‘You do, mate,’ Bluey said. ‘And it’s as good as gold.’

Bluey smiled after taking back his hand.

‘Looks like they will be sending me to Goulburn,’ Bluey said. ‘They don’t want to keep me here after what’s gone down. Look me up if you’re ever down that way.’

JAX became familiar with the smell of strawberries and sunshine.

‘How is the pain?’ Laura asked as she placed her hand on Jax’s wrist to take his pulse, like she’d done almost every morning. It was only the weekends that Laura wasn’t there. Mark, the weekend nurse, was a fine nurse too. But he was no Laura.

‘Fine,’ Jax lied. He deserved to be in more pain.

‘How’s the leg?’ Laura asked as she pulled back the blanket.

‘Yeah, heaps better,’ Jax said, this time the truth.

‘You know they didn’t think you would ever walk again,’ Laura said as she started unwrapping the bandage. ‘And here you are, almost completely healed. It’s nothing short of a miracle, to be honest.’ She looked back up at him and smiled again. ‘Father Marty agrees.’

Jax looked down as Laura unfurled the bandage, round and round, the pile of cotton thinning with every flick of her wrist. He found it almost mesmeric.

‘Here comes the painful part. Ready?’ she asked as she lifted the edge of the puss- and blood-soaked gauze that sat directly on the wound. The healing skin had grown into the backside of the bandage. Laura was as gentle as she could be, but even she winced as she pulled and the bandage snapped a stitch as it came away. But Jax didn’t so much as flinch.

‘Sorry about the stitch,’ she said.

‘I have way too many of ’em anyway,’ Jax replied calmly. ‘What’s one stitch when you have 142?’

‘Make that 140,’ she said as the bandage tore another stitch from the wound. ‘Sorry.’

She stopped grimacing when the covering was finally removed. ‘It’s healing nicely’.

This time Laura was doing the lying. His right upper thigh was a mess of stitches and skin grafts. Still, Jax was surprised it didn’t look worse, considering it had taken four hours just for the surgeons to remove the shrapnel. From the shark-bite sized hole in his left thigh, they’d pulled out pebbles, wire, glass, tin, and bone fragments that weren’t his. They didn’t find any razor blades in his leg, but they did remove half a safety razor handle, a piece of aluminium and two of Marsh’s teeth from Jax’s face.

After redressing his leg, Laura removed the bandage around his head.