‘He’s obviously sedated to manage the pain,’ the nurse said briskly over her shoulder, ‘and he’s still coming out of the anaesthetic so you won’t get much from him. Keep your visit short. It’s just to let him know you’re here.’ She showed them into a room that stored all the surgical scrubs, gloves and disposable hair nets. ‘Wash your hands thoroughly here. Then put these things on.’ She handed them each a disposable outfit sealed in a plastic bag. ‘Leave your belongings there.’ She nodded towards a table that was set against the wall for such things. ‘We can’t risk infection, so be thorough. When you’re prepared, the doctor will be out to brief you.’
Elvis turned on the long arm of a silver tap with his elbow and the nurse left the room.
On any other day, Elvis would be making jokes as they all stood in their disposable overalls, masks and hats, the way he’d done during his cancer treatment, but today, that inexhaustible repertoire of daggy jokes eluded him. He believed the explosion that saw his son so horrendously burned was his fault. He was certain there’d be an investigation of the shed and the family would be exposed. He had failed them. He had let his growing boys down, and his beautiful wife. All for scientific pride and glory. He berated himself for his arrogance! His son’s bubbling still-burning skin. The sound of Amos screaming out, ‘Dad! Help him!’ The horror of Zac’s guttural screams. The rush to the sink, the running water, the grapple to find his mobile phone, calling Gwinnie back at the roadhouse, not 000, such was his panic.
Gwinnie had reacted instantly. Swiftly. Local ambulance, flying doctor, even a bag packed for them all just before the staff hustled them to the Culvert airstrip. Elvis knew it wouldn’t be until after Gwinnie had seen her boy alive that she would collapse. Only then would the woman of iron buckle and soften and crumple to the floor. If she let him, he would hold her like a broken bird. Then, he knew, after a shower, something to eat, some sleep, she would emerge the next day and carry on, bright as a button. He had seen her do it so many times before during his own treatment.
The doctor was coming soon, and soon they would be seeing their son.
When the doctor did appear, it was as if he had come straight from the set of a daytime TV soap. Dr Day was a walking cliché of tall and handsome, with flawless skin and neat-combed black hair. From that moment Amos thought of him as Dr Daytime TV.
‘We’ve removed the intubation tube. His oral cavity is functioning fine, which is very lucky, otherwise he would be having difficulty breathing. He does, however, have severe burns to his neck and one side of his face. A section of his left forearm is exhibiting third-degree burns. Fortunately, as you know, he was wearing some protective clothing at the time, which saved his sight, but we can’t determine if he has permanent hearing loss at this stage. Of course for now that’s the least of our worries. It’s too early to tell, but he may need grafting and reconstructive surgeries. Certainly on his arm, but possibly on his face as well.’
Dr Daytime TV glanced up and almost took a backward step: his patient was standing before him. Then he realised he was looking at a twin. He made a mental note to mention it to the psych. There would be severe guilt for the brother who hadn’t suffered the burns. There may also be complications in the parents’ mental wellbeing, accepting such changes to one of their boys while the other was whole. He sighed. This was just another day of human horrors. Always so many complications.
‘We will also arrange counselling to help him with the psychological and social impairment that often follow facial burns. Are you ready to see him?’ Dr Day swept his arm towards the door and clenched his jaw in a smile. ‘Come this way.’
They shuffled forwards, entering the burns unit, trying beneath their masks to arrange expressions on their faces that conveyed to Zac comfort and hope, not horror.
Twenty-six
Culvert’s Councillor-Mayor Jones alighted from his council car with the ease of a hippo squeezing through a cat flap. He held a blocking hand up to the journalists who were waiting to swarm him outside the roadhouse and glanced around for his police escort. The constable was nowhere to be found.
Where was that damned man? In the media pack was a pimpled cadet from the Rington Gazette, not much older than his own daughter, clearly terrified to be in the company of the older female journalists from the city. Since word of the explosion had reached the city, the high-heeled women and polyester-panted men had smelled local government excrement in the form of incompetency. They were on the hunt for the scoop — or the ‘poo scoop’, as one journalist put it.
The questions began to fire.
