The Ghost by the Billabong

by Jackie French

  And she could feel his happiness even before he spoke. ‘Mum, it’s twins. Thomas and Clancy.’

  But of course, she thought.

  ‘They’re well. It’s all good.’

  Good, she thought. So very good.

  ‘Mum? Say something. I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘I am. I just . . . just can’t talk. I’m too happy for words.’ She searched, and found one. ‘Nancy?’

  ‘She’s fine. Went into labour yesterday afternoon, but we didn’t want to worry you. She didn’t even want to worry me — she said things started moving the day before yesterday! Tom’s six pounds eight ounces, and Clancy’s six pounds two. Not bad for twins.’ She could hear the pride in his voice. Tom, she thought. Already his own person, though he had been named for Tommy. Which felt right too. ‘Moira reckons Joseph got the date wrong.’

  ‘Men,’ she muttered, forgetting that her son was a man, as had been her husband. She heard her son laugh, tired, joyous, fulfilled. Everything I have ever wanted for him, she thought. He has it all. Was ever a mother as blessed as I? ‘Why didn’t Joseph tell us it was twins?’

  ‘He didn’t know. Even the obstetrician missed it. Joseph said you can’t even find the second heartbeat if one twin is behind the other. You can’t X-ray a pregnant woman.’ Matilda had been his mother for long enough to know Michael’s laugh had tears too. ‘Jed says women need a machine that uses something other than X-rays to see inside people.’

  And she might even invent one, thought Matilda. Tommy’s genes were in that girl; Tommy’s vision and his determination. And in his boys too. Tommy still striding into an extraordinary future . . .

  A pause on the other end of the phone, and then her son’s voice again brought her back from Tommy’s future, from their own shared and wondrous past, into the present. Michael sounded half embarrassed, half totally sure of what he said: ‘Mum, Nancy said to tell you a currawong and an eagle.’

  ‘Not identical twins then?’

  A shaky laugh. ‘One’s bald. The other has a black top knot that won’t lie down.’

  ‘Good.’ Hard to be any child in this family of strong personalities; harder if most people thought you were half of a pair of bookends. Matilda was glad there’d be an eagle in the family. Poets only saw eagles soaring: they didn’t realise that eagles had telescopic vision — eagles saw the land spread below them, the people, the plants and animals, and understood. Old Drinkwater had been an eagle, though Auntie Love perhaps had never told him, nor would he have understood. Eagles take what is necessary, and feel no guilt, but they see further and more deeply too. Eagles ride the updraughts, letting the land’s strength move them, instead of flapping wings.

  And currawongs? Matilda wasn’t sure about currawongs. Noisy. Lots of laughter. Liked a crowd. Ruthless if they had to be. Intelligent birds too, easy to underestimate.

  Those twins would be interesting young men. But any child of their genes would be interesting — hers, Tommy’s, the dogged ferocities of her father and grandfather, Auntie Love’s quiet faith, stalwart Michael, Nancy with her heart and courage, old Clancy with his hair as white as snow. Few could ride beside him when his blood was fairly up, except his wife, the black girl he had gone to Queensland droving with, to escape the scandal.

  Matilda had been breeding sheep for over seventy years. Strange to think she had been breeding humans too. A good strong strain of humans. Once more happiness filled her too deep almost for speech.

  ‘Give Nancy my love,’ she croaked. ‘Give them all my love. You too.’

  ‘I love you too, Mum. You’re okay?’

  ‘Yes. I’m fine. Happy. So happy.’

  She put the receiver down, then walked to the kitchen, where Anita was pretending not to listen. ‘Twins,’ she said. ‘Thomas and Clancy. All doing well.’ She waited while Anita clapped her hands and laughed and hugged her, held her impatience in and hugged her back.

  And then, at last, back to the veranda. Daylight blossomed. The sun kissed the sky. The silver frost whiskers on frozen wombat droppings melted. How many times had she sat there with Tommy and watched that sun pull itself above the horizon?

  ‘Tommy,’ she said. ‘It’s twins. Twin boys.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  She felt him smile beside her.

