Green Dream

by Robert Gollagher

  In the turmoil of her violent home, Sally had found an expression for the love she craved, in the love of animals. Sally liked horses and dogs, although she had neither for herself, and her mother had let her keep a cat. As a teenager, Sally dreamed of becoming a vet. She was a good student at school and she wanted desperately to enter veterinary college. Claire had met a wealthy Canadian engineer, after Karl’s death, and had set her mind upon marrying him and emigrating, but Sally could not bear the thought of going to some strange new country with a mother she could never trust to provide her with even the most basic things a child needs: safety and love. It was then that she hit upon the idea of going to live with her grandmother, in Perth. Sally was eighteen, a little older than her classmates, and she could make her own decisions. Claire seemed almost not to care, but Ruth was overjoyed.

  Sally came to live in the old house by the Canning River, finished her final year of high school and did well in the university entrance exams, gaining entrance into the veterinary studies program at the local university. The day she got the letter confirming her acceptance into the course, she was ecstatic. She had run into the house and hugged Ruth. It seemed to Sally that the misery of the past was at last behind her. A new life could begin.

  In Ruth, Sally had found the family love she had always wanted and never had. In Sally, Ruth had found a living part of the family that had been taken from her years before. For a time, the future seemed bright. They lived together, as the only family they truly knew, for almost six years, before Sally graduated and left to begin work as a veterinary surgeon.

  When the police officers had told Ruth, barely a year later, that Sally was dead, they could have had no comprehension of just how great a loss it was to Ruth, of how it seemed like the crowning sadness of a life of many sad events, and of how it left Ruth more alone than she would ever be able to express. Nor could they fully understand the crushing pain that Ruth felt at the knowledge that Sally’s bold determination, to move beyond the violence and the heartbreak of the home she grew up in, had failed, that the innocent young woman had not been able to escape the past, and that, rather than moving forward to a better life, she had stumbled, fallen, and ended it all. The cruelty of this fate was more than Ruth could bear.

  She had not cried in front of the officers. She had been polite to them, thanked them for their time, and seen them out. Then she had locked the front door, gone to her recliner chair in the library, sat down, and wept. In the evening, she had checked her mailbox and found the suicide note, which Sally had written and posted the night before. Reading it, Ruth wept so hard she could barely breathe.

  Nearly two years had passed since that awful day, and Ruth had her own demons to deal with now, in both her mind and body. She had not blamed herself for Sally’s death, but she always wondered if there might have been something she could have done to prevent it. And when one day she had gone to see her doctor, complaining of chest pains, and he had sent her to have X-rays done, and CAT scans, and MRIs, and when all the scan results were in, and a surgeon told her she had to have a biopsy done, and when the biopsy came back as cancer, Ruth was almost relieved. It was not that she wanted to die, for she wanted to live, but that at least the uncertainty of when and how her death would happen was taken away. Ruth was a practical woman and she knew, at that time seventy-four, that she was not getting any younger. The news of her cancer at least gave her something tangible she could fight. She knew that her lymphosarcoma would be the final act in her life story. But it seemed that not even this malignant cancer could defeat Ruth MacDonald, for the disease went into remission. For the last twelve months, she had been relatively well.

  The knowledge that the end of her life was coming made Ruth want to change a few things. She was lonely and she didn’t see the point in living out her last little while by herself. It was true that she liked solitude and that she enjoyed her quiet days working in the garden, or reading, or walking by the river, but there was also something inside her that made her want to help someone other than herself. Perhaps it was the feeling of helplessness, that she could not save her beloved granddaughter now, or perhaps it was just Ruth’s practical nature, that she wanted to, in some small way, do something to help her fellow man. In any case, she decided that she would contact an aid agency and offer to take in a boarder, perhaps a young student needing a safe place to stay, or a foreign student come to learn something of Australia, or perhaps someone recuperating from a hospital stay, needing a halfway house before they launched back into the world at large. As fate would have it, it was someone in the latter category the agency suggested. Ruth made the agency promise not to reveal that she herself had cancer, because she wanted to live as normal a life as possible, as long as her remission lasted, and anyway she wasn’t given to discussing private matters with strangers. The agency agreed.

