The Ghost by the Billabong

by Jackie French

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The baby isn’t moving as much as I’d like. Babies don’t move a great deal later in pregnancy — there’s not much room. But you’re larger than I’d expect, and carrying more fluid than normal, and that can mean a risk of miscarriage. Will you at least think about Sydney?’

  She sat, silent, feeling the pulse of the earth beneath her feet, hearing the voice of the land outside the window, as well as children’s laughter. At last she said: ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Good. And promise me you’ll take it easy. No lifting — nothing, not even a tray. No reaching up to high shelves either.’

  ‘No playing tug-of-war with the kids or galloping along the river flats?’

  ‘You’ve got it.’

  She stood. ‘Thank you, Joseph. I really will think about it. Give my love to Blue.’

  ‘You’ll probably see her before I do. She’s dropping off some pies and a couple of casseroles at Overflow this afternoon.’

  Her dear neighbours. Her loving friends. They were the heart of her life too.

  But not her soil.

  She crossed to the car carefully. She didn’t quite know the shape of her body these days, and was all too aware how easy it would be to fall.

  She drove, slowly. She had promised Joseph she would think about it, but only because he didn’t understand what she must do now. Had to do.

  Michael would understand, but she couldn’t put this burden of choice on him either. Matilda too might help her make the right decision, but Matilda had enough to cope with now, as had Michael.

  If only Gran were still alive. But she must do this alone now. Her baby. Her land. Her choice.

  She took the turn-off onto the bush track a few kilometres past the Drinkwater driveway. There was a billabong there, used by swaggies in the past and still the odd camper these days. But when she stopped the car and got out there were no fresh car tracks.

  No human tracks either, though a hint of sweat in the air made her look more closely. No boot prints, or shoe prints, or full outlines of bare feet. But here and there she could see the smudge that meant someone had been walking there, using the edges of his feet so he left no prints.

  He? Yes, she thought, their length meant a man, and the scent was a man’s too. She knew, as well as anyone, that a man could be a more dangerous beast than a tiger. But a man who knew how to walk and leave the soil under him almost untouched? Who could stand with so much stillness he might be a tree?

  No. She did not fear a man like that. For he was part of the land, just like the wombats and wallabies and roos, the bandicoots who had left those cone-shaped holes, the platypus that smudged the mud by the billabong. Yes, there it was, sunning itself by the water’s edge. She smiled and walked by softly so she didn’t disturb it.

  Nor the ghosts. She could feel them there; always had, ghosts from tens of thousands of years ago as well as more recent ones — Matilda’s famous swaggie father, her own almost equally famous grandfather, Clancy, who camped here with his black wife when his father banished them from Overflow.

  Every place had ghosts. They could be felt more strongly here, she suspected, because a billabong was a place where people stopped and thought awhile as they camped or fished or hunted for yabbies. And when you sat and thought you sometimes made decisions. So she would sit by the river there today. The land itself would tell her: stay, or go.

  There were places by the river at Overflow and Drinkwater where she could have done the same, sat and watched the endless water till at last the answers she needed came to her. But to reach the river there she’d need to walk across paddocks, or scramble down the now-dry channels that gave Overflow its name. Even without Joseph’s warning, she’d have hesitated at this stage of pregnancy, especially alone.

  Here she only needed to walk past the billabong, up the temporary rise of sand-covered debris, now grassed over but one day destined to be swept away again, and the river would be there, before her.

  And there it was, the sand white, the river water the winter brown that sucked in colour and refused to give it back, despite the high blue of the sky that should be reflected in it.

  She lowered herself awkwardly onto the chilly ground. Swollen ankles — Joseph was right. Ugly, like the too-blue veins below her knees. When had she got middle-aged women’s knees?

