by JH Fletcher
The constant pyrotechnics of the Mandales’ home life was no environment for a sensitive child and short-sighted Frances was — and is — one of the most sensitive people you could wish to find.
She met Jock Woodcock in 1977, when she was twenty-one and he was fifty-seven.
To most people he would have seemed a poor catch. A sugar farmer from the north and a widower to boot, he knew about cane but that was about it. If you wanted information on sucrose content, the season’s prospects, the likely price for cut cane at the mill, Jock was your man. Anything else and you were thrown back on the library, the church or the Country Women’s Association. On top of being thirty-six years older than she was, Jock also had Harley, a twenty-year-old son from his first marriage, and a more poisonous bastard never walked. None of it mattered to Frances. What she wanted more than anything else in life was a stable, peaceful environment, and when she met Jock Woodcock she knew at once that he was the man to give it to her.
Frances met him in a Sydney tea shop when, brick-red face and brick-shaped body, he stumbled as he passed and managed to slop his cup of tea all over her. It was the luckiest accident in Frances’s life and, as far as Jock was concerned, the only good thing that happened to him during his visit to what he always remembered as the madhouse of Sydney.
So to North Queensland Frances came, to the cane plantation outside Goorapilly and the house by the beach, with its extensive views across the Coral Sea. Harley, being Harley, did what he could to make their lives difficult but, in spite of him, they were happy. I’ve always been glad, for Frances’s sake, that they had those happy years together. There weren’t that many of them. Jock was fifty-seven when they married; he never saw seventy. Eleven good years, then cancer took him. Arthur was the only member of the family to come north to the funeral. When it was over he returned to Sydney and Frances was alone once more.
TWENTY-THREE
1
After Jock’s death, Frances had a month or two of grieving, shut away behind the screened windows of the big verandahed house. Harley, mercifully, had moved out long before and, if he did nothing to make Frances’s life easier, at least he did nothing to cause her any additional grief, either.
That came later.
Slowly, she dragged herself back into the world. When she was ready, she phoned Arthur, who was working for a big garage in Sydney. She told him that the Goorapilly service station and workshop was on the market and suggested he buy it.
‘It’s a bit run-down, but there’s plenty of scope if you’re willing to put your back into it. I think it would be right up your street, if you like the idea of working for yourself.’
It was what Arthur had always wanted. The timing was right, too, because Arthur had also suffered a bereavement. He had fallen in love with a local girl, an energetic, beautiful creature as bright as the sea she loved. Winter and summer she swam, regardless of the weather. She went out one day and never came back. Her body was never found, which in some ways made her death even more difficult to bear. Arthur, a hard-loving man, was devastated. He used to stand at the window of the cliff house, staring out at the sea that had killed his girl. Never a talker, he became more silent than ever.
Then Frances’s suggestion, and he jumped at it.
Alone among the family, Arthur was of a scholarly disposition. With a different background he would probably have been a lawyer; as it was, because he enjoyed mucking about with engines and getting grease on his hands, he became apprenticed to a garage, where he learnt to mend trucks and cars and read whenever he had a spare moment. The idea of being his own boss appealed to him; it would give him the chance to decide how much time he needed for fixing trucks and how much he could give to reading.
Of course, there was one snag.
‘What do I use for money?’
The house had been promised to Harley long before Frances came on the scene but Jock had taken care of her financially.
‘I can help you out there,’ she told him.
Arthur came north, gave the service station a look-over, had a chat with various people in the town, dropped in to see the bank manager and then went back to Frances.
‘It needs a fair bit spent on it. Some of the equipment has to be replaced and there are one or two other things I want to buy.’
‘How much are we talking about?’
He fetched a pencil and paper and scratched away for a few minutes before giving her a figure.
‘Go for it,’ she said.
So Arthur bought the Goorapilly service station for a little less than the asking price and headed north.
The day before he left, with his mother doing her stint down at the milk bar, Arthur had what turned out to be his last conversation with his father. It was eleven o’clock in the morning but already, as had become habitual in recent years, Charlie had a skinful and was in maudlin mood.
He rabbited on, about life in France and some woman called Babette who he seemed to think had been badly treated; about someone else who’d died in a Broome cyclone; about the years, meandering and inconsequential, when he had mooched through life in the cliff house.
‘Don’t seem to have done much, do I? Never mind, boy; I’ve enjoyed myself, and that’s what counts, eh?’
It was then, raking through the tousled memories of an aimless life, that Charlie mentioned the Cloud Forest.
‘That’s what brought me to this country in the first place, you know …’
It was the first Arthur had heard of it.
‘The Cloud Forest,’ he repeated. ‘What’s that?’
Charlie told him about the band of temperate forest on top of a mountain, or maybe mountains, far away in the tropics of North Queensland.
‘You came to Australia because of a forest?’
‘It was the idea of it, see? That was what was important. Kept your grandfather going in the trenches. Until he died, of course. Where d’you say you was going?’ Blinking at him owlishly through a smear of booze and cigarette smoke.
‘Goorapilly.’
Charlie tried to focus his scattered wits. ‘I reckon that might be the very place.’
