The Ghost by the Billabong

by Jackie French

‘What don’t you want them to find out?’

  ‘Who said there was anything?’

  Nancy sighed. ‘My dear, I’m not a fool, and nor are Matilda and Tommy. It would be far easier to follow your history back than try to trace your mother living under another name in the USA sixteen years ago. Were you really christened Jed Kelly?’

  ‘I don’t even know if I was christened or not.’

  ‘You’re evading the question.’

  Jed looked at the passing sheep. The sheep ignored her. It was strangely comforting being ignored by sheep. ‘Okay, I’ll make a deal. When Tommy and his wife accept me as Tommy’s great-granddaughter I might — might — tell them anything else they want to know about my life.’

  ‘You won’t tell even me your name now?’ Was there a hint of wistfulness in Nancy’s voice?

  ‘It’s Jed,’ said Jed. ‘Now,’ she added as the car swept into the Drinkwater driveway.

  A nurse — not Matron Clancy — sat in the corridor outside Tommy’s room, weaving the ugliest macramé wall-hanging Jed had ever seen. ‘For my mum, for Christmas,’ she said, holding it up for Jed to inspect.

  ‘She’ll love it,’ said Jed easily. No lie, for presumably her mother would see the love, the time, put into it. Plus maybe she, like her daughter, actually thought fluorescent green acrylic spiderwebs were gorgeous.

  She opened the door quietly, in case Tommy was asleep, but he gazed at her from the bed. Every time she came into this room she was afraid she might find him dead. She wondered if his family felt the same.

  ‘Happy Apollo 8 launch,’ she said. She looked at the short-wave radio on the polished table, the Voice of America turned down low. ‘All going to plan?’

  ‘Yes. Fine weather.’ He took a gasp, then added, ‘It’s just . . . before dawn there.’

  She slid onto the chair next to his bed.

  ‘Going to have . . . a television set . . . soon.’

  ‘But there’s no reception at Gibber’s Creek. You need a TV station —’ Jed stared at him, suddenly realising who she was speaking to.

  Tommy Thompson smiled. Suddenly he was the industrialist, not just a dying man. ‘Gibber’s Creek will have . . . TV . . . soon enough. Cowboys and Indians . . . and tom-fool comedians . . . and men walking . . . on the moon.’ Jed waited for him to gather breath. ‘I’m going to see it . . . And . . . not just in . . . my imagination. See . . . the moon.’

  ‘We’ll find out what’s on the other side soon.’ She kept her tone light. ‘Maybe an alien race has already landed there. Has a spaceport and we could never see it.’

  ‘I imagine we’d have seen aliens . . . arrive or depart . . . if they were already there. Your children will . . . holiday on the moon.’

  Her children? She pushed the images away. ‘I’d rather see another planet than the moon. One with life. All sci-fi, all we can imagine, is based on what we know. I want to see things we have never dreamed of. Talk to aliens.’

  A wheeze, which she realised was a laugh. ‘Have you ever . . . talked . . . to a sheep?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then how . . .’ pause ‘. . . will you talk . . . to aliens?’

  ‘I’ve thought about that. Some writers say using mathematics, but how can you ask someone if they want breakfast with maths? Or find out if they want you for breakfast.’ She saw him smile, and went on. ‘Gestures only work if you want the same things, can see or hear the way we do. What if aliens communicate by smell? Or touch, enveloping each other every time they need to say something?’

  Another laughter wheeze. ‘And you still want . . . to meet aliens?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good girl. And go to . . . the moon?’

  ‘Yes. It’d be easier to launch a ship to other planets from the moon. Lower gravity. Have you ever thought that we just call it “the” moon? Other moons have names.’

  One side of his lips curled in an almost grin. ‘What do you . . . want to call it?’

  ‘Cedric.’ It was the first name that came into her head. ‘No, it deserves more than that.’ She thought of the giant yellow disc that had lighted humanity’s nights. Through all its history. ‘Let’s call our moon Sir Cedric.’

  ‘I’ll . . . suggest it . . . next time —’ He broke off as the Voice of America on the radio began the countdown. ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .’

  Jed turned the radio up and felt a paperlike wisp on her skin. Tommy’s hand, seeking hers. ‘Six . . . five . . . four . . .’

