The Cloud Forest

by JH Fletcher

  The light through the doorway shone upon the tears running down his face and he was making the sound she had heard before, the rusty sound a person makes when they are hurt and lost and far from home.

  That emotionless man.

  JACQUI

  Beacons of hope, ye appear

  Matthew Arnold, Rugby Chapel

  JUDY SPEAKING …

  Neither Frances nor Arthur realised it at the time, but the decision to adopt their niece was to have huge significance, not only for the three of them but for the Cloud Forest as well. You could say that Jacqui’s arrival in Goorapilly was the first step in the drama that came close to visiting disaster on them all and that brought to a climax the dreams that had occupied the Mandate family for more than a century.

  By then I had arrived on the scene. Family reasons brought me.

  According to family legend, there had been Shaughnessys in Queensland since the 1850s when Wilma of that name — a hooker, no less — had travelled north from Sydney in the company of a bushranger named Schultz.

  Back in 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression, my grandfather Shaughnessy killed himself over the impossibility of making a go of the patch of desert that had been allocated to him by a grateful government as reward, or punishment, for having risked his life in the First World War.

  His wife and young son were left penniless. Grandma had no living relations. Pride prevented her going to her in-laws for help. Some of the Shaughnessys weren’t badly off and could have given her a hand, if they’d wished, but they never offered so much as a finger.

  My mother never forgave them for the hardship my father had suffered, and she refused to have anything to do with them.

  I thought I knew better. After she died, I had the sentimental notion that it would be nice to have members of my clan around me. I’d had a bust-up with my boyfriend and there was nothing to keep me in Brisbane. I knew there were Shaughnessys around Goorapilly so, when an opening came up at the local high school, I applied. I got the job and to Goorapilly I came. We would be a great big happy family, I thought.

  Joke. In true family tradition, the local Shaughnessys had no interest in helping or acknowledging me at all. I discovered something else. In Goorapilly the Shaughnessys were like weeds: cropping up everywhere and about as popular.

  It’s Warren’s fault, mostly. Warren the bulldozer. He knows what he wants out of life — power and wealth followed by more power and wealth — and goes head down to get it. Scruples are irrelevant, lies and promises the means for snatching what he wants from others and from life. Whatever it takes.

  Warren engenders two emotions in the people who have dealings with him: fear and hatred. Fear he values; being hated does not trouble him at all.

  Warren is my distant cousin, very distant. I knew his name and little else about him. Name apart, we had nothing in common. He saw himself as the Terror of the outback; I was a schoolteacher. Teachers, in this enlightened world where literacy is a joke, are, as everybody knows, short on pay and non-existent on clout. It didn’t take me long to find out what it meant to be an underpaid, cloutless Shaughnessy in Goorapilly.

  Not that anybody did anything. People were invariably polite: a starched courtesy that in its way was worse than hatred, because it left me with nothing to complain about. It wasn’t all bad. The town’s disapproval did me a favour because it made me stubborn. I had done nothing to these people and they were not going to drive me out. So I stuck in there and slowly things got better.

  First thing, I meet Frances Woodcock. It was by chance that I met her and it was the saving of me.

  I was mooching around the flea market one Saturday close to Christmas. It was as hot as Hades, but after close to a year I was still on the receiving end of the town’s unrelenting politeness so that even the tropical heat felt chilly to me.

  I was looking for a gift for a friend, not too expensive, and while Frances ferreted around for something suitable she chatted away about this and that. A woman in her mid-forties, her glasses made her eyes goggle like a frog’s. Even with the glasses, it was obvious she was half blind. Blind, it seemed, in more ways than one. She was friendly, a rare quality in my experience of Goorapilly. She obviously had no idea who I was. To avoid embarrassment, I thought I’d better introduce myself.

  ‘I’m Judy Shaughnessy,’ I said. ‘I teach at the high school.’

