by Joy Dettman
Thomas was looking at it too, a wide smile on his lips. ‘You’ve been stirring up emotions in the old town, Aunty Stell.’
‘That’s not nice, Tommy. Small things amuse small minds, and smaller minds take notice, I always say, Stell,’ Marilyn replied. ‘We were all that proud of the way you just chose to ignore the whole stupid thing, weren’t we, Ron?’
Stella looked at Marilyn, at the prematurely grey hair – hair she had dyed at twenty-eight, and gave up dyeing at forty. She was eighteen months older than Stella, had started school late. Stella had commenced at four. Doctor Parsons saw to that.
She turned to the church where the little doctor was trying to get away from Willy Macy. He caught her eye, nodded, and touched his chin, and she heard his unspoken words. ‘Keep that chin up, Mousy Two.’
Good little man, she thought. Her chin lifted.
‘Tommy was saying in church that he’s never heard you sing better.’ Marilyn was still speaking.
Still she didn’t reply. Ron was standing back, his eyes on her. He smiled. She looked away, felt her scalp crawl. Don’t blush. Please, God, don’t let me blush. Please, please, God. I’ve got to get away. I can’t –
Thomas was speaking again. She turned to him, and his eyes held her own.
‘Except for that day I caught you singing in the old shed. That was really something else, but you were singing a different song that day, weren’t you, Aunty Stell? A more modern song. I’m into modern songs.’
Her face began its burning. She looked at her shoes, rubbed at her brow, her cheeks.
‘You look as if you’re feeling the heat, Aunty Stell? Does she look well to you, Mum?’
‘And you look exceptionally pleased with yourself this morning, Thomas Spencer. Has anyone checked your fingernails for yellow paint?’ Miss Moreland said.
Steve Smith stopped his painting. He turned and stared at the youth.
But to youth go the nerves of steel. Thomas extended steady hands before him. ‘Look, no fingernails,’ he said. His hands were long, slim, his fingers tapered, his nails pared down to the quick.
Miss Moreland took his hand in her own, stared at it, looked at the palm, then up to his face, to his eyes.
‘Well. Well, I never did – ’ she started, then she dropped the hand as if it burned her and quickly turned to Stella, taking her arm. ‘Help me to that car, girl. Laughter might be the best medicine, but it didn’t make it down to my old legs today. Not as spry as they used to be. Maybe I’m getting old.’ Again she laughed, allowing the others to laugh at her great age as she and Stella walked away from the group.
Stella clung to the older woman’s arm, carefully placing one foot before the other, afraid she may fall before she reached the sanctuary of the car. Youth and its certainty, she thought. He is so sure of himself. So obviously guilty, yet so innocent. ‘Feeling the heat, Aunty Stell.’ Just a youth showing concern for an honorary aunt, but his words had been chosen with care.
Clever, handsome Thomas. His jeans were the best money could buy, his casual sweatshirt complimented his dark good looks. He was, if possible, more attractive than his father had been at the same age. Taller too, or has Ron grown shorter, Stella thought. Dear Ron, with his greying beard. Dear Ron, so clever at school, so bright, and able.
Able to transfer his love with his stage kiss to the new leading lady, her inner voice whispered.
She shook the thought away.
Thomas had not inherited his father’s gentle smile. His smile was his mother’s, as were his teeth. He had Marilyn’s green eyes, her smaller, more classic nose, her high cheekbones – and her hair, dark, thick, as Marilyn’s had once been.
This is not a youth who turns to rape. This is the boy who has every girl in town following him with her eyes. How did it happen? Why did it happen? Did it happen? Have I gone mad, and cannot tell where reality ends and mania begins? Is madness genetic?
She turned away, glanced at Steve Smith, still working with his paintbrush, his back again to the group, and she turned her back and looked down at her sensible shoes.
‘What a fine young fellow he’s turning out to be. A son to be proud of,’ the minister said, walking up behind the two women, his car keys jiggling. He opened the car door and allowed Stella to escape inside.
‘Humph. That is a matter of opinion,’ Miss Moreland scoffed.
Stella wound the window wide, and Steve Smith turned, waved his paintbrush. She lifted her hand and waved back.
