Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  It was rare that a doctor would set up in such a small town. They learnt it was all part of Georgia’s grand plan. She had been on the prowl for a doctor for two years and finally found Meg, convincing her to service the area as a GP but with a speciality in women’s health. Part of the agreement was to share Meg with Cobar: once a week, she would drive the two hundred or so kilometres to Cobar to work at the women’s health clinic. Georgia was sure that once the town had a part-time doctor, big things would follow. Maybe a nurse or an oral hygienist? A counsellor for all the depressives, which she knew was a growth area out here? Perhaps the chemist would expand?

  After finding a handy funding provision in the state-government health department and two face-to-face interviews and numerous emails with Meg, Georgia had offered her the job. The town’s new doctor had arrived on Thursday, pulling into her rental home just out of town in her four-wheel drive, and died the next night. She had checked out her offices on Friday morning but hadn’t even seen one patient. It was a pity about Meg. Georgia shook her head in a break from her verbal PowerPoint presentation. It was hard getting doctors in the bush who spoke English as their first language.

  Another round of drinks was ordered, and after the four at the bar exchanged condolences with Meg’s great-aunt Vicky, who was busy sipping gin under the glow of the TV, they decided to swap real estate and sit down at one of the many available tables.

  Eve was glad to sit; the empty tables and rote words of sympathy to strangers, the forced camaraderie, had somehow become a weight in her legs, making them ache. Exhaustion washed through her, and she felt the need to clutch her stool in case she fell off.

  ‘You’ve gone all pale. Are you okay?’ Georgia asked. ‘You’re such a tiny thing.’ Georgia squeezed Eve’s arm, not to steady her but to emphasise that there was nothing to her. Sarah reached out and put her hand on Eve’s back for support.

  ‘I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.’ Eve tucked her hair behind her ears, as if that proved it. ‘You spelt her name wrong on the cross.’

  ‘Pardon?’ Georgia said.

  ‘It’s Meghan.’ Eve emphasised the ‘han’, using her English vowels to the utmost. ‘Not Megan. And I don’t mean to be rude, but when it’s time for the tombstone to be laid and engraved, I think “Death is not a foe but an inevitable adventure” should be scrapped. It’s not right. It’s not an adventure when you’re thirty-four. It’s a stupid, stupid mistake.’

  ‘Ohh, right,’ Georgia said. ‘Of course. Do you mind sending me an email? Perhaps you could provide another inscription, then. Something you find more suitable.’

  ‘Sure,’ Eve said.

  The four of them sat in a circle for a moment. Sam kept absolutely still. Georgia wrote her email address on a piece of paper from her handbag and slid it across to Eve. Eve took it, put it in her pocket and then wiped the beads of moisture on her glass with a small paper napkin. Sarah moved her handbag from the floor to a chair behind.

  ‘Meg had enough work here?’ Eve said finally, unwrapping her fingers from the edge of her stool.

  ‘Well, as I said, it wasn’t just this town. We were going to share Meg with Cobar. Around here has been a black hole for medical and health services, and finally there was going to be a doctor close, well, close-ish for a lot of people. As you can imagine, as you can probably see, we’re lacking some pretty basic services out here. We do the best we can. With everything, we do the best we can.’

  Maybe Georgia was not as irritating as Eve first imagined when she had walked in talk, talk, talking, telling them everything. She looked at the woman fiddling with the tasteful necklace around her neck and thought she was the person in these small towns who was not just the glue but also the spark. Someone had to get things moving, learn how to use email, lobby the government for a more reliable internet service, organise book club on a Friday at the pub and family-night Saturdays, raise money to build a playground. Someone had to make things happen.

  ‘Shall I bother with the wontons, Georgia, or save them?’ a voice behind the bar interrupted.

  ‘I’d say save them, John, and double-wrap and label them this time before putting them back in the freezer,’ Georgia said tightly.

  ‘Would anyone like another?’ Sam asked.

  When Sam left for the bar, the conversation followed him, and the three women sat looking at each other over their empty glasses. Eve had no idea what to say next. She wanted to talk more about Meg, ask Georgia what Meg’s plans were in Tallow. Meg was actually renting a house, not staying temporarily in someone else’s home, so that was a good sign. But Eve felt that showing her ignorance to Georgia would give her a power and ownership that she wasn’t willing to hand over.

