‘Watch out!’
The teenager was back. He caught her elbow and yanked her to the side of the path just as another horse and cart rattled past at full speed. It almost struck her.
‘Thank you, I’m fine.’
She picked up her fallen sunglasses. She wanted to tell him she could take care of herself but she refrained. He was only being chivalrous and she had been caught off-guard. She hadn’t slept in almost two days.
Frazzled and sweating, she wheeled all her worldly belongings along the thick, dusty, potholed concrete that constituted a street.
Street food vendors were mixing noodles and jabbing straws into coconuts. Girls were swigging beer, pedalling bicycles in bikinis. The salty air was already clinging to her forehead. No one else offered to help her but that was OK. She’d done this before, in worse places. She just hadn’t imagined the island would be this crowded...
Through the jet lag she remembered that she’d come in on a tourist boat, to the tourist side of Gili Indah. The MAC was on the west side. That part of the island was exclusive territory—just for patients and staff. She couldn’t wait to dive into a swimming pool. She just had to wait until tomorrow...
Mila was about to hail the approaching horse and cart when a noise from the shore made her stop in her tracks. A shriek. Someone thrashing in the waves.
Squinting through the throng, her eyes fell on a girl a few metres behind the speedboat. She saw the yellow dive boat she’d seen before, from the water. Something must have happened.
* * *
‘Snake!’ Gabby screamed. ‘It bit me! Ow, it hurts! Sebastian, help!’
‘OK...it’s OK. Let’s get you back to shore.’
Sebastian looped an arm around her waist, turning his head in all directions, looking at the shallows. Where was the snake?
One minute Gabby had been heading back from the boat right next to him, after their second dive, the next she’d been toppling over in her half-undone wetsuit.
He made a grab for her mask and fins before they were swept out of reach, and threw them to another guy in their group.
‘There it is!’ Gabby sounded horrified.
He followed her pointing finger to the thin, yellow and black stripy body of a sea snake. It wriggled past him, heading for the deep beyond the reef.
Sebastian tried to wade faster. Gabby’s face had turned pale. She wasn’t making this up.
‘Where did it bite you?’ He kept his voice controlled, not wanting to panic her. Her head was heavier every time it landed on his shoulder.
‘On my foot...my foot!’ She was sobbing now, barely able to breathe.
‘Ketut!’ he yelled.
Gabby’s legs seemed to crumple underneath her on the sand. He caught her before she could fall and lowered her gently to her back on the sand. She was whimpering now, trying to clutch at his arm. Her face was almost white.
A frenzy of people crowded around. Some were even snapping the scene with their cameras.
‘Get back,’ he ordered gruffly, as the familiar surge of contempt for this kind of privacy invasion consumed him. ‘Ketut!’ he called again.
But someone else was already sprinting over.
‘I’m a doctor—how can I help?’
The lady in red from the boat. The British tourist. It was definitely her...the woman from a few years ago. Speechless, he watched as she dropped to her knees.
‘Snake bite,’ she noted out loud, before he could explain. She put a hand to Gabby’s ankle.
‘Yeow!’ Gabby clamped her hand around his wrist in a death grip.
Easing her fingers away, he helped his new partner adjust the bitten leg and support it on an upturned rock.
‘We need pressure immobilisation,’ she told him—as if he didn’t know.
She started pulling things from her bag. Her sunglasses were pushed high on her head, sweeping back the kind of thick honey-brown hair he’d bet smelled good wet, right after she showered...
He caught himself, racking his brain for her name.
They hadn’t done more than flirt a little back then. If his memory served him right there had been no chemistry between them whatsoever. She’d been a drinker, he hadn’t, and she’d been intent on partying every night until she dropped.
But he never forgot a face. Had she really forgotten his?
‘Do you know what to do?’ she asked him.
Her wide-set eyes were a vivid blue in the sun, over high, freckled cheekbones.
‘There’s anti venom at the clinic,’ he said.
‘At the Medical Arts Centre?’
He lost his voice for a second. Up close, he smelled the coconut waft of her sunscreen.
‘No, the other one—the Blue Ray Medical Clinic on the strip.’
Didn’t she recognise him at all? Was it even her? But, yes, it had to be. Her eyes, her face...they were all so familiar. He just couldn’t remember her name.
‘What will you do to me?’ Gabby cried out.
‘You need to keep as still as you can,’ he said. ‘Stop the venom circulating.’
The Brit...what was her name?...raised an eyebrow. Her blue eyes gave his body a swift appraisal in his wetsuit.
‘You’re a doctor?’
‘You could say that.’ He watched her pull an elastic bandage from her bag. ‘The clinic’s next to the Villa Sunset Hotel. It wasn’t here before.’
‘Before...?’
Her hands worked quickly, wrapping the elastic bandage around Gabby’s leg with deft efficiency, starting from her toes, moving swiftly up to her thigh.
He sprinted to the restaurant right by the harbour. Their fence was made up of pieces of piled-up driftwood—just the right size for a splint.
‘Use this,’ he said, dropping back down next to her.
‘Perfect—thanks.’
She was impressively fast. She looked like the girl he’d met before, but she sure as hell wasn’t acting like her. Her red dress was catching dirt but she didn’t look as if she cared or even noticed as they loaded a sobbing Gabby into the back of a cart. His eyes lingered on the curve of her shoulder as one strap fell down to her arm. She caught his eye and yanked the strap up.
‘Come with me, please,’ Gabby begged him.
The Brit answered instead. ‘I’ll go with you. We need to take the pressure off your leg as much as possible in this cart, though. Can you work with me on that?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘I’ll help you.’
She was good with her patient. Sebastian helped her arrange the leg, waiting for any hint that she might remember him.
‘The driver knows where to go,’ he told her. ‘I’ll follow on my bike. Tell them I sent you.’