‘And then you left.’
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t tell him why — or how — she left the lace-curtained hell that had been the only place she’d had to live. Couldn’t lie to him. Jed Kelly, con woman, except she couldn’t lie. If any shopkeeper had asked, ‘Have you taken a packet of biscuits?’ she’d have answered yes and held them out.
She nodded instead. There was no lie in a nod. Nor were there words that might prompt him to ask the questions she couldn’t answer: not just why she had left the house where she had lived so long — she could not call it a home — but where she’d gone and what had happened after that. Please, she thought, let Nicholas not ask that. I can bear anything, almost, as long as he never knows that. If she never spoke of it, perhaps it would vanish, as if it had never been.
Which of them had lost the most? She didn’t know. Her body was whole. But Nicholas had a family who’d loved him all his life; loved him so much that he had fled their care. And she had lost . . .
She shut her eyes to try to stop remembering just what she’d lost. Squeezed them tight so there’d be no more tears. Looked towards the setting sun so there’d be a harsh red light behind her eyelids and nothing else . . .
‘Jed?’
She opened her eyes. ‘Yes?’
‘Are you going to tell them?’
‘Tell them what?’
‘Everything. He’s an old man, Jed. Dying. You can’t keep him dangling, hoping.’
‘But I might be his great-granddaughter! I . . . I want to be. He’s so much like me. Or I’m like him. He thinks about things, just like me. I’d never met anyone else who thought about the future . . .’
‘Other people do. I do. And you and I are not related.’
‘I know, but . . .’
She looked along the creek, the day’s heat shimmering from the rocks. ‘I want to be his great-granddaughter,’ she whispered. ‘I feel that I am. Truly.’
‘He needs to be with his own family now,’ he said softly. ‘You can’t keep pretending, Jed.’
She waited for him to say, ‘If you don’t confess everything to him, I’m finished with you.’ He didn’t. Instead she heard the creak of the wheelchair, heading back across the paddock to the house.
She kept her gaze on the creek. Nancy’s creek. Lucky Nancy, who’d known who she was all her life.
Except she did know who she was. She was Jed Kelly, who didn’t lie. Who took from the rich, but only from the rich, and only in desperation. Who had discovered she loved the way the air turned gold before the evening, and the smell of dawn. Who swam through history, felt its ghosts and heard its whispers, and who dreamed of the future too. Just like her great-grandfather.
Tommy had to be her great-grandfather. Even if he wasn’t by blood, if children could be adopted, then so could a great-granddaughter. She just had to show him that she was.
But if the investigators found out that she wasn’t, before she could prove she was, even if not by blood, the Dragon would probably shut the door in her face, unless Tommy asked her not to. Which he probably would. But he would feel the pain of being lied to, even if the lies had just been by omission.
She lay back on the rock, feeling its heat through her bones. If only there were some way to show him, to show the Dragon, that there really was a link between her and Tommy. Something more than just a feeling and a hope.
The clouds floated above her, flitting past the ghost moon, Sir Cedric looking almost stationary in the high, deep blue. It seemed impossible, lying there, that soon men might actually stand on that white disc. Or perhaps die trying in the attempt, lost forever among the endless black.
And suddenly, deeply, perfectly, she knew what she could do for Thomas Thompson.
Chapter 30
FRED
26 DECEMBER 1968
Fred leaned back against the tree and held the stick against the glowing coals, listening to the fat sizzle.
It had been a good Christmas. He’d managed to see Mah and Belle at the kids’ party at their biscuit factory; even snaffled a bottle of lemonade and a piece of cake when they took the kids inside to see Santa. He’d hidden behind one of the big tombstones on Christmas Day too, pretending to read the inscription when anyone passed, to watch them go to church, both women smiling and hugging half the neighbourhood.
Mah looked as pretty as a picture, and her daughters too. Belle still looked like a million quid, the mermaid of the South Seas, even in her respectable blue dress and hat and high-heeled shoes.
No chance of watching them at Christmas dinner. Mah’s house was too near the Drinkwater homestead. Good big house it was: suitable for a farm manager’s family. But that night he’d snuck in behind the hedges, and peered through the window. Mah and Belle sat at the table, sipping coffee, while their husbands nattered on the veranda with their beers. They looked tired. They looked happy.
