The Ripple Effect Read Free Page A

day,” he’d said with all the determination of an eight year old. “Do you know who has her?”
    “No,” said Stan. “We don’t. We don’t even know her name.”
    But surely his sister would be looking for him, wouldn’t she? She’d want to know her big brother. As adults no-one could tell them not to meet. Now he was not just an adult but an educated one, a doctor. He had time, he had resources and above all, he had determination.
    Shay slowed the Golf and swung into the Birrigai Medical Centre parking area. One visit before he left town. Olive Newsome. The low white weatherboard building had expanded. It could handle a range of surgeries and hospitalisations, with two permanent doctors and three nurses.
    The shade trees overhanging the buildings had grown and a neat garden greeted visitors instead of the previous straggly array of shrubs fighting for survival beside the path. The doctors’ names were displayed on a board by the glass front door, which had become automatic and slid open soundlessly as Shay approached, squinting slightly as the early morning sun broke over the roof of the building. Olive would be here first thing, his mother said.
    Shay didn’t even bother to ask how she knew the roster of the Centre’s nursing staff. She always had and always would make it her business to know everything that went on in Birrigai.
    Memories flooded back at the sight of the reception area, virtually unchanged since his childhood—sitting holding a wrist broken at footie training, a crack on the head which knocked him unconscious for a few seconds when he fell off his bike racing Alan and Jack and they all crashed spectacularly on that gravel corner by the tennis courts. Waiting with Amy and Lisa and Evan while Ben had his appendix out. All their disasters given over into the gentle, skilled hands of Jenny Cross. She couldn’t save his mother, he understood now in the light of his own training and knowledge, but she’d saved his sister. And she’d inspired him to become a doctor.
    Doctor Jenny had passed away as the result of a car accident. He remembered the town plunged into mourning at her untimely death. He was fifteen and he’d shed salty, awkward tears because she was the link with his mother and his sister. Stan told him after her funeral how she cried that nightmarish day at not being able to save them both.
    “She tried really hard,” he said. “She was heartbroken at losing the girl. She was so young and so pretty, your Mum.” Dad always spoke of Emily with a wistful faraway look in his eyes. “She was young enough to be my daughter. About Lisa’s age.”
    Shay sat in the head nurse’s office with a cup of tea and Olive opposite, assessing him. She hadn’t changed a bit in all the twenty something years he’d known her. She’d be in her early sixties now. Thin, bony, short grey hair cut in a bob, wide blue eyes, forthright manner, generous to a fault, bossy as can be. In his experience as a doctor many of the best nurses were. His arrival at seven thirty-five in the morning didn’t appear to surprise her in the least.
    “So you’re a doctor now,” she said.
    “Yes, I qualified a few years ago. I’m working as a GP in a suburban practice in Sydney.” She’d know all that, of course, via the ever flourishing grapevine.
    “Ever think of working in the country? There’s a chronic shortage out here.”
    “I have, as a matter of fact. I feel I owe it to the community somehow…I don’t know…if it hadn’t been for Stan and Jenny who knows what would have become of me—and my sister.” How to steer her back to the topic burning his brain without being rude? She’d been delighted to see him, more so than he expected. Under the familiar, stern face a genuine warmth, and even pride, shone forth. Surprising.
    “You were lucky,” she acknowledged. “The fires were devastating that year. Four people died on the same day. Could easily have been two more. Three, really. We thought