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'I just wanted to know.'

Of course. Ask a silly question, get an obvious answer.

She tried again. 'I mean, were you thinking that you'd like me to, or
not
like me to, or something?'

Charlotte's use of the word 'again' was nagging at Lucy's conscience as she spoke.

She'd never actually said that she'd been married to Lucy's father. She'd given as little detail as possible, and had couched it in general terms. They'd only spoken about it together a couple of times, and not for quite a while. There was a big difference between what you told a three-year-old, and what a five-year-old wanted to hear.

But even at three, Lucy had
not
wanted to he to the extent of telling Charlotte that her daddy was dead. Instead, she'd explained how sometimes a mummy and a daddy found out that they couldn't get on well enough together and it was best if they didn't have anything more to do with each other. They decided which person the child would live with. Often the mummy. Sometimes the daddy.

Sometimes the daddy had visits with the child, or had her to stay in the holidays or on weekends. But some mummies and daddies didn't think this was a good idea. They thought it would be confusing and upsetting for the child, and that it was best if the daddy didn't see the child at all.

All of which had seemed to work very nicely, in answer to 'Why haven't I got a daddy?' up on the farm, when Charlotte had been little, with a wonderful male influence in the person of Grandad. Till very recently, Charlotte had had far more curiosity about the natural world around her than about a father she'd never seen, and she'd had little daily contact with other children and their sophisticated ideas and modern family relationships.

Now, suddenly, out of the blue, the difficult questions had started.

'I don't know if I'd like you to or not,' Charlotte said. 'I wouldn't know that, would I, until I'd met the man that you were thinking of having be my new dad? If I liked him, then I'd like a new dad. I've never had a proper one before, and it'd be fun. Ellie's dad is fun. But if I didn't like him, then I'd tell you that, and you'd tell him, 'No, I can't marry you', wouldn't you?'.

Charlotte obviously wasn't saying all this off the top of her head. She must have been thinking about it very seriously.

'Well,' Lucy managed, feeling almost dizzy at the hypothetical heights she and Charlotte were ascending to, out of the blue. Charlotte was due at school in twenty minutes, and her school lunch wasn't made and Lucy was still in her slippers. 'I don't think I'd get as far as having him ask me to marry him if you didn't like him. I think if you and he didn't get along well together after you'd met each other a couple of times, I'd tell him...tell him...'

'That you wouldn't marry him, like I said,' Charlotte supplied helpfully.

'Well, no, because people don't usually talk about getting married until they know each other very, very well.'

'Like for a whole term?'

'Usually longer than that.'

Two. terms?'

'Sometimes two terms.' Now Lucy felt as if she was being pulled very cheerfully farther and farther down a path that was in completely the opposite direction from where she wanted to go, and she knew she had to take firm control of the conversation. 'You've been talking about this with someone, haven't you? Was it a teacher?'

'Are you cross?'

'No, I'm not cross, gorgeous, but I would like to know.'

'It was Ellie. She talks about it with her dad. Her dad says he thinks he might get married again, but not yet. You see, it wasn't that he and Ellie's mum couldn't get on together. She died when Ellie was a baby. Ellie doesn't remember her. Isn't that sad? I couldn't
bear
it if you died, and I think Ellie's dad is still sad about it.'

'I expect he is,' Lucy agreed carefully. 'People stay sad about things like that for a long time.'

'And he asked Ellie if she'd like him to get married again, and she said she didn't know, and he said to think about it, so she did, and she decided the same as me.'

'Right. I see. Was...was that recently?'

'Yesterday. At breakfast.'

'Ellie's dad must be more awake in the mornings than I am, then!'

And he was, she remembered. He was one of those people who bounced out of bed in full possession of his faculties, whereas she needed to be jolted into it—as she just had been—or coaxed into it with the long hot shower she hadn't had time for this morning.

Speaking of time...

'Charlotte, we'll have to finish talking about this another time,' she said desperately, 'or we'll both be late.'

'I've finished talking about it, anyway,' Charlotte assured her comfortably. Evidently, Lucy had managed to allay any underlying doubt or anxiety, although that had to be good luck, not good management, as she knew she hadn't handled the subject particularly well.

