The Ghost by the Billabong

by Jackie French

  ‘Come down to the foals with me? Did you KNOW that all horses have the same birthday? Even if they aren’t born on the same day?’

  ‘I think so. I don’t know where the foals are though.’

  ‘I do.’ Scarlett’s tone seemed infinitely tolerant of all those who underestimated the brain in her small body.

  A small horde suddenly erupted through the kitchen door: Gordon, the kid in callipers, Janine in a wheelchair, and Nancy laughing behind them.

  ‘There’s a flying fox!’ yelled Gordon. ‘Michael made us a flying fox.’

  ‘Nancy! Is it safe?’ Moira looked at the collection of ropes and fruit-box seats dubiously.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Nancy cheerfully. ‘It’s a flying fox.’

  ‘Still want to go to the foals?’ asked Jed.

  ‘Flying fox,’ said Scarlett firmly.

  A child who could not even sit erect by herself using a flying fox? Maybe she’d just have fun looking.

  ‘I have to go,’ said Moira. ‘No accidents, everyone, and Nancy, for once, no spoiling.’

  ‘Of course not.’ She took Moira’s place behind Scarlett’s wheelchair, and waved as the van drove down the drive. ‘Anyone want an ice block?’

  Chapter 11

  JED

  A small girl with useless limbs could whizz between trees in a flying fox, strapped into a seat that must have been designed with her in mind. Jed wondered if Michael shared some of his father’s engineering genius. She unstrapped the child carefully, then lifted her back into her chair. Scarlett was surprisingly easy to carry. For a few seconds of dread the feel of her body nestling against Jed’s was almost impossible to bear. And then memory vanished, and this was just Scarlett. She settled the child in her chair, as Scarlett instructed her in how to secure her.

  Nancy stuck her head out the door. ‘Brown snake over by the rose bushes, heading towards the creek. No one go over there.’ The head vanished.

  Jed stared. ‘Is she serious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But brown snakes are deadly!’

  ‘Not if you know where they are and stay away from them,’ said Scarlett. The small girl seemed to think nothing strange about the warning. ‘Listen. You can hear the scrub wrens.’

  Now Jed could hear it too, a frantic chirping, slowly moving from bush to bush.

  ‘The birds tell you where the brown snakes are,’ explained the child.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because brown snakes eat eggs,’ said Scarlett patiently. ‘They eat small birds too. The birds don’t yell about black snakes though, but red-bellied blacks are mostly down by the creek, except when it’s dry. Did you KNOW that snakes get bigger every year?’

  ‘Nancy taught you that?’

  Scarlett nodded. It wasn’t much of a nod — her neck seemed almost as weak as her back — but it did the job.

  ‘Does she teach you other things too?’

  ‘Mostly Miss Hitchens does that. She’s our teacher at school. And Miss Sampson teaches me about ligaments and tendons and things. She’s the physiotherapist.’ The girl pronounced the word carefully, and with a hint of pride.

  ‘But Nancy is the one who teaches you about snakes?’

  ‘And how wild bees live in the ground and give green honey and about lizards biting each other before a storm. Stuff like that. Can we go get ice cream now?’

  ‘Before dinner?’ She was still trying to accommodate a world view where birds told you where a snake might be.

  Scarlett gave her a don’t-you-know-anything? look. ‘You can eat ice cream any time at Nancy’s.’

  ‘Do you come here every weekend?’

  ‘And in the holidays. Janine and Gordon only come in term time. Then they go back to their families.’

  And you don’t, thought Jed. Was it because the child’s condition needed more care than they could give? Or had her parents just discarded her?

  ‘Will you be here for Christmas, Jed?’ The twisted face was hopeful.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jed. ‘Let’s find the ice cream.’

  A small girl could also eat a chocolate Paddle Pop and a Hava Heart, getting chocolate all over her face even though Jed was sure she held the ice cream steady, and then consume a plate of roast chicken and vegetables. Somehow Jed seemed to have become Scarlett’s carer for the evening, feeding her forkfuls of dinner in between eating her own.