  Back in the Japanese internment camp in Malaya, swollen ankles had meant beri beri, vitamin deficiency: vitamins C and B1, thiamin. She’d picked hibiscus buds to cure their scurvy; the islanders had smuggled them hard-boiled eggs, which had helped to keep the women and the child alive . . . for a while, at least, for of the fourteen civilians in the camp, only four had returned home. And one of the graves had been her nephew’s.

  Moira, beloved companion and sister-in-law then, as now, understood so much. But she would not understand a modern woman letting the land make such a vital choice for both herself and the baby that she carried.

  Nor would the other survivors. Nurse Rogers, now the matron of a hospital in Albany, her home town, was married, but like so many of the long-starved women had no children of her own. Mrs Hughendorn, in her eighties, President of the Women’s Institute at Little Welling on the Sea back in England — darling Mrs Hughendorn who had come to Australia to visit River View and still sent a money order every Christmas to be used for birthday presents for each child throughout the year — would not have understood either.

  But those women who had been through so much with her would respect her judgement. Joseph, as a scientist, would not.

  Nancy waited for the swans. They would come, if they came at all, in the late afternoon. The swans were her birds. Mum and Gran had seen them fly when she was born, circling up beyond the window. They will keep her safe, Gran had said. But the swans were more than that.

  Nearly thirty years ago she had sat by this river with a young man, a rich young man with whom she had nothing in common, except everything that was important in their lives. His bird was the pelican and, as they watched, pelicans and swans landed together in the moonlight on the river. Each of them had known that their lives too would be together. Even when the ship she’d been on sank escaping the fall of Singapore, Michael had seen black swans again and known that somehow, sometime, she would come home to him, and them.

  And now she waited. Tree shadows stretched their arms. A kingfisher swooped, dived and came up gleaming wet, something too small to see in its beak. A duck edged out from a small clump of reeds.

  If the swans did not come, then it meant the land had no answer for her. But when she had asked before, it had never failed to give her a reply. She put her hands onto the coolness of the sand, as if bare skin on soil might link her even closer.

  An arrow in the sky. Five swans, too high to make out their species unless you knew them well. Flying east, towards the coast, towards Sydney.

  No! She wanted to stay there. Needed to stay there. But also knew that her longing was so deep it might blind her to what was needed. She had told herself she’d trust the swans. And now she must.

  She began to scramble to her feet, then stopped. For the swans had circled back, high above her, but swooping lower all the time. Like a small black squadron of feathered planes they came in for a landing, skimming along the river, feet down to help them brake and then stalling on the water, looking as calm and settled as if they had never left it.

  They floated, the five of them, slowly paddling, serene and entirely unruffled, as the woman on the shore watched, sailing down the river towards Overflow.

  She watched the birds for perhaps ten minutes, till they vanished around the river’s bend. And then she realised she was crying.

  Chapter 61

  JED

  Jed watched the white car vanish over the hill. Strange to think that part of her life had ended. Her months at Honeysuckle Creek had begun on an impulse and she missed it already. But already too she was longing for Drinkwater, to see Tommy, to share the day with him, to sit with him, if t
he Dragon allowed it, till the astronauts were safely home on Earth again. To see Nicholas. Perhaps he’d kiss her again, start to kiss her every time they met and every time they parted, like couples were supposed to do. Surely you should kiss a girl who’d helped put men on the moon. One you had asked to live with you.

  She was tempted to set out for Drinkwater straight away. But that would have meant hitchhiking in darkness. It was hard to get a lift at night. Few people would pick up someone from the shadows unless their motives were shadowed too.

  There was no need for dinner, not after shepherd’s pie and steaming pudding with custard sauce for lunch. But she lit a small fire in the fireplace and boiled water to make cocoa.

  She lay down to sleep for her last night on the foam mattress in the tent, setting the clock for six-thirty am, and the first grey light. She fought the urge to go out and stare into the sky. What was happening up there? Had the astronauts had any sleep? There were no beds or hammocks in the Apollo lander. Could anyone sleep when they knew they only had twenty-one hours on another world, one they might never see again?