Was that because the whole conversation had been built on tacit untruths she'd hidden behind for years?

For now, the question had to stay unanswered, and she convinced Charlotte so thoroughly of the disastrousness of being late that they tumbled out of the house together in good time. The breakfast dishes weren't done, but who cared?

In front of the school, Charlotte jumped out of the car at once and rushed off to greet a friend who also came to before-school care. On the short journey to work, the traffic flow and both sets of lights went Lucy's way. The result was that, instead of being late, as she'd feared, she arrived a good ten minutes early. The bright morning sun was just starting to heat up the air that had chilled overnight, and the sulphur-crested cockatoos were screeching at each other in the tall eucalyptus trees that surrounded the hospital.

Knowing that she'd get roped into work the moment she set foot in the department, Lucy decided to go up to the neurological ward to see how Sam Ackland was getting on. It was four days since he had passed through their department, and yesterday afternoon, at last, they'd had a good report from the ward.

The shunt, as suspected, had stopping working as it should. Malcolm's emergency draining of the fluid which had been pressing on Sam's brain had very probably saved his life, and neurosurgeon Nick Blethyn had found that the shunt was now too short, following Sam's recent spurt of growth to his adult height of 154 centimetres.

Dr Blethyn had replaced it with a shunt of the correct length, and physically Sam had handled the surgery well. Full precautions had been taken against triggering another allergic reaction to latex. Vinyl gloves, silk tape and plastic catheters had been used. Sam had regained consciousness the previous morning, although it wasn't yet known how much, if any, permanent brain damage he'd sustained. So far, the signs were good.

Further tests showed that the fluid was now moving through the new shunt properly, and it would be checked again at intervals, with a series of X-rays over the entire length of the shunt and tubing.

This morning, Sam was well enough to have the upper end of the bed raised, and he could manage a light and mostly liquid diet. He was also well enough to disdain such a diet and was insisting to a nurse when Lucy walked in, 'Take it away! Yuck!'

The blonde nurse, Sally, whom Lucy knew by this time from one or two lunches at the same table in the hospital dining room, was unperturbed by his rudeness.

'You're doing great, Sam,' she said cheerfully. 'I love it when you guys get hungry. Then I know you're really on the mend!'

'So can I have eggs?'

'No!' she taunted him gently. 'Maybe tomorrow. Ask your doctor when he comes round.'

She rolled her eyes at Lucy as she left the room, but she was smiling at the same time. 'We really didn't know what you lot had sent us this one for,' she said, deliberately speaking loudly enough for Sam to hear. 'We weren't convinced he was going to be here long enough to warrant changing the bed linen. But listen to him!'

Sam laughed with some effort, then turned at once to Lucy and wanted to know, 'Who the heck are you?'

'You weren't in a fit state to remember,' she agreed calmly. 'I work in the emergency department, where you got admitted on Monday.'

'Oh, OK.'

'Yeah, we're the ones who had to guess what was wrong with you because you'd decided not to provide us with any little hints, like ID or a medical alert bracelet,' she told him cheerfully.

'Yeah, well, I used to, but I lost it,' Sam growled.

He seemed a little taken aback by her frankness, but she saw no point in letting him hide from the truth. This young man reminded her of some of the lads who passed through the casualty department of Brewarra Base Hospital. Country boys whose prospects seemed to them to be shrinking in a changing world. Angry, because they were scared. Belligerent, because they didn't know how to ask for help. Denying what was wrong, because maybe will-power would be enough to make it go away.

Lucy had decided some time ago that the tender treatment didn't work with these people. They didn't like a spoonful of sugar with their medicine. Instead, if you just kept on giving it to them straight, they eventually responded. It was usually a simple matter of time. They grew up. They worked out what they wanted, and what was possible. You couldn't rush the process.

She asked Sam casually, 'Planning to get it replaced?'

'I'll get to it.'

'Soon, OK? It isn't obvious from the outside that you've got spina bifida, and the association between that and latex allergy is a pretty recent discovery.'

'Like hell it isn't obvious I've got spina bifida!'