  It should hurt to feed a small child. But it didn’t, and not because she was too numb to feel, but because this was Scarlett; because Nancy laughed and Janine and Gordon squabbled. She felt as if she had dipped her toes into a new life again, so different from all she had known that pain and guilt receded. For now.

  Nancy’s husband arrived as she and Jed were handing around apple pie and more ice cream. Jed had expected someone small, like his parents, but this man had to duck as he came in the door. He crossed the kitchen and gave his wife a kiss on the lips.

  ‘Have you had a proper dinner?’

  ‘Of course I have.’

  Michael looked around the room. ‘Has she?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gordon.

  Janine poked her tongue out at him. ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire. Nancy only ate a slice of chicken and half a potato and a spoonful of cabbage.’

  ‘Tell-tale tit, your tongue will split, and all the little puppy dogs will come and have a bit.’

  ‘Shush!’ Michael took the plate that had been keeping warm in the oven, then looked at his wife with so much love that Jed could feel the force of it across the room. ‘Eat dessert. All right?’

  ‘Yes sir, husband sir.’

  Michael grinned. He held a hand out to Jed. ‘I’m Michael. I’ve been hearing all about you.’

  I bet you have, thought Jed. She stood and shook hands politely. ‘Um, where is Nicholas?’ She had been longing to ask since dinner began, looking at the kitchen door every time the house creaked.

  ‘Nicholas never eats with us at Overflow,’ said Janine. ‘Says he has too much togetherness at River View. He comes here to get away from us. Some people,’ she looked at Gordon, ‘keep asking him to play cricket with them.’

  ‘Some people don’t know when to shut up.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Nancy absently. ‘Jed, would you mind taking Nicholas his dinner?’ She lifted another plate out of the oven, using a tea towel as an oven mitt. ‘Take your pie and keep him company.’

  ‘But if he doesn’t want company . . .’

  ‘Just don’t ask him to play cricket,’ suggested Michael, forking up chicken and shrivelled gravy. ‘Or ask him to read you The Magic Pudding a hundred times.’

  ‘Nicholas LIKES reading The Magic Pudding,’ said Scarlett O’Hara as Jed carried the tray out of the room.

  She had forgotten to ask which bedroom Nicholas used. But the only light on beyond the living room came from the wing her bedroom was in. She headed there and knocked on the door with her foot.

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘Can’t. My hands are full.’ She heard wheels. The door opened. Once again Nicholas’s sheer beauty — she could think of it in no other terms — overwhelmed her. Again too after-images shivered around him: grey hair, beard, laughter instead of grimness. She managed to give what she hoped was a normal smile.

  ‘Dinner is served,’ said Jed.

  He had been reading. She saw the book on the small desk by the window: identical to the furnishings in her room, including the dangling bar by the bed that she assumed was to help those in wheelchairs or callipers get in and out of bed.

  This time he did look at The Beasts before he looked up at her face, but that might just have been because in his chair he was level with them and they were impossible to avoid. ‘Thanks.’ He held his hands out for the tray.

  ‘Actually, the second plate of apple pie is mine. Nancy suggested I eat with you to keep you company. But I can take it away, if you like.’

  ‘And send you back to the monkey house? Sit down.’ He sounded as if he didn’t care whether she w
as there or not. He wheeled over to the window and turned to put his plate and cutlery on one end of the desk.

  She put hers on the other, and sat on the room’s only chair. ‘Don’t you like the kids?’

  ‘They’re okay.’ He took a mouthful of potato.

  ‘I think they’ve got guts.’

  He glanced up at her. ‘Because they live in wheelchairs or callipers? That’s not courage, it’s fate.’

  ‘It’s courage when you swing on a flying fox and laugh despite the callipers or wheelchair.’

  He actually looked at her this time. ‘Fair enough. I just get a bit much of the “Don’t let your wheelchair stop you from leading a full, rich life” stuff every day. And being the only adult in a mob of kids. Sometimes I expect Matron Clancy to remind me to brush my teeth and not be late for school.’

  ‘They all go to school?’