  ‘I know, dear.’ Frances spoke as though it were of absolutely no consequence. Her casual friendliness was so extraordinary that I found it hard to accept at face value. I was even tempted to say I was Warren’s sort-of cousin; might have done it, too, had I not been afraid she might think I was actually boasting of the connection. As it was, I kept my lip buttoned.

  She continued to fumble her way through bits and pieces of craftwork until she found what she was looking for: a concoction of bronzed leaves amid an intricate shaping of wood that conjured magic out of the sultry air.

  She handed it to me. ‘Is this the sort of thing you’re looking for?’

  I held it in my hand, feeling its weight and delicate structure, sensing the fantasy that the making of it had somehow created out of Frances’s mind and spirit.

  ‘That’s it exactly.’

  While she wrapped it for me I asked her where she’d found the wood.

  ‘I get most of my bits and pieces up the mountain.’

  A young girl came racing past, bent on some urgent errand, or mischief, of her own. A black boy of about her own age was with her. Frances called to her; she skidded to a stop and turned, and Frances introduced the girl as her niece.

  ‘This is Jacqui,’ Frances said. ‘And this is her friend John.’

  I liked Frances for that; lots of people — my cousin Warren among them — wouldn’t have bothered to introduce an Aboriginal boy.

  ‘How do you do?’ I said to the pair of them. They studied me with eyes that gave away nothing of what they were thinking, then, like twigs sucked suddenly into a turbulent stream, they were gone, not a word spoken by either of them, racing and chasing between the legs of the stallholders and customers.

  So for the first time I had met not only Frances but also Jacqui and her friend John Munda. A momentous occasion indeed. Not only were Jacqui and I, despite early differences, destined to become friends, but I had already begun to fall in love with Frances, gentle, lovely Frances, while Frances, bless her forever, was the means by which I met Arthur Mandale. Frances, Jacqui and Arthur: in different ways, I came to love them all. No one could have hoped to troll such treasure from one chance meeting at a flea market, where treasure is often promised but seldom found, but that was how things panned out.

  It also meant that later I, too, became involved in the unfolding drama of the Cloud Forest and the succession of events that evoked such fury within the little town where I had made my home. The drama was created principally by Frances’s stepson Harley and my cousin Warren.

  This, at least, was appropriate. It is hard to think of two men better qualified to be emissaries of desecration.

  TWENTY-SIX

  1

  Arthur’s warning to Jacqui to keep her beak out of his books lasted as long as it took her to learn to read. It was as well; to be brought up without books would have been like being raised in a house without windows. It was particularly important in a place like Goorapilly, far from centres of what you might call culture. One television commentator eventually had a major impact on the town but culture … Hardly.

  His reputation for book learning made a considerable difference to Arthur’s life. People might not read much themselves, but it was to those who did that they turned when they had a problem. Unless they could avoid it, no one with any sense went anywhere near Angelo Lupini, the local lawyer, and then only with their pockets buttoned. But Arthur … Never a week went by without the sound of boots on his verandah as someone dropped in to pass the time of day and, in so doing, to chat to him about whatever it was that had the caller in a spot.

 
Without looking to do so, Arthur had become a man of influence in the town. He was not alone; Warren Shaughnessy was another one, although in his case he looked for it all the time. Warren had an interest in the sugar mill and owned a string of buildings and businesses up and down the main street. The real estate agency was his and the stock yard and feed store out by the railway line. There was the tractor agency, the hardware store, two or three others, and collecting them into his horny hands had not made him an easy man.

  The Shaughnessy clan had a name for being bull-headed bastards and Warren was king bull of the herd. He fitted the part — a big man, hard in muscle, hard in heart, who looked as though he ate a deal of red meat. With a high colour, heavy neck and arms, little eyes as sharp as needles, he stalked through the town like an abattoir of other men’s dreams.

  One evening about dusk, Warren Shaughnessy set his boot heels on the boards of Arthur’s verandah for the first time. Unlike other people he came by appointment: he was too busy to drop in on the off-chance.