  They waited, her square hand in his thin one, long seconds of silence on both the radio and in the room.

  ‘Three . . . two . . . one. Lift-off!’

  More seconds. Empty.

  No explosion. They were bound for space! Jed found her face was wet and saw tears on Tommy’s cheeks too.

  Man was going to meet Sir Cedric. And one day, thought Jed, women would too.

  Chapter 21

  NANCY

  It had been a long Christmas Eve already, thought Nancy, as she sped the ute through the night to Drinkwater, Jed beside her. She’d been jetting sheep with Michael from six am till long after dinnertime. The rain had been good for the grass, but damp wool meant fly strike.

  Michael had stayed at Drinkwater, which meant he’d probably had a three-course sit-down meal of Scotch broth from the shank, roast mutton, roast pumpkin, potato, home-grown peas and gravy, followed by apple crumble and custard. Mum had fed Jed and Scarlett by the time she’d got home, and had thrust a thick lamb sandwich at her and watched her eat it before she’d tried to shower off the stink of chemicals and rotting wool. But at least she had a mother-in-law who was used to the smells of sheep.

  Jed peered out the window next to her, staring up at the star-scattered sky. That rocket, spacecraft, or whatever it was, up there in the darkness, was flying around the moon tonight, which for some reason meant a lot to both Tommy and Jed. The two of them planned to listen to the Voice of America tonight together again, relaying the news from space to the world.

  She could have asked one of the men to drive Jed to Drinkwater, or even Mum. Could have been sitting with her husband, talking about the things you couldn’t say when you had your arms full of angry sheep. But she wasn’t quite sure why she hadn’t.

  It wasn’t just protectiveness for Matilda and Tommy. Having Jed beside her felt surprisingly companionable. She had come to like the girl, not just feel sorry for her; she enjoyed Jed’s insights, admired her capacity for hard work.

  But Nancy also acknowledged that she was a poor judge of character. Sheep she understood, and cattle, and horses too. But not people. A horse never lied to you. Nor did a sheep.

  Was Jed lying, pretending? Had she made herself into the kind of person she thought Nancy would like, and therefore trust, pretending to be a hard worker, the girl who read stories to Scarlett and caught her, laughing, at the end of the flying fox? Was this quiet girl beside her using her to con the people she loved most, having her living with the family, working at River View? Driving her to Drinkwater every day, where Tommy seemed so glad to see her?

  Jed made Tommy happy. Surely that was the main thing. But there was still that secrecy, that hiding away of her whole life, even her true name. Even in the internment camp no one had made any secret of who they were, nor was such a thing possible for long in a country town, or on the long days droving.

  Nancy spoke quickly, to edge away her thoughts. ‘I still expect to see Drinkwater’s driveway lined with cars on Christmas Eve,’ she said. ‘Tommy and Matilda used to give the most wonderful party every year. That’s when I met Michael.’

  ‘I thought you lived next door?’

  Nancy laughed. ‘Next door meant nearly two hours away before they put in the new road. And Michael was at boarding school in Sydney most of the time, and then I went to Queensland droving for a year. We met again at the party here. 1940.’ Her smile deepened. ‘We got married at a Christmas Eve party too.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘1
946.’

  ‘Were you going out together all that time?’

  Nancy gazed at the road. Her driving slowed, for which Jed looked grateful. Nancy knew people thought she drove too fast. But she had never had an accident, not even run over a wombat, which wasn’t easy, as wombats seemed to linger until the exact moment a frightened scamper would bring them under the wheels of a car. Roos ran quickly, easily startled. But a wombat’s response to a strange noise was to stand still and consider it. A good survival tactic, probably, till humans invented cars. ‘We didn’t see each other for five years. I was interned in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, up in what was Malaya, remember. So was Moira,’ she added.

  ‘All that time. I didn’t realise. Those places were horrible, weren’t they? Lots of people died?’

