Facing the Flame

by Jackie French

  The fire waited.

  Chapter 4

  RIVER VIEW REHABILITATION CENTRE

  LU

  Lu Borgino tapped her white cane back and forth along the path past the River View office. It was too hot to walk, but if she waited till it was cool, the paths would be used by others too. The younger River View kids were back at school, finally, which meant she didn’t have to risk being butted by a wheelchair or avoid kids lurching about on callipers.

  Nor did she have to talk. To anyone. No one here had anything interesting to say; they just nagged about exercises to get her fingers fully mobile so she could learn to read and type the braille she was not going to learn, no matter how much coaxing, ordering or bribery anyone resorted to.

  A year ago she’d have been back at school now too. But at sixteen you didn’t have to go to school, and for her it would need to be a school for the blind now, which Gibber’s Creek — thank goodness — didn’t have. And she wasn’t blind. Her eyes just couldn’t see, which was different in some way she could not explain. Lu Borgino did not belong with a mob of blind people.

  No kids till mid-afternoon also meant few staff walking about and making conversation. She didn’t want conversation. She didn’t want anything! Or rather what she did want was her old life back.

  Why was she even bothering to go for a walk? ‘Keep practising,’ Ms Sampson-Lee said about a hundred times a day. Walking with a cane would get easier. The puzzle of braille dots under her fingers would get easier. Finding her dinner on her plate and then not dropping it down her front or not even noticing she had dropped it would get easier.

  She didn’t care if any of it got easier or not. She turned to go back to her cottage — at least as one of the older patients here she had one to herself — then stopped. She may have lost her sight, but her hearing was excellent.

  ‘The girl’s impossible!’ said Nancy Thompson in the slightly too-loud voice people used on the phone.

  In the year since her car crash, Lu had learned to listen to the way people spoke. ‘Impossible’ meant Nancy was probably talking about her. ‘Outrageous’ was more likely to be George climbing out onto the office roof. ‘Wicked’ with a laugh meant Matron’s son Gavin, who was able to magically make cake vanish from its tin and reappear in his hands each time he passed in his wheelchair.

  She didn’t mind. Nancy Thompson was right. It was impossible that she could no longer see. Impossible that she could no longer work with horses. Impossible that the person creeping around here with a cane could be Lu Borgino. Impossible that her mother . . .

  ‘I’ve tried everything,’ said Nancy’s telephone voice. ‘Moira has too. The girl just flatly refuses to go home. What can you do with a sixteen-year-old who will not leave?’

  So Mrs Thompson was talking about her. Lu listened, vaguely curious. Not that it mattered really. Nothing mattered now, except that going ‘home’ was not possible either, because there was no home.

  Her stepfather’s house could not be home again, kind though Joe was, sending her Turkish Delight because she had loved it when she was ten, phoning her twice a week, sticking to the painfully paralysed conversations.

  Nor were his racing stables ‘home’, for she would be carefully kept away from them if she did go back to Joe’s. Racing stables would be deemed too dangerous for a poor blind girl.

  Even seeing Joe again was impossible, because she couldn’t see him. She kept making new excuses to cut his visits short — a new therapy, a River View excursion. She didn’t even ask Ms Sampson-Lee to read his letters to her, though she dutifully managed to type a letter to him each Sunday afternoon. Dear Joe, I am well. I hope you are too. The therapy is continuing. Love, Lu.

  Vaguely she was aware that the excuses, and the formulaic letters, probably hurt him. She wanted to hurt him. Because Joe hadn’t been in the car when Mum had died and the steering wheel spoke had shot off the column and through Lu’s temple and pressed into her optic nerve. Because maybe if she hurt Joe enough, she’d remember what it felt like to love him, would feel something, anything, not just the nothing where once there had been sight.

  A year back Lu Borgino was going to be the first professional female jockey in Australia, the first to legally ride a race when the law was finally changed, the first woman to win the Melbourne Cup. Joe had even proudly announced that the day Lu got her trainer’s licence he’d make her a partner in the business, breeding and training the best racehorses in Australia.

