by John Clanchy
Billy looks at the ceiling then, but whether he’s just looking or is actually working something out, I can’t tell.
‘Christ,’ Mr Prescott says again, and his hands go back to his head. ‘I’ll have to ring Amanda.’
And I can only guess Amanda must be his wife. In Sydney. And it seems it’s a good name for her – and I know it’s hard to judge when you’ve only seen someone once or twice and you’ve only said, ‘Hello, Mrs Prescott’ or ‘How’s your baby?’ – because she’s pretty and that, and blonde, and a bit shy, and so different from someone like Toni who’s … well, everyone knows what Toni’s like.
Mr Prescott doesn’t speak after that for at least an hour, just groans once or twice, when you’d expect it to be Billy doing that. And I can’t think of anything to say, so I open my journal and try to write, and I could, the ambulance’s as steady as a classroom, especially now, on the highway, on the way to Alice. But I can’t think of anything to write, either. And I remember someone saying once it was always like this when someone died or a really awful thing happened – words were never any good then. And I think about Larkin’s poem again, and how even for Mr Prescott, I can’t find anything to say that isn’t untrue or unkind.
And ages later when Billy stirs and breaks my mood, I find I haven’t written anything at all, but I’ve drawn a picture and it can only be Mr Prescott’s head in his hands, and he’s unshaven and sorry for himself, and his hair’s all tousled like he hasn’t combed it – and that’s what shocks me, because I look at him, and he hasn’t. And under the drawing I’ve written some words, or three words in big letters, and they’re underlined about half-a-dozen times: I didn’t know. And when I look up, he’s wide-awake again, and looking at me, and I realize I’ve never felt so sorry for anyone for ages and ages, and he’s trying to see, then, what I’ve been drawing. I can’t show him, of course, but if I don’t, then he’ll think -
‘It sounds awfully quiet in there.’ Henk comes to my rescue. ‘Is everyone still with us?’
And we realize then that you can manipulate the intercom without using any buttons at all. Or they can. And Mr Prescott’s face is full of pain and exhaustion, as he tries to remember what we’ve been talking about. When we’ve hardly said anything the whole trip.
‘We’ll pull over for a minute, and pump you up again, Billy.’
It’s Terry who’s speaking this time. ‘Then it’s no holds barred for the Alice. We’ll be there in an hour.’
And in the end, I still don’t have any idea why Billy wanted me there. But he did, and when we get to the hospital and drive into Emergency and they wheel him out, he has another moment of panic, and yells past the porters and the nurse who’s come out, who’s Aboriginal and black and in a blue and white uniform. ‘Laura?’ he shouts. ‘You’re coming in too?’
‘Yes, Billy. Of course.’
‘Cos otherwise,’ he says, looking at the nurse who’s got the prettiest face and this huge grin and looks about fourteen, ‘I won’t know anyone.’
‘You know me, Billy,’ the nurse says, straightening his pillow, and already teasing him as she checks his pulse. ‘You see my name here?’ she says, but looking herself all the while at the watch pinned to the breast of her uniform. And counting.
‘Jindy,’ he says, trying to lift his head. And I can see he’s responding to her already, and I mightn’t have to stay long. Because I’m thinking of Toni now, and where she is, and if the buses will be long behind us, and I’ve got the wrong clothes on and it’s very hot here. But I like the trees I can see along the street, and there are tourists and backpackers walking about everywhere outside the hospital yard. And a big sign near the grey iron gates just says, The Gap. And I’m wondering what that is, and I’d like to stretch my legs and walk after so long in the ambulance but they’re wheeling Billy in and he’s looking back at me, and Jindy’s smiling and beckoning me and saying I can come too, and we’re unfair then on Henk and Terry, who are kind of just dismissed now and have finished their job and have nothing to do and aren’t important any longer, though of course when we needed them, they were. And remembering this, I’m just turning to thank them when Henk makes it difficult by saying:
‘What about it, Lorrie?’
‘Laura,’ I say.
‘Laura, then. Today’s Friday. We could go to a disco. Tonight. What d’you say? I could show you around.’
