Chapter 4 #2
The oppressive quiet of their surroundings and any lack of companionship didn’t seem to bother Guy at all. Even when they stopped for a short rest, he simply dropped the bundle he was carrying beside Jennifer and then walked off to do his thing with his watch and the sun again.
Jennifer’s voice sounded loud in the silence. ‘So how do you navigate by using your watch?’
‘You point the figure twelve towards the sun. True north is approximately halfway between twelve and the hour hand.’
‘Too bad if you’ve got a digital watch then.’
The raised eyebrows were enough to make Jennifer realise she’d missed the point. She sighed. ‘Okay… I guess as long as you have the correct time, you know where the hands should be.’
Guy’s expression and brief nod were the kind of acknowledgement a parent might make to a child who had said something unexpectedly clever. Jennifer found herself increasingly annoyed by his condescension as she once again trailed in Guy’s footsteps. He had some nerve!
They both knew how dependent she currently was on his skills. Wasn’t that enough to allow him to feel superior without taking other opportunities to put her down? He’d already made it clear he didn’t like her, and she wasn’t that thrilled with his personality either, but it shouldn’t matter what they thought of each other on a personal or professional level.
They were in this together, and it would be nice to be recognised as an active participant and not simply a passenger. Surely she deserved some credit for keeping up? It had to be time for another rest. Hours had passed since they’d eaten the biscuits, and shadows in the valley were lengthening. The temperature dropped gradually as the sun lowered but still Guy went steadily on.
When he did stop, it was abruptly enough for Jennifer not to notice until she bumped into him.
‘Sorry!’
His arm had caught hers, which was just enough to stop her toppling from exhaustion. ‘You can stop for a bit,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve found a good place to camp for the night. Look at that!’
Jennifer’s gaze had been on Guy’s back or the track in front of her feet for so long she had to blink to focus. Then her jaw dropped.
‘It’s gorgeous!’ she exclaimed.
The mountain lake ahead was so still it reflected the surrounding peaks absolutely perfectly. Trees grew close to one side where a stream led into the bush line.
‘We’ll head for that stream,’ Guy announced. ‘We’ll build a shelter among the big boulders and I should be able to get a fire going with some fuel from the bush.’
It sounded like heaven to Jennifer, but having stopped, it was an effort to force her feet to move again, and when she did it was impossible not to limp.
Guy said nothing until they had gone another five hundred metres to where huge boulders were overhung by the branches of massive trees.
‘I’ll start collecting some wood, shall I?’ Jennifer offered. ‘For the fire?’
Guy shook his head. ‘Sit down,’ he ordered. ‘I want to look at your feet.’
‘I’m fine,’ Jennifer protested. Then she looked up and caught Guy’s expression and she was suddenly way too tired and sore to try arguing. Or even to care that she was so dependent on this man who thought she was a waste of space. She sat.
Guy pulled at the wet laces on her shoes. ‘These things are like boats on your feet,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how you’ve managed to walk as far as you have today.’
‘How far do you think we’ve come?’
Guy eased a shoe off. ‘Somewhere between ten and fifteen kilometres. A good distance over this kind of terrain anyway. Especially for someone who isn’t used to this kind of thing.’ He pulled a sock off before he glanced up. ‘Well done, Jenna. I’m impressed.’
The glow of pride created almost as much warmth as her feet were generating under the cool touch of Guy’s hands.
‘What a mess!’ he said in disgust.
Jennifer had to agree. Her feet were bright red, alarmingly swollen and had angry raw patches where blisters had long since popped and rubbed away.
‘Soak them in the stream for a minute or two,’ Guy suggested. ‘We’ve got extra dressings and bandages and hopefully we’ll have a fire going soon so we can warm you up if they get too cold.’
Jennifer sat on a rock, easing her burning feet by degrees into what felt like liquid ice as she watched Guy gather materials for a fire. He disappeared into the bush briefly and came back with an armload of twigs and bark. He gathered small pieces of driftwood from the stony edge of the lake and then glanced towards Jennifer.
‘I’ll just go and find some bigger pieces,’ he told her. ‘Won’t be long.’
The sound of him moving through the undergrowth ceased astonishingly quickly. Jennifer heard the loud snap of a branch from further away and then only silence. She twisted to look at the forest, but it was becoming rapidly dark and forbidding. Twisting further, she turned her gaze to the mirror created by the small lake, and she could see the sunset gilding the mountain peaks without raising her eyes any further.
For a moment the thought of Guy somewhere in the forest behind her vanished, and Jennifer realised she was more alone than she had ever been in her life. Strangely, it wasn’t frightening. The beauty around her was awe-inspiring and the sense of being so insignificant ceased to matter because she wasn’t trying to impose herself on this landscape in any way. She was simply a part of it for those few minutes. A part of something breathtakingly magnificent. And what should have been overwhelming enough to spark fear gave Jennifer a sense of utter peace instead.
The moment was lost as she heard Guy return and saw his arms laden with wood.
‘You look exhausted,’ he said.
‘I think I must be.’ Jennifer summoned a smile. ‘I was actually enjoying the view.’
Guy just grunted. He crouched low and started arranging his supplies. With the pocketknife he’d used last night to harvest grass, he shaved fine slivers from a piece of driftwood, covering a handful of dead leaves. He used a cigarette lighter to start the fire.
‘Someone must be on our side,’ he murmured. ‘This would be so much harder if it had been raining.’
Jennifer watched the smoke curling up from the leaves, then the tiny flicker of flames reaching for the kindling Guy added slowly. When he was satisfied the fire was well alight, he filled the billy with water from the stream and balanced it on top of the fire. Then he turned his attention to Jennifer’s feet.
His hands felt deliciously warm against her chilled skin now. Warm… and very gentle.
‘Wiggle your toes,’ he commanded. ‘Now your ankles. Does anything hurt?’
‘They feel better now they’ve had a rest.’
‘The swelling’s gone down quite a lot.’
Guy took the bag of first-aid supplies and smeared antiseptic cream over the raw patches before covering them with gauze dressings. Then he sliced a crepe bandage in half lengthways to make a narrow strip, which he used to bind the dressings in place.
‘This should work like extra socks,’ he commented. ‘Might make the shoes fit a bit better as well. Now.’ He sat back on his heels. ‘Let’s see that arm.’
The cardboard splint had become soggy way back when the snow had gone up her sleeve that morning. It was doing little to support the fracture, but Jennifer’s arm still felt exposed and vulnerable when the splint was removed along with the bandage.
‘Any paraesthesia?’ Guy queried.
‘A bit,’ Jennifer admitted. ‘Just in the tips of my ring and little fingers.’ The tingling had started after that fall.
‘Can you squeeze my hand?’
His fingers felt wonderfully warm and solid. Jennifer closed her hand around them and held on. It was worth the pain.
‘Pretty weak,’ Guy said with a grunt. ‘You’ll have to watch you don’t put any real weight on that arm tomorrow.’ He uncurled her fingers and removed his hand. ‘I’ll find a stick or two we can splint it with. That cardboard’s useless.’
‘What about your ankle?’ Jennifer asked when he returned. ‘And that nasty cut on your leg?’
‘They’ll keep.’ Guy bound her arm firmly. ‘I’m going to collect some leaves for the base of our shelter and then’ – he smiled at Jennifer – ‘I’m going to make the best soup you’ve ever tasted in your life.’
It was more like faintly chicken-flavoured hot water, with only two packets of dehydrated soup dissolved in a whole billy full of boiling water, but Guy was right.
It was more delicious than anything Jennifer could remember. The thin layer of noodles at the bottom was a bonus. They took turns drinking from the billy after it had cooled enough to handle, and used their fingers to scoop up the noodles. They sat on the foil sheet spread over a layer of dead leaves beneath the tarpaulin Guy had tethered between two large boulders, and they basked in the warmth radiating from the roaring fire in front of them.
‘Try and get some sleep,’ Guy advised. ‘We’ve got another hard day ahead of us tomorrow. I’ll keep the fire going as long as I can.’
The padding of two anoraks was enough to make leaning against the smooth rock almost comfortable but, as tired as she was, Jennifer didn’t feel inclined to sleep.
‘Do you still think you know where we are? What direction we need to go in?’
Guy’s grunt was noncommittal. ‘Roughly. Whether we can keep to it is another matter. Depends on how many bluffs we need to get past and how dense the forest is. If the weather closes in, we’ll be in real trouble.’
Jennifer sat quietly for several minutes. She would have considered herself in real trouble already if it wasn’t for Guy. After today she was quite prepared to trust in his leadership, wherever that took them. Okay, so he hadn’t rushed back to help her when she had fallen on the snow slope, but she had coped, hadn’t she?
He hadn’t slackened his pace for the rest of the day either, but she had kept up. Trying to prove to Guy that she was capable of more than he thought had pushed her physical boundaries further than she would have imagined possible, and a part of her was feeling pretty damned proud of herself right now.
Guy’s movement as he added more wood to the fire drew her attention, and Jennifer knew he wouldn’t realise he was being observed from the darkness of the small shelter. She watched as he hunkered down beside the flames and stretched his hands towards the warmth. His physical size alone was enough to give the impression of great strength, but there was something far more solid about this man than mere physical attributes.
The flickering firelight illuminated his features enough for Jennifer to see a repose that was startling. The sadness was only to be expected. How many times that day would Guy’s thoughts have returned to Digger? A lot more than hers had, and that had been frequent enough. How much pain had he had to cope with in the past to have reached the level of acceptance he was unknowingly projecting at the moment? And where did anybody gain the strength of character to actually seem at peace in a situation like this?
He belongs here , Jennifer realised suddenly. He was a part of this landscape… The way she had felt for those fleeting moments when watching the sunset on the lake surface. But she didn’t feel like that now. She felt left out. And lonely.
‘You don’t like talking much, do you?’
Guy flicked a brief glance in her direction and then shrugged. ‘Is that necessarily a fault? Maybe I’m a good listener.’
She could imagine that to be true. Guy was probably as dependable as a GP as he was proving as a leader in a survival situation. How many people trusted him with their secrets and their health? Even their lives? Jennifer had the strong impression that once you earned loyalty from Dr Knight, you would never lose it. She liked that. It was the kind of dependability her father had always demonstrated. The kind of man Digger must have been.
Guy obviously misinterpreted her sigh. ‘Did you have something you wanted to talk about?’ he asked.
‘Not really.’ Jennifer chuckled softly. ‘I must have bad karma, I guess. I’ve never been so cut off from the rest of the world and I’m stuck with someone who hates me.’
‘I don’t hate you. I don’t even know you.’
‘You think you do. You think I’m useless. Posh. One of a “type” you clearly have no time for.’
‘You’re rich and famous. Highly successful and very popular. You must be used to living in luxury. It doesn’t give us a lot in common, does it?’
‘I’m not rich and I’m hardly famous. Outside the world of emergency medicine, I’m a nobody. What’s more, I’ve worked incredibly hard to get where I am and I’m not ashamed of it.’
‘I never suggested you should be.’
‘Your tone suggested it.’
‘All I’m saying is that we’re very different people. We may as well live on different planets as far as our daily lives and backgrounds go.’
‘What makes you so sure?’ Jennifer let her breath out in an exasperated huff. ‘For your information, I grew up in the country. On a dairy farm on the outskirts of a one-horse town in Taranaki. My dad was a sharemilker and my mum died when I was eight. We had nothing. My dad worked to help me get a better life and I got up at 4a.m. every day so I wouldn’t let him down. I helped milk the cows. I worked hard enough at school to get labelled a nerd and had no real friends. I left my dad living alone so I could go to university and med school. He was proud of me.’
‘I’m sure he was.’ Guy added some more sticks to the fire. ‘Did you ever want to go back?’
‘Of course. I went home to visit Dad as often as I could.’ Which hadn’t been nearly often enough in recent years. And now it was too late.
‘I meant to live.’
‘That would have defeated the whole purpose of escaping.’
‘And that’s what makes us so different.’ Guy nodded. ‘I wanted to escape as well when my mother died. I was eighteen. It was Digger who persuaded me to go to med school and helped me fund it. He knew I’d have to go back one day, even if it did take me ten years to realise how much I hated the city.’
‘If you hated it so much, why did it take so long?’
‘Med school kept me pretty focused. And then I had another reason I couldn’t leave.’
‘Which was?’
‘I got married.’
‘Oh.’ Jennifer blinked in surprise. Of course. Why wouldn’t he be married? He probably had his wife and several kids tucked away in a country cottage behind a white picket fence covered in roses. Then she remembered his tone. ‘You make it sound like a problem.’
‘Turned out that way.’ Guy snorted. ‘I made the mistake of picking one of your lot.’
‘My lot?’
‘A townie.’
‘I just told you I wasn’t a townie.’ Jennifer could well remember the insult levelled at city dwellers who decided they wanted to join a rural community. A single word, but it spoke volumes about their ignorance and unacceptability.
‘You are by inclination. You couldn’t wait to escape. You’ve never gone back.’
Jennifer was silent. There was no argument there. The isolation of rural life held no appeal whatsoever. She didn’t want their conversation to end just yet, however. The feeling of companionship was too valuable.
‘ You went back,’ she observed quietly. ‘What about your wife?’
‘She tried it for a while. Said it would kill her if she tried any longer.’ Guy’s tone was bitter. ‘It had already killed her love for me.’
‘But not yours for her?’ It was an incredibly personal question, and Jennifer wouldn’t have been surprised if Guy told her to mind her own business. She was quite ready for a rebuke when he finally spoke, but, again, he surprised her.
‘You can’t keep loving someone if it has to be on their planet and the atmosphere’s incompatible with your own.’ Guy cleared his throat, which came across as a kind of verbal shrug. ‘She’s happy now. Married to a plastic surgeon and living in Sydney. I believe they’ve got a holiday house on some Fijian island for when they want a break from the rat race.’
Guy started banking up the fire as he spoke. ‘It’s all ancient history.’ He moved back to lean on a boulder and closed his eyes. ‘Get some sleep, Jenna. I intend to.’
That was the end of the conversation. Sleep wanted to claim Jennifer’s exhausted body now, but her brain held on for a few more minutes. No wonder Guy didn’t think much of her. It fitted. The impression she’d had earlier that it would take a lot to break this man’s loyalty returned. How much stronger would that loyalty be to a woman he loved? One that he had made a commitment to spend the rest of his life with? The pain of having that union destroyed was quite likely great enough to have prevented him ever risking his heart again. Or even trusting a woman, let alone a townie, on a personal basis. She was also aware of a sneaking sympathy for the woman involved in that shared history.
At this point in time she herself might be sharing this man’s planet, but he was quite right. The atmosphere was incompatible for long-term survival and she’d be stepping off at the first opportunity. Once she reached safety and civilisation, she doubted that anything would make her want to return.
Ever.