‘Councillor, how could anyone not notice a pipeline being dug into a sewage-treatment plant?’
Kelvin thought momentarily of Elsie and fury enveloped him. She must’ve known about it, but had said nothing to him. She had known her friends’ activities would bring him down and smear the township’s good name (never mind the fact very few people had actually ever heard of Culvert until that morning).
‘Reports have been leaked that the council was already investigating why Culvert had almost half the national average output of sewage compared to similar-sized towns. Why hadn’t your team of experts, hired for thousands of dollars of taxpayer money, simply inspected the ponds and found the illegal pipe?’
‘Would you say this has been a shitty day for the town of Culvert, Councillor?’ one wag of a journalist asked.
‘Get it right!’ Kelvin barked, his face burning red. ‘It’s Councillor-Mayor.’
The journalists had discovered the story via a group email, where Nathanial Rogerson had sent his version to the media outlets — that a local loony father had blown up one of his sons with gas made from people poo. Poo that had been stolen from a sewage plant.
So it seemed public sewage theft was big news, and it would be Kelvin’s head on the chopping block. He knew with the internet the first of the media reports would be making their way overseas right now. Kelvin wished Elvis Smith was here to take the full brunt of this.
Constable Gilbert was at last arriving in the police four-wheel drive, followed by the Deputy Mayor, Cuthbertson Rogerson, who sat so low in his driver’s seat it looked like the vehicle was being piloted by a chimp.
Constable Gilbert got out, tucking in his shirt, his cheeks flushed, a grin on his round face. He winked a greeting at Cuthbertson.
‘What took you?’ muttered Kelvin to Constable Gilbert.
‘Domestic situation to attend to,’ the police officer said without losing his grin. He turned to the journalists, who were now firing questions at him. ‘Are you ready, ladies and gents?’ he enquired commandingly as he eyed a honey-pot blonde in a short skirt suit. ‘I’ll show you where raw sewage was being stolen right from under the council’s nose, so to speak,’ he said jovially. Kelvin flashed him a glance.
This case could be Constable Gilbert’s ticket out of Culvert. He couldn’t have dreamed up a better crime to put himself in the spotlight. He knew the Smiths were nutters. He knew the pain-in-the-arse mayor-councillor would be sunk. He opened the door of the police vehicle for Kelvin Jones and invited him in with a sweep of his hand. ‘Track’s a bit rugged for the council car in places, sir. Be my guest.’
He thought about the woman he had just been with. All she’d needed was a little compliment here, a little hand touching there and then he had her on a string. And on her back in a flash, he thought devilishly as he closed the car door, almost banging Kelvin’s knee in the process.
He hitched up his gun belt and gestured to the journalists. ‘Form an orderly convoy behind me and I’ll answer all your questions when we’ve arrived.’ To build excitement and tension, he added, ‘And remember, no smoking near the accident site!’
Bright yellow police tape cordoned off the area. It flapped in the wind, humming eerily. At the arrival of even more people, the galahs went wheeling and screeching away over the high fence of the treatment plant towards the tip. Constable Gilbert nodded to a group of men as he got out of the vehicle, the medi
a drawing up beside him, parking their Wagga Wagga hire cars in a row as if white city lines were printed in the paddock grass.
‘All right, fellas?’ Constable Gilbert asked the overall-clad men. ‘Site secure?’
One nodded. They were bomb-squad experts, brought into Culvert to ensure there were no illegal weapons being manufactured in the shed. That rumour was again compliments of Nathanial. The power-company guys were there too, shutting off the supply to the shed, inspecting the rat-chewed wires that possibly caused the explosion. Some of the equipment in there looked so sophisticated it was hard to tell what its actual function was and that was making everyone nervous. Chunky’s fire crew, including four of his sons, was there too. It had taken them fifteen minutes to put the gas fire out after the blast, but now the pipeline had been secured, they were merely hanging about for a gander of the whole shemozzle. Other men in orange high-visibility vests from the sewage plant were standing about in another cluster. They were watching a man in an excavator uncovering a buried pipe that ran from the shed all the way under the high mesh fence towards the nearest slurry pond of sewage.
