Brumby's Run

by Jennifer Scoullar

  If Faith noticed her daughter wandering about the house in the early hours, unable to sleep, she didn’t say anything; if she saw Sam in the garden at the compost bin, quietly disposing of her morning bowl of fruit and muesli, she didn’t ask how she was. It was like she was afraid to mention Charlie or the treatment at all.

  Mary, on the other hand, had bothered to find out about the effects G-CSF injections might have on donors. She knew that they hurt, for one thing. This is going to sting, the nurse had said when she gave Sam the first one. Sting? Biting fire ants swarming over her stomach was more like it. The nurse was cheerful, peremptory, distracted. It was Mary who noticed the tears that Sam tried to squeeze back.

  Mary waited for the nurse to leave the room after the injections, then produced a little pot of greenish-gold salve. She leaned forward, reeking of tobacco smoke, and gently lifted the front of Sam’s shirt. Sam screwed up her nose and touched Mary’s arm, ready to push her hand away, but Mary shushed her and applied the goo to Sam’s burning stomach. It brought instant relief. Sam relaxed back on the hard hospital trolley. ‘What is that stuff?’ she asked.

  ‘Organic aloe and calendula balm,’ said Mary, offering Sam the little pot. It looked homemade, and had pretty orange petals floating in it. ‘Your mother doesn’t make it, then?’

  Faith didn’t make anything, except a spectacular entrance. Sam couldn’t tell if Mary was being sarcastic. If only she knew more about the woman.

  ‘I’ll give Faith the recipe, shall I?’ Mary sounded sincere enough.

  ‘Tell me how it’s made,’ said Sam. A test. For all she knew, Mary had whipped around to the nearest Body Shop and bought the stuff. That’s what normal people did.

  Mary looked thoughtful, like she was actually trying to remember. ‘You pick two cups of marigold petals at noon on a sunny day, so they’re not the least bit damp …’

  ‘Marigolds?’ asked Sam.

  Mary nodded. ‘Calendula, edible marigolds. Our garden at Brumby’s Run is full of them.’ Sam imagined a picturesque cottage with a rambling herb garden – chooks and flowers and fruit trees. She wanted to ask Mary about her home, about her life, not about the stupid ointment. ‘Put the petals into a small saucepan of sweet almond oil and heat for, oh, an hour or so? Add a cup of fresh aloe-vera jelly.’ Mary paused, and looked hard at Sam. She seemed to be deciding how detailed the instructions needed to be for her townie daughter. ‘You get that by scraping out the inside of the leaves,’ Mary said slowly, as if talking to a young child.

  ‘Go on,’ said Sam, fascinated.

  ‘Strain it all through a square of cheesecloth, unbleached cheesecloth. Warm the mixture again in a saucepan, with a quarter of a cup of melted beeswax, until it’s smooth. Tell your mum to pour it into sterilised jars, like she was bottling fruit – and she can mix in a few petals for colour, if she likes, before she seals them.’ Sam was speechless. ‘Would you like me to write it down for her?’ asked Mary.

  Sam burst out laughing. There was obviously nothing normal about Mary. She’d passed her test with flying colours. ‘I’m not laughing at you,’ said Sam swiftly, concerned by the hurt on Mary’s face. ‘It’s just funny thinking about Faith bottling fruit, or going to so much trouble over anything, let alone something you could just buy at the chemist.’

  ‘Oh, but you can’t buy this at the chemist,’ said Mary earnestly. ‘It can only be made by a mother or a grandmother for a child. There’s a slightly different recipe for fathers, but they don’t often seem to bother.’ Sam smiled, unsure if Mary was making a joke. How could she remain so … so heartfelt and preposterous at the same time? ‘The magic of mother’s love is the active ingredient, that’s why it worked so well for you.’

  Sam turned the strange little pot around in her hand, and examined it like she would an object from another world. It promised to be a very steep learning curve indeed with this woman, her birth mother.

  Mary had been equally attentive to Sam’s other ills. Ginger tea for the nausea. Nettle soup for the yawning ache in her bones. Mary could identify the problem with one glance. ‘Here, take a couple of these,’ she said one day as Sam sat outside Charlie’s room, waiting for her sister to wake. Mary offered two little sticky tablets. A bit like miniature rum balls, they bore the characteristic green-gold colour of Mary’s homemade concoctions. ‘They’ll help with the headache, sweetie.’ Sam’s head was pounding, too furious for analgesic relief. Mary fetched a plastic cup of water, and Sam swallowed the odd little pills without question.