I shake my head. Terry, the reserve driver, I can see, is backing away, getting embarrassed now, and shaking his own head. A lost cause, he might as well be saying, but I wouldn’t be sure whether he meant Henk or me.
‘C’mon,’ Henk says.
‘Thanks for taking care of Billy,’ I say. ‘And driving us.’
Which, I think, Mr Prescott should be saying, but he’s wandering after Billy and the stretcher and Jindy. With his head in a fog. Leaving me to deal with this.
‘Whadya say, Laura?’
‘No, I can’t. I’ll be on duty anyway. I’ve got to look after the kids.’
‘Well, after that?’ Henk won’t let go. ‘That’s still early – c’mon, what d’you say?’
I’ve tried that, I might as well have said, but I don’t. I just shake my head and start after Mr Prescott, who’s already disappeared inside.
‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ Henk says then in this sleazy way, and I get sick of him and say:
‘I think I do.’ And just stop myself from adding, And it isn’t much.
Which may be smart and that, but I wish – as soon as it’s out
- I hadn’t said anything, not because I can see it makes him angry and rude back, but because he’s been nice enough and driven all this way and I know Mum would say, ‘There’s no need. All you need to say is, Thank you, no.’ And I wish I had, just like that. ‘Thank you, no,’ which puts the thank you first and yet sounds really strong and decisive and is much better than ‘No, thank you,’
when you could be saying you don’t want milk in your tea. But I haven’t, I’ve been smart, so he’s got to get his own back.
‘Stuck up skirt,’ he says.
‘C’mon, Henk, c’mon, leave it,’ Terry’s saying and pulling at Henk’s arm.
‘Stuck up Sydney bitch,’ I hear as the glass doors of the hospital entrance close behind me. And I just catch a reflection of the red and blue and white of the ambulance pulling slowly away in the glass.
Sydney, I think, as I go over to the white, curtained cubicle where I can see Billy’s trolley, and Mr Prescott standing uselessly beside it. Sydney.
‘Ambulance? ’ Mum says, and I realize I should never have mentioned the word. ‘Accident? ’
‘It’s all right, Mum, it’s all right, it wasn’t me.’
‘But who?’
‘One of the boys, Billy Whitecross, you wouldn’t know him, he fell on the Rock, on Uluru, and broke his leg and they had to drive him here. That was yesterday, and he wanted someone in the ambulance to come with him, and for some reason he chose me.’
‘But you’re all right?’
‘Yes, Mu-m. I just rode in the ambulance, that’s all.’
‘Thank God for that. Poor boy.’
‘Poor me, you mean. Four hours in an ambulance isn’t much fun. You don’t see anything for a start.’
‘You weren’t responsible for him?’
‘Not specially, he’s just one of the kids, the most obnoxious, I used to think, but he’s not so bad. He’s just a normal boy. I’ve almost got to like him.’
‘Well, I can think of a thousand reasons why he’d choose you to go with him. You’re sympathetic, you care about people, you’re a pleasure to look at. If I was a boy in an ambulance …’
Sometimes the things your mother says about you can make you puke. Other times, especially if you’re low, they can really lift you up. Even if they’re lies.
‘And oh,’ Mum says then, making some strange connections in her head. ‘Before I forget … Philip’s rung, twice, in the last couple of days.’
/> ‘So?’
‘He asked me to let you know. He seemed very anxious to talk to you. Again.’
‘Oh.’ There’s a silence on the line for a moment while we both think. It’s amazing, Mum’s voice is so clear you’d reckon she was in the next room, not her in Sydney and me standing under this tiny perspex bubble in a street in Alice Springs, more than a thousand kilometres away. And there weren’t even any pips when she picked up the phone. I imagine I can almost hear her breathing. And waiting.
‘Mr Prescott came in the ambulance with Billy and me.’
‘Did he?’ she laughs for some reason. ‘And how are he and Toni getting on? Did she chase him round the Rock?’
‘Nearly.’
‘That girl –’ She laughs again, and I can hear Thomas then, gurgling and snuffling right up close to the phone and I wonder if Mum’s feeding him while she’s talking. But I don’t want to ask.
‘I’ll be glad to get home,’ is all I say.
