The Cloud Forest

by JH Fletcher

  ‘Warren Shaughnessy.’

  Jacqui stared at him. It figured: bully for uncle, bully for nephew.

  ‘You’re not from round here,’ she said. ‘What have you got to do with Warren Shaughnessy?’

  ‘We’re from out west. My dad’s a miner.’

  He even managed to sound boastful about that.

  ‘Not much mining in Goorapilly.’

  ‘He’ll find something. He always does.’ He grinned at her; nasty grin he had, too. ‘I hear you’re tough. For a girl.’

  She tried to work out what he wanted. He seemed to be looking for a fight but it couldn’t be that. Jacqui had indeed been pretty tough when she was seven or even eight, but now she was nine and so was Brett. And Brett was ginormous. She’d have to be crazy to get into a fight with him. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t want one, either: what would his mates say if he started fighting girls?

  She decided he was trying to scare her. Fat chance.

  ‘I am tough. You’d better believe it.’

  ‘So’m I.’ The grin was wider now.

  ‘I’m smart, too. That’s where I score over lunks like you.’

  His eyes grew spiteful. ‘I heard some old woman say you’re a foundling.’

  She wouldn’t have known what a foundling was if one had bitten her on the nose. ‘That’s a lie!’

  ‘They say you were washed up on the beach.’

  She jerked up her chin at him. ‘At least Arthur decided to keep me, then. If I’d been ugly like you, reckon he’d have chucked me back, eh.’

  She was gambling he wouldn’t thump her in front of all the others, and she was right. He didn’t like it, though. She watched his scowl as they went back inside again and knew her stupid mouth had got her into trouble again. Brett had wanted to scare her and it hadn’t worked; now he owed it to himself to do something about it.

  When they got out of school at three o’clock, Kyle went off with some of his mates. He would have hung around had Jacqui asked him, but she didn’t. She wanted no one, not even Kyle, to think that Brett Shaughnessy had her worried.

  She walked home by herself and Brett Shaughnessy followed her. He was only a metre or two behind her as they turned into the alleyway that made a short cut from the school to Gallipoli Street.

  ‘Jacqueline …’ He crooned her name as though it were the most stupid name on earth. ‘Jacqueline Gaddy …’

  She neither looked back nor walked faster; well, not much faster. She could hear him behind her, the great oaf, could feel him grinning at her back.

  ‘Jacqueline …’

  He wanted her to run, cry, do anything to show she was scared of him. He wanted her to acknowledge his authority over her.

  She would not do it. She wanted to run; she felt close to crying; she was very scared of him, indeed, and unsure how far he’d go to make his point, but she would not, would not, would not give him the satisfaction of seeing any of these things.

  She walked along, her heart going hoppity-skip, but Brett couldn’t see that. She forced herself to hum a little, as though she didn’t have a care in the world, with her head held high and the little suitcase containing her school books swinging in her hand. She even managed a smile. Brett couldn’t see her smile, being behind her, but she hoped he might feel it, just as she could feel him without seeing him.

  There was a sudden slap of bare feet on the pathway. She couldn’t help it: she flinched. She thought he was running straight at her but he went on past and never even brushed her arm.

  She watched him suspiciously. She did not believe that he was going to give up as easily as that. Sure enough, where the path narrowed just before it reached Gallipoli Street, he paused. The path was no more than two metres wide at that point, with a brick wall on either side of it. Brett lounged with one shoulder against the wall, grinning at her as she walked towards him.

  Jacqui saw that she had two choices. She could turn tail and run. It was what he wanted; what she wanted. The alternative was to keep on walking. She didn’t think he would try anything but she didn’t know him well enough to be sure. If he was mad enough, she thought, he might try anything.

  Somebody come, she prayed.

  Nobody came. She kept on walking until she came up to him. She went to walk past him. At the last moment he moved, coming off the wall to block the path, still with that nasty grin all over his face. She didn’t know what he had in mind, nor did she wait to find out. She swung her case horizontally at his face and the hard edge caught him a good one just above his left eye.

