Return to Moondilla

by Tony Parsons

  She kept speaking, her eyes cast down. ‘Ian told me this didn’t sound like something I should be telling him, but rather something I should talk to you about. That I wasn’t being fair to you. And he was right. So I made the decision to have this talk.’

  ‘I’m stunned.’

  ‘Not too stunned, I hope. Look, Greg, the thing is, you’ve been a very distracting influence ever since I met you again here in Moondilla.’

  He grinned. ‘I have?’

  ‘Yes, you have,’ she said firmly, finally meeting his gaze.

  ‘You could have fooled me,’ he said, his grin widening.

  ‘Do you think I’m made of marble? That I could fail to be affected by you?’

  He sobered, not sure what to say, but he reckoned he should be honest. ‘To tell you the absolute truth, I thought maybe you didn’t have whatever it is that makes a girl or a woman want a man. Steve told me you never looked at a boy in school, and your sister says you’ve never had a male friend here, apart from me. Everything you said and did made me think you weren’t interested in a relationship with me.’

  ‘If I’d given you an inch I’d have been lost,’ she confessed. ‘I was so scared of letting you in and then being rejected. But the thing is, you’ve already become such an important part of my life. I missed you while you were in Queensland.’ She took a shaky breath. ‘I realise I haven’t played fair with you, as Ian said. It should have been me who’s had a baby with you. Greg, do you still want to be with me?’

  ‘I’d marry you like a shot,’ Baxter said quickly. ‘You know I’ve wanted you ever since you first came to my classes, and I’d just about given up on girls after I lost Elaine. I gave up on you too, after you went to England. I couldn’t believe my luck when I found you again here in Moondilla.’

  ‘I don’t claim I’d be an ideal wife—’

  He shook his head at her. ‘What’s an “ideal wife”?’

  Julie grinned, but then it faded. She seemed nervous again. ‘I just mean I might not be up to much after a day’s surgery, but I’ll do my best in the . . . well, in the nooky department. I know that’s an important part of any marriage.’

  The thought of ‘nooky’ with Julie sent heat through Baxter. He recalled the secret Liz probably shouldn’t have told him—that Julie had never been with a man. It made sense that she was worried about her ability to do the deed. He just hoped he’d have a chance to put those fears to rest.

  ‘Whatever happens in that department is all right by me,’ he said.

  He wasn’t sure if Julie fully believed him, but she nodded. ‘There’s one thing I can promise you,’ she said. ‘You won’t have to worry about money. But if we have children together—and I certainly hope to—you’ll have to take a fair bit of responsibility for looking after them while I’m at work.’ She lowered her eyes again. ‘You could get a lot more writing done with another woman. It just depends on how much you want me.’

  Baxter gently tilted her chin so he could look right into her eyes. ‘For a long time I’ve dreamt about you being my girl. Well, dreams sometimes do come true. I dreamt about this river too. Now it seems I’ve got you and the river.’

  She smiled. And for the first time he’d ever seen, there were tears in her eyes.

  Then she pulled away and stood up, and his heart clenched in disappointment.

  ‘Are you going home now?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ Her smile turned wicked. ‘I’m not going home tonight, Greg. That was another of the decisions I came to.’

  He got to his feet and took her hand, lifting it and putting her palm against his cheek. She rested her head on his shoulder.

  ‘Did you notice my green light outside?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, what’s that about?’

  There was a note of mischief in her voice. ‘You once told me that you wouldn’t touch me unless I gave you the green light.’

  ‘Then green means go, doesn’t it?’ he asked.

  ‘It certainly does,’ she said, and kissed him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Baxter woke up slowly. He became aware that he wasn’t alone and that one of his hands was encircling a generous breast. When he opened his eyes, he saw Chief looking at him from beside the bed.

  ‘Greg,’ Julie murmured sleepily.

  ‘Mmm,’ he murmured back, as he pressed himself more tightly against her.

