by Amanda Doyle
‘Worthy? A tiny little shop at the back of beyond?’ Sharon scoffed.
‘The shop is incidental, as Millie meant it to be. It’s the children that are the worthy cause—giving them a good start, continued security and happiness and fun, like Millie meant them to have. And Koolonga isn’t at the back of beyond, Sharon, and full of country hicks. It’s right on the railway line.’
‘Well, what about us?’ There was a wailing chorus of protest all about her as her family finally realised that gentle Emmie was indeed in earnest, that she meant what she said, however crazy it was.
Emmie had had to maintain that firmness right to the end, right to the very moment when she climbed into the train at Central and waved them all a relieved and exhausted goodbye.
It had been difficult not to allow herself to be overridden by their alternate scoldings and entreaties, but at twenty-six one had to have a mind of one’s own. At twenty-six, and with ‘no prospects’, one had to begin to stand on one’s own feet, hadn’t one? It was all very well, the way they had all carried on, but it was only a matter of time before Mark would bring a bride to the family home, and then he wouldn’t want two women in the house at all. And Robert was already engaged and had hopes of a flat that went with the new consultancy. As soon as he got that, his own wedding arrangements would be going ahead. And Melissa’s children would one day be too big to need a maiden aunt to keep an eye on them, just as the Montfort family themselves had outgrown the need for Miss Millicent. And Sharon had so many boy-friends that, by all the rules, she was one day bound to stop juggling them all around in that wasteful manner—(Emmie could have done with just one of them, quite splendidly!)—and settle for a permanent partner in life.
And what would become of her then? Emmie asked herself realistically, as the train rattled through Sydney’s outer suburbs and on to Parramatta. What would become of her then?
It was still rattling on, that train, many many hours after Emmie had asked herself that question. It had been an unexpectedly tiresome and lengthy journey, and it was not yet over. The day had been a gruelling one—of heat and tiny flies that gathered around when she opened her sandwich lunch, and crawled on her bare arms, and tickled her neck; of crying babies, and fretful children who fell over her feet every time they went in and out of the compartment with that restless energy that the very young seem to reserve for long train journeys.
Now it was rattling away again, but this time it was on a branch line. The light was rapidly fading, and she was alone in the carriage.
Emmie had not realised that, about the branch line. When she had glanced over the map to find Koolonga, it had been enough simply to see that the dot which marked the town was firmly placed on the black, broken line which meant a railway. The map had not said that the railway line was a branch one, although Emmie supposed that if she had taken more trouble when looking, she would have noticed the fact for herself. Neither had the map indicated that only two trains a week ran on this particular branch line, or that they were somewhat antiquated motor-trains. Emmie had had to find that out at Berroola Junction away back there, and now here she was, seemingly the only passenger in this second-last carriage, although there were probably a few other people scattered about through the train’s other two coaches.
If there were other passengers, she had lost interest in the fact, she was bound to admit. Her curiosity had become dulled, replaced now by a creeping lethargy which had to be fought off with determination in case it engulfed her altogether. There had been a lot to attend to prior to her departure, and the family, as usual, had prevailed upon her to do a lot of last-minute errands and chores. Now she was too hot, too sticky, too hungry, too weary, to worry very much about what the other passengers on this train were feeling, or even to wonder if there were, in fact, any other passengers at all.
Perhaps I’ve been crazy, she thought, and then pushed the thought away half-fearfully as a couple of kangaroos straightened high, cars alert, and stood quite still with their paws poised over their furry tummies as the train lurched past over the flat brown plain. Maybe Mark had a point. She buried her niggling uncertainty, watched instead as a giant, ungainly bird that could only be an emu loped off helter-skelter into a sea of yellow-blossomed scrub with an oddly drunken, lopsided gait. Could Robert’s caution have actually been warranted? She dismissed the mere possibility, followed with her eyes the screeching flock of pink and grey parrots that sheered low over the stunted vegetation and disappeared in a shimmering wave into the rosy dusk of the setting sun.