  Mary’s treatments had proved at least as effective as conventional remedies. But what she liked most about these odd cures was hearing how Mary made them. Sam never wrote them down, and Mary didn’t seem to expect her to. She was a little girl listening to fairy stories. ‘I suppose you want the recipe?’ Mary asked after Sam had swallowed the pills, and Sam nodded. ‘Let me see … two tablespoons each of dried valerian, chamomile, peppermint and rosemary. Then the active ingredient – extract of feverfew.’ There was always an active ingredient, usually something rather dark-sounding, like skullcap tincture or devil’s shoestring. ‘Grind them together,’ Mary mimed the actions, ‘blend with enough bloodwood honey to bind. Break off pill-sized pieces and roll into balls. Then store them in a tightly sealed tin, on the sill of an open window overnight.’

  ‘Why do you put them by an open window?’

  ‘So they can absorb lunar peace,’ said Mary simply.

  Marvellous. Sam imagined the country cottage. She felt she knew it quite well by now. Mary worked the mortar and pestle in a sunny kitchen, fragrant with fresh herbs. Charlie sat at the rough-hewn timber table, eating scones with homemade blackberry jam, warm from the wood stove. Sam’s headache had lost its grip as she imagined out the window to the herb garden. A mountain beyond. She’d not got so far before. A gum-tree gully, a rough paddock of native grass and bright alpine daisies. Some wide-horned cattle. Herefords, was that what Charlie had said? And a herd of wild horses, escaping up the distant hillside, necks arched, manes and tails streaming in the breeze.

  By the time the course of injections was finished, Sam had a complete picture of Brumby’s Run in her head. Charlie and Mary hadn’t been much help. They couldn’t even show her a photo. Mary’s phone was ancient, too old to take pictures, and Charlie’s phone was broken. Mary talked a lot about her herb garden but that was all, and the intensive chemotherapy had laid Charlie so low she could barely speak. Sam spent every spare minute at the hospital, willing her sister to get well, craving the day when she could talk to Charlie properly.

  Chapter Seven

  Charlie looked up as two people entered the room. Mum and Sam? With those ridiculous gowns and masks on, it was never immediately obvious who anybody was. A figure leant over her. ‘How are things, sweetie?’

  Mum asked the most stupid questions. How did she expect things to be? The deadly routine was killing Charlie. She dreaded waking up just to take a gazillion more pills. If she turned on the TV, she was too weary to keep track of the program. She couldn’t see the sun, didn’t even have a window. Breakfast had looked crappy, and she wouldn’t have eaten it even if she could. She was so tired she’d gone back to sleep, and woke up puking her guts up. Nurses came in and out of her room taking vitals – blood pressure and temperature and a million other things – God knew how many times a day. She felt like shit all the time and didn’t see anybody except Mum and Sam. Had it only been a week since she’d started on this high-dose chemotherapy treatment? It felt like months. The days were a miserable blur, and she wanted to rip out the central line snaking from her chest, delivering its cell-destroying venom. Rip it out and break its back. Charlie wanted to say all this, but the mouth ulcers made it hard to speak at all. Her mouth was like sandpaper and she had canker-sore things all over her tongue, inside her cheeks, even down her throat.

  ‘I’m fine, Mum,’ she said.

  Mary placed a few ice chips and a little lozenge in her mouth. ‘Peppermint, powdered ginger and v
iolet petals,’ she said, for Sam’s benefit. Her brand-new sister was quite taken with Mum’s mumbo jumbo. It was a pity Mum couldn’t come up with a herbal remedy for leukaemia.

  Sam reached for her hand. ‘I can’t wait for tomorrow.’ Charlie nodded. Tomorrow, the fifth of December, was D-day, peripheral stem-cell transplant day – the day she’d begin to get her life back.

  Sam yawned. It was a bit of an anticlimax really. She was hooked up to the dalek machine that had so frightened her the day she’d first met Charlie, just ten short days ago. Not that the machine was any fun, but it wasn’t all that bad either. Not compared to the horror stories people liked to tell about the alternative – surgical bone-marrow donation. That involved an enormous needle, sucking a litre or more of warm liquid marrow from deep inside your hips. Sam clenched her pelvic floor involuntarily just to think of it.

