The Cloud Forest

by JH Fletcher

  Only Frances would have thought to talk to a four-year-old child about the mountain and to make it sufficiently interesting for her to listen and remember. The point was that Frances wanted her stories to be true and so, to the wide-eyed child listening to them, they were. Wonder was an essential part of Jacqui’s nature, as it was of Frances’s, and the magic of these stories never left her.

  Frances’s yarns did not stop at yetis. She also told Jacqui about the real people who had visited the mountain, long before her own great-grandfather had climbed to the summit. She told her of the first white men — drovers, prospectors, adventurers and plain bums — who had arrived in the district a hundred and fifty years before, in search of what they could find.

  These men discovered gold, up on the lower slopes of the mountain. Around its base they also found thousands of square miles of pasture and a soil and climate favourable to the sugar cane that eventually, Frances told her, became the true gold of that part of the world. The white men also met the native inhabitants, a scattering of naked Aboriginals who scientists came later to believe might have been living in the district for tens of thousands of years.

  To begin with, Frances said, the Aboriginals welcomed the new arrivals. Confused by their white skins, they believed that these men, with their guns and cattle, were the spirits of their own ancestors, and that their coming would bring good fortune. It did not. It brought disease and ruthless depredation yet it was only later, when the strangers showed no sign of moving on and their actions seemed increasingly at odds with what might have been expected of the benevolent dead, that the spears came out.

  Spears were good against livestock and the occasional unwary settler but offered little long-term hope in a war against guns, and the Aborigines were driven out. Houses, schools, municipal offices and a police station sprouted. Red tape parcelled out the land. The remnants of the clans, disregarded, drunken and diseased, clung to the skirts of the new civilisation or disappeared into the emptiness.

  The gold did not last long. The miners moved on, leaving the detritus of their abandoned workings scattered across the lower slopes and creek bottoms of the surrounding countryside, yet rumour claimed that there was rich ground still to be exploited, if anyone could find it.

  More recently, other people also used the mountain. Frances and her friend Betty were two who went there regularly, hunting for material for Frances’s stall. Young men and women also went there, for reasons of their own.

  Years later, when she was nine, Jacqui heard for herself about one of them: Mary-Ann Donoghue, whose father worked at the sugar mill. The wonders that Mary-Ann discovered may not have included the yeti but were sufficiently compelling for her to go back time and again. Each time she took a new man with her, so that he, too, might share in the wonders: or so the gossips claimed. She took off when she was sixteen and Goorapilly saw neither hair nor hide of her again. It was a dumb thing to do, but everyone knew where Mary-Ann carried her brains and it was not between her ears.

  Jacqui did not hear this tale from Frances. Nevertheless, it was because of the tales Frances had told her that Jacqui grew up with the idea that one day, when she was big enough, she herself would go up into the Cloud Forest and explore the wonderland that Frances’s stories had made real to her, to discover whatever there was to find amid the trailing mists.

  When she was big enough. That was for the future; for now, she had some growing to do.

  2

  The weatherboard house on Gallipoli Street where Arthur had lived since he first came to Goorapilly was full of books. Vast and tottering piles of them filled every room. Arthur warned Jacqui to keep her beak out of them; that apart, his basic philosophy was to let her get on with her own life, trusting to luck or God or the devil that she would turn out more or less all right. With Frances’s help, that’s what she did.

  Frances pitched up each day in a broken-down ute owned and driven by her friend Jeff Toms, a Vietnam vet who most of the town reckoned was as barmy as a bandicoot. She stayed all day, poddled back home again in the evening. Without her reassuring presence, it is probable that neither Jacqui nor Arthur would have survived.

  Jacqui found Arthur hard to know. He was a tall, lean, bent nail of a man with his nose permanently under the bonnet of a vehicle or in a book. When she grew older, she asked Frances about him.

  ‘Doesn’t he have a girlfriend?’

