The Ghost by the Billabong

by Jackie French

  She made her way to the office that Nancy had directed her to. The office was an office, with metal filing cabinets, a functional desk. But outside the river glinted beyond a white sandbank, and on the wall facing the desk was a giant painting of a laughing child, chasing more butterflies.

  Matron Clancy — still in a floral frock but unmistakably a matron — inspected her as she sat in the chair by the desk, in her Crimplene dress again, her hands politely in her lap. ‘No references?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not even from your school?’

  Jed shook her head.

  ‘Identification? Birth certificate? Driver’s licence?’

  ‘I don’t drive.’ Had the Thompsons asked Matron to see if she’d produce her birth certificate? Well, they were out of luck. She realised with a shock that tomorrow would be her birthday. She hadn’t celebrated her birthday since Dad died — he never remembered to get her a present, but he took her out to dinner, just the two of them. But if she mentioned her birthday here, it might make tracking down the records of her life easier.

  Matron sat back, assessing her. ‘So you expect me to give you a job with no references, and no proof of your age.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jed repeated. ‘Nancy said I could have a job here —’

  ‘Nancy is responsible for River View’s policies, not its day-to-day running. The children here are vulnerable. We have to be sure who we are taking on.’ Matron Clancy gave a small portion of a smile. ‘One weekend isn’t quite enough to know you, especially as you are so unforthcoming about your past.’

  Jed stood. ‘I’m sorry to have wasted your time.’

  ‘Sit down. I can offer you a shift from seven-thirty am till two pm, five days a week. You’ll be washing dishes, cleaning in the kitchen. Once you’ve been here a few months, if you’d like a more challenging job we can reconsider.’

  It was what she’d expected. She hoped the pay would be the same as Nancy had offered, which was far more than the going female rate for dishwashing. ‘Thank you.’

  Matron nodded. ‘You’re confined to the kitchen block and the admin building. You’re not to go into the living areas or the rehabilitation building unless a member of staff expressly asks you to. Understood?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘Nancy will give you a lift here each day, or Michael will if she can’t.’

  ‘What does Nancy do here?’

  So Matron could smile. ‘Cares. Talks to the children. Praises them. Reads stories. Whatever is needed.’ The smile deepened. ‘Or whatever she wants to do.’

  ‘She loves kids very much.’

  Matron stood. ‘We all do, Miss Kelly. Miss McGarry will show you to the kitchen.’

  ‘Please . . . could you tell me what’s wrong with Scarlett? I didn’t like to ask her. Or Nancy.’

  ‘The children’s medical conditions are private, Miss Kelly.’

  ‘I . . . see. But can you tell me, do you think she will be able to use her hands?’

  Matron’s face softened slightly, making her look more like the woman she had seen at Overflow. ‘If we didn’t think that, she wouldn’t be here. We’re not a nursing home. We only take children we believe we can help.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jed again. For some reason she felt like crying, but she never cried, not even now, thinking of the child’s too-big eyes and wizened body. Whatever Nicholas said, Scarlett had courage.

  She followed Miss McGarry to the kitchen.

  Chapter 17

  NICHOLAS

  16 DECEMBER 1968

  Someone had twisted tinsel on strings across the therapy-room ceiling. Something else to be grateful for. He was so tired of being grateful.

  He lay on his back, his knees hooked over the metal bar, feeling the physio’s firm hands press them down. Six months ago that had been agony. Now it no longer hurt at all, or rather so little more than the pain he felt every day that his mind and body accepted it as unremarkable and acceptable. Dr McAlpine had explained that the human mind could accept a considerable level of pain once it understood that the pain was not necessarily a warning, but simply part of life.

  And this was his life now. Dedicated to the part of him that was no longer there, could never be there. Artificial legs might let him walk, but they would be no more part of him than the watch on his wrist.

  ‘Okay now, press again. That’s it. You’re doing well. Very well.’