Sandy watercourses threaded an arid path over the plains; lonely, broad plains that brought that tiny flutter of apprehension to Emmie’s throat again. She wished that she had taken a larger flask. Her tea had been finished long ago, and her mouth felt as dusty and dry as those channel-beds out there where the turpentine bushes and drab myalls sucked away the moisture from below the soil surface in their fight for continuing survival. In the gold-fired glow of sunset a windmill loomed dark on the horizon. Beside it was an earth-walled tank, and a galvanised iron hut. A dwelling of some sort, perhaps. And a dwelling meant human beings, didn’t it?
Emmie had been getting a little bit worried about the dearth of human life as the train sped on its noisy way over the branch-line sleepers. Apart from a drover’s outfit, with a sulky and some dogs and a skinny youth on horseback tailing some spares at the rear of a vast mob of questing sheep, there only seemed to be animals and birds in evidence just now. The dignified grey kangaroos, those lolloping emus that galloped away in such an ungainly fashion, those screeching flocks of brilliantly coloured parrots, all appeared to be heading the same way as Emmie and the little motor-train, right into the rosy, diffused haze of the west. They couldn’t go much further without getting back to a more civilised landscape, could they? After all, she was going to Millie’s shop, and shops meant towns. Koolonga couldn’t be more than another half-hour’s journey, if she were to believe what the man at Berroola Junction had told her.
Emmie leaned back against the sticky warmth of her seat, and tried to imagine the sort of place that Miss Millicent would have chosen in which to retire. She had been an enthusiastic gardener, Millie. A lover of green lawns and shrubs and trees. She had often talked of the small cottage she would one day like to have, in a pretty little country valley, with white walls and a purple wistaria climbing over the porch. She would grow roses, she’d said. And she would have beds of agapanthus and white lilies, and at the bottom of the garden she would have an apricot tree, because Miss Millicent had always said that apricots were her favourite fruit, and that you hadn’t really tasted one to proper advantage unless you had just picked it, warm and fully ripe, directly from the tree upon which it grew.
Emmie could do with an apricot right this minute.
She thought of its succulence and its warm, sharp juice with a fervour that was also tantalising. She was still thinking about it when the noise of the motor subsided and the train slowed to a grinding stop. Heavy steps sounded outside and then her carriage door was wrenched open and a man leaned in.
‘Was you the dame th’t wanted Koolonga? If you are, here she is.’ He was the driver of the train. Brief and laconic.
Emmie stared. She hadn’t nodded, actually, but he seemed to accept the stare as an affirmative, because he was already pulling down her cases and slinging them out through the door.
‘Koolonga? Are you sure?’ She tried to peer beyond the man’s shoulder, but all she could see was a small piece of platform, a tiny slatted shed that looked like a signal-box, a wedge of faded rose that was the evening sky and the tracery of a pepper tree that showed up like black lace against the cloudy pink beyond. The man grinned. It was a slow grin. Wry. Amused.
‘Sure I’m sure. I reckon I’ve been doing this run since before you was a nipper, even. That’s her. Koolonga.’
He swiped her luggage together and clambered down.
‘Oh, please, watch how you carry that! It—they’re my hats, you see. I did
n’t know how else to pack them.’ Emmie tumbled out after him and retrieved the large paper bag, peeped in to reassure herself that the contents were unharmed. The man’s grasp, after all, had been careless and excessively casual, and his hands were large and rough. Greasy, too.
‘Where d’you reckon you’re going to wear them things? You got a wedding lined up, or is it a bush christening?’
He smiled good-naturedly and ambled away in the direction of the little slatted shed.
It was a signal-box, and he was already busy changing the staff and pulling levers. Apparently he had forgotten his erstwhile passenger already.
‘Excuse me---- ’ Emmie had thrown down the paper bag
containing her hats upon the rest of her piled-up luggage with a reckless haste that must have appeared somewhat illogical, considering that she had just reprimanded the man for his own carelessness with these selfsame articles. Luckily he wasn’t looking.
‘Excuse me---- ’ she panted, hurrying after him as he shut
the signal-box door and headed once more towards the motor-cabin. ‘Please—where is Koolonga itself?’