  It seemed all wrong that he should have no one.

  ‘He has you and me,’ Frances told her.

  ‘You know what I mean …’ But in truth was not at all sure what she meant. ‘Hasn’t he ever been married?’

  ‘He had a girlfriend once, down in Sydney. They were planning to get married. You mustn’t let him know I told you,’ she cautioned.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She drowned. She was only twenty-three.’

  ‘Hasn’t he ever found anyone else?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  Nor doing much to rectify matters, apparently. For a time the sad story of the loved one who had died made Jacqui see Arthur as a romantic figure, although fortunately she soon got over it.

  Years passed. It was hard for Jacqui to come to terms with this new place, her new life peopled by strangers, but eventually she managed it. To begin with every day had been a trial but, by the time she was ten, she could look back at the time she had lived in Goorapilly and remember only one or two incidents sticking up through the vanished years like the peaks of mountains through mist.

  3

  Jacqui’s first memory was of the time when she was seven years old and Kyle Sweet came to live on the other side of the street, in the house that had belonged to Mrs Swenson.

  Mrs Swenson had been a fat old lady who panted a lot in the hot weather and had brown marks as big as two cent pieces on her face and the backs of her hands. In the past, whenever Jacqui came home from school, she used to see Mrs Swenson sitting on her verandah but that year she never came out of the house and Arthur warned Jacqui not to make too much noise because the old lady was crook.

  ‘I fear she’s sinking,’ he said, and Jacqui had visions of the old lady, whale-like, being swallowed by the sea. How the sea could swallow someone who never left the house she didn’t know but it seemed it could because a few days later another woman arrived. She was also old-looking but as thin as Mrs Swenson was fat, with a face as sour as sick.

  Frances said she was Mrs Swenson’s niece. Her name was Mrs Loop from Maroochydore, in the south of the State, where it seemed she was Someone Important in the Ladies’ Afternoon Bridge Club. She talked to Frances about A Blessed Release and what a relief it would be when Mrs Swenson Finally Laid Down The Load.

  Jacqui, ears flapping as usual, overheard all this and assumed that Laying Down The Load must have something to do with Mrs Swenson being so fat, but when she asked Frances about it she said it meant that Mrs Swenson was dying.

  A week later, a long black car arrived outside Mrs Swenson’s gate and she was carried out in a box — having Passed Over, in Mrs Loop’s words, and now being taken to her Last Resting Place.

  Frances said that never in her life had she known anyone who could talk in capital letters the way Mrs Loop could.

  ‘Did she drown?’ Jacqui asked Frances.

  Frances looked at her. ‘Drown?’

  Jacqui thought of telling her what Arthur had said about Mrs Swenson sinking but it was too complicated, what with that and Laying Down The Load and The Blessed Release.

  ‘I just wondered,’ she said.

  An agent’s board went up outside the house, Mrs Loop went back to Maroochydore and in October the Sweets arrived.

  Jacqui watched them unloading their furniture from the back of a ute. They were very different from Mrs Swenson. Mrs Sweet was youngish and jolly and sang all the time, even when she was lugging the furniture into the house. She saw Jacqui watching and said hi there, smiling as though she meant it. She was as tall as Arthur and as thin as a pole. She had long thin a
rms and long thin legs. She had hair the colour of string and wore a pale green shirt and jeans of the same colour, very close fitting. She looked like a glass of limeade. Mr Sweet, on the other hand, was a blocky sort of man, with thinning black hair, a red face and hairy arms.

  Frances said they came from Victoria. All Jacqui knew about Victoria was that it was a million kilometres away, was freezing cold and rained all the time.

  Mr Sweet had a job at Warren Shaughnessy’s hardware store. After the first day he disappeared, leaving Mrs Sweet to get on with things: Warren Shaughnessy was not a man to allow anyone more than a day to move in, even if they had come all the way from Victoria.