  He wondered if Miss Sampson had ever told any patient, ‘You’re doing terribly. Give up now, and save us a lot of work.’ He wished she’d stop smiling too, that bright encouraging smile.

  ‘Two more and we’re done for the day.’

  He pressed down again, and a second time, still angry, after all these months, that the effort left him sweating and panting. ‘Any better?’

  ‘Another two millimetres this week.’

  ‘Wow. Strike up the band. At this rate I’ll be here another year.’

  The smile became slightly less professional. ‘Is that what Dr McAlpine told you?’

  ‘He has very carefully given me no date at all.’

  ‘Do you want one?’

  For a moment he felt terror, and then shock at the depth of his feeling. It had been a long time since he had felt much at all. ‘Okay. What do you really think?’

  ‘Bad news or good news first?’

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘It’s going to take another three months, maybe longer, for you to get full mobility. You need to build up strength in your back a little more too, or you might injure it again trying to get used to new legs.’

  ‘What’s the good news?’

  ‘That is also the good news. You are going to get full mobility, and your back will be strong enough so when you get your prosthetics, you’ll eventually be able to walk, even run. But you knew that already. Actually, there’s another piece of good news.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mr Thompson’s company has been funding research into stronger, more flexible materials. Lighter too. If you’re prepared to be a guinea pig, they can design prosthetic legs just for you, lighter, stronger than any available elsewhere.’

  He should feel happy. Hopeful. He didn’t feel anything. But he owed it to them all to pretend. ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t go spreading it around. It’s all early stages yet. But by the time you’re ready for them, they should be ready for you. And if yours work,’ the smile was far more heartfelt than professional this time, ‘it may be a real revolution in what’s possible for everyone like you.’

  Was anyone else like him? God help them if they were: which was a prayer, not blasphemy.

  He grabbed the bar and hauled himself up to sitting position. He could feel Miss Sampson’s eyes examining his progress as he pulled his chair next to the bench and shifted himself down into it. She was ready not just to help, but to offer suggestions on technique.

  ‘Same time tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Thank you, Miss Sampson.’

  ‘A pleasure,’ she said. She probably meant it too. The staff there genuinely loved their work. Which didn’t make it easier to accept it.

  He wheeled himself over to the showers, used yet another bar to transfer himself to the shower seat, then turned on the tap and let the water flow over him.

  What was left of him.

  He remembered the last time he had been truly himself. Almost Christmas then too. Bloody, bloody Christmas: which was not swearing but description.

  It had been night. True night, no lights, just stars above, and ahead of him the steady chop, chop, chop as his mates hacked back the jungle to clear a path for those carrying the stretcher he was on, and the stretchers that carried his friends. A narrow path, fast, because they were sitting ducks . . . No, straggling, struggling ducks. And any moment Viet Cong bullets could shatter the stretcher-bearers and the wounded or dead they carried on the stretchers.

  He wanted to tell the stretcher-bearers to put his stretch
er down, to save themselves, get back to relative safety at the base. He couldn’t. Not just because he knew they wouldn’t do it — just as he would not leave a wounded mate behind either, and there were other stretchers behind him tonight too — but because his lips could only manage: ‘Morphine. Please, morphine.’

  He’d wondered how many on the other stretchers were living and how many were dead. One dead, at least. Sam. They’d met during Basic Training. Sam was from Adelaide. One day, if he lived through this, he’d have to tell Sam’s parents how their son had died.

  But now just chop, chop, chop; the whining of mosquitoes lusting for blood. Vietnam’s war must be a paradise for mozzies.

  Time vanished. Just the jolting, the agony in his chest, his shoulder. But not his legs. He couldn’t feel his legs, nor anything below his waist. In a way he was grateful for the pain because it stopped him thinking what that might mean. He might have flunked medical school, but he knew that absence of pain could be a symptom of a far worse injury. Agony meant you still had nerves to feel the pain.