  Then she wriggled away and turned to look at him, frowning. ‘What a blow that I have to get up. I’ve got hospital rounds.’

  ‘Hospital rounds will be a wee bit delayed this morning,’ he said, wrapping his arms around her again. He pulled her close and kissed her.

  ‘You’ll be bad for my reputation,’ she said with a laugh, but didn’t try to escape.

  ‘I’ll be good for your reputation. People will think you’re terribly busy.’

  •

  After a scrumptious omelette breakfast, Julie was ready to go back to being a doctor.

  ‘Do you want me to come out for lunch?’ she asked.

  The significance of her question wasn’t lost on Baxter, and he remembered the fears she’d expressed the night before—that she wouldn’t ‘stack up’ against Liz Drew. He didn’t want Julie to feel he needed sex around the clock.

  ‘Don’t throw your arrangements completely out of plumb,’ he said. ‘I’ll be able to hold up until I see you tonight. That’s if I’ll be seeing you tonight.’

  ‘Of course you will,’ she said, kissing him quickly. ‘What will you do today, Greg?’

  ‘I’ll have a fish and a think about my book. And a sleep—didn’t get much of that last night!’

  She laughed and kissed him again. ‘You know, we’ll need to announce our engagement at some point,’ she said.

  ‘How about next weekend, we’ll go buy the ring? You have a think about what kind of a party you’d like.’

  ‘Before that, I’ll take you to see Mum. I suppose you realise you’ve never met my mother, in all the months you’ve been living here. She’s not too happy about that!’

  ‘I hope she approves of me.’

  ‘Me too.’ Julie sighed. ‘She’s a hard woman to please.’

  ‘Well, I believe your sister likes me, and Steve’s my best mate, so at least I’m assured of some family approval.’

  Julie nodded and he took her in his arms. ‘I’m truly sorry I kept you waiting so long, Greg,’ she whispered between kisses.

  ‘We’ll have to make up for those lost years.’

  ‘We made a good start last night and this morning,’ she said with a smile. ‘Well, I’d best make haste.’ As she was going out the door, she gave Chief a pat and called out to Baxter, ‘I’ll expect fresh fish for dinner!’

  He chuckled and called back, ‘Yes, dear.’

  He stood at the window, watching his fiancée’s car drive down the track. He was on a high about the fact that he’d be seeing her again that night, but he still had mixed feelings about her departure—now that she’d committed herself to him, he wanted her with him for every minute of the day. He supposed he couldn’t have everything.

  ‘Well, Chief, we’d better go and see if we can catch a fish or two,’ he said.

  He was fortunate to have the river beside him. It was the avenue to the ocean and all it promised for the fisherman. Moreover, his lifelong dream of returning to the river had brought him Julie Rankin, and all she promised for the future. It was, in every sense, the ‘river of dreams’.

  EPILOGUE

  Women’s Voice staff reporter Jennifer Crompton recently interviewed author Greg Baxter, whose first novel River of Dreams burst onto the Australian literary scene with the impact of a runaway truck.

  Greg is the son of Frances Baxter, who has made her own kind of impact as a chef extraordinaire and author of several bestselling culinary books. Greg himself is no mean hand in the kitchen thanks to a thorough grounding with the Great Woman.

  He’s also a martial arts guru—in fact, he’s a very high degree black belt.
As a teenager, he was a gymnast of near Olympic standard.

  Our reporter says that a meal prepared for you by Greg Baxter comes as close to a heavenly experience as anything one could expect on this planet. There’s only one snag, ladies: this hunk is married to a very lovely medico.

  •

  There’s something mind-blowing about a wild river, especially the rivers of eastern Australia. When they’re at their benevolent best they project a kind of paradisiacal ambiance without parallel elsewhere in Australia. When they flood, and they flood quite often, they swamp towns, drown farm animals and make a big mess of the countryside.

