‘Call it off!’ His words were a shriek now. ‘Janet, please, for the love of . . .’
Jed stared down at him, her hand on Maxi’s shoulder, neither encouraging the dog nor restraining her. ‘I haven’t been Janet in a long, long time, and you don’t know what the word “love” means.’
She counted to ten under her breath, holding the calmness to her, resisting the urge to let fear and hatred out, to grab the hall stool, to smash Merv’s face as she had once done with the telephone.
At last she said quietly, ‘Maxi, heel.’ She tugged lightly on the dog’s collar.
Maxi looked up at her, Merv’s wrist still in her mouth. The rumble grew to a snarl at the back of her throat. She didn’t move.
‘Please!’ screamed Merv.
Maxi never had learned to heel. ‘Treat?’ offered Jed instead.
Maxi glanced at her person uncertainly, but let go of Merv’s wrist.
Merv lurched to his feet. Blood dripped down the left side of his face. Had Maxi really bitten him? No: he’d hit his head when he fell. ‘I’ll have the law on you!’
Jed forced a smile, still clasping at calmness. ‘Good girl,’ said Matilda’s whisper. Or her subconscious.
‘No proof of anything,’ Jed mimicked. ‘Nothing to prove neither. Get out of here. And if I see you again, it’ll be worse.’
He stumbled down the steps, along the path, slightly blackened with dead grass. Jed stood, Maxi at her side, as he opened the door of a battered Holden Kingswood. Soot had settled on its blue paint.
Merv paused to stare at her. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said.
‘Only if you are very, very stupid,’ said Jed in a voice like ice. ‘Come on, Maxi.’
She shut the door, but didn’t move till she heard the car’s engine, listened to it vanish down the road to town. She had known hate before, terror too.
She had never realised that to defend her baby, she might be able to kill.
She walked steadily into the kitchen, opened the fridge, handed Maxi a few slices of last night’s stuffed rolled shoulder of lamb and watched as the dog gulped them down.
Then she stumbled to the toilet to be sick.
Chapter 7
ROCK FARM
FLINTY
Flinty McAlpine sat in her favourite armchair, the one covered in fabric with cabbage roses on it, though the roses had faded into what her oldest great-grandson described as ‘watermelon stains’. The chair was carefully placed to capture the mountain breeze from the open front door, with its comforting smells of horse manure, ripe tomatoes and mountain rock. She gazed at her grandson-in-law with amusement. ‘You want to take Mountain Lion down to River View so crippled kids can ride him?’
‘The other kids can ride Old Downer. Or at least feed him carrots.’ Back when he’d been at River View as the centre’s only adult patient, there’d been more than thirty kids there. But with polio now eradicated and better facilities at public hospitals, fewer kids needed River View’s services, and most of those were outpatients. ‘I think all of them should be able to amble a short way though, if I’m sitting behind them to steady them.’
‘Then why do you need Mountain Lion?’
‘Joe Borgino’s stepdaughter’s a patient down there. Car accident. She’s sixteen. She was sent there for a year and she’s physically okay now, but she can’t see. Won’t ever see — a piece of metal severed her optic nerve.’
‘Poor kid,’ said Flinty. ‘Joe’s a good man. I met the stepdaughter a couple of times too. Lu, isn’t it? Red hair in plaits, a bit like a fairy built out of steel? She was determined to change the law and become a jockey.’ Flinty grinned. ‘And to breed, train and ride a horse that would win the Melbourne Cup. I had the same dream, long ago.’
‘She won’t go back home because she thinks she will never ride again.’
‘You think she can?’
‘Do you?’
Flinty considered. ‘Possibly. Probably . . . It’d be a bit like riding on a moonless night. Riding is more balance and knowing your horse and yourself than eyesight.’ She shrugged. ‘But then I’ve never had to ride without my sight. And riding a horse is a long way from being a jockey. She never will be able to be that now, even if they change the law.’
‘If she can manage to ride Mountain Lion, it will be more than just riding a horse.’
‘True. Where will you put him?’