  Georgia spun around from Eve and Sarah to survey the bar for a staff member to take away their empty glasses. Failing, she spoke as soon as her attention returned to the table. ‘Have you been in London long, Eve?’

  ‘I suppose it’s nearly ten years.’

  ‘You almost wouldn’t know you were Australian with that accent,’ Georgia said. It was not the first time someone had commented on Eve’s strange two-thirds English accent; the remaining third was sprinkled with the odd Australian vowel or rising inflection at the end of a sentence. ‘What do they call it? A no-man’s-land accent. I suppose that’s bound to happen after a while. You’ve always played the cello in London?’

  People often wondered about this. Surely a bush girl from New South Wales couldn’t make a living playing a musical instrument. In London? For the Royal Opera? ‘Well, I’ve never played anything else,’ Eve said, watching Sam coming towards them carrying supplies. Sarah cleared their table onto the table next to them on his approach.

  ‘Did Meg ever see you play, in London?’

  ‘Yes, she did, she did,’ Eve said, thinking about Meg in a grey overcoat, red scarf and black gloves. ‘She came and stayed with me about three years ago in my old squashy flat, but I don’t think London was her kind of town.’

  Sam arrived and passed around the drinks. ‘I remember that,’ he said, sitting down. ‘She recounted in great detail the lessons you gave her on catching the Tube: warning signs for nutters, the way to carry your handbag to lessen the risk of being pickpocketed, how to stand squashed up next to people and touch them as little as possible. She loved it that you had sorted out your world, that you were an expert. I think she found it fascinating that there were all these rules for being so close to people and not touching them.’

  ‘That’s my gift in life, Tube travel,’ Eve said, a little shocked and put out that something so prosaic and aggravating as catching the Tube in London became a memory worth retelling for Meg.

  Sam pushed back his stool to give his legs some more room and spun his coaster around and around with his fingertip. His hair was thick and sandy, and there was a tiny patch that stood up on his crown like he was a naughty little boy in a comic strip. It was disarming, that little patch of sticking-up errant hair; so were the thick smile lines around his eyes and on his cheeks. He took his finger off the coaster and looked at Sarah. ‘I think you came over to visit Meg one day at the little terrace in Paddington we lived in and left us a truckload of food. I came home and there were all these meals frozen in the freezer. With labels. We ate them for weeks and used to say “Thank you, Sarah, thank you, Sarah” whenever we were defrosting.’

  Sarah and Eve exchanged looks at the thought of Meg in her kitchen long ago, thumping buttons on the microwave, thanking Sarah.

  ‘She always surprised me …’ Sam trailed off.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Eve asked.

  ‘No,’ Sam replied, feeling no obligation to expand.

  Eve imagined the life Meg led with this man as an adult. Keeping up with research. Exams. Parties. Working. Using all those complicated words she had seen in TV medical shows. Coming home and watching a DVD with Sam on the couch on days off, discussing whether they should have chicken or lamb or packet soup for dinner, laughing about the way Meg couldn’t cook.

/>   ‘How did she surprise you?’ Eve said in the middle of her imaginings.

  ‘I don’t know whether …’

  ‘When is there a better time to talk about Meg?’ Sarah asked, pushing her empty vodka glass forwards to make room for Sam’s story.

  Sam paused and took another sip, taking in the three women sat at the table waiting. He wasn’t going to get out of this. He didn’t want to get out of this.

  ‘Just after we had graduated, we were both working at Royal North Shore in Sydney. A man was airlifted into the hospital with fourth-degree burns over seventy per cent of his body. He was an oyster farmer. He was leaning over some piece of machinery he had invented for sorting oysters or something, something to make life easier. It was smoking up, and as he leant into it the engine blew up. Half his face was okay, the other side was melted, and most of his body too. He ended up having to stay in the hospital for weeks and weeks for treatment. He hardly had visitors. They had to stay on the farm, probably.