  But if you’ve been very cluey, you can live almost alongside a river and not be affected by flooding. Old Harry Carpenter was one of these cluey people. Many years ago, he built the house where Greg and Julie Baxter live at their gorgeous property, Riverview, near the town of Moondilla in New South Wales. The river has never come near the house, so Greg and Julie have the best of all possible worlds: the river and all that it promises, and the peace of mind engendered by the knowledge that they’ll never be flooded, no matter how high the water rises.

  Rivers rate very highly with Greg. In his words, the Moondilla river fulfilled his innate yearning for peace and contentment, and provided the kind of atmosphere he needed for his writing. This sentiment might appear greatly at odds with his martial arts exploits—in fact, unless you’re in the know, outwardly he’s as mild-mannered a man as you would ever meet.

  It was only through speaking to both police and some residents of Moondilla that I unearthed a very different Greg Baxter. And the deeper I dug, the greater grew my respect for the popular author. Baxter, so I was told, once killed two drug hoods with his hands and feet in self-defence, and put two others out of action for several months. He also saved one very good police officer from what promised to be a sticky end.

  As the result of a tip-off, I managed to obtain an interview with a high-ranking drug squad detective, whose name I cannot reveal.

  ‘What kind of man is Greg Baxter?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s one of the most physically dangerous men in the country, or the world for that matter. Especially dangerous to drug pushers—he hates them. One on one, I doubt there’s many men who could beat Greg. But for ninety-nine per cent of the time, he’s just a great bloke. A really lovely man. It’s the power he can generate in that one per cent that makes him so lethal. He’s a wonderfully fit man and a colossal bloke to have on your side, but I wouldn’t want to be up against him.’

  So I went down to the South Coast to interview this ‘lovely man’, and I found him to be as kind and gracious as any man could be. While he isn’t over the top about himself, he understands that some self-promotion is necessary to help sell his book, and he couldn’t have been more co-operative.

  JC: You’ve been described in some publications as a ‘dropout’. Is this a description you’d go along with?

  GB: It’s true that I’ve dropped out of Sydney society. I became completely disenchanted with that lifestyle and with the way the city was evolving. There’s a vast difference between the rich and poor, and there’s the drugs. At the time I left Sydney to live in Moondilla, I’d been working as a journo, talking to homeless kids and teenage prostitutes hooked on heroin and cocaine. Eventually I’d had enough.

  The turning point was listening to a nineteen-year-old girl talk about the number of men she had to have sex with to pay for her heroin. Her ‘boyfriend’ had got her started on drugs and prostitution, and he was taking money from her to pay for the drugs he was supplying her, in addition to a percentage of what she made. This grub was crooked on me interviewing one of his meal tickets, as he thought I was trying to wean her away from him. The girl was too far gone on drugs for that, but he didn’t care about her welfare one little bit. He pulled a knife on me and I had to deal with him.

  JC: You actually broke his arm?

  GB: It should’ve been his neck.

  JC: Is it true that you took that prostitute to lunch at your mother’s restaurant?

  GB: Absolutely. I thought the girl could do with a decent meal and I also thought, naively, that if she saw what was on the other side of the fence I might be able to persuade her to get treatment for her addiction. I’m pleased I took her to Mum’s place because it was the last decent meal she ever had. To bring her into line, her pimp fellow wouldn’t let her have any heroin. When she got some, she overdosed. She was taken to St Vincent’s Hospital, and Mum and I were with her when she died.

  JC: And this girl, or a girl just like her, was one of the central characters in your book?

  GB: That’s right. To a certain extent it’s an obituary for her, and for all the other poor unfortunate women chained to prostitution by drug addiction.

  JC: There’s a lot of anger in River of Dreams. Are you a naturally angry person?

  GB: Definitely not. You can’t get to my level in martial arts without the ability to harness and discipline one’s feelings, anger included. It’s true that I’m angry: we’re losing hundreds of young people to drugs and depression annually. That shouldn’t happen. But I channel my anger into my writing, in the hope of making a difference.

  JC: Can you tell me more about what makes you angry?