‘Right here, miss, like I said. Look.’ He pointed a stubby finger at the neat white board with its black printed title. KOOLONGA, it read, without a doubt. ‘Koolonga Siding, see.’ The few other passengers already had their heads out of the windows, querying the delay.
‘Yes, but --- ’ Emmie smiled a little desperately. ‘The—er —the town itself?’ she suggested nervously but determinedly. ‘Where is that?’
The man scratched his head, in genuine perplexity this time.
‘Well, I mean, it’s there, ain’t it—if yer like to call it a town. Like I said, it’s Koolonga Siding, see. But there’s a store down there. It ain’t in use just now, though. Beyond that there’s a couple of petrol pumps and a telephone. The Bradys run the Post Office, an’ the school’s over the other side of the level crossing. You’ll see them better once I go.’
Once he went! My goodness! Once he went there’d be nobody here at all. Just Emmie and that neat white notice-board.
She felt stunned at the mere thought. She wanted, suddenly, to cry out, Please don’t go. You can’t go and leave me here alone, can you?
But he could, and he did.
Her words hadn’t come. They were still unspoken, mere pleadings in Emmie’s strangled throat, as he turned and climbed up into his cab with a ‘thumbs up’ sign that sent the few heads disappearing inside the windows again. A moment later the small train had gathered speed once more, and Emmie stood right where she was, and watched it snaking away over the plain until it was no more than a little black worm wriggling into the distance.
Once the worm had quite gone, she turned and looked about her.
Up and down the small platform.
It sloped away gently at either end, slipping unobtrusively back into the monotonous, tussocky plain again. The cemented edge of the platform was neatly painted white, to show the demarcation between platform and railway line. The paling fence that ran along behind the gravel length of it was white too, but the signal-box itself sported a rather less recently applied coating, of a dirty caramel colour. On either side of the board which spelt out ‘Koolonga’ there was a half mooned flower bed, cluttered with perennial geraniums. They and the pepper tree drooped in the evening gloom, cowering in sagging submission to a sun that had beaten down on them relentlessly all through the day.
They looked defeated. Wilted. Emmie experienced a kindred twinge of sympathy. She felt that way herself!
The railway gates defended the approaches of a dusty track, worn and rutted and tyre-marked. Heaven knew where it came from, that road, but it undoubtedly led to the few scattered buildings to which the train-driver had pointed in the gloaming. After sidling around the buildings’ precincts, it wound away again.
Emmie picked up her two heavier cases, and made for those gates. She opened and closed each one as she crossed the line.
She was panting with effort by the time she reached the veranda of the store, and her shoulders ached agonisingly. Most of Emmie’s possessions were in those two cases. They, together with the third one back there on the platform, plus her rug and the hats and the small plastic picnic case, comprised her ‘worldly goods’, she reminded herself breathlessly, as she took the single shallow step up on to the veranda.
Above the step, in the fading light, she was able to distinguish the sign which proclaimed the place to have once belonged to ‘Laceys, General Merchants’. Beneath, less obscurely, was printed Millie’s own name.
‘Miss J. Millicent, Owner.’
Well, that left no doubt, did it? Emmie felt the last faint hope that she could possibly have come to the wrong place die a
brief, sore death within her.
This was it, quite certainly. The venture for which she had thrown up her safe existence, those dubious city comforts, the pallid satisfaction of anonymous security in the bosom of her brilliantly successful family. She had sustained her determination to come, in the face of so much vehement opposition, because some inner, inexplicable instinct had told her that at last, through Miss Millicent’s final will and testament, she was about to find a new and exciting approach to life itself. New, because she was going somewhere where she was needed, quite badly, in a way in which Mark and Robert and Lissa and Sharon could never need her. Exciting, because Millie had always painted her dipping, green valley that way. She had drawn her little white-walled house and her roses and her apricots with such consummate skill and vividness that the picture had come alive. It lived with a reality that was tantalising and inviting—magical, almost.
