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  Leanne Owens

  Copyright © Leanne Owens 2019

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  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations for book reviews.

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  You are welcome to contact the author at: [email protected]

  Thank you!

  Dedicated to my schoolfriends from Geelong - I'm glad we grew up in the 60s and 70s together. All that we are now grew from what we were then. Best friends forever - you are all amazing. XXOOLO

  CHAPTER ONE

  Extract from "The Florentine Letter", dated 1514.

  To appreciate the complexity and nature of the flower, it may help to first look at the part which human eyes find most attractive: the exquisitely shaped and brightly coloured petals supported by the plant. Each petal has its own perfection, a work of art in every fine detail. Look at them first and be amazed by such splendour, then realise that you are observing the last stages of the flower, perhaps the reason for its existence. To fully understand the whole flower, you will need to go back through the stages of its development, right back to the seed from which it grew. Watch the seedling emerge from its hard shell and respond to its environment through all its stages of growth until it produces the petals, which many believe to be the purpose of the plant. Look again on the magnificence of the petals and understand the journey of the flower.

  Extract from “The Florentine Letter”, dated April 12, 1514. Found buried in a cellar in Florence in 2019 in a small carved box along with some miniature artworks. The art is believed to be by Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, and several other high-profile artists of Renaissance Florence.

  Ally and Peter

  Kamekura Private Hospital, Queensland. May, 2019

  The glass doors at the side of the hospital burst open. A man dressed in a dark blue shirt and jeans stepped out, a look of desperation in his grey eyes as he scanned the lawns and gardens which spread out before him.

  ‘Ally! Ally!’ he called, his voice strained, his expression anxious. He looked left and right, then raised his voice to yell, ‘Ally!’

  The only answers came from the birds. The chattering and cries of lorikeets, rosellas, wattlebirds, and honeyeaters rolled over him from the garden. The trees and flowering shrubs seemed filled with birds feeding on the nectar filled flowers. Magpies and kookaburras perched on branches, hoping for patients to come out with scraps of food. The prattle of the birds danced on the air as he waited for Ally to reply, but no reply came.

  A petite nurse, wearing a uniform half a size too small, appeared at his side. She looked up at him with a serious expression. Carefully arranging her body for his benefit, she turned slightly side on and pushed her chest forward. She realised he would not notice her curves while he worried about Ally, but that didn’t stop a girl from trying, she mused. His obsession with this patient made her curious, but she knew better than to ask him about it. He owned the private hospital, favoured by famous and powerful people recovering from addiction, depression, or mental illness. As far as she knew, Ally was simply one more in a long line of wealthy people who could afford to stay at Kamekura.

  Dr Peter Barker handled them all with the calm, supportive manner of a doctor who cared and who would always be the tower of strength they could lean on in their time of need. If they tried to leave before they were ready to handle the outside world, he responded with gentle concern. If they needed to talk of their worries or unburden their sins, he listened without judgement. He remained composed and reassuring, and he genuinely cared about them. The tranquillity that emanated from him spread to his patients, helping their recovery.

  Except for this woman, thought the nurse with a touch of venom. This old, pale woman called Ally unsettled him to the point of terror if he thought any harm had come to her, and she wasn’t even that good looking. She looked years older than Peter, and was scrawny like an old cat. Montana poked her plump breasts out a fraction more and sighed inwardly - she didn’t get what he saw in Ally.

  ‘Carl thinks she’s still inside, Doctor,’ Montana told him, her voice crisp and efficient, her eyes wide and inviting. ‘We’re searching all the rooms and he’s sent a couple of wardsmen up to the roof to look there.’

  Peter shook his head, his eyes sweeping left and right across the gardens, looking for some clue as to Ally’s whereabouts. ‘She’s out here, I know she is. Yesterday, she said that the gardens in autumn were too beautiful...’

  His voice faded as he recalled her soft words and the lost expression on her face as she uttered them, the gardens in autumn are almost too beautiful for goodbyes.

  The tightness in his chest made it difficult to breathe. The implication of her words wrapped around him like a ghostly hand that dug its nails into his heart… almost too beautiful for goodbyes, meaning her goodbyes. Oh, God, dear God, please no. The pain tightened in his chest.

  ‘Do you want me to send some others out here to look for her?’

  He nodded, his voice tightly desperate, ‘She’s out here somewhere. I know she is. Get as many as you can to help look. Please.’

  The last word squeezed painfully from his throat, and he set off at a jog, following the winding path through the flowering garden beds and hedges. He tried to feel her presence on the air. He wanted to sense which path she’d taken into the autumn gardens. There were two acres of grounds surrounding the hospital, all filled with walking paths that invited the patients to explore their surroundings and rediscover the joy of nature. Small pockets of lawn offered seats that asked the ailing to sit awhile and rest. Rustic bridges over tiny streams and rock pools called to visitors to stand and watch the fish. Leafy glades beckoned the tired to come and find joy in nature.

