by Kim Kelly
‘Not a stick of wood to prop ’em up inside,’ Buckley explains. ‘There’s graves amongst ’em for the ones that weren’t so clever at it.’
Then I must be more than clever. I must not leave the slightest trace of my intentions here except for a Chinaman’s worthless word.
‘It’s a superior design, though, I would suppose,’ Mr Wilberry adds. ‘The cylinder – far stronger than any stanchioned tunnel might be in this silty rock. A squared structure is always going to be more vulnerable to …’
Pressure. Of course it is, and I would suppose one can work a rat hole alone then. As I must act alone now.
I turn to Mr Wilberry, at last, and reply: ‘Yes, a cylinder would be stronger.’ And I wish I could tell him that I am sorry, that the way should be built differently for us, for dear lovely him, but I can only say, in this flat, clanking way: ‘The circle is the strongest of shapes.’
‘I’d bet you know your maths better than me.’ He smiles, and his sun-like hopeful face, would break my heart if I had one in any state left to break. I wish I could touch his face, kiss the fine blond stubble along his jaw, somehow let him know all that I might promise him: my sorrow and my refusal to use him in any dreadful way. Make the only vow I may: that I not play him, of all people, in this devil’s game.
He says: ‘But I do know the sphere, the orb, is king of structures – eh? Such as an unopened bud – there’s nothing much tougher in this life than that.’
As he says this, his leg touches mine again with the swaying of the buggy and lightning of a different kind flashes through me: this now familiar sweep of prickling warmth across my skin, up my neck and down along the tops of my thighs, a tingling that seems to emanate from somewhere in the centre of me, just below the solar plexus. I have never loved before, I have never been touched by a man in this way nor ever wanted to be – Marvell’s ‘Coy Mistress’ had me running for the med library to try to work out what all the whispering and snickering was about – and yet I know what this sensation is now as if I’ve known it since the day I was born: my desire for Mr Wilberry. Then let us tear our pleasures with rough strife thorough the iron gates of life … It makes sense now: perfect, and terrible. And it must be overcome. It will be. It’s only a feeling, isn’t it? Like any other. It’s just an emotion, just another longing to be put aside.
It would be more useful by far if my fear was as easy to rationalise; control. As the gully opens out again now into forest and we return to what looks more like a road, I stare into the hellish confusion of trunks and limbs either side of us and see only monsters: armies of them, gathering, waiting to move on me. Devour me: perhaps they have already.
‘Oh that’s a good one,’ Mr Wilberry says beside me, and I follow the gesture of his hand to the right: a cottage almost entirely collapsed to the ground but for a branch that’s grown through one corner of the roof. I can’t reply; the only thought I have is that I am that house exactly. Consumed but somehow remaining. And almost calm at seeing it: that I am becoming something else.
Until I see a lonely kerosene-drum letterbox a little way further along and I sense that we are at our destination. My chest screams with redoubled alarm for what I must do here. What I must ask, and how I must ask it; I have rehearsed a thousand ways in my mind, but I can hold no firm decision; no clear plan.
‘Whoa, Whiskey.’ Buckley slows us to a cautious walk, turning into what appears to be utterly trackless bush. Within a few yards we are inside it, and it is one monster. We are travelling through the spines along its back: trackless bush in every direction, distant and near, a million square miles of it. A dog howls and I might well be instantly petrified where I sit.
‘Well, I hope we don’t need to make too quick a getaway.’ Mr Wilberry inclines his head towards mine and his breath brushes my cheek. ‘I’ve just spotted a crimson grevillea,’ he says, his self-deprecation deliberately jolly, ‘and I should like to have a bit of a look at it on our way back, if that’s all right with you, Miss Jones.’
‘Hm, all right.’ My voice is duller still, my mouth so parched I don’t know how I shall speak to Dr Ah Ling at all.
The cicada hum rises to a roar here in the high sun. A million square miles of piercing threat: Go away from this place, go away, go away. Every instinct warns me to run.
‘It will be all right, Miss Jones,’ Mr Wilberry’s gentle baritone assures. ‘I won’t let anything bad happen to you, here or anywhere.’
