The Ghost by the Billabong

by Jackie French

  She hadn’t liked Rose’s fiancé. Easy to think why a woman might want to leave him. Harder to understand why one would marry him, apart from his wealth, and the glamour of America.

  Nor had she liked Rose. Too fashionable, too citified, too happy to be leaving Australia, too confident that America was the centre of the world and she would be part of it. An alcoholic? Rose had drunk too many martinis that last evening at the Windsor. But surely that bright young woman had not been an alcoholic? Could she have become one?

  If the girl’s story were true, Anna had been dead at least two years when Rose had left her husband and married again. Or not married, for after all there had been no divorce, though she had apparently at least made a half-decent charade of pretending marriage to Jed’s father.

  The story was possible. Just, remotely, possible. The more she thought about it, the more the scrap of possibility grew.

  The girl had clearly been trying to manipulate them at first. Surely an honest girl would have told them more, her father’s name, her own real name. And yet there had been honesty there too. What had the girl said? I tell the truth. Well, yes. But she had not told the whole truth, not by a long shot. She wished the girl was simply an obvious confidence trickster, as the last girl had been. So like Anna, and Rose, to have complicated Tommy’s last months with someone like Jed. Which wasn’t fair. But when your husband was dying you were entitled sometimes, surely, to be unfair.

  Tommy’s eyes were shut, seeing who knew what. ‘Would like to know . . . before I die . . . what happened to poor Rose.’

  Matilda clutched his frail hand, the only comfort she could give. So many police and private detectives had failed to find one woman. Had Rose really fallen for Jed’s father? But why vanish? Divorce was almost impossible in Australia, and women lost custody of their children if they were the guilty party, had committed adultery or deserted their husbands. It took many years too, even if there were sufficient grounds. But in some states in America you could get divorced in weeks, and Jed was surely too young to be Rose’s husband’s child. Rose could not have worried she might lose custody of her daughter, as so many divorced women did in Australia.

  ‘Give Jed . . . Anna’s . . . old room.’ The whisper hissed above the oxygen.

  Matilda froze. ‘I can’t. She’s gone.’ And, because she could never lie to Tommy, ‘I told her to go.’

  She hated the pain in his eyes — the betrayal. Even worse, that Tommy understood immediately why, in part, she’d done it.

  ‘Get her back.’ The whisper was faint, and firm.

  It was the right thing to do. But she couldn’t. It wasn’t just admitting she had been wrong. She couldn’t bear to have the girl in the house, turning her husband’s last days into a mockery of hope.

  Equally impossible to leave the girl unprotected.

  A whisper of common sense emerged from the pain. ‘I’ll call Nancy. She’s at River View today. She can track her down. The girl can stay there, get a job there. They can always use more hands.’

  The settlement she had established for unemployed families in the Depression hadn’t been needed for decades: the establishment of the biscuit factory and then World War II had meant full employment for the district, even for women. Now River View was a rehabilitation home for children crippled by polio, thalidomide and the many unknowns that meant a child might not have use of their limbs, or even limbs at all.

  ‘Should be here.’ Tommy had never been one for speeches. Needed none, now.

  ‘Darling, think about it. It will only take Jeffries a few days, a week maybe, to see if she’s telling the truth. If she isn’t . . .’

  Tommy met her eyes. ‘I think she is . . . telling the truth.’ He paused again, to harvest breath. ‘What she hopes . . . is true.’

  Another pause. Matilda counted seven shallow gasps inside the mask before Tommy added, ‘I . . . like her. Still doesn’t mean . . . she is Rose’s . . . daughter.’

  ‘Nancy will keep an eye on her.’ Matilda trusted her daughter-in-law’s judgement too. ‘She’ll only be half an hour away.’

  And if — when — the girl’s claim was shown to be false, she could stay at River View if she wanted to, as a maid or nurse’s aide. A home and a job provided for her. No need for guilt at all. She tried to ignore the memory of seventy years earlier, when she too had been offered the position of a servant, here in this house, and had coldly refused.

  Matilda had survived, and found fulfilment and joy. But she’d had friends to help her, even in those dreadful days. Not least her very best friend, who was now lying in front of her and dying.

