Girl Alone: An Australian Outback Romance

by Lucy Walker

  ‘I like you calling me “sweetheart”, David. It sounds friendly. Yes, I can read and write. And manage algebra now and again. What I’m trying to add up is something in my second question. How did Mister Falldown know what had happened? And where to look for us?’

  ‘It’s Wednesday, Mardie,’ Mrs Richie reminded her. ‘So yesterday was Tuesday ‒ the day Mister Falldown should have come in for his stores. When the police came over on the blower as they usually do, we had to tell them he hadn’t come in. They went out to his camp and, as is routine, took their tracker with them.’

  ‘Old Mister hasn’t forgotten all he pretends he’s forgotten,’ Mr Richie interrupted with a chuckle. ‘He knew darn-all a tracker would come. And he remembered to leave the kind of tracks the tracker would understand and read. In other words, his kind of message.’

  ‘Quite a one is our Mister Falldown ‒ when he’s up to something,’ Pete said with a laugh.

  ‘But how on earth did he know where to look? In which direction?’

  ‘Old Mister is a bushman and he knows everything that happens in his stretch of country,’ David said. ‘He knows that mesa range out there has a strong water seepage. He wouldn’t understand the geological terms for a “water catchment”, but he knows there’s underground water running along the base line of those mesas. He was the first to take Jard out there. What’s more, he knows Jard can’t keep from taking a look at the place every time he takes the ’copter for a ride.’

  Mardie made a little move.

  ‘He didn’t go just to take me for a pleasure trip? It wasn’t because of my bright eyes?’ She hoped they didn’t see her disappointment. She had to make a joke of it, of course. ‘He wanted to go and look at his beloved water tracks, so he took a bird along just for the company! Then the other birds got him. I mean the big feathered ones.’

  They all laughed again.

  ‘That’s just about it.’ David’s eyes were twinkling.

  ‘This time it was a couple of wedge-tails that had him. Not a mini skirt. He’ll get plenty of chipping about that ‒ don’t you fret!’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Mrs Richie said, ruffled. ‘We shouldn’t be making fun about him. After all, he is ill in hospital.’

  ‘He has Joanna to hold his hand,’ Pete said consolingly.

  ‘Till she brings the ute back,’ Mr Richie added drily. ‘Well, the sooner it’s all over, the better. Meantime we have Mister Falldown to thank for being a godsend of a bushman.’

  ‘Don’t forget the police with their two-way, and the Dig-in with theirs,’ David added. ‘After all ‒ we were there too!’

  Yes, but not all night, Mardie thought. Not cold and close together ‒ with my arms round him.

  The Breakaway was a busy place for days. Apart from the workmen and the first bricks rising above the cement foundations for the motel units, there came the usual through-travellers stopping for petrol, a drink, stores and a chat.

  Then two days later Joanna came with Mardie’s ute.

  ‘Why I bothered, I’ll never know!’ she said. ‘After all, Mansell could have sent their jackeroo over with the wretched thing. It really is a clanger, Mardie. Time The Breakaway bought a new one.’

  Mardie, still under orders to take it easy, thought about this too. She passed over the bit about the ute being a clanger.

  ‘Perhaps, out there at Mansell, they didn’t want their jackeroo to learn how to pick car locks,’ she said with a laugh. She was glad to see Joanna. It was company to have someone her own age, but she wished she could get past her feeling of being over-awed by all the things Joanna could do. Then there was the little matter of her own wishful thinking because Joanna was, as usual, wonderful to look at. Even in the emergency of rushing out to the rescue from the Dig-in she hadn’t forgotten her make-up case. Nor her brush and comb. And a change of clothes.

  Joanna explained these last away airily. ‘After all, when you’re around a crash-up in the outback you don’t know how long you might be stuck there nursing the injured.’

  ‘You are always prepared? They happen that often?’

  ‘A couple of weeks before you came up a truck turned over on the creek bridge between Mansell and Mytana Station. The driver was killed so there was no staying around then. Five weeks before that the same thing happened, and that time we did have to stay around. The driver and his mate were alive all right, but the creek was flooded, so the Flying Doctor Service was grounded. The stations couldn’t even get a Land-Rover over to this side of the river. There was quite a bit of swabbing and bandaging to get on with then!’