  That same afternoon, Sam’s stem cells were transplanted into Charlie, while Sam waited anxiously for news. When Professor Sung came to see her, she knew it had gone well – the doctor couldn’t stop beaming. The transplant had been textbook perfect. Mary performed some sort of pagan ritual of thanks in the hospital car park, with chalk circles and burning beeswax. Charlie was exhausted, but smiled weakly at Sam when they were finally able to see each other. ‘Here’s to a shared future,’ she said.

  The only person who didn’t seem overjoyed with the news was Faith.

  ‘I still don’t understand why you didn’t want me there,’ said Faith that evening after Sam had arrived home. ‘I’d have been your support person,’ she said. ‘But no, you had to go straight to that Mary woman.’ This last remark came with a theatrical flourish.

  Sam took a deep breath. ‘It was something I needed to do myself, Mum. And Mary was only my support person in hospital. You’ve been here for me at home.’ And about as supportive as a wet dish-cloth, thought Sam. ‘You were busy getting ready for France. And anyway, it’s given me a chance to get to know Mary.’

  Faith snorted her displeasure. ‘And what’s she like then, this Mary?’

  Sam wouldn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. Mary was a contradiction. She’d never met anybody quite like her. Sometimes Mary didn’t seem any older than Sam herself. Sometimes she was selfish and childish. Sometimes she was patient and wise. She was far too direct. At times she was just plain rude, especially if she had a complaint about Charlie’s care. Sam smiled. Faith would approve of Mary’s fearless advocacy on her daughter’s behalf. She had scant respect for hospital rules and regulations. She’d been thrown out, more than once, for smoking in the toilets. But when she wasn’t with Charlie or Sam, she spent her time reading to children in the paediatric ward, or visiting a growing army of elderly patients who didn’t seem to have any family. None who cared, anyway. Mary never seemed to have any money, except for cigarettes, and for Charlie’s beautiful scarves. Sam had bailed her out a few times already – ten dollars here, twenty dollars there. But Sam didn’t mind. Although Mary never had enough money, she always seemed to have enough time for her daughters.

  ‘She’s nothing like you,’ Sam said to Faith. ‘It’s difficult to explain.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Faith sniffily. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment, shall I?’ She swept out of the room and began clattering about in the kitchen.

  Being at the hospital, although frustrating and worrying, was no hardship compared to being at home. Since Faith had revealed the truth about Sam, she had grown brittle, defensive – paranoid, even. And for someone who’d rarely cried before, she was making up for lost time. Despite claiming she wanted to help, Faith had turned the whole thing around so that she was the victim. The victim of an unfeeling, ungrateful daughter, willing to toss her aside after eighteen years of love and self-sacrifice. This dynamic allowed Sam no leeway to ask the questions she most needed answers to.

  What Sam wanted was to sit down for an entire afternoon and hear her mother’s side of the story. She fantasised about it, and even wrote a list of questions in her journal. How had Faith found Mary? Had she wanted both girls or not? Why had she wanted a closed adoption, a confidential arrangement allowing for no interaction between the birth mother and her child? Had she ever wondered about Charlie? The list was endless. And of course, the most burning question of all: how could she justify having never told Sam the truth? In Sam’s fertile imagination, this illuminating afternoon always ended with Faith’s teary apology. An I’m sorry would go a long way to help make this mess right. Of course, Faith didn’t really do ‘sorry’, but for once Sam wasn’t going to be emotionally blackmailed into taking the blame.

  Sam spent more and more of her time at the hospital. She abandoned the few friends she had. She even neglected her horse, Pharaoh. She rang the stables and told them to turn him out.

  ‘But he’s in top condition. Rachael will keep him in work while you’re in Europe,’ protested her coach. ‘You can’t spell him now. You’ll miss the national squad trials.’

  ‘I won’t be trying out for the squad,’ said Sam. ‘And I’m quitting as coach of the juniors. Just do as I say, please.’

  ‘Fine,’ her coach said. He sounded disgusted. ‘But I’ll have to clear it with your mother first. She pays the bills. It will mean cancelling your training contract and altering Pharaoh’s terms of agistment.’ He hung silent on the end of the phone for a while. ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ he said at last. ‘It’s a waste of a fine young horse, at the top of his game.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Sam, ending the call. She had no time for Pharaoh at the moment. She had no time for anybody but Charlie.

