The Ghost by the Billabong

by Jackie French

  ‘Jed, are you all right? Sorry. Stupid question,’ Nancy answered herself. She waited till the last retch was over, and Jed had leaned against the fence, panting. ‘Here.’ She offered a handkerchief and then, after a scramble in her handbag, a barley sugar.

  Jed shook her head.

  ‘Take it. You’ll feel better. You won’t smell like vomit either.’

  The last bit convinced her. She took the lolly, unwrapped it, sucked.

  ‘Tummy bug?’ asked Nancy sympathetically.

  She should say yes. Easiest to say yes. But it would be a lie, the biggest possible lie she could tell.

  But what could she say? Because all that I am crashed down on me, there in church, as I held the baby, heard the carols, saw the honest hard-working faces on each side.

  Because if any of you knew who I was, and what I’ve done, you would not be sitting with me, nor would you be offering me even a barley sugar now.

  She forced the thought away. She had to put it behind her. Could put it behind her! ‘Not a bug. I’m okay now.’ ‘Really?’

  Jed managed a laugh. ‘No. Not really. But I’m not going to be sick again.’

  ‘Jed, you’re not . . .?’ Nancy didn’t finish.

  Jed realised what sickness at this time of day could signify. ‘No, I’m not pregnant.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Absolutely sure. I haven’t . . . Well, you know. There’s no way I could be pregnant.’

  No. Not pregnant. Guilt slashed deeper still.

  Chapter 25

  NICHOLAS

  He sat in the shade of a tree, one of Overflow’s ancient apples growing in its paddock between the gum trees, a perfect harmony between nature and humanity’s need to farm, and tried to read, brushing the flies from his eyes, attracted not just by their moisture but the smells of a roast dinner cooking while the family was at church. Even Jed had gone, which disappointed him. Going to church looked too much like sucking up to the Thompsons, dressing in stockings and her new dress, for surely she wasn’t a churchgoer.

  He looked at the book in his hands. He didn’t want to read, he realised. He wanted to write. But all his mind produced was glimpses, themes, and he didn’t know how to even begin to put them together into something worth tapping on the new typewriter that sat on the desk in his room.

  Could a fragment of a man create more than a fragment of a book? Nor did he want to write something just for the sake of trying out the typewriter. In a strange way the fiction in his mind seemed the only real part of him. Too much of his life was second rate: flunking uni, even flunking being a soldier, not even able to survive an entire tour of duty, now not even a whole man.

  If he was to write, it must be good.

  Cars snaked along the road beyond the orchard, then turned into the Overflow driveway. He wheeled himself back to the house in time to catch Jed getting out of the last of the cars as the rest of the clan went back into the house, Matron Clancy navigating Scarlett’s wayward new chair.

  ‘Enjoy yourself at church?’

  Jed smiled at him. She moved over to the shade of the gum trees that lined the drive. He joined her. ‘It was interesting. I’ve never been to church at Christmas.’

  ‘Then why go now?’

  ‘Because I’m their guest. Sorry,’ she added quickly. ‘I didn’t mean that it was rude of you not to go too.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’ She looked lovely, he thought. Her hair had grown thicker, shinier. Her face was no longer bruised, physically or in that deeper way that was impossible to define. The dress suited her, falling to a few inches above her knees. She had nice knees. He shut his mind to the sudden image of his own.

  ‘Okay, it was bad manners.’ She grinned. ‘But they’re used to you. They like you, anyway.’

  ‘Do they?’ The thought hadn’t occurred to him.

  ‘Of course. Why do you think they ask you here?’

  ‘Because they feel sorry for me,’ he said flatly.

  She considered that. ‘Probably how it started. That’s why Nancy asked me to stay here too. Well, and to find out more about me. But the presents this morning . . . They were from people who know us. Cared about what we wanted. Not bath salts and talcum powder.’

  ‘Or aftershave and an ashtray.’

  ‘Is that what people give blokes when you don’t know what they’d like?’

  ‘Pretty much. Not a typewriter, at any rate.’

  ‘Will you really use it? I like to read sci-fi, but you need to have a possible world in mind to write it.’