It was hard to make out what the old man, increasingly incoherent, was talking about.
‘You never went there?’ Arthur asked. ‘After coming all the way from Europe?’
‘Nah.’ Charlie was dismissive of one more failure in a life that had consisted of little else.
‘Why not?’
‘Didn’t want to.’
Arthur couldn’t come to grips with it at all.
‘The idea of it,’ he repeated, wondering. ‘What sort of idea?’
While Charlie, slopping Scotch into and around his glass, sagging and mumbling on the very brink of unconsciousness, was beyond talking of ideas, or metaphysics of any kind.
‘Maybe I’ll go and take a look at it,’ Arthur suggested, as much to keep the old boy quiet as anything.
‘Up to you, my boy.’ Slurp. ‘Up to you.’
And passed out, leaving Arthur wondering.
2
On his way north, Arthur stopped off at the Gold Coast to catch up with Bella. His baby sister; some baby: she’d been a tearaway from birth.
She’d been nineteen when she’d married Lyle Nabbs. You’d have been hard pushed to find anyone less suited to Bella than Lyle, but Bella had been another one in love with love and had listened neither to her own doubts nor anyone else’s.
Lyle had been Mr Prim, as straight as a ruler, who had fallen in love with the very flamboyance that his own life lacked. He had told himself that loving Bella would make up for any differences in temperament and, like most wishful thinkers, he’d been wrong.
It hadn’t taken Bella long to become unhappy with her staid husband. She’d hung in there for eighteen months and had then met Brett Gaddy, a car salesman with fire in his belly and bubbles in his head, someone who viewed life much as she did. Six months later she’d walked out on Lyle, shacked up with Brett until the divorce came through,
then moved with him to the Gold Coast and settled down to the pleasures of a razzle-dazzle life.
Bella fetched Arthur from the airport. A vision of red and gold, bosom and bum out to here; lacquered, golden hair forming a halo around her head, for all the world like a diminutive Cloud Forest itself. Arthur asked if she knew anything about this place up in the north that their father had told him about.
‘Cloud Forest?’ Bella said. ‘I reckon he did say something to me once. Can’t say I paid much attention, mind.’
‘You’ve never been there?’
She laughed, lips wide, as brassy as the rest of her. ‘Reckon I’m gunna waste my life checking out a bunch of trees?’
So Arthur was no wiser by the time he reached Goorapilly. He was a stubborn man when he wanted to be; having failed with one sister, he asked the other one about the Cloud Forest instead. This time he had better luck.
TWENTY-FOUR
1
‘Come out on the verandah with me.’
Frances led the way through the glass-fronted doors. The house had been built on high ground. With their backs to the sea, they could see Mount Gang Gang rising like a dark cloud over the town.
She pointed. ‘There’s no mist today. You can see it from here.’
Sure enough, he could see the line of forest crowning the distant summit. His first feeling was one of disappointment. Awareness of the Cloud Forest, he now knew, had been a major feature of the family’s history since the time, over a hundred years before, when his grandfather had first discovered it. Their father had come all the way from Europe because of it. And now by chance — or so it seemed — Frances and himself had come here, too. In that sense the Cloud Forest had made a profound impact on all their lives.
Now he stared at it with all the concentration he could muster and wondered what the excitement had been about. All he could see was a line of distant vegetation, dark against a luminescent sky. It didn’t seem significant enough to have had so powerful an impact upon them all.
‘What’s so special about it?’
‘There are herbs and plants there you won’t find down here.’
‘Is that all?’
‘What did you expect?’
Arthur said, ‘Dad spoke of it as though it were a special place. Magical, almost. A forest, yes, but a lot more than that.’
‘It is,’ Frances said. ‘It’s an idea, really.’
‘That’s exactly what he said.’
‘He was right. It’s a place that remains while everything else is going mad around it. A reassurance. That’s how it affects me anyway. As long as places like the Cloud Forest exist, I feel that things can’t be truly bad. Perhaps that’s what makes it important, because it represents hope, for ourselves and for the world.’ She shrugged self-consciously. ‘Bella always told me I go on too much.’
‘Bella …’ Arthur said indulgently; they both knew what Bella was like. ‘I asked her about it.’
‘I daresay she wasn’t very interested.’
The Bellas of the world weren’t, as a rule.
2
There, for some years, they left it.
Once Arthur had found out what lay behind the idea of the Cloud Forest he lost interest in it; not in theory, but in practice.
‘I’ll get up there, one of these days …’
But he never did. Instead, he worked hard to build up his business and his own place in the society of which he had become a part. The Goorapilly Service Station and Workshop soon earned a reputation for quality service at fair prices, and Arthur’s affairs prospered. He became one of the town’s most influential citizens: quite a feat for someone who had not been born there, or even in the State.
Perhaps it was not so surprising; he was wise, patient and discreet. It wasn’t his style to run for council but within a few years his advice was being sought by a wide range of people, young and old, who dropped in to see him as he sat on his verandah in the evenings, a table with a glass upon it convenient to his elbow. They could talk to him about anything and know that their business would not be spread around the town. He was sensible and knew what he was talking about, but it was his nature that really made the difference: an astute man, as well as a well-informed one. There weren’t many who could say as much.
Frances also got on with her own life. With time on her hands after Jock’s death, she decided to start a craft stall at the flea market that was held every weekend under the trees which shaded the creek on the edge of town. She scoured the shoreline for pieces of driftwood. She explored the lower slopes of the mountain for herbs and plants from which she prepared lotions and remedies. She hunted out bits and pieces of fallen timber and leaves that she fashioned into table decorations. She knew she would make next to nothing out of it but she enjoyed doing it and that was reason enough.
To begin with she managed by herself but her eyes had always given her problems and eventually she roped in a friend to help her: Betty Ngaro, who lived in the settlement on the other side of the creek with her boyfriend Tommy George and John Munda, her three-year-old adopted nephew.
As for the Cloud Forest … On a day-to-day basis, it meant nothing much to either of them. Frances never climbed beyond the lower slopes of the mountain; Arthur never went there at all. Both would have said that its unspoiled existence was important to them but, as their father had said, it was the idea rather than the reality of the Cloud Forest that mattered to them.
Both their parents were dead by now. Despite all their domestic dramas, Linda and Charlie had stayed together for thirty-eight years until, when Charlie was seventy-four, a stroke slammed him to the ground as he was leaving Randwick with near on a thousand dollars in his pocket. It was a shame it happened when it did — the best day he’d had in months — but maybe that was the problem, the excitement too much for the old fellow.
With Charlie stone-dead, everyone expected Linda to leave the cliff house. She had moaned about it nonstop since she’d bought it, yet now, when at last she had the chance to get rid of it, she refused to go. Arthur, down in Sydney for the funeral, tried to talk her into moving somewhere warmer and drier, better suited to a seventy-year-old woman half crippled with rheumatism, but Linda wouldn’t have a bar of it. She stuck heels and toes into the rock and swore she would never move from the place where she now claimed she and Charlie had been so happy together. She would stay put, she declared, for life.
With the kids gone, she became a bit of a recluse. No one knew exactly when she died; what was sure was that she’d been dead at least a week by the time the local newsagent, noticing her absence, took the trouble to walk up to the isolated house where he found Linda Mandale dead on the living-room floor.
The loss of their parents saddened Frances and Arthur but they had grown apart from the old people a long time ago and the bereavement did not disrupt their lives. Then, in 1997, something happened that did.
3
Bella’s daughter Jacqui had been born four years before, in 1993. Her arrival had not affected her parents’ lives one bit. They had always loved to party and had seen no reason to change their ways simply because they now had a child. They were still having a rip-roaring time on Jacqui’s fourth birthday when, with both of them aboard and Jacqui in the care of friends ashore, Brett, half-cut as he was every weekend, flipped his speedboat at high speed in a calm sea and wiped out the pair of them.
Easy come, easy go, as Bella herself might have said.
The accident nevertheless created a problem that had to be sorted out by their friends and relations: what was to be done with Jacqui?
Frances came up with the answer. She was as different from Bella as it was possible to be: far more vulnerable yet with a core of steel running through her. It was Frances, for all her gentleness, who had talked Arthur into coming to Goorapilly. Now she got him to agree to their niece doing the same.
At that stage in his life Arthur seemed to have all the makings of a bachelor. He knew nothing about young children nor had any in
clination to learn yet, with Jacqui an orphan at the age of four and Frances dropping words in his ear about family and responsibility, he did not hesitate.
They contacted the authorities, went through all the rigmarole beloved of bureaucrats, and before either of them knew it found themselves with a child in their lives.
Frances had envisaged Jacqui staying with her but Arthur would have none of it. He pointed out that Frances was as blind as a bat; a four-year-old would be too much for her. Besides, she lived outside the town; it was important that the child make friends as soon as possible and she would be more likely to do that in Gallipoli Street than out in the bush.
‘The bush?’ Frances said. ‘Two kilometres. Not even that.’
‘It’ll make it all the easier for you to look after her while I’m at work.’
Frances was willing to fight him about it; she fancied the idea of having a girl to raise.
‘Why’s it so important to you? No man wants a little kid under his feet every day.’
It seemed Arthur did. They argued about it but Arthur would not give way and Frances came to realise that her brother was lonely. By having Jacqui stay with him he would have not only the child, but Frances too.
‘I should have realised it from the first,’ Frances told herself.
So that, eventually, was how they left it: Jacqui would stay in town with Arthur while Frances would come in every day to look after the pair of them. That way they would both have her, and were content.
TWENTY-FIVE
1
When Jacqui Gaddy arrived in Goorapilly she was alone and frightened, a four-year-old child surrounded by strangers. Frances knew little about small children but felt for her in her loneliness and tried to make her feel more at home by telling her stories that she hoped would comfort her. She started off with fairy stories but, when she found that Jacqui was less than impressed by magic frogs, bad fairies and sleeping princesses, she changed her tactics and began to tell her tales about the mountain that loomed over their own town: the ferns and orchids growing on its slopes, the rope-like creepers, the trees covered in moss and the yeti that she said had been miraculously transported from the Himalayan snows to the rainforests of North Queensland.