So far the girl’s story had checked out, thought Matilda. Which proved nothing.
‘What city in America did she come from?’
‘Just America, was all her friend knew. Not quite a friend, I reckon, because she didn’t seem concerned about where this Janet kid might be now. I sent telegrams to my contacts in the USA.’
‘And?’
‘There’s no divorce records for any Rose Zambriski, but you knew that. No marriage records for one either, even under her maiden name. But she could have lived with this Skellowski bloke as his common-law wife. Couldn’t find any record of a Rose Skellowski having a baby either. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one, just that we haven’t found her yet.’
‘Go on.’
‘But what my contact over there did find is a birth certificate for a Janet Skellowski in Dallas, Texas. Father was John Skellowski, Australian, profession freelance journalist. Mother Violet Skellowski, profession housewife. No maiden name. There’s a death certificate for a Violet Skellowski too.’
‘That settles it,’ said Matilda. She felt as though a log had fallen off her back. Of course Jed was not Tommy’s descendant. Tommy was hers and her family’s, the last ties to his first wife cut when Anna and her daughter died . . .
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Henderson heavily. ‘Violet, Rose. Two flower names. Neither of them all that common either, not these days. And why didn’t this Violet Skellowski put her maiden name on the birth certificate?’ He flushed, obviously unhappy about what he had to say next. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Thompson, but that granddaughter, Rose, of yours — she had a police record, you know. Drunk and disorderly twice in Los Angeles. Possession of an illegal substance. Then she vanishes. Know what I think?’
‘What?’ Tommy’s breath was hoarser than ever. Matilda wanted to sweep these men from the room, sweep Jed Kelly back to wherever she had come from, ease his last weeks, months, into peace and contentment. But all she could hope for now was that the girl might be plucked away from them, so the ripples she had caused would fade away.
‘I think it’s just possible that your Rose took up with this Skellowski bloke and had a child by him. Maybe she’s lonely; maybe she meets a man from home and thinks she’d be happier with him. But she was still legally married to her husband. Probably made her an illegal immigrant if she left him too. I don’t know enough US law. Might have made Skellowski’s position difficult too. I wonder if she called herself Violet to stay in hiding.’
‘Why on earth would she do that?’
‘Because the baby might be claimed by her husband,’ he said evenly. ‘They were still legally married, after all. Skellowski had his name on the birth certificate, but he’d’ve known it was shonky.’ He shrugged. ‘But that’s all just maybe. Just as likely that your Rose vanished somehow, had an accident while drunk or on drugs, and no one knew who she was. Maybe she didn’t intend to vanish forever, just give her husband a scare. And this girl really is the daughter of Violet and John Skellowski. There’s just one other thing though.’
‘You can’t find . . . any records . . . for a . . . Violet Skellowski . . . either?’ Tommy’s eyes were sharp above the oxygen mask.
Henderson looked at him admiringly. ‘Got it in one, Mr T. No Violet Skellowski either that anyone can find, except for that birth record and the death certificate. No passport, no birth certificate, nor a marriage certificate. Or rather we found five of them, but none the right age. All but one were over sixty, too old to have had a kid. Old-fashioned name, Violet, even twenty years ago.’
‘And the other one?’ asked Matilda.
‘Nine years old. Too young.’ He drew a notebook out of his pocket. ‘I went to see Janet Skellowski’s stepmother last week. Mrs Debbie Skellowski. Lives at Carina. One of those houses that all look alike, put up after the war. Nice enough places, though the Skellowski place is a bit unkempt.’ He grinned yet again. ‘You notice that serving summonses, looking for missing people. The house you want is usually the one with the lawn that needs mowing. This one stank of grog too. A bit grim, to tell the truth. But the stepdaughter was bright enough to pass the entrance exams for State High. Not easy to get into, you know. She was in the top class too. Doing real well. A clever kid, the teachers said, when I saw them.’
