The Girl from Snowy River

by Jackie French

  ‘Well, yes. But you were a girl fifty years ago. Not in 1969.’

  ‘Who do you know around here?’ Suddenly his words from a few minutes ago came back to her. ‘Who told you that you’d find ghosts on the Rock?’

  He looked at her steadily. ‘Not ghosts. A ghost. The ghost of Flinty McAlpine, the girl from Snowy River.’

  ‘I’m not a ghost!’ Her words echoed back from the valley: Ghost, ghost, ghost…

  She thrust out her hand. ‘See? Pinch me. I’m real.’

  Instead he put his fingers lightly on her wrist for a second, then drew them back. His skin felt warm, despite the chill of the mist.

  ‘See?’ she demanded. ‘I’m solid. Who told you I’d be a ghost?’

  ‘Someone I’m staying with. In 1969.’

  ‘Who?’

  He looked at her strangely. ‘The family of a boy I went to school with. His grandmother asked if I’d like to get away from Sydney after I got out of hospital. I…I’d had enough of Mum fussing, of nurses and antiseptic. I wanted to smell gum trees again. I wanted some place new.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘Looks like I found that all right.’

  The sun had slipped behind the ranges now. The shadows were gathering into dark. Flinty glanced up at the house, a vague shape through the Rock’s mist. Suddenly Joey yelled, ‘Flinty! Flinty, where are you?’

  She was shocked how much relief she felt at the real world — her own world — reasserting itself. Had she began to doubt her own sanity — even her own reality? ‘I’m down at the Rock!’ she yelled. ‘I’ll be there soon.’

  ‘Kirsty hurt her knee!’

  ‘What? I’ll be right there… See?’ she demanded of the soldier. ‘You heard that! They’re real! I’m real!’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything,’ he said softly. ‘Just the wind. And you.’

  Impossible. But she believed him. Somehow she knew he was real, knew she wasn’t dreaming, knew that somehow his world was the future. Could both of them be real? Could she be here, in 1919, somehow meeting a man from 1969? Neither of them ghosts. Both — somehow — real? But she couldn’t stay here and try to sort this out. She had to do her duty. ‘I…I have to go. Kirsty needs me.’

  ‘Then off you go, Flinty McAlpine.’

  Mounting Empress was one of the hardest things she had ever done. Would she see the soldier again? All at once she realised that if he really was from the future he could tell her so many things. Would Andy come back to Rock Farm? Would they get the rates paid? Maybe even if she and Sandy…?

  After all the changes that had shuddered through the past few years it would be good to glimpse the future. Just to know there was a future…

  ‘Flinty!’

  Empress shivered, as though longing to be gone. She broke into a trot.

  Flinty looked back. He was still there, growing fainter in the dark and the mist. ‘What’s your name?’ she called.

  ‘Nicholas.’

  ‘Will you be here tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he called back. ‘Maybe ghosts can’t choose when they’ll appear. But I’ll be here on this Rock. Will you?’

  ‘Flinty! Hurry!’ Joey’s voice sounded increasingly desperate.

  ‘Coming!’ she yelled, then added, ‘Yes,’ to the ghost on the Rock.

  But this time when she looked back the mist was empty.

  Chapter 5

  He just vanished. Men in bathchairs can’t just disappear. There’s nowhere to go, except over the cliff.

  All my life I’ve heard stories about the Rock. All right, most of them from Dusty Jim when he’s been at the bottle. But what if he really has seen strange things there? People from another time?

  What is time anyway? The day Mum died went on forever, holding her hand while Dad rode for the doctor, knowing she was dead but still hoping, somehow, that she wasn’t, watching her skin change from pink to wax.

  Maybe time flows like the air on a mountain. The wind will freeze your nose and toes, then suddenly you’ll find a pocket of warmth. Maybe time flows too, and there’s a pocket of it that slips and slides around the Rock.

  There is something special about the Rock. Mum and Dad felt it too. I’d see them sitting down there together, watching the sunset through the mist. Maybe…

  No, I’m being stupid. Someone is playing a joke. Amy, maybe. They carried the chair down so there’d be no tracks. He pretended to have no legs.

  But you can’t pretend that. I saw his empty trousers! Saw his face too. He has a kind face, not a cruel one. And even Amy wouldn’t joke about a wounded soldier.

