The Cloud Forest

by JH Fletcher

  Arthur was right, she thought. Of course he was. What could they do, after all?

  So why did she feel this sense of betrayal?

  6

  ‘The sleepy North Queensland town of Goorapilly is making news tonight, on two counts.’ The television commentator’s teeth would have put a concert grand to shame. ‘For over a hundred years the town of Goorapilly — situated between the mountains and the Coral Sea — has been the centre of the local sugar trade.’

  The camera panned to bring to the viewers a vista of sugar cane stretching, it seemed, forever. Back to the teeth.

  ‘Now all that has changed. Goorapilly is set to step onto the stage of international eco-tourism. With me now,’ the commentator spoke in the solemn voice of one confiding momentous secrets, ‘is the chairman of the local shire, the man whose vision of the future has been firmly behind this daring project from the first.’

  The camera pulled back to reveal Warren Shaughnessy. His grin might be unable to compete with the commentator’s gnashers but his boulder-like chin threatened susceptible viewers most delightfully.

  ‘Councillor Shaughnessy, tell our viewers about the inspiration that lies behind Rainforest Rendezvous.’

  ‘Cash,’ Judy said. ‘That’s what lies behind it. Enough to make you puke.’

  ‘You want to turn it off?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘Yes. No. Oh God. I suppose we’d better hear the worst.’

  Yet she could not bear to listen properly and shut out most of it, picking up a phrase here and there, like someone reading a book only because she believes she should.

  Jobs … Opportunity … Knowledge …

  Enough to make you puke, indeed. And then …

  Warren aimed his grin at the commentator, tooth to tooth, like a graveyard of slaughtered elephants. ‘I am very proud to be able to announce to your viewers tonight that Josh Richards, spokesman for the local Aboriginal community, has given the project his full support.’

  Judy turned to stare open-mouthed at Arthur, her display of ivory less imposing than some, perhaps, but still quite impressive. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

  The commentator was cross. He hated his thunder being stolen by anyone but made the most of it, using the mention of Josh Richards to move smoothly to the second item on his agenda.

  ‘Now, tell us about the exciting discovery that has been made recently on the mountain behind the town …’

  7

  First thing in the morning the house in Gallipoli Street was always quiet. Never silent — always there were the creaks and susurrations of a wooden house warming little by little to the coming of the dawn, the conversations and squabbles of birds — but quiet with the slow gathering of energies for the day.

  Not that day.

  Was it instinct or an unnatural intensity in the silence that brought Judy out of her bed that morning? She never knew. What happened was that she was one minute asleep, the next tiptoeing on apprehensive feet across the bedroom and down the corridor where the first coin-bright patterns of sunlight lay upon the wooden floor. She reached the door to Jacqui’s room. The door stood open. She looked inside, knowing what she would find: the room empty, the bed used but, when she rested her hand upon the undersheet, cool to the touch.

  Jacqui was gone.

  Judy crossed to the window. The western sky was pearl-coloured above the mountain. The lower slopes lay in shadow but near the summit the first rays of the rising sun brought to life a glitter of leaves, rocks, the silver hint of water.

  No prizes for knowing where Jacqui had gone.

  She returned to the bedroom where Arthur still lay in uneasy sleep, the events of the previous day perhaps haunting even his dreams. Moving silently so as not to disturb him, she collected her clothes from the chair on which they lay and went into the bathroom to dress. The question was whether she should follow the child or leave her to come home when she was ready. Anxiety for her safety urged Judy to go after her but instinct said no. Pursuing her would be likely to make Jacqui more hostile than she was already; she would wait.

  She made herself a cup of coffee and went and sat on the verandah. It was an anxious time for them all: Arthur stripped of self-respect; Jacqui dismissing Arthur and herself as traitors, sell-outs to expediency; herself determined to hold together the tattered components of her happiness, the man and the girl damaged by what was happening.

  Judy waited silently, the empty coffee cup at her feet.