‘Now, there is a son any mother could be proud of,’ Miss Moreland said.
‘That long-haired lout?’ the minister replied.
Doctor Parsons
From the shady side of the church, where he always parked his bike, Doctor Parsons watched Stella’s escape. What’s ailing Mousy Two? he thought, and his eyes squinted into the late morning sun, striving to see more as the minister’s car drove by.
Parsons didn’t like the heat, and it didn’t like him. Donning his old straw hat, he dragged it on hard, low, fixed it lower by sliding its loop of elastic beneath his beard. He hitched his socks up to meet with his knee-length shorts, then straddled his bike, all the while watching the minister’s car. It backed out slowly, turned crazily, and crept away.
‘Safe to hit the road, James. To the surgery, and spare the ponies,’ he said to his aging bicycle, and he pedalled off behind the car, his bright blue eyes near closed against the glare.
A small room beside his waiting room was where he tossed his hat. He never called it home. Maidenville would never be home. He was just filling in time, just swimming around and around in circles, still looking for a way out – as he had been now for the past forty-odd years.
He had arrived on the Monday afternoon train with his old bicycle, a Gladstone bag, and a brand new medical degree. Great expectations had carried him the long hot miles from Sydney. His prospective employer ran a one-man practice in a thriving farming community – or so it had said in the advertisement. He’d applied for the job in writing, and twice in the following month, had spoken to Cutter-Nash on the telephone. The job sounded good – the money offered, more than good. His grandmother had bought him a new suit for the interview and paid extra to have six inches taken off the trouser cuffs. She had packed his spare shirts and underwear. With complete confidence that her grandson would quickly prove there was more to him than his four foot nine inches, she’d bought him a one-way train ticket to Maidenville.
It was mid afternoon when he’d stepped down at the station and the 114-degree heat rose up from the bitumen platform to suck his fair skin dry. He saw no sign of the thriving town, just one half-dead dog, and two crows waiting for it to fall over.
Maidenville had sounded green, neat country-village green, and Parsons had spent his hours on the train seeing himself as the revered village doctor in his new pinstriped suit, with its fashionably wide lapels, but Maidenville, the reality, now sprawled out before him, white on blistering red. No green. No neat. Just another outpost, a few miles east of the black stump. The afternoon sun glared off the corrugated-iron roofs and windows, hitting him between the eyes whichever way he turned.
‘When’s the next train out?’ he had called to the stationmaster, busy swatting flies.
‘On Saturday, lad.’
‘Saturday?’
‘Saturday.’
‘That’s five bloody days.’
The stationmaster placed his fly swat down and counted the days off on his fingers, slowly. Only after the second count did he agree. ‘Five right enough,’ he said, reaching for the scabby growth on his forehead, picking at it.
It was probably cancerous, Parsons thought, hunting flies from his eyes. ‘Get your doctor to have a look at that thing,’ he said. ‘It ought to be seen to.’
‘Got a bigger one on me neck. What are ya, boy? You wouldn’t be that new quack we’re all sweating on today?’
‘No. I’m just a little lad, sweating on the Saturday train and his granny.’ He paid for his return ticket
, tucked it safe into the rear compartment of his wallet, picked up his bike, and wheeled it across the road to a department store. Out front, they were selling cheap straw hats. He bought one, and a pair of too large khaki shorts, which he put on in the fitting room, stuffing his new interview suit into his Gladstone bag. He no longer needed it for the interview because he wouldn’t be taking the job, but he had only thirty shillings left on which to survive until Saturday. Maybe Cutter-Nash wouldn’t see a colleague starve.
‘Where might I find the doctor’s surgery?’ he asked the aging shopkeeper.
‘Old Cut-n-Slash. What do you want with him?’
‘Not a lot,’ Parsons replied.
‘He’s got Mick Murphy’s eldest boy up at the hospital. Past the Post Office, then two blocks east. You can’t miss it. It’s brick. Got a Moreton Bay in front.’
Parsons found riding east was preferable to riding into the sun. Three blocks east he saw clinker brick and Moreton Bay. He was drinking hot water from the garden tap when he sighted his prospective employer exiting the building.