  She could bear life, just, as long as she never had to hear the soft whicker of a horse again, smell oats and warm horse droppings in the early morning air. Sometimes, in the past year, as she grudgingly went through the exercises that got her injured hands working again, she had thought death might have been easier.

  ‘Nicholas, would you really?’ said Nancy’s voice. ‘You are a total darling. Felicity won’t mind? How is she? Oh, great! Yes, I’m not surprised she’s more comfortable than she was last month. And give Flinty my love, won’t you?’

  Lu heard the click as Nancy put the phone back in its receiver. She began to walk again. She must be nearly passing the dining hall now . . . Yes, there was the smell of stir-fried cabbage, soy sauce, peanuts, chicken, taking over from the hot hay scent of dry hills across the river. She could even make out the cooler scent of water these days, the faint hint of duck and waterweed and sand.

  Who was Nicholas? A furniture remover maybe, Lu thought grimly. He’d tie her to a trolley and wheel her out of here. Which was the only way River View was going to get rid of her. She was not going to the School for the Blind. And she was never, ever going back to Joe’s . . .

  The scent of cabbage grew stronger. Lu could hear voices to her right now, the muted snicker of a food trolley’s wheels on linoleum. She flicked her cane to the left, found where the path branched and turned.

  She could put up with cabbage. Could put up with the chatter of a dozen kids younger than herself, all with varying problems she didn’t care about. She could stand anything, as long as she did not have to face what she had lost.

  The log was a hollow shell now. The fire nibbled at the remnants, still hungry, until the log collapsed into a length of coals and ash. The fire flared as the breeze freshened it.

  Free!

  Chapter 5

  ROCKY VALLEY

  NICHOLAS

  Nicholas Brewster sat outside his wife’s veterinary surgery, cicadas shrilling above him in the wind-sculpted snow gums, and considered what he had lost.

  Two legs to just below the knee, in Vietnam. The veterinary course he had planned to do, before his legs had vanished; the one that would have meant he wasn’t just married to a veterinarian and helping out. A career as a writer gone bust: he’d published only one book that only four thousand, two hundred and eighty-one people had bought, according to his publisher, and Nicholas suspected half of those had not bothered to read it. His third career as a politician, lost since Gough Whitlam’s dramatic dismissal and the ’75 loss. Nicholas had had that job long enough to know rigid obedience to the party line was not for him though.

  And what had he gained? He smiled. In the eight years since he had sat on the vast boulder up on the mountain at Rock Farm with a girl from 1919, he had gained a wife, the extraordinary young woman who ran this clinic in what had been the old schoolhouse, as well as the refuge for injured native animals up on Rock Farm.

  Flinty was in his life again too — his Felicity’s grandmother, a writer and horse breeder. Rock Farm and its horses were a gain too, as was working with injured animals, from orphaned wombats learning how to dig and forage to kangaroos who’d been caught in barbed-wire fences.

  He had so much these days: the mountains soaring up to the endless blue umbrella of the sky, the tussocked horse paddocks that grew frost whiskers in winter and temporary coats of snow. He had the tumbling boulders of Rocky Creek as it trickled to the once-mighty Snowy River. He had horses: the progeny of Snow King, the brumby captured by Flinty McAlpine, sire o
f major winners of two Group One races, though not yet a Melbourne Cup champion. Flinty and Matilda Thompson’s perseverance had even got Snow King’s progeny officially recognised by the Australian Racing Board, able to compete in the important ‘black type’ races with large amounts of prize money.

  Flinty had given up the horse stud she and her late husband, Sandy, had run, subsidised by Flinty’s horse books, many thousand times more popular than his sci-fi effort, but she still had horses: two mares in the lower paddock, as well as Old Downer (officially recorded as ‘Down for the Count’ in the Stud Book), who’d never made it as a racehorse, and Mountain Lion, a more-than-promising three-year-old in the paddock by the house, almost ready to go to a regular trainer to gain the stamina, feeding and experience necessary to race.

  Nicholas could even ride again now, using stirrups made to fit his knees, allowing him far better control than he would have with his prosthetics, even if it meant he needed help to mount and dismount.

  He smiled. He stood, easily managing the new metal legs he’d learned to use the year before, a major improvement on the old heavier ones.