  And now, on a boiling-hot November afternoon in 1997, Ruth watched a taxi pull up at the front gate of her riverside home. A man got out and opened the gate, with some difficulty, then hobbled down the path to her front door using a walking stick to steady himself.

  Ruth stood on her front verandah and waited for him.

  She saw a handsome man with a sun-browned face that was creased with lines of laughter and lines of grief from thirty-nine years of living well. He had short, dark, straight hair, flecked with grey, and a tallish, athletic figure, now crippled. He looked the kind of man, Ruth thought, who must have wooed many admiring women in his day, with his movie-star looks, but there was something pathetic about him now, as he limped up the front steps of her home and onto the verandah, resting heavily with every step on his walking stick, held in his right hand. And as he finally greeted her, Ruth could see that there was much hidden behind his well-practised charm and much belied by his boyish smile. He seemed immediately complex to her.

  The woman that Michael Andrews saw standing by her front door, waiting for him as he painfully made his way towards her, had a strong, dignified face, deeply wrinkled and without make-up, and the look of someone dressed for work in the garden, with sensible, green slacks and a big, white shirt. She had a thin figure and was a little taller than average but her back was straight and she was not frail. Her hair was a uniform silver grey, it was long and straight, collected back and wound into a bun. She looked more like someone in her mid-sixties than the aging old woman the agency had described. She was obviously still a very active person, whereas Michael himself found it a tremendous struggle merely to walk. He liked her, at once.

  “G’day. Mrs MacDonald?”

  “That’s right. And you must be Michael Andrews.”

  “That’s me. Pleased to meet you. How you going?”

  Ruth took Michael’s outstretched right hand and shook it. “Fine, fine. Looks like you’ve got some luggage coming.”

  Michael leaned on his walking stick. He turned a little to see the taxi driver pulling bags out of the cab, a white Falcon sedan.

  “Where do you want these, luv?” said the driver to Ruth, when he had made his way up the path and to the house.

  “Second room on the left, thanks.”

  “No worries.” The driver took the suitcases in, then went back to the cab and collected the rest of Michael’s things: a couple of cardboard boxes packed with books and mementos, and a large, soft suit-bag which the driver layed out on the single bed in Michael’s room. When the driver had gone, Ruth led Michael inside.

  “Well, this is your room, Mr Andrews.”

  “Call me Michael, please.”

  Ruth smiled. “I’m Ruth. Breakfast and lunch are up to you, but I’ll serve dinner every night at seven. You’ve got your own bathroom, at the end of the hall, and you’re welcome to use the sitting room, over there. You can see the river from the front windows. There’s a big garden out the back, that’s my hobby. I’d like to think someone other than myself could enjoy it. You’ve been indoors, in hospital, quite a while, the agency said.”

  “About three months.”

&nbs
p; “Well, summer’s on the way. It’s beautiful out in the garden. And there’s the river, just across the road.”

  “It’s lovely,” said Michael. “You’re very lucky to live here.”

  Ruth thought for a moment. “The agency told me about ... your accident. I just want you to know, I’m very sorry.”

  Michael felt uncomfortable. “Thanks.”

  “But I won’t pry. If I know hospitals, you’ve probably had every nurse and social worker in the place asking you about it. They’ve probably even sent you to a shrink.”

  Michael grinned. “Every Wednesday. I still have to go.”

  “Well, you won’t get any questions from me.”

  Michael said nothing.

  “Right. Come and I’ll show you the rest of the house.”

  In truth, the agency had warned Ruth to keep a close eye on her boarder. The doctors at the hospital, concerned by his slow recovery, had called in a psychiatrist. Michael was under therapy not just for his physical injuries but for post-traumatic shock syndrome and clinical depression. Although Michael was a good man who would never be a danger to anyone, he might well be a danger to himself, after what he had been though. It was probably this very warning that made Ruth agree to take him on. She still thought of Sally often, and this was as close as she could get to helping her.