  One minute I think I’ve got it all worked out, then the next I change my mind.

  I want him to be real so badly. Not mad, not lying. Not a ghost either, because ghosts are dead. I want him to be the person who he says he is, the soldier from 1969. How is it that someone who says he is from 1969 looks at me like I am really here, while Sandy can’t?

  If he’s real — if he’s ever there again — then I can talk to him. Someone just to talk to, at last.

  ‘Flinty!’ Joey’s voice came from the kitchen.

  She slid off Empress. The pony gave an abrupt snort as though to say, ‘Get in there. Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘How badly is she hurt?’ Suddenly Flinty had a vision of Kirsty with her leg so badly injured she would lose it too. She should never have left them alone so long…

  The lamp shone on the kitchen table. The fire was alight too, as well as the wood stove — thank goodness, she thought with a small part of her mind. Joey must have chopped the wood as she’d asked. ‘Where is she? Oh…’

  It was a sigh of relief. Kirsty sat on the floor looking up at her, patting at the tears running down her face with a lace-edged handkerchief. There was a trickle of blood on her leg. A very small trickle from a cut on her knee.

  ‘I tripped over the step!’ wailed Kirsty.

  ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake.’ It had been Dad’s favourite oath. Ladies never swore, but sometimes…

  Flinty grabbed the hanky to press it against the bleeding knee. Kirsty snatched it back. ‘No! It’ll get all stained! I’ve already got blood on my best petticoat!’

  Flinty gazed at the tear-streaked face. Kirsty hadn’t cried when Dad died nor at his funeral, just stood there with a face of ice. When the brown snake came in the kitchen door last autumn her little sister had hit it with a shovel and cut its head off before she yelled for Flinty and her brother. But get a drop of blood or mud or gravy on her pinafore and she howled like a banshee.

  ‘Get the bandage basket,’ Flinty said tiredly to Joey. Her brain felt like cotton wool. Today had been too much: the stranger, seeing Sandy. She needed quiet to sort each piece out. But there was no quiet, not just now. ‘Joey, wait. I’ll get the basket. You see to Empress. Take the lantern. There’s a sack from Mrs Mack to bring in too.’

  Joey nodded, and was gone. She hoped suddenly that he didn’t go seeing ghosts down on the Rock.

  She fetched the basket from the linen cupboard in the hall. She wished they didn’t need to keep the lamp lit — lamp oil was expensive — but kitchen stoves didn’t give light to see by, not like an open fire. Mum had made slush lamps with a wick floating in mutton fat, but they had no sheep left now. Joey trapped enough rabbits to keep them fed, but there wasn’t much fat on a bunny.

  ‘It’s going to sting,’ she said, holding up the iodine.

  Kirsty wrinkled her nose. ‘You won’t spill any on my pinafore?’

  The pinafore was almost worn through from so much washing, but Kirsty had embroidered little flowers all along the edge, long nights spent peering at the cloth by lamplight. She had embroidered her petticoats too and crocheted lace along the edges of the hanky that she still held away from the blood.

  ‘No. See? Just a dab and then I’ll bandage it up like this.’ She tied the clean rag around the skinned knee. ‘There you are. All vanished.’

  Like the man — Nicholas — down on the Rock. She looked at Kirsty, examining her bandage, hea
rd Joey’s voice talking to Empress out in the yard. Should she tell them she’d seen a ghost out there? A ghost who thought she was a ghost, a ghost who said he was from 1969…

  They might believe her. Might have nightmares too, dreaming of ghoulies lurking in the darkness. But also…

  The ghost was hers. Mine and no one else’s, she thought suddenly. She had nothing else that was really hers. Her dresses were Mum’s, cut down to size, to be handed on to Kirsty when she’d outgrown them. The shirt and trousers she’d worn today had been Dad’s, would be Joey’s when he grew to fit them. Her days were looking after her brother and her sister, scrubbing, cooking, bandaging knees. Even Rock Farm belonged to Andy now, as the eldest son.

  Nicholas was hers. Her ghost. Her story.

  Maybe she’d tell Joey and Kirsty about him, one day, as a bedtime story, but changed so it was just a story, not maybe true.

  Maybe…possibly…impossibly…true.

  Had he even really been there? Or had she dozed while Empress plodded up the road? No. She’d seen him twice. She might have dreamed Nicholas once, but not two times.

