Stillwater Creek

by Alison Booth

  With shaking fingers, Zidra ripped open the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of lined paper that had been roughly torn from an exercise book. The pencilled message was sloping from left to right for only the first few lines and after that the writing changed. It was now unmistakably Lorna’s hand, although still written in cramped capital letters. Lorna must have been in such a hurry that she’d given up the attempt at complete anonymity.

  WE’RE GOING BY BUS TO JERVIS BAY FOR A HOLIDAY WEEKEND 16th–18th FEBRUARY. TELL MUM AND DAD TO GO THERE TOO. I’M BANKING ON YOU. THEY CENSOR EVERYTHING HERE AND I’M NOT EVENSURE IF I’M GOING TO GET THIS LETTER OUT. I’LL TRY TO POST IT TOMORROW. WE’RE ALLOWED OUT SOMETIMES TO THE SHOP TO BUY LOLLIES, BUT I’M GOING TO BUY A STAMPED ENVELOPE INSTEAD. THOUGHT IT SAFER TO WRITE TO YOU AND ANYWAY I DON’T EVEN KNOW IF THEY’RE STILL LIVING AT THE SAME PLACE.

  I REALLY MISS YOU, DIZZY. IT’S LIKE A PRISON HERE. I’M ALWAYS GETTING INTO TROUBLE – THAT’S NOTHING NEW – AND THEN I GET LOCKED IN THE BOXROOM. THEY DON’T KNOW I CAN GET OUT THE ROOF LIGHT AND SIT ON THE ROOF. HA HA.

  CAN’T WAIT TO SEE MUM AGAIN. PLEASE TELL HER TO GET TO JERVIS BAY SOMEHOW. I’VE HAD NO NEWS ABOUT THE FAMILY SINCE NANA CAME TO SEE ME A YEAR AGO AND DON’T KNOW HOW THEY ARE.

  WITH LOVE

  Lorna used to attend Jingera primary school with Zidra in the days before the Hunter family had been sent to the Reserve. Soon after that, Lorna had been taken to the Gudgiegalah Girls’ Home. She was a half-caste, that’s what they called her, and Tommy Hunter wasn’t her real father.

  Zidra read the letter again. There were no names to identify the writer, or the recipient either, apart from Dizzy, and who would realise that this was short for Zidra? Yet if the message had been intercepted at Gudgiegalah Girls’ Home, anyone would have been able to guess who’d written it. Zidra wondered how many letters had already been written and never gone out. The girls there were banned from all contact with their past.

  According to the postmark, this letter had been posted less than a week ago. It was several months until the bus trip to Jervis Bay. She’d have to figure out how to get the message to the Hunter family, though like Lorna she had no idea if they were still at the Wallaga Lake Reserve.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  Her mother’s voice startled her. For a moment she’d forgotten where she was and now felt irritated at being distracted from her thoughts. Her mother opened the back door of the car and sat down on the seat next to Zidra. She made a face to herself, but not so that her mother would see. It was doubly annoying that there was no Hello darling, have you had a nice day at school?

  ‘Hello, Mama,’ she said, kissing her on the cheek and folding over the letter. ‘Have you had a good day?’ Mama’s hair was pinned up in some sort of topknot and her even-featured face, without its usual frame of exuberant fair hair, appeared tired. Zidra would tell her about Lorna later. She needed to digest the contents of the letter herself first.

  Her mother smiled, apparently oblivious of Zidra’s veiled reproof. ‘It was bonzer.’

  Zidra winced. An expression like this sounded ludicrous when spoken in a thick Latvian accent. After nearly a decade in Australia, her mother had acquired the local slang but not the diction. You’d think her musical training might have made her more receptive to the rhythms of speech.

  ‘I just had tea with Mrs Llewellyn and Eileen Cadwallader,’ her mother continued. ‘Where’s Peter?’

  ‘At the butcher’s.’

  ‘What for? He killed a sheep only two days ago.’

  ‘Same reason as you went to see Mrs Cadwallader and Mrs Llewellyn,’ Zidra said. ‘To have a chat.’

  Her mother’s grin was reflected in the car’s rear-vision mirror above the windscreen. The brown dress she was wearing was almost the same colour as her eyes.

  At that moment, Peter opened the front passenger door and settled himself into the seat. Her mother climbed out of the back seat of the car and into the front. After she turned the ignition and preselected first gear, the car kangaroo-hopped several feet before stalling.

  ‘Foot on the change gear pedal,’ Peter said mildly.

  You weren’t allowed to call it a clutch. That was because the Armstrong Siddeley Whitley was so special that all its parts had different names to ordinary cars. Zidra knew this because Peter had also been teaching her to drive around the home paddock, and she reckoned she was already a better driver than her mother. But it would be two years at least before she could sit for her driving test.