  A knock at the door. It opened. Anita wheeled in a trolley: two bowls of chicken-and-vegetable soup, a plate of bread and butter. She’d bring the coffee later, with the day’s newspapers for Matilda to read to Tommy.

  Matilda rose. She would phone Nancy. Darling Nancy, who could manage anything, including a pretender to her father-in-law’s family. And then she would come back here.

  She would spread one linen napkin over the sheet, another on her lap, and spoon the soup, a spoonful for him, and one for herself, knowing each spoonful, every breath, marked one less remaining in the small store her greatest love had left.

  Chapter 9

  JED

  It was as if she had reality knocked out of her when she walked out the door. But if she turned into a ghost now, that old woman would have won. She tried to follow the ghost’s advice. Listen. Watch.

  Cicadas shrieked from the gum trees. Even the sun seemed to grin at her, high, hot and pitiless. She could feel eyes upon her as she trudged down the driveway. Blokes in the shearing shed. Women from the houses down towards the river. She could try knocking on their doors and asking for a lift into town, but they’d probably refuse and, anyway, she had nowhere to go, so it didn’t matter when she got there.

  She hesitated at the end of the driveway, where gravel met the bitumen. Go back down the road the way she had come? Or head the other way, into Gibber’s Creek?

  Part of her wanted to try to find the ghost again, and his magic sausages at the billabong. But he had just been passing through, just like she had been. She’d also learned the hard way that vagrants could be friendly one day, and turn on you the next. There was nothing for her at the billabong. Nothing for her anywhere.

  She’d head towards Gibber’s Creek, and the main road. Go wherever the next lift took her, and the one after that. Ask at truck stops if anyone wanted a dishwasher, hope there might be a room that went with the job. At least with kitchen work you got to eat the leftovers, stale corned-beef-and-chutney sandwiches, mostly. Luxury would mean never eating another sad corned-beef sandwich again. But a truck-stop job probably wouldn’t be near a school or a tech college where she could study. She’d need a library too . . .

  The road seemed hotter than the day before. Air wrinkled in the heat. She should be crying, her big chance gone. She should have accepted the thousand dollars. Should have kept her mouth shut.

  She couldn’t cry. Couldn’t allow herself to feel. The ghost had told her not to let herself become a ghost, but he’d been wrong. Ghosts were invisible. Invisible was safer. The less real you were, the less the pain. Pain from what had been done to her. Even more at what she had done. Unbearable pain.

  Be here, the ghost had said. But she no longer wanted to be here. People, sheep, gum trees. None of them wanted her, nor did she want them. Did not even want herself . . .

  A truck drove past. She hadn’t even stuck out her thumb. She was tired. Not sleepy tired, or hungry tired. Too much of herself had been used up trying to survive. It was all so hard. And running didn’t stop the pain for long. There were the moments between lifts, smiling at the drivers, between scavenging food, when memory took over again. Memory and self-loathing . . .

  A station wagon had rolled to a stop beside her. She hadn’t even noticed it was coming. She stepped back instinctively as the driver peered out. Never trust a man who stops for you when you haven’
t stuck your thumb out.

  But this driver was a woman. Dark haired, darkly tanned skin, forty perhaps, and wiry. ‘Jed Kelly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good name. I’m Nancy of the Overflow.’

  Who was she kidding? ‘I don’t believe you.’

  The woman laughed. ‘I am, you know. They named me Nancy for my grandfather Clancy. The actual Clancy. And I live at Overflow. And someone called Jed Kelly has no right to laugh at Nancy of the Overflow. Hop in.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Matilda rang me. Mrs Thompson, I mean. She’s my mother-in-law.’

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Jed warily. Was this woman about to drive her to the Gibber’s Creek police station? Demand she be arrested for attempted fraud?

  ‘Matilda said you are probably an imposter claiming to be Tommy’s great-granddaughter, but she’d lost her temper and thrown you out and Tommy had given her what for. Matilda didn’t use those exact words, of course, but that was the gist. She told me to look after you.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Nancy grinned, suddenly looking younger, but Jed was aware of eyes as shrewd as her parents’-in-law. ‘She didn’t specify. I think she assumed I might offer you a job, but how about lunch to begin with? I can give you a bed at Overflow for the night, at least. There’s no train till tomorrow morning, but I’ll drive you to the station then if you like.’