‘No one is disputing her intelligence,’ said Matilda dryly. ‘If she were less intelligent, this investigation would not be necessary.’
‘Well, like I said, that house is a grim place. Neighbours say this Debbie drinks her widow’s pension, has a series of boyfriends and not too choosy about them either. But she was married to this Skellowski all right. Showed me the marriage certificate.’
‘What did you tell her?’ asked Matilda. Curiosity had won through distaste.
‘A bit of the truth. Always helps. That I was working for Mr Thompson here and there might be an inheritance involved. That got her bringing out her marriage certificate real quick. She had all Skellowski’s old paperwork in a big black box: his old passport and Janet’s too, even his birth certificate, his Senior Exam results, and his degree from the University of Queensland, BA in philosophy, if you want to know, a pile of cuttings of articles he’d written as a war correspondent — that guy got around — even a certificate from when he was in the Boy Scouts as a kid. But despite all of this, there wasn’t a marriage certificate for Skellowski and Janet’s mother, which makes me think maybe there never was one. She’d have showed me if she’d had it, if it got her closer to your bucks. But she had school photos of Janet that look pretty much like the photo you sent.’
He took one out of the back pages of his notebook. ‘What do you think?’
Matilda glanced at it. The girl looked young and ridiculously respectable in a white school blouse and dark skirt and tie, her long hair tied up in a ponytail, and no make-up. But it was Jed. ‘Yes,’ she said, passing it to Tommy. He held it, as if unwilling to let it go. ‘So, Janet Skellowski left home to come here.’
‘Ah,’ said Mr Henderson. ‘That’s where it gets difficult again.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Janet Skellowski didn’t leave home. She was kicked out. Taken into custody.’ He looked at his notebook again, unwilling to meet their eyes. ‘On 2 December 1967, Janet Skellowski, fifteen, was charged with being uncontrollable. The magistrate sent her to the Princess Charlotte Reform Home for Girls.’
The clock ticked too loudly in the corner. Tommy let the photo drop. ‘What had . . . she done?’ The whisper was clear in the silent room.
‘Quite a lot, according to her stepmum. Attacked her, knocked her down. Attacked the stepmum’s boyfriend too. Broke his nose. Her stepmum says the girl was a compulsive liar. Lied about everything and everyone. Ungrateful. But that wasn’t the only reason she was sent to the home.’
‘What was the other reason?’ asked Matilda quietly.
‘She was pregnant,’ said Mr Henderson heavily.
Chapter 40
NICHOLAS
18 FEBRUARY 1969
The air in his cabin felt like thin soup and the fan didn’t help any more than the open door and window trying to catch a breeze that wasn’t there. The sky outside was tinged with white with smoke from a far-off bushfire, not the more ominous grey that might mean fire nearer by.
He turned back to the typewriter. The pile of manuscript pages was slowly growing — even two-fingered typing was faster than writing, and more legible too.
He hadn’t known quite what to expect when he began this. A book at the end of it — a good book, or he’d trash it. A way of talking about the unspeakable, Vietnam, and what he had seen and lost and, most of all, what he had done, but could never speak about, not to his family, because they loved him and they shouldn’t have to know their son had done anything of the kind. Instead he could put it in a far-off future war, with a hero who was what he’d like to be, and a heroine remarkably like Jed. In this army of the future, armoured suits contained the weaponry and strength, and men and women fought side by side against an enemy as invisible as the Vi
et Cong — until they struck.
He had expected the book to fill in time too, between therapy sessions. He hadn’t expected to find the world he had created so vibrant that only the growing ache in his back reminded him to stop. Nor had he expected that he would begin to see the actual world more vividly, as if creating one really had let him see his own more clearly.
But, mostly, turning the parts of life that hurt most into fiction seemed to cleanse them. The fiction felt more real than the truth, and once it was on the page it hardly hurt at all. Except, perhaps, in four am nightmares.