  ‘Mostly. The really bad polio cases, the kids in iron lungs, don’t get sent here, just the ones who Dr McAlpine thinks have got a chance of using their arms or legs.’

  ‘Even Scarlett?’ She couldn’t imagine those tiny legs walking or the arms even holding up a spoon.

  ‘They hope she’ll be able to use her hands enough to use a mechanical wheelchair. One of the Thompson factories makes them, specially fitted for each kid. It’s better exercise to use your arms, but there’s no chance of Marilyn, I mean Scarlett, doing that.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘I’ve never asked.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘When you spend your life being dressed and undressed and encouraged, you learn to respect the bit of privacy anyone has left.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Scarlett was too young to have had polio, wasn’t she? There hadn’t been any polio cases since the vaccinations began, or she didn’t think there had been. Was Scarlett a victim of thalidomide, that innocent-seeming drug to stop morning sickness that twisted or stole the limbs of the unborn child?

  ‘Have I stopped you asking the question?’ Nicholas looked at his dinner, not at her.

  ‘What question? Oh, that question. I wasn’t going to . . . I thought you’d be sick of —’

  ‘Everyone asking, how did you lose your legs? Like I mislaid them on a train. I was in Vietnam,’ he finished shortly.

  ‘What?’ She stared at him. ‘You were a soldier?’

  ‘Nasho.’

  National Service, compulsory for those whose birthdays were drawn in the national lottery. The boys she’d debated with at school had been worried about it. But you could defer for uni, and after that they had assumed they’d be draft resisters, hiding rather than be forced into the army, or to gaol.

  But this man had let them take him.

  ‘You . . . you just let them conscript you?’

  ‘Yes, I just “let them” conscript me. My number came up and I went.’

  She’d never met anyone around her own age who’d thought Australia should be in Vietnam. ‘Why? You really think we should be fighting there?’

  He still looked at his dinner, rather than her. ‘Probably not. But probably not for the same reasons as you.’

  ‘Why didn’t you refuse then?’

  ‘Become a draft resister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Spend the time in gaol instead of the army?’

  ‘There’re places you can go. People who hide objectors.’

  ‘Is that what you’d have done?’

  ‘Yes! The right thing, not the coward’s way out. Fighting a war you don’t believe in.’

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t believe in it!’ His voice had risen to match hers. ‘I said I didn’t think we should be there. But that’s because I think we’re not fighting it with enough conviction to win it, not because I think it’s wrong. We need to take a stand against communism. We need to stand by America too, after they stood by us in the last war. What have you done that’s so courageous? Leeched onto a bloke who’s dying —’

  ‘I am not a leech! And America only fought the Japanese to save themselves, not for us. We just happened to be a useful base —’

  ‘Excuse me.’ Nancy stood at the door, a bowl of ice cream in her hand. ‘I brought you more ice cream in case the other lot had melted,’ she said to Nicholas.

  He wheeled over to her and took the bowl. ‘Thank you.’

  Jed stood. ‘I’d better be going.’ Fool, she told herself. One chance to make friends with him, and you not only insult him, you demean the reason he lost part of himself. But he was wrong. Surely he was wrong. All over Australia people protested against the war . . .

  She heard the door shut as she walked down the corridor. Nancy caught up with her. ‘Jed?’

  ‘I’m sorry I made him angry. He doesn’t deserve it.’

  ‘It probably did him good. When . . . bad things . . . happen to you everyone pussyfoots around you like you’re made of china. I overheard what you said though. Nicholas was not a coward.’

  Jed stopped. ‘You mean he lost his legs doing something heroic?’

  ‘I don’t know how he lost his legs. He never talks about it. But I do know he was in the Battle of Long Tan. Have you heard of it?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You should have. Every Australian should have. One hundred and eight boys — and they were just boys — against thousands of battle-hardened Viet Cong. And they won. They secured the entire area. He’s shown guts since he came back too. Couldn’t even sit up at first, or use his left hand. But he kept on working at it. It isn’t easy for him, being among all the kids, but he puts up with it because Moira and Joseph — Dr McAlpine — use the best possible techniques to get limbs moving.’

