The Cloud Forest

by JH Fletcher

  ‘Of course not!’ How snooty could you look? Her fingers and toes were crossed but with any luck he couldn’t see them. ‘I just wanted you to know what I thought. What I want.’

  Arthur had a crooked smile sometimes. ‘Just wondering,’ he said.

  8

  Six months later, Arthur Mandale and Judith Shaughnessy were married in the Goorapilly Catholic church. It was 21 June, the shortest day of the year, which also made it the longest night. Of course there were a lot of ribald remarks about that.

  Everyone in town, it seemed, came along. Bernie Young was best man. He told Father Weekes it was the first time he’d been inside a church in twenty-five years and seemed surprised when the father was less than impressed by the news.

  Warren Shaughnessy was there, big shoulders and avaricious smile, eyeing whom he might buy up next. Fat old Pat Lucas, the previous shire chairman, came along with his wife. She weighed in at two hundred and twenty pounds, all of it concealed in a confection of multicoloured Indian silks that made her look as sweet and tasty as a SQCDMKG.

  The food was good, too. There was cake and sausage rolls and sandwiches. There was ice cream in great tubs.

  All in all, Jacqui thought, it was a very satisfactory afternoon.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  1

  After the froth and exitement of the wedding came a period of adjustment, flat as flat, with Jacqui left very much to her own devices. At first it didn’t seem too bad; she had always been proud of her independence, how she and Arthur respected each other’s space, and she still had her special friends Emily Hardcastle and Kyle Sweet.

  Then Emily, precocious in all things and a year older than Jacqui to begin with, chose now, of all times, to become boy conscious and drifted away into a world of sexual fantasy where Jacqui was not yet ready to follow her. No sooner had that happened than Kyle’s father had a yelling match with Warren Shaughnessy over promises made and never honoured and the next thing they had gone, too, blown away on the wind of Mr Sweet’s fury.

  Jacqui rediscovered how it felt to be alone. Frances, bat-blind yet seeing with absolute clarity the hurts of those she cared about, did what she could; but Frances was living in her own house now and wasn’t always there when Jacqui needed her.

  Jacqui mooched and thought dark thoughts about stepmothers. Then, one Friday afternoon, Frances came up with a suggestion.

  ‘Betty and I are going up the mountain tomorrow to get stuff for the stall. I wondered if you’d like to come.’

  ‘Into the Cloud Forest?’

  Frances laughed. ‘Not as far as that. But you might still find it interesting.’

  It would be something to do, anyway.

  ‘I could come, if you want me to.’

  Not the most gracious of acceptances, but Frances smiled. ‘That’ll be nice.’

  Betty Ngaro lived in the settlement on the other side of the creek. Jacqui had always known it was there but had never gone into the area of shanties and stripped cars where the Aborigines lived. On the other hand she, like everyone else in Goorapilly, had seen some of the men lurching drunkenly about the town; unhappily, there was nothing unfamiliar about that sight, or in the occasional individual lying unconscious by the roadside on the outskirts of town. There were others who worked in the mill or for the council and behaved like everybody else, but it was the drunks who stayed in people’s minds. It wasn’t fair — no one thought all whites were drunks just because Sid Donoghue was — but that was the way things were, and there were those who thought, and said, that the settlement should be cleared out once and for all, before things got out of hand.

  ‘Whatever that is supposed to mean,’ Frances said acidly.

  Jeff Toms drove them out to the foot of the mountain in his old rattletrap. He dropped them at the foot of the track that meandered uphill through a paddock of threadbare grass and into the trees.

  ‘Sure you won’t come with us?’ Frances asked Jeff through the open window of the ute.

  ‘Reckon I won’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll pick you up at the usual time, though.’

  And chuntered on down the track in a diminishing cloud of blue exhaust smoke.

  ‘He never comes,’ Frances confided to Jacqui, ‘but I wouldn’t like him to think he wasn’t welcome.’