  Her mother muttered something in Latvian that was almost certainly indecent, and turned the ignition key again. She’d been driving for three months so you’d think she’d have got the hang of it by now. She insisted on practising, and Peter didn’t seem to care. In fact it was almost as if he enjoyed it, in spite of all the jerking and stalling.

  Zidra’s mother began to drive so slowly along the Jingera to Ferndale road that soon there was a queue of cars behind them. When Zidra mentioned this, Peter suggested that she give her mother a break. When she’s had more practice she’ll get her speed up and on no account are you to pressure her to go any faster. Fat chance of that, Zidra thought. Even the bus with the Bradley boys might be better than this slow crawl north.

  Once home at Ferndale, Zidra went to her room in the attic. It had originally been used as a boxroom until she’d persuaded her parents to have it painted and insulated and made into her bedroom. Three dormer windows illuminated the space, which was large with steeply raked ceilings. Each window was rather small, but together they shed sufficient light that the room never seemed gloomy, even on the most overcast of days. One dormer looked to the east and the ocean, the other to the north with Mount Dromedary rearing up in the distance, and the third to the west. That was her favourite view, of the folds of hills rising to the distant mountain range, all framed by the pine trees that had been planted when the house was built in the late nineteenth century.

  After throwing her school-case onto the bed, Zidra stripped off the Burford Girls’ High School uniform – the navy blue tunic and white shirt – and put on old trousers and a shirt. She glanced quickly at her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. Several months ago she’d decided that she might actually be quite good looking – she’d been lucky to inherit her mother’s regular features and even that high forehead could be disguised by allowing her dark curls to fall forward. Curls that periodically her mother said were just like those of her real father, poor Oleksii, whom Zidra herself always thought of as Our Papa Who Art in Heaven.

  With the two letters now in her pocket, she clattered down the stairs and out to the kitchen, where the family’s outdoor boots were lined up, in regimental order, near the door to the back verandah. Her piercing whistle summoned the two dogs, Rusty and Spotless Spot, who knew without being told that she was off to the stone stairway leading down to the beach. Here she perched on the top step while the dogs bounded down to the strip of white sand below.

  Carefully she unfolded Lorna’s letter and read it again. She had no idea whether or not the Hunters were still at Wallaga Lake. She certainly hadn’t seen any of them in Jingera lately. Glancing around her at the vast dome of the sky and the ocean in front of her, she thought of how much Lorna must loathe being incarcerated at her school. Training Centre was how it was described. Mama had snorted when she’d learnt that. Training to be domestic slaves, she’d said.

  Zidra put the letter away and slit open the fatter envelope from Jim. Three sheets of closely written paper, which she began to peruse with great eagerness. After reading a couple of paragraphs, however, she puffed out her cheeks in exasperation. It wasn’t that liking cricket was evil as such, it was more that inflicting lengthy descriptions of it onto others was deeply inconsiderate, especially when he knew how boring she found team sports. She skimmed through the letter until she reached the final paragraph.

  I was interested to read in your last letter that you want to be a journalist. That would suit you, Zi
d, with your love of writing and history. One of the teachers told me that newspapers offer cadetships, so you might want to check up on that. By the way, did I tell you that my good friend Eric Hall is coming to stay with us in Jingera for a week or so towards the end of the Christmas holidays? He comes from near Walgett and you might remember I visited his family’s property last year. Flat as a pancake out there, so he’ll think he’s in paradise at Jingera.

  I’m really looking forward to coming home.

  Yours sincerely,

  Jim

  She laughed out loud at the Yours sincerely, wondering how long she would have to know Jim before he could write anything a bit more affectionate. She always made a point of signing her letters to him With love from Zidra, just as she did with all her friends. With love from Zid mightn’t go down so well if people thought she was a boy, though.

  Jim’s abbreviation of her name was nice and no one else ever thought to use it, although it wasn’t as nice as Lorna’s name for her, Dizzy. Together the nicknames made a good combination, she thought: Dizzy Zid. There was something glamorous and light about the name Dizzy.

  Now she found that thinking about Lorna was bringing back all those feelings she’d been keeping squashed down ever since reading her letter and, having forgotten a handkerchief, she sniffled into her hands.

  Lorna had been taken from her family almost four years ago. Zidra remembered waking from a nightmare at that time, convinced that Lorna was telling her something. Telepathy was how her mother had described it. Of course Zidra hadn’t known then that Lorna was being taken away, only that she was in trouble. After that, Zidra’s own life had become difficult. It wasn’t just the loneliness and fear that she felt after her best friend vanished, but also the vulnerability. It was only Jim’s friendship that had kept her going.

  And she hadn’t spoken to Lorna about any of this. Although longing to, she hadn’t seen or spoken to her for years.

  Random House