Far Horizon by Tony Park Page B

someone may be looking for me.’ She had no way of knowing if Mike Williams had got her message and would be able to meet her here, at the clinic, over the weekend, or if he would be waiting for her to return to the capital.
    The priest jogged back to the mission and returned shortly with their battered old Land Rover, a gift from a parish in England whose hearts were bigger than their bank accounts. Isabella supervised the lifting of the critical patients into the back of the four-wheel drive and wondered silently if there was any chance they would survive the agonising trip.
    â€˜Good luck, and God bless,’ Father Patrick said with a wave. Despite his best efforts, the priestly words never seemed to gel with the image of a young, freckle-faced man in a T-shirt and shorts, Isabella thought. Suddenly she felt very alone.
    Her exhaustion was starting to show, while the tin roof of the clinic pinged and squeaked as it expanded with the warmth of the morning sun. She found it hard to focus her eyes and twice now she had dropped the forceps she was using to pull chips of glass from a teenage boy’s arm.
    For nine hours she had been suturing, bandaging, plastering and comforting. The nuns had workedtirelessly at her side and had even found time to make her a sandwich and coffee sometime in the early hours. Isabella had lost count of the total number of people she had treated after the first thirty. Most were minor injuries, thankfully, and the majority of the patients had been released.
    News of the accident spread, somehow, to the town of Mapai a few kilometres up the road and enterprising minibus taxi drivers had been running a regular shuttle service all morning, picking up those who were able to travel. Isabella was left with just nine patients, those with broken limbs, head wounds or other injuries that needed monitoring over the next day or so. That meant all the clinic’s beds were full.
    A steady stream of general patients, those she had actually come to the mission to treat, had been arriving in ones and twos all morning, and been turned away by the sisters. It broke Isabella’s heart to see them turn and walk back to the main road, especially the very old and the very young, clutched to anxious mothers’ breasts. All had been told the doctor would see them the very next day, at the same time, and word had soon passed back through the town.
    Isabella stepped out of the clinic building into the bright mid-morning sunlight and had to shield her eyes from the glare with her hand. As her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she reached in the pocket of her dark-stained skirt for her cigarettes and lit one with a small gold lighter. She wondered again if Mike had got her message. She desperately needed to talk to him. She wanted him to hold her, right now. Hismuscled arms encircling her always made her feel safe, wanted, loved.
    Looking around her at the mission compound she knew she would make the right decision when next they spoke. His time in Mozambique was drawing to a close and he would soon be returning to Australia. They had avoided discussing their future in any great detail. She didn’t think of their time together as a fling, but she had been as reluctant as he to broach the subject of a more lasting commitment.
    Isabella was pretty sure Mike loved her as much as she loved him. Their careers, though, were poles apart and, very soon, they would be living worlds apart. She had been in Mozambique for two years and, despite the sadness, the death, the poverty and the frustrating bureaucracy, she loved Africa. She knew Mike loved this crazy continent as well, but she doubted he was ready to leave the army. Isabella had a guaranteed tenure at the hospital for as long as she wanted it, but what would he do if he stayed in Africa? If he became a safari guide – something he had trained for – she worried she would see even less of him than she did now.
    I am making the right decision, she