  Where would Ally go? he wondered as he ran along another path, and another. She had always loved walking barefoot on grass, looking into the branches for birds, touching flowers, but not picking them. The gardens hid her, and he did not know how to find her. It scared him.

  He ran through half a dozen garden alcoves looking over one empty, manicured perfection, searching desperately for the woman he had loved since childhood. He called her name, his fears growing with every second without a response from her. He believed that if she heard his voice, she would answer him if she could, but if she’d already succeeded in saying goodbye to autumn...

  Peter stopped by a statue of a rearing horse. It dominated a small oval lawn surrounded by pale sandstone walls. He leaned his head against the cool marble of the horse’s side, closed his eyes, and uttered a prayer for help. Dear God, he pleaded silently, don’t let her be gone from here, don’t empty my world, don’t turn off the light, please don’t. Please help me. Please show me where she is. Guide my footsteps. Please.

  A butterfly landed next to him, and he stared at its gently moving wings. He rubbed a hand across his eyes. Ally insisted that butterflies brought messages from the dead. Oh God, he thought, please don’t let this be a message from Ally. He broke into a run. He had to find her.

  Sighting another butterfly, he went towards it. Then another, and another. With little else to guide him, he followed the trail of butterflies, running with the panicked fear he’d known in childhood, only this time he wasn’t running away from something that terrified him, he ran towards his greatest fear: life without Ally.

  He found her on a circular lawn ten metres across and enclosed by a high hedge of jasmine. A simple and beautiful garden, not cluttered with the joyful colours of bright flowers, just lawn and hedge. She had always loved simplicity. She would want to die in such a place.

  Ally lay on the emerald lawn, h
er white gown spread around her like Ophelia floating on a river of grass, the white and the green stained crimson with blood. So much blood. Her face reposed white and lifeless, with her blue lips slightly parted, her perfect features turned skywards where she meant her soul to fly.

  That moment of discovery seemed an entire universe to Peter. An eternity filled with all the memories he stored of her life, every smile she’d gifted him, her laughter, her love, her troubles. He existed because of the universe that Ally created. She could not die. He could not let her die.

  Falling to his knees beside her, he took her butchered wrists in his hands and pressed them tightly together as he leaned an ear onto her chest, hearing the faint beat of a heart that refused to stop. Holding her wrists hard against his chest with one hand, he used the other to search his pockets for his two way and clicked it on, telling his staff to get to the Jasmine Garden with everything to do an emergency AB negative transfusion, but his voice broke as he tried to tell them that Ally had sliced open her wrists. He could not bear to think of her wanting to kill something as beautiful as herself.

  One of the nurses replied that they were on their way. Throwing the two-way down, he used his spare hand to pull the tie from his neck. He struggled to wrap her wrists to stop any more blood draining onto her dress and into the ground. His face crumpled as he stared at the congealing blood … so much blood.

  He was a doctor, a surgeon turned psychiatrist, his trained hands saved lives, and yet his fingers fumbled amateurishly as he tried to bind her wrists. Faced with Ally dying, he became a child again rather than an esteemed doctor who turned sixty this year. A clumsy child who worshipped the girl who saved him. A boy who feared the dark, who ran from bullies, and who would do anything to please Alice Lamore, his saviour.

  Now, he had to save her, something he’d been failing at these past decades as she hid from him and self-destructed, and he could not help her. This was his chance to turn it all around and bring her back to life, but his hands shook and he cried, just like when he’d been a boy in the school ground and she’d protected him. He blinked tears from his eyes and tried to be the man she’d told him he would be - the man who would be there when she needed him.

  He wrapped her wrists as best he could, and the flow of blood stopped. He wasn’t sure if that was because of his work or if she simply had no more left. Her skin was almost translucent, a pale whitish-blue that spoke of death, and he felt his heart dying with her as he gently touched her cheek, his fingers leaving obscene trails of red. Gently, ever so gently, he gathered her body to his chest, pressing his face into her hair as he prayed for her life and asked God to take him and leave her. Rocking her slowly, he held her and willed his own life force into her body.

  ‘Stay with me Ally,’ he whispered to her as his tears mingled with her blood. ‘Don’t leave me now, not ever. I still need you. We all need you. He’s not real, Ally, we are. He’s not real, he’s not real...’

  Her lips moved ever so slightly, but her breath was too faint to push words out. He hushed her, begging her to stay with him.

  ‘He’s waiting for me...’ she whispered, so softly that if his ears had not been close to her lips, he would have missed the words.

  She opened her eyes and he tilted his head back to look down into their dark violet depths, but she was not looking at him, she was looking beyond him at something that wasn’t there - someone who wasn’t there. Her mouth moved slightly and her face lit with the barest of smiles as she breathed, ‘Peter, he’s here.’

  He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. He had to find the words to make her stay, ‘Ally, he isn’t here. I’m here. I am real. Stay with me, Ally, you have to stay with me.’