  Jacqui asked Frances how the Sweets would handle the hot weather when they were used to the snow and ice down south, but Frances put on her mind-your-own-business voice and said she was sure they would manage very well.

  She baked an almond slice and took it across the road to welcome the new arrivals. When she got back she told Jacqui about the Sweets’ son Kyle.

  ‘He is a year younger than you.’

  Jacqui was cautiously interested. ‘I haven’t seen him.’

  ‘He is staying with friends until they’ve finished moving in. He’ll be here by the weekend.’

  ‘How’s he going to get here?’

  ‘His mother said he was flying up.’

  ‘By himself?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  That was something; Jacqui didn’t know anyone who’d been in a plane. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea. A kid who’d flown all the way from Victoria — by himself — was liable to think he was pretty fancy. If so, that was going to create problems. All the same, Jacqui kept her eyes open and, sure enough, on Saturday afternoon Kyle arrived.

  She saw him in the yard after tea and sauntered out herself. They looked at each other.

  He was wearing shorts and shoes, with ankle socks that made him look more like three than the six he was supposed to be. His skin was as pale as milk: not surprising, coming from where he did. Even his hair was pale and stuck up in spikes all over his head. He looked like an echidna. Jacqui was wearing shorts, too, but was barefoot and her brown legs were covered in scratches and bits of dried mud.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Is it always as hot as this?’

  She laughed as scornfully as she could. ‘This isn’t hot. Wait until December.’

  ‘My name’s Kyle. I just got here.’

  ‘I’m Jack.’

  ‘Jack’s a boy’s name.’

  ‘It’s my name,’ she told him, very fierce.

  He looked doubtful.

  ‘Wanner make something of it?’

  ‘No. You say your name’s Jack, that’s okay by me. I reckon you ought to know your own name.’

  That was all right, then.

  ‘I came up by plane,’ he offered, but not making a big deal out of it.

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘They put a label on me.’

  Jacqui was astounded. ‘Like a parcel?’

  ‘They were afraid I’d get lost. You know what they’re like.’

  Adults, he meant.

  ‘Always fussing,’ she agreed.

  ‘That woman I saw over your place. She your mother?’

  ‘Aunt. I’m a norphan.’

  ‘What’s a norphan?’

  ‘It’s what you are when both your parents are dead.’

  ‘Do you miss them?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Jacqui retained hardly any memory of her parents: a blonde woman in cream slacks and a thickset, hairy man who seemed always to be shouting. If you had to be a norphan, perhaps that was the way to do it: getting it over early seemed the way to go.

  ‘They give you anything to eat on the plane?’

  ‘I had biscuits and ice cream and a Coke.’

  It was the first enthusiasm he’d shown. Jacqui was impressed, too.

  ‘Cool!’

  ‘Not bad.’

  He didn’t seem to think he was pretty fancy. She looked at him again and made up her mind.

  ‘Wanner come over?’

  4

  The second memory concerned Arthur. In his case it took longer, but in time she came to think of Arthur, too, as a friend.

  Like Frances or Kyle, Arthur was always there: in his jeans, industrial boots and khaki shirt, an old bush hat stuck on the back of his head. He smelt of petrol, grease and middle-aged man. He never had much to say for himself: if he spoke a dozen words a day it was a lot. Arthur was a listener.

  Most people would have said that emotion was as far from Arthur as the dried-up rocks of the outback; one Thursday evening when she was eight years old, after Frances had returned home and Arthur had gone to have his weekly drink with his friend Bernie Young the accountant, Jacqui learnt the truth of that.

  At the back of the house was a little room that Arthur had fixed up as an office. It was dark and dingy in there, altogether a place of wonders. There was a machine with a handle on one side that you could use to spew out a seemingly endless tongue of white paper from a roll set on top. An old-fashioned telephone was balanced on a tottering pile of invoices, receipts and delivery notes all lumped together with the corners sticking out every which way, like hairs on a sick dog. There was a large, ancient, cast-iron safe that contained more of the papers that Arthur seemed neither to read nor throw away.