‘Nicholas! Mail!’ Gordon walked carefully up the path. No wheelchair, no crutches now, just his callipers.
Nicholas found that today he didn’t even have to manufacture a smile for the boy. ‘You’re doing great.’
‘Yep. Two for you.’ The boy turned, even more carefully, using the handrail this time, just in case. Going down needed more balance than going up.
Nicholas looked at the letters in his hand. Two today, one from his mother, another one from Jed. She had written every week since she had left. He was slightly unnerved by how much he looked forward to her letters.
He opened his mother’s first, to get the guilt over with so he could linger over Jed’s. He was glad there was no public phone nearer than the Gibber’s Creek Post Office that was accessible for his wheelchair. He could have used the one in Matron’s office, of course, and his parents could have called him there too. But he had made them think that those calls would be inconvenient for the staff. Which was true, but not quite as true as he had made out. But no phone calls meant no awkward maternal questions: when will the therapy be finished, darling? When will you come back to Sydney? When, in fact, would he begin life again, with prosthetic legs?
Dr McAlpine, at least, understood that the road to ‘normal life’ was not necessarily a straight one. His mother — and most people — assumed that as soon as he had his prosthetics he’d get right back on track.
And that was the trouble. He still didn’t know what life he wanted, except that writing would be part of it. Didn’t even know what life he could tolerate. And, until he did, he had a convenient answer for his mother to give her friends when they asked sympathetically, ‘And how is Nicholas doing?’ ‘Still in therapy at River View,’ she could say. ‘No, not ready for his new legs yet, but soon . . .’
He skimmed the letter. Ginger had had puppies, three male, two female; a hail storm had destroyed her roses; Mrs Higgins next door said to give him her best wishes; they’d seen Bob and Dolly Dyer’s yacht when they were out on the harbour last weekend; such a pity they didn’t get TV at Gibber’s Creek yet, Pick a Box was so clever.
Well, TV was coming. River View even had a TV set in the playroom, which the kids kept turning on and off hopefully in case a picture might magically appear. He’d be able to tell Mum that, at least, in his weekly letter.
Was Mum’s life really as circumscribed as Jed suggested? Surely most women didn’t want to work after they were married, not if their husband could support them or unless they had a true passion for their work. Those women existed, of course. Politicians, doctors . . . and, come to think of it, every woman there at River View, as well as the women who worked the farms with their men. There was nothing stopping Mum from getting a job, if she wanted to . . .
He picked up Jed’s letter, grinned at the scrawl, and opened it as eagerly as a kid with a packet of jellybeans. He started to read, then stopped.
This letter had an address at the top.
She’d mentioned sending an address as soon as she knew she might be there long enough to get a letter. He could have sent a letter to the tracking station at Honeysuckle Creek. But as far as he knew neither Nancy nor Tommy had done so. Some places didn’t like employees getting personal mail. It might raise questions: why don’t they send it to your home?
He looked at the address again. Queanbeyan, the New South Wales town next to Canberra. He’d show it to Nancy, though Jed had probably put it on her last letter to her too, and on Tommy’s. She seemed to write her letters, or at least post them, in a batch.
He began to read.
Dear Nicholas,
I hope you are well, and everything is going as you hoped it would at River View. I’m good. In fact I’m really enjoying myself. I didn’t think I’d ever say that about a job washing dishes.
It’s funny: I came here for Tommy’s sake, thinking they were about to launch the rocket that would take men to the moon. But it’s so fascinating I am glad I am here for my own sake too.
It looks as though there will be at least two more missions before the moon landing. The lander is still too heavy to be sure it can take off (I think that is right, but I may have misunderstood) and there are software problems.
You now have my total understanding of what that means. How can there be a ‘problem’ with something that doesn’t exist yet? Either you have the software to do something or you don’t. Maybe ‘problem’ means ‘we haven’t invented it yet but are pretty sure we can soon’. Soon enough, anyway, for them to build the hardware to go with it.