  She will be back. When she is ready, she will be back.

  She knew, only too well, how little joy there would be in Jacqui’s return. She thought about the two individuals who were more important to her than anything else in her life: the one damaged by perceptions of his own inadequacy, the other by betrayal of trust. Judy did not believe she was overstating the dangers. The empty paddocks stretching away in front of her, the mountain’s dark face, the invisible child walking despairingly amid the trees, all told the same story. If the situation were not resolved, the damage suffered by Jacqui and Arthur would become permanent. Permit that, and she would in some measure have lost them both, and what was most precious in her life.

  Determination grew like a fire within her. No, she would not permit it. It was not right. She would fight. God willing, she would win but what mattered was not so much victory but knowing she had refused to acquiesce feebly in what she knew was wrong.

  Yet the question remained. David — her only hope — had failed her. What else could she do?

  8

  Warren had given his brother a week to get out but even Warren couldn’t get rid of Luke Shaughnessy as quickly as that. He’d paid rent to the end of the month and was damned if he was going a day earlier. There was a problem as far as his job was concerned too: quit before payday and he wouldn’t get paid. Hell could freeze before he’d work for nothing. Or even pretend to work, which in Luke’s case came to the same thing.

  ‘I’ll go when I’m ready,’ he said. He wasn’t in the business of handing out favours; he was steaming at how he’d been treated, by the brother who had used and then chucked him, by the town that had despised him from the first, most of all by that sassy little Mandale brat who’d caused all the trouble in the first place.

  ‘Fix her wagon, given half a chance …’

  Brett, a chip off the old block if ever there was one, thought red thoughts. He, too, had no wish to go back to Western Australia, or even to the Isa, a possibility his father had also suggested. He wanted to stay right here but that no longer seemed a prospect. All because of bloody Jacqui.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  1

  Jacqui came home. Life went on seemingly as normal. Then one afternoon, when she was coming home from school, Brett went back to his old trick of trying to scare her by following her. The way she’d roughed him up the last time she’d have expected him to know better, but this time was different. This time he had Magnus Clark with him. Magnus wasn’t much, one to one, but when he had back-up he could be as mean as a junkyard dog. Tormenting kittens was Magnus’s mark; from the way he looked at her, he had just appointed Jacqui kitten of the month.

  She pushed on, trying to keep an eye on them without making it too obvious. Halfway home and Magnus disappeared, but her relief was short-lived. He must have nipped around ahead of her because, by the time she reached the footpath where she’d nailed Brett before, he was waiting for her.

  She looked from one of them to the other. Magnus grinned. Brett, walking steadily towards her, did the same. Maybe she should run straight at him, the way she’d done the last time, but Brett was awfully big and she didn’t fancy her chances.

  ‘You be careful, Brett Shaughnessy.’ Hoping she sounded more confident than she felt.

  He did not answer but his grin widened. It was not a nice grin. She swung her case, just to remind him, but that didn’t seem to trouble him either. Far from it; he laughed.

  ‘You won’t catch me like that a second time.’

  The two of them would defi
nitely be too much for her. There was nothing for it, she’d have to charge Brett full-tilt and hope for the best. Of course, if she got it wrong he would half kill her. She was still hesitating, tightening her grip on the handle of her case, when Arthur came around the corner and walked down the path towards them.

  You could never tell what Arthur was thinking. He gave Magnus a sharp look but did not break stride even for a moment. Not that it mattered; by the time he’d reached Jacqui, both boys had done a runner.

  ‘All well?’ he asked her.

  ‘Good, thanks.’ Cool chick Jacqui.

  ‘Right, then.’ And carried on, leaving her half dead with terror and relief. She still felt Arthur had let her down over the Cloud Forest but it had certainly been a relief to see him now.

  Maybe, she thought, that would be the end of it.

  2

  ‘Arthur says you were walking home with Brett Shaughnessy this afternoon,’ Judy said that evening.

  ‘We were walking,’ Jacqