THE WHITE SAND curved away in a crescent as Ellie Swift descended to Lighthouse Bay Beach and turned towards the bluff. When she stepped onto the beach the luscious crush of cool, fine sand under her toes made her suck in her breath with a grin and the ocean breeze tasted salty against her lips. Ellie set off at a brisk pace towards the edge of the waves to walk the bay to the headland and back before she needed to dress for work.
‘Ellie!’
She spun, startled, away from the creamy waves now washing her feet, and saw a man limping towards her. He waved again. Jeff, from the surf club. Ellie knew Jeff, the local prawn-trawler captain and chief lifesaver. She’d delivered his second son. Jeff had fainted and Ellie tried not to remind him of that every time she saw him.
She waved back but already suspected the call wasn’t social. She turned and sped up to meet him.
‘We’ve got an old guy down on the rocks under the lighthouse, a surfer, says he’s your doctor from the hospital. We think he’s busted his arm, and maybe a leg.’
Ellie turned her head to look towards the headland Jeff had come from.
Jeff waved his hand towards the huddle of people in the distance. ‘He won’t let anybody touch him until you come. The ambulance is on the way but I reckon we might have to chopper him out from here.’
Ellie worked all over the hospital so it wasn’t unusual that she was who people asked for. An old guy and a surfer. That was Dr Southwell. She sighed.
* * *
Ten minutes later Ellie was kneeling beside the good doctor, guarding his wrinkled neck in a brace as she watched the two ambulance women and two burly lifesavers carefully shift him onto the rescue frame. Then it was done. Just a small groan escaped his gritted teeth as he closed his eyes and let the pain from the movement slowly subside.
Ellie glanced at the ocean, lying aqua and innocent, as if to say, it wasn’t my fault, and suspected Dr Southwell would doggedly heal and return to surfing with renewed vigour as soon as he could. The tide was on the way out and the waves weren’t reaching the sloping plateau at the base of the cliffs any more where the lifesavers had secured their casualty. The spot was popular with intrepid surfers to climb on and off their boards and paddle into the warm swell and out to the waves.
‘Thanks for coming, Ellie.’ Dr Southwell was looking much more comfortable and a trifle sheepish. ‘Sorry to leave you in the lurch on the ward.’
She smiled at him. He’d always been sweet. ‘Don’t you worry about us. Look after you. They’ll get you sorted once you’ve landed. Get well soon.’
The older man closed his eyes briefly. Then he winked at Ellie. ‘I’ll be back. As soon as I can.’
Ellie smiled and shook her head. He’d gone surfing every morning before his clinic, the athletic spring to his step contradicting his white hair and weathered face, a tall, thin gentleman who must have been a real catch fifty years ago. They’d splinted his arm against his body, didn’t think the leg was broken, but they were treating it as such and had administered morphine, having cleared it with the helicopter flight nurse on route via mobile phone.
In the distance the thwump-thwump of the helicopter rotor could be heard approaching. Ellie knew how efficient the rescue team was. He’d be on his way very shortly.
Ellie glanced at the sweeping bay on the other side from where they crouched—the white sand that curved like a new moon around the bay, the rushing of the tide through the fish-filled creek back into the sea—and could understand why he’d want to return.
This place had stopped her wandering too. She lifted her chin. Lighthouse Bay held her future and she had plans for the hospital.
She looked down at the man, a gentle man in the true sense of the word, who had fitted so beautifully into the calm pace of the bay. ‘We’ll look forward to you coming back. As soon as you’re well.’ She glanced at the enormous Malibu surfboard the lifesavers had propped up against the cliff face. ‘I’ll get one of the guys to drop your board at my house and it will be there waiting for you.’
Ellie tried very hard not to think about the next few days. Damn. Now they didn’t have an on-call doctor and the labouring women would have to be transferred to the base hospital until another locum arrived. She needed to move quickly on those plans to make her maternity ward a midwifery group practice.
FOUR DAYS LATER, outside Ellie’s office at the maternity ward at Lighthouse Bay Hospital, a frog croaked. It was very close outside her window. She shuddered as she assembled the emergency locum-doctor’s welcome pack. Head down, she concentrated on continuing the task and pretended not to see the tremor in her fingers as she gathered the papers. She was a professional in charge of a hospital, for goodness’ sake. Her ears strained for a repeat of the dreaded noise and hoped like heck she wouldn’t hear it. She strained...but thankfully silence ensued.
‘Concentrate on the task,’ she muttered. She included a local map, which after the first day they wouldn’t need because the town was so small, but it covered everywhere they could eat.
A list of the hours they were required to man the tiny doctor’s clinic—just two in total on the other side of the hospital on each day of the week they were here. Then, in a month, hand over to the other local doctor who had threatened to leave if he didn’t get holidays.
She couldn’t blame him or his wife—they deserved a life! It was getting busier. Dr Rodgers, an elderly bachelor, had done the call-outs before he’d become ill. She hummed loudly to drown out the sound of the little voice that suggested she should have a life too, and of course to drown out the frogs. Ellie concentrated as she printed out the remuneration package.
The idea that any low-risk woman who went into labour would have to be transferred to the large hospital an hour away from her family just because no locum doctor could come was wrong. Especially when she’d had all her antenatal care with Ellie over the last few months. So the locum doctors were a necessary evil. It wasn’t an