Page 3 of Reckless

“Oh.” I felt stupider than I had when he’d told me about the gonorrhoea. “What do I owe you for the pills and stuff?”

“Right.” He straightened. He was thin and tall, made entirely of narrow angles. “Do you have a Medicare card?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know why I’m even asking,” he murmured. “Not a single person I’ve treated since I got here has had one.”

“None of the government’s business how often we get sick,” I said. “Like I said, we do just fine on our own.”

“Hmm.” His gaze drifted to the metal dish where he’d put the cotton swab he’d shoved up my dick. “In that spirit, Mr. Finch, I’d appreciate it if you could notify your sexual partners and have them make appointments too, so that they can be tested and, if necessary, treated.”

My face burned. “There’s no-one on the island.”

He looked up. “Oh. Well, any of your partners on the mainland, then.” He must have read the truth in my expression—that there was no way of notifying anyone if I didn’t know who the hell they were—because he let out a long breath. “Please use condoms in the future, Mr. Finch, at the very least.”

I nodded, staring at my feet so I didn’t have to look him in the eye.

Katrina didn’t say anything about the antibiotics that appeared in the kitchen, sitting right out in the open so that I didn’t forget to take them with meals. She also didn’t say anything about the eighty dollars that disappeared from the egg money so I could pay for the doctor’s visit and the pills. I’ll bet she would have had something to say about the handful of free condoms I got, but I hid them in my sock drawer so I didn’t have to hear her opinions on the subject. I just shut my mouth, put my head down, and got back to work, and so did she.

We were a good team, Katrina and me. Always had been. We’d been running the farm on our own for ten years now, since Mum passed away when I was eighteen and Kat was twenty-two. Our dad had never really been in the picture—and wasn’t that still talked about all over the island. How Bobby Finch had left his wife with two kids and buggered off to the mainland, never to come back. I’d only been little. I couldn’t even really remember what he looked like, because there were no pictures in the house. Mum must have torn them up, Katrina said. Mum had never said why he left, and Katrina didn’t know, but once, when I was about fourteen or fifteen, I’d shifted a cabinet in the milking shed and found the magazine stashed behind it. And once I’d got over the shock of seeing those pictures, it didn’t take long to realise my dad must have gone to the mainland for the same exact reason I did—except he hadn’t come back again.

I’d burned that magazine because I didn’t want Mum to find out about it, but I couldn’t help wondering if she’d known. If she had, she’d never said anything. But then Mum wasn’t a talker, same as me. Katrina must have inherited her muttering from our dad. Given what I’d inherited, I reckoned she got the better deal of it.

Katrina muttered when, two and a half weeks after I finished my antibiotics, I left to go and meet Young Harry Barnes at Mayfair Bay for a ride over to the mainland, and I pretended I didn’t hear her.

That night I was back in the usual club in Newcastle, with enough money in my pocket to get drunk, but not enough to book a place to stay—not that it had ever been a problem before. There was a guy over by the bar who’d looked me up and down more than a few times. I hoped he lived close, so I didn’t have a long walk to Queen’s Wharf tomorrow. I slid my hand into the pocket of my jeans to check I had my condoms. Doctor’s orders. I remembered Dr. Jones’s sad expression that day in his clinic—the one that said he didn’t really want to be here, and I felt a flash of weariness, like I didn’t want to be here either, in this club, about to do this same thing I did every month, because the things I was looking for you couldn’t get on Dauntless Island. Did I even really want those things, or did I just not know how to stop chasing that thrill?

I didn’t know. I’d drunk so fucking much that I didn’t know anything at all, except that my feet were carrying me towards the bar, and towards the guy whose smile was growing as he watched me approach. He was big, and broad, and looked like he’d be rough.

I hoped he didn’t feel like holding back tonight, because that, for some reason I’d never been able to figure out, was exactly what I wanted.

Chapter 2

ALASTAIR

Neal had always joked that we’d end up running a practice together in a small country town full of quirky residents and hidden secrets, and solve mysteries in our spare time as we grew old and fat together. Well, Dauntless Island certainly had a bunch of quirky residents, and probably just as many hidden secrets, but the joke was on Neal: I was as skinny as I’d ever been, and Neal wasn’t going to grow old. I’d been too much of a coward to make the decision to start over, but circumstances had made it for me, and now here I was.

Dauntless Island, with my name on the door and a ten-year government contract. The old mill floor was now my clinic, and what I presumed was once the manager’s office and quarters was now my living space and bedroom. My bathroom and kitchen were crying out to be renovated into this century, but since I had hot water and electricity, I could manage in the meantime. With the clinic at the front of the premises, my rooms at the back overlooked nothing but a bedraggled hedge and, beyond that, the sandstone wall of someone’s cottage. Still, I could take my morning cup of tea and a chair into the front garden and watch the harbour as I slowly acclimated to the day. And what a gorgeous view it was. The harbour wall, the jetty, the boats, and a pristine blue ocean that stretched all the way to the horizon.

Work itself was difficult, if only because I hadn't worked as a GP since my compulsory locum work over ten years ago, and certainly never on my own. I didn’t have many patients yet—hardly any, really—but I also didn’t have a medical receptionist, which meant I was doing everything myself. I probably could have figured out the billing and records software, except the whole process was complicated by the fact that hardly anyone I’d seen so far had a Medicare card or even a government-issued ID. I’d spent way too many hours on the phone with the health department trying to explain that yes, I was seeing patients, and yes, I would like to continue to receive my subsidies for that, but no, I couldn’t provide the Medicare details of my patients because nobody had them. My contact at the health department, a lovely woman called Sandra who was as confused by the whole situation as I was, was currently talking to one of her contacts at Services Australia to see what our options were. Our running theory was that most of the Islanders had to have been issued Medicare numbers at some point—presuming they’d been born in hospitals and had birth certificates—and it would just be a matter of finding them and linking them to my new patient files. I’d had enough dealings with government departments to suggest that the process wouldn’t be that simple at all. It was certainly something I didn’t want to deal with, but in the absence of an admin who could do it for me, it was well and truly my problem.

As was somehow explaining to the health department and the tax office that I’d taken a mud crab as part payment from Young Harry Barnes when he was short on cash. I’d tried to tell him that if he got a Medicare card he’d be charged a lot less, or even nothing at all, but he’d just patted me on the shoulder, said, “You need to learn how we do things here, mainlander!” and handed me the crab.

Things were very different here.

The island moved at a slow pace. After years working in Emergency at the Alfred in Melbourne, I was used to grabbing food and sleep whenever I could, and running on coffee fumes and adrenaline. Mornings spent with a cup of tea, watching the harbour with nothing else to do? That was going to take some time to wrap my head around. Even the quiet moments at the Alfred had come with a caveat: enjoy it while it lasts, because any second now it will be chaos. There wasn’t much chaos on Dauntless Island.

What little there was arrived on my doorstep one Wednesday morning, attempting to comb his wild hair down with his fingers.

“Hi,” he said. “Are you the doctor?”

“Alastair Jones.”

He stuck his hand out. “Button John Barnes. I’m here for the job.”

“The admin job?”

“What?” He blinked at me. “I mean doing your yard work. My cousin, Natty, he does the copper’s yard, and I thought, busy bloke like you, you won’t want to be cutting your own hedge, will you? So I can do that for you.”