‘I’m seventeen,’ said Flinty.
‘Yes. Well.’ Mrs Mack’s pursed lips said more than her words about what she thought of seventeen-year-old girls keeping house.
‘And Andy will be back by the end of summer.’ Please let him come home, thought Flinty desperately.
Mrs Mack patted her hand. ‘You let us know whatever you need. Your ma and the captain were our friends. You just remember you’ve got neighbours all down the valley who’ll help. All you have to do is ask.’
She reached out and hugged her. For a moment Flinty was folded in the scent of floury arms and new butter and wood smoke.
‘I’ll remember,’ she said.
Chapter 3
22 November 1919
Dear Diary,
It all seemed magic on Armistice Day. As though we could step into peace the next day. But it took months and months for all the boys to come back.
Could Sandy have met another girl, a nurse in England, maybe? I asked Jones the postman last week if the Macks had got any letters. I pretended Joey was still collecting stamps. It wasn’t a lie — he kept every stamp we got, from Andy and Jeff and a few of their mates who didn’t have anyone else to send them socks and cakes, and wrote back to thank me and Mum and Kirsty. But Jones said the Macks don’t get any letters at all, just the weekly paper and the rates bill. ‘Waste of me time coming up here,’ said Jones. ‘Now everything is back to normal all I bring anyone is bills and no one thanks me for them.’
‘You bring the wool cheques,’ I said. That made him smile. Mum would have given him tea and cake, but I hadn’t made any cake, and I was too embarrassed to give him bread and syrup, so I just offered him a cup of tea. We’re almost out of tea, so I was glad when he said no.
Now everything is back to normal, he said. Except it isn’t. No Mum and Dad and Jeff, Andy gone and Sandy like a stranger. Maybe that’s why I can think that what happened on the Rock today is even possible. The impossible has happened over and over the last few years.
Maybe even ghosts are possible too.
The sun hovered between the mountains as Empress cantered back up the mountain track to Rock Farm, like a lamp in the window beckoning the way home. The last of winter’s distant snow blazed like fire in the sunset.
Dad had called this the shadow time. The sun sucks colour from the world, he’d said. He’d taught her to see the softer colours of the dusk, the green and orange bark, the purple shadows. At times like this Flinty felt her edges vanish, leaving her part of the mountains, like the wallaby pulling wonga vine down from a thorn bush, or the sleepy possum peering from a tree.
She’d stayed with Mrs Mack too long, comforted by the scents of cake and roasting mutton. It would be dark by the time she got home, if she kept to the track. Empress could find her way in darkness — Flinty reckoned Empress could find her way even if rain fell as mud — but Kirsty and Joey would be worried if Flinty wasn’t home by dark.
She tugged at the reins. The track twisted back and forth across the mountain; if she cut straight uphill she’d be home before dark. A horse could stumble and break its leg on rough ground. But Dad had put Flinty in the saddle when she was two years old. Empress could sense a wombat hole at twenty paces. She never stumbled no matter how steep the slope, or caught her hoof in a tussock that a bettong had twisted into a nest.
Flinty let Empress have her head. The horse picked her way up through the tussocks, over the little round billy buttons, the tiny white heath flowers and the bigger yellow everlastings. Dad had kept only two horses when the others had gone as army horses: Lord George for himself and Empress.
Now Andy was riding Lord George, up by the Queensland border. Did he still have nightmares, crying out in his swag under the trees as he had in the narrow bed at home? Did anyone make him a cup of cocoa to drink when he woke, sweaty and shaking?
Not that he’d ever told her what haunted the empire of sleep. He’d just sat there, sipping his cocoa, holding it with both hands till the shaking stopped.
Was Toby right? Had her questions driven Andy away? Maybe he didn’t want anyone to bring him cocoa, to watch him force his hands to slowly still.
What had taken Jeff and eaten Andy’s laughter too? Hearts can break, Mum whispered, when she read the telegram that said that Jeff had died. And Mum’s had broken, even if hers hadn’t stopped beating till a month later.