As the media gathered up their cameras and recording devices, Constable Gilbert gestured for them to follow him into the dimness of the shed, where a large metal vat looked as if a giant bowling ball had ripped its way out of it with the force of a cannon. The smell of burned gas inside the shed was overpowering.
Again the journalists flicked on their lights for filming and the blood ran fast in their veins. Questions began to flow again. Pointed questions. Accusing questions. Like knives. All aimed at Councillor-Mayor Jones.
‘Seems seducing virgin girls wasn’t all this shed was used for,’ Constable Gilbert muttered as he held up a bottle of cleanskin whisky. ‘I think that Culvert’s shit has hit the fan.’
Behind him Cuthbertson grinned while Kelvin grimaced.
‘I’ll see them pay for this if it’s the last thing I do!’ said the councillor-mayor.
Twenty-seven
When the Smith family entered the room, they saw Zac with his head turned away on the pillow. His young strong chest was bare and there was a structure like an igloo covering his left arm. He was attached to a drip and seemed to be sleeping. The room smelled of silver nitrate. Elvis glanced at Gwinnie and saw the scrunch of pain on her face. Amos had turned pale and his mouth had fallen slightly open, his big brown eyes staring at his brother.
‘He’s a little groggy,’ Dr Day said, snapping them out of their silence. ‘It’s a case of wait and see over the next ten days. It’s difficult to estimate the wound depths at this point. Because of the excellent blood supply to the human face and its high density of epithelial appendages, facial wounds heal rapidly. If after a couple of weeks he hasn’t healed, though, he may develop hypertrophic scarring, so we will need to investigate excision and grafting. His arm, of course, will be slower to heal.’
The only word Gwinnie heard was ‘heal’. She moved towards her son and shut out the rest of Dr Day’s monologue. She collected herself with a deep breath, but it was all she could do to stifle a cry when she saw the hideous wounds on her son’s face. She felt, for the first time in her life, fury towards Elvis. His overly ambitious (not to mention illegal) secret and his ludicrous dreams were not only dead in the shit-ponds water, now one of her sons was wearing the scars of those dreams on his face, arm and hands for life, and her other son was witness to his brother’s suffering. She reached out and touched Zac lightly on his shoulder. He didn’t move. Tears spilled from Gwinnie’s eyes when she saw his beautiful face blackened around his left ear, his hair singed over the crown of his head. If his face looked bad, his arm and hands would surely look worse. Wound treatment cream smeared over the side of his face looked so thick it was as if he were about to swim the English Channel. The burn ran the length of his jawline and even through the cream Gwinnie could see weeping, blistered, cherry-red bubbles of skin and tissue that swathed down to his neck. She felt the rip of her heart again. This boy had arrived on the clean white sheet of the maternity ward sixteen minutes before his twin. It had been enough just to glance at that tiny mewing baby to know that his skin, his body, his heart and above all his soul were perfection to her. Seeing him so disfigured now, she felt the cruelty of life almost crush her. They had just dragged themselves through Elvis’s survival only to be faced with this.
Gwinnie drew deeply from within herself. She reached for that place in her soul that sang to her with gratitude.
Your son is alive, she heard a voice in her head say. He is alive. And that is a great thing. Whatever else happens on his journey is now a blessing. Whatever way his face heals and re-forms itself is a blessing.
The voice inside her was insistent. It was the only way she could go on, instead of falling down now on the floor and howling out a guttural wail of misery and fury that her beautiful boy had been burned.
Elvis stood beside his wife, a broken man.
Amos looked at the mirror of himself lying on the bed. He felt Zac’s pain and his heart tore too. He reached out and laid a hand on his brother’s upper arm. ‘Hello, other brother,’ he said.
Just then the nurse returned with a young man decked out in hygiene gear. The nurse nodded at the doctor curtly and busied herself with checking the machines beside the beds. The young man stood at the doorway too. When the Smiths didn’t react to the man’s presence, she glanced at them. ‘Your other son’s here.’
‘What?’ Gwinnie asked.
But it was too late. The man had already lifted up a camera and was taking rapid-fire photos of Zac, then swinging the camera to capture images of the others.