  Mardie’s eyes widened in a real admiration of Joanna’s many abilities.

  ‘How did you learn all these wonder things?’ she asked. ‘I mean bandaging, and all that?’

  ‘When I decided I wanted to be a field geologist, not a desk-bound chartist, I used my brains. Good advice that, Mardie! Always use your brains first, not later. I took a First Aid Ambulance course. I went to the Land-Rover firm and took a routine course in the mechanics of the thing. By the way that’s a Regulation Must for Government geologists. Not that they use any women in the field.’

  ‘Anything more?’ Mardie asked, still wide-eyed.

  ‘Yes. I took a beauty care course as a package deal. Face lotions, oil, moisturiser, lipstick, the lot. I did not intend to get frazzled out by the heat.’

  Mardie was still blinking.

  ‘So?’ Joanna asked.

  ‘I’m amazed! How thorough can anyone be!’

  ‘Meaning me? Well, that’s the way I set out to be. I’m that way about my possessions too, including men friends. So come clean, Mardie. How come Jard made a mistake about those wedge-tails? He wasn’t looking in the wrong direction, by any chance? Gazing into other eyes, or some such?’

  Mardie was puzzled. She hadn’t quite caught Joanna’s meaning.

  ‘I guess one’s looking round about all the time, when flying a ’copter. It’s not the same as flying a plane, is it? He certainly wasn’t heading to land in that bush strip. He wasn’t heading to land anywhere. He just fell. Like a meteorite; bang out of the sky. We were flying fairly low, thank goodness.’

  Joanna stretched her arms above her head as if about to yawn. ‘Oh well!’ she said. ‘I guess he’ll tell us all about it when he’s well enough.’

  ‘Does he remember everything about it?’ Mardie asked cautiously. She pretended to be interested in the state of her hands.

  ‘He says so. But doesn’t go into details, yet. After all, he is still getting over a nasty bash on the head. One thing for certain … he was very pleased to see me sitting there when he did wake up. I never saw a sweeter grin in my life. However, he didn’t remember how he got there.’

  Joanna stood up and walked to the window. ‘You won’t mind if I don’t tell you his exact words, will you?’ she said. ‘They were very private.’

  ‘No, of course I don’t mind.’ Mardie’s small laugh somehow was mixed up with her cheek muscles and this felt rather painful. ‘You are old friends. And good friends.’

  Joanna turned round. ‘More than that,’ she said succinctly. ‘But we’ll talk about that another day. Meantime David Ashton is crazy for you to come out to the Dig-in. By earth-bound passage this time. Gravel track only. You will come, won’t you? We’re probably bringing the big diamond drill in shortly. Depends on the Company’s directors. Testing the depth of the intersections at strike length, you know. That will be in the next week or two if it can be arranged. I doubt if Jard will be out there at the time but you’ll have had more than enough of his company I guess. After all, he did rather let you down.’

  ‘He didn’t let me down. We fell down,’ Mardie insisted. ‘The ’copter just fell. Jard didn’t have anything to do with it. Except he was there. Same as I was there. One eagle came through the wind-screen and the other must have got mixed up with the top works. The blades went askew and came clean off. You must have seen the broken windscreen and the ‒’

  ‘Hush, Mardie,’ Joa
nna said, using kindly tones this time. Talking to a child. ‘You really must stop thinking about it. And keeping on about this “fell down” thing. It’s bad for you to dwell on it after such a traumatic experience …’

  ‘I know you’re a very good nurse, Joanna. You’re in charge of the First Aid room out there at Dig-in, aren’t you? What with all that First Aid training ‒ not to mention the beauty care, and being a scientist. But, please, what is a traumatic experience?’

  ‘To put it simply, it’s an experience that leaves an aftermath of strain and anxiety, a desire to churn things over and over. Keep repeating oneself. Letting it get one down!’

  ‘And now you’ve put it into simple English for me!’

  Joanna laughed. ‘Mardie dear, you really are quite a pet, but you mustn’t take things so seriously. You must try to forget the whole experience. This is important because there can be after-effects.’