  Chapter 81

  JED

  A whisper woke her. She had slept most of the next day, after the sleepless night at the hospital, woke in time for a late lunch, and hugs, and tears, and visiting time, Nancy with one baby in her arms, Michael with the other, Nancy’s mother holding her daughter’s hand, or stroking the baby’s small shock of hair, too happy to speak, Matilda as proud and erect as if she had a winning ram at the Royal Easter Show.

  A strangely perfect early dinner with Matilda and Michael and Anita, Irish stew eaten at the kitchen table, before Michael went alone to the after-dinner visiting hour, Matilda obviously seeing that husband and wife needed time alone with their boys.

  Jed had gone to bed straight after dinner, slept deeply and dreamlessly.

  And then the whisper.

  She opened her eyes. Had she really heard it?

  She could dimly see the shapes of furniture in the room Matilda now referred to as ‘your bedroom’. There was no one here, nor footsteps in the hall. Outside the sky was grey, not black. She lay, simply enjoying the feel of the bed, the sheets somehow soft and crisp at the same time, a comfort that enveloped her.

  She must have imagined the whisper. Or perhaps it was a cuckoo’s call. Nancy said they called sometimes when it was still dark. She had yet to learn the night sounds of this land. She lay for a few minutes, trying to absorb all that the last week had brought.

  Love. Security. Loss. Nicholas, slashed from her life. Her visions of loving the older Nicholas crumpled, unreliable. Had all her visions been, as Nancy said, the imagination of a lonely child?

  How could she manage without him? She needed him! She didn’t want to be alone any more, to cope with new people, a strange university, all by herself. Nicholas could teach her how to be part of a family . . .

  Except she was learning that all on her own. She lay back on the soft white pillows and smiled. Michael, a great protective bear of an uncle, or great-uncle, or whatever he was. Jim, who might not approve of her — probably didn’t approve of his whole Drinkwater–Overflow family — but would remain loyal and loving nonetheless, even if he was not the kind of man to ever say so.

  Matilda, still a dragon, but her dragon now. Scarlett, darting about after the funeral in her wheelchair so that everyone had to get off the path before they were run over. Thank goodness wheelchairs didn’t go at a hundred kilometres an hour, or Scarlett would be as bad as Nancy.

  Nancy. Safe. Happy. The two babies so ridiculously different from each other, in their mother’s arms, as Jed left with Michael and Moira and Nancy’s mother, yesterday morning, Michael still protesting as the matron insisted they leave and let Nancy get some sleep. Moira might be a matron, but in that hospital another woman’s rule was law. Matron had let the family see Nancy and the babies once out of visiting hours, cleaned and dressed after their birth, but from then on it was two hours in the afternoon and one at night only.

  Jed had held the babies. Just for a few seconds, one in each arm, so much life and love in one place. She’d breathed the soft baby smell. Had felt neither anguish nor longing nor the horror of being trapped, at sixteen, in a life of poverty and motherhood and no chance of more. The guilt had vanished too.

  The magic of tiny hands; of a smile that Moira said was wind, but Jed had seen the true smiles that would come, and no, her visions were not imagination, for she had seen one of these babies as a young man on horseback, galloping with Nancy, and known as surely as she knew the feel of touch in her fingers that what she saw was true.

  And Nicholas? Those visions had been true too. But had she interpreted them to mean what she had longed for: a man who’d ask her to marry her, to give her the home and fa
mily and security that had seemed an unattainable paradise?

  She would see Nicholas again. He would be happy, just as she had seen.

  And she would love him. Yet . . . perhaps . . . the love she felt for the future Nicholas was just the love between two people who had helped each other survive a time of emptiness and change. Maybe one day she would love another man in another way, a marrying kind of way.

  No! Desolation seeped across her, like mud flowing from a puddle. She loved Nicholas now! Needed to love him. Needed him . . .

  The whisper came again.

  It was unmistakable. A man’s voice, almost like a tickle in her ear. Yet there were no words, or none that she could hear. But suddenly she knew where she had to go, must go, had to walk, to come full circle, walk hand in hand with the girl she had been, and who she would become.

