Ruby Tuesday

by Hayley Lawrence

  But it was too late for them.

  Daylight is fast fading, but the forest is alight with an aura of its own. An orange halo. There will be no dark tonight.

  I pull everything from the pack and line it up, looking for items of use. Dried noodles, cans of soup, waterproof matches, a silver thermal blanket, the first-aid kit, a compass, a knife, a permanent marker, a torch. No water. This is all I have to work with.

  My fingers are icy and rigid, despite the heat and thickening smoke. My body can’t afford to protest. Erik is sitting up, but shaking hard. He looks ghastly yellow. I remember Mum doing the same after she fell off the horse, her body going into shock.

  I unwrap the thermal blanket and drape it around his shoulders, tucking it around him as the amber evening closes over us.

  I click the torch on and off. By some miracle, it still works.

  ‘They’re not coming tonight, are they?’ I say.

  He doesn’t answer. I don’t need him to.

  Erik is shaking against the ground, his clothes plastered against skin.

  The night gets hotter. The amber glow from the forest, stronger. Smoke so thick, my lungs are heavy.

  We’re waiting for a rescue that’s not coming. Waiting for a fire that is.

  Enough.

  I stand up. Sling the backpack on.

  ‘Where’re you going?’ Erik says.

  ‘To find the junction.’

  ‘You could get lost.’

  I flash the compass at him. ‘I’m heading south. It’s got to be safer near the water.’

  ‘By yourself?’

  ‘If it looks okay, I’ll come back and get you.’

  ‘You’re not going alone. If a rescue chopper gets through they’ll see the Bluebird . . .’

  I look up at the sky. Nothing could get through this. Surely he knows it.

  ‘The Bluebird is dangerous. You said it yourself.’

  ‘We need to stay together.’

  I love the way that sounds, but he’s not strong enough. He’s in pain.

  ‘I’ll be okay. Look.’ He struggles to his feet, blanket gripped tightly around him. He grimaces as he shuffles forward. Rests a heavy hand on my shoulder for support.

  ‘Wait.’ The first-aid kit has pain relief. Only over-the-counter stuff like Panadol, but it might help.

  I dig through the bag until I find it.

  ‘Take this.’

  We have no water. Erik dry swallows the two tablets and gags.

  ‘Champion,’ I say, grinning. I pull on the backpack.

  ‘All right, let’s do this,’ he says.

  I grit my teeth, as we shuffle our way into the forest. I try not to think about the feral dogs as we move beneath the canopy of trees.

  I ignore the throbbing of my forehead, which pounds more ferociously with every step I take. I focus on taking Erik’s weight.

  I use the permanent marker to make slashes along the trees so we can find our way back if we need to. Or someone can find us in the morning. I can feel the heart of the forest beating. The eyes watching. That’s the thing about the bush at night. We’re blind, but we can be seen.

  A pant to my left stops me. Erik halts too. I swing the beam of torchlight in the direction of the noise.

  ‘What?’ he says.

  My neck prickles. I strain to hear through the thudding of my heart.

  Then I see what I feared. Sprawled beneath a tree. I hold out one hand to quiet Erik. It sees us too, raises its head off the ground, eyes green and demonic in the torchlight. The dog cocks its scruffy ears. I freeze.

  ‘Jesus,’ Erik whispers. ‘Look.’

  The dog is covered in writhing mounds and it takes me a moment to figure out what they are. All those furry little bodies clinging to their mother for survival.

  In my mind, the dogs have always been males. Snarling, fearsome beasts with glinting fangs. But it suddenly dawns on me that half of them are female.

  Tears spring to my eyes, and I blink them back. The dogs aren’t monsters. Just animals fighting for survival. They don’t have choices like we do. At worst they’re acting on instinct. At best hunting to feed their young.

  I keep eye contact with the wild dog, and edge us away from her, slowly, so she doesn’t feel threatened. Or see us as injured prey.

  Erik’s hand is on my shoulder as he limps beside me. The pace is painstaking. Bracken, twigs and bark break under our feet. Mechanically, we shuffle forward. Pausing for Erik to catch his breath. Blocking out the fear, the pain.