  ‘Almost everyone in our camp. Including the guards at the end.’ Nancy forced herself to keep her voice light. She had never told anyone — even Michael — how bad those years had been, nor how strangely good either. Thank goodness for Moira, who had been there, who understood why every cottage at River View must have a butterfly, why the treatment rooms needed a wall of butterflies too, a tribute to her tiny nephew who had laughed among the butterflies, even in the squalor and starvation of the camp. Tomorrow at Christmas dinner she would only have to meet Moira’s eyes and know that her sister-in-law too was remembering. But Nancy suspected this girl had too many horrors in her own life to have to hear Nancy’s too. And that, perhaps, was why she was in this ute now. Those who had seen horrors, and survived — not just with their lives, but with their capacity to love and laugh intact — needed to help each other. She wondered if Jed would ever learn that too.

  ‘Michael waited for me, all through the war, even when just about everyone else assumed I must have died. I wasn’t . . . well enough . . . to marry for a while, when I first came back. But he waited for that too.’ The smile returned. ‘It was a very good party in 1946. But it was the last of them.’

  ‘Why?’

  Nancy shrugged. ‘Things changed. The Sampsons — they’re my cousins and Michael’s cousins — went to spend Christmas in Mildura in ’47. Two of their daughters married brothers down there after the war. Matilda got pneumonia that year too. Blue McAlpine — Dr McAlpine’s her husband — held a big kids’ party at the biscuit factory instead. She still does. And somehow there never was another Christmas Eve party at Drinkwater. We were all so tired after the war, people like Tommy and Matilda especially, who’d kept doing the jobs of people half their ages.’

  ‘Tonight will be better than a party.’

  Nancy glanced at her. How could this girl possibly know the wonder of a party where you finally placed your hand into that of the man who was now your husband? The hilarity of those pre-war parties where shearers had danced with squatters’ wives and skin colours were forgotten, for one night at least, as the shadows of the lanterns flickered and the music sang around them? ‘How could tonight be better than a Drinkwater party?’

  Jed stared at her as if she were a halfwit. ‘It’s a party for the whole world tonight. Apollo 8 is going behind the moon tonight. No one has ever seen the other side of the moon.’

  ‘Of course we have. The Earth turns.’

  ‘But the moon doesn’t turn: it keeps the same face to us all the time. And the astronauts have left Earth’s orbit too. The first craft to orbit the moon.’

  For some reason this seemed to be important. ‘Ah. Good,’ Nancy said, though even if people across the world might celebrate the event tonight, Nancy doubted there were many of them.

  It was the right response. Jed grinned. It was a different grin from the ones she had given when she had first arrived, only a few weeks earlier, lighter, happier. ‘Good? It’s incredible! You know that Tommy’s arranging for Gibber’s Creek to receive TV so he can watch the telecasts when man finally lands on the moon? Tommy says it should be up and running in a few weeks.’

  ‘Believe me, I’ve heard. Half the district talks of little else. But no one has mentioned that we’re getting TV to see spacemen. Tommy tell you that?’

  Jed nodded.

  Interesting. Nancy wondered if Tommy had even told Matilda the real reason for this technological gift to Gibber’s Creek. Hundreds of families would be getting TV sets for Christmas tomorrow, looking forward to watching cricket or cartoons on their own screens, none of them dreaming it was all so an old man — and a girl — could watch astronauts.

  She turned down the Drinkwater driveway. Her pulse quickened at the sight of Michael’s ute parked under the oak tree. Their twenty-second wedding anniversary and they’d spent it jetting the sheep for fly strike. They’d spend the evening sitting with his mother while a stranger listened to space talk on a short-wave radio with her father-in-law, then for the following two hours they’d play Santa to three young people, none of them their blood, waiting till they were asleep before placing the pillowslips of presents at the foot of their beds . . .

  Yep, she’d happily spend another twenty-two anniversaries with this man, and hopefully three or four times twenty-two, just like this.

  And when she looked at the baby in the manger in the tableaux at church tomorrow, it would hardly hurt at all.

  Chapter 22

  JED

  Her alarm clock woke Jed early on Christmas morning, not because she needed to go to work — River View was closed until the new year — but because she had promised to help Scarlett see what Santa had brought her.

  Nicholas and Scarlett were the only ones from River View staying at Overflow for the holidays. Nicholas had informed his family he had been told not to interrupt his therapy. Jed suspected his father, at least, would know that was unlikely.