  What was life like in the future? In the past fifty years they’d had the Great War and the Boer Wars, as well as the battles on the North-West Frontier in India, where Dad had served. Queen Victoria had died and bicycles had been invented…oh, and motorcars and wireless sets, though she hadn’t seen either yet. Would as much happen in the next fifty years?

  I’m thinking like he really is from 1969, she thought.

  ‘Kirsty? There haven’t been any strangers about, have there?’

  Kirsty shook her head. She glanced at the dark out the back door warily. ‘You didn’t see a swaggie, did you?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Flinty reassured her. ‘How about wheel marks?’ she added casually.

  ‘Only from the Mullinses’ dray last week,’ said Kirsty practically. ‘But the rain washed them away.’ She scrambled to her feet as Joey lugged in Mrs Mack’s sack.

  Tomorrow, Flinty thought. I’ll see Nicholas again tomorrow. Meanwhile there was dinner to make. Joey and Kirsty peered into the sack as Flinty hauled a forequarter of mutton, wrapped in more old sacking, already cut into chops and a big leg roast.

  Chops for dinner, she thought with relief. It only took ten minutes to fry chops. You had to boil bunny for an hour, then spend another picking out the bones. Boiled potatoes from the garden would be quick too, with boiled carrots and spinach if Kirsty had remembered to pick them.

  ‘Apple jelly!’ yelled Kirsty.

  ‘Fruitcake!’ breathed Joey. He picked it up like it was the crown jewels. ‘Why don’t you make fruitcake any more, Flinty?’

  Because we can’t afford dried fruit, she thought, but didn’t say it. Because my life is full of looking after you, and worrying about the rates and Sandy — and now a ghost. ‘I haven’t time.’

  Joey was still examining the cake. ‘How come the fruit doesn’t sink to the bottom? Or float up to the top?’

  ‘Because it doesn’t.’ She knew better than to try to answer Joey’s ‘why’ questions, though Dad had been able to. ‘Why is so much of the map pink?’ Joey would ask, and Dad would explain it was the British Empire, so big the sun never set on it…

  ‘Look!’ Kirsty gave an excited dance. She was wearing her red shoes, even though they were two sizes too small now. She held up the contents of an old pillowslip.

  Three jumpers. One blue, one brown, one smaller and pink. New jumpers — or newly knitted anyway, from wool rewound from ones worn out at the elbows but otherwise still good. A jumper made to fit Flinty, and ones for Joey and Kirsty too.

  Flinty felt the lump grow in her throat. Every woman in the mountains had knitted the war away, clicking her needles even as she walked out to do the milking. But it must have taken Mrs Mack weeks to make these.

  ‘Pink,’ said Kirsty softly. ‘Can I wear it to church? Please?’

  It would be too hot. But maybe they’d have a cold snap. And even if it stayed warm Mum herself couldn’t have stopped Kirsty wearing a new pink jumper regardless of the temperature.

  ‘Yes,’ said Flinty. ‘Come on. Give me a hand to get dinner on.’

  Life was real again.

  Chapter 6

  Fried chops and gravy for dinner, with Mrs Mack’s fruitcake for afters. Funny, I meet a ghost, then end the day frying chops. But oh, they were good. I am so sick of rabbit. They have built up to a plague since the boys went to war, but rabbit skins still fetch a good price, though not as much as they did when they were needed for army hats. How do you turn a shaggy rabbit skin into a smooth hat anyway? If I asked Joey he might know — or drive me barmy asking me how he could find out.

  They ate by lamplight, plates piled high with wonderfully greasy fried chops, boiled baby carrots, last autumn’s potatoes and spinach from last summer’s plants bolting to seed in the vegetable garden. The fire glowed behind them, the room filled with the sweet scent of gum-branch smoke that Flinty had known all her life.

  ‘Elbows off the table,’ she said automatically to Joey, just as Mum had said a million times. ‘Thanks for the wood,’ she added.

  ‘Wasn’t me,’ said Joey, around a lot of chop. She almost told him not to speak with his mouth full too. But one nag was enough each meal. ‘The Mullins boys rode by and cut up the dead tree in the top paddock for us.’