  Eventually, the forest thins, and through the trees we see a clearing. God, let this be it. We make our way slowly forward, and I swing the torch light around.

  ‘There,’ Erik says.

  I pan back.

  ‘Water.’

  It reflects the torch beam, like the moon lighting the river at night. I could cry with relief. But we need to get to the water’s edge. It’s safer if the fire comes and we’ll be more visible from the air.

  Erik stops, panting. ‘That’s it. Enough,’ he says.

  ‘Just a bit more.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A bit more,’ I insist. ‘Or I’ll drag you.’

  Erik squeezes his eyes shut. Then grimacing, he lets me guide him, limping, the final few hundred painful steps to the edge of the junction where he collapses in a heap.

  It’s smaller than I remembered and the water when I cup my hands to drink is covered by a black film of ash. But it’s there. And it’s cool.

  I help Erik drink and empty out the backpack to cushion his head, but Erik falls quickly to sleep, muscles still twitching. When I shine the torch on his bandaged leg, it isn’t saturated. The pressure must have stemmed his bleeding. It worries me that he’s sleeping and shiny with sweat, but it’s probably the shock. Or loss of blood. Or both.

  Should I wake him? I touch his forehead lightly, and it’s cold. I don’t think it would help.

  I lie down beside him, careful not to hurt him, then slip beneath his thermal blanket and nestle my face into his shoulder.

  I put my hand against his chest, his heart, and find the comforting beat of it beneath my palm.

  My face is cold and wet in the dull white light of morning.

  I shoot upright. Rain!

  I’ve forgotten what it feels like, and I hold out my hands to let it dance on my palms. Erik stirs beside me.

  ‘It’s raining!’ I say.

  I can see to the end of the clearing, little daggers of rain darting diagonally into the earth. The air is cooler, the wind no longer gusting, the smell of damp wood smouldering.

  And something else. A roaring noise.

  Erik is up on one elbow.

  ‘Search and rescue.’ His voice breaks on the word rescue.

  He tries to stand, but collapses in pain.

  I still can’t see the chopper, but I can hear it above us, angry and loud. I run into the middle of the clearing, and there, covered in blood and grime, I wave my arms furiously, yelling even though I know they can’t hear. It occurs to me that somewhere along the way, I might have become a real forest queen – not the royal kind, the warrior kind.

  Tree branches whip up a frenzy, leaves stinging my face and arms as the red-and-yellow chopper breaks through the cloud base. I shield my eyes and step back, and it lowers itself like a giant insect until first one strut, then the other hit the earth. Bark and debris catapult in all directions, biting at my legs. Two uniforms in blue, hunched over, run towards me. One has a backpack and the other is carrying a flat board. I point them towards Erik.

  The female paramedic goes straight for his bandaged leg, the other for his head. They attempt to slide the board beneath him and he flinches. The male paramedic puts a white pen in his mouth and tells him to breath on it. I watch Erik suck back hard, frown as they jam the board beneath him. They put a collar around his neck. A spinal injury never occurred to me. It should have. Should have been the first thing I thought of. But he dragged me to shelter and got through the forest. It
was only afterwards he couldn’t move.

  ‘He’s going to be all right?’ I yell over the chopper.

  Both paramedics turn to me at once. The woman wraps me in a silver blanket to match Erik’s.

  ‘You did good,’ the guy yells, nodding at his leg bandage.

  They strap up his leg, and the woman turns her attention to me. It’s hard to talk above the roar, but she asks me a few questions, and I can see the guy asking Erik things too.

  I tell her what I remember about going down, which isn’t much. It happened so fast. I don’t remember the hit or anything after it, except Erik pulling me to the trees. No, I don’t think I’m injured anywhere else. Nothing broken. She doesn’t take my word for it, giving me a quick physical before unwinding my head bandage.

  ‘That’ll need stitching,’ she says. ‘Let’s get you guys out of here. You can walk?’

  I nod and follow as the two of them carry Erik on a stretcher. They tell me to wait as they load Erik first. Then come back for me, helping me duck beneath the chopper blades, as they get me aboard.

