Her sister-in-law sat in the kitchen with her, knitting a matinée jacket. Moira’s stitches were much finer and more complicated than hers. Moira was not ‘most women’ either.
Nancy reached for a scone, made by Anita at Drinkwater and brought over still hot and wrapped in a tea towel by Moira, along with two jars of freshly made marmalade and another of lemon butter made from the tree outside the Drinkwater kitchen that fruited all winter long despite the frosts. She bit into the scone, tasted its floury goodness, the apricot jam, the butter. She had always enjoyed food when she remembered to eat it. Now her body remembered.
Sheep bleated; the envious ones, who were not getting lucerne, but had to make do with the frostbitten grass. It had been a good season. The hay sheds were full and the silage pits too. The silage pits had been Michael’s idea — hay fermented and sweetened with molasses before being buried in a good season to be dug up in a lean one. The stink when the first pit had been opened had made them gag and Michael cursed himself for a fool. Two hours later the stench had vanished and the pit smelled sweet — so had the others. And, more importantly, the animals loved it.
Overflow’s channels of long-lasting water, the insurance of the silage, but above all the forewarning that a drought was coming, so they could sell all but the most valuable breeding stock: these assets and strategies had meant that they survived hard years well, with enough profit to keep River View going without having to ask Tommy to subsidise it. Having family money did not always mean you wanted to ask for it.
Moira suddenly broke the silence of women who knew each other too well to need to fill the quiet times with conversation. ‘Nancy, if it’s a boy, please, I hope you don’t mind . . .’
‘What?’
‘Don’t call him Ben. Or Gavin.’
Ben: Nancy’s brother, Moira’s husband, dead by a Japanese sword. Gavin: Moira’s son, his small life blown into shreds that had coloured her life for over a decade, until at last — except in nightmares — she remembered his laughter, the warmth of his skin as she cuddled him, his life and not his death, the butterflies he had loved and chased and they had recreated — both love and butterflies — at River View. ‘Because those names belong to them?’
Moira looked back down at her knitting. ‘You understand.’
‘Yes. I feel the same. Moira, do you ever think what we’d have been doing if . . . the war and everything hadn’t happened?’
Moira smiled. ‘We’d be much the same as we are now. You and Michael would have built another house nearby. Ben and I would be living here at Overflow, that’s all. I probably wouldn’t have become a nurse. But the heart of our lives . . .’ She shrugged. ‘The war didn’t cause the polio epidemic, or all the kids damaged by thalidomide. You and I would still have known we had to do something to help them. Matilda would still have offered River View.’
But we’d have had babies, thought Nancy. We might have had three each by now, or even four.
It would be Gavin’s twenty-eighth birthday soon. She wouldn’t mention it and neither would Moira. But Moira would come to dinner at Overflow . . . No, a picnic, that would be better: by the water at River View where the kids could leave their wheelchairs and splash and float in the shallows. Cold stuffed chickens and saveloys boiled over a campfire in big pineapple-juice cans, after they’d drunk all the juice, and ice creams for everyone in big canvas bags of dry ice to keep them frozen, and dozens of watermelons cut into vast chunks, and Napoleon cake and lemonade, fresh white bread and tomato sauce and lettuce and beetroot and balloons and small white bags of lollies for each kid to take away. The best birthday party possible, even if the word ‘birthday’ was never mentioned.
She smiled at herself. For, after all, she and Moira did have children, both of them. One hundred and fourteen of them. Riches beyond compare.
She rested her hand on her stomach, hoping the baby would move on cue. It didn’t. But then Nancy had never been an obedient child either, doing as others expected.
Please, she thought, I know I have had so much. But just this. Give me a baby too.
Chapter 52
JED
15 July 1969
Dear Tommy,
Apollo 11 is nearly ready. You can feel the excitement now, though everyone is still calm and focused, but it’s a different calm and focused, as if they have trained themselves just to concentrate on their own particular equipment and make sure it’s right.
If just one thing goes wrong, it could doom the whole mission. I wished I could play a bigger part when I first came here, but now I am sort of relieved that if I make a mistake peeling potatoes or wiping tables or emptying ashtrays, the worst that can happen is that Mrs Clissold would tell me to watch what I was doing. And anyway, it’s pretty hard to make a mistake with potatoes and table wiping.
I’m not sure if I should tell you this, so don’t tell anyone else, but I overheard two of the visiting Americans talking yesterday. The Aussies say ‘Hi’ and talk to me when I clear up around them. The Americans are super polite, but they don’t ever think I might like to know about their jobs. I don’t even know what these men do, and sometimes I think that the rest of Honeysuckle doesn’t either, as they’re not technicians or computer boffins.
Anyway, one of the Americans was telling the other about a rumour that they only give Apollo 11 a forty-six per cent chance of taking off from the moon to come home. The other said, ‘Close enough to fifty–fifty. There are worse odds.’ And then, ‘What happens if they don’t make it?’
The other one said, ‘They’ (meaning the astronauts) ‘have told Mission Control that if they know they’ll be stranded there, they’ll spend the first day taking samples and the next saying goodbye. Then they want all monitoring turned off.’ He looked very grim as he said, ‘They won’t want the world watching their astronauts suffocate. Joe Public might want the whole program stopped if its heroes run out of air live on TV.’