  And then the stretcher-bearers stopped. Darkness. Silence, or rather the noise of the jungle, almost familiar now, screeches, chirps. Even then, his mind stayed alert, listening for sounds that might mean Viet Cong approaching. Or innocents, who simply lived there, and endured.

  He felt the dull engine noise before he heard it, the deep subsonics touching his skin like the bass notes of a rock band. And then the clatter, clatter of the helicopter. Closer, closer, throbbing engines and whirring rotor blades.

  The light, so bright he had to shut his eyes.

  ‘Keep your eyes off the light!’ called the corporal.

  Looking at light destroyed your night vision. Could be half an hour before you got it back again. Some of these blokes would be working with their eyes shut, in case they needed to fire back into the dark . . .

  He kept his open. Another engine. Another. He tried to count the choppers, just to keep himself awake, alive. It suddenly seemed the most important piece of the jigsaw of his life to know how many choppers they had sent to carry them out. Two. Three. Or was it four?

  More time. The most dangerous time. The high jungle canopy meant that every helicopter had to hover at least thirty metres above the ground with its landing light on.

  He looked up and saw two side gunners aboard the chopper lower a metal-framed Stokes stretcher, winching it down, whirling, jerky, bit by bit. It was grabbed by hands whose owners he couldn’t see without turning . . . and his body wouldn’t move.

  ‘Morphine?’ he said again, before he realised he had said it. But either there was none to give or, more likely, he’d had all it was safe to give him. Not enough. Which meant . . . medical knowledge seeping back unwanted . . . he had lost too much blood to risk giving him more, because morphine widened your arteries and made the bleeding worse. Internal injuries? That would explain why his chest hurt.

  How much of him was still there?

  The first stretcher rose into the too-bright sky. He waited for shots to bring it down, to bring the chopper down.

  They didn’t come.

  Another stretcher twirled above him, was captured and brought down. This one was for him. He felt himself moved, strapped, heard a muttered, ‘You’ll be right, Nick,’ wondered if his being second meant that the other stretchers held the dead. The dead were always the last to be lifted off, though of course even the dead would not be left behind.

  And then the lift, so like a ride at Luna Park he laughed, whirling, jerking, the orderlies hauling him aboard. Not able to tell them why he laughed, nor even thank them, only able to say the words: ‘Morphine. Please. Morphine.’

  And either they had more to give him, or blood loss blacked him out, because there was no more of that night to remember.

  And when he woke again he was no one that he knew.

  He turned the shower off, dried himself and began laboriously to dress. At least he could do this alone now: here Mum wasn’t hovering, offering to help. At this place they knew when to step back.

  Mostly.

  He hadn’t been to see Sam’s parents. He wondered if he ever would.

  Chapter 18

  NANCY

  Nancy stood in the gym, watching the new physiotherapist guide Gordon between the walking bars. The physio was doing a good job. Even better, she was smiling, and Gordon too. Satisfied, she turned and headed back to the office.

  Moira and Tommy had designed most of River View’s equipment and the narrow exercise pool too. The project had begun nearly twenty years earlier, when Moira had completed her nursing training and sailed to Australia to visit her dead husband’s family. She had planned to take up full-time work back in England after seeing Overflow at last, and laying her ghosts to rest.

  A chance encounter with a child in a wheelchair on the voyage, however, had begun her quest for better therapy for kids who would otherwise be shut away as cripples. Now Moira lived in the land that would have been her home, if her late husband, Nancy’s brother Ben, had survived, deeply part of the extended Overflow and Drinkwater families. Tommy had put his heart and all the engineers on his staff into creating what she might need, based on the pioneering work of Sister Kenny, creating miracles with paralysed polio victims when doctors had given up hope.

  It was a nightmare disease, killing in days, leaving the bodies of those who survived twisted or with useless legs or arms or backs. Now, thanks to the miracle of vaccination, there should be no more cases, in Australia at least.

  But there would always be children who needed help. Her children, and Moira’s, to cherish and to love.