And all my senses jolt at his words. Only bad things will happen now. As they must. I see Greta as I left her with the hand basin beside her on the bed, just in case, her stomach upset again. Don’t worry about me, I’m sure it’s nothing, Ryl. Nothing mentionable; just a whooshing in her head. For that alone, Alec Howell must die.
The trees thin now and the tobacco field appears, or what I assume is the tobacco field – I’ve never seen a crop growing before. Plants as tall as a man, with fat leaves of bright green and gold, harvested bunches of them hanging like sheaves of brown paper bags from a thatch-roofed colonnade along the edge of the field. And, just beyond it now, a line of tin huts.
And a man jumping out of the nearest one to halt our further progress. He is bow-legged and pig-tailed and screaming above the barking dingo at his side: ‘What you want?’
He has a large knife in his belt, it must be a foot long. It is a machete.
‘G’day, Sam,’ Buckley says more steadily than seems humanly possible. ‘I’ve got a Miss Jones here to see your brother, Ah Ling, about a medical matter.’
‘Who you?’ The man steps closer, squinting myopically; denim trousers filthy with who knows what muck, face wizened and hollowed by some other, internal purulence.
‘Buckley – Roo Buckley. Old cobber of Wheeler’s.’
‘Ah! Yeah, Mick Wheeler, he a good bloke. Yeah, you want Ling? You see him up there. My brother, Ling. Last door up there.’ He waves towards the line of huts, the last one set a little way off from the others, towards the far corner of the tobacco field. But he doesn’t step out of our path. He squints again and says to Buckley: ‘You want smoke?’ That doesn’t sound like a question so much as a demand.
‘Wheeler’ll have a four-pound sack of stripped, thanks, chum,’ says Buckley, as if he’s asking for a sack of sugar, and I take in a long, deep breath, as if I might will some of his cool composure into me.
‘Yeah, yeah, good. Ten bob for Mick.’ The exchange is as quick as that, Tiger Sam throwing a hessian bag of the stuff at Buckley’s feet, and then squinting yet again, at Mr Wilberry now: ‘Who this man?’ He might change his mind about us yet; his nostrils flare as if he’s trying to discern some plot in Mr Wilberry’s scent.
‘He’s me mate, Jack Smith,’ Buckley replies, and no one might disbelieve him, the lie comes so easily, while Mr Wilberry doesn’t blink, his expression remaining mild and pleasant as it ever is.
‘Jack Smith.’ The Chinaman laughs at who knows what. Yellow-toothed, utterly repulsive; if this is the devil come for Alec Howell, he could not be more appropriately designed: an evil Oriental cartoon. ‘Yeah, you go, you go.’ He waves us away and he and his dingo disappear back into his hut with a jangle of tin as the wire screen whips shut behind them.
Buckley takes us slowly up the cartwheel ruts that run along the front of these crude dwellings. The second hut along is open-fronted, doorless, more like some sort of work shed than a hut for living in, if life is what people have here. As we pass it, inside I can just spy men playing cards, white men, smoking, one asleep on the dirt floor, testament, if one were needed, that opium should never be made available outside a hospital dispensary. The air is languorous, suffocating, the reek of manure from the field mingling with some other sweet, cloying smell. Even the flies are tired and listless here. Yet in between this hut and the next a child plays under a line of washing, a little girl playing peg dollies, as any child might. Her hair shines like black lacquer but
she doesn’t look up from her game for me to see her face, see if she is a mix, like me, and sorrow stills my fear now as nothing else might. Sorrow for that happy girl I was, with Gret, running through the misted daffodils at Echo Point, pegs clinking in our apron pockets.
‘Stay there in the cart, Miss Jones,’ Buckley says to me as we pull up at the final hut. ‘I’ll see this Ah Ling first, and see to it that you won’t be alone with him.’
‘No. Please. I must be alone with him,’ I insist, with some sort of tortured whine. ‘Along with the general discussion of his cures, I must ask about things I do not want you or any man to hear – things of a feminine nature, and of a personal nature. Please. Please don’t make me explain myself further.’