  Jed shrugged. ‘I’ve nowhere to go. And no money to get there if I did.’ And for once, she had eaten enough today.

  ‘Ah. In that case “looking after you” means a bed for as long as you need it.’ Nancy pushed open the passenger door. ‘We can talk about whether you want a job or not later. Hop in.’

  Jed hesitated. There was no reason not to get into the station wagon. It might mean that the Dragon was relenting, that she might even repeat her offer of a thousand dollars. It might perhaps mean exactly what Jed had hoped this morning, a place for her to stay, to study. And yet the steps to the car suddenly seemed like the longest journey she had ever made.

  ‘Are you coming or not?’ Nancy demanded.

  Jed slid into the passenger’s seat. Her feet crunched on ice-cream wrappers and what looked like half a set of Lego.

  Children. She could face the Dragon. Face ghosts, and men who stopped their cars for all the wrong reasons. But she wasn’t sure that she could face children. Not young ones, not a baby. Please, let there not be a baby . . .

  ‘Excuse the mess.’ Nancy accelerated without looking in the rear-view mirror, as if she expected the world — or at least the Gibber’s Creek traffic — to watch out for her.

  Jed watched the paddocks pass on their left, the Drinkwater homestead, more paddocks, then the bush and glint of river on the right. They flashed past the turn-off to the billabong. No smoke from a campfire, but they were going too fast to see if a ghost — or ghosts — still lurked there.

  ‘Where are we going?’ She tried to make it sound as if she were interested, as if she wouldn’t rather keep driving forever, the changes out the window (almost) enough to keep memory away.

  ‘To Overflow.’ The car swerved around a corner at a speed a racing driver would have envied. ‘My husband, Michael, and I manage Overflow and Drinkwater, together. About another twenty minutes’ drive. Used to take most of a day to get to town from our place before they put the new road in. That was when Matilda was on the council.’

  ‘Why am I not surprised?’

  Nancy laughed. ‘It wasn’t Matilda’s idea. She was as cross as a chook about it, muttering about hordes of tourists cluttering up her road. Not that there have been. I’m pretty sure the shire engineer was trying to curry favour though.’

  Was Overflow a property or a town? Jed tried to remember the poem. Not that it mattered. ‘Do you always do what Mrs Thompson — Matilda — says?’

  ‘Nope. I’m a terrible daughter-in-law. But she’s an impossible mother-in-law, so we get on all right. Iris — that’s Michael’s brother’s wife — is terrified of her. Probably why Iris and Jim live in Sydney.’

  ‘You’re not worried you might lose some of your inheritance to me?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Nancy again. ‘Get off the road, you feathered twit,’ she added to a duck that was walking rather than flying across the bitumen in front of them. ‘You’d think the stupid birds wanted to end up roasted. Overflow’s mine; and Michael is half-owner of Drinkwater already, and will own it all when Matilda dies. The rest is just money.’

  ‘Only someone who’s always had money would say that.’

  Nancy raised an eyebrow. ‘You’d be surprised. Hold onto your hat.’

  ‘Why . . .? Aaahh!’ The car leaped over the brow of a hill then, well, flew for a few seconds before it landed with a thump.

  Nancy cast her a wicked look. ‘The kids love that bit. Nearly there.’

  Jed gripped the seat and they lurched around a corner. She wondered how long it took a normal driver to travel this distance. An hour? Two?

  The car swerved again, onto a dirt road that Jed realised was a driveway. An arch of shaggy-barked gum trees, each trunk the size of a small room, paddocks of sheep behind them, an orchard, a flock of red-and-green birds that rose shrieking, protesting at the interruption to their meal, squares of crops she couldn’t identify, and then a house.

  A big house. Drinkwater was big, but neat big. This looked like a truck of painted wooden boxes had been dropped from a great height — white-painted wings led this way and that, linked by railed verandas. Ramps instead of steps added to the craziness, leading down from each wing into the garden, which was not a garden, but roughly mown grass and trees apparently grown solely to support ropes, swings and a flying fox that looped from tree to tree.

  The car skidded to a stop. Nancy opened the door. ‘We’re home!’ she yelled towards the house.