  ‘I might have one,’ he said cautiously. ‘But so much is happening now that seemed sci-fi just a few years ago.’

  Her face lit with eagerness. ‘Isn’t it? I wish you’d been with me and Tommy, I mean Mr Thompson, last night. He’s got a short-wave radio with Voice of America. We listened as Apollo 8 came back from behind the moon. Mike Lovell said, “Please be advised there is a Santa Claus.” It was so funny, after all the worry that something might go wrong, but so moving too.’

  ‘I’d have liked to have been there,’ Nicholas said sincerely. ‘I heard about it on the news this morning — I’ve got a transistor in my room. But it’s not the same as hearing it as it happens.’

  ‘It was amazing. How can there be any war, after this, now we can all see that we belong to one planet?’

  He stared at her. How naïve could she be? ‘Of course there’ll still be wars. The worst quarrels are within families. The whole moon-race thing is part of the Cold War between America and the Soviets.’

  ‘But —’ She stopped. A magpie sang above them as she considered what he’d said. ‘I didn’t think of that,’ she said at last. ‘Dumb, aren’t I? I just didn’t think that people would risk so much just to beat the Russians.’

  ‘At least fewer people have been killed in the Cold War than real war,’ he said with feeling. ‘But don’t you see — controlling the space above the planet makes war even more dangerous. You can lob missiles from the moon onto anywhere on Earth. The moon could be one giant military station.’

  He stopped. It was as if the air exploded silently around him, sending him a hundred years into a possible future. He could see it: the armoured vehicles on wide tracks crawling across the moon’s surface. The enemy deep in tunnels, as they had been in Vietnam, but this time the craters of the moon hid them, instead of jungle.

  And conscription, to get men to fight the space war. But this time they’d conscript engineers, physicists, not just anyone who turned eighteen on the wrong birthday. But then no one would study physics . . . so they’d conscript boys at fourteen, no, twelve, so they could be forced to learn. Anyone with an IQ above one-sixty. An army of geniuses . . .

  ‘Nicholas?’ Jed asked, just as Scarlett called from the kitchen door.

  ‘Nicky! Nicky!’

  He grinned at Jed. ‘She knows I hate being called Nicky. Sorry. I just had an idea.’

  ‘Maybe I should call you Nicky when you’re being a male chauvinist.’

  ‘I’m reformed. I promise I will never buy my mother a cookbook again. Even if she goes down on her knees and begs me.’

  Jed laughed. ‘Nicky! Nicky! Nicky!’

  ‘Nicky!’ yelled Scarlett again. ‘Dinner’s on the table!’

  ‘Come on,’ said Jed. ‘The flies will get it before we do.’

  Nicholas grinned back at her. Suddenly, with no warning, he was happy.

  Chapter 26

  JED

  Christmas dinner, to Jed’s surprise, was not chaotic. The dining-room table shone: each place was set with polished silver cutlery, Michael’s at one end, Nancy formally at the other, Nancy’s mother in between Nicholas and Matron Clancy on one side, and Jed and Scarlett, still in her fairy dress, next to a place setting and an empty chair.

  ‘Are we waiting for someone?’ Jed asked as Nancy began to dish out roast potatoes, perfectly charred pumpkin, beans, Brussels sprouts, and Michael carved the turkey.

  ‘No,’ said Moira softly. ‘They’re
still with us.’ Nancy reached over and held her hand. They sat silent for a moment, then Nancy spooned out more pumpkin. Moira lifted the gravy boat. Scarlett said something beside her. Jed sat frozen.

  For others were at the table. An old man, his beard as white as snow, gazing at a woman with black skin wearing a white dress patterned with cherries as she carried in a bowl of roast vegetables, watching her with so much love that for the first time Jed felt her visions were intruding on a private world.

  Then they were gone. Another man sat where the old man had been; he was in his late twenties, perhaps. A small, thin boy with bright eyes and wearing a ragged shirt sat next to him, holding his hand, and fluttering above him were gaudy tropical butterflies.

  ‘Jed! Jed, I don’t like pumpkin.’

