The rain eased overnight, sweeping out to sea. A clear autumn day dawned.
Emma dozed uncomfortably in a chair by Gwendoline’s bedside, waking at six am when the doctor stuck his head in with a jolly ‘good morning!’ He examined Gwendoline, gave her a clean bill of health, then breakfast was wheeled in.
As Gwendoline drank tea, Emma prodded her curiously about the previous night’s walk and who she might have been looking for, but her grandmother was evidently sceptical that such a walk had even taken place. ‘I don’t think I did that, dear.’
Emma stole a slice of toast from her grandmother’s tray, kissed her cheek goodbye and stepped out into the morning sunshine. She had an afternoon shift at The Coffee Bean and probably should have gone home to shower and sleep, but thoughts of Gwendoline searching the dark, wet streets for a mystery boat fuelled her interest.
She drove to Mascot, stopping along the way for coffee, and spent the morning in the storage facility where she had relocated her grandmother’s possessions years earlier. She rifled through bags and boxes, old plastic tubs and photo albums, but she was sure finding anything related to her grandmother’s time at the Quarantine Station would be a futile exercise. She was positive she hadn’t seen anything like that when she’d packed it all up and she was certain she wasn’t going to come across it now. The key to settling Gwendoline’s night-time wanderings was not going to be found in that storage container.
Eyes heavy and back aching, Emma locked the roller door and went home to change for work.
The lunch rush was over at The Coffee Bean when she arrived at two. She pushed through the door and felt cool afternoon air follow her inside.
Her boss, Chloe, was behind the coffee machine on tiptoes, filling the grinder with beans. ‘Hey, hey,’ she sang out as Emma dropped her bag behind the counter and shrugged out of her jacket.
‘Need a hand with that?’
Chloe was just over five foot and her petite arms were trembling under the load of the bag. ‘It’s okay,’ she said cheerily, copper curls bouncing. ‘I’ve got it.’
The café had almost cleared except for a few patrons sipping the last of their coffees. Emma stepped out from behind the counter and cleared the tables. She carried plates and glasses into the kitchen and began stacking the dishwasher. Her body was tired, her thoughts sluggish and she hoped for a busy afternoon to keep her eyes from closing.
‘How was your night?’ Chloe asked, walking into the kitchen.
Emma closed the dishwasher, setting it to a heavy-duty cycle. It gurgled to life. ‘I spent it at the nursing home.’
Chloe leant against the stainless steel bench and flicked a tea towel over her shoulder. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘My grandmother went wandering again.’
‘Oh, Em, that’s like the third time in three months.’
‘I know.’
‘What’s the nursing home doing about it?’
Emma sighed. ‘The usual. They won’t accept responsibility. They blame my grandmother for it, like she’s purposely sneaking out.’
‘Move her out of there.’
Emma stifled a yawn. ‘I can’t afford to move her. For the money I pay, the facility is pretty good. They just can’t seem to keep an eye on her.’
‘Have you slept yet?’ Chloe didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Let me make you a coffee.’
Emma wiped down the bench and began preparing for the afternoon rush. She pulled a cheesecake and quiche from the refrigerator, slipped on disposable gloves and began to slice equal portions.
The Coffee Bean was a small establishment two blocks from Emma’s apartment and next door to the local cinema. The patronage was a mix of office workers, university students and moviegoers, a constant flow of diners keeping the café busy until doors closed at ten.
It had been a scribbled job advertisement taped to the café window that had led Emma there three years earlier. She’d had no waitressing experience and was floundering around at rock bottom when Chloe had taken a gamble on her, offering the position. Emma had been there ever since.
Chloe returned with a latte and placed it down on the bench. ‘Here you go; three shots of espresso. That will wake you up.’
Emma sipped, making a face. ‘And keep me awake for days.’
‘I’ve got two new university students starting at five. If it’s shaping up to be a slow night, you can go home early.’