  GB: There’s a whole army of second-rate people who have stuffed up what should be the best and fairest country in the world. Brave men and women died to defend our way of life. I knew and loved one of these men, a decorated World War One soldier named Albert Garland, when I lived in Moondilla as a boy.

  Australia could have and should have set the standard for the rest of the world. Our country wasn’t infested with religious fanatics and bigots like some others, and it had—and has—resources that most countries don’t have in such abundance. There’s also the fact that Australia has never been invaded, although it came close in 1942.

  JC: Isn’t it a fact that you’re living a lifestyle that would be the envy of many people?

  GB: I suppose so. I’m not earning much money, but I have a successful medico wife. Writing isn’t an easy occupation, though. It’s damned hard and solitary work.

  JC: But you shouldn’t be lonely now. You have a very lovely wife, and I hear that she exercises and fishes with you.

  GB: I’m damned lucky. Julie is a woman in a million. Before her I had only my dog, Chief, although he’s a dog in a million!

  JC: Is it true that your wife first came to you to learn martial arts when she was studying medicine at Sydney Uni?

  GB: That’s true. She was a feminist and had done some outrageous things—I mean, outrageously daring things. Then she went to Britain to further her surgical studies.

  JC: How did that affect you?

  GB: I missed her. Of course she was a little younger than me, but we got on very well, although at the time she wasn’t interested in men and had never had a boyfriend. I expected that she’d make a great name for herself as a surgeon and I was surprised to find that she’d come back to Moondilla. She came home to take over her father’s medical practice when he died, and I met her when she stitched up my arm after an accident.

  JC: What kind of accident?

  GB: I had to help a couple who’d driven off the road and smashed their car.

  JC: I suppose Julie was just as surprised to find you here?

  GB: That she was. She used to come out and fish with me. She can tie two hooks to my one.

  JC: You’re implacably anti-drug. Is this going to be a continual theme of your writing?

  GB: Certainly not, although it’s an issue I do feel strongly about. I’m implacably anti-drug because we’ve created a society in which drugs are regarded by many people as an answer to their problems. They’re not. Nobody forces you to take drugs, and there are plenty of things you can do instead, even if you’re unemployed. You can do voluntary work for charities, both in Australia and elsewhere, and there’s more satisfaction to be gained from involving yourself in that kind of work than in drugs.

  I chose
to write a novel centred around drugs because they represent one of the most significant problems facing modern society. What they’re costing us, God alone knows, and it’s all money down the drain.

  JC: Will all your novels be concerned with social problems?

  GB: I shouldn’t think so. But anyone who has a conscience has to be concerned with social problems. They’ve been the basis for some of the best novels ever written. Take Dickens, Steinbeck, Cronin, and the best of our Australian writers. What did they write about? Social problems.

  Not everyone is smart or has rich parents, and it makes me mad to hear the smart arses refer to others as ‘losers’. We used to have virtual full employment, and I think the most important things a country can offer its citizens are a good education, a decent health system and a job. The fact that we can’t offer everyone a job means that we’ve run off the rails and let our young people down. The decline in morality and the use of drugs are part of the unemployment syndrome.

  JC: How would you rectify the situation?

  GB: I think we need to introduce a form of National Service, at least for young people not in a job. Get them off drugs and teach them something useful, maybe incorporating a program of first aid. You can’t have young people sitting about on their hands or homeless. You need to give them a mountain to climb, even if it’s not a very high mountain. Other countries have National Service but we seem to always rely on volunteers, except in the case of Vietnam which was a war we should never have become embroiled in. No politician would be courageous enough to broach the subject of National Service, of course, but I think it’s what we need now.

  •

  There were more questions I wanted to ask, but it was time for Greg to do his daily martial arts and gymnastic routine, after which there would be lunch. I’ve never seen anything to approach Greg’s athleticism or the controlled power he demonstrated for me. If Julie works out with Greg, as she assured me she does, it’s no wonder that she’s in such great shape.