,’ she called to Tracy as she opened the back door, looked out at the flooding rain and sighed. Even with an umbrella, she’d be soaked by the time she reached the car. And then the aging vehicle, which hated wet weather, would probably refuse to start.
‘One day!’ she muttered to herself, looking up at the heavens where the planets ruling her life were surely permanently misaligned. ‘One day my luck has to change!’
It did, in so far as the car started the first time, but when she reached the underground car park, the parking spaces designated for clinic staff were all full and she had to drive down into the bowels of the earth to find a vacant spot.
‘You’re late!’ Rebecca, the clinic receptionist on night duty greeted her, and Steph glanced automatically at her watch.
Rebecca laughed.
‘Honestly, Steph, you fall for that every time. But you are five minutes past your usual arrival time—only ten minutes early instead of fifteen.’
‘Someone’s pinched the parking spaces again,’ Stephanie told her. ‘I wish the guy who’s supposed to clamp illegally parked cars would just once clamp the cars in those spaces.’
‘Well, one’s mine,’ Rebecca said, ‘and Peter’s still here so his car is probably there, and Joanne’s, and maybe the new bloke. That’d make four.’
‘The new bloke? What new bloke? Don’t tell me we’re getting a second doctor for midweek night duty? Miracles do happen!’
‘Yeah?’ Rebecca’s tone echoed her disbelief. ‘I don’t know that he’s a doctor, just that Muriel left a message saying some new bloke’s coming to check out the place. Succinct and informative as ever, our Muriel.’
Stephanie chuckled. She’d never met Muriel, the late-shift day receptionist at the clinic, but was aware she and Rebecca had a running battle over messages, charts, information-sharing and probably the number of spoons in the tearoom.
‘But if he was here, you’d have seen him,’ she pointed out.
Rebecca shrugged.
‘Not necessarily. He could be hiding in the administrator’s room. No one’s been in there at night since the clinic changed hands—and Flo’s only been working part time for months.’
Steph nodded. Flo had been the full-time office manager, and had often worked in the evenings so she could keep an eye on things on the night shift, but her hours had been drastically reduced since the new owners had taken over.
‘We could sneak the door open and have a look,’ Steph suggested, but at that moment the front door opened and three young Japanese—two women and a man—came in, brushing rain off their jackets and looking around for somewhere to put their umbrellas.
Rebecca hurried out from behind the desk, showing them the makeshift holder she’d fashioned from a waste-paper basket.
Speaking in fluent, if Aussie-accented Japanese, she welcomed them and led them across to the desk. Were they all ill, or only one?
She pushed a form, printed in Japanese as well as English, across the desk, and the young man began to fill it in, at the same time explaining he was a tour guide and it was one of the women who was ill.
Rebecca introduced Stephanie, who led the sick young woman to a consulting room. As the area attracted predominantly Japanese tourists, all the staff in the clinic spoke at least a smattering of the language. Her own command of it was proficient, although medical terms defeated her.
Tonight, however, the tour guide, who’d followed the patient into the consulting room, could speak English, and it was he who explained that the holiday maker had a sore throat.
Stephanie began her examination by taking the young woman’s pulse, feeling the fast beat and heated skin immediately. Explaining each move in Japanese while she worked, she then took her blood pressure—higher than it should have been for a young woman—and finally examined her throat.
The tonsils and pharynx were an angry red, with whitish blotches on the tonsils.
‘We call it in English a strep throat,’ Stephanie explained. ‘A streptococcal infection. I can give you an injection of penicillin to start fighting it, then follow up with tablets to take. Have you had penicillin before?’
The young woman nodded.
‘Did you have any allergic reaction?’
A definitive shake of her head.
‘Have you any other allergies you know of?’
Again the head shake.
Stephanie rang for Joanne, the nurse on night duty, and, when she came, told her what she needed. As Joanne departed, Stephanie turned her attention back to her patient, concerned that the young woman, who was now shaking with feverish chills, would have to go back out into the inclement weather.
And possibly continue a gruelling ‘holiday’ schedule.
‘Where are you staying?’ she asked.
‘Just down the road at the Whale Beach Resort,’ the guide replied.
It was just down the road—perhaps only five hundred metres—but in the rain…
‘I think you should get a taxi back there,’ she told the man, speaking Japanese so the patient would also understand. ‘And—’ She checked the completed patient form ‘…Reiki should spend at least tomorrow in bed.’
‘But tomorrow we go to see the dolphins!’ It was Reiki who protested, and Stephanie knew it was useless to argue. The young woman had probably been feeling sick for days, but was soldiering on because she’d paid good money for her holiday and wanted to make the most of it.
However, the doctor in Stephanie had to make the effort.
‘You should stay in bed,’ she repeated. ‘If you don’t, you could become even sicker.’
Reiki’s obsidian-dark eyes filled with tears, as if the thought of feeling worse was truly horrifying.
Maybe she’d listen to the advice.
Joanne returned and, after asking the guide to leave the room, Stephanie gave the intra-muscular injection of benzathine penicillin G into Reiki’s buttock.
‘Stay in bed,’ she warned again, as she showed the young woman out.
‘Bet she doesn’t,’ Rebecca said, when the three had departed.
But more patients had drifted in so, although Stephanie agreed, she didn’t have time to chat.
Jet lag struck at midnight, but for a couple of hours Harry refused to give in to it.
‘Damn it all, I took my melatonin, I was flying west to east. This isn’t supposed to happen!’
He was striding back and forth in front of the wide windows of the apartment so kindly loaned to him by Bob Quayle. Outside, the rain still lashed down, blurring the streetlights and hiding from view the ocean he knew was only a block from where he stood.