  Jeff Toms was a sad case. Like many others who had gone with the army to Vietnam, the man who came back was different from the one who’d left and people thought Jeff strange. Like the Aborigines, he lived on the edge of the community and there were those who thought, and said, that he too should be cleared out in the great purging that would restore the town of Goorapilly to how it should be.

  ‘Such nonsense!’ Frances said. ‘As though Goorapilly was ever more than a frontier town! You’d think they would welcome people who were different.’

  But they didn’t; as in most places, conformity was valued above all things: most people who lived on the edge of the emptiness were intensely conservative. It was an attitude that provided a barrier behind which to hide from the desert, and themselves.

  The women and the child went up the track into the forest. Differences of colour and appearance — above all, the mystery surrounding someone who was different — stood in the way of Jacqui seeing Betty as someone like herself, but the awkwardness didn’t last long. It was amazing how quickly differences disappeared when you came face to face with the other person’s absolute normality.

  They had a good time up on the mountain, the two adults digging and poking about for herbs, bits of branch, multicoloured fungi, laughing and yakking to each other, while Jacqui went exploring. More than ever was she conscious of the mountain’s mass rising all round her in its mystery and silence. She didn’t find a yeti but she did see two wallabies who blended so well into the shadows that she didn’t know they were there until they jumped out under her feet. Made her jump, too, while they were about it: almost out of her skin.

  They weren’t up the mountain long but it was fun and, when they got back and found Jeff and his ute waiting for them as arranged, the three of them were like old friends together.

  They went back to Frances’s house with its vast overgrown garden. The two ladies got on with the job of manufacturing their display pieces for the market. Jacqui offered to give them a hand but really only got in the way. After a while Frances gave her a glass of homemade lemonade and sent her out into the garden to amuse herself.

  ‘You have a care,’ Betty told her. ‘There could be crocs down in the creek.’

  It didn’t seem likely. After months without rain, Roper’s Creek was mostly dry, with isolated pools, greeny-black and hung about by veils of mosquitoes and little stinging flies, set at intervals along a bed of pale sand. All the same, the idea that there might be crocodiles added spice to the afternoon, turning what might otherwise have been ordinary, even boring, into an expedition of infinite possibilities.

  Apart from the matter of crocodiles, she was glad to get out of the house. The day was still and full of sun and heat and the air indoors had started to close around her so that she felt she could hardly breathe. It didn’t seem to affect the two women who were as lively as two joeys on the loose, but Jacqui was glad to escape from the grown-up laughter that somehow shut her out, even when it did not intend to do so.

  She walked through the overgrown garden, the grass that in places rose higher than her head. All around was stillness and a raucous chorus of unseen insects. Somewhere in the distance a screech of cockatoos gave the world what for. She followed the slope down through the mysterious wonderland of towering grasses towards the trees that lined both banks of the creek.

  She was careful to watch the ground in front of her as she walked; there would be snakes down here. Tread on a taipan or king brown and you wouldn’t need to worry about crocodiles. She came out of the grass into a patch of open ground. The creek was right in front of her — dried into a series of stagnant pools, as she had suspected — and she saw a boy watching her from the trees.

&
nbsp; For a moment Jacqui was not sure what she was seeing: the figure as brown and motionless as the trees lining the creek banks. Then he moved, a band of sunlight shone yellow across his face and she recognised him at once.

  ‘John,’ she said. ‘John Munda.’

  Betty Ngaro’s nephew. Probably that was why he was here, because his auntie was up at the house.

  He came towards her, long-legged as a heron, walking without sound across the ribbon of pale yellow sand, dry now, that during the wet would form the bed of the creek.

  ‘I never seen you here before.’

  ‘It’s my aunt’s place,’ she told him. ‘Do you come here often?’

  ‘My auntie’s up at the house with her.’

  ‘I know. We’ve been up the mountain.’

  ‘They’re always doing that,’ he said and grinned. ‘Two aunties together.’