That was enough for Fred.
Something moved at the edge of the trees.
Snake. Red-bellied black, a big one. It stopped, smelling the sausages, or hearing the sizzle, then lay curved, as if to say, ‘I am a stick. Ignore me.’
‘Can’t trouble you, old girl. I’m a ghost,’ Fred told it. He began to nibble his sausage, small bites because it was hot, and also because when you’d lost half your teeth nibbling was about the only way you could eat a sausage.
The snake considered. It raised its head tentatively. The tongue tasted the air. Then, slowly, watchful for any human movement, it coiled its way down to the billabong. The tongue flicked out again. Drank.
‘Lots of frogs for dinner,’ Fred told it.
It seemed the snake knew this. It lay motionless along the edge.
Fred stayed motionless too: mostly because it was too hot to do anything else; partly because there wasn’t anything else he wanted to do; and partly to watch the snake.
But when the movement came it was too fast for him to see it. Where there had been a stick-like snake there was now a snake with its head and neck rearing upwards and, in its mouth, a frog.
The frog struggled, seeking escape or even rescue. Fred thought about it, but snakes had to live and this one had caught the frog on the square. And would possibly leave the world a place of slightly smarter, faster frogs, too fast for red-bellied black snakes to catch.
Of course that might mean that only the best snakes lived to breed too.
Belle had explained it to him, one day in the truck as they moved the circus from one small town to another. Survival of the fittest, she’d said. The best live to breed.
Well, she and Mah had had kids and he hadn’t . . .
The frog lay quietly in the snake’s mouth. Given up. Stupid thing, to give up, Fred nearly told it. But he doubted the frog understood English and he didn’t speak frog.
Why hadn’t the snake swallowed it? And then he realised. Greedy blighter. The frog was too big for its mouth.
The snake twisted, shuddered, and its jaw unhinged. For three seconds, perhaps, the frog could have jumped, fled. Fred doubted that the snake would have wasted venom on it, so it was still alive. But it was dinner now, and it knew it.
‘Bon appetit,’ said Fred. He was pretty sure that was French; Madame had said the phrase sometimes, before supper after the show, and he’d heard it at the movies too.
The snake glanced at him, suspecting he wanted its frog. Fred stilled himself again.
Slowly, steadily, the amphibian vanished down the snake’s mouth, into its neck, towards its belly. Fred could see the bulge as it went.
He could move now, without interfering in the snake’s dinner. Get another sausage from his tucker bag. He’d always been fond of sausages. Old Mrs Martin probably got them in specially. Kind old thing. He must remember to suggest he clean her chimney. The way it smoked there were years of soot built up in there. Didn’t want it catching alight.
The snake scooted through the sedge as Fred heaved himself up, stretched and began to scout for firewood.
Chapter 31
JED<
br />
Boxing Day was easy. Happy. Watching Matron Clancy teach Scarlett how to go forwards in her chair and, most importantly, how to stop. The family trooping down to the river, to what seemed to be a traditional post-Christmas barbecue-cum-swimming party with half the district likely to be there.
Staying behind with Nicholas; alone in the house with him, strangely companionable, reading, discussing their books: what would they have told the alien intelligence about the planet Earth and the human race in Chocky; could they see themselves living in Panshin’s great generation ships that had fled from the Earth that atomic bombs had ruined; Nicholas carefully not asking, ‘Will you tell him? When?’
Jed, as carefully not answering, not telling him her plans.
Apollo 8’s splashdown was due at about two am that night, Australian Eastern Standard Time, the men who had seen the far side of the moon leaving the cold, dusty craters and desolation and returning to their blue Earth.
It was momentous, miraculous — that man could not just fly to the moon but might be brought back safely, though so much could still go wrong. The tiniest miscalculation could leave them spinning off into space, never reaching Earth at all. If they came in at too shallow an angle, they might skip off the atmosphere and back into space. The parachutes might fail to deploy so that they plummeted unchecked. If they came in too steeply, the speed of their descent would turn the returning rocket into a flame of death, burning the men up, like the doomed crew of Apollo 1.