‘Maybe it doesn’t happen when you’re flying east-west, not west-east!’ he muttered as he made his way to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door, bending over to eye the edibles Pete Jennings, Bob’s business manager, had organised for him.
No, it wasn’t food he needed, but sleep.
He strode back to the living room and slumped into an armchair, wondering if it might be more conducive to sleep than the bed.
But nothing worked, except his brain, which was alive and alert and looking for some action.
Action!
Ha! Maybe that was the answer.
In return for the largesse of the apartment, he’d told Bob he’d take a look at the twenty-four-hour clinic somewhere downstairs in this very building. Twenty-four hours meant open all the time. It should be open and operating right now.
He leapt out of the chair, strode through to the bedroom, pulled on trousers and a long-sleeved shirt that could have done with an iron, but at two in the morning he didn’t care, and headed down to ground level to find the ailing medical centre.
Steph was battling with Tom Butler, a regular patient with a bipolar condition. She’d seen Tom a few times when he was in his depressive phase of the illness—feeling suicidal and needing someone to assure him he was wanted on the earth—but tonight he was the opposite, flying high, not on drugs but on the curious chemical imbalance in his system that caused his mood swings.
‘So I thought I’d come and show you how well I am,’ he said, grabbing Steph and swinging her off the ground, then dancing around the waiting room with her in his arms.
‘Put me down!’ she shrieked, while Rebecca pressed the hidden alarm bell to summon a security man—just in case.
Steph heard the asthmatic wheeze the doors made as they opened, and tried to see if help—in the form of the security man—had arrived, but it wasn’t until Tom completed his arc that she saw the newcomer. Tall and angular, his midnight-dark hair tousled and untidy, his so-familiar face a study in disbelief.
‘Harry?’
Harry heard his name, and stared in total bewilderment at the woman dangling in the arms of a dancing maniac. The beautiful dark red hair was cut so close to her head she might have been shorn, while her face was too thin—all flat planes and angles and huge, huge eyes—but it was still Steph.
‘Steph?’
He heard his voice say her name—heard the incredulous shock in it.
‘Put me down!’ she was saying to the man who held her. ‘Now, Tom!’
The man not only ignored her but whirled her around once again, while, behind Harry, the doors slid open again and a very large security guard entered.
‘Put me down, Tom,’ Steph repeated, more sternly this time.
The dancing man—Tom—did just that, dropping his burden so Steph crashed to the floor. Instinct sent Harry towards her, rushing to her aid, his hand outstretched to help her to her feet.
She looked up at him, and flinched—the movement so apparent he drew back, muscles stiffening with shock, his heart wincing, his mind numb with regret.
Then she scrambled to her feet, thrust her hands on her hips and glared at him.
‘If you’re not here as a patient then get out right now, Harry Pritchard,’ she said, but her voice was shaking and her smoky grey eyes were bright with unshed tears.
Harry felt the wince become a clenching kind of pain. He opened his mouth to explain, but she’d moved away, motioning to the man who’d dropped her, sending him ahead of her into what was probably a consulting room.
‘Are you a patient?’
For the first time he noticed another woman, this one behind a desk in the far corner of the waiting room, her arms folded as she awaited an answer from him.
‘No, I’m to be working here,’ he said, turning towards the security man to include him in the conversation. ‘My name’s Harry Pritchard. The new owner has asked me to take a look at the way things are run. His business manager was supposed to let you know.’
The woman behind the desk—Rebecca Harris if the name plaque was correct—studied him for a moment.
‘We heard a bloke was coming,’ she said, shrugging as if his arrival was a matter of supreme indifference to her. ‘But we hardly expected you to start work in the early hours of the morning.’
‘That was obvious!’ Harry snapped, as a vivid picture of Steph in the man’s arms flashed across his mind. ‘Do those kind of shenanigans go on all the time? Do you all mix business with pleasure?’
Rebecca—if she was Rebecca, introductions had been bypassed—looked at him as if he was mad.
‘Mix business with pleasure?’ she repeated. She shook her head. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘I’m talking about that man dancing around the waiting room with that woman in his arms,’ Harry said, growing angrier—mainly with Steph—by the moment.
‘But she didn’t want to be in his arms,’ Rebecca told him, still frowning dubiously at him. ‘That’s Tom. He’s a patient. Bipolar, and apparently in a manic phase. Dr Prince came out to call him—he was the next patient—and he grabbed her. I called Security—that’s what Ned’s doing here.’
She nodded towards the large man who was still standing like a misplaced monolith just inside the front door.
‘Oh!’ Harry said, then struggled to find something else to add. ‘I’m actually jet-lagged. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.’
They weren’t the best couple of sentences to have found—pertaining as they did to a much earlier bit of the conversation. But as the woman showed no signs of rescuing him from this conversational morass, he plunged valiantly on.
‘That’s why I’m here at this hour.’
‘You can go, Ned,’ she said, looking past him to the security man, who touched his uniform cap and departed. ‘As for you…’ She turned back to Harry. ‘I don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing, but I’d advise you to do it during the daytime in future. From the sound of things, you know Dr Prince, and if she’s not happy having you here when she’s on duty, then neither am I.’
Harry watched her draw herself up to her full five feet six and puff out her chest as birds did when they wanted to make themselves look bigger, and fiercer—and he had to smile.
‘Actually,’ he said, hoping his voice sounded properly apologetic, ‘Dr Prince has no say over when I’m here and when I’m not. But I will try not to antagonise her.’
Lie! Of course he’d antagonise her. He didn’t even have to try. There was so much unfinished business between them it was inevitable.