  ‘Your aunt said there might be crocodiles down here,’ she told him.

  ‘She’s always fussing.’

  Jacqui was conscious of her arms and legs, her white feet inside her shoes, and thought how much nicer it must feel to be black and barefoot, wearing only a raggedy pair of shorts under the sun that shone impartially on the pair of them.

  ‘I’m going for a hike up the creek,’ John said. ‘You can come if you like.’

  She followed him along the creek bed. It was strange to see him moving so silently and effortlessly from patch to patch of shadow as though he, too, were part of the darkness that embraced them now they were beneath the trees. It was cooler here, the mosquitoes not as bad as she had expected, and the brilliant jungle of Frances’s neglected garden cut out any hint of that other world in which she normally lived. She felt she had moved into a remoteness not only of space but of time, so that by moving through the shadows of the dried-up creek she had travelled to the distant past where all things had been different, all things new.

  Eventually, after what seemed a long time, John stopped in a clearing where the sunlight, pouring down between the trees, turned the parched grass as yellow as gold.

  ‘I come here all the time,’ he said. ‘This is my corroboree ground.’

  She thought he had done her a great honour by bringing her to such a place.

  ‘Do they really hold corroborees here?’

  ‘It’s only pretend. I pretend I’m a great warrior and I dance the deaths of all my enemies.’ And he took two dance-like steps, crouching and scowling most fiercely, before slapping with hollow palms on his bent knees. Then he looked up and uttered a sharp cry, sudden and ferocious:

  ‘Ah ha! Ah ha!’

  Jacqui watched. In another place it might have been embarrassing to see a boy who she thought was probably a year younger than herself going through such a performance but here, amid the stillness, it seemed not only right but mysterious and important.

  John straightened. ‘You can do it, too, if you like.’

  ‘What was that shout you made?’ She tried to imitate what she had heard, but it didn’t come out right at all. ‘Er … rer. Er … rer.’ The sound sagged feebly. Hopeless.

  ‘That’s my war cry.’ And did it again, his voice sharp and clear, puncturing the stillness of trees and shadows. ‘Ah ha! Ah ha!’

  ‘Aren’t men and women things supposed to be done separately?’ She didn’t know much about Aboriginal customs but was sure she’d read that somewhere.

  ‘That’s when it’s done for real,’ John said carelessly. ‘This here’s only pretend, so it’s okay. You can be a warrior, too, if you like,’ he offered generously.

  Jacqui was wearing shoes and a T-shirt as well as her shorts. She took the shirt and shoes off. Her white skin shouted at the shadows, the downpouring of golden light. The bare patch of ground on which she was standing felt warm beneath her feet, the dust as thick as cream.

  ‘You do it like this,’ John said, and demonstrated. Jacqui watched, then tried to copy him. He indeed looked like a small warrior, legs purposeful, feet punishing the hard and dusty ground; Jacqui hopped and scrambled like a panicky chook.

  ‘I’m hopeless,’ she said sadly.

  ‘You’ve never done it before.’

  It was nice of him to say so.

  ‘I’d better get back,’ she said. ‘They’ll be wondering where I am.’

  ‘If you wanner come again …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m here most Saturdays,’ he said casually, in a voice that said take it or leave it.

  She walked back by herself. On the edge of the corroboree ground she turned. John was standing as she had left him, his dark body one with the shadows. Just as he might have stood a million years before, she thought. The silence, the golden pool of sunlight, the poised darkness of trees and boy combined to give her a feeling that she knew would remain with her forever.

  She raised her arm to wave to him. For a moment she thought he was not going to acknowledge her, then his body moved into the two or three steps of the warrior’s dance and she heard once again, faintly through the sunlight, the ferocious sound of his battle cry.

  ‘Ah ha! Ah ha!’

  2

  Two weeks later, Frances and Betty once again making their pilgrimage up the mountain into the forest, Jacqui went with them. This time John came too. To start off he was a bit awkward, one boy among three females, but as soon as he and Jacqui went off together it was all right.