  She threw on a pair of the new moleskins, a shirt, woollen jumper, boots. Then she scribbled a note in case anyone came to look for her, though more than likely they’d think she was just sleeping in after the emotions and drama of the previous days. Gone to the billabong. Back soon. Jed.

  An hour and a half maybe to walk there. An hour and a half to walk back. And an hour there, perhaps. She would be back at Drinkwater by ten o’clock, which was late but still possible for breakfast, just like her first day there. And just as she had then, she would sit in the dining room and eat a good meal, but this time with the Dragon and Michael eating scones while she ate her scrambled eggs.

  The house was silent. She wondered if the babies were awake in the hospital nursery. Clancy and Tom. So perfect. She’d ask Nancy if she could come back to Overflow for a few weeks, at least, to help.

  Down the stairs, out the door, along the driveway and then the road. The tang of cold bitumen and dust, of frozen sheep droppings, ice-dripped spiderwebs between the fence wire, the curiously unanimous faces of the sheep, watching her, accepting her, dismissing her, as they trod in single file to the dam to drink before their morning’s munching.

  So much lost. Tommy. Nicholas. Nicholas, Nicholas. She couldn’t give him up! She wrenched her mind to happier things. So much won: a family, a home, knowing the smell of a baby once again, happy babies, wanted, loved. Knowing she could hold a baby and feel only joy. Tears chilled on her cheeks. So much lost; so much found, including this land where she now walked.

  Kookaburras called, then magpies, and the soft descant of cuckoos. Then sheep. More sheep.

  She listened to her footbeats on the road. Pad. Pad. The complaint of sheep, about nothing else, perhaps, than being sheep. But she still didn’t know what the urgency was. Why must she come now?

  And why the billabong?

  And then she knew.

  She had to meet a ghost.

  Chapter 82

  FRED

  Ghosts had power. Fred hadn’t expected that. Ghosts could call the living.

  Whether they heard you or not he didn’t know. Nor if they’d come when you called. If Jed turned up that morning, he’d find out.

  He hoped she would. Jed needed to see something that morning, there by the quiet water. He’d done his best to get her there. Wasn’t like he could limp over to Drinkwater or find a phone box and ring her up. If there was more a ghost could do, he hadn’t learned it yet.

  It wasn’t bad, being a ghost. He’d had practice, after all. He’d been a bit worried when the pain hit, an all-over pain, so bad the world turned black. He’d just had enough time to realise it was his heart that hurt most; to check the bastard was really dead and to hope he didn’t meet him on the other side, to get deep into the bush between the campground and the billabong and squeeze under a log or behind a boulder or something — it was a bit of a blur when he looked back at it — and wonder would there still be stars at night when he was properly dead?

  There were.

  The sky pilot back in the army had said that good guys’ souls went to heaven. Fred reckoned his soul might have gone there, but still left a bit of him down here. Or more likely that he’d never earned harps and angels singing, but he had earned this.

  The river flowing forever; and the river of stars too, their endless sweep across the sky.

  No, not endless. One day the stars would fade, though long before that the river would have slowly swept each grain of soil away. On that day he’d be gone too, to heaven, maybe. But while the gum leaves rustled and the magpies sang, he’d be there. Vicious buggers, magpies. Fred liked them. He had all he needed, the nearness of those he loved, the smell of sheep, the billabong.

  And a campfire, of course. He supposed it was a ghost fire now too, and ghostly warmth. And the sausages cooking on his stick were probably ghost sausages as well. Still tasted good.

  Could he leave? Fred didn’t know. Didn’t want to try either, which probably answered that question.

  There were other ghosts around this place too. When he’d been alive he’d learned there are places in the world that are deeper than the rest, where time flowed like the river but was nearer to the surface, so you could see eddies sometimes, ripples, past and future for a little while until they too flowed on.

  The camp by the billabong was a place like that. Some nights, lying there beneath the blanket of stars, Fred had felt he could drift into any time he chose and maybe he had, for that place hadn’t changed, and wouldn’t change, not for a thousand years. He’d thought that then. He knew it now.