  ‘One day, I went to check him a bit earlier than usual because I wanted to get going and meet this nurse before her shift finished, and Meg was bathing him. I could hear her voice behind the bathroom door. I could hear him inhaling, trying not to scream. She was talking away about the football or something or other, trying to distract him. I heard him saying one word, maybe two, back to her, trying to pretend it wasn’t killing him having his skin scrubbed. She wasn’t cooing and carrying on, she was just giving him a commentary as if they were sitting next to each other watching TV. Occasionally, he would scream. He was a tough man, but I can’t imagine the pain he was in. I left and didn’t tell her I knew. I asked around and worked out she had been coming in early for five weeks to bathe him. He didn’t want the nurses to do it. Somehow, Meg became his person. I don’t know, maybe Meg chose him as her person.

  ‘He died from an infection. I was rostered on that morning. Meg came in to bathe him, and he just wasn’t there. She came home that night and never said a word. I waited. For weeks, I waited for her to tell me something about this man. She never, ever spoke about him.’

  There were just the four of them now in the back bar; the others had all left. Lots of empty tables and stools in twos and threes and the coloured lights from the TAB betting machine blinking through the doorway. The air conditioning was working too well. It was cold. Fake cold.

  Eve touched her cheekbone and rubbed it a few times, right where Meg’s two moles lined up perfectly.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Hetherington Girls’ School on Sydney’s leafy north side boasted an impressive collection of buildings. If you were looking down upon it, as the latest intricate Lego-town creation of a precocious seven-year-old, to the north would be the history, English, maths and science buildings. The creative cluster – music, drama, art, language laboratories and an amphitheatre – lay to the west. The green at the south contained the manicured oval, two basketball courts, a twenty-five-metre pool and a handy, near-forgotten gate for final-year bad girls to make lunchtime escapes. Lastly, to the east sat the boarding house, Cooinda, and a canteen that specialised in salad rolls with too much butter for the girls who ate, and lemonade iceblocks for the girls who didn’t.

  In 1895, the brick three-storey boarding house had been the entire school. Fifteen girls completed an education in religion, home economics, English and, controversially, basic maths. Now, the building with the wraparound verandah was home to one hundred and twelve female boarders, aged from eleven to eighteen, Years Seven to Twelve, mostly from country New South Wales, a few from Singapore and Hong Kong and a handful from Sydney itself. The boarders made up approximately one-eighth of the school’s population.

  Two days before the new school year, the Year Seven boarders would be summoned to Cooinda. The next day, after a day of the first-timers settling in, Years Eight to Twelve would file in and claim their new territory.

  The iron gates from the street to the boarding house opened at 8.30 am. Morning sun trickled onto the front verandah and down to the front doors, where groups of three huddled outside the entry before disappearing into the wide mouth. Meg stood with her father on the pebbles near the gate, looking at her new home. The drive to Sydney was over nine hours, and they had arrived the night before, staying in a little hotel ten minutes away.

  Earlier, Bill and Meg had taken turns using the bathroom and trying not to get in each other’s way as they dressed. They had a silent dance going on: one would sit on the hotel bed, suitcase jutting into hip, sighing and looking for underpants, zipping and unzipping side pockets, wondering in what clever place they had hidden three pairs of undies two days ago, while the other brushed hair or organised towels or took shoes out of plastic bags and put them near the door for later. The father and daughter, with the same full lips and green eyes, couldn’t recognise the new feeling in the hotel room. It was something resembling defeat. The path had been set. After boarding, she would go on to university; after university, she would get a job, a good job. At eleven, Meg was leaving home.

  Bill needed something to do and put his new blue checked shirt on, the one he’d bought in town, and now he was standing in this hotel room with the TV news on in the background, wearing undies and a shirt. His shirt was so well starched and perfect-looking that he had hung it on the hook above the window in the back seat of his four-wheel drive the whole way into Sydney. Sometimes, the shirt had got in his line of sight when changing lanes, but it hadn’t bothered Bill. There was no way he would have risked it lying on the back seat; he needed a shirt that looked ironed by a wife.