  The two men had never been friends but Arthur was not a man to ignore the normal courtesies. He poured them both a beer, they settled into the rockers and watched the evening sift down, warm and gentle, over the town. Lights were shining in the houses on the other side of the street. The occasional car drove past and a kookaburra upbraided the evening from the gum tree on the corner of Arthur’s property.

  ‘I hear that Mary-Ann Donoghue’s done a runner at last,’ Warren said. ‘Maybe she got tired of spreading it around here.’

  ‘Could be.’

  Arthur sipped his beer. Foamy suds ran down the inside of the glass as he put it down. Somewhere inside the house a floorboard creaked.

  ‘Suppose she reckoned there’d be more openings down the Gold Coast.’ The red face creased as Warren’s lips laughed. His eyes remained still and watchful, as always.

  ‘Could be.’

  The sharp eyes flickered in Arthur’s direction. ‘You ever …?’

  Arthur laughed quietly. ‘What would I be doing with a kid like that?’

  Warren shared the laugh, more loudly. ‘Same as the rest of us, I reckon.’

  Arthur shook his head. ‘Enough trouble without Mary-Ann.’

  ‘All the same, a man needs something to keep him warm o’ nights, eh.’

  ‘I manage fine,’ Arthur said and for a time neither of them spoke.

  ‘That filling station of yours,’ Warren said eventually. ‘Good position there, on the highway.’

  Arthur allowed that the position wasn’t bad.

  ‘Put some capital in, expand it a bit, reckon you’d have a regular gold mine.’

  ‘Reckon you could. Given the capital.’

  Warren’s little eyes creased. ‘Always cash available for a good venture.’

  ‘Something’s big enough for your needs,’ Arthur said, ‘don’t seem much sense getting bigger.’

  ‘Never knew a man yet turn down having extra cash in his pocket.’

  ‘Depends what you got to pay to get it. Being your own boss, that’s worth something.’

  ‘There’s a price for everything,’ Warren told him. ‘Business gets bigger, you gotta spend more time watching it.’ He laughed. ‘Or watching the bloke you put in to run it. There’s a price to pay if you don’t, too.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A business doesn’t realise its full potential, it leaves a gap in the market. Someone comes along to fill the gap, next thing you know there’s no business left.’

  Arthur watched the darkness for a while. ‘Man has to rely on his friends, I guess,’ he said finally.

  ‘Man has to look after himself. Especially a man with responsibilities.’ Warren’s voice sounded tight and angry, as though he’d stubbed his toe on an unexpected obstacle and didn’t much like it. He tipped the last of his beer down his throat. ‘That your last word, is it?’

  ‘Reckon it is,’ Arthur said.

  ‘That’s it then.’ The chair creaked as Warren stood up. ‘Ta for the beer.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Silence as Warren hesitated, as though expecting something more. Whatever it was, he didn’t get it. His boots bruised the floorboards as he crossed the verandah to the steps.

  ‘Catch you,’ Arthur said.

  Warren did not reply. His heels crunched the gravel. He was gone.

  A few minutes’ silence while Arthur remained slumped low in his chair, looking at nothing, with the empty glass in his hand. The screen door batted behind him and Jacqui came out to join him.

  ‘Arthur?’

  His teeth gleamed in the darkness as he smiled at her. ‘How ya doin’, sweetheart?’

  ‘What did Mr Shaughnessy want?’

  ‘Thought I heard someone’s ears flapping back there,’ he said. ‘Something that isn’t his, that’s what Mr Shaughnessy wants.’

  ‘Will he get it?’

  ‘He’ll give it a full go, you can bet on that.’

  Still he sat, while the darkness whined about them.

  ‘You’d best come inside,’ Jacqui told him. ‘The mozzies will eat you up, else.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  But still he didn’t move, while his eyes continued to watch the empty street.