Cutter-Nash was an Errol Flynn of a man, sixty-plus, tall, his features fine, his thick hair dyed a dead flat black. At that moment it was sticky with blood. Parsons frowned and ran his head under the tap while watching the older doctor frog-marched down the verandah and tossed overboard to the flowerbed.
‘Matron brained him with a bedpan. He was trying to cut young Mick’s bloody leg off,’ Mick Murphy explained, dusting his hands. ‘You’re not the new one, are you?’ he asked, and when Parsons nodded, he added. ‘Christ. You’re a bit short on. Ah, well, beggars can’t be choosey, can they lad? Get yourself inside then. Young Mick is bleeding like a stuck pig.’
The bike propped against a post, Parsons took off his hat and allowed Mick to shepherd him to the operating theatre. At least it was cool in there, and the two staff members, both sixty-plus, looked pleased to see him. He took his time washing the dust off, and more time in checking out a broken but otherwise healthy leg, then he stitched up Cutter-Nash’s slash and set the break while Mick looked over his shoulder.
Matron Firth was a one-woman army. She made two of Parsons. They were in the hospital kitchen drinking a well deserved cup of tea, when a third giant, wearing a dog collar and toting a middle-aged female in his arms, came bullocking down the corridor.
‘Knitting needle. She used a knitting needle,’ the giant said, and he fainted. The female escaped, leaving a trail of blood and snarled invectives behind her.
Parsons decided to forgo the cup of tea and make a run for it. Three hundred miles on a bike and a residency at the Sydney asylum was starting to look like a preferable future. He stepped high over the fallen giant, donned his straw hat and walked out to Cutter-Nash, still sleeping peacefully where he had fallen. This was his mad bloody thriving community, so let him deal with it, Parsons thought, kicking the older doctor’s imported shoe. Cutter-Nash snored on. Mick Murphy wandered over, preparing to aim a kick at the opposite end of the sleeping man.
Parsons shook his head. ‘Tut-tut,’ he said.
Mick was built like a truck, all chassis and cab. His shoulders were three foot across, and his massive head had somehow been attached to a barrel chest, with no need of neck. He’d probably make a better friend than enemy.
‘Dirty, murdering, mongrel bastard of a dog,’ Mick said, but he stepped back from the sleeping doctor and offered his new mate a smoke.
Terrible noise was issuing from the building, Matron Firth adding to it with her bellow for help, so Parsons placed the smoke in his breast pocket for later, then beckoning Mick to follow, he re-entered the shade. Together they brought the bleeder down and Mick sat on her until Matron Firth and Sister Balwyn tamed her with chloroform.
Parsons washed his hands again. He picked up Cutter-Nash’s favourite tool and did the old cut-n-slash trick. The male was stillborn, but he found a second baby cowering high in the womb. Unlike her deliverer, she had been forewarned about Maidenville; she didn’t want to come out, and when he got her out, she chose not to gasp on Maidenville air.
‘Breathe, damn you,’ he ranted. ‘Give me a wail, baby, or this town will be wearing my guts for garters before sundown.’ He should have known better than to ask. Didn’t he have his return ticket to Sydney safe in his wallet? But the infant had sniffed at the scent of responsibility; she wailed. Two hours, two pints of good old Murphy versatile blood and a rough hysterectomy, done with Matron reading the instructions over his shoulder, and it looked like the crazy mother might even live to tell the tale.
Bedded down that night in a disused verandah ward, Parsons had not heard the Maidenville buzz as news of the semi-dwarf doctor, who’d come in on the Monday train then spent the day performing miracles, was passed from mouth to mouth until it reached the town’s upstanding citizens.
They’d arrived in force at the hospital in the early morning, before the sun spilled too much heat to the air, and they recognised a good thing when they saw it, even if it did come in the shape of an undernourished jockey in his Bonds jockey shorts. Matron made them tea and toast while Parsons’ elastic gut wrapped itself around the outside of a huge country breakfast.
They offered the young doctor good money to stay on in his verandah ward, all meals thrown in. They offered to get the cook back and to import two more nurses, and a part-time woman for the office. The chemist swore he wouldn’t dispense any more of Cutter-Nash’s scripts, and all the while Matron Firth’s big brown eyes pleaded with Parsons to accept the offer, bribing him with more toast.