  Meg took her new dress into the bathroom to slip it on. Bill and Meg had searched for over an hour for the perfect outfit to wear on her first day at a new school in the city. Bill stood in doorways and outside change rooms offering his verdict on tiny outfit after tiny outfit. When Bill exchanged an amused glance with a shop assistant as Meg pulled away the change-room curtain at Playful Princess to reveal a red dress with an oversized red and white polka-dot bow on the waist, Meg had had enough. She chose the next dress she tried on. It was navy with white trim around the sleeves and a drop waist. Her dad liked it, and Meg thought it looked like nothing.

  ‘Dad, can you …?’

  Meg lifted her long brown hair away from the back of her neck and bent forwards in the middle of the room. The nape of her neck was a cream rather than the soft brown of the rest of her body. It was long and delicate, and tiny bits of twisted new hair sprang out from the base of her hairline. Meg was normally so nimble with her fingers, but today they refused to work. Bill stood behind her, his moleskins now on and his new shirt hanging untucked above, and did up the white flower-shaped buttons that ran down the back of her dress to the waist.

  ‘What a strange day, Meggie,’ he said, three buttons to go.

  Meg looked at the bottom of her dress and her bare feet on the sturdy purple carpet. She wondered when she would wear a bra. How would she know when it was time? ‘Yeah.’ She rolled her tanned feet onto their sides.

  ‘It might take a little while, but it will happen, Meg. You will love it there. You won’t be by yourself, there will be all those other girls to talk to, be around, and the education. I wish I had a better education. You can be whatever you want to be with a good education. Even if you stay at home, Meg, the nearest high school is two and a half hours away. You have to leave, one way or another. And all those girls.’ Bill was trying to condense all of his arguments into a bullet-point verbal presentation in a last-ditch attempt to get some kind of ‘You’re right, Dad, you’ve been right all along and now I finally see it. I’m going to be absolutely fine. Don’t worry about me for a minute. And, by the way, thanks for this opportunity.’

  He finished with the buttons and tried to ignore the silence, giving Meg two pats on the bum as a code for finished.

  ‘I’m not lonely, Dad.’ She let her hair fall on her back against the dress and turned to face him. Strangers sometimes found it disconcerting, but Meg was always a child who would loo
k people in the eye. Grown-ups, after they looked down the waitress’s top at a Mother’s Day lunch for their wife, or didn’t tell the butcher they were undercharged by five dollars, didn’t want to be looked at like that.

  ‘You need to leave the farm and get a good education. It’s that simple.’

  Meg knew her dad’s voice. She knew the thinness meant it was final. She wasn’t angry any more, she was sad. What she didn’t know, standing there in her navy-blue dress with a drop waist, was that if she started to cry now, if she begged one more time, he would have packed up, taken off his shirt, shoved it into his bag, got back into the car and driven them home.

  ‘Yeah, I know … Dad?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t forget to take that thing off your face before we go.’

  Bill slapped his thick hand against his chin, connecting with a bloodied shred of toilet paper. He had cut himself earlier, shaving in the tiny bathroom with tiny soaps and tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner.

  ‘Shit,’ he said as he ripped it off. They both smiled.

  Looking straight at Cooinda, Meg brushed her hand against her dad’s. She wanted to make sure he was there. She wanted to feel his calluses and the hair on his knuckles. His broad fists were curled tight around the handles of her two new suitcases, and even though they were both standing still, looking into the distance, like two figures in a painting, he didn’t put the suitcases down. Bill was thankful for them; just holding them gave him something to do. Meg squeezed her eyes tight so her perspective and vision became blurred and undulating. There were rows of windows for thin eyes, a squat door for a nose and that long verandah with perfect white teeth for a mouth. It looked as though it was smiling after a good meal of good girls.

  As Meg and Bill walked through the front door, they kept to the side, watching sets of parents milling about, leaning over and talking in hushed tones to nervous-looking daughters, offering to quickly dash out and buy some deodorant or a pen or more hairbands, whatever it was that seemed terribly important at this particular moment. Suitcases crammed the dark foyer, and the smell of a collection of mingling mothers’ perfume unsettled the nose. Smiling boarders in their final year wove in and out of groups, greeting new arrivals and handing out a schedule of the morning’s events. Confident and fresh, in full school uniforms, with pert ponytails tied with satin navy ribbons, they were cheery tour guides and living examples of convivial survival when away from home.