  ‘I hope you thanked them properly.’ If the Mullins had seen a stranger the news would be all over the valley by tomorrow, she thought. And how could a stranger get up here without the gossips noticing?

  ‘Course I did. They brought an apple pie too,’ he added.

  ‘Where is it?’ There’d been no pie in the food safe.

  ‘Me and Kirsty ate it. We knew you’d be having a grand afternoon tea down at the Macks’,’ he said defensively.

  ‘With jam and everything,’ said Kirsty.

  ‘Fair enough. I did too.’

  ‘What sort of jam?’ asked Kirsty, making a small mountain of her potatoes and trying to balance the smallest on top.

  ‘Don’t play with your food.’ Two nags then.

  ‘I wouldn’t if anyone could see me,’ said Kirsty reproachfully.

  ‘I can see you.’

  ‘Family doesn’t count. Was there strawberry jam?’

  ‘And plum and blackberry and apricot and crab-apple jelly.’

  ‘Apricot…’ said Kirsty wistfully. Mum had planted an apricot tree next to the north-facing wall. It survived the winters — just — but the late frosts always froze the blossom. Trust your father, Mum had said each year, to choose his land for the view and not the weather. And every time Dad had laughed and said, ‘But the view’s worth it, isn’t it, old girl? I’ve got five mountains to look at, and five children too, each strong as any mountain…’

  Flinty swallowed a lump in her throat, as well as a mouthful of potato.

  ‘Flinty?’ Joey’s voice was too casual.

  ‘What? You haven’t been using Dad’s shotgun again, have you?’

  ‘Of course not! Not till Andy sends his wages and we can get more shot. I just wondered,’ he carefully looked at his plate, not her, ‘if I could borrow Empress on Thursday.’

  Flinty looked at him, his hair the colour of winter tussocks, bleached by the sun, his eyes like the sky. The three of them had ridden Empress down to school for more than a year, and old Big Bob before that. Empress might be her horse, trained by her under Dad’s watchful eye, but she belonged to all of them too.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To go down to Mullinses’. Do a bit of work.’

  She sighed. ‘Joey McAlpine, you never could tell a lie. What do you want Empress for, really?’

  He looked up at her from under his eyelashes. ‘Billy Mullins says Sandy Mack is going to a brumby muster, down in the hills north of Drinkwater.’

  Sandy hadn’t told her that either. She swallowed her bitterness. ‘You want to go on a muster? Not till you’re sixteen, like Dad said.’ She looked at Joey
suspiciously. ‘It’s a day’s ride down to Drinkwater. How long did you plan to be gone?’

  ‘I’d have left you a note,’ he said defensively.

  ‘Well, there’s no need for a note because you’re not going. We need you here,’ she added softly, so as not to say, ‘You’re too young. You might get hurt, or injure Empress.’ He might only be twelve, but Joey had a man’s pride.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said earnestly. ‘This is a special round-up. Back in ’15 Miss Matilda bought this stallion, Repentance. Its sire was Lamentation, out of old Regret…’

  ‘It’s that poem, isn’t it?’ she said tiredly. ‘The one Dad used to read to us?’

  Joey gave a cautious grin. ‘But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head, And he swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer…’

  ‘And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed,’ chanted Kirsty. ‘While the others stood and watched in very fear.’

  Flinty didn’t know whether to laugh or sob. ‘You think you can be the man from Snowy River all over again? The poem’s just a story. It’s not real.’ You’re the girl from Snowy River, the ghost had said. But she couldn’t think about the ghost now.

  ‘I know you can’t chase a mob of brumbies like that and bring them back alone. This is a proper muster. They’ve got a canyon marked out already to drive the brumbies into.’

  ‘I don’t care. You’re still too young.’

  ‘Flinty, listen! Miss Matilda’s offered a thousand pounds if Repentance is caught. He’s worth even more. That’s a hundred pounds, if it’s divided between ten of us. It could pay the rates!’

  A hundred pounds!

  The world lurched. A hundred pounds would pay the rates over and over. Buy flour and sugar so they wouldn’t have to scratch every dinner from the vegetable garden and the rabbit traps. Joey and Kirsty could go back to school. There’d be other brumbies worth selling or training up too. The stallion could have covered a good few mares in four years. They mightn’t be as good as Repentance — most of those brumby mares weren’t up to much — but some would be half thoroughbred, at least.