Christmas at Jimmie's Children's Unit: Bachelor of the Baby Ward / Fairytale on the Children's Ward

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!

Chapter Five

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.

‘See,’ she said quietly, ‘just there under the lemon tree, I’ve a little table with cut-up apple and banana and some cherries on it.’

She had the outside light on, knowing its soft yellow glow didn’t disturb the nocturnal animals.

Holding Hamish steady on the bench, she was aware of Angus moving up behind her, aware of the warmth of his body close, and even the scent of him, citrusy yet still male. It was some primordial instinct that had her body responding, she told herself, trying hard to concentrate on Hamish in order to blot out the effect Angus was having on her hormones.

‘Listen,’ she whispered to Hamish, ‘can you hear them scrabbling down the tree?’

Hamish nodded, his little body rigid in her hands, though she could feel excitement thrumming through him. The longing for a child—her child, family—zapped through her like an electric current, shocking her with its intensity. It had to be because she was holding Hamish, because normally the longing was no more than a vaguely felt dull ache.

Well, at least it had shocked her out of focusing on the man behind her.

‘Look, Dad, look!’ Hamish said excitedly, and Kate was happy to yield her place to Angus so he could hold his son and share the excitement as the small furry animals with their pointed noses and big bright brown eyes landed on the fruit table, the older pair looking around, checking their safety, while the two youngsters began to eat.

‘Oh, they’ve got little hands!’ Hamish cried as one of the possums turned towards them, a piece of apple in its paws, sharp white teeth nibbling at it.

‘They’ve got wonderfully expressive faces,’ Angus said, a note of genuine delight in his voice as he turned to smile at Kate.

‘I know,’ she agreed, ‘and I love them to bits, but they are not going to continue living in my ceiling!’

They watched in silence, broken only now and then by Hamish’s exclamations of wonder and delight. Then, the feast finished, the possums leapt into the branches of the lemon tree and, from there, scrambled into a jacaranda, scurrying up the trunk, then out along one of the top branches, from which they leapt into a eucalypt.

‘There’s a hole in the trunk of that tree where they can live,’ Kate told Hamish. ‘They could go and live in the park but they probably won’t because they know they get fresh fruit here every night.’