  What were their families feeling? Pride? Terror? Too much of both to even know what they were feeling, but only that it was too overwhelming to feel at all? Because that was what she had felt today. And if one insignificant dishwasher felt such extraordinary pride, or that her pot scrubbing had made the most minute contribution possible . . .

  She realised with sudden loss that from now on she would only hear the news at the same time as it was given to the general public. Of course even if she had still been working at Honeysuckle and something went wrong up there tonight, no one would ring the kitchen hand to tell her the news.

  Would some girl like her, in fifty or a hundred years’ time, see the film of two astronauts gently bouncing step by step across the lunar surface? She smiled. Those images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would never be forgotten, even without the ability to see ‘ghosts’.

  And what of tomorrow morning? That small Eagle lander, sitting like a tin can in Aldrin’s ‘magnificent desolation’? Eagles’ wings could balance on the air, as she had seen eagles soar at Overflow. Could NASA’s Eagle really surge up off the moon, with no extra humans and their vast machines around to help it? No air beyond the two days’ supply in that tiny craft. No help closer than Earth, a quarter of a million miles away. Michael Collins in the Columbia had no way to get down to them, and even if another lander could be built and sent into the skies, it would be far too late to help those two men on the moon tonight.

  Could Aldrin and Armstrong sleep up there? Could anybody sleep? Was Tommy awake in his small bed, listening to the Voice of America? Had today’s triumph inspired Nicholas to sit at his typewriter, spinning his dreams into words?

  At last she did sleep and deeply. For once there were no nightmares, no images of Debbie’s face, implacable, shutting the door behind her, Merv sweating and furious as she fought back. It was as if all she had been part of today had swept her life clean. Instead she dreamed of picking apples near a house beside a river, and Nicholas, but not the same Nicholas, and Christmas at Overflow that was not the one that she had known but strangely like it.

  A kookaburra woke her before the alarm clock did.

  Instinctively she gazed out the window, as if she might see fire flicker across if the lander had exploded or crashed as it tried to take off. But there was nothing, except a hopeful magpie looking at the dishes outside the next door’s laundry.

  Please, she thought, let them be safe, on their way home. Please, let Tommy be safe too, watching and listening to it all. Let Nicholas feel the future flowing through him, and be happy.

  She was hungry, but there was no breakfast: she had grown too used to relying on Mrs Clissold’s cooking. But she didn’t want to wait for the shops to open. Maybe one of the drivers would stop for breakfast. At least she had money to buy food now. But if they didn’t and even if she didn’t manage to get to Drinkwater before nightfall, a day with no food wouldn’t kill her.

  Tommy, she thought. Nicholas. Overflow and Drinkwater and men who had walked upon the moon. She looked around at her belongings: there was far more than she had ever carried before.

  Schoolbooks, clothes, the tent and mattress. She managed to make it all roll up into a kind of bulky swag that would fit on the back seat of a car. She hoped she wouldn’t have to carry it for long.

  It was strangely hard to say goodbye to ‘her’ house. It was the first time she’d had a place of her own. Even if she came back to Queanbeyan at some time in the future, it was unlikely it would even still be there. The builders who had abandoned it must be coming back eventually. Had the owners run out of money? Had the builders just moved on temporarily to another job? She would probably never know why this half-house had been there to shelter her. Soon there would be a new house in its place, a neat box, rat-proof, comfortable, with all its walls and roof intact. A good house to live in, but not one to love.

  She had been happy there, she realised. Or at least, at peace, except when the memories tore at her. She’d had shelter and enough to eat and above all, no fear. There had also been moments of extreme exultation, not just yesterday’s triumph around the world, but small things, picking fruit from the tree in the backyard, reading by candlelight; finding letters from Nicholas, Scarlett and Nancy in the letterbox, the first letters she had ever received.