‘Thanks. I should be fine after this.’ Emma set the coffee down and went back to slicing the quiche.
Chloe leant against the bench again and studied her. ‘So, what are you going to do? Obviously something has to change.’
‘Yes, something has to change,’ Emma agreed.
‘You need to be more forceful with that director. She keeps slithering her way out of any responsibility. At the end of the day, you pay her a lot of money to care for your grandmother.’
‘I guess I don’t want to be a bother in case she asks me to leave. I don’t have any alternatives and I can’t care for Gwendoline full-time.’
‘I doubt she’ll ask you to leave,’ Chloe said.
‘She suggested that when my grandmother wanders, she could be chasing old memories. It’s like they’re leading her somewhere. She grew up on the Quarantine Station in the early 1900s. She lived there until she was seven. Did I ever tell you that?’
‘The Quarantine Station in Manly? No kidding.’
‘Yes. And when she wanders, she talks about going down to the wharf to find the boat.’
‘Boats would have been in and out of that place all the time to drop off the sick.’
‘Yes, but I think it’s more specific than that.’ Emma set down the knife. ‘She’s looking for a particular boat. I’m completely baffled. I don’t know what it could mean. The director said I should find some old photographs or letters from Gwendoline’s time there. If I could find something like that, it might give her comfort and she’ll stop wandering.’ Emma finished slicing the quiche and cheesecake and placed them both back in the refrigerator for later. She started on the salads.
‘Does your grandmother have anything stored away that you could use?’
‘No. I went through all of her belongings in storage this morning but couldn’t find anything. And I don’t remember seeing items like that when I packed it all up years ago.’
‘Why don’t you go to the Quarantine Station and ask around? Someone might know something.’
Emma stopped slicing tomatoes. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I’ve never been out there, to be honest.’
‘It’s scary as hell at night. The ghost tours are good.’
Emma chuckled. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’ But as Chloe left to serve a customer at the counter and Emma finished preparing the salads, her words continued to sound in Emma’s mind. Why don’t you go to the Quarantine Station and ask around?
The shift picked up and diners came and went. After helping to train the new staff, Emma left at nine and walked two blocks home, under a row of street lamps, to her Kensington apartment.
The air was cool and a bright moon balanced in the sky. She let herself into her apartment, dropped her bag on the lounge and kicked off her shoes.
Home was on the small side but she didn’t need much space. The apartment comprised of a single bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom with windows that overlooked a street lined with pubs that never failed to remind her of how lacking her social life was. The walls were plain, the carpet a once-pretty cream and the furniture mostly Gwendoline’s because Emma had been thrust back into single life with barely more than a suitcase of clothes.
She flicked on a lamp. Exhaustion had crept in on the walk home and she wasn’t sure if she was hungry or tired or both. Chloe had fixed her a container of quiche and salad for dinner. She placed it on the coffee table for later and ran a hot shower, scrubbing food and coffee from her skin.
Settled on the lounge with her plastic container of dinner, she switched on the television. This w
as her usual nightly routine—sitting alone in her pyjamas on the lounge, eating leftovers from the café, watching bad TV and listening to the frivolities of east Sydney life beneath her windows.
Friday nights were lonely, Saturday nights lonelier. She thought of her time with Drew and the challenges they’d had, and she wasn’t sure if she desperately missed him or desperately hated him, though she suspected both.
The universe had thrown some curveballs in the past, life-altering ones, and Emma had clung on as best she could, adapting to each hurdle, picking up the pieces and trying to move on.
She didn’t want to think what life would be like after Gwendoline was gone. There would be no trips to the aged care home, no frail little hand to hold or soft papery skin to kiss. It would be the end of all that she had left in this world.
Emma rested the quiche and salad on the arm of the lounge and reached for her laptop. The conversation she’d had earlier with Chloe still rang in her ears and her curiosity began to outweigh her exhaustion.
She typed ‘Quarantine Station Manly’ into the Google search field and hit enter.