  ‘And you pay for it?’

  Nancy looked surprised at the change of subject. ‘Not just me. Moira, Matilda and Tommy.’

  ‘I thought they were all your kids at first.’

  Silence stretched, slick as silk in the dim corridor. Then Nancy said lightly, ‘I can’t have children. Starvation does that to your body, sometimes.’ She forced a smile. ‘I’ve got a hundred and twelve children. No, a hundred and fourteen: I forgot the Wilson twins. I hear children’s laughter every day. And I make sure they can chase the butterflies too, even if it’s in a wheelchair or callipers. How are you at reading bedtime stories?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Jed warily.

  ‘Half an hour only, and don’t let Scarlett keep asking for just another one. Cup of tea after if you feel like it.’

  Jed wasn’t sure if she could cope with reading bedtime stories. This day had been too long, too much. Emotion she had buried had spilled out. She was suddenly afraid that if she saw Scarlett again — Scarlett who faced the world with so much courage — she would start to cry. ‘Is it all right if I just go to bed?’

  ‘Of course. You must be bushed.’

  ‘Yes. Nancy, thank you.’

  ‘No worries.’ Nancy reached over and hugged her. Jed let her, unsure what she should do to hug her back.

  ‘You can read the bedtime stories tomorrow,’ said Nancy.

  Chapter 12

  NICHOLAS

  He couldn’t sleep. He rarely could sleep. How could agony from legs that weren’t there be worse than the pain from the now-healed wounds below his knees? Could the girl — what was her name? Jed? — ever understand that?

  Did she have nightmares too? She seemed to have more bruises than the one about her eye, invisible ones but real nonetheless. He’d seen too many bruised souls not to recognise another one. That wild reaction to the mention of River View had to come from somewhere. Moira Clancy had given him a brief but vivid description of the girl’s arrival at Drinkwater that morning.

  Who was she really, besides another waif collected by Nancy? A faded dress you could’ve worn to Sunday school when it was new, a child’s plaits, disturbing breasts bulging from what was clearly a too-small bra, and a black eye that she thought not worth referring to. He shrugged mentally, and rolled over. At least he could roll now. His arms like an orangutan’s
.

  She’d been hurt. But he’d learned in the last two years that tragedy either turned people inwards, focused on themselves, or outwards, helping others, like Nancy Thompson and Moira Clancy.

  He bet Jed Kelly was the first kind, thinking of herself, not others. Like her automatic assumption that he should have been a draft resister. Hell, they’d hardly even coined the term when he was called up!

  Pain rippled upwards again. He sweated it out, waiting, trying to breathe as Moira had taught him, relax each muscle one by one as the therapist had explained, rather than reach for the pain killers that grew less effective every time he took them, and left him constipated to boot. When sitting on a toilet meant balancing with legs you didn’t have, constipation was no joke.

  What were real people doing now? The boys he had gone to school with, the young men he’d known in his only year of uni, before he’d failed his exams and the nasho had caught him. Getting drunk, or into bed with girls in short skirts and pale lipstick? Joining the United People’s Liberation Group or some such rubbish, middle-class youth who’d never worked in their lives thinking they could foment revolution, who yelled ‘Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh’ in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations with no thought of what communism meant to those who lived there? Who had never known a Viet Cong, either as the grim and expert soldier emerging from their kilometres of tunnels, machine gun in hand, or sweet-smiling village girl in a white tunic that hid a hand grenade made from a thrown-out American tin can.

  And he was there with phantom legs, and phantom pain, bloody phantom friends and enemies who visited in dreams, and nothing . . . nothing that he wanted, not even prosthetic legs, for all he did his exercises now. Because once he had those legs, life must begin again and he had no life to want. Nor did he care enough to even try.

  At last the pain retreated. A bird called softly, out the window. Nearly dawn then. For some reason he could sleep better after dawn, as if the light pushed pain and memories away.

  He’d sleep. And when he woke again, with luck Jed Kelly would be gone from Overflow. No need to think of her again.

  Chapter 13