Meredith Webber - Christmas at Jimmie's Children's Unit - Bachelor of the Baby Ward / Fairytale on the Children's Ward

‘Later,’ she said. ‘Just let me finish here and I’ll come down and explain.’

Angus found himself wanting to order her down right away—wanting to tell her he’d do whatever it was she was doing—but having no notion of possums’ habits, nor of what she could be arranging for them, he knew he’d be making a fool of himself if he said anything at all. So he stood and held the ladder steady, and not, he told himself, so he could watch her as she climbed down it. In fact, he turned resolutely away, determined not to have his resolve weakened by long pale legs in short shorts.

Kate told herself that of course she could climb down a ladder that Angus was holding; after all, hadn’t she been successful in avoiding him these past few days, limiting their encounters to purely work contact? But her legs trembled as she came closer to where he stood and it took an effort of supreme will not to climb back up the ladder and perch on the roof until he grew tired of standing there.

‘What exactly were you doing?’ he asked as she passed him, very close—close enough to see a beard shadow on his cheeks and lines of tiredness around his eyes.

Wasn’t he sleeping well?

She wasn’t exactly enjoying night-times herself, finding it hard to sleep when images of him kept flitting through her mind.

He was so close …

‘There’s a hole,’ she said, reaching the ground and backing away from him, lifting a hand to stop him moving the ladder. ‘That’s how they’re getting in and out. I had to measure it.’

‘So you could make a door for them?’ Hamish asked, dancing around with excitement at the thought of a possum door.

‘Not exactly,’ Kate admitted, ‘although I suppose you could call it a door, but I intend to keep it locked.’

‘You want to lock them in?’ Angus asked. It must be something to do with the air in Australia that so many of the conversations he had with Kate had a feeling of unreality about them. Battered savs came to mind…

‘So I can keep them out,’ she replied, speaking to him but squatting down so her face was level with Hamish’s. ‘There are plenty of other places the possums can live, think of all the trees here and in the park. That’s where possums should live—in holes in the trunks and thick branches of trees. Once I fix my hole, they’ll find somewhere else very easily.’

Hamish nodded his understanding, then asked the obvious question.

‘But how will you get them out?’

Kate smiled at him, though Angus imagined there was sadness in the smile. Was she hurting for her own lack of children? Were they so very important to her?

Maybe one child would do her?

Hamish—

The thought shocked him so much he straightened his spine and clamped down on his wandering mind, thinking he’d go and cut the hedge on this side, departing forthwith, but she was talking again, explaining to Hamish, and Angus couldn’t help but listen.

‘I’ve been feeding them every night since I came back here to live,’ she told Hamish. ‘Are you allowed to stay up until eight o’clock because that’s when it starts to get dark and they come out of the roof and down here to the garden to eat the fruit I put out. There’s a whole possum family—a mother and a father and two little ones that sometimes ride on their mother’s back but who are learning to climb themselves now.’

‘Can I come and see, can I, Dad?’

The excitement in his son’s voice meant Angus had to look at him, really look at him, something he usually avoided as Hamish’s resemblance to Jenna was like a knife blade going through his skin.

And the excitement in Hamish’s voice was mirrored in his little face. Seeing it, Angus could only nod. He even found himself smiling.

‘You’ll come and see them, too?’ Hamish persisted, and Angus lost his smile, knowing for sure he’d have suggested Juanita take the little boy to see the possums. It wasn’t that he didn’t love Hamish dearly, but with the move and settling in to a new routine, the bond between himself and Hamish had seemed to weaken rather than strengthen. Besides which, more out-of-work hours’ proximity to Kate Armstrong was something he needed to avoid.

‘Of course,’ he responded, suddenly aware that it was selfish to refuse—a kind of self-protection because Hamish looked so like Jenna.

Angus didn’t sound overly excited by the idea, Kate decided, but then she wasn’t so chuffed, either. She wanted to see less of Angus McDowell, not more.

‘Eight o’clock, then,’ she said, and headed for the shed where she hoped she’d find a piece of timber the size she wanted. Unfortunately the gate was in that direction so Angus fell in beside her, while Hamish raced excitedly back to his place to tell Juanita about the possums.

‘Just what do you intend doing about the hole?’ Angus asked.

Ah, easy question!

‘I’ll cut a piece of timber to fit over it and nail it in place. From the look of it, someone’s tried to fix it before using some kind of magic glue to stick fibro over the hole but the possums were too cunning for that. They just ate the glue, or got rid of it some other way.’

She realised Angus had stopped walking and turned back to check on him. He was standing stock-still, staring at her with an unreadable expression on his face.

‘What’s up?’ she asked, although she knew what was wrong with her. Just looking at the man raised her heart rate.

‘The way I figure it, you wait until the possums come out, then you go and cover their hole, that right?’

Kate nodded.

‘Up that rickety old ladder, and in the dark because they won’t come out ‘til dusk? You were going to do that yourself, telling no-one who’d go looking for you if you fell, asking no-one for help?’

Kate nodded again, although she was starting to feel peeved. It was none of his damn business what she did, yet he was sounding like a father admonishing a wayward teen.

‘Didn’t it occur to you how dangerous that was?’ he demanded, and she forgot peeved and smiled.

‘Angus,’ she said gently, ‘this is the twenty-first century. Women do these things. They take care of themselves, and if that includes minor repairs to their homes, then that’s part of it. Actually,’ she added after a momentary pause, ‘they’ve been doing it for centuries. I bet it was often the woman who climbed on top of the cave to move dirt and stones over places where the rain got in. The men would have been off chasing bears and wouldn’t have considered a bit of water over the fire an inconvenience.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about sexism or what women can or can’t do. There’s a safety issue,’ he countered, but something in the way he said it didn’t ring true.

Kate, however, went along with him.

‘The ladder might look rickety but it’s perfectly safe,’ she assured him, but he didn’t look any happier than he had when the whole stupid conversation had begun.

They parted, Kate leaving Angus hacking at the hedge while she continued on to the shed, not thinking about oddments of timber at all, but about a little warm place inside her that seemed to think Angus’s concern might have been personal.

Fortunately it turned out to be one of those afternoons when the sensible part of her brain held sway. It seemed to laugh so loudly at the thoughts of the emotional part that she knew she’d got it wrong.

Which was just as well, she told herself, although a heaviness in her chest told her she did not believe that at all!

THEY came, the tall man and the child, as dusk was falling, filling Kate’s backyard with shadows. Urging Hamish to talk softly, she led them into her kitchen and lifted him onto the bench beneath the window.