  It was Mardie’s turn to stare through the window. She wasn’t sure that Joanna wasn’t wishing simple-mindedness and traumatic aftermaths on her by way of suggestion. But, in that case, someone with a scientific training, a First Aid training, and a beauty care training would know what she was doing. Or wouldn’t she?

  ‘I’ll tell you what I do take seriously,’ she said at last. ‘It’s when those men out there don’t put a spirit level along the brick line as they lay the bricks, and don’t drop a plumb-line down the doorway gaps so the doors will really fit. That is when they come. Funny how some types … you know, skilled trained people … sometimes need watching.’ She glanced at Joanna with one eyebrow just the smallest bit lifted. This time the other girl had missed the message. Actually, for the fraction of a second Mardie thought she herself was the meanie, and was rather glad Joanna had not clicked.

  Chapter Nine

  Other visitors came and went.

  The Flying Doctor dropped down on the landing ground east side of the bitumen. He examined Mardie and pronounced her fit enough to take on a marathon walkathon any time she felt like it. He stayed for lunch and told amusing stories about people who thought they were ill in the remote vastnesses of the outback when all that was wrong was that they were newcomers, and weren’t used to eating kangaroo steak in large quantities. Or that a master bull-ant wasn’t a scorpion and, if bitten, they wouldn’t die in spite of a large gland popping up under the arm.

  One of the workmen on Mardie’s new building had a mildly poisoned finger and Dr Fells treated that. He took the plastic bindings off Digger’s leg, and pronounced a lump in Mr Richie’s wrist as a boil and not a growth ‒ a fear Mr Richie had been secretly musing for four days.

  ‘Any more queries, complaints or imaginary pains?’ he asked with a grin as he glanced round the assembled group which consisted of The Breakaway’s household, builders, and a host of young aborigines who, like the early morning shades cast by the mulgas against the morning sunrise sky, had crept in from unimaginable distances. They had come to see the Magic Flying Man who was here to cure all ills and who cast goodwill about as vagrantly as he might crumbs to colourful birds.

  There was a general shaking of heads as he was escorted by this motley posse back across the bitumen and over the landing ground to the aeroplane which had the enchanting and magic letters printed on its sides: Royal Flying Doctor Service. God’s greatest gift to the outback.

  The next drop-ins were the strangest of all. Two of them; and Mardie had seen them before. But two weeks before this visitation, David Ashton came through on the two-way from the Dig-in.

  ‘How’s Bickleys Brandy this morning? It’s your sweetheart from Red Wine calling.’

  ‘As if I wouldn’t know your voice.’ There was a smile in Mardie’s voice. ‘I’ve been dying to hear from you, David. Each time I’ve called Red Wine you’ve been out at the drill site. There’s always been someone else on call.’

  ‘What do you specially want to know, love? The only messages we’ve had were all about stores.’

  ‘How Jard is getting on, of course. After all, I have a vested interest. We fell down out of that sky together. Remember?’

  ‘That’s what I’m calling you about. I’ll have to take second interest for the next five minutes, won’t I? So count your words. Here comes someone.’

  Mardie drew in a deep breath. Could it be …?

  Jard’s voice came over the air. Quiet, sort of contained, yet with that soft but certain note in it.

  ‘Hallo, Mardie. Jard Hunter calling. How are you?’

  It seemed so formal. Yet there was a certain something in it that made Mardie’s heart turn. There was a lump in her throat but she tried not to let its presence come through.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, mustering brightness like gold dust out of the air. ‘Never better in my life. Bruises gone, aches vanished. But what about you? I knew you were all right. I heard it over the session. But I didn’t know how much all right.’

  ‘I’d have called you over the Session, Mardie, to say “thank you”. But in this case it would sound too personal to have the whole world listening in.’

  ‘You don’t have to say thank you for anything, Jard. It was nothing. Nothing at all. I want to know how you are. Any permanent … well, scars … or such things?’

  ‘A stiff leg ‒ temporary only. One bent little finger ‒ you’d hardly notice. A fine line where they put a row of stitches in my head ‒ quite unnecessarily. But you know what doctors are. Give them a skin cut and they hassle for a needle. I’m sorry I can’t come over to thank you personally just yet. I would have done so when they first brought me back to the Dig-in, but I can’t drive until my leg loosens up a bit. The damn thing won’t operate the accelerator pedal yet.’