  ‘You want another beer?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘What did Mr Shaughnessy mean when he said that about Mary-Ann?’

  Arthur came back from a great way off. ‘What?’

  ‘About her spreading it around the town? Spreading what?’

  His lips twitched. ‘Little jugs, big ears.’

  ‘But what did he mean?’

  It took Arthur a while to work out his answer. ‘Mary-Ann was a very popular girl. She had a lot of friends.’

  Jacqui shook her head. ‘I never heard anyone with a good word to say for her. I was just wondering whether she’d got a job with Mr Shaughnessy at his fertiliser plant. Putting fertiliser on his land, maybe?’

  Arthur’s lips were squinched tight. ‘Fertiliser?’ he said. ‘Might have been something of the sort, at that.’ He flapped at the air by his ear. ‘Reckon you were right about the mozzies. Let’s get inside.’

  But Jacqui hadn’t finished. Back in the living room, she asked: ‘Will Mary-Ann be coming back?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Can’t be very nice for her parents. Won’t they miss her?’

  ‘I doubt Sid Donoghue ever missed anyone in his life.’

  Her father spent most of his time in the bar of the Imperial Hotel. He was big, with broken hands and dirt around his neck. Mary-Ann had often gone to school with marks on her face; his wife, too, when she went to the shops to spend what little money he allowed her. Sid Donoghue was a horrible man.

  ‘Do you think that’s why Mary-Ann left?’ Jacqui wondered. ‘Because of her father?’

  Arthur sighed. ‘What I think is we shouldn’t talk about it any more.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s none of our business.’

  ‘Even when Sid Donoghue belts his family —’

  ‘Jacqui!’ Arthur’s voice was stern.

  She pouted rebelliously. ‘It’s not fair!’

  ‘A lot of life isn’t. Including the fact that today is the last day of the holidays and you’ve got to get yourself ready for school in the morning.’

  His logic was irrefutable, even if it had nothing to do with Mary-Ann Donoghue. Jacqui headed for the door. At the last, with her hand on the knob, she turned back to look at him.

  ‘If I took off, would you miss me?’

  Arthur, settling into his chair, hand already reaching for his book, smiled at her. ‘Very much,’ he said.

  2

  Jacqui didn’t notice Brett until the first break.

  She’d been late — getting up had never been one of her greatest talents — and had barely had time to greet even her friends before they were herded inside for the first session of the term.

  Mrs Harker was their teacher. She as
ked them all to tell her what they had been doing during the holidays. It wasn’t too bad; they knew she was really interested and wasn’t asking because she had to, or anything like that. The session passed quickly and in no time they were outside again in the sunshine. That was when Jacqui saw Brett.

  She was amazed she hadn’t noticed him before: he was so big, easily the biggest boy in the class. She didn’t know who he was, but she soon found out.

  Brett was a big lout, and big louts were like magnets, drawing all the rubbish to them. Certainly some of the boys congregated around him fell into that category. There was Magnus Clark, for one. He was a weedy little runt; Jacqui had zapped him good at the end of last term over something he’d said.

  She could see Brett loved the attention but they had nothing to say to each other at that stage, so they didn’t. Someone must have told him something about her, though, because at the next interval he came looking for her.

  ‘My uncle was talking with your dad last night,’ he said.

  ‘He must be clever to do that.’

  He scowled suspiciously. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘My father’s been dead for years.’

  ‘Who’s that bloke you stay with, then?’

  ‘Arthur Mandale’s my uncle,’ she told him, very la-di-dah.

  ‘That right? Well, he was talking to him, then.’

  ‘Arthur speaks to a lot of people.’

  ‘So does my uncle.’ His voice was fat and boastful. ‘Breaks them, too.’

  She looked him up and down. ‘Better make sure he doesn’t break you, then. Who is this famous uncle of yours? Someone who wants Arthur to lend him some money? Because, I warn you, if that is what he wants —’