‘Oh. Righto, Miss.’ Buckley scrunches the brim of his hat in some shame, and Mr Wilberry clears his throat in agreement. Men, I see, really are astonishingly easy to manipulate in this way, aren’t they? Good men, anyway. May Ah Ling be as easy to plead with as these good men are, and as compassionate. Please.
Please, help me.
Buckley knocks on the timber frame of the wire screen of the hut and I send my plea into the blackness beyond, as Mr Wilberry bends to me again: ‘Nothing you might need to say would ever shock or disturb me – are you sure you must be alone?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ I can’t meet his eyes. If I did, what truth might rattle out of me? I look at the hut instead: contrary to the newspaper reports, it doesn’t in fact have a thatched roof, but it is the sturdiest of the constructions here and the most home-like in appearance. It has a window by the door, and a garden bed of herbs at the front here; beside it a small patch of some other unfamiliar crop and then beside that – oh, I see the poppies. They are paler in colour than the poppies on the Track, their petals fading to mauve and falling in this blinding, blanching sun. One tilts its face to me over the raised edge of the herb garden: its centre is a black heart. A field of black-hearted poppies stretching up to the forest. A lone worker in amongst them, bending to them under his conical coolie hat, harvesting the bud sap, I suppose.
‘When my mother was ill, in her last days, I was privy to much medical discussion that – well, you know, cattleman’s son and all that, there’s no mystery about the nature of things for me. I –’
‘No. No, please, Mr Wilberry.’ I just about scramble from the buggy in my haste to be away from him. He cannot be privy to this.
‘You tell the lady to come, yes.’ I hear Ah Ling before I see him, a spry, round-faced man as vivid with health as his brother is sick with living death. He wears a black silk cap and long, frogged shirt: as traditional as his brother is … whatever he has become.
‘Dr Ah Ling?’ I hold out my hand to him and my calmness surprises me, now that I am finally here, now that this chance is mine to take, my voice is crisp and bold.
‘I am Ling.’ He holds the wire screen open, avoiding my hand. ‘You come in, come in, tell me what happens, I help.’
‘Thank you.’ I nod, once more making my silent prayer to whomever or whatever might listen or care. ‘I hope you can help.’
Inside the hut, it takes my eyes some moments to adjust to the dimness; I can barely see the chair Ling directs me to: ‘You sit, sit, lady.’
‘Thank you.’ I feel my way, and shelves appear behind his white moon face. Jars and canisters of all kinds, his dispensary, I suppose. There is another screen door on the other side of the room, opposite the one I entered by, and a breeze of that sickly sweet smell pervades through it. What is that smell? The poppies? No, they have no scent, I don’t think. Perhaps it’s the opium.
‘So, you tell me what happens.’ Ling sits over the other side of the table, as any doctor might, clasping his hands, waiting to hear what ails.
‘Well,’ I begin, as far and as firmly as my rehearsal had taken me, ‘as it happens, I am about to become a student of Medicine, at Sydney University.’
‘Ah, good, good.’ He smiles and nods, but not in any way that would suggest he is especially impressed by that one way or another, and somehow I find this encouraging.
‘I am interested in the case you treated,’ I continue. ‘The man with the tumour in his arm. It’s quite famous. I heard about it from the newspaper, and –’
‘Yes, good, good,’ Ling interrupts, smiling and nodding now as if urging me to get to the point, not moved in any way by my attempt to flatter him.
‘I would like to discuss your treatment of the tumour.’
‘Yes.’ He nods, but he has ceased smiling. ‘All medicine is different, one case to the next. No person is the same as the next one. What is it I will help you with?’
Right. I see. He is not going to discuss his methods with me. Too bad – it’s hardly of great importance to me now. Let’s get to the point. I place my hands on the table before him. I close my eyes: I am the blade. I open them and say to him: ‘Yes, I am here on a personal matter. A very personal matter. My sister is pregnant to a man who raped her. I would like advice on aborting the foetus safely, what quantity of pennyroyal or tansy might be used, or perhaps you might have an altern –’
Ling holds up a hand and says: ‘You go to a different place for this. Not here.’
What? ‘No. Please.’ I beg. ‘Someone must help us.’
‘Not here.’ He nods, telling me he can’t possibly help us: he is no abortionist, I must suppose, and he is possibly offended by the suggestion that I may have considered him as such.