Sometimes it was like the war still growled around the windows in the darkness, lurking, snickering, waiting to snatch even the men like Andy who’d seemed to come home safe, and drag them back, at least in dreams.
What was war really like? What vast crack had buried Jeff down in the mud, had sent Andy off with cattle? What had changed her best friend so much he could hardly look at her now?
Empress broke through the hop bushes back onto the road again. Flinty glimpsed the house in the last of the light, tucked among its apple and plum trees, above the mist. Rock Farm was bigger than any of the houses in the valley, its walls of stone, its roof of she-oak shingles, as lichen covered as the tree trunks now.
The mist still covered the Rock. The man in the bathchair was a dim shape just visible through the white.
The soldier.
She urged Empress to a canter again. The horse responded instantly, hesitating only slightly this time as they reached the mist’s edge, her hooves clacking on the stone of the Rock.
The mist stopped at the edge of the Rock. The valley stretched below her, trees and tiny patches of paddock, the houses hidden among the green. Here and there Rocky Creek glinted red and silver in the last of the sunbeams, on its way to join the great spring rush of the Snowy River further down the mountain. Between the ridges one last mountain top of snow glowed pink as the sun descended.
The young man must have heard her, but he didn’t turn even when she dismounted. Empress backed off a little, showing the whites of her eyes. Flinty stroked her nose till she quietened, trying to control her anger. How dare he not even look at her? The Rock was her home, not his. How dare he not even speak?
And then he did. ‘What do you want?’ He still stared out across the valley.
It was as though her anger fizzed up like a shaken bottle of lemonade. ‘I want to know what it was like.’
‘What do you mean?’ The man wheeled the bathchair around so it faced her. Its wheels were made of shiny metal edged with black rubber. She had never seen a metal wheel before.
‘The war!’ she cried. The sound echoed across the valley: War…war…ar…ar…
He stared at her, almost wary, his mouth still that hard harsh line. His hair was black above his white face and shadowed eyes — none of the families in the valley had black hair. It made him look even more a stranger. But his shoulders were square, like the men she knew, even if they looked too thin. His hands and arms were muscular, she supposed from wheeling his chair. ‘You want me to talk about the war?’
‘Yes!’
‘Why?’
‘Why do you think? Because it killed my brother. Because…’ She buried her face in Empress’s warm neck so he wouldn’t see her cry.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know about your brother. I only got here yesterday.’ He didn’t sound sorry. There wasn’t any emotion in his voice at all. But at least he was looking at her. ‘I’m staying at the old farmhouse.’
He must be at Dusty Jim’s hut after all, thought Flinty. Maybe he was even Dusty’s nephew or great-nephew, though bush rats looked more like Dusty Jim than this young man.
She should be sorry for him, his legs shot away, a stranger. But he was using all he had suffered — all that all the returned men had suffered — as a wall around himself. Didn’t any of them realise how much she had to cope with too, just like Mrs Mack, like Mum?
‘Please! Just tell me what the war was like.’
He stared at her. She could see pain. Guilt did stab her now. She hadn’t wanted to add more suffering. But still she met his eyes, daring him to speak.
‘You really want
to hear about the war?’ He sounded faintly incredulous.
‘Yes!’
‘No one wants to know,’ he said flatly.
‘I do.’
‘You want to know what it’s like to lose your legs? Well, I can’t tell you. One moment I was running, the next I was in a hospital bed. No pain. It hurts now more than it did then. Or maybe it hurt so much then that I just don’t remember the pain…’
She tried to keep her voice steady. ‘I’m sorry about your legs. But I didn’t mean that. I want to know what it was like to be in a war. The newspapers just told us where the fighting was, and who had died or been hurt. I need to know what it was like being there. Please.’
‘You want a tour of war? All right then.’ Suddenly there was so much emotion on his face that it felt like he’d slapped her. ‘You think war is battlefields, but it’s not. No country starts out as a battlefield. It’s farms and houses and women and kids, but any one of them can kill you, even a boy peering from behind a door. Every time you see a face you have to think, is this someone I need to kill or someone I must protect? You never know. Never.’ His breath ran out and he stopped, then managed, ‘You want more?’