  He and the other ghosts might have a yarn together, one of these days or nights. Plenty of time for that.

  Could the living see him too? Have to be careful, he decided, just in case. Didn’t want to scare the kiddies. No sheets and woo-wooing for old Fred. He’d make himself scarce if anyone came visiting.

  If Jed did come this morning, if somehow a ghost’s whisper had the power to call the living, he’d stay out of sight too, though maybe he’d give her a hint he was still hanging around. One day it’d be good to have a natter with her again. She’d be able to tell him how Mah and the nippers were doing, and Belle. He had a feeling that Jed Kelly was someone who wouldn’t balk at sitting at a campfire with a ghost. But today she needed to see something else.

  Because this girl saw other ghosts, he reckoned, not just the sort he was now. People from the past, and people from the future too, because another thing he’d learned as a ghost was that time was just a way of counting forwards. Everything simply was, and in some places bits of it shone more brightly, so people in other times might see.

  Was Jed really coming? He thought he’d managed to reach her, but he was new to all this stuff. He glanced over where the sun was about to heave itself through the reds and oranges of sunrise and get on with its job of lighting up the world. Jed had to get there soon! Maybe he should have called her earlier. Tried harder . . .

  And then he heard her. Everyone’s steps sounded different, and he’d learned the sound of hers. He could see her now too, as she rounded the track down to the billabong. Fred looked at her critically. Bit more meat on her these days. She had been crying as she walked, he reckoned, but they were mostly happy tears. Most important was that she wasn’t lost no more. She’d been as much a ghost as him back then, and in as much danger of being one like he was now, far too soon.

  She was better now. And had got here just in time too.

  Fred had long practice in making himself invisible. But now he could make his fire and sausages invisible too.

  Chapter 83

  JED

  She could feel the heat of flames. Stupid, for when she held her hand above the campfire’s coals, they were long cold. She could even smell the sausages.

  Was Fred here, a true ghost now? She had to thank him, for saving her life, for saving other women, whether he knew it or not.

  She suspected he did.

  But she owed him far more than that. Fred hadn’t just given her shelter from the storm that night, nor the sausages that had given her the strength to show Matilda and Tommy who she was. The ghost had made her see the world again, and be
part of it. Would she have had the passion to find that link with Tommy if Fred hadn’t forced her to feel the beauty of the present, instead of the blackness of the past?

  ‘Fred?’

  No answer. But she could still sit against the tree by the fire, still imagine the scent of sausages. This place had witnessed the first day of her real life. This place and its ghost had given her life back to her, hauling her back to the real world with kindness and sausages.

  ‘I’m coming back till I see you again, you know,’ she remarked.

  Still no answer. But the scent of sausages grew stronger.

  Perhaps that first night, cold and dizzy from lack of food, she would have let the lightning strike her if Fred had not been here. The Thompsons would have kindly buried her in their graveyard, but as a stranger, not one of their own. Or maybe, shivering, starving the next morning, she would have lost the will to face them; have waited by the road with her thumb out for a car to take her somewhere, anywhere, a living ghost, till, one day, accepting the wrong lift, she became a dead one.

  But it had not happened. There was a strange comfort, now, in sitting with her back to the same tree, where the ghost had sat before.

  Frogs croaked. Rain coming? They were different frog calls from the ones she’d heard last summer. She must ask Nancy and Matilda to tell her about frogs. And about birds, the river, the land that was now hers.

  And she’d been loved. She hugged the thought to her. That old man had loved her enough to include her in his will. Had either felt the connection, as she had, known of the blood tie or — maybe even better — had just liked her enough, loved her enough, to include her, relative or not. No matter what happened now she knew, at last, she could be loved, because she had been.

  What now? What was she even going to study? She’d never had the luxury of choosing futures. The ones she’d vaguely imagined — doctor, lawyer, teacher — had been safe professions that would buy her breakfast, lunch and dinner for the rest of her life and keep a roof above her head.