The Ghost by the Billabong

by Jackie French

  She glanced at him; she was panting, her hands trembling again. His wrinkles had tightened in concern. ‘You’re back in your past, ain’t you? When bad things happened?’

  She managed a nod.

  ‘Well, you come back from there. I’m an old man. It’s okay for me to be a ghost. But you’re too young. You understand?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You listen. I learned this the hard way and you’re getting it for free. Bad things happened to you? Stuff that hurts?’

  Jed nodded, still fighting to keep the memories away.

  ‘Right, this is how to shove ’em away. Think of now, not then. What can you smell?’

  ‘Sausages.’

  ‘Yeah, but old Fred won’t always be around with sausages to help you. What else can you smell?’

  You, she thought. Sweat and gum leaves. But he was kind so she couldn’t say that and, anyway, it was a fresh sweat smell. He must wash in the river. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Wrong answer.’

  ‘But there isn’t . . . I can’t . . .’ Jed stopped. The breath rolled through her nostrils, clean and cold. And yes, there were scents here. Good ones. ‘Wet soil,’ she said slowly. ‘Hot soil that’s wet now. Cold air. And the billabong. It’s, um, fishier than the smell of the river.’

  ‘Ah, now you’re getting it. What can you hear?’

  A million drops, slowed by the trees and falling to the soil. Something too low to hear properly, like the earth exhaling after the day and letting night-time in. All at once the fire-lit gum trees weren’t the same. Some carried their branches like arms reaching to the clouds. Others drooped like diamond-splattered umbrellas.

  She smiled.

  The ghost smiled in return. ‘Good girl. You’re back here again. When the bad things bite, remember you’re here now. Think of what you can smell, what you can hear. Think you can do it again?’

  ‘I . . . I think so.’

  ‘Takes practice. You’ve got a life ahead of you, girl.’

  Colour faded a little from the world. A life ahead of her? Maybe, if her plan worked and she could convince the old folks at Drinkwater. Because if she couldn’t, this might be as far as the road could take her. As far as her strength could manage . . .

  The ghost stared at her, intent. ‘You need to make the most of being alive while you can, girlie. Still not going to tell me what you’re doing so far off the beaten track?’

  ‘No.’ She waited for him to insist, even to turn mean.

  He didn’t.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said mildly. ‘Time for shut-eye, Jed Kelly. I’ll stoke up the fire in a while. No need for a blanket tonight.’

  She didn’t have a blanket. Carrying a blanket made you look homeless, which meant shopkeepers looked at you suspiciously and café owners wouldn’t give you a few days’ work as a dishwasher either. Easier to find a newspaper in a bin and line her clothes with it to keep warm at night. But there were no rubbish bins out there.

  She touched the outline of the book in her shoulder bag. It felt wrong to go to sleep without reading first — she usually needed at least a short visit to a world between the covers where things made sense and endings were tidy and people were happy. But torches were too bulky to shoplift, and candles flickered unless you were in a draught-proof room. She could probably make out the words by firelight, but it would seem unfriendly to read with the man . . . or ghost . . . beside her. He hadn’t even glanced at The Beasts all the time she had been there.

  She settled her bag at the far end of the shelter and placed her head on it. Her feet poked out beyond the canvas, but the rain had stopped and the fire glowed. And she had a ghost to guard her sleep. She shut her eyes and felt the fire’s heat cover her like a quilt.

  ‘I’d sing you a lullaby, if I knew one, but the songs I know got words you don’t sing to a young lady.’

  Where did he think she’d grown up? A sweet little house with a sweet little mum and no bad world past the front door? I bet I know every word you do and more, she thought. And slept.

  Chapter 2

  JED

  Jed woke to the sound of a sheep. Not the sheep in the paddock by the road, but a sheep by the billabong.

  ‘Baaa?’ it said.

  Jed opened her eyes. Light slanted gold from a sun slung low across the river. There was no sign of the ghost from the night before, or of the canvas shelter.