‘And I’ll be so glad to see you, darling,’ Mum says. ‘Do you realize – I was thinking just last night – this is the longest you’ve ever been away from me. I don’t know what I’ll do when you leave home.’
‘Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just be an old maid and live out the back in Grandma Vera’s flat.’
‘Some hope you’ve got,’ Mum says. And I don’t ask her whether she means I won’t escape marriage, or she’s not going to have me living rent-free in Grandma Vera’s flat for the next two hundred years.
‘I better go,’ I say. ‘I’m visiting Billy in the hospital, and then we’re going out to Desert Park for the morning.’
‘Okay, darling. I can’t wait to see you tomorrow.’ But neither of us wants to hang up. ‘What’s that – Desert Park, by the way?’ she asks.
‘It’s a place where they have exhibitions of animals and birds and all the plants of the desert. And they have this live display, Mrs Harvey says, with eagles and hawks, where they feed them in flight.’
‘That poor boy,’ Mum says, and just for one second I imagine she’s talking about Philip again. ‘Billy,’ she says then, as if she’s read my mind. ‘He’ll miss all that.’
‘Everyone’s promised to take photos for him.’
‘What about your things?’ she says suddenly. ‘Your bag and things.’
‘Toni packed them for me. She brought them all on her bus.’ ‘Toni can be such a pain,’ Mum says, ‘but she’s a sweetie, too.’ ‘She was supposed to be there,’ I say then, though I don’t know why. And coming out like that, it sounds brutal, like an accusation, even in my ears. But Mum’s got to know sometime. ‘Supposed to be where?’
‘When it happened. The accident. Toni was supposed to go with them on duty.’
‘But not you?’
‘No, I was on the night before, and I didn’t go. I wanted to, I think. But I slept in.’
‘Still,’ she says, ‘having climbed it once …’
‘Yes,’ I say. Because it’s too complicated.
‘But Toni … Is she in some sort of trouble over this? Who was the teacher in charge?’
‘Mrs Harvey.’
‘Poor woman, she must feel terrible.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Toni was supposed to be there, and the two of you slept in?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Still, one student … what do they call you … monitors'? One monitor, I can’t see how that would have made such a difference.’
‘Some of the teachers slept in as well.’
‘Oh,’ Mum says then.
‘And three mightn’t have been enough to supervise the kids who went.’
‘I see.’ I swear I can almost hear her thinking. ‘So, why didn’t Mrs Harvey just wake them? When she realized she didn’t have enough?’
‘She couldn’t find all of them. And a few of them had been up late invigilating, and she didn’t want to wake them.’
‘So who couldn’t she find?’
‘I’m not sure of how many,’ I say, and in the last couple of minutes while Mum and I have been talking, I’ve been watching through the perspex this old Aboriginal couple trying to cross the road. Every time they move out another car comes and they have to scramble back to the footpath. At last the old man walks slowly out into the centre of the road and raises his hand, and a white ute covered with red dust pulls up sharply. He beckons the old woman, and they move across the road like crabs or beetles, they’re so slow. The ute doesn’t move until they reach the opposite footpath, and there’s a line of cars now pulling up behind it. One of them toots loudly. The Aboriginal man turns and waves vaguely towards the ute – his eyes are cloudy, and I’m not sure he can even see it properly. The boy who’s driving the ute cocks his thumb at the Aboriginal man. ‘No worries, mate,’ I hear him call as he speeds off. ‘But Mr Prescott,’ I tell Mum, ‘was one.’
‘Oh,’ she says, then. And the distance between us which a minute ago was as little as one room has suddenly stretched to half a continent.
‘There’s not a problem, is there, darling?’ she says. ‘A real one, I mean?’
Billy’s on the top floor of the hospital, and normally he’d have been discharged by now because his leg’s been set, and the doctor at Yulara was right – it was the fibula, and the break is clean and there’s nothing else wrong with him. Physically. Even his blood pressure is nearly back to normal, but he’s still very quiet and pale and gets the shakes sometimes, and there’s nowhere for him to go except a campground until the plane leaves tomorrow, so Mrs Harvey has talked to the doctors and they’ve said he can stay till then – because the children’s ward is nearly empty.