  The chopper is fitted with two stretcher beds and four seats, medical supplies and equipment. The big guns. We are no longer relying on paracetamol and a survival pack. The professionals are in charge, and the relief is so great, I begin to tremble.

  ‘Strap in,’ the woman says to me, gesturing to a seat alongside one of the stretcher beds.

  The need to be near Erik is fierce. To my relief they put me alongside him. The second they’re not looking, I reach for his hand. He grips mine and squeezes it tight.

  The doors to the chopper are shut and the wind stops buffeting us, but the noise of the blades remains deafening.

  ‘You okay?’ I mouth.

  He smiles. It’s all I need to know.

  The chopper carries us over scorched treetops, burned valleys and naked black tree trunks. The sun rises like a golden balloon, hazy and red behind a curtain of smoke. I get a glimpse of the fire front still burning in a line to the north. The rain hasn’t been enough to put it out completely, but before we’re buried in blinding cloud, I see the falls.

  ‘Look!’ I say. Erik tries to lift his head, but is restrained by the collar and the straps. ‘Rawson Falls.’

  The entire clearing above Rawson Falls is charcoaled and smoking, flames still climbing patches of the mountain ranges beyond. In spite of that, in the midst of the ash and the charred landscape, it’s a beautiful sight.

  ‘Rawson Falls,’ I say. ‘It’s running!’

  I smile to myself because it feels like a gift. Erik doesn’t need to see it. Nobody else does. The rain has brought the falls back to life.

  The chopper lowers us down on a large yellow H painted on the roof of Port Macquarie Base Hospital. It’s a good sign – anything life threatening and they’d have flown on to Newcastle.

  A small cluster of people are gathered on the hospital roof. I can’t see their faces but I make out a wheelchair. When the doors open I choke up at the sight of her. Mum, with Susan by her side.

  The second Erik is stretchered out, our hands part.

  The paramedics carry him towards the waiting doctors as Susan rushes to his side, kissing him on the forehead and firing questions at them.

  Mum wheels towards me, and I step down from the chopper, but she’s held back by the waiting paramedics. I clear the chopper exclusion zone as the helicopter engine shuts down, blades whining to a stop.

  Relief is written across her face.

  I bend down and she wraps me up in her strong arms, so tight I almost lose my footing.

  I’m about to apologise, when she says, ‘God, I’ve never been so scared.’

  She holds me at arms’ length and touches my forehead, still roughly bandaged.

  ‘When I got the alert from the RFS, I called, but your phone went to voicemail. I rang Susan to see if you were there. She told me Erik was missing too. They all thought you were with him – flying. I said, “Impossible! Ruby’s never flown in her life.”’

  Mum is babbling and I’m trying to catch the words. ‘You don’t fly . . . But, deep inside, I knew. Erik – of course you’d go flying with him. Then they said some kind of emergency distress signal had been activated.’ Mum is struggling to talk now, almost whispering. ‘I said, “What does that mean?”’

  We’re both silent for a moment, and her hand slides down my arm and clutches at my wrist. She’s shaking. ‘They said they’d sent out search and rescue.’ She grips me tighter. Her body starts heaving in great gusts. ‘Ruby, my Ruby, I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘I haven’t been able to protect you, have I? I’ve tried, and I’ve failed . . .’

  I squeeze her hand with both of mine. ‘Mum, I love that you tried. And you were right. I do still need mothering. I wouldn’t trade you for ten packed-away kind of mothers.’

  But Mum doesn’t appear to hear me and, when she finally speaks, her voice is thick.

  ‘When Susan told me about the search and rescue . . .’ she clears her throat. ‘I pleaded with a God I don’t even believe in, Ruby. When you get to that dark place . . . you need to believe in something. In a higher power, in miracles. I knew if you came home to me, I had to let you take a chance.’

  She looks at me while I struggle to understand.

  ‘Ruby,’ she says. ‘It is your turn now. You were born with the song inside you. It’s your gift. You’re allowed to take the chances that come. Any chances. And I’ll be there to support you. And if it all falls down around you, I’ll be there then too.’