  Instead a girl sat by the billabong, about ten metres away, scratching a sheep behind its horns. The girl had long wheat-coloured hair. She wore a dress to her ankles, not a modern Indian dress or a maxi skirt, but in some indefinable way a dress from perhaps a century earlier. A man with dark skin and laughter wrinkles sat next to her, a sack bulging on his lap. The early sunlight shimmered across the billabong, and the figures shimmered too — the laughing man, the smiling girl, the sheep, its knees weak with ecstasy as the girl scratched it.

  ‘You’re not going to let me cut that woolly fool’s throat, are you?’ the man asked resignedly.

  ‘No! Why was it trying to get into the tucker bag?’

  ‘Smelling for the sinkers, I reckon.’ The man took out a brown-white blob from the sack. He grinned. ‘Go on then. Feed the blasted thing. But we ain’t taking a sheep with us.’

  ‘Why not? We won’t even have to feed it. It could eat grass!’ The girl held the blob out to the sheep. It grabbed it with surprisingly long teeth and began to chew. Neither girl nor man — nor the sheep — glanced towards Jed.

  Ghosts, Jed thought. Real ghosts, not like the gnome last night. And from so far back in the past, if their clothes were any guide, that they were probably dead. Because the ghosts she sometimes saw could be from any time, the future too, as though time had worn places of great pain or happiness thin and transparent, allowing her a glimpse of what had happened there.

  Few ghosts were as solid as this girl and man. And sheep. If she spoke, they might turn around and see her too.

  She didn’t. Why spoil their happiness with a tormented ghost from the future? And this day of theirs must have been extraordinarily happy to have survived the grinding sands of time.

  ‘Baa?’ said the ghost sheep, swallowing its latest mouthful with extreme enjoyment. It turned its head. For a second the sheep looked straight at Jed.

  Then they were gone. Girl, man, sheep.

  Jed waited, still and silent, wondering if they might return. But all she could hear was a fluting bird call high above her and the plop of a frog leaping into the billabong. Yet the echo of happiness remained, comforting, companionable. She could even still hear the sheep . . .

  No, she thought. Those were the sounds of the sheep in the paddock across the road.

  She sat up and looked around, in case the ghost from last night was still nearby. But there was no sign of him. Even the fire was blackened, and when she felt the air above it, cold and sodden. Its ashes could have been there for days, or even years.

  Had the rain put out the flames? Had a living man poured water on it when he folded his tent and slipped away? Or had it been a ghost fire, ghost warmth, ghost sausages? She looked at the sandy ground. The rain had washed away all prints, even hers.

  But she wasn’t hungry. Or rather she was hungry, but just with an I-want-breakfast sort of hunger, not the faintness that meant you had to breathe consciously and slowly just to keep going, going, going till there was a chance of food, leftovers on a plate at a truckies’ café (choose the table that hasn’t yet been cleared, eat the scraps on the plates while you pretend to look at the menu, then head to the loo, wash and leave).

  Those sausages last night had been real, so the fire must have been real. And the man too. Definitely. Probably. Almost certainly. Because during the past two years sometimes nightmares had become real and what was real was nightmarish, and when you saw ghosts flickering out of the corner of your eye you began to wonder if you could tell what was real, and what was not.

  She needed breakfast. She rummaged in her bag, drew the biscuits out and op
ened the packet, then leaned back on a tree to eat half the packet. No, all the packet, because she must be nearly there — the truckie who’d given her a lift had said that Drinkwater was only eight miles up the road, and she must have already walked at least two of them.

  Whatever else awaited her at Drinkwater, there’d be food. And she could conquer the Thompsons better after a decent breakfast. A whole packet of squished-fly biscuits was about the best breakfast she knew. And a book to read while she ate, even if it was just her ‘emergency’ book and she knew most of it by heart already — John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, about the world being overrun by venomous plants after falling stars had made anyone who watched them blind, and a few survivors of a vicious plague trying to rebuild civilisation.

  A book she could read again and again, a book about good people, doing good things in a crazy world. She loved sci-fi for that: seeing the ‘what if’ and how it could be survived, even one where nearly everyone in the world died in a plague or went blind or was eaten by the triffids.