'It could be a spinal cord injury, or a degenerative condition,' she pointed out. 'Until we saw the scarring on your back, we weren't sure.'

He shrugged. 'Does it matter?'

'You tell me!' she suggested lightly. 'I expect it would matter to your parents and your friends if you were ever in another situation like Monday, and there were doctors treating you who didn't know your history and so didn't know what to do. It was lucky Dr Lambert happened to have treated you before.'

She didn't say any more, and was a little afraid that she'd said too much already. He might chew on it a little after she'd left, but would he digest it?

Hearing a voice in the doorway, she turned and got caught in the captivating fight of Malcolm's grey-eyed gaze. Her body reacted straight away, heating up as if an infrared lamp had suddenly switched on overhead.

They both jumped into an explanation at once.

'I had a minute, so—'

'I got here a bit early, and—'

Then they laughed. 'Same impulse,' he said. 'You should be flattered, Sam.'

'Flattered?' He blinked.

'We only follow up on the really interesting patients,' Malcolm explained, the dry humour evident in the little tucks at the corner of his mouth. 'The rest we consign to the questionable care of the staff on the higher floors, once we've done the dramatic, life-saving bit down below.'

'So what makes me interesting?' Sam growled. His speech was still slow and a little unsteady, but there were no obvious signs of brain damage. He had been extraordinarily lucky.

'We're taking bets,' Malcolm teased, with a grim edge behind the humour. 'How long before you get brought in again, because you've developed Chiari symptoms and you've ignored the fact that you can't breathe or swallow properly, or because you've got slack with self-cath and with check-ups at your doctor's, and you've got infected urine backing up into your kidneys.'

'Are you saying I shouldn't be living on my own?'

'I'm saying that if you live on your own you've got to look after yourself, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to have said it.'

'You got that right!'

'I happen, however, to be the person who'll have to bring you back from the brink long enough to get you to a surgeon or the ICU, like I had to the other day. It was so close, Sam,
so
close! And if you've left it too late next time, and you go over the brink, I'm the one who'll have to tell your parents, and who'll have your death confronting me over and over again every time I wonder if there was more I could have done. You've done so well with weight loss and fitness since I last saw you. Don't let that count for nothing.'

'You're not really taking bets...'

'No. But I'm tempted, mate. Which side do you think I should put my money on?'

Sam didn't answer at first. He'd closed his eyes and his face looked tight. There was a silence. Then he creaked slowly, 'OK. You made your point. My parents did, too. They yelled last night.'

'After they'd finished squeezing you so tight you practically burst, I expect,' Malcolm suggested.

'Yeah,' he admitted. 'After that.'

'Bye, Sam,' Lucy said. 'Get your parents to chase up a new medical alert bracelet, hey?'

Malcolm added in the same tone, 'Yes, give them something to do. Parents tend to need that, though I know it's a nuisance.'

They were both rewarded with a faint, reluctant smile as Lucy stretched forward to give Sam's shoulder a pat. Then somehow it seemed very natural for them to leave the neurological ward together.

'A bit strong for a moment, there, weren't you?' she commented to Malcolm as soon as they were out of earshot along the corridor, although she'd decided herself that the soft approach would be wrong for this patient. She'd been strong, too, but not nearly as strong as Malcolm.

'Probably,' he answered her.

'Didn't you mean to be?'

'It wasn't rehearsed, if that's what you're asking.'

'Then you lost control.'

'No, I simply made a decision on the spot to air my real opinion, couched in a little rough humour and a little dramatic imagery, which I hoped he might appreciate later on, even if he doesn't now.'

'Risky.'

'I know. Do you think that's wrong?' he challenged. 'Should we only take physical risks with patients, like thumping them so hard to get their heart restarted that we break a rib? Or drilling their skull open, largely on intuition? Can't we take the occasional emotional risk of that kind, too? Sam's trying to live on his own. That's great, but he just won't make it if he doesn't accept what a responsibility it is. What's better? To yell at him and get him angry, but hopefully thinking? Or tell him he's doing a great job when even
he
knows, deep down, that he isn't? Do we want him slinking back to his parents in a couple of months, feeling like the word 'failure' is tattooed on his forehead?'