  The house was a big, quiet, stately home. It had only one storey, which meant no stairs for the disabled man to climb, other than the steps which led up to the wide front verandah and those which led down from the back door to the peace and privacy of the rear garden. From the verandah and from the big windows of the adjoining sitting room, there were pleasant views of the Canning River. The high ceilings of the old house, the heavy, red clay tiles sheltering its roof, and the cool, polished floorboards underfoot, made for comfortable living in the melting-hot summer. There was an old kitchen with a pot-bellied stove to warm it and the small dining room beside it, in winter, and there was a library at the back of the house, to complement the sitting room at the front. The rest of the house, Michael did not venture into. He assumed the other bedrooms and storage rooms would hold secret memories for the old woman, into which he would not want to pry. He had been impressed by Ruth’s not invading his own privacy – it was a courtesy he wanted to return. After the tour of the house, Michael excused himself and went to his new room, to rest. He felt constantly tired, in those days.

  When Ruth knocked on his door to bring his dinner, a couple of hours later, Michael thanked her profusely. The food was delicious. It was Ruth’s custom, she explained, to eat in the library over a good book or watching television, and she encouraged Michael to make use of the sitting room for his own mealtimes. Something in the tone of her voice made it clear that she preferred to eat alone, and it was a routine that they would soon settle into. Ruth would cook dinner, Michael would thank her for it and he would always take the time to compliment her on her cooking, and then they would eat separately, being the intensely private people they were.

  Michael, of course, paid for his room and board, and Ruth was glad of the extra income. She spent it on books or on the garden. But at the end of that first day at Ruth’s home, Michael knew nothing of the routine which would develop, of how comfortable he would come to feel, and of how much he would value Ruth’s friendship. What he knew was that he had had a life and he had lost it, that he was in a lonely room with nowhere to go.

  He felt very alone.

  Loneliness was a new feeling for Michael, something which he had scarcely known before in his life. He did not like it. It was a kind of emptiness, an inescapable longing, which was so much in contrast with the contentment and love that he had known for fifteen years. He had no idea that a life could go from so good to so indescribably empty, without any warning, until it happened to him. He had heard stories of terrible tragedies which had befallen others but his own charmed life had never made him feel any such unbelievable pain, until now. And were it just the pain, the loneliness, and the loss, that he had to deal with, it might have been something he could cope with, somehow, barely, but greater than all of those things, since the accident, was the guilt which he felt, for he was no good.

  The accident – there’s a euphemism, he thought bitterly, as he sat in his quiet room on that first night in Ruth’s home.

  There was a big jarrah wardrobe opposite the bed, a small writing desk and chair, and even a comfortable recliner chair, as well, as if Ruth had guessed he might want to spend time alone, reading, thinking, pondering, in this little room. But Michael sat on the bed. He didn’t bother to unpack his suitcases, and only one of the boxes had been opened. Michael had put a framed picture of his wife on the desk, where he could see it from the bed. Three people were dead because of him, and he would never see Marie again, for she was one of the three.

  Michael didn’t believe in accidents. He was a pilot, a trained professional, and a professional makes decisions and those decisions count. If a storm is gathering, a pilot should know it, know where the storm is, which direction it’s moving in, what altitude the big storm clouds are flying at and how best to avoid them. A pilot should know his aircraft, what it is capable of and what it is not capable of, and the hard line between the two which separates life from death. Michael blamed himself for not knowing the difference, for pushing his aircraft beyond the envelope of what it could survive, and for ending three lives. Most of all, he blamed himself for not being one of the dead. He had killed his wife and his two closest friends by putting his aircraft on the wrong side of that hard, unforgiving line.

  And, that night, it was all he could think about.

  Chapter 3

  Ian and Diane Rogers had known the Andrews for the best part of two decades. They loved Michael for his charm, his good humour, and his rock-solid confidence. Michael was a man who inspired trust in everyone who knew him, an experienced pilot who for several years had flown small and medium-sized aircraft for charter companies and small airlines. Diane even admired him for his rugged good looks and for his turquoise eyes that always seemed to twinkle with the hint of a smile, although she would never have admitted this to her husband, whom she loved dearly.