Yet it seemed as though no one except she and Tommy talked about these things. Even this morning’s news on the radio had said little about it, but more on the cricket, the Sydney to Hobart yacht race, another headless girl’s body discovered by some kids trying out their Christmas bicycles, and Christmas celebrations for the troops in Vietnam. Jed was surprised when the Dragon had phoned on Boxing Day afternoon, to ask if she would like to stay the night at Drinkwater, and sit up with her and Tommy to listen to the Voice of America broadcast.
‘It will be too late for anyone to drive you home after what do you call it? Splashdown. Besides,’ Jed could almost see a most undragon-like smile, ‘Tommy knows that I am interested only because he is interested. He will enjoy explaining it all to you.’
Did the Dragon realise that whatever it cost him these missions lent Tommy the energy to stay alive? That he truly could force his heart to keep beating until he saw men on the moon?
‘Miss Kelly? The correct answer is, “Thank you, Mrs Thompson. I would love to.”’
Jed smiled into the receiver. ‘Thank you, Mrs Thompson. I would love to.’
It was a curiously gentle evening, especially for one spent in the company of a dragon. They ate dinner on trays in Tommy’s bedroom, Matilda feeding her husband in between bites of her own food, roast lamb and baked potatoes, gravy, beans and carrots that had clearly never been frozen, Tommy’s plateful already chopped up before the gravy was applied, to make it easier for the spoon and chewing.
Fresh fruit salad, mostly peaches and the freckled apricots that grew in the orchard at Overflow, and ice cream, but he ate little. Probably he needed little, lying in his bed. But he drank the cup of tea afterwards. Jed was asked to take the trays downstairs. She suspected that was to get her out of the room while he used a chamberpot, or one of the stainless-steel narrow-necked devices she had seen at River View and that one of the cleaners had explained.
He was dozing when she came back. Jed sat, the book in her shoulder bag unread, while Matilda knitted what looked like a pair of long-johns for a larger dragon, or perhaps for one of the aliens that so many had predicted the astronauts might find on the moon.
But the astronauts had discovered Earth instead. Already Anders’s image of the blue globe rising from the blackness behind the desolation of the moon had spread across the planet . . .
Later, Matilda herself dozed, the knitted dragon tights fallen to the floor.
Jed watched Tommy as the radio muttered in the background. His eyes were closed, his breathing even. But when she shifted in her seat he opened his eyes. ‘Nothing will be the same after this,’ he whispered. ‘Once people see man on the moon, they’ll know humans can solve anything we have to. Can solve . . . wars . . . solve pollution . . .’ The words vanished into his breathing.
‘You think going into space will make the world better?’ Nicholas was so sure it wouldn’t. Which one was right?
‘Has to. Trains changed us. Cars. When I was a boy . . .’ more gasps ‘. . . most people only thought of their own town. Trains, cars, radio . . . made us . . . Australia.’
She looked at the sunken face on the white starched pillow, damp at one edge from his drool. ‘Is that what you thought of when you made the cars, the radio? Showing us we were one country?’
He smiled, a wonderful Tommy smile that seemed to hold secret amusement with the whole world. ‘Course not. Fun. Challenge. Humans . . . made for . . . challenge. Boredom . . . kills. Worse thing for people . . . ever . . . to be bored. Hopeless.’ He flicked his eyes up to the ceiling, roof, atmosphere, the soaring universe beyond. ‘We need . . . challenge,’ he said again.
‘So when I’m your age, life will be better?’
‘Has to . . . be.’
‘I . . . I’m not sure about that. There’re two kinds of futures in sci-fi, mostly. One where we wipe each other out, or almost, with atom bombs or plagues. In the other, people have robot servants and automatic food dispensers and everyone can log into the central computer. Paradise or ruin, and nothing in between.’
‘Won’t be . . . what we imagine.’ Pause. Hiss. ‘Never is.’
‘I don’t understand.’
A laugh like grass rustling. ‘People like . . . me . . . like you . . . maybe. People who have . . . ideas. Bright sparks . . . in a . . . dull world.’ A longer pause. ‘No. Not that. World . . . is beautiful. Wouldn’t want . . . Matilda . . . to hear that . . .’