  And that other great gain: in five months’ time he’d be changing nappies, then learning how to spoon mashed pumpkin into a baby’s mouth.

  Surely, love and happiness were enough, helping those you cared about, volunteering where you were needed. And yet . . .

  Helping: that was it. He still stood on the edges of other people’s lives, as he had stood on the edges of the government, contributing nothing to the vast social changes those three years had engineered. Helping in the surgery, instead of a vet himself. He was Dr Brewster’s husband, a good bloke with the bushfire radio; someone to call if you found a baby wombat still alive when its mother had been run over — or if you wanted a horse brought to River View for a blind girl refusing to live her life.

  Which he would do, he thought as his metal feet clicked across the car park to his ute. He had given up wearing shoes when he began to use the new models. Why bother with shoes when you had metal feet?

  A riding therapy program for kids with disabilities might fill in more of the cracks in his own life. He even had the perfect horse for the task. Old Downer would fall asleep mid-plod if you let him; he had a back as broad as a coffee table and was quiet enough to sit under to eat your lunch if it was raining. He was exactly the kind of horse Nancy had been thinking of.

  But Old Downer wouldn’t do for Lu Borgino. If Nancy had ever lost her sight, or her legs, she’d understand. He’d be patronising her. ‘Here, kid: a nice quiet horse that even you can manage.’

  Nicholas gazed beyond the mountains. People were so nice when you’d lost part of yourself. Pick up the bananas at the supermarket even though he could easily reach them himself, grab the milk from the fridge with a ‘Don’t you bother, mate.’

  You could endure stares; kids who whispered, ‘Mummy, why does that man walk funny?’ But niceness could be unendurable.

  Miss Lu ‘I have lost everything’ Borgino used to help train racehorses, did she? What would she think of Mountain Lion? A horse who knew he was king, descendant of kings, whose sassy arrogance might, just possibly, one day win him the Melbourne Cup.

  Not a vicious horse, but not an easy one either. King horses did not allow humans to rule them. Was Lu Borgino capable of the kind of partnership the stallion might deign to accept?

  At least he would give her the chance to try.

  Of all people, Nicholas knew how much of riding was not just balance but a half-instinctive bond between horse and rider, each predicting what the other would do next. If Lu Borgino had been riding Joe Borgino’s horses, she was up to riding Mountain Lion.

  It was a risk, both to the kid and the horse. And he still had to convince Flinty to let her Melbourne Cup hope go down to the plains so a blind girl could try to ride him. But giving a kid a future was worth it.

  Flinty had done that for him. And Felicity. Flinty might worry about Mountain Lion, but she had a heart as soft as butter, for people as well as animals. And he’d only need the horse for just a few weeks, long enough for the girl to get her confidence back, to dream again.

  Could a blind girl train horses? Not by herself. Could she be a vital part of a training stable? Maybe. This at least was a start.

  Time to drive up to Rock Farm to feed the orphans and make sure the wallaby hadn’t chewed its way through the hay-bale fences they kept moving to give the marsupials new pasture. Time to put dinner on so it’d be ready when Felicity came back from the surgery — they usually ate at Rock Farm with Flinty, even now they had their own place. He’d become a decent cook in the last few years. If it had once lived, he could stir-fry it. Vary the meats and veg; add a touch of soy sauce and sherry, or oyster sauce, or his favourite sauce based on peanut butter, soy sauce and chilli, and you had a different dish every night.

  He turned at the ute to look across the valley once again. The paddocks shimmered in the heat haze. At least summers were cool up at Rock Farm, even if the winter winds tried to bite your nose off. And the beauty never ceased to seep into his soul.

  His life might not be entirely fulfilling, but the valley was where he wanted to be: its carpet of trees under the mountain crags, the vast umbrella of the sky.

  Perhaps he and Felicity could take a weekend ride soon, sleeping overnight by the poor trickle that had once been the mighty Snowy River, but which still provided excellent stretches of sand to camp on — as long as there was no deluge upstream during the night.

  No, probably not a good idea with Felicity four months’ pregnant.

  Pregnant. It was a lovely word, thought Nicholas. One of the best words in the world.