  ‘Oh … I am sorry. About your leg, of course. And about your not coming over too. I would like to see you.’

  ‘Yes. We have to get together with the Law, I’m afraid. They need a record of what happened, and meantime the Company is sending up an insurance expert about the ’copter. They’ll both need your evidence. Do you remember exactly what happened?’

  ‘Only at first ‒ when the blades made that dreadful clanging noise on the roof. I hope I’ll be able to help, Jard, but it all happened so quickly. I was busy saving myself and not thinking about how and what was actually happening … I mean, second by second. It was all so quick. That eagle came beak-first straight through the windscreen at your head. I do remember that.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Over to you, Jard,’ Mardie said, in case he hadn’t flicked the switch and was still waiting for her to go on speaking.

  ‘Yes. I’m on air, Mardie. Sorry to take so long about it. Is this a good time to ask you how on earth you got me out of that cockpit?’

  ‘Well … I was doing things … so I wasn’t thinking. I can’t remember all the details ‒ quite. Couldn’t we leave it awhile? And Jard? You haven’t lost your memory or anything like that, have you?’ An almost hopeful note crept into her voice. She wanted to beg him not to remember the night. ‘I mean ‒ sometimes it happens about forgetting what has happened after an accident.’

  ‘Some of it, Mardie. Things are blank after I cracked my head on the panel, of course. But not in any other way. I’m not Mister Falldown-the-Second, if that is what you’re thinking. I haven’t forgotten who I am, or where from.’

  There was such a long pause that Jard said, ‘Over to you still, Mardie. I haven’t switched across.’

  The lump that had been in Mardie’s throat had disappeared but there was a frog in its place. She felt awkward, embarrassed, but she had to know the answer to the next question. She knew that no one else on their two-way code could listen in.

  ‘Do you … well … do you … sort of remember anything of the night, Jard? I mean, it’s not important … except it was a bit cold. Over.’

  ‘No, I don’t remember that … except seeing someone close by. A face, or something. I think it was early in the morning. Just a flash picture, but I thought it was yours. I could be wrong. The next t
hing I knew I was in the hospital.’

  So that was all!

  Mardie was so relieved she slumped in her chair.

  ‘Oh, it was probably one of the men. Or Mister Falldown.’

  ‘It wasn’t Mister Falldown. It was a white face … if there was one there at all. I could have imagined it. Of course Joanna was there some time. Yes ‒ I remember that now. Things come back bit by bit. She was peering into my eyes. I remember her face close to mine then. Other people around ‒ that sort of thing.’

  ‘She did give you a thorough search and run-over, Jard. You know, the usual First Aid stuff. She’s awfully good at it.’

  ‘Yes. But there was something else about a face. Forget it, shall we? I guess I was dreaming. That is, if people can dream in a half-conscious state.’

  ‘That would be it, of course,’ Mardie said hastily. ‘Anyhow, Mister Falldown and later Joanna did all sorts of wonder things for you. They both seemed to know how. I’m afraid I wasn’t much use then.’

  ‘Don’t be modest, Mardie. You did a wonderful job to get me out of that ’copter. Let me thank you for that again. As soon as I can use a car or if one of the men is going over for stores, I’ll come and thank you personally. That is, if I may? You might be harbouring hard feelings about my part in the accident. I did wreck you. Over to you again.’

  ‘Oh no! No! No hard feelings, Jard. The opposite. Please do come when you can. But just to visit us. There’s nothing to thank me for. You must go and see Mister Falldown for that. Over.’

  ‘I’ll be seeing you both. By the way, how’s Digger?’

  ‘He’s fine, too. He had medical attention from the pilot. You should be asking after Dingo Pup.’

  ‘I have. At least Mister Falldown has sent messages by way of a couple of tribesmen. Dingo Pup is fine, growing, and being firmly taught by Mister Falldown that killing other animals is not the in-thing this year. Over now, Mardie. Thank you once again, and I’ll be across to see you as soon as possible.’