And this is strange, I think, because when you walk round the town, half the population, especially the Aborigines, seem to be on crutches or in plaster or in bandages or something. And it looks as though it should be in the Guinness Book of Records as the most accident-prone town in existence. But when I ask the nurse, Jindy, about this, she just laughs and says Aboriginal people don’t like to go into the hospital, they just go to Outpatients or Emergency and their relatives come and pick them up. ‘Even to die,’ she says and laughs, then puts her hand up to cover her mouth as if she shouldn’t have. And I find I like her a lot.
‘So, Billy,’ Mrs Harvey says, when we visit after breakfast, ‘you’ll be on the plane with the rest of us tomorrow. Will you like that?’ ‘Yes, Mrs Harvey.’ He sounds almost polite.
‘And you talked to Mum and Dad again last night?’ Mr Prescott asks him.
‘Yes, Mr Prescott.’
‘And what did they say?’
‘Serves me right,’ he says. In the deadest of voices.
‘Oh, I’m sure they didn’t say that,’ Mrs Harvey says, though her voice says something else.
‘Wouldn’t mean it anyway,’ Jindy says, up close to him as she bends to tuck the fold of a sheet back in under him. Her lips brush his forehead as she does. ‘Just jokin. Like Billy and me jokin all the time, eh Billy?’
Billy nods, his eyes following her as she moves to the end of his bed and writes something on the clipboard hanging there. I look down from the window into the yard of the hospital, and I see something strange. Two Aboriginal men, and a woman and a child – it looks like a boy from up here – are crossing the yard from the gates, coming towards the main building from where I’m looking down, almost straight down above their heads. From a different side of the yard, two other men are also coming, talking together as they come, porters, or maybe even doctors, two men anyway in white coats. And the paths of the two groups, I can see, will cross. In fact as they get closer, with each group talking, engaged in itself, I find myself getting tenser and tenser because they’re making directly for one another and, unless one of them slows, or changes direction, they must meet, collide, and I don’t know what will happen then, and I almost want to open a window and shout down to them, Look out. Cant you see? ’, but I also want to see what will happen. And the two men in each group are maybe three metres away from
one another and still neither has given way or even acknowledged the presence of the others, and they walk into one another – almost – the two men in white passing – it can’t be more than a metre – in front of the black men, and the two lines then pass, and draw away to complete the sketch of a cross, without once seeming to be aware that the other existed.
And I realize I’ve seen this before, though never so clearly, in the town itself, around Todd Mall, where Aborigines meet and wander about, or just sit and wait for friends, and white people pass between them, and I’ve thought before, watching them, there’ll be a collision, they pass so close, and they never seem to look at one another, but it never happens. Now, I realize, it’s because – though they never look – they do know each other is there but just as a tree is there, or a bus, something you unconsciously time yourself to avoid on your way to something else.
And I’m still standing there, wondering what all this means, when I hear Billy say, ‘Yes, Mrs Harvey.’ And he’s so polite and passive, I almost miss the old Billy, and would prefer to see him poking his tongue out and saying, ‘Mind your own business, you old bag,’ or machine-gunning Japanese tourists.
‘I don’t want you feeling,’ Mrs Harvey says, ‘that there’s anything we could do for you, that we haven’t done. So, you just let me know, won’t you?’
‘Yes, Mrs Harvey.’
Mr Prescott has at least shaved and has a clean T-shirt and fresh pants on, and doesn’t look as though he has to rush off to the executioner’s in the next five minutes anyway. But he’s almost as comatose, verbally, as Billy, and so Mrs Harvey has to do all the talking.
‘When we get back, Mr Jackson will want to know that we did everything we could for you.’
‘Yes, Mrs Harvey.’
And it’s weird to think you can go away for a school camp for only nine days and you’re only eleven or twelve years old, and something happens that changes you forever. But that’s happened, I know, to Billy, and he knows it has too, but he doesn’t, I’m sure, know what it is. And that’s what frightens him. And everyone else will go back to being what they were before – the teachers, the monitors, the kids, the drivers – even if they’ve acted a bit strangely out here – even Toni and Mr Prescott – but Billy won’t.