  The ghosts vanished. Jed forced her eyes away from the now-empty seat, just as Nancy said, ‘Then you don’t have to eat it.’

  ‘Promise?’ Scarlett demanded.

  ‘Promise,’ said Nancy. ‘This is a no-vegetables-unless-you-like-them house. Do you like sweet potato?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Give it a go. Three spoonfuls and if you hate it spit it out.’

  ‘Really?’ Scarlett’s eyes lit up. Jed wondered how far a small girl could spit sweet potato. She looked up and met Nicholas’s eyes; he was clearly thinking the same thing.

  ‘White meat or dark?’ asked Michael. ‘And who gets the parson’s nose?’

  And Jed realised that whatever the Thompsons’ investigators discovered, she might still be welcome at this table, even if they found out she was no relation. As long as they did not find the far deeper truth of who Jed Kelly was — and surely, please, the worst of that was impossible to find — she could be at this Christmas table again the next year.

  She had everything she’d come here for already. The chance to get her HSC and that scholarship. And then to Sydney for uni, exactly as she’d planned — even, perhaps, coming back here for the university holidays, with a holiday job at River View, filling in for someone over summer, as if she really belonged.

  She should be singing joy to the world, like the congregation had this morning. Instead the turkey turned bitter in her mouth.

  Nancy, Matron Clancy, Michael, Nicholas, saw a girl who was kind to children, helped a crippled child eat baked potatoes. They could not see the real Jed. The Jed it was impossible to love, for no one had ever loved her, and she had destroyed the one person who might have.

  She did not deserve a place there.

  She forced a smile as she helped Scarlett hold a Christmas cracker. Because to fail to look happy now would hurt each of the extraordinary people at the table. Even, perhaps, their ghosts.

  Chapter 27

  TOMMY

  He missed day and night the most. Even Christmas Day had little meaning this year, merging with the nights on either side.

  All his life, till the last six months, there had been sleep at night, then the opening promise of each day. Now he slept in fitful dozes, woken by the hissing of his mask, the choking of his own body as it tried to breathe. It was one of the many farewells you made before the final one: knowing he would never again step into the golden light of day, see sunrise upon the river, with Matilda by his side.

  Matilda. He smiled. He had said ‘Sorry’ five months before. Just the one word, meaning so much: sorry to have turned our bedroom into a hospital room; sorry to make you closet yourself up here, with me, instead of being out in the world you love.

  And she had smiled at him. Darling Matilda. ‘Each time I step through that door and see your smile I am as happy as I have ever been.’

  Today even more than ever he was divorced from time and place, his mind soaring with the astronauts aboard the Apollo 8 spacecraft as they orbited the moon for the eighth time.

  Across the world, television screens he could not see showed the orb in grey and black and white. Endless craters on what might be a dirty beach. He saw it today only in the astronauts’ words — ‘it’s a vast, lonely, forbidding type of existence,’ said Borman; Bill Anders’s joy in the lunar sunrises and sunsets; the wonder of seeing Earth rise and set; the starkness of the terrain; and the tempting as well as terrifying expanse of black sky.

  But it was Lovell’s words that had moved him most: ‘It makes you realise what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis to the big vastness of space.’

  His Earth. His planet. His land and his wife, in the chintz-covered armchair between his bed and the window, knitting. He had no idea what the garment was; he suspected that Matilda had herself possibly forgotten. Nothing she knitted was wearable, anyway, and even her blankets were more holes than stitches. But she liked the click of knitting needles; and so did he.

  A car engine hummed and then stopped below the short-wave radio’s chatter. Matilda didn’t move. They’d find their own way up.

  He had become good at listening in the past year. Those were Jim’s footsteps heading down to the office, checking for telexes even on Christmas Day. No yells from his grandsons — Iris was driving the boys back to Sydney to have Christmas dinner with her family that night. Michael and Nancy would have Christmas lunch at Overflow, bring Jed here to visit, then Nancy would take her back while Michael joined him and Jim and Matilda for dinner.