I’ve really got the jargon, haven’t I? A month ago I thought ‘hardware’ went with ‘shop’ and ‘software’ was haberdashery!
I hope you don’t mind, but would you mind going to see Scarlett after you get this? I’ve just written her a letter too. Could you hold it up for her, so she can read it herself? She hates always being read to, just because she can’t hold a book or a page. But maybe she will be able to do that for herself soon.
That is about all the news from me. I miss you all, and hope you’ve forgiven me for doing a vanishing act. But it was important I do this by myself, not with the Thompsons pulling strings. I’m sorry it’s going to mean I’m away longer than I thought — I wanted to begin night school if I could this year too, and now it looks like I can’t. But Honeysuckle is something even greater than Christopher Columbus, because after all he just got to go where people were already living. And all the worlds that Heinlein and Hoyle and you and I have dreamed of start here.
Love,
Jed
Love, thought Nicholas. Jed signed her letters to Scarlett and Nancy and Tommy with ‘love’ too. But he was pretty sure she might actually believe herself in love with him.
Which would normally have sent him wheeling as fast as he could go in the other direction. When you didn’t know who you were, or what you wanted to do, when you had secrets that whispered themselves across your dreams, the last thing you needed was someone changing her life to be part of yours.
But Jed didn’t have a life to change. Not a permanent one. Even her tracking-station job was temporary, until man did walk on the moon. (He was less optimistic about that being managed this year than she and Tommy were.)
Nancy had not told him what the Thompsons’ investigator had found out, but the whole town knew that the solicitor had been down, and had stopped for a cup of tea and a rock cake at the café before setting out for Drinkwater. He reckoned that if the investigator had found out Jed truly was related to the Thompsons, Nancy would have told him.
Which meant, as he and everyone else had believed, she wasn’t.
Which left Jed as simply Jed. Someone who had no family, no one whose job it was to care for her, and care about her. Someone who needed help, even from someone as damaged as him. Someone he liked. Even, if he were honest, cared about more than anyone, even himself. Especially, perhaps, himself.
Which wasn’t saying much.
Chapter 41
JED
21 FEBRUARY 1969
Dear Tommy,
It has been an exciting week. I overheard the blokes in the canteen talking about a Russian rocket. I asked them what was happening and Mr Sullivan told me that the Russians have the biggest rocket ever built ready to fly — it’s as tall as a thirty-seven-storey building. It’s called the N1, which is about as boring as you can get. It is the Russian version of the Saturn rockets that launch the Apollo spacecra
ft. They think this one won’t carry people, but if it works, they may be ready to send men to the moon before the Americans do.
Would you mind if the Russians get there first? It matters a lot to the people here, and to me too now, because being first is, well, being first. But the main thing is to get people there, isn’t it? And then go further and further still. The moon is a big place so even if the Russians claim part of it like the English claimed Australia, the Americans could still claim where they land. Or doesn’t it work like that? I asked Mr Sullivan, but he didn’t know. Mr Reid the station manager might, but he is too important for me to ask.
I didn’t know the Russian astronauts had transferred astronauts from Soyuz 4 to Soyuz 5 in space, and then brought them down safely — the first time a space transfer has ever been done. It does look like the Russians are way ahead of us.
I am enjoying working in the canteen. Mrs Clissold is a darling and a really good cook — nothing fancy, but casseroles and Irish stew and enormous pots of custard to go with the stewed fruit or jam puddings. I can now make custard for fifty people!
It was rabbit stew last week, because one of the cooks shoots them at night on the lawn, but this is a secret so do not tell anyone! He was in the navy, was a navy cook — not a chef, which is important for some reason. He has three tattoos on each arm and keeps his rifle behind the aprons. He skins the rabbits too. He says there is good money to be had from rabbit skins. I suppose the kangaroos are happy, despite the bangs, as getting rid of the bunnies means more grass for them, but I am glad they are all skinned and ready for the pot by the time we see them.
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