  Pow!

  Brett reeled back, hands clutching his face. Jacqui ran.

  3

  That evening Luke Shaughnessy, face like a storm cloud, marched around to see Arthur. That was one occasion when Jacqui did not dare eavesdrop, so she did not know what they said to each other. After Luke had gone, Arthur came looking for her.

  She wasn’t feeling very good about what had happened. Brett had scared her with his stupid nonsense. The fright had come out when she thumped him, and she’d hit him a lot harder than she’d intended. She was afraid she’d done Brett real damage. If she had, would his father sue her? Would Brett wait to get his own back? What would Arthur have to say?

  When Arthur found her she was in her room pretending to read a book.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  Jacqui made a symphony concert out of concentrating on the book. Carefully she turned the page. Arthur reached out a hand and took the book away from her.

  ‘I’ve heard Brett’s father,’ he said. ‘Now it’s your turn.’

  That was a good thing about Arthur, he was always willing to hear both sides.

  ‘Brett and me, we had a fight.’

  ‘His father says he’s got a lump over his eye the size of a coconut.’

  ‘I hit him with my case.’

  ‘Why?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Where did it happen? Outside school?’

  ‘In the slipway by Mrs Ellis’s house.’

  Arthur frowned. ‘But that’s just around the corner. The Shaughnessys are staying on the other side of town. What was he doing outside Mrs Ellis’s?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Was he following you?’

  ‘Heading this way, maybe.’

  ‘Did he say anything to you?’

  ‘Just my name. While we were coming along. Jacqueline … Jacqueline Gaddy …’ She imitated how it had sounded. ‘He made it sound real yucky.’

  She could see that Arthur was lost. ‘Why should he be doing that?’

  Grown-ups didn’t understand how it was with kids. She did her best to explain.

  ‘What’s a foundling?’

  His face changed. ‘A foundling is a child who’s been abandoned. Did Brett Shaughnessy call you that?’

  ‘I didn’t care,’ she said.

  ‘If you didn’t know what it meant, I don’t suppose you did.’

  That was wrong, too. You didn’t always need to know what something meant; sometimes the way it sounded was enough. But she said nothing. She felt a bit sorry for Arthur, trying to understand and not having a clue. But perhaps he understood more than he’d let on.

  ‘And then he followed you home and cornered you in the slipway. And you belted him with your case.’

  Statements, not questions.

  He looked troubled. ‘Maybe I should have a word with Brett’s father …’

  ‘Leave it! Please?’ Jacqui was horrified. She didn’t want Brett to know how scared she’d been. She’d told him she was tough; now, with a bit of luck, he might even believe it. But if Arthur took it further, Brett would know she’d been frightened, after all. Then he’d have her, for sure. ‘Please leave it.’

  He looked doubtful. ‘If you’re sure …’

  ‘Oh yes. Please. Thank you,’ she said, with more enthusiasm than coherence.

  She could see his relief — Arthur would never be a man for confrontation. At the door, he paused. ‘Jacqui, you know you’re not
a foundling, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh sure, I know that.’ She beamed at him. ‘I don’t care anyway.’

  It was true. It was strange how little it mattered, after all.

  4

  Warren Shaughnessy didn’t come to the house again but three months later another service station opened on the highway on the far side of town from Arthur’s garage. It had a forecourt twice as large and sold a range of holiday junk — visored caps, postcards of naked women, little toys that were supposed to amuse kids on long journeys but whose buzz-saw racket reduced adults to thoughts of murder within five kilometres.

  Arthur detected no significant fall-off in business.

  ‘The area’s growing,’ he told Frances and Jacqui. ‘We’d have been hard pressed to handle all the trade if Warren hadn’t opened up down the road.’