She saw Nicholas’s relief that she wasn’t going to argue. ‘The paddock across the river from River View.’ It was Drinkwater land: the vast property now stretched from Overflow almost to Gibber’s Creek. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll put up electric fencing so he doesn’t hurt himself on the barbed wire. The men can build a yard there. The kids can ride Old Downer in it.’
‘Lu Borgino isn’t going to be satisfied with walking a horse around a yard.’
‘She can gallop on the track along the river. When she’s ready.’
Flinty nodded. She trusted this grandson of hers to know when the girl would be ready to gallop again, if she ever was.
It was a risk, of course. A risk for the girl, and an even greater risk for her horse — her hopes that she might finally get a runner in the Cup. But in her seventy and more years, she had learned that the risks taken for others gave the greatest rewards.
‘When will you start?’
He grinned at her. ‘I’ve called Michael to get the men working on the yard.’ He headed towards the door on the bare metal legs she was finally getting used to, after the more clumsy ones he had first worn and kept covered in trousers. ‘Chicken stir-fry for dinner?’
‘I’d rather have mutton chops and mashed potatoes.’ Or rabbit pie, she thought, but myxomatosis had got rid of Rocky Valley’s rabbits.
‘Need to watch your cholesterol,’ said Nicholas, and he vanished into the kitchen.
He’d be insisting she ate muesli for breakfast next, or added wheat germ to her morning scones. Oh, she was glad Nicholas had become tangled in her life again, as grandson-in-law and friend.
She missed Sandy every morning when she woke and he wasn’t there, every lunchtime when there were no yarns across the kitchen table, at dusk when he didn’t come in, asking as he had for fifty years, ‘What’s for dinner, darling?’, every evening when she looked up and found he wasn’t dozing while the telly chattered in the corner. But life went on, even if your knees and back ached, and sometimes your heart ached even more.
A few inches of rain would be reassuring too. There’d been too many seed heads on the blackwoods last spring. The trees expected bushfire. The ants were digging deep and the valley was on alert for smoke. So was she. From up here she’d see fire long before it could threaten any place or person she loved. She wasn’t wasting the best grass on the mountain by burning a firebreak around Rock Farm — not yet. Rose Clancy had taught her well. If bushfire did threaten her mountain, she knew what to do.
She rose stiffly and moved to the front door. She could see Felicity’s green ute winding up the road from her surgery to the house. One day she’d need to show the child the bushfire lore Rose had taught her. But hopefully not this year, with Felicity pregnant.
Flinty smiled. Felicity and Nicholas, a baby to come, horses in the paddock and friends across the valley and beyond: life was good.
Bark flared quickly and was as quickly gone. The fire needed more. And found it. A tree, hollowed out by ants, two metres high and gloriously dry. The fire climbed into its hollow, eating as it went, too hot and hidden even for a spire of smoke . . .
Chapter 8
RANDWICK, SYDNEY
SCARLETT
Scarlett Kelly-O’Hara put the receiver down, then sat back in her wheelchair and stared at the phone. She’d been calling Jed every day since she got back to Sydney to check she was okay.
But just now Jed had sounded . . . odd. You didn’t have to have completed two years of a medical degree to know that pregnant women sometimes did sound odd, especially in such heat. But Jed had also sounded as if she
was trying not to sound odd — and that was weird. The young woman who had informally adopted her as ‘sister’ was someone who not only would not but could not lie, yet Scarlett had grown skilled at detecting when Jed McAlpine-Kelly was carefully not saying something.
Should she go back home? She’d planned to do some extra reading at the library before uni began again. So far the only real challenge of her medicine degree had been the embarrassment of having to always sit at the front of a tiered lecture theatre. Even the pracs had been easy. But when you were conspicuously different, you had to be so brilliant no one could say you were a pity project, admitted because the new anti-discrimination legislation made both businesses and universities feel they needed a few ‘disableds’ to show they took it seriously.
It was especially necessary when your adopted sister had provided you with a small van engineered for you by Thompson’s Industries so you could drive it without needing your almost useless legs, and a ground-floor flat in what had once been a Randwick mansion and was still a delight with high ceilings, big windows and a richly buffed wood floor.