Jed glanced over at Matilda. Her eyes were still shut, but Jed knew that she was listening. ‘Earth is . . . so beautiful. But those who . . . can see . . . that . . . are so few. Those who can understand the world . . . are fewer . . . Those who can change the world, even fewer.’ That smile again. ‘You. Me. Matilda.’
She wanted to ask how Matilda had changed the world. Instead she asked, ‘You really think I could change the world?’
‘Brains. Insight. Why . . . not?’
Teachers had told her she was intelligent. Friends had said so too, often slightly accusatory, as if being intelligent had made her too different to be quite comfortable with. But no one had ever told her so confidently before that she’d use that intelligence.
She owed this man so much. He had given himself to her as freely as if she really was the great-granddaughter she so wished to be.
It was time to work out how to put her plan into action. A plan that would show him how much she cared for him as well as the passion for space travel they shared. The one thing that Tommy Thompson would like now that neither his family nor his money and reputation could give him. But she needed more information to put the plan into action.
His eyes shut. She let him rest, waiting for his eyes to open again. Her own eyes closed. Ten minutes later she found him watching her.
She tried to keep her voice careless. ‘What do you think they are doing at Honeysuckle Creek now?’
The shadowed eyes watched her. ‘Waiting. Listening. Like us. Calm and focused.’ Another pause. ‘Tom Reid . . . rang to wish . . . me merry Christmas.’
‘The director of the station?’ She wondered suddenly if Tommy, or one of his businesses, was part of the project. But surely he’d have told her if that was the case. The call had probably just been a courtesy to a man who technical and industrial Australia revered.
‘There were some . . . hiccups . . . with the launch.’
For a second she thought Tommy meant he had the hiccups, then realised he was talking about the space mission, things the Voice of America had not told the public. She leaned fo
rwards eagerly.
‘Borman began . . . vomiting . . . worried it was . . . radiation sickness? They almost . . .’ gasp ‘. . . brought the mission back early.’
‘But it wasn’t?’
‘Flu, probably. Others. A bit . . . too. Gobs of . . . vomit . . . floating around.’ She saw the shadow of a gleeful small boy pass across the ancient face.
‘Yuck.’
‘In . . . deed. Honeysuckle . . . dish.’ She knew he meant the main antenna of the giant structure that held the sensitive receiving equipment. ‘Started . . . sparking too. No . . . signals . . .’
‘Shi—’ She glanced at the perhaps-sleeping Dragon and bit back the four-letter word. ‘Shivers. What did they do?’
‘Only one thing . . . to do. Replaced . . . cranes . . . floodlights . . .’
She could almost see it, the men dwarfed by the vast dish she had seen in the newspaper cuttings, kept in a book by Tommy’s bed, working, working, working in the darkness to re-establish contact with that tiny spacecraft in the deeper dark so far above. ‘How did the spacecraft manage with no signals?’
‘Used Tidbinbilla Tracking Station . . .’ He had mentioned this one before, the station set up to peer into deep space, rather than the near space of the moon that the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station had been designed to view. ‘Signals transferred . . . by microwave . . . linked to Honeysuckle computers . . .’
Brilliant, she thought. No panic, just a solution to a problem no one in history had faced before. And it had worked.
The old man took another breath. ‘Honeysuckle got the first . . . signals when Apollo 8 emerged from behind the moon.’ He was speaking faster, as if the mere thought of that tiny craft emerging from behind the vastness of the moon gave him strength. ‘Rockets . . . had to fire at exactly . . . the right second . . . when they were . . . behind . . . the moon. If they failed . . . Apollo 8 would have . . . floated off into . . . deep space.’
She wondered again what it had felt like, the blackness of night behind the moon, the star-dotted darkness of the sky, the silence from Earth, cut off from Earth as no one had ever been before. What if the far side of the moon had had a vast mountain? If the spacecraft had crashed, the world would never have known why they had been lost, or even where they were, until humanity again had the courage to venture so far.
The Ghost by the Billabong Page 18