‘You’re the fifth quack we’ve had in the past twelve months. The hospital is bloody dying, and so are we,’ Mick Murphy said, and a bloke from the menswear store upped the ante. He offered a three-piece suit, tailored to fit, plus three new business shirts. Then the old bloke from the cycle shop said he’d be willing to donate a new Malvern Star bike with gears.
‘I’ve got a suit. Don’t need a new bike.’
‘We’ll fix up one of the rooms here as a surgery. I’ll give you full board free at the hotel,’ the publican offered.
Parsons dipped his knife into homemade fig jam, just like his grandmother made. Then he scraped it off. He didn’t want their jam or their offers. He wanted Sydney, and Granny’s jam. He wanted to go home.
Cutter-Nash had regained consciousness halfway through the hysterectomy and tried to reclaim his operating theatre. If not for Mick Murphy, who had refused to leave Parsons’ side, then there may have been more blood spilled in there that day. Mick had flattened Cutter-Nash, tossed him on the tray of his truck and dumped him fifteen miles from town. But the old doctor would be back this morning, and Parsons now knew why. Cutter-Nash had a vested interest in the hospital’s medicine cabinet. Mick and Matron Firth liked a good gossip. The man they called Cut-n-Slash was a womanising drunk, a butcher and a morphine addict, Matron Firth said. Mick’s description hadn’t been so kind.
At nine o’clock, the businessmen began leaving. Shops had to open their doors, but Martin Templeton arrived to take their place in the hospital kitchen. He was big enough to make four of Parsons. ‘You were sent here by God,’ Martin said. ‘He has work for you to perform here, lad. It is your duty to remain and do his work.’
‘Yeah. Well you be sure to give him my apologies on Sunday, Rev. I’ll be hanging around here till the Saturday train, and that’s it. That’ll give you time to move the patients to Dorby hospital,’ Parsons replied.
As it turned out, there wasn’t a lot of hanging around to do. A landowner got himself gored by a rampaging bull on the Wednesday, three women decided to pop their infants on the Thursday, and old Jennison from the garage set himself and a car on fire on the Friday.
It was a conspiracy, and Parsons knew it, a Maidenville conspiracy to keep him there. The nursery and the four functioning hospital wards now full, the committee had to call on volunteer staff, and borrow two nurses from Dorby. They hired a couple of Murphies to help the local cop with his day and night patrol of
hospital verandahs because the chemist was keeping his promise. Cutter-Nash was in withdrawal.
Saturday had eventually dawned. Parsons and his bike were waiting at the station when the owner of the hardware store, also mayor of Maidenville, came puffing up one side of the station, just as the train puffed into the other.
‘You got it, boy. It’s yours,’ he bellowed. ‘I’ll throw in an airconditioner.’
‘What?’
‘He’s cut his own bloody throat. Old Cut-n-Slash. Slit his throat from ear to ear last night with his own bloody scalpel. The practice is yours, boy.’
‘Life happens,’ Parsons said. He wheeled his bike from meagre shade back into full sun, knowing he didn’t want the bloody practice, didn’t want Maidenville, but also knowing he didn’t want to leave his patients and his now semi-functioning hospital.
At the hospital mortuary he got to examine his deceased colleague with his mate, Mick, and the local cop leaning over his shoulder. It was bloody suicide, Mick decided, but not a soul in town cared if it was or wasn’t.
‘He could a done it himself. Maybe. Shit happens sometimes, lad, and when it does, the best you can do is bury it deep and keep your mouth shut,’ the old constable said.
Over the years, Parsons became a master at keeping his mouth shut.
Although he hadn’t planned to remain forever, he never seemed to catch his train out. The stationmaster kept getting skin cancers, the locals kept breeding, limbs kept breaking, bulls gored, and people got singed. He’d been looking at houses, planning to move Granny, but she had enough sense to drop dead before he had the chance. So he was alone now, with no place to go. He had a real feel for doctoring, and he swore he could sniff out need at fifty paces. Maidenville had been needing bad. His bills eventually got paid too – if he bothered to send them out for long enough, and he had a good body of pensioners to service.