‘Get out,’ Elvis said with force, stepping forwards.
The paparazzo backed away, a victorious gleam in his eyes. Then he was gone, bursting out the door, flying back through the corridors, down the exit stairs and out of the sliding doors, away from the mayhem of the city hospital.
Shock waves roamed around the room as the Smiths absorbed the knowledge that back at the roadhouse shed their illegal secret must have been exposed for all the world to see. Just how big would the story be? Now with the internet, unauthorised, prying pictures like the ones just taken would spread like wildfire and there would be no going back. Elvis suddenly realised how much trouble he and the boys were in.
He pulled up a chair beside Zac’s bed, held his son’s hand and rested his forehead on the crisp white sheet. He shut his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said hoarsely first to his son, then turning his heartbroken face to Gwinnie and Amos.
Gwinnie stepped forwards and rubbed her hand over his back. ‘It’s not your fault.’
He shook his head and scrunched his eyes shut tight. ‘It is. We should’ve gone through the proper channels.’
‘We tried,’ Gwinnie forced herself to say. ‘You know how important this is. It could revolutionise the world.’
‘But look,’ Elvis said, his voice choked. ‘Look what I’ve done.’
Grief contorted Gwinnie’s tired but pretty face. ‘You didn’t do it. It was an accident. Zac is just as passionate about changing the world as you are. We will recover from this. Zac will recover from this. We have a revolution to plan.’
Elvis smiled sadly up at his wife. ‘Nice try, Gwinnie. I love you for saying that, but in truth our boy is scarred for life and I’m headed for gaol.’
Twenty-eight
Like a hard punishing whip to the skin, a letter from Sarah Jones arrived for Elsie about the Smiths’ downfall. Elsie was at first excited to be getting mail as she watched Gracie walking from the direction of the station office towards her with a smile on her face. Gracie loved delivering the mail by hand.
Elsie’s enthusiasm dimmed when she saw her mother’s handwriting on the envelope and she almost passed it straight back. Instead she slumped down on the bench seat outside the mess room. Her feet felt hot in her boots, her toes sweating, the flies seeking moisture in the corners of her eyes. She swept them away crossly as she began to tear open th
e envelope. Her mother had barely written anything on the thick embossed stationery folded around a sheaf of newspaper clippings and website print-outs.
Dear Eleanor,
I hope you are well. FYI about your ‘friends’ and what was going on in the shed you spent so much time in. Your poor father is having to deal with it.
Love Mum xxx
Elsie could read between the lines. They were furious with her. They knew she knew all about the sewage pipe to the shed. The clippings started with a front page from the local Rington newspaper. Elsie looked at a photograph of her father putting his hand up to block the camera. She flicked to another article from a bigger regional paper with a picture of the Smith family’s shed. The headline read Town Bogged Down by Blast. Then another from a city paper, then some global coverage. Another tacky article titled Bog Hogs from another magazine. Mother went all out, Elsie thought as she shuffled through clipping after clipping. Sarah Jones was keeping tally of just how angry she was with Elsie for the scandals she’d created with those boys.
The print before Elsie’s eyes blurred. The explosion was news worldwide, not because a beautiful boy had been seriously injured, but because the sewage theft allowed subeditors to use their basest puns. The Sh*t Hits the Fan in Small Town, mocked one of the headlines in bold font.
There was even a quote from their former science teacher Vernon Tremble, saying the Smith twins were like local gangsters and deserved all they got. But the worst things were the photographs of Zac taken in hospital. The way his face was cast away so his blackened hair and red-raw skin screamed. His body limp on white sheets, his family standing around him. He was barely recognisable.
Suddenly she was transported back to that night. It felt like an age in the past, but it had only been this month! She thought of the light in the twins’ eyes when they explained what was going on in the shed. She could hear the excitement in Zac’s voice: ‘The technology we’re working on with Dad could revolutionise life for everyone. Few people think about it, but we have a superclass created by the world’s dependency on fossil fuel for industry and transport. They control everything. If we get what we’re doing in here right, the use of sewage as a power source could potentially overturn those world dominators as well as free up communities to access a reliable power source locally.’
Cleanskin Cowgirls Page 19