  She dressed in jeans, and a loose T-shirt to make The Beasts look less prominent, then heaved the swag onto her shoulders. She shut the door behind her, a silly ritual that she performed despite the gaping hole in the wall, despite this being her final departure, walked down the path for the last time, then up the street to the road out of town. The frozen grass crunched under her feet and the street lamps switched off as she stuck out her thumb.

  It was too early for much traffic. The first driver who stopped looked like a student — hippy beard, sideburns, Indian shirt and filthy jeans that could have stood up by themselves, but in a shiny car that was probably his parents’. He offered her a puff on a joint, and seemed surprised when she refused.

  There was no radio in the car. ‘Please, have you heard about the astronauts? Did the lander take off from the moon safely?’

  The young man stared at her as if she were a being from the moon herself, and shook his head. ‘Dunno.’ He didn’t attempt conversation after that, but dropped her at the edge of the city then turned back the other way.

  She held out her thumb again, trying to look friendly as the traffic passed, to keep her smile in place as car after car ignored her.

  At last a truck stopped. ‘Where are you headed, love?’

  ‘Yass? Gibber’s Creek after that.’

  ‘I can take you to Yass. I turn off there for Melbourne.’

  She climbed into the cabin, hoping he’d have a lunchbox full of thick breakfast sandwiches.

  No luck. But the truck did have a radio. ‘Please, have you heard the news this morning? Did the moon lander take off safely?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘The men on the moon.’ I’m making it sound like a nursery rhyme, she thought. The man in the moon came down too soon. ‘The astronauts. They were due to take off from the moon early this morning. Are they okay?’

  ‘Yeah, there was something about that, about them heading back to Earth.’

  ‘Something about that’ was vaguer than she’d’ve liked. But the driver would have remembered the more dramatic news flash she’d feared, the lander blowing up or crashing or just sitting there, inert, the men waiting for slow deaths. ‘I’m so glad.’

  He grinned, showing brilliant white false top teeth that clashed with his yellower lower ones. ‘Bit of okay yesterday, wasn’t it? I parked the truck and went round to the electrical store. Whole row of tellies showing it. Must have been a hundred of us watching. Maybe two hundred. Thought the shop girls would go crook at none of us buying anything, but they was watching too.’ He patted the steering wheel. ‘Imagine this old girl fly
ing all the way to the moon, eh? Think we might be doing that one day?’

  She grinned back. ‘I hope so.’

  The truckie dropped her in Yass with a wave and a ‘You look after yourself, girlie.’ Three Mormon missionaries gave her a lift after that, dark suits, squeezed into the front so she and her swag could have the back. They didn’t try to proselytise or even ask where she was going, or why, but smiled and talked about Canberra’s lake, and the snow caps on the mountains.

  She wanted to talk about the moon landing again, to say, ‘I was there.’ Which was silly, as she had been no more there than anyone else who had watched it on television. And yet she had, for those footprints in the lunar dust were just the tip of the vast network that had put them there. She might have only peeled potatoes and wiped tables, but she had been part of it, the mountain peak of all that humanity had done before.

  But the missionaries were kind, and she was grateful. And it was the code of the hitchhiker — her code, anyway — to talk about what the driver wanted to hear.

  They dropped her at the turn-off to Gibber’s Creek. Almost at once a kombi van pulled up. It was old, but well cared for, with not a spot of dirt or dust even on the hub caps, though there was a strange, vaguely unpleasant smell when she peered in through the door the driver opened for her, like someone had been eating liver and onions.

  The driver glanced at her without apparent interest: a man, fortyish, ordinary looking, not a man you’d glance at in the street. She’d expected anyone who drove a kombi to wear jeans, or hippy clothes, but this man was dressed in a slightly shiny suit of the kind she associated with cigarette salesmen. She gave a safe, friendly smile. ‘I’m going to Gibber’s Creek. Are you going that way?’

  The driver nodded without speaking. Did he mean he was going all the way to Gibber’s Creek? Or just in that direction?