The Ghost by the Billabong

by Jackie French

  Mrs McAlpine’s eyes widened as she stared at the new cross near Tommy’s grave. ‘No, of course not. I mean yes, it hurts, but it is so good to finally have the truth. He was a hero,’ she said.

  ‘I know. Other girls might have been attacked if he hadn’t —’

  ‘I mean in the war. I always thought he faked his death, in case they arrested him when he came home. In case it embarrassed me and Andy and the kids. One of his army mates told me he was pretty sure Fred had survived. I kept hoping there’d be a postcard. Something. But he never came near us, never. But he was here when he died . . .’ Jed watched her absorb it. Mrs McAlpine shook her head. ‘And he was sneaking around the garden at the wedding reception. I don’t know whether that’s creepy or wonderful or a bit of both. But that’s Fred. You never knew where you were with Fred.’

  ‘He loved you very much,’ said Jed. ‘And Belle as well. He told me he loved her too. I . . . I’d like to tell her that he kept on loving her. That he died to save others.’

  ‘I’ll tell her.’ Mrs McAlpine gave a twisted smile.

  ‘I’ve looked in the phone book, but there’s no Belle Magnifico in it. Your brother said she was a mermaid. The glorious mermaid of the South Seas,’ she added uncertainly. She had never been sure if that had been a joke or not. Like his sister said, you never quite knew where you were with Fred.

  ‘Belle was Blue’s stage name back in our days in the circus. Now she runs the biscuit factory with me. And she’s married to Joseph, Dr McAlpine, who you already know.’

  ‘Dr McAlpine’s wife was a mermaid?’ Jed glanced over at the respectable figure in a black woollen dress and high heels, chatting to a neighbour.

  ‘In a sequinned tail with a long wig and flesh-coloured top, so the punters would think she had no clothes on. And I was sawed in half each night by Fred. Miss Kelly, Jed, I’d like to be alone for a moment, if you don’t mind. But one day, later, could you tell me more about him? What he looked like? What he said?’

  Jed nodded. ‘I’m going to be living here,’ she said, and felt the warmth flow through her.

  ‘I know.’ Mrs McAlpine smiled again, though tears spilled slowly from her eyes. ‘Everyone knows everything around here.’

  Except about Fred, Jed thought. And me, to begin with. But she was not a ghost now.

  She moved back through the crowd to join Nicholas.

  Chapter 75

  NICHOLAS

  He sat in his wheelchair, watching Jed talking to Mrs McAlpine. She looked . . . happy was not the correct word. No one looked happy at the funeral of someone they loved. Tommy Thompson had probably been the first person Jed Kelly had ever loved unreservedly, though he was not the first to leave her.

  But she looked alive. Fully present in that moment and gazing at the next with hope.

  She had so much now. Not money — that didn’t matter to him and nor particularly to her. Money was useful and it was good to have enough. The house was no problem either. In a strange way he longed to live in it, with Jed and with the river, watching the eagles soar above the Drinkwater cliffs, the swallows leave each autumn and return in spring.

  But he and Jed had other paths now. He had only offered to go to Sydney because that was where university was, for her. He had no wish to go there, to go back to any city. And Jed . . .

  Jed deserved more. Better. Not just a man with two legs, but one who could face life with joy, wholeheartedly.

  That man was not him. Not now, and possibly not ever.

  His legs hurt. Usually the phantom pain only came at night. Now it was so bad he had to grip the chair hard, to stop from crying out. Ghost legs, refusing to let him go.

  He had been waiting for Jed to ask the question. The question. What did happen to your legs? Probably she expected him just to tell her as she had offered him so much about herself. She deserved the truth in return.

  He couldn’t give it. No one deserved to have what he had done that day etched in their brain. Not his parents, not Nancy. And certainly not Jed. Dear Jed, who had been through so much that was bad herself, and who had so much that was good now.

  The most real parts of him were not real at all: his legs, and the fantasy world in his brain that he had nearly finished writing out and must redraft again. The rest of him was hardly there at all.

