Which was why, perhaps, she lived those moments time and time again, seeing his face part into shreds, his small body evaporate till even the sunlight turned red . . .
She woke, sweating, though the night was cool. Michael snored beside her. In the early years, when she woke screaming, he had woken too, held her, comforted her. Now, at least, she dreamed in silence, woke in silence, and was grateful for it. She did not want Michael to share her terror now.
She lay till her heartbeat steadied, then put her hands on her belly, waiting, waiting. At last the baby moved. She relaxed then, a little, enough to sit without shaking, and padded out to the kitchen.
She knew her dreams well enough to know she would not sleep now till the grey grains of dawn spread up from the eastern sky. She slipped out the back door, the night like cold silk against her skin, listening to the noises of the night, the possum clambering across the roof.
The moon looked pregnant too, bobbing in the cloud-dappled sky, its glow erasing the nearby stars. But the stars stretched above the mountain on the other side, as if a vast paintbrush had scattered drops among the black. Enough light to see by, if your feet knew the path, your skin each breath of wind, if you recognised the she-oak scent floating up from the creek, the sheep behind you, the cold tin taste of water in front.
Nancy slid between the trees, feeling the warmth of the soil on her bare feet, and stepped onto the rock, glowing as if it stored the starlight. The water shone like a black mirror.
This was the land that had brought her home, that had given her life again, and love, and now a baby too. If there had been no Overflow, she would have died after Gavin’s death, no reason to keep fighting to stay alive. If Overflow had not fought for her, to bring her back to it, she would have died in Malaya.
She had known that her grip on happiness was too fragile, after those war years, to leave here. She was Nancy of the Overflow. Overflow was part of her, just as she was part of it. Travel too far from these plains, the hills, the river, and she would wither like an autumn leaf and blow away.
Joseph McAlpine understood, a little. But the land that had made his flesh and bones, as it had made hers, did not hold him in its grip as it did her. To him it made sense that a pregnant woman her age and with her history would go to Sydney and see an obstetrician, even though that doctor would almost certainly order her to stay in Sydney for at least six weeks before the baby’s birth, might even insist that she stay for the rest of the pregnancy.
She couldn’t. Did not think her body would even step into the car or train that might take her away. And if the unthinkable — which was too easily thinkable — meant hands forcibly took her from this country, she knew that her body would fail once her heart’s land was no longer there to give her strength. Her baby would be in danger, because for these nine months all the baby had was her, the frail protector who looked so strong, unless you knew about the dreams.
She did not feel guilt over Gavin’s death. Those years when she had blamed herself for almost the entire war and every loss had gone as the omnipotence of youth faded and she knew how much one person could do and could not do. This was a world where children died, even if they were cherished. Neither a hand grenade nor polio asked if a child was loved. You did what you could even though you knew that nothing, ever, would be enough to help each child who needed it.
She rested her hand on the skin above her child. She didn’t know if she felt love yet. A tigress’s protectiveness — a small deep seed of resentment too, that this baby had been so long in coming that it must be her final hope of ever bearing a baby of her blood and flesh, and Michael’s. But mostly she felt terror.
Because even when the sun shone and butterflies flew, you never knew when a dagger could flash out of the clear sky and slice away your heart.
Chapter 49
JED
26 May 1969
Dear Jed,
I’m writing this because the next scene in the book has to be a good one, the first time the Earthlings actually see a Centaurian, and this is a good way to put off tackling that. Also, this morning Scarlett used a spoon to eat her breakfast for the first time in public. It took her three times as long to eat her cornflakes, but everyone cheered at the end. I wish you had been here to see it. I have never seen a kid look so happy.
Nancy says that Scarlett’s upper-body strength is improving so much that she won’t need to be strapped in soon, and one day she’ll even be able to get in and out of her chair by herself. She’s a bright kid. She’s conned me into reading her that book you gave her every night. I think I’m going to have to buy her a new book in self-defence because, if I read it again, I’m going to tear it into small pieces and eat it. Or maybe I should just introduce her to the concept of libraries. Should we both take her to the Gibber’s Creek library this Saturday? We might even risk three ice-cream sundaes at the Bluebell Café.