The link to the official Q Station page popped up and she clicked on it, scrolling through the photo galleries and tours available. It was a different place now from when Gwendoline had been there a century before, having closed its doors as a working quarantine station in 1984.
In 2006, the Mawland Group had taken over the lease of the site and began an eighteen million dollar conservation and restoration project. The name was changed from the Quarantine Station to the modernistic Q Station, and it was now used for weddings, conferences, historical education programs and ghost tours. It was heritage-listed, significant in Aboriginal history and part of the Sydney Harbour National Park, located on North Head.
Emma browsed the website, read all the information, and it was after midnight when she finally closed the laptop and yawned. Her mind was made up and as she crawled into bed, her brain began to formulate a plan.
Two days later, Emma climbed into her humble VW on her quiet Kensington street and turned the ignition.
It was Sunday and she wasn’t rostered to work at The Coffee Bean. Usually, she liked to make herself available for Chloe, picking up extra shifts when the university students called in sick after a night out. It helped with the rent but that day she was determined to make use of her time off.
The Q Station was located forty minutes from Emma’s apartment, in Manly on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Emma navigated her grumbling car over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, up through Military Road and across Spit Bridge, the autumn sun bouncing off glassy water in Middle Harbour.
She felt light all of a sudden, as though bestowed with a sense of purpose. Rarely did she do anything outside visiting Eastgardens Aged Care or working at The Coffee Bean and certainly never anything as adventurous or spontaneous as this.
She knew very little about Gwendoline’s childhood, only that she’d been born and raised at the old Quarantine Station in 1919. In 1926, at the age of seven, Gwendoline had left with her mother and father. She hadn’t shared many details about her young life, or perhaps, disappointingly, Emma hadn’t bothered to ask. Understanding who her grandmother was and where she’d come from felt long overdue.
Emma turned her VW onto Sydney Road and ground to a halt in the weekend traffic. When she eventually crawled into Manly, she was greeted with a stretch of turquoise ocean that nudged up against the horizon. The sky was peppered with wheeling seagulls, tourists swarmed the esplanade and she heard a ferry toot its horn as it pulled away from the wharf.
She turned onto Darley Road and travelled up the hill past the Manly Hospital. Following the signage to North Head, she drove beneath an arch with the words ‘Parkhill’ engraved in the sandstone and followed the road to the Q Station. The view was lovely to her right; Sydney Harbour sparkling around the headland. With a view like that, there could have been worse places in the world to be quarantined.
In the Q Station carpark she found an empty spot and turned her car off, the engine ticking down. A few metres away stood a small building with the sign ‘Reception’ on the front. Emma shrugged out of her jacket, throwing it back into the car. The day had grown warm and she grabbed a bottle of water, her backpack and started walking.
The reception area was empty when she pushed through the doors and she approached the counter where a woman sat, glancing over a computer screen.
‘Welcome to the Q Station,’ she said, looking up with a smile. Her name tag read ‘Joan’.
‘Hi,’ Emma said. ‘I’m wondering if I could speak to someone about locating some historical information, specifically old photographs or letters from 1919 through to 1926.’
‘Are you conducting research for a project?’
‘Actually, my grandmother was born here in 1919 and lived on the station until she was seven.’
‘How wonderful!’
‘Yes, and I’d love to learn more about her time here. She’s in a nursing home now with early dementia and we think it could help her.’
Joan looked thoughtful. ‘We have a small museum on site. But I’m not sure if anyone is available down there right now to take you through. You would have to call ahead and book an appointment with the visitors’ centre.’
‘How about tours running today? I haven’t pre-booked anything, but I’m happy to join if you have a spot available.’
‘I’m sorry, dear. We have a daily history tour called the Wharf Wanderer, but it’s already started, and the Quarantine Station Story tour only runs on Saturdays.’
‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ Emma said, trying to mask her disappointment. ‘I should have been more organised.’