  Jed was hugging Mrs McAlpine. The Jed he had first met hadn’t known how to hug anyone. He understood in that heartbeat that he had loved her then, even if he hadn’t known it, just as he loved her now.

  But that meant little, when there was so little left of him to give any love at all.

  Chapter 76

  JED

  The wake after the funeral was like a party, tables set with food along the veranda, plates of pikelets and jam, plain scones, date scones, pumpkin scones, spiced apple scones brought by neighbours, as well as cold chicken legs with napkins to hold them, crab quiches, quiche Lorraine, orange baskets filled with fruit salad, pineapple and marshmallow skewers, meringue swans and stuffed tomatoes from the caterer. Tubs of ice filled with soft drinks and beer sat in the shearing shed, while other tables held tea urns and hot water for instant coffee. Next to them were giant green canvas bags filled with dry ice that steamed even colder air up to the winter sky, guarding their treasure of small tubs of ice cream, chocolate ice-cream hearts, ice-cream wafers, Paddle Pops and Drumsticks.

  Kids ran or sped in wheelchairs, laughing, their faces smeared with jam sponge or ice cream, or skidded bicycles down the drive. Men, uncomfortable in ties, talked wool, sheep and weather with other men. Women in black dresses talked with women, mostly about other women and their triumphs or troubles. The Drinkwater dogs sniffed the humans’ feet, and each other’s tails, and industriously lifted legs on each strange car. Someone had tied black bows around their collars, which Jed found both unbearably sad and funny, especially as most had been half chewed off.

  It was the end of a world, yet everyone talked about everything except the reason they were there. For Tommy Thompson had not been charismatic, unlike his wife; he hadn’t bought a local paper for his mouthpiece. Tommy might have changed the world, but he had done it from back rooms or factories, with diagrams and engines and theories of electricity and valves and then transistors. Few of those who had bought his radios, nor army sergeants who used his tracking devices, even knew the name of Tommy Thompson.

  To his neighbours, he was another old bloke in a hat, a good one, who’d send a cheque to help build a new scout hall or a library for the school and who could tinker with a busted windmill and get it pumping, at least till a new part arrived. Since the war he had even vanished from his factories. To most people, the Mr Thompson of Thompson’s Industries was his son.

  Jed stood next to Scarlett, watching her eat an ice-cream cone, holding it with both hands but steady, every mouthful a triumph. She crunched the last of the cone proudly. ‘See?’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Nicholas. He grinned, though it looked forced. With trousers on and pinned at the end of each leg, it was possible at first glance not to realise what he had lost, but there was a darkness about him that worried Jed. Had the funeral reminded him of friends he had lost in Vietnam?

  Nicholas drew his chair over to Scarlett’s. ‘Do you want to see my knees wiggle?’

  ‘No,’ said Scarlett, giggling. ‘Jed, what do you do about sticky fingers?’

  She’d never had sticky fingers before, Jed realised. ‘Lick them, if no one is looking. Or wash them. If they won’t leave a mark, wipe them on your clothes.’

  Scarlett laboriously lifted one misshapen arm to bring her hand up to her lips, then cautiously licked one finger, and then another.

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Nicholas. ‘You’ve just managed your first really bad manners in public.’

  Scarlett looked at Jed speculatively. ‘Nancy says you have a house now. What are you going to call it?’

  It hadn’t occurred to her that her house needed a name, but there were no street numbers here. What did you c
all ten acres on the edge of Drinkwater and Overflow? She looked at the mess on Scarlett’s chin and grinned. ‘How about “Dribble”?’

  Scarlett giggled. ‘I like “Dribble”. I’ll tell Nancy your house has a name now! Jed, did you KNOW there used to be an elephant living here?’

  Jed shook her head.

  ‘Did you KNOW elephants can pick up people in their trunk and put them on their backs? Nancy says your house has a paddock, so you could have an elephant for when I come and stay with you . . .’

  ‘How about you get another ice cream?’ said Jed hurriedly.

  Scarlett grinned. ‘Do you KNOW I can pick ice creams up by myself now too?’