And on that note, I’d better get back to work again. See you Friday night, as usual.
Love,
Nicholas
The Apollo 9 launch had been successful, the first test for the whole Saturn rocket that would take men to the moon. The next space mission, Apollo 10, had flown within 15,240 metres of the lunar surface. Jed felt envious, but also vaguely sorry for them. Astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young and Eugene Cernan would always be the men who almost landed on the moon, but not quite, a footnote in history, not a headline. Apollo 10 sent images of the moon back to Earth too: fuzzy black-and-white images streaked with interference. Fascinating. Terrifying.
The astronauts had gazed into lunar craters, investigating the surface of the moon in preparation for the eventual landing.
Apollo 11. Next time.
Today Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station celebrated with the ritual splashdown dinner — roast lamb and roast pork, roast potatoes and roast pumpkin, peas and beans and gravy, and vast vats of custard with the pudding.
The whole station was in the canteen, except the few still on duty. Jed knew most of the staff by name now: Mr Grey and Mr Reid, Mr Saxon, Mr Hicks and Mr Sullivan, who’d explained so much about the computers for her to pass on to Tommy.
She glanced over at him, forking up roast lamb with gravy. Mr Sullivan always asked for extra gravy. He’d written a new software program called Sabre to simulate camera commands for the new Apollo video camera and its remote controls. During the simulation testing, which had used a NASA aircraft circling Canberra pretending to be a spacecraft they needed to track, he’d ended the exercises by manoeuvring the video camera in the aircraft to focus on the pin-up girl picture on the flight-deck door. She had heard the applause from the canteen, had imagined blokes in tracking stations across the world applauding too.
Mr Sullivan and Mr Hicks had also created the ‘Miss Honeysuckle’ Christmas printout that everyone still talked about. They’d had the bright idea that pictures could be created using the different shapes and light and shade of letters. So the picture of the pin-up girl had circled the world, been printed out hundreds of times. Amazing: that a picture could be sent from one computer terminal to another!
If Tommy was right, the techniques created here would change the world. One day, perhaps, every office’s computer would be able to talk to computers in other offices. Pictures could be flashed from computer terminal to computer terminal, just like Mr Sullivan’s Miss Honeysuckle had been. She imagined sitting at a computer terminal here, tapping out a message for Nicholas. Instead of his typewriter he’d have a computer terminal, which would be linked to the one every city would have — even country towns like Gibber’s Creek would have one, just as they were getting television.
Or would anyone bother sending pictures by computer? Because after all telexes and faxes could do much the same thing, and you could always speak on a telephone. Maybe no one would bother about a computer network for the world . . .
‘Jed! More custard.’
‘Yes, Mrs Clissold.’
Her schoolbooks waited for her, back in th
e Queanbeyan house, along with the sample exam papers. She ran through the pages she’d memorised last night, by candlelight. It was surprisingly easy to learn outside a classroom, in fact much faster, because all you had to focus on was what might be asked in an exam. She was feeling more and more confident that she could do her HSC this year, at least well enough to get a Teacher’s Scholarship, binding her to teach wherever she was posted for three years after graduation, if not win the harder Commonwealth Scholarship.
She didn’t particularly want to be a teacher, but teaching at least paid well enough to live on, and the rules had been changed lately so that married women could keep their jobs in schools.
This might be the last time she worked washing pots and stirring custard. Not that she minded doing that at Honeysuckle!
She filled the bain marie with yellow gloop again, and carried it to the counter, listening to the chatter, storing it up not just for Tommy now, but for herself. So she would be able to remember, decades later, how she had watched humanity prepare to meet the moon.
Get out the teapot and scones, Sir Cedric, she thought. You’re going to have visitors.