  5

  At the end of a hot and sultry afternoon, while lightning flickered in a sky dark with storm clouds and the residue of trash fires sent smuts swirling above the town, Harley Woodcock cleared his desk in his airconditioned suite in Goorapilly’s main street. He locked the door of his private office behind him and strode through the front room and down the corridor to the side entrance of the building. He did not bother to say goodnight to Amanda, who was sitting at the word processor and attempting to make sense out of one of Harley’s barely decipherable notes. Harley would no more have said tooroo to her than to the chair she was sitting on. She was paid to work; let her get on with it.

  The sultry day laid its blanket weight upon him as he went out of the building and across the patch of open ground to where he parked his car. The humidity raised prickles of sweat on a body that he should, he told himself for the thousandth time, exercise into some semblance of fitness.

  Harley was only forty-six yet there were days when he felt closer to sixty. Time to get a grip, he told himself, but knew he never would. His excuse was that he didn’t have the time; the truth was that he couldn’t be bothered, as with everything that did not relate to the making of money.

  Money was what mattered. Only that. With it, you had power, esteem, a chance to get back at a world that all his life he had regarded as an enemy. Without it, you had nothing.

  He unlocked the door of his car, got in and switched on the engine, eager for the airconditioner to quench the clammy heat. Like most people he hated this weather but in his case the resentment was deep-rooted and personal.

  He put the car into gear and drove out of the car park. As he did so the rain began. Within seconds it was pouring down, the wipers barely able to cope. Traffic groped down the main street. The shadows of pedestrians, already drenched, fled for shelter or plodded with morose resignation, heads hunched against the downpour. The headlights of cars and trucks threw gutters of flickering light on the bitumen ahead of them. Nose almost touching the windscreen, Harley cursed the rain as he inched his way along. At this rate he would be late for his meeting but there was no help for it; in these conditions, fast driving would have been lunacy.

  He lived in an area of an arid continent where the rainfall was, if anything, excessive. He knew, as everyone did, that it was essential to their survival. Without it, the cane industry upon which all else depended could not exist. Other people moaned but put up with it; for Harley, it was another thing to hate: for the almost obsessive nature of the cloudbursts that fell with such ferocity, the all-pervasive humidity that furred shoes and clothes with mould; above all because it had been the cause of his mother’s death.

  When Harley was twelve, his mother had died in a car crash that the cops claimed had been caused by her driving too fast on a back road made treacherous by heavy rain. The report said she had lost control on a bend that had seen many accidents and ploughed head-on into a truck coming in the opposite direction. Harley had never believed a word of it. The bloody cops had been bribed by the company that owned the truck, that was what it was, but there had never been any chance of proving it. Of course it had been his mother’s fault, too: if she hadn’t chosen to use a road completely unsuited to the conditions, she would be alive today. It made him resent her as well, as he did his father for having failed to lay the blame for the accident where it rightly belonged.

  He had other, more potent, reasons for resenting his father. After his mother’s death, Harley had assumed that the two of them would make a team against the world, but it hadn’t worked out like that. Eight years later — when Jock was nearly sixty, for God’s sake — he had brought home a bride only a year older than his own son. Disgusting. Harley had never forgiven him for it, or the woman who had tried to usurp his rightful place.

  She had tried to soft-talk him into accepting her but he never had. When he discovered that his father had set up a trust fund for her he had been furious: the money should rightfully have been his own. What did bloody Frances need it for? She was young enough to earn her own living, whereas Harley was up to his ears in property development and needed all the capital he could get.

  At least he’d been able to put a stop to the Old Man’s plans for the house. It had been in his mother’s family. His father had told him that she had wanted it to be left to Harley eventually; yet, after he’d been diagnosed with the cancer that was to kill him twelve months later, the old man had had the cheek to tell him that he was planning to leave Frances a life interest in the property, with it coming to Harley only after her death.

  ‘I don’t like to think of her without a roof over her head,’ he had explained, the brick-red face sunken now.