  Why was he so unwilling to go to his family? He obviously liked them, had tried to think of Christmas presents they’d enjoy. It would have been nice to think he’d come to Overflow to be with her. Besides, his Christmas plans had been made before he even met her.

  She yawned, stretched, swung her legs out of bed, and stopped. A pillowslip sat on the end of her bed, presents in green-and-red wrapping spilling out of it.

  For one impossible moment she wondered if Santa Claus’s magic held at Overflow, then smiled. Too much sci-fi and fantasy. For Overflow’s magic was Nancy and Michael and they, surely, had been the ones to leave the pillowslip.

  But Scarlett — Princess Anne — no, Cleopatra, that was it — would be waiting.

  She shoved her jeans on, keeping on the T-shirt she’d slept in, and then, just in case Nicholas might see her before she’d showered and changed for breakfast, washed her face in the old-fashioned basin with its jug on the dresser, applied eyeliner quickly, and brushed her hair too. She grabbed the pillowslip and hurried to the room next to hers.

  ‘I’ve been waiting AGES!’ The small girl glared at her from the pillows.

  ‘Sorry.’ Jed fetched the chamberpot, placed it under the wizened body, waited, eyes politely averted, then emptied it down the hall in the toilet, washed her hands and the pot, and headed back to the bedroom.

  ‘Chair or bed?’

  ‘Bed.’

  ‘Your wish is my command, Cleopatra.’

  A determined headshake. ‘I think I like Scarlett best. I’m going to be Scarlett from now on. It’s a New Year’s resolution.’

  ‘I like the name Scarlett too. How about we open one of your presents, then one of mine?’

  ‘ALL of mine first.’

  ‘Two of yours and one of mine?’

  Scarlett shook her head. She bounced slightly with excitement as Jed unwrapped the first present.

  ‘Scarlett! You’re bouncing!’

  Scarlett giggled. ‘Look!’ She held up her small arms, then, with visible effort, brought her hands together. ‘I can clap!’

  ‘That’s brilliant.’ And it was. How many years had Scarlett been working to manage that small act? She pulled away the last of the wrapping paper.

  ‘Show me!’

  Jed held it up. A music box. She o
pened it and a ballerina began to twirl, one leg raised, to the sound of the ‘Waltz of the Flowers’.

  Jed stared at it. How could anyone be so cruel as to give a crippled child a ballerina? She looked up, to see Scarlett entranced. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she whispered. ‘Open more, Jed!’

  A snow dome that Scarlett managed to hold between her two small hands, jiggling it just enough to make the snow dance around a Santa and his sleigh. Chocolates. Three books: Blinky Bill, Blinky Bill and Nutsy and Marmaduke and Margaret, which Jed had never heard of. When she looked at the dates they were all first printed, she saw that they were probably Nancy’s childhood favourites, given to decades of children to love as she’d loved them. A fairy wand, and fairy wings and fairy dress . . .

  ‘Jed, dress me in them!’

  ‘Good morning.’ She hadn’t heard the wheelchair in the corridor. Nicholas looked in, a stuffed pillowslip of his own on his pyjamaed lap. Jed flushed. There was something intimate about pyjamas. ‘I heard voices,’ he added. ‘Merry Christmas.’

  ‘Go away!’ Scarlett bounced again. ‘Jed is going to make me into a FAIRY! Then you can come in.’

  The chair retreated. Jed carefully pulled off the small girl’s nightie and underpants, then slipped on the pink satin undies, the tutu, the pink slippers, altered surely to fit her tiny crumpled feet, and then the wings and, last of all, a tiara, sparkling with every shade of glass between purple and yellow and pink.

  ‘Wheel me to the mirror!’

  Jed lifted her. The small body hardly weighed more than her shoulder bag. She strapped Scarlett into her chair, then wheeled her to the wardrobe mirror.

  ‘You look magic.’

  ‘Am I . . . am I pretty?’ Suddenly it was a genuine enquiry.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jed softly. ‘But you always are, you know.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I look like a goblin. The kids at the other home said so. But fairies are small too,’ she added hopefully.

  ‘They were just too dumb to see you’ve been a fairy all along. Can Nicholas come in now?’ She turned as he wheeled his chair in. He had changed into his usual jeans. ‘What do you think?’