  ‘We noticed,’ said Jed. How many had Scarlett eaten already? But eating too many ice creams was a good way to discover indigestion, now that the small girl could finally reach for her own food, not wait for what was fed to her.

  Scarlett pressed the button on her wheelchair.

  ‘You realise that your new address has just become “Dribble, via Gibber’s Creek”?’ asked Nicholas.

  ‘Yeah. Probably.’ Jed watched Scarlett’s wheelchair travel down the path to the ice-filled tub on the veranda of the shearers’ quarters beyond the house. Trust the Dragon to have ice cream at Tommy’s funeral. She’d probably organised Pass the Parcel for later.

  She looked around for her. Matilda was a black rose among other black roses, all women of her own age and with every shade of skin from white to tanned to Asian and almost chocolate dark. She seemed comforted, bolstered by women who were obviously close friends. At the end of the veranda, Jim Thompson was deep in discussion with two men who looked like farmers or squatters or property owners or whatever was the correct term for having sheep and being rich. She supposed if she were going to live there she should find out how to describe the neighbours.

  Neighbours. Community. There was so much she didn’t know, things she bet she didn’t even know she didn’t know. But Nicholas would. He’d lived in the country before his parents moved to Sydney. He’d know all about what to do with garbage, and how water got from the river to the house. And she knew how to cook everything from café chips to Mrs Clissold’s steamed pudding. She must send a thank-you card to Mrs Clissold — she hadn’t even known about thank-you cards before Nancy mentioned them. And she could scrub and polish. Polishing would be a joy when it was her own house.

  Her house. Four months free to study till the exams and she bet she could pass her HSC at the end of them. It’d be a cinch. She could pay her own uni fees now, anyway: no need to do well enough for a scholarship. She could study whatever took her fancy — philosophy, she knew she wanted to study that, now she no longer had to think about study just for a career. Did universities give courses in computers? She’d never seen any in the guide books. She could choose whatever profession she wanted to qualify for. Social work? Speech therapy or physiotherapy? None of them quite fitted. But she could spend years now, trying out subject after subject.

  She’d been checking the real-estate pages in the Sydney Morning Herald too. A flat near Sydney Uni, or even a small house, cost less than ten thousand dollars: not even a whisper of her money. It would be best to buy a flat, because she already had a house, and she didn’t want two gardens to look after, though come to think of it her family would probably arrange that for her too. There was a lot she was going to have to learn about being in a family, especially such a large one, made up of people who were not backwards in organising others’ lives.

  But she would need to get her driver’s licence soon, and buy a car, one that would be easy for Nicholas to get in and out of, so they could come back home at weekends.

  Home. She could ask Nancy and Michael and the Dragon over for dinner, bake roast lamb just like Mrs Clissold’s, serve them jam roly-poly, custard. She could get a television set, so she and Scarlett could watch Gilligan’s Island and eat ice cream. She and Nicholas would sit on the veranda and watch the river, and slowly he’d open his life to her, and they’d grow as close as Tommy and Matilda had been.

  And gradually her world would widen, because there must be people like her and Tommy and Nicholas at uni, people who dreamed of a future further off than two or three years’ time. She could ask some of them home for the weekend too. She had never asked a friend home before.

  Suddenly she knew she had to find somewhere quiet to weep with joy and sorrow, for all that Tommy had given her, not just the money but the belonging and the dreams. She looked at Nicholas, wishing for the first time that he could stand beside her, put his arms around her. Perhaps they could go behind the house. Would it hurt him if she sat on his lap, so she could cry properly . . .?

  She found him looking at her too. ‘Jed, we need to talk.’

  ‘We are talking.’ For the first time in weeks she felt wary. Her wish to move away from the crowd vanished. There was nothing to talk about so urgently. Weep, yes. Not talk.

  ‘Please,’ said Nicholas. ‘In private.’ His face was pale, almost desperate. And all at once, she knew what he would say. Not because she had seen it in the future, but because she loved this man, and understood him.

  She could say that she had to speak to the Dragon or follow Scarlett. She could manipulate him so he could say nothing now and, perhaps, by tomorrow he would have lost the courage to say what he wanted to tell her now.