  For the last two weeks they had seen each other every day at school and she, at least, had observed him with new eyes, yet they had passed each other with shuttered faces, as though each had been made of air. The previous Saturday she had intended going down to the creek to see if he was there but Judy had dragged her off to see some friends who lived fifty kilometres away and by the time they’d got back it had been dark.

  Now she and John were together again and everything was all right between them once more. They danced the warriors’ dance, prancing about, stamping the ground and shrieking together until the dance turned by degrees into a pursuit with each chasing the other through the undergrowth while the silent canopy threw a blanket of silence over their clamorous excitement.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’ Frances asked when they got back.

  ‘Yes,’ Jacqui said. ‘We did.’

  3

  The following week Jacqui talked first Judy, then Frances and finally Betty into allowing the two of them to take a picnic lunch up the mountain together.

  ‘Don’ you go gettin’ lost, now,’ Betty warned them. ‘Don’t do no stupid things. No fires. Keep away from cliffs …’

  ‘I want to see you back here by four o’clock,’ Frances said. ‘No later.’

  ‘They won’t be late,’ Judy said. Betty in particular seemed unconvinced but Judy smiled at both children. ‘They know we won’t let them do it again if they are.’

  It was a nice way of warning them but a warning it was, nonetheless.

  ‘We don’t have a watch,’ Jacqui objected.

  ‘That’s easily fixed.’ And Judy lent them her own, not the smart gold one Arthur had given her when they got married but the cheap Japanese digital she wore to school during the week.

  Judy ran them to the beginning of the path and they set out together, across the paddock and into the trees.

  They went up and up. No fooling around now; no warriors’ dances, real or pretend; no squealing pursuits through the undergrowth. They had made up their minds. They were going up into the Cloud Forest.

  They never got there. It was further than they’d expected. Harder going, too. The slope was steep and it was difficult to make their way through the jumble of boulders and trees, the mosses, ferns and tumbling streams. There were no paths and, if they were following in the footsteps of the boy who had climbed this way over a century before, there was no way of knowing it. John’s ancestors had probably explored all over this land but of them, too, there was no trace. Jacqui and John might have been the first people ever to have pushed their way through the forest to the upper slopes of the mo
untain.

  As they climbed higher, the vegetation began to change from the tropical growth of the lower slopes to a world of ferns and dampness. They saw birds; once they heard what might have been the thump, thump of fleeing kangaroos, but the thick ground cover made it impossible to be sure.

  They reached the top of a cliff that fell vertically into swimming depths of green and blue haze, with the treetops little more than a blur of heat and silence far below them. There were streams and cascades, silvery in the green light, and the noise of the falling water enhanced rather than diminished the brooding silence that lay over all.

  By the middle of the afternoon they had eaten the food they had brought with them and drunk the Coke. Jacqui wasn’t particularly hungry and thirst was never going to be a problem with streams flowing everywhere between the rocks, but time was against them.

  For the hundredth time, she checked Judy’s watch. ‘We’ll never make it to the top. Not and get back by four o’clock.’

  ‘So what if we are late?’ said John.

  ‘They’ll skin us alive, that’s why.’

  More important than that, she knew that Judy would keep her word: be seriously late and this expedition would be their last. She no longer resented Judy or told herself she hated her but there was no messing with her; four o’clock she’d said and four o’clock she’d meant.

  ‘We’d better go back.’

  Black looks from John but Jacqui went anyway, with him grumbling behind.

  ‘Just like a girl …’

  It made her mad. ‘You be quiet, John Munda! I’ve had a good time. I want to do it again. Maybe, now we know the way, we’ll be able to get higher next time, even to the top, maybe. But if we muck up now, there won’t be a next time. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  But sulkily, as though time and female logic were twin burdens that no man should be expected to carry.

  Halfway down the mountain, John pointed off to their left. ‘There’s a cave …’