She nodded.
‘The smells. That’s what you can’t forget. Every smell is foreign, every smell is etched on your brain. Rice paddies, jungle, even the markets, not a single smell of home. Nothing.’
She hadn’t known there were rice paddies in France or Flanders. Dad had had the paper delivered with the mail, once a week, so he could put little flags on the big map in the kitchen to show the battlefields and Mum would know who had lost someone and when to bake a cake for the memorial. But the newspapers just gave names and places, not what the land was like.
The soldier was looking out across the valley again now. ‘There’s noise. But the silences are worse, because then you’re waiting for the shelling and the screams. And even when you think you’ve won, you’ve lost.’
For the first time he looked down at the dangling blue trousers where his feet should have been. ‘We won the Battle of Long Tan. We won! A hundred and eight of us Aussies facing thousands of the enemy. We should have been heroes. You know what happened back in Sydney, the day I left hospital like this?’ He touched his chair. ‘A girl spat at me. A protestor.’
Flinty stared at him. She had heard that some people had been against the fighting. Pacifists, they were called. She had never heard of any woman spitting at a soldier.
‘I can still hear her,’ he said. She could hear the anger now, pushing its way through his control. ‘“Ho Chi Minh!” she shouted. “Dare to struggle, dare to win.” Like the enemy was the only brave one, not us. We Aussies secured the whole Long Tan area. But it hasn’t made any difference. Nothing we did then, not my legs, not the blokes who died. Not the blokes still dying over there —’
‘What blokes? Who’s dying?’ Flinty stepped back towards Empress. She’d heard some of the men had come home touched in the head. Or maybe he’d been drinking Dusty Jim’s moonshine. ‘The war’s over,’ she said cautiously, in case he really was drunk, or mad. ‘It stopped at the Armistice. Everyone’s come home.’
The young man looked back at her. ‘What armistice? Are you crazy? Just turn on the news at night if you really want to know what’s happening in Vietnam. Not that they’ll tell you the whole truth. Either way, stop bothering me about it.’ He turned the wheeled bathchair again, as though to go.
‘Vietnam? I…I didn’t know there was a place called Vietnam in France, or Flanders. Is it in Palestine?’
The mist grew colder. Empress gave an uneasy whicker and tried to back away. Flinty pulled the reins, patting the horse’s neck automatically, staring at the man.
The soldier gazed at her, then at the horse. He gave a sound that might have been a laugh. ‘I thought it was just a story. I didn’t believe it. Don’t believe it! I’m imagining all this. Too many painkillers for too long —’
‘Don’t believe what?’ she asked, desperate to understand.
‘You’re a ghost.’
Chapter 4
This morning I didn’t believe in ghosts, especially not ones from the future. I’m still not sure that it really happened. But I saw it! It was as real as my hand. And I’m not mad. Neither is he, though he is unhappy.
Is he really a ghost? I keep going over and over it in my mind. If only there was someone I could talk to about it, but the only people I could talk to about things like this were Jeff and Sandy. I don’t want to scare Kirsty or Joey by talking about ghosts, and Mrs Mack would worry it’s all been too much for me, that I’m seeing things like Dusty Jim does when he’s on a bender, or that poor soldier down in Gibber’s Creek who ran away screaming during the fireworks, yelling that the guns were firing.
The man on the Rock this morning was real all right. I was upset about Sandy and Jeff and, well, everything, but not upset enough to imagine a ghost.
He didn’t seem like the sort of man who’d play tricks either. I think he believed everything he said. But if what he said was true then he’s seen enough to imagine things, like ghosts from the past.
Except his ghost is me. And I am real.
So that leaves only two solutions: he’s staying with someone around here, and is having hallucinations, thinking he is from the future — someone who carefully wiped away all the wheel tracks from the bathchair, to make me think his story is true.
Or there are ghosts on the Rock, just like people said.
‘I’m not a ghost.’ She spoke automatically.
