The Doctor's Mistress

At the end of the preschool session, Hayley saw an attractively dressed woman with red-brown curls waiting outside the gate, and realised that it was Dr Piper.

‘How’s the play-dough?’ Wendy Piper said to Byron.

‘Sticky.’

‘Yuck!’ It was cheerful, but there was an edge.

Tori looked up at Dr Piper gravely, holding her father’s hand. She didn’t say hello until prompted by her father. Hayley slipped past them with Max, who said a cheerful, ‘Bye, Tori.’

‘Bye, boy!’ she answered, and added in a stage whisper to Byron, ‘I haven’t learned his name yet. I’ll learn all their names adventurely.’

Oh, ‘eventually’! In Tori’s innocently self-important tone, it had been a cute mistake.

‘I’m going to show you my horses today, Victoria,’ Dr Piper said, with bright yet distant friendliness. ‘After we’ve been to a nice seafood restaurant for lunch. Do you like prawns?’

‘No, they have feelers and eyes.’

Hayley suppressed a giggle. Perhaps she ought not to be enjoying the miscommunications between doctor and four-year-old, but she was!

‘Let’s go home, Max,’ she said, ushering him to her car and getting out her keys.

She wasn’t due at Ambulance Headquarters for her shift until just before six that night. Her service worked a standard ‘four on, four off’ roster—two day shifts, followed by two night shifts, and then four days’ break. It was workable, as a single parent, but only with her own parents’ tireless support.

‘Bye, Hayley,’ Byron called out after her, as she strapped Max into his seat belt. Dr Piper echoed his words with a brief, uncertain smile in Hayley’s direction. Possibly Dr Piper hadn’t recognised her out of context.

‘Thanks for the wisdom about the fruit,’ Byron added. ‘Apparently I still did the banana wrong, but I think Karen’s forgiven me.’

‘What was that about?’ Wendy asked him in a possessive yet lightly amused tone.

But Hayley didn’t hear his answer, because she’d closed the car door.

* * *

The strident ring of the hotline at Ambulance Headquarters broke into what had been a quiet shift. Hayley had been watching television and getting sleepy at almost eleven o’clock. She hadn’t been able to decide whether to head off to an uncertain night’s sleep in one of the stand-down rooms, or to curl up in the reclining chair where she currently sat.

The hotline suggested she wouldn’t have to make the choice.

Bruce got there first, and reported succinctly when he’d put down the phone, ‘A prang on the highway near the state border.’ Their station covered the isolated area that straddled the border between Victoria and their own state of New South Wales. ‘It sounds serious. One car, two injured.’

Hayley fought off sleep and lethargic muscles, pulled up the overalls she’d peeled down to her waist and was ready to go. Bruce took the wheel, and she was happy with that. It was an isolated, winding stretch of highway. Not an easy drive in the dark.

‘What else do we know?’ she asked as they pulled out of the driveway, sirens already whooping.

‘A passer-by phoned it in on his mobile, but he had to drive a fair way beyond the crash scene to get within signal range. He’s going back to the scene now, so he can flag us down. Says the car’s hard to spot from this direction. He didn’t actually witness the crash and isn’t sure how long ago it happened.’

‘So it might have been several minutes before he even got there.’

‘Longer, on that stretch of road, on a weeknight.’

‘Did he check them out?’

‘He has no first-aid or emergency training so he was reluctant to do anything.’

‘Which was the right thinking. How near the border?’

‘Don’t know. Dispatch didn’t have any more details. They’ve got the second crew on standby. We’ve got road rescue and police on the way, too.’

‘So it could be forty kilometres?’

‘Fifty, if ‘‘near the border’’ means on the Victorian side.’

‘I hate that stretch of highway!’

Hayley shivered. She’d driven it many times over the past couple of years, taking Max to visit his father in Melbourne.

Once out of town, on the Princes Highway, heading south, Bruce brought the car’s speed up to the edge of safety. It was a Thursday night, just over a week after Tori Black’s first day at preschool, and the road was deserted. The shadows of the eucalypts reared strangely in the powerful headlights, and the road’s many bends made it anything but a relaxing drive.