‘You’re still welcome to walk around the grounds. Most buildings are open to the public and you can roam as you please. If you catch up to the Wharf Wanderer tour, I’m sure no one will mind if you tag along,’ Joan said with a smile.
‘That’s very kind of you. I’ll do that.’
‘The shuttle bus is due to leave in a few minutes. It can drop you near the Former First Class Precinct and you can start there. You can board it again anytime from anywhere. Just wave Ted down as he passes.’
Emma thanked Joan and stepped back out into the sunshine. She boarded the shuttle and a few minutes later the driver, Ted, pulled away from the reception building.
The bus bounced down Wharf Road with a handful of passengers, the scenery beyond the windows an intriguing mix of steeped bushland and old weatherboard buildings propped up on sandstone piers. The verandahs, surprisingly spacious, had been restored with freshly-painted timber balustrades.
Ted dropped Emma on Main Axial Road at the beginning of the Former First Class Precinct and she stepped down into a light breeze. The shuttle continued on, disappearing around a bend. The sun was warm and there were a few people out strolling, but the expanse of land was so great it hardly seemed bustling.
Emma wandered down Main Axial Road, trying to grasp what life may have been like in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries if one were a first-class citizen forced into quarantine. She passed the former men’s smoking room and women’s sewing room and read from a large information board about a former liquor bar, barbershop, croquet lawn and tennis court. If you were in good health and good class, quarantine didn’t seem like a bad place to be.
She passed a white building with the signs ‘painter’ and ‘carpenter’ over the top of two separate doors. She passed the former kitchen and first-class dining room, then a row of cabins, interconnected by walkways that were once the first-class passenger sleeping quarters, now refurbished guest accommodation.
Across the road was the Former Second Class Precinct, with a similar layout and beyond that, thirty hectares of heritage buildings and Australian native bush that sprawled across the headland. The sheer size of it was immense.
Emma reached the end of the Former First Class Precinct and stopped at a junction, feeling small in that vast place. She scratched her head, not sure which
direction to go. A sense of disorientation set in and she wished she’d asked Ted for directions or Joan for a map.
She had no idea where Gwendoline had stayed with her family when she’d lived there and no idea where to start looking. Surely there must have been staff quarters somewhere on the station, but where they were and how she would get there, she hadn’t figured out.
Perhaps the museum was a better place to start or she could try to find the Wharf Wanderer tour. At the very least, she wanted to find the wharf where Gwendoline’s memories seemed to stem from, the mystery boat that so often drew her from her bed at night.
Deciding on the wharf as a focal point, Emma crossed over the junction, sticking to Main Axial Road. She reached a fork in the path and crossed over to Asiatics Road. After ten minutes of walking, an information board alerted her that she was now in the Former Third Class Precinct. With no wharf or water in sight, she feared she’d gone too far in the wrong direction.
She doubled back, but Asiatics Road somehow led her to Isolation Road and, with her sense of direction deserting her, she became hopelessly lost. She gave up somewhere near an old freestanding weatherboard building, which, according to another information board, was the former Gravedigger’s Cottage.
Frustrated and hot, she sat on a grassy knoll next to it and pulled her drink bottle from her backpack. The sun was beating down, the day too warm for autumn, and she gulped back her water. In the bushland behind her, animals scurried around in the undergrowth and birds trilled.
There were no other tourists around. This area of the station was empty and Emma glanced up and down the road for Ted and his shuttle bus, wondering just how far she’d strayed off course.
She took another gulp of water and screwed the lid back on her bottle, tossing it into her backpack. She stood and headed back down the grassy slope, continuing along Isolation Road, embarrassingly relieved when she finally happened across a man perched over a set of timber steps, inspecting them. He was wearing work boots, shorts and a polo shirt and had a tool belt around his waist.
Emma walked quickly to him and he glanced up at her approach. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Can you help me?’
The Quarantine Station Page 2