  On Nancy’s thirtieth birthday Michael had suggested they adopt a child, now it seemed they could have none of their own. A failure of her own body, she knew, and common in women who had been starved for as long as she had in the internment camp. Her periods had stopped soon after she and Moira had been taken prisoner. They had returned only after the war, and had never been regular since.

  She had refused Michael’s suggestion then; she had refused to even talk about adoption ever since. How could she tell this man she loved, who loved her, who had waited those long years sure that she would return, and still be Nancy of the Overflow, that she had failed to protect the one child in her care in those years in the Japanese internment camp, years that were part nightmare, part joy for the love and friendship she had found there. If fate did not give her children of her own, then it must mean she did not deserve them.

  The kids of River View were different. Society, even their families, had failed to care for them, had abandoned them in institutions with, at best, no therapy and benign neglect, at worst, abuse. Here they would have the best of her, the most caring, patient, generous, hopeful Nancy she could summon, that lessened the guilt, most of the time, of the one child she had loved so much and failed to save. Whatever Nancy gave these kids was better than they’d had. And what she and Moira did give them was the best they could achieve.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Thompson.’ Nicholas manoeuvred his wheelchair to the edge of the path so she could pass.

  ‘My name’s Nancy. Remember? Good morning to you too.’ A polite young man, though perhaps heaven alone knew what lay behind his mask of courtesy. He did his therapy with gritted teeth, no exclamations of pain or even frustration, and kept to himself. Which was reasonable, in this place of children, and even at Overflow. But life was too precious not to be lived, in full. Nicholas needed the company of people of his own age.

  Which she was about to give him, like it or not. Nancy smothered a grin. ‘Bought your Christmas presents yet?’

  Nicholas looked surprised. ‘No. I sent off for the David Jones catalogue, but it hasn’t come yet.’

  ‘There’s a whole town to buy presents in. You don’t need mail order.’

  He flushed. ‘I can’t get the chair up the gutters. And, thank you, but I don’t want a nurse to escort me.’

  ‘Not a nurse. Jed!’ she yelled.

  The girl had been w
orking there for a week now. A good worker. She put her head down and got things done. Jed read to Tommy now for an hour every afternoon too. Silly fantasy books about made-up futures, but at the end of each session Tommy seemed brighter, even if his body was more tired. Which was perhaps why Matilda tolerated Jed’s visits, and even usually left Tommy alone for a full hour with the girl.

  No news yet about who she really was, or wasn’t. But Nicholas had refused the invitation to Overflow the previous weekend, and Nancy suspected it was because he knew Jed would be there.

  Apathy sapped you more than fear, even more than hunger. She had learned that in the war too. Time to jerk this young man out of his shadows.

  ‘Jed!’ she called again, louder this time.

  The girl put down the bucket and scrubbing brush by the kitchen block, then walked towards them. She wore her usual jeans and T-shirt. That and her hideous dress seemed to be the only clothes she had. Size twelve, and she needs a couple of bras that fit her too, thought Nancy, planning her own Christmas presents even as she said, ‘Nicholas needs a hand to go into town and buy some things for Christmas.’

  ‘Please don’t go to any trouble.’ The young man’s voice was clearly reluctant.

  Nancy smiled at him sweetly. You’re not getting out of it that easily, she thought.

  ‘I’d love to.’ Jed held up red hands. ‘Another hour of this and I’d have scrubbed myself away. Give me five minutes and I’ll meet you here.’

  Nancy glanced down at Nicholas. He looked like someone had turned a hose on him on a hot day: not sure whether to be angry or just enjoy the coolness. Exactly what you need, thought Nancy. ‘Have fun shopping,’ she said.

  Chapter 19

  JED

  She tried not to let her excitement show. Had Nicholas asked Nancy if she could go with him?

  Nicholas hadn’t come out to Overflow on the weekend. He’d seemed to avoid her all the previous week, taking his meals in his room instead of in the dining room where the kids had theirs. But maybe he always did that. He was not a child, like them . . .