  No reply. Nancy hauled a box of groceries from the back seat. ‘No one home. Come on in.’

  ‘Who did you think might be here?’

  ‘Mum, sometimes. Maybe Michael, but he’s drenching over at Drinkwater. He’ll probably grab something to eat there.’

  Jed had a vision of a farmer getting drenched under a shower, boots and all. She suspected Nancy referred to another kind of drenching entirely. But there was too much else to take in for Jed to ask.

  Nancy carried the groceries effortlessly up one of the ramps, then pushed open a door with her boot.

  The room was a kitchen, had once perhaps been two rooms. A giant fridge. Ten chairs along a large wooden kitchen table. An empty wheelchair.

  Whose?

  ‘Sit,’ said Nancy.

  Jed sat. The battered table was already laid with tomato sauce, salt, pepper, butter dish, three kinds of jam in jars with home-made labels, a large jar of Vegemite and another of peanut butter, a smaller mustard pot and a windmill that might contain sugar. All looked as if they were permanent residents.

  ‘Sorry about the mess,’ said Nancy, not sounding sorry at all. ‘We keep the chaos out of the dining room for when Matilda visits.’ She shoved the box onto a bench, clicked on an electric jug, spooned tea into a teapot, dumped a couple of cake tins on the table and opened them, then hauled Tupperware containers out of the fridge.

  The first cake tin held jam drops, the second an apple teacake that looked like it had been grabbed by small fingers, not sliced with a knife. Bread, a giant wholemeal loaf with a blackened top, and a breadsaw. A leg of lamb, or what was left of it; the remnants of two roast chickens, lying side by side; and a slab of cheese.

  ‘Eat,’ said Nancy, filling the teapot, and making no attempt to put the food neatly on plates, or even to take off the lids. ‘You’d better hurry before the horde arrives and scoffs the lot. There’s egg-and-bacon pie somewhere in the fridge too. It’s Michael’s favourite. He picks one up every couple of days from Drinkwater.’

  Surely a wife would resent her husband still being fed from his childhood home? But Nancy just shoved the second cake tin toward
s her.

  ‘Try the apple cake. Mum makes it.’

  She plonked the teapot down, two cups, a plate.

  Jed stared at the vast array of food, the plate, then began to cut the bread. Home made, by the look of it, a shape no baker would sell. ‘Did you bake the bread?’

  Nancy laughed. ‘I can’t cook. Well, I could make you a nice lizard stew, but don’t worry, I won’t. No, Anita — you met her at Drinkwater — baked the bread, and the egg-and-bacon pie. She thinks Michael will starve if he has to rely on my cooking.’ No resentment there.

  ‘Would he?’ Jed meant it as a joke, but Nancy’s face shadowed.

  ‘No one I love will ever starve.’

  Jed buttered her bread, then added chicken to make a sandwich. Stuffing: wonderful. She bit into it, suddenly feeling nothing but the wonder of soft fresh bread and butter, roast chicken, the lemon tang of the stuffing. ‘You’re not eating?’

  Nancy shrugged. ‘Not hungry. Though, hell, I’d better eat or Michael will tell me off.’ She took a slice of bread, buttered it, covered it with jam, stared at it for three seconds, bit. She looked up at Jed’s visible bemusement. ‘I starved in the war.’

  ‘Really? Why? How?’

  ‘I was in a Japanese internment camp. Long story. I don’t feel hunger now. Don’t even notice I haven’t eaten.’ She grinned. ‘Until I faint. Then Michael gives me what for.’

  ‘Leave him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If your husband slaps you around. No bloke should do that to a woman. Leave him.’

  Nancy choked on her bread, grabbed the teapot, poured, gulped. ‘Michael slap me around? He treats me like I’m made of china. He doesn’t tell me to do anything often, but when he does, he’s right.’ She sat back with her cup of tea, sipping it, considering Jed’s face. ‘You’ve known blokes who hit women?’

  Jed shrugged. ‘Bet it happens in more houses than you think. Men have a few beers after work, a few more when they get home. They’re cranky about something so they start lashing out at the family. The women keep quiet because there’s nothing they can do about it. Women mostly can’t earn enough to support a family. Not everyone is lucky enough to own an Overflow.’