  The breeze gave the fire enough oxygen to consume the whole log. An orange flame flickered briefly as the wind gusted, and a spark landed on a string of elderly bark, discarded by the snow gums twenty years before.

  The bark flamed, then vanished into smoke. The fire retreated to an ember again.

  Chapter 6

  JED

  Jed pressed her fingernails into her palms. She would not panic. Janet Skellowski was long gone. She was Jed McAlpine-Kelly now and she would no longer cower before men like Merv.

  ‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ he said. ‘Dunno why you wanna burn the lawn though. A rich girl like you should be able to afford a lawn mower. Well, aren’t you going to ask me in?’

  ‘No,’ Jed said, her voice steady. ‘And if you’re not gone in ten seconds, I’m calling the police.’

  Merv smiled. Merv had always been good at smiling. He’d lost a side tooth since Jed had last seen his grin. ‘And tell them what, love? I just came to visit, friendly like.’

  ‘I’ll tell the police you raped me,’ said Jed flatly.

  Merv laughed. He’d always been good at laughing too. His laughter had hurt more than his fists. He was amused. Confident. Enjoying this immensely. ‘It was you got sent down, Janet love, not me,’ he said lightly. ‘No proof of anything.’ His eyes grew harder. ‘Nothing to prove neither. But I reckon some people around here would be interested in how . . . what’s your name now? . . . how their high and mighty “Jed Kelly” has a juvenile record.’ He glanced down at The Bulge. ‘How she was pregnant when she was fifteen and, oh dear, where is that baby now?’

  Miscarried under a bridge, thought Jed, keeping all emotion from her face, her hands covering as much of The Bulge as they could. Michael and Nancy had put a stone memorial up for her in the Drinkwater graveyard.

  ‘I reckon it’d be worth a few quid to make sure none of your nice new relatives ever know . . .’

  He was like a cane toad that had been living in a septic tank and decided to emerge out into a clean bathroom. She dug her nails into her hands so her voice wouldn’t shake. ‘Everyone around here knows what happened to me. This is Gibber’s Creek. You can’t sneeze in Gibber’s Creek without the whole district offering you a hanky. The gossip about me was old years ago.’

  The smile grew wider. Merv prefer
red to tear the wings off people, not flies. ‘Yeah? Well. I’ll have to think of something new. Or how about a little . . . persuasion?’

  He pushed the door fully open before she could react, knocking her back against the wall.

  She clutched The Bulge again, frantically looking for something to protect herself with. She’d bashed him with Debbie’s phone, years ago, breaking his nose — and they’d had her up on charges. But Dribble’s phone was too far down the corridor. If she could get to the kitchen, she could snatch up the frying pan . . . or even out the door and run, get to the car before he could grab her . . .

  She had a vision of three hard punches to her stomach, like the ones he had given her in Debbie’s living room when Debbie had announced Jed was pregnant. ‘Soon fix that,’ he’d said and Debbie had laughed, four whiskies in her already, as Jed had bent over, retching, screaming.

  Those punches had not dislodged her baby then, but maybe they’d helped bring on labour prematurely, months later. And now, with this baby almost full term . . . and he would not stop at three punches today. Merv hadn’t come all this way, hunting her out, just for three punches.

  ‘Don’t panic.’ The whisper was almost too soft for Jed to hear. Matilda’s voice? No, surely Jed’s own subconscious. And it was good advice: Merv feasted on fear. Don’t show it.

  And a growl, definitely coming from the real world. A grey shadow bounded from the living room and leaped, sending Merv to the floor. Maxi slavered over him, her teeth bared, then firmly held the hand that vainly tried to push her off, holding it with rock-steady jaws.

  ‘Get him off me!’ The voice held true terror.

  Jed leaned against the doorjamb, suddenly, wonderfully, calm. A temporary calm, she knew, but a useful one. ‘She’s a girl. Don’t know if I can call her off. She’s never been trained to attack.’ Though who knew what old Matilda had trained her dog to do? She didn’t know if Maxi would go for Merv’s throat next either, and despite everything, she did not want that. For Maxi more than for Merv.