Chapter 50
FRED
5 JUNE 1969
The stars winked at him, extra bright the way they always were before a frost. Fred had always headed north long before mid-winter. His bones ached in the cold, and his scars too. When you’d been through what he had in his life that meant there was a lot of you to ache.
And yet he hadn’t left. Old Mrs M had given him a ragged quilt. ‘The dog don’t want it any more,’ she told him. ‘Not now it’s dead.’
He rigged the tarp to make a tent now, not just a cover to keep off the rain, but even so his whiskers had ice on them each morning, where the moisture in his breath had frozen.
He should be up with the sugar cane and mangoes. You could sleep on the beach up north, with a driftwood fire to keep off the breeze’s chill. Someone always had a bottle of rum to share around and a tale about a crocodile seen on this very beach to frighten the new chums.
And yet he hadn’t left.
Mah was happy. He watched her small blue car pass by as she drove off to work each day, and she was usually smiling. He watched and saw Belle pass too, with her husband mostly, or Mah if she’d picked her up. There was grey in Belle’s red hair now, which was fashionably permed — she was not like the ragged-haired girl he’d met all those years back. A contented and most respectable woman, but somewhere, Fred reckoned, Belle was still the mermaid of the South Seas. Fred hoped Belle’s husband knew it.
Fred watched Jed Kelly too. He’d learned the pattern of her visits now. She came back to Gibber’s Creek each Friday night in Michael Thompson’s ute, called at the big house at Drinkwater for a couple of hours, then Michael Thompson drove her on to Overflow, where that young man in the wheelchair waited for her, reading on the veranda so he could hear the ute coming, though he’d never noticed Fred watching from the trees.
Funny bloke. He cared enough about the girl to wait for her on the veranda, but there was no sunlight in his face when he saw her each Friday night, not like Mah’s husband smiled when he saw his wife — did Fred’s heart good to see that smile for his sister — and not the way Belle’s husband gazed at her either. There was Jed, pretty as a picture now she had more meat on her and some decent clothes, and he didn’t even kiss her, or take her hand to tug her down to kiss him.
But at least Jed got kisses now, from Nancy, her belly growing as big as a battleship, and that little twisted crippled kid in the wheelchair who screamed, ‘Jed! Jed! Jed!’ and zoomed her chair out down the ramp as soon as the ute pulled up, holding her cheek at the right angle to be kissed. But no kisses from the bloke who should be giving them. And Fred reckoned he knew why.
That bloke was a ghost too, like Jed had been. Though Jed was less ghost-like every time he saw her. Whatever she got up to nowadays was anchoring her back into the world.
How had that young man lost his legs? He’d even asked at the local pubs. You could find out about anything in a pub if you listened long enough, though he took care only to visit each pub around here once a year, and not to talk to the same blokes twice, in case people started to remember him.
But the bloke who’d said, ‘The guy in a wheelchair at River View? He lost them in Vietnam,’ had never seen a war. If he had, he wouldn’t have made it sound like losing your legs was like losing your luggage.
In war there were a million smaller wars and no two blokes ever had the same story, even if they’d been in the same war at the same time. There had to be a lot more to that bloke losing his legs than just ‘in Vietnam’. He’d asked Mrs M too, who knew everything about everyone, and if she didn’t could find the answers at Senior Cits or the CWA. But even Mrs M couldn’t find anyone who knew the young man’s story. Maybe only the young man himself knew.
And stories mattered. If Fred’d been wounded in a proper battle, he’d never have become a hero because everyone there would be a hero, not just him; he could have got better in hospital and no one would have given him a second glance. But he’d taken out those Japanese machine-gun posts by himself, and blokes passing on the story of what he’d done had made the papers take notice, what with everyone back in ’42 being so starved for good news, and heroes can’t vanish, unless they’ve had years of practice at it, like Fred.
Most blokes told the story of how they’d been injured over and over till you were sick of it. ‘It was just after breakfast’, they’d say, or ‘we were heading up the ridge’ . . .