The two of them were quiet for a minute or so. I just kept wiping and wiping the table, pretending there was a stain on it. Then the first one said, ‘We just have to make sure that doesn’t happen,’ and the second one said, ‘Pray.’ Then Mrs Clissold called to me that the potatoes needed mashing and I went back to the stove.
It’s funny, I thought I knew about the moon, sorry, Sir Cedric. It was just there, for silly stories, like its being made of green cheese or the cow jumping over it, or to look romantic on postcards.
I’m just finding out how much I don’t know, like the moon’s days and nights last for two of our weeks. That’s why Apollo 11 is going to land in the ‘early morning’ lunar time, not at ‘midnight’ when they couldn’t see anything without light and it could be minus nineteen degrees Celsius, or at ‘midday’ when it might be hot enough to boil water. They are going to orbit the moon counter-clockwise too, otherwise they’d be staring into the sun and it would be too glary to see anything.
Apollo 11 will be the beginning of everything, won’t it? Travelling to other planets, seeing strange darkness and new stars. Ships that carry colonists for future generations, almost like the First Fleet coming to Australia but taking even longer and going to places even more unknown. Our ancestors survived and so will we. Will what we find out there be stranger than we could ever have imagined, or so like us that we can sit and talk and try to understand each other?
Every day I feel more and more that you are right. This is a beginning for Earth too, to be one planet, with wars and quarrels forgotten. All of it, starting next week, if all goes right.
Oh, Tommy, it has to! No one says much, but everyone knows how much can go wrong. Just one person can make a mistake, or a single wire could fail, then the astronauts might spiral off into space forever, or burn up like Apollo 1.
Or be stranded on the moon. That is the real fear, though I don’t think anyone has mentioned it on the news. What if they land badly, or Apollo 11 sinks too deep into the moon dust to take off again? I’m scared for them and excited for them and so envious I�
�m almost grass green with it. But I am very, very glad I am here. I thought I was coming here for you, to thank you for treating me as if I might really be your great-granddaughter. But now I’m here I know it’s for me too. When I am an old, old woman I can say, ‘Yes, I was there.’
Give my love to the river when you watch it out the window. It’s funny, I miss it, and the hills and even the sheep. But I love the roos here too.
Love from me to you too,
Jed
Lift-off would be late at night, eleven thirty-two pm, 16 July, Australian Eastern Standard Time, although it would be daytime at Cape Kennedy. Normally Jed left the canteen at five pm. But that night too many at the station would need food and coffee through the night as they tracked the tiny spacecraft on its long journey. The canteen operated on a different shift pattern from the rest of the station. Horrie and Betty made sure that on nights like these there was food available around the clock, bacon and eggs for two sittings of breakfast, the coffee pots kept full.
Mrs Clissold had smiled when Jed had offered to be on the late shift that night, as if she had guessed Jed would want to be at the station. The canteen’s telly would only show what the rest of the world could see too. But somehow it was different, knowing you were so close to the men listening through the headsets, making decisions that could save lives, change history.
If Apollo 11 exploded on lift-off, would there ever be another in her lifetime? Would the American public decide that space exploration was too expensive, not just in money, but in lives?
The astronauts had to make it to the moon! Tommy had to see it too. And if a miracle could happen and men could walk on the moon, then the other miracles she needed must fall into place: that the Thompsons would accept her as a friend, even if not family; that she would pass her HSC and get to uni; and that Nicholas would say he loved her, even if he met someone he loved more when he had his new legs and a life that didn’t revolve around rehabilitation.
That she would have a home, even for a few years, with Nicholas in Sydney. A home where she could lock the door, fill a bookcase, use that phrase that people took for granted: ‘I’m heading home.’
Jed looked at the clock on the canteen wall. Ten-thirty. ‘Turn off the custard,’ said Mrs Clissold quietly.
They left the kitchen to gather with the others from all over the station, looking up at the television on the wall. Minute after minute went by, eleven o’clock, eleven-fifteen. You could almost feel the excitement seep through the TV screen: families in far-off Florida on beaches all along the coast, picnicking in bright shirts, people singing, laughing, as if the whole launch was a carnival, waiting for the sight of that rocket speeding into space. But here at the tracking station the countdown had begun many hours ago. Everyone was quiet and focused on their tasks. Jed watched more than a million people crowd as near as possible to Cape Kennedy, where rockets had been launched since 1958. Cars, caravans along the roads, in every possible picnic spot or car park, kids on their fathers’ shoulders, strangers shoulder to shoulder, watching, waiting. Strange to think that all across the world, even at Gibber’s Creek, people watched these same scenes on their new televisions too.
It had seemed like a day had passed, not an hour, as at last the live TV countdown began . . . ‘Twenty seconds and counting . . . nineteen seconds . . . eighteen seconds . . .’
Jed felt her fingernails digging into her palms. No one in the entire room had spoken since the countdown began. The silence felt thicker than the custard, except for the words on the telly.
At eight seconds to lift-off . . .