Emmie put down the cases upon the decaying boards, blinked away the disappointment that at this moment threatened to demoralise her entirely, and turned resolutely back to where the remainder of her belongings lay awaiting transportation.
Her despair was such that she pushed the bulging hat-bag feverishly beneath one arm, slung the rug along with it, seized the picnic hold all and the last of her heavy suitcases, and dragged her unwilling feet back through the dust to the front of Miss Millicent’s general store. Or rather, her own general store. Emmie’s.
She gazed at her dubious inheritance with a mute disbelief that widened her hazel eyes into great, perplexed pools in the pale oval of her small, dusty, perspiring face. The weight of that luggage, the trek unaided with her burdens, had brought a dew to Emmie’s forehead that had eventually channelled its way from her temples right down to her neck, her collar.
She could see the outline of her own form reflected in the glass of the cobwebbed windows, but only the outline, not the travel-stained details. Emmie was thankful for that! If she looked as drained as she felt, the picture was bound to be a depressing one, and anyway, the view beyond her mirror-image was enough to send her spirits floundering, in a final sinking spiral, right to the pit of her stomach.
Hands on either side of her eyes to shut out the last of the twilight reflections, Emmie could only stare through the glass. She felt so numb, so weary, that it was difficult to accept the reality of those dusty counters, drab shelves, dingy curtains, the disordered piles of stock so jumbled, so chaotic, so—so absolutely antiquated—that it was like peering back into another century.
Oh, Millie! Whatever could have brought you here? Where was the lush green valley, the little white-walled house, the porch with its scramble of wistaria? Where were the roses, and the apricot tree, and all those other promised things? Where, come to that, were the children? Not here, certainly. Here there was only emptiness and desolation. Creaking floorboards and fly-stained curtains. Filthy windows and mouse-plagued counters. Powdery cobwebs. Spidery graveyards, beaded with the bodies of small, dead flies.
Emmie shuddered.
The front door refused to yield. She made one or two effete attempts upon the windows themselves, and then walked slowly around to the back.
The building had a weatherboard lean-to attached to the rear. Surprisingly, the door-ha
ndle turned obligingly beneath her fingers, and Emmie stepped inside, into what must obviously be the kitchen. A bedroom lay to her right, a bathroom to her left. The bathroom had the usual plumbings, and a tiny, dim window. Most of the floor space was occupied by a gigantic iron-legged bathtub and a monstrous-looking geyser whose dragon-like, open mouth revealed the remains of what had presumably been its last meal—a mound of white mulga ash and some half-burnt, crumpled papers.
She shut the door, inspected a second bedroom and the familiar spectacle of the store itself.
At close quarters, and in this gloom, it was an oddly pathetic sight. Difficult to associate it with the prim and orderly Miss Millicent. There had to be an explanation, though. A reason for its deserted state, and for the absence of those foster-children, too. But right now Emmie was too dazed, too low, even to
conjecture.
She unlocked the front door, stepped out into the warm night air, and pulled her cases inside. Her fingers sought automatically for the electric switch, found none. No light, even. And it was rapidly becoming quite dark. She quelled her growing uneasiness at the realisation of her predicament, dismissed the idea of going further down the road, to the Post Office or the school. If no one happened to be in either of those places, she’d have missed the last of the light. Better to install herself for the night, while she could still see what she was doing, at least. In the morning she’d have to take stock of things. She’d have to think! Just now, it was better not to think too deeply at all, because it might only serve to increase the hollow misery that had formed itself into a hard, unyielding ball at the base of her throat. Just now, it was better simply to concentrate upon doing things, one by one. Things like finding some means of lighting the place, and boiling a kettle to make herself some tea. Tea would do to wash down the two curling sandwiches that remained from her picnic lunch. Then she must make up one of those canvas-ticked stretchers upon which to sleep. Oblivion would be welcome. It couldn’t come quickly enough, so far as Emmie was concerned! She was giddy with fatigue and reaction. Not even her corroding anxieties at the mess she had got herself into could be allowed to postpone that longed-for oblivion. Thinking was definitely for the morning—and yet, in spite of herself, thoughts kept on coming, just the same.