  He would have liked to have asked Jed to be with them too; thought that Matilda had probably engineered Iris’s plans so that ‘just the boys and us’ seemed reasonable, not an exclusion, with Nancy spending the evening with her mother, Moira and the youngsters. But even so . . .

  The door opened and there were Michael and Nancy. ‘Merry Christmas, Dad, Mum.’

  Hugs. Kisses. Jed stood back against the door. The expression on Matilda’s face was impossible to read as she pressed a kiss to the girl’s cheek. ‘Merry Christmas.’ She handed Jed an envelope. ‘This is from both of us.’

  He saw the moment Jed suspected the slim envelope might contain a cheque or even cash; watched her take out the slip of paper inside; saw emotions wash across her face, joy mixed with disappointment — whatever she pretended, the girl needed and wanted money — but mostly joy. ‘An account at the bookshop!’

  He had discovered that grins need less energy than frowns, which was lucky, as he preferred to grin. ‘Order any book you want. If they don’t have it, they’ll get it in for you and I’ll pay the bill.’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know what to say. It’s magic. No one has ever given me a present like this . . . it’s the most wonderful . . .’

  Tommy glanced at Matilda, wondering if she realised that this girl, who must have been in so many second-hand bookshops, knew that used books were poor objects for resale. Jed could buy every book in the shop, but get almost nothing of their worth back if she sold them second-hand. No, this girl knew the value of a book was not expressed in dollars.

  That did not necessarily make her his relative. But it did make her his kin.

  He managed to lift his hand. ‘Give an old man a kiss.’ She bent and pressed her lips to his cheek. Her own cheek was damp.

  ‘Hey, listen.’ Michael turned up the radio. ‘. . . are now approaching the lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message for you.’

  Jim opened the door. Matilda held her finger to her lips, to warn him not to speak. The room was silent except for the crackling from the radio and then astronaut Anders’s voice. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth . . .’

  No one spoke, as the message spread across the world. ‘. . . and God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light and there was light . . .’

  He lay there, with those he loved about him, all listening too, Jim, Jed, Michael and his Nancy, darling Matilda, the knitting forgotten. Listening. Listening. Then finally Borman’s voice: ‘. . . and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.’

  ‘So far away,’ whispered Matilda.

  But they weren’t, thought Tommy
. That was why they must go out there, so mankind knew that it was one, together, on this shining blue planet, this strange creature called humanity. But he didn’t have the strength to say so.

  He knew he didn’t need to say so to Jed, for she understood. Knew that Nancy’s, Michael’s, Matilda’s love of this piece of land linked them slowly, inexorably, across New South Wales, to Australia, then across the oceans, to the entire planet. They did not need to see Earth from space to know that this one planet held them all.

  He was tired. Matilda saw it, and stood, in a subtle — for her — hint for them to go. Nancy bent and kissed him, and Michael . . . He had forgotten what gifts Matilda had arranged for them, but they’d examine them later. It didn’t matter, after all. The gift he had received today was more than any man deserved, a room of love and family, and his people reaching out towards the stars.

  He gestured again to Jed. ‘Welcome home, dear child,’ he whispered. He hadn’t known he was going to say it, but was glad he had. This girl was his kin, even if there was no relationship by blood. He saw Jed’s look of shock.

  He glanced at Matilda. Just a glance. She knew exactly what he wanted. She stepped over and kissed Jed firmly, one kiss on each cheek, leaving a smudge of lipstick. There was no mistaking the sincerity in his wife’s voice when she said clearly, ‘Welcome. I am so glad that you are here.’

  Chapter 28

  NICHOLAS

  The ute had driven sedately through the afternoon shadows down the Overflow driveway again, which meant Michael must be at the wheel, not Nancy. She and Matron Clancy and old Mrs Clancy chatted over the washing-up.

  Jed had put an exhausted Scarlett to bed early, tearful now the day was ending and she had not yet mastered her new chair. He wheeled by the bedroom to hear Jed reassuring her. ‘By next Christmas you’ll be playing basketball.’

  ‘What’s basketball?’

  ‘You throw a ball up through a hoop and try to stop other people getting the ball through their hoop at the other end.’