  Luckily his willpower had also been corroded by the disease working within him; in the old days Harley would never have been able to change his mind for him. Cancer was a great leveller, fortunately, and this time it hadn’t taken him long to talk Jock round.

  ‘She’s hardly any older than I am, Dad. She may even outlive me. That would mean I would never get the house. And that was what Mum wanted, you told me so yourself. I mean, if Frances has a life interest, she may decide to move back to Sydney, remarry, anything. Bring in a tenant, live off the proceeds. If that’s what you really want, go ahead, but I don’t think Mum would have been too delighted …’

  Easy, really.

  ‘But you will let her stay in the house as long as she wants?’

  He couldn’t see what Frances had done to deserve it but it was easier not to argue. Some promises, let’s face it, were meant to be broken.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Dad.’

  He hadn’t done anything to kick her out either: not yet. It was enough to know that he could. There was no way he would let her stay forever, of course, whatever he had told his dad. He’d sent her a letter to say so, only a week or two ago. Of course that had only been his way of placing her on notice, keeping her on the hop. He had no immediate plans to do anything about it, provided he got the results he expected from the meeting he was going to now. If he didn’t …

  That would be another story.

  He saw the road and turned right on to gravel. There was a bridge across the creek. It had no parapet but fortunately he knew the road well and was able to inch across without drama. Beneath the timber planking he caught a glimpse of yellow flood waters raging below him, then he was safely over and they were gone. Now the gum trees grew close, their silhouettes grey with rain. He speeded up a little; with luck he wouldn’t be too late.

  The meeting was important. He had just about finished his developments further south. Now he wanted to turn his attention to this part of the world. The Gold Coast had become too crowded. Expensive, too: it was getting increasingly difficult to hold your own against the big boys. Up here things were a lot easier. With the tourist trade in the state it was, he should be able to get in on the ground floor. Tourism was certain to revive, in time. North Queensland would be a prime area, once the right infrastructure was in place. Play his cards right and he might become Mr Big. He knew, better than most, what a huge world was waiting out there and he wanted a slice of it. Correction: he wanted it all.

 
; He had seen long ago that Canberra was the way to go. Get into federal parliament, establish links with the real movers and shakers of the nation, there was no saying where he might end up. But only if he had enough financial muscle behind him. Oh yes, he had plans for Goorapilly, no error.

  He saw the entrance to Warren’s spread loom out of the deluge. Just in time he managed to spin the wheel. Tyres slipping on the waterlogged gravel — careful! — he half drove, half skidded between the massive entrance pillars on either side of the driveway.

  He could see the lights of the house when he was still a hundred metres away. Palatial was the word for Warren’s place. Well, why not? No sense owning half the businesses in town — more than half — if you couldn’t afford to spend some of the loot on yourself.

  Harley was determined he would have an even bigger place, eventually. People respected what they could see: big house, expensive cars, beautiful women … All these things, in time. Then the world would look up to him, sure enough.

  Not that he planned to say as much to Warren Shaughnessy.

  All three sets of garage doors were closed; even the covered area in front of the front door was taken by Warren’s Range Rover. Harley was here by appointment; given the storm, most people would have made sure their visitor had somewhere to park out of the rain, but Warren Shaughnessy thought consideration for others a weakness.

  One day the tables would be turned but, for the moment, there was nothing Harley could do about it. He parked the car as close to the house as he could. If it meant he was blocking the driveway that ran around the side of the house, tough. Warren wasn’t the only one who could ignore the interests of others. He grabbed his briefcase, clambered out into the driving rain and ran hunch-shouldered for the front door.

  It was only ten metres yet, by the time he got there, he was soaked. At least the door was open; Warren stood there, grinning, enjoying the spectacle of his visitor floundering towards him through the storm.

  ‘Nice weather you’ve brought with you.’

  He closed the door while Harley leaked puddles onto the Italian tiles of the entrance hall.