Fred wondered if Jed knew how her young man had lost his legs. He reckoned not. Because, if he was right — and he most often was right, ghosts saw a lot, just like con men did — it was that story that had turned Jed’s Nicholas into a ghost. And a girl like Jed who was learning how to live shouldn’t tie herself to a ghost, even if he was handsome and kind to kiddies.
Ghosts should stay where they belonged, away from the world of real people. Real people ended up getting hurt if they spent too much time with ghosts, might even become one themselves. Jed was still too close to being a ghost herself to get herself hitched to a bloke like that. And one day he’d have to have a good long talk to her about that. Because he liked Jed Kelly. She reminded him of Mah, and Belle, when they were her age. Nothing of their own but courage and shadows and a lot of love to give.
But for now, Fred lay back, tucked up with half of the eiderdown under him for a mattress, half on top of him, his shirt and trousers lined with newspaper, his nose so cold it seemed to have wandered off his face. (It’d be back come morning. Noses usually were.)
He watched the stars out the door of his makeshift tent, the moon’s soft rise into the sky; heard the deep long hoot of that bird with wings big enough for a vulture but what he was pretty sure was called an owl. Heard a possum grunting.
Good eating on a possum, but he was too fond of the blighters to eat them these days, not while there were bunnies to trap, and yabbies in the billabong and cod in the river, not to mention the leftovers from the shoulders of mutton old Mrs M gave him, and the spuds he bandicooted from the vegie gardens out of town, only once per garden — never enough that his haul was missed or noticed.
Nothing better than a roast spud, crisp with charcoal, to keep your hands and your innards warm while you waited winter out, down here in the cold, when you could be up in Queensland in the warm.
You could have a good life, as a ghost. But that young man of Jed’s would have to choose, because if he stayed a ghost he’d start to hurt those he loved if he stayed around them too long, and maybe other people too.
And that, maybe, thought Fred, was why in the end he had chosen to stick around this year and brave a southern winter. Even ghosts had a duty to care for those they loved.
Chapter 51
NANCY
30 JUNE 1969
Gold-brown grass, a sky stained blue. Nancy could hear a ute in the distance: Michael and Goober Smith feeding out hay for the pre
gnant ewes. Ewes needed extra feeding this time of year to ward off pregnancy toxaemia.
Nancy wished she were out with them. Morning sickness had faded. She felt as if she could leap the river, fly with the swans. But she’d make a cake — a cake! — because there wasn’t much else she could usefully do.
She hadn’t expected pregnancy to limit her so much. The obstetrician Tommy had invited down from Sydney had warned her not to ride. He hadn’t mentioned not throwing out bales of hay out of the back of a ute, or crutching sheep, or climbing the cliffs above the creek, but only because he didn’t know that his patient did all those things, and loved them. But they were clearly the kinds of things he meant when he suggested she avoid all risky and energetic physical activities, although he declared her perfectly fit and, by the way, he and his wife were planning a holiday on the river in August, just about the time that she was due. What a convenient coincidence.
Gibber’s Creek women had their babies delivered in the Gibber’s Creek Hospital by Joseph McAlpine GP, except for those who still had them at home with the help of a neighbour, calling the doctor only if the labour went on too long or a baby’s leg or arm appeared before the head. But Nancy Thompson, aged daughter-in-law of Matilda and Tommy Thompson, would have an obstetrician.
Which was why now her cake was made, and iced so it didn’t look too lopsided, Nancy sat in the kitchen and knitted booties. Knitting booties was what pregnant women did. She wanted to do this properly. Because if the booties were knitted, the freshly washed and folded nappies piled by the changing table, the cot waiting and the bassinet made up with its tea-tree mattress and bunny rug, then all would go properly, normally . . .
It would not occur to most women she knew that it might not, not in this modern age of antibiotics and surgery. But those women had not seen life shredded by Japanese occupation, despite two or three governments assuring them that the Japanese would never attack or get so close. Most women had not seen a nephew they loved as deeply as a son blown apart by a hand grenade, just as the war ended and he should have been safe.
The Ghost by the Billabong Page 29