  Inside, he screamed silently for the medical team to arrive. He beseeched the God that she didn’t believe in, to save her. Without giving voice to the words, he cursed the man who called her to death. For Ally’s sake, the only sounds she heard from him were a soft stream of words pleading with her to stay, to wait until they all arrived, to take back from them some of the life she had given. Her eyes, her beautiful eyes, closed, and the smile froze on her lips.

  The first nurse to arrive found them together on the lawn, and she stopped, shocked by the tragic intimacy of the scene. She usually saw Dr Barker wearing the professional, friendly mask of a man who could handle all emergencies with equanimity and confidence. It jarred her to see him with a look of raw anguish on his face as he gently rocked the patient in his arms. His eyes revealed a depth of suffering that reached into her chest and wrenched her heart. Miss Lamore appeared dead in his arms, her face peaceful with the pale touch of death and, judging from the amount of blood around her, she had done a good job of ensuring that they could not save her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Doctor,’ the nurse’s voice broke into his tormented thoughts, ‘the AB neg blood and the O has been compromised.’

  ‘Compromised?’ he asked, his expression confused as he struggled to pull himself back from the turmoil of emotions surrounding Ally, and understand the nurse’s words.

  ‘Someone punctured the bags. The blood. We can’t use it.’

  Peter understood. Ally always was thorough when she put a plan into action. She did not want to risk them finding her and bringing her back with a transfusion. She had removed the supply of her blood type and the universal O from the fridge in the medical storage room before coming to this place and carving open her arms. He had no idea how she had managed to get in there, but knew, without doubt, that she was responsible for the action.

  There was something she hadn’t planned for, though, he thought as he gently stroked her hair back from her face. Something he’d never revealed to her because he felt it had been God’s secret gift to him, the ace to hold up his sleeve for this moment. It was the way he could repay her for giving him life. If she had been his reason to live all these years, then he could now be the cause of her to go on living. This was his purpose.

  The rattling approach of medical equipment heralded the arrival of the hospital’s emergency response team, and Peter carefully laid Ally back on the grass as the nurse began looking for a pulse. The team had handled other attempted suicides over the years – people so overcome with depression and sadness that they thought life wasn’t worth living. Even if they had everything money could buy, it did not help with depression. Their desperate sadness proved that money truly did not buy happiness.

  He tried to help them as Ally had helped him. There were many other professionals at Kamekura, as well as counsellors, medication, rest, ECT if required, meditation, and activities designed to stimulate the mind. Depression stalked many, making their hours so dark that they considered suicide an alternative to living. It wasn't that they wanted to die - they wanted to end the pain.

  A few of his patients needed to learn how to care for others as they had only lived for themselves, and, ultimately, found that to be an empty existence. That was not Ally’s problem. Peter knew that. He was living proof of that. He was the first of the Lamore Crew, as they had dubbed themselves. They had seen her live her life for others and put their needs and happiness above her own since childhood. The Lamore Crew consisted of rudderless lives destined to self-destruct before they had even reached adulthood. Ally had ushered them into her safe harbour, given them sails, and placed dreams at their helms. She had provided the winds that had set them sailing into life.

  She had given and given, until her ships sailed away to wondrous lands, leaving her empty and alone. Once, long ago, she had come to them and asked for help, and they had betrayed her. A sob racked his body as he remembered. She turned to them, and they had been unable to accept her as she had accepted them. When she needed them, they failed her.

  They thought they were doing the right thing for her, but they had been disloyal to the essence that was Ally. Their actions drove her away. From the moment she ran from them, they looked for her. She was ignorant of the fact that each one of them would have given up everything to change their mi
stake and give her the help she asked for, not the help they thought she needed. She never again asked for help. She watched them from afar, withdrawing from life and thinking more and more about him. It seemed that, in the end, all she had left in life were her delusions about him.

  He found her a month ago after almost thirty years of searching. She lived an invisible life, withdrawn into her fantasy world about the man who did not exist. Peter had dedicated his life to helping those with mental illness so that when he had the opportunity to help her, he knew what to do.

  He gathered her up from her dingy apartment in Sydney and brought her to his hospital in Queensland, a little over an hour west of Brisbane. He believed he had the tools to help her. Only he failed. He couldn’t reach her. She didn’t want his help. She just wanted to die so that she could be with him.

  Alice Lamore was determined to die without understanding what she meant to Peter, what she meant to all of them. They had betrayed her friendship, and that was the last time she had seen them. They needed to fix everything.

  He called them all yesterday after waiting until she had gained some weight and looked more like the Ally they remembered. He called the whole Crew. His message was short, not much more than, ‘Ally needs us.’ With those words, they dropped everything and were coming from all over the world. The actress, the politician, and the banker - the lives she sculpted from the raw materials of fractured childhoods.

  There had been others raised up by Ally, but they were the four main petals of the flower, as she sometimes called them. For the first time in almost thirty years, the four of them would be together with Ally… if he could keep her alive until they arrived. It was time to play the ace up his sleeve.

  ‘She’s AB negative,’ he told the response team as they set the gurney down and parked the equipment trolley next to Ally, ‘so am I. You are going to hook us up and save her. Do you understand?’