Tears sting and they are as strange as they are hot, sliding down my face. Tears that I have not shed for so long. When did I last cry? Homesick at school, knowing Gret would finish in the junior dorm at the end of the year and I would be a baby alone without her the next. Idle tears of a happy girl who longed for Christmas at Libby’s with Mother and Papa. Then tracks along my cheeks I could barely feel in the churchyard, and another churchyard, for them. But these tears? These are for the end. For defeat. Because no one will help us. No one can. This was fantasy all along, base and pathetic. A Chinese doctor will help me solve all our problems in one shake of a mystical chicken bone or some other ludicrous thing? I am a fool, a desperate fool. I reach for the wishbone in my pocket and snap it in half again with my thumb, ripping through the pound note again, too. What do I do now? Purchase a bottle of oil of pennyroyal from the nearest chemist and risk killing my sister with a fatal quantity? No. I’ll ask at a brothel; there must be a brothel madam in town who will know. Give me a packet of bitter-apple menstrual pills and tell me how many might be effective. But how will I find that madam? How will I ask … who will I ask? Mr Wilberry?
‘Don’t cry.’ Ling taps the table between us with his index finger. ‘Don’t cry, lady. You tell me, who is the man who hurt your sister?’
‘Who hurt my sister?’ The truth lashes out of me: ‘Our uncle, Alec Howell, the district surgeon, of Bathurst Hospital – a real doctor. He hurts my sister.’
Ling sits back in his chair and lets out a long breath. His eyes fix on mine, expressionless but regarding me with an intensity that stops the course of my tears. He asks: ‘Howell, the surgeon?’
‘Yes.’
‘He hurt your sister in this way? He make her pregnant?’
‘Yes.’
‘He has hurt many in this way,’ Ling says simply, with that same expressionless intensity.
Many? The word spears into me as the greatest truth yet: of course Alec Howell has hurt many. Of course he has. I know this. I feel his beard scrape along my neck: Good girl. My scalp screaming; burning. I hear Greta yelp: Please! I see him in some memory not my own waltzing round the ballroom of the Gulgong Star, reptilian senses hunting for her, the next one, and the next one, whoever she might be.
Ling clasps each of his hands into fists on the table before me. ‘I will help you.’
‘You will help us be rid of the child?’
‘I will help you be rid of the one who hu
rt your sister.’
A force charges through me at this, a maelstrom of terror and relief. ‘Thank you. Oh God, thank you. You mean …?’
Ling stands and searches the shelves behind him, selecting various items and placing them on the table: a beaker of translucent amber liquid, a jar of some sort of dried herb, then a gold satin box of something else, and three small red beans placed on a little green dish. The beans jiggle like red beetles on the dish, as he pours the merest amount of the liquid, about half an ounce, into a tiny blue bottle that’s stopped with a syringe dropper; a medicine bottle, just like one that might carry any household serum for colds and bellyaches or such chemicals as tartaric acid for making jam. Do I dare to believe this can be occurring?
‘What is that?’ I ask.
‘Dragon tears,’ he says. ‘Carry the bad spirits away.’
It looks like castor oil to me, in viscosity and colour, and it is not for me to know what it is. From a drawer at his side he takes a small square of fine paper and makes a funnel with it, placing it in the neck of the bottle. He adds the herbs, half a tiny pewter spoon of one that looks like dried lavender, powdery specks of some purple flower, perhaps a drachm of it; he says: ‘This will go to the stomach.’ He adds as much again of one that looks like thyme from the satin box: ‘This will go to the mind.’ Then he grinds the three tiny beans in a mortar with a pinch of what looks like lunar caustic from a snuff box and adds that to the bottle too: ‘This will make the fever that will go to the heart.’
My own heart is racing once more, to have this done. ‘Will it be quick?’ I ask Ling. ‘Will it look –?’ Like murder.
‘It will be one symptom coming after the next,’ he explains as he stoppers the bottle and slowly swirls the mixture. ‘First will come the stomach sickness, then the madness and the fever. It will look like typhoid. But quick, yes. Only half a day, maybe less. Howell is not a big man in size, yes? Maybe less than half a day.’