His face looked even whiter, like a bleached sheet; the shadows under his eyes had deepened. He shook his head, drops of mist wet on his hair, peered out at her. ‘The people I’m staying with warned me I might meet a ghost down here. I thought it was a joke. Like drop bears.’
‘Drop bears?’
‘Killer koalas that jump down onto your head from the trees. We used to trick the Yanks about them.’
‘How can there be killer koalas?’ She still kept carefully away from him.
‘How can there be ghosts? Except you’re here, just like they said. And so am I.’
‘That doesn’t make me a ghost.’ She tried to smile at him as she pinched her arm. ‘See? I’m solid.’
His hands still clenched the arms of his bathchair. ‘And you’re fifty years in the past. Just like they said.’
Someone was tricking him. Dusty, with his drunken stories. The White boys, maybe. But surely even they wouldn’t trick a returned soldier. And none of them could have convinced this man he was from another time.
‘It’s a trick,’ he said, almost as if he’d been reading her mind. ‘You’re pretending to be from the past.’ Suddenly he stopped, staring at the track behind her. ‘It’s not a trick.’ His voice had lost all emotion, but his eyes looked wary. ‘There’s the proof.’
‘Proof I’m a ghost? What is it?’
‘Look at the road. It rained a couple of hours ago,’ he said flatly. ‘But there aren’t any hoof prints.’
She looked back. Empress’s hoof prints were plain in the mud. ‘Yes, there are. Look.’
‘I am looking. The only prints are my wheel tracks.’
There was silence while she tried to see whether he was lying or mad. Was he dangerous? He couldn’t get up the steps to Kirsty or Joey in that chair, and she’d be on Empress’s back before he got within six feet of her.
‘Maybe you really are a ghost.’ He stared at her, then suddenly he laughed. ‘You’re supposed to be scared of ghosts, but who can be scared of a girl and a horse? You’re Flinty McAlpine, aren’t you? The girl from Snowy River. They showed me a photo of you, a few years older than you are now, just last night. You’re a ghost, from fifty years ago.’
‘I’m not dead,’ she said quietly. ‘You have to be dead to be a ghost. I had apple teacake for afternoon tea. You can’t eat apple teacake if you’re dead.’
‘What year did you eat the cake? What year is it for you, I mean?’
‘1
919, of course.’
‘I’m in 1969,’ he said flatly. She looked at the track again. There were Empress’s hoof prints. But there were no wheel tracks from his chair. How could you wheel a bathchair up to the Rock and leave no prints? Unless he was a ghost.
Her head reeled. 1969? He couldn’t be real! She tried to stay calm and look at him properly.
His clothes. The too-long hair. Most of all the bathchair — that strange slim bathchair with its shiny wheels. Suddenly she believed that the man in front of her might indeed be from the future.
You were supposed to scream when you saw a ghost, weren’t you? But she didn’t want to scream. In a funny way this ghost seemed more real than Toby and Andy and even Sandy. At least this ghost talked to a girl, instead of hugging close a coat of silence. ‘If one of us is a ghost, it’s you, not me.’ She tried to keep her voice steady.
‘Me?’ He looked out through the mist at the track again, so obviously seeing what she could not. Hoof prints in my time, she thought, wheel tracks in his. ‘I thought I might die a dozen times back in Vietnam. I’m pretty sure I’m not dead now. I’d have noticed dying. I spent nearly three years in hospital trying not to do it,’ he added dryly. ‘Trust me. You notice when you nearly die too. Besides, I know your name.’
She stared at him. The shut-off look he had worn before had vanished. He’s starting to enjoy this, she thought. Then: three years in hospital! Three years wondering if the war would take you after all. Whatever was happening here had brought him back from his war. Ghosts held no terror for her — not after the loss of so many she loved. And apparently the idea of ghosts didn’t scare him either. But which time was the real one? 1919 or 1969? Could she really be a phantom, haunting the place she loved? No! She’d just had afternoon tea at the Macks’. A ghost wouldn’t remember that — would they?
‘Ask anyone around here if I’m real. They all know me.’
The Girl from Snowy River Page 3