  She couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it. Jed Kelly, manipulator, was no more. She was the girl who did not lie. Not lying also meant facing the truth.

  ‘We can take the path around the back of the shearing shed.’

  It was quiet around there, as she had thought, the sheep silent, eating; a horse behind the sliprails, dozing. Nicholas rolled his chair off the path under the shade of a tree and began to speak without any preamble. ‘Jed, we can’t live together.’

  ‘Yes, we can.’ She met his eyes. ‘You mean you don’t want to live with me.’

  ‘No! I do. But you don’t need me now. You have family, money —’

  ‘I need you because I love you.’

  ‘You love me because you haven’t met anyone who deserves your love yet. But in the next few years you are going to meet lots of men. With two legs.’

  ‘The legs don’t matter.’

  ‘They do, you know. You can only say that because you have no idea how much they do matter.’

  He was right. But that wasn’t the important thing, even if he thought it was.

  ‘Do you love me, Nicholas?’

  He was silent.

  ‘That answers that,’ said Jed at last.

  ‘No, it doesn’t. But I don’t know if I am worth loving.’ ‘Stop blaming everything on your legs!’

  ‘I’m not talking about my legs. I lost more than my legs in Vietnam. I lost the ability to feel properly too. I do love you, but it’s like that love is as far away as, hell, I don’t know, Alpha Centauri. It’s not the kind of love that Michael has for Nancy, that really means something.’

  ‘I . . . I don’t understand.’

  ‘That’s good, because I’m not sure I do either. But I do know this. Even before I went overseas I was a man who didn’t care enough to even think about if I should go to Vietnam or not. Who still hasn’t got the guts to think, was I wrong? Were we all wrong? Because if we were wrong, then I should say so publicly, and I can’t. And if we were right, then I don’t have the courage to speak out about that either. There is a lot you don’t know about me, Jed.’

  ‘I’ll still love you whatever it is. But that doesn’t matter, does it, if you don’t love me? Truly love me? It’s all right. You’ve never actually said you do.’

  ‘I know you are lovable,’ he said softly. ‘I know you are incredibly precious to me.’

  ‘Nicholas, how did you lose your legs?’

  His gentleness vanished, like a blanket had been withdrawn. ‘Does it matter? This is who I am now! Can’t you take me for what I am? Just stop prying into my past . . .’

  He was trying to make himself angry, and
her angry too. Anger would get this over faster. But she wouldn’t let him. ‘The past matters. Don’t you think my baby matters?’

  The anger left him as if a balloon had been unknotted. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘Your baby matters.’

  ‘She’s part of who I am now. I think maybe your legs . . . what happened to your legs . . . matters too. If it didn’t matter, you’d have told me. If . . . if I’m not going to live with you, then you owe me that.’

  He was silent for a while. He really is thinking what he should tell me, she thought. In a strange way she felt closer to him than ever before, even while he was driving her away. This was the true Nicholas.

  ‘Are you sure you want to hear about it?’ he asked at last. ‘Because if I tell you, you’re going to have to live with it. It isn’t easily forgotten.’

  ‘I can cope. I want to know.’

  He stared at her, then nodded. ‘Fair enough.’

  Chapter 77

  NICHOLAS

  It was not much of a story. He knew about creating stories now, building up the tension so the reader wanted to keep turning the page, even if the only reader up to now was Jed.

  Dear Jed. Could she really cope with this? He looked at her, her eyes serious, watching him.

  Yes, Jed Kelly could cope with this. And she was right. She had given him the worst about herself, though only she could ever think she was to blame for what had happened. But there was no way of shifting the blame for his actions.

  He turned his wheelchair a little so he could watch the river as he told his story, not her. This small, this meaningless, this devastating story.

  A routine patrol, through a village. The smell of cooking, fish sauce and scorched rice. Kids peering from doorways, or crouching, standing still among the vegetable gardens. Women in straw hats watching them too. Some of the younger kids had been playing, so when something rolled towards him he thought it was a ball.