  She wouldn’t mind most people vanishing, even if she got triffids in their place. People who hurt others. People who saw others being hurt but didn’t want to get involved, would rather pretend it wasn’t happening, who pulled their lace curtains so they didn’t see what was happening just beyond them. Sometimes she hated lace-curtain people even more than those who inflicted the pain.

  She found she was shaking again. Pain. Pain and blood and terror, and the worst had been her fault. You could run from what others had done to you, but it was harder to escape your own guilt. Just keep moving so you’re too busy surviving to remember . . .

  The whisper might have been the wind. It might even have been last night’s ghost, but when she turned there was no one there, just shadows. But the words lingered. When the bad things bite, remember you’re here now.

  She forced herself to smell: squished flies, the comforting scent of a much loved book.

  Gum leaves, different from last night, as the sun dried them. Wet ashes.

  She forced herself to look: to see the trees’ arms raised towards the sky, the lamb’s-fleece clouds. They were beautiful. The whole day was beautiful.

  She could hear birds — four, no, five different calls. The rustle of a snake . . . She snapped around and grinned. No, a lizard in the leaves, shiny skinned and bronzed as the new two-cent coins.

  And she could still hear the laughter of the girl ghost too. Feel the happiness like sunlight on her skin. She took another biscuit from the packet, bit it, tasted it, really tasted it. I’m here, she thought, as she swallowed the lovely fatty pastry and the sweet fruity jam inside, and she read a whole chapter while she ate the rest.

  The past was gone. Strength returned. If she was going to have a future, she couldn’t flee now. She had to face the Thompsons.

  She could do this. Time to stop running. Time to be a person again, and not a ghost.

  She used her finger to find the last crumbs, finishing them regretfully. Time to get ready.

  Time to look innocent. Respectable. Clean. Totally, absolutely trustworthy.

  She looked around carefully before she undressed, to make sure last night’s ghost really had vanished, then washed all over, even her hair, using the scrap of soap she’d taken from the council toilets three towns back.

  Wonderful to be free of grime. She fastened The Beasts into their bra, which she’d outgrown, but that was good because The Beasts looked smaller, then slipped on her only dress: a good one, Crimplene so it didn’t need ironing, twenty-five cents at St Vinnies, but she hadn’t even paid that, had shoved it into her bag and sneaked off with it. She had felt bad about that, but St Vinnies was supposed to help people who had little, and she had about as little as you could have. She suspected the woman at the counter had seen her go off with it too, and had not said anything, which somehow made her feel worse.

  The dress was too long, right down to her knees, but that was good too, because old people didn’t like mini skirts. Would her black eye be a help or a hindrance? She hoped it made her look vulnerable. Not that she could do much about it now. If she waited till the bruise subsided, it might be too late to get what she needed from the Thompsons. And if this didn’t work, she wasn’t sure what to do next.

  Survive. Somehow.

  But this would work. It had to.

  She plaited her hair, still wet. It looked better loose over her shoulders, but plaited was neater and old people, like the Thompsons, trusted neat. Plaits made her look younger and more vulnerable too.

  Eyeliner? She still had the eyebrow pencil that had rolled out of that woman’s make-up bag. She hadn’t stolen it, just hadn’t pointed out where it had gone. Eyeliner was good for the waif look, but maybe no make-up was the way to go. She left the pencil in her bag.

  Should she wash her jeans and T-shirt? No, they’d take too long to dry . . . She realised she was trying to find reasons to delay.

  You can do this, she told herself. How hard can it be? Just one old couple to convince, that’s all. Old people were trusting. Jed Kelly could make today’s sad old country couple believe because they’d want to believe exactly what she wanted to tell them . . .

  The sun gave a small bounce to emerge full and round above the billabong. It must be about seven o’clock. Too early for traffic on this kind of road, except for mums taking kids to school, and mums didn’t pick up hitchhikers. If she started walking now, she’d get to Drinkwater at about eight o’clock.