  But no one admired Michael more than his wife of fifteen years, Marie. Michael’s respect for her was equally profound. Her career as a research biologist, studying the insidious process that makes a normal, healthy cell turn cancerous and how that change might be treated to save a life, had always deeply impressed Michael, as much as his glamorous job as a pilot had attracted Marie. They complemented each other perfectly. Michael’s single friends, mostly young pilots who shared his passion for the sky, men who valued their freedom above everything else, would nevertheless tell him, from time to time, that, “You’re a lucky bastard, Andrews, to have a woman like her.” And Michael would never argue, for he knew that he was lucky, and for fifteen years he had been so.

  Ian and Diane were high-school teachers. Ian was a scientist, Diane, an artist. Ian, Diane, Michael and Marie were an inseparable group. Their friendship went right back to their days at university. They had seen each other make the first, tentative steps in their new careers, they had volunteered as best men and bridesmaids at each other’s weddings, and they had travelled together.

  On holidays, Michael enjoyed his role as chief pilot and tour-coordinator. He would fly them all down to Esperance, on the impossibly beautiful, remote southern coastline of Western Australia, or to Margaret River, a short hop south of Perth, a fertile district dotted with wineries and lodges and fine restaurants hidden in forest groves or overlooking rolling pasture. He would fly them inland, over the desert, to the old mining city of Kalgoorlie, or out over the ocean to the little island of Rottnest, a diver’s paradise. He would fly them north to Monkey Mia, where dolphins swam along the beach and played curiously with eager tourists, or even further, if it was a long holiday, to Broome, with its stunning beaches and huge tides that left big boats balanced on the sand. These were the many good times the four had
known.

  But three months before Michael had come to stay with Ruth, when he still had good legs and his characteristic, jaunty walk, when his blue eyes still twinkled with laughter, when his closest friends still trusted him, and when he still had Marie by his side, Michael took them all on the last trip they would ever make together.

  It was late on a Sunday afternoon, the tenth of August, 1997, when Michael obtained clearance from the tower, opened the throttle wide and raced down the smooth runway away from the safety of the ground and into the sky. Michael had always loved flying. Marie loved it too. From the first time he had taken her flying, the thrill had never grown stale to her. As the Cessna 172 gradually climbed, Marie looked out over the tiny airport of the southern town of Albany. Ian and Diane were in the back seats, tired after a long day of sightseeing and eager to make it back to Perth for a good night's sleep before Monday morning reared its ugly head.

  It was cold and wet. A light drizzle fell from the overcast sky. As a rule, Australian winters are mild – it rarely snows anywhere, except at the top of a few low mountains, and the most that has to be contended with is heavy rain, strong winds, and occasional hail or frost. But the wind coming in off the Southern Ocean in the dead of winter is icy cold, and the air was heavy and damp that evening. Michael had checked the weather forecast carefully before he had decided to fly, and although there was rain predicted, he saw no problem with making the journey back to Perth safely. Michael turned the aircraft north and trimmed for cruise. And the journey began. Marie squeezed his knee and smiled at him. The engine droned. Ian and Diane fell asleep.

  Before the flight, Ian had walked around the little Cessna, following Michael as he performed the customary preflight check of the aircraft. Michael had checked the control surfaces, made sure the luggage was stowed properly, visually verified the fuel load was adequate, checked the engine, and even kicked the tyres – an old habit of dubious importance but part of the routine. Michael was a safe pilot and he never took stupid risks and never left anything to chance. It was a philosophy that had kept his flying accident-free for the best part of two decades. And whatever little mishaps had arisen in that time, he had handled with the level-headed, cool demeanour that good pilots cultivate and that keeps good pilots alive. Ian, on the other hand, not burdened with the serious task of preflighting the aircraft, spent his time distracting Michael and making jokes.