  The door of the safe was propped open by a battered wooden chair: Arthur had read of a case where a child had been locked in a safe overnight and suffocated to death. He had instructed Jacqui never, in any circumstances, to go anywhere near the safe.

  The idea of going into it was too extreme to warrant formal prohibition. It was unthinkable that she should ever do such a thing.

  Except that this was what she planned to do.

  She was currently reading a child’s version of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. One of the stories concerned a man who had got himself bricked up inside the walls of an old house. The idea fascinated her; she wanted to find out for herself what it felt like to be trapped in a tiny space, in utter darkness, without any hope of rescue.

  The safe was the obvious place.

  She had to wait until Thursday because this was the only evening that Arthur went out. The window of the room faced away from the street and no light entered it from outside, so that when she inched open the door an hour after sunset the room was as black as black.

  She closed the door behind her. The hinges always creaked, but the sound was amplified one hundred times by the darkness. She stood in the dust-smelling, pitch-black room with her heart pounding along like a runaway train.

  She nearly chickened out. She clutched the round, safe handle of the door and told herself that the room was dark enough for her to visualise how the character in the story must have felt, that there was no need to climb inside the safe at all. It was no use. Standing by the door she knew she could walk half-a-dozen steps in any direction; no way was it like being bricked up inside the walls of an old house.

  Somehow she forced herself to let go of the door handle and walk slowly in the direction of the safe. She knew the room well enough to navigate safely between the rocks and shoals of the papers heaped upon the floor. She reached the safe. Her outstretched fingers felt all around its open doorway and the iron frame was cold to her touch.

  There was enough space inside the safe for an eight-year-old child. She took a deep breath and squeezed herself in, found there was less room than she had thought. Her head was jammed against the top of the safe and her knees were somewhere up around her ears. With her eyes open she could see nothing but the strip of light under the office door. Shut them and everything was absolutely black. So tightly was she wedged that she could barely move; it was not at all difficult to imagine how the man in the story must have felt. All too easy, in fact. She opened her eyes and nearly died.

  The door from the passageway was creaking open. She watched as a creature entered the room. Despite the darkness, she could see it c
learly. It was a monster, bent-shouldered, with slavering jaws exposing rotted teeth. She knew at once what it was. It existed for the sole purpose of locking disobedient children into safes. There was no chance of escape; she could barely move. Screaming would not help: she was alone in the house. She waited, eyes screwed shut, for the safe door to slam closed on her.

  Nothing happened.

  She opened her eyes one hundredth of a millimetre, ready to snap them shut the instant she saw the monster staring at her.

  Nothing.

  Had the door into the passage not been ajar, she would have thought she had imagined it.

  She opened her eyes a little further and saw a shadow move at the periphery of her vision. She slammed her eyes shut; then, after another minute in which still nothing happened, opened them cautiously once more.

  Someone was sitting at the desk on the far side of the room. The light from the passageway fell upon him. It was Arthur. Better than her imagined monster, but not by much. Arthur would skin her alive if he discovered her hiding inside his safe. She breathed as quietly as she could and prayed for him to finish whatever he had come to do and go away.

  She wondered why he hadn’t switched on the light. At least she had that to be grateful for: he could hardly have missed her if he had. Whatever his reason, he sat there in the dark for what seemed a very long time. Eventually she heard a sigh that seemed to come from the bottom of his boots and the sound of a drawer opening. Again silence, then a strange, creaky noise that she did not recognise.

  She inched an eyeball around the edge of the safe to try and make out what was going on. Arthur was looking at a photograph in a gold-coloured frame. Jacqui had seen it once before, when Arthur had left it out. It was the picture of the woman he had intended to marry and who had died. By the angle of his head, she thought he was looking, not at the portrait, but at something only he could see: a memory perhaps, or an old longing.