  That could work too. Ordinary visitors arrived mid-morning. You had to offer someone breakfast if they arrived at eight o’clock. And the best part of the con was the absolutely true part. If the Thompsons kicked her out, she had nowhere else to go.

  Wish me luck, she said to herself, or the ghosts, or the billabong.

  She hung her bag over her shoulder, and began to walk.

  Chapter 3

  FRED

  Fred waited till the girl had reached the road before he let himself move from the tree shadows to eat his sausage, cold from the night before. People do not look at what is there, old Madame had told him in his first month with her circus. They notice movement. When you are still, you vanish. Here in the shifting shadows of early morning the girl had looked straight at him and seen nothing. You got to be a pretty bonzer ghost, thought Fred, after more than twenty-five years.

  He bit the sausage cautiously, careful to avoid his crook teeth. Even a ghost had to eat. The girl had been so tuckered out she hadn’t even stirred when he’d fetched his swag from among the trees and cooked another lot of sausages.

  Jed Kelly. Who did she think she was kidding, with a name like that? Might as well put a sign around her neck that said Con artist. Watch out.

  Who did she plan to con? That was the real question. What was Jed Kelly doing way out there, on a road that led from nowhere to nothing, unless she knew the folks who lived nearby? Not used to the bush either, or she’d have carried something to keep the rain off her. Easy enough to snitch a tarpaulin off a truck at a petrol station while the driver was inside, pigging out on eggs and bacon. Dumps were good spots to forage too.

  If this Jed Kelly didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain, she wouldn’t even know how to catch a fish for her dinner. Which reminded him . . . Fred threw in his fish traps quickly, before the girl got too far ahead. He had to check out what she was up to — not that it was likely to involve Mah and the kids, or even Belle, but better to be sure than sorry.

  She’d have to walk to wherever she was going at this time of the morning. Wouldn’t be any cars for an hour or so. He’d been watching so long he knew the traffic patterns now as well as he knew the best places to catch a turtle — good eating on a turtle — and when the apples on the roadside trees would be ripe, grown from thrown-out apple cores. And the plums and quinces, pears, persimmons and oranges that survived after a farmhouse had been burned or eaten by white ants. Not to mention which householders grew spuds — easy to wriggle your hand down and ban
dicoot a few potatoes from each plant then smooth the soil over; no one would ever know they were gone. A pumpkin here, some cobs of corn there, nothing anyone would miss. Fred managed, and managed well.

  Come winter he’d headed up north, where it was warmer and his bones ached less and where no one would recognise him. Could pick up odd jobs there; even find a place that gave room and board sometimes. Sleep in a proper bed, have a shower, a beer and a yarn after work, head down to the library and look up the newspapers and catch up on what he’d missed, especially the Gibber’s Creek Gazette, see the faces he loved at weddings, fêtes, read the names of their families in birth notices. Small-town papers mentioned everyone at least once a year, and those who were active in the community were there every month or so.

  Coupla places he’d even thought of settling down. That pub out of Narromine with the widowed barmaid; that station up the north-west that had offered him the foreman’s job and a house to go with it.

  But he’d always hit the road again. Told himself for years that he did it because if he settled in one place too long there was more chance of someone talking about him, or putting his face in the paper where someone might recognise it. He didn’t worry about coppers these days — his armed robbery case would be buried under ten tonnes of paperwork, if the silverfish hadn’t eaten it. More danger from one of the blokes he’d served with during the war. Hero Still Alive, the headlines would shout. The whole story would be raked up again. He’d gone to too much trouble to be a ghost to have it ruined now.

  But as the years went by, walking the road, choosing which way to go by keeping the wind on his back, not his face, he’d come to realise he’d chosen this, not had it forced upon him. All his life he’d been a breeze, not a tree. He’d floated into lives and out of them. If he had a home at all as a ghost, it was here, the campsite by the billabong that he’d found a couple of years after his official death, the bush thick enough around to vanish into when a car or horse approached, the river his bathroom and his larder.