  ‘What about you, Mum? Your chances?’

  Mum takes a deep breath and looks across at the smouldering mountains on the horizon. She smiles thinly. ‘I love you,’ she says. ‘Just in case you didn’t know.’

  ‘I know.’

  And I do. I really do. Because there are few things she deemed worthy of keeping, but I am one of them.

  After a local anaesthetic and a few stitches, the doctor puts me in a bed in Emergency. Alex comes to see me while they’re checking my blood pressure. The rest of her family is by Erik’s side.

  Alex tells me his arm was dislocated in the crash and he needs microsurgery to repair an artery in his leg so I’m not allowed to see him until afterwards – family only, the doctor said.

  When Erik was whisked away, there was an empty ache inside me that hurt more than my head. I want to tell that doctor we’re as close as family, only they won’t see it that way.

  Alex must read my face, because she smiles and says, ‘By the way, a little birdie told me about you and Erik.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I don’t know where to look. I don’t want to lose Alex again. What will I do if I have to make a choice?

  ‘Erik is hopeless at keeping secrets.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Besides, for a big scaredy-cat like you to go up in a plane? That’s gotta be love, right?’

  ‘Love?’ I baulk at the word.

  ‘Oh, does that word scare you? Even though you just crash landed a plane?’

  We both laugh.

  ‘So, are you okay,’ I say, ‘with the Erik thing?’

  I don’t even know what to call it.

  ‘That you love my cousin? Of course I’m okay with it. We all love you, Ruby.’

  Her words fill me up like warm soup. Today, I’m one of the lucky ones.

  On our way.

  Robbie’s name is always flashing up on my phone these days. The contact just says ‘Robbie’, and his photo is that ridiculous car. I’m getting used to seeing his name so it doesn’t usually make me nervous. Only today.

  My old phone was never found. The crash investigation team said it was probably flung out into the forest somewhere, so Robbie bought me a new one. A shiny, latest-model iPhone with a new number and an unblemished screen.

  I told him I don’t take charity, but he said when life offers you a gift, you should be humble enough to accept it. Plus, it’s apparently a ‘work phone’.

  The rain was short-lived, but it was enough to get control of
the fire, and the RFS marched in to finish it off. The rain swept in a cool change, and autumn has finally taken hold in time for the holidays.

  Erik’s been out of hospital over a week, but he can’t fly until he gets the all clear from the doctor. Which means he can’t leave the country, so that suits me just fine.

  His name lights up my phone.

  Good luck today, gorgeous. I miss you. xx

  I smile every time I read his texts, like sunshine is pouring out of me. I see the same in him, the way his face lights up when I walk into Alex’s lounge room. It’s not that I want to spend every waking minute with him, listening to his laughter; it’s that I need to. A physical, aching, powerful need.

  Thanks. I miss you too, more than you know. Don’t get better too fast. xx

  A message from Alex has popped up while I’m typing.

  You’ll kill it, Rube. Pretend we’re in the hangar, just you and me.

  I’ll do my best. I feel sick, but ready.

  I’ve spent the morning vacuuming, tidying the house, making the beds up.

  Our best four mugs are waiting by the kettle, chipped but perfectly functional, teabags sitting inside them.

  I hear the cars before I see them. A shiny black sedan and the deep rumble of the Lamborghini. I have a last look around the house. Give the Steinway one final polish.

  Mum wheels up alongside me. ‘Remember who you are.’ She grips my hand, squeezes it. ‘You’re mine. You’re Nan’s.’ Her voice cracks. ‘She’d be so proud.’

  The soft murmur of voices floats towards me as they approach. I’m very conscious of our shabby little house. I hope Martha de Lange can look beyond the surface of things.

  ‘You’ve got this, Rube,’ Mum whispers, nudging me forward.

  I open the flyscreen to meet them.

  Martha is not at all what I expected. Taller than I imagined. Her headshot online showed a woman in a suit with tightly styled hair. Today, she’s younger looking, in jeans and a tee, black sunglasses and a pair of boots, her dark hair falling loosely across one side of her face.