  Chapter Eight

  Charlie grew stronger every day, and as her strength grew, so did her willingness to talk about life back home in Currajong. She was a born storyteller. ‘Brumby’s Run is simply the most beautiful place on earth,’ she told Sam. ‘Just wait til I show you. A thousand wild acres in the shadow of Balleroo Range, half an hour’s drive from town. At its highest ridge line, on the edge of the national park, you might as well be on the roof of the world. It’s magic. The air is magic. The view is magic.’ Charlie’s eyes shone with a vitality Sam hadn’t seen before. Her voice took on a compelling quality. ‘To the north there’s Maroong Mountain, a granite monolith, like Uluru. Parts of it are covered with cypress pine forests. That sort of disguises it, but it’s bigger than Uluru; almost twice as big.’ Sam tried to picture it. ‘At the top there are rock pools with rare frogs. I love frogs.’

  ‘Who knew?’ said Sam with a smile, looking at the amphibian-themed hospital room.

  ‘When it rains, streams spill off the bluff, turning the rock to molten silver, and there are permanent waterfalls as well. Balleroo’s an Aboriginal word for ‘rain god’. I’ll take you there in spring when the snows melt. Show you the platypus in Snake Creek, and the lyrebirds at Wagtail Gully, and the powerful owl nest in the hollow candle bark above the home dam. God, I miss it.’ Telling stories seemed to settle Charlie, helped alleviate what Sam sensed to be a growing homesickness. Sam spent whole afternoons listening to tales of brumbies and musters and rodeos. ‘When I was twelve,’ said Charlie, ‘I got lost chasing steers in the foothills. Had to camp alone overnight near the creek, and I swear I saw a panther come down to drink. I was shitting myself.’

  ‘A panther?’ said Sam.

  ‘There are panthers in the mountains.’ Charlie smiled. ‘Of course, I was just a kid. It might have been a big wild cat. They do get some whoppers around Balleroo.’

  ‘You were allowed to go off by yourself at twelve?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Sure. Went on my first muster when I was ten. I was a pretty feral kid.’ It was hard to imagine this frail sister as feral. ‘Half the time Mum never knew where I was, or what I was doing. Wagged school as often as I went.’

  What a life. The thought of that much freedom was intoxicating. Charlie had more independence at ten than Sam did now. Faith had been, and still was, a helicopter mum. Sam’s eighteenth birthday had so far made little difference.

&
nbsp; Sam was torn between love and frustration every time she thought of Faith. She knew Faith had added valium to her daily pill cocktail. To calm my anxiety, she’d said. Well if that was its purpose, the drug was a dismal failure. Faith, always highly strung, now seemed to live on the rim of hysteria. Sam had been keeping informal track of the stash of tablets in the upstairs bathroom. They were disappearing faster than ever before. Perhaps she should tell her father? But Dad could be so judgemental where Mum was concerned. Best not give him anything that could be used as ammunition.

  Sam surprised herself by beginning to cry. Her mask served as a shield, so Charlie didn’t immediately notice. Perhaps she could stem the tears in time – she didn’t want to explain to her sister, didn’t know how to explain.

  Charlie extended a fragile arm and took her hand. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Too late. Sam’s words came all in a rush. ‘Your life sounds so perfect, idyllic …’ she said. ‘I wish I was you.’

  Charlie squeezed her hand with new-found force. ‘That’s the nicest thing anybody ever said to me.’ Her expression was puzzled. ‘And the silliest. I’m half-dead. Bald. Stuck in Melbourne for another two months, or even longer. When I do get home, I’m not supposed to have contact with pets. I live on a bloody cattle station, and I’m not supposed to have contact with animals. How’s that going to work? Tambo’s probably half-starved, or cleared off with the brumbies. Mum’s broke, and you wish you were me.’

  ‘You’ve had freedom,’ argued Sam. ‘An authentic life. I’d forfeit a lot to be able to say that. I’ve been so protected, it feels like I haven’t lived.’

  Charlie released Sam’s hand. ‘I haven’t asked you much about yourself. You’ve been so interested in me. Maybe I’ve been rude. Truth is, I didn’t much feel like hearing about your big house and rich friends and fancy school. I don’t blame you or anything; I’m happy for you. But Mum and me, we’ve had some really tough times. I sometimes wished she’d given me away to the posh family, instead of you.’