The room filled with a vast roar. The television screen turned red as the giant Saturn V rocket engines fired, building up to a force equal to one hundred and eighty million horsepower. Flames shot out, so bright that those watching near Cape Kennedy covered their eyes in pain. The cameras showed people being blown back, holding onto cars for support, or covering their ears, as vast shockwaves thundered across the countryside. The giant clamps at the base of the rocket that had been holding the rocket vertical on the launchpad suddenly sprang back after all five engines had ignited, releasing the Saturn launch vehicle for lift-off.
‘All engines running! We have lift-off!’
The rocket seemed to rise slowly at first, far too slowly to ever leave Earth. Flame gushed in a bright torch from its base. Once again the onlookers on the ground held their ears as the sound of the rocket boomed across the landscape.
Jed felt her breath stop. It was going to crash! To fall over, without gaining lift-off speed! But it kept rising, defying Earth’s gravity.
Seventy-two seconds after lift-off, the massive first stage of the Saturn V rocket dropped away, empty of fuel. The second-stage rocket fired, exactly on schedule, propelling Apollo 11 faster, and faster still.
She inhaled, relief prickling her skin. She looked around. She had expected cheers, dancing. But instead everyone showed a gathering concentration. For this was their time, now. Far above them, now out of sight, the blue sky around Apollo 11 was vanishing, the dark of space gathering them in. Human eyes on Earth could no longer see the rocket. Across the planet, space trackers in stations like these must watch and guide. In the black of space the third rocket would fire.
The spacecraft would circle Earth, still held by the planet’s gravity, with Carnarvon Tracking Station on the other side of Australia now monitoring to check that it was on course, all systems operating correctly, and on track for the first ‘burn’, intended to give the vehicle power to leave the Earth’s orbit, and head towards the moon.
Today’s extraordinary launch was not the end, but the beginning. Now came three days of tracking the spacecraft Columbia and its lunar module Eagle on their long flight to the moon. For the first time in its billions of years Sir Cedric would have visitors.
Two days seemed a long time to wait to tell Tommy what the launch had been like here at Honeysuckle. Jed considered putting in a long-distance call to Drinkwater, to describe in person what she had seen. But Tommy could not come down to the phone in the hall, so the story would be relayed by the Dragon. She wrote to him instead, as the car twisted and slid along the curving icy road back to Queanbeyan, stopping to drop the letter in a post box. Tommy would get it tomorrow. He could read it and reread it as he lay in his comfortable prison.
But a letter arrived for her too, in the letterbox of her half-ruined squat, written on pink notepaper, with a rose on a pink envelope and shaky writing inside.
Dear Jed,
I am writing this. Nicky is holding my hand!
We got to watch Gilligan’s Island on TV! TV is wonderful!
I love you,
Scarlett O’Hara
Jed smiled as she wrote back, the candlelight flickering. If she posted it on the way to work tomorrow, Scarlett would get it on Friday. Even if she saw her that same night, she knew the girl would love getting a letter of her own.
Dear Scarlett,
Your writing is wonderful. I am so proud. I miss you, but it is very exciting working at the tracking station just now. When you watch the men walk on the moon you can say, ‘I know the girl who washed the dishes for the men who tracked the astronauts up there.’
I love you too,
Jed
It was the first time she had written the words. She found that she meant them.
Work. And friendship. The building hope that the day after next, people might walk on another world. And love, from a six-year-old girl, at least.
She listened to the old-house sounds: roof creaking, ceiling rustling with what she hoped was a possum but was almost certainly rats.
It was so good to have a house, or even half a house. One day, she thought, I will have a house of my own. Not just a flat with Nicholas near the University of Sydney, but a real house. It will have secure walls and a watertight roof and a kitchen with a biscuit barrel like Nancy’s that is always full and a room with books up to the ceiling. And it will be mine, and home, and I will never leave it, or
only for the day, knowing it will be there and safe for me when I come back.
It would not be in a suburb, like this, where everyone lived so close together but knew so little about their neighbours — or carefully chose not to know.
Flat-faced houses. Every time she walked down a street she wondered at the lives behind the curtains. How many women were bashed by their husbands? How many girls molested by men like Merv the Perv? How many neighbours carefully didn’t listen to yells or screams, because what a man did in his own home was private, and they didn’t want to get involved?
But she had seen a community where neighbours looked out for each other. They gossiped about each other too — but they also helped. Just reading the Gibber’s Creek Gazette had taught her about the CWA, the Lions Club, Rotary, Bushfire Brigade, Senior Citizens, Historical Association, Show Grounds Committee, Hospital Board: over fifty clubs and societies for a town of just over a thousand people, with another couple of thousand living nearby.
She’d have to live in Sydney to go to university. But even if she had no home yet, beyond this squat, she had a land that called her heart. One day, somehow, she would be part of its community too.
Chapter 53
NICHOLAS
17 JULY 1969
Strange to think of Jed, in her tracking station among the mountains that spoke to stations across the world, as well as to the astronauts far above the Earth, while his life was this narrow space called River View. Nicholas brought his attention back to Dr McAlpine, watching him from across the desk. A good bloke, McAlpine. Didn’t mince words.
The Ghost by the Billabong Page 30