But it wasn’t home. Dribble had been her first real home, after a lifetime at River View. Dribble always would be home, sitting in its bend of the river, the water flashing, the pelicans coming in to land . . .
Stupid not to have stayed there till the end of the uni holidays. Selfish too. Jed had confided the horror of her teenage miscarriage to her. Of course she was worried that something might go wrong this time.
She’d drive back to Gibber’s Creek tonight, Scarlett decided, as soon as she’d given Hannah the old medical journals Dr McAlpine had lent her. Fascinating work on orthopaedics . . .
She wheeled herself over to her motorised chair, battery fully charged. She preferred propelling herself — better exercise — but the electric-powered chair left her hands free at uni and was less bulky to manoeuvre through doorways.
The mirror by the front door flashed her reflection back at her. Scarlett examined herself. Not too bad. The condition that had left most of her muscles too weak to move independently had also stunted her growth. She would always be an elf. But this elf had a strong face and arms and shoulders, the result of relentless therapy and determination. She even had an almost-bust, shown off to best advantage in a bra only slightly padded and low-cut peasant blouse. Embroidered bell-bottom jeans hid stick-thin legs, though they too were gaining a little muscle now she could manage to walk between two bars, assisted by her arms, for half an hour every day.
Every day. She glanced over at the bars opposite the television set. Like the pulley above her bed, her shower and toilet, the extra bars on the walls and the plastic chair in the extra-large shower, they reminded anyone in the flat that no matter how brilliantly Scarlett Kelly-O’Hara studied, how vivaciously she talked, how gorgeously and perfectly she dressed, thanks to Jed’s cheques and Julieanne’s notes from London on what was the big thing on Carnaby Street, the body below it all was deformed.
Scarlett stilled and stared at her reflection. Not deformed. Unformed. Because one day her legs would look decent enough for her to wear shorts and her lower spine would carry her weight enough for crutches . . .
And meanwhile Hannah was waiting for her at the café. Not as good as Leafsong’s Blue Belle Café — nowhere was as good as the Blue Belle — but a place to meet friends.
Scarlett smiled. That was the best thing about uni. Friends, with enquiring minds, like hers, and the determination that when she went back to Gibber’s Creek permanently again, it would be as a doctor.
This café had been a saddlery, then a funeral parlour, then a corner shop, till the supermarket cancer ate away most family stores. Now it was a coffee shop, smelling of car exhaust and bitumen and slightly charred coffee beans — Leafsong would never tolerate it — catering to students, who might not have much to spend, but did consume vast amounts of stewed coffee and cheap spag bol, and never noticed that the ‘bol’ was mostly sauce made of tinned tomatoes cooked up with some chopped onions, garlic paste and a few bottled black olives. Its walls had once soaked up stockmen’s crudest songs, then soft condolences and more candid observations — ‘By gum, the old girl’s heavy. Must have been on a hundred scones a day!’ — and, later still, ‘Half a pound of broken biscuits, please, a pound of butter and a bottle of malt vinegar.’
Now the walls rang with conversations about workers’ rights and revolutions, though few of the students had ever either worked or revolted; the future of China now Mao Zedong was dead; how Aboriginal Senator Neville Bonner had been refused service in a Queensland hotel despite the existence of Whitlam’s anti-discrimination laws; ‘Did you hear Wittgenstein’s question, “If we could talk to lions, what would we talk about?”’ and ‘Hey, did you know he loved Westerns?’; and Premier Bjelke-Petersen’s call for prayers for rain, which had not, as yet, been answered apart from a light scattering of drops.
But mostly, as Scarlett wheeled her way to the table on the footpath where Hannah would be waiting — it was impossible to squeeze a chair between the tables inside — the talk could have been at any coffee shop in Australia: weather, plans for the weekend, who was doing or wanted to do what to whom, anyone want to head down to Bondi? . . . A question that always hurt, a little, because wheelchairs were not designed for beaches and sand.
She shoved a chair aside and wheeled herself into its place at Hannah’s table. ‘Sorry I’m late. Some dweeb wanted to help me down the kerb. It took five minutes to convince him I was fine. Gorgeous earrings!’
Hannah smugly fingered the clusters of amber. ‘Two ninety-five at Paddington Markets. Some woman selling all her late mum’s jewellery. I told her she was asking too little.’ She stared at the magazines in Scarlett’s lap. ‘I thought you said just one article.’
‘Yes, but there’s a reply in the next issue, and letters after that.’
Hannah gazed at her slightly helplessly. ‘Scarlett, I just want to pass my exams and not kill too many patients. Not be a —’
‘Small human medical computer?’
Hannah laughed. ‘Exactly. Though knowing a small human medical computer is useful.’
‘Cappuccino, please,’ Scarlett said to the waitress. Everyone else ordered at the counter, but the staff knew her and her chair. She held out a dollar note as the coffee arrived, the frothed milk as thick as marshmallow, thickly sprinkled with grated chocolate on top. ‘Keep the change.’
She scooped off part of the foam with her teaspoon, sighed in satisfaction, then rifled through one of the magazines on the table. ‘There’s an article here that’s hilarious. It’s about how people can’t dream in colour.’
‘I dream in colour.’
‘So do I. But this bloke says we only think we dream in colour.’
‘But dreams are thoughts . . .’ Hannah stopped as an all-too-familiar voice cooed from just inside the door.
‘But, darling, you have to come to the Equinox Ball. It’s for charity . . .’
Barbara, thought Scarlett sourly.
Barbara had been in their first-year anatomy class and flunked it, which didn’t matter, because as Barbara said blithely the main point in going to uni was getting a husband, which was why she still hung around the medical students, transferring from subject to subject as the departments gave up on her.
Someone laughed. Doug, thought Scarlett. Nice bloke, fascinated with diseases of the eye. ‘One of those charities where everyone has fun and the charity makes three dollars twenty for the whole event?’
‘There’s no harm in having fun and doing good. Alex, darling, why don’t you come?’
Alex! Scarlett tried to remember if she’d put lipstick on and freshened her eyeliner.
‘Don’t have anyone to go with,’ said Alex’s voice casually.
‘I’m free,’ said Barbara. Scarlett could just imagine her fluttering six kilos of mascara. ‘Alex, it really is for a good cause. You have to come.’
‘Barbara, give it up,’ said Alex gently.
/>
Scarlett could imagine Barbara’s flush too. The one that meant anger as well as embarrassment. ‘I’ll take Simon then. He’s been on at me for ages about it . . . but it’s such a good cause. If you’re not interested in going with someone fun, why don’t you take Scarlett? Two charitable deeds in one night. Here, I can sell you two tickets now.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Alex. ‘I’m all out of charity just now.’
Scarlett carefully put down her cup. Hannah reached over and took her hand. ‘I’m going to carve him into small chunks as soon as I get a scalpel in my hand,’ she said quietly, ‘and then give Barbara an appendectomy.’
‘No. Really. I’m used to it.’
A chair scraped. ‘Got to go,’ said Alex’s voice. Footsteps behind her. Scarlett quickly picked up her coffee cup and buried her face in it, but there was no way to hide a wheelchair.
‘Scarlett,’ said Alex.
The fire had reached the treetop now. Not just glowing coals sipping at the wood, but flames, reaching red fingers out into the light, sending sparks in a joy of heat and wind.
One spark caught a neighbouring tree. It flared. A dead tree burst into flame . . .
Time to grow.
Chapter 9
SCARLETT
‘Hello, Alex,’ said Scarlett coolly. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Hello, Alex, and goodbye,’ said Hannah, not coolly at all.
Alex flushed. ‘Scarlett, I didn’t mean . . . I was just . . .’ He looked around, obviously hoping the café’s noise had drowned out the previous discussion.
‘Yes, I heard exactly what you meant,’ said Scarlett. ‘I’d better be going,’ she said to Hannah. ‘I’m driving back to Gibber’s Creek tonight.’
‘But you’ve only just got here . . .’
‘It’s not because of what I said?’ asked Alex quietly.
‘Don’t overestimate yourself. My sister’s nine months’ pregnant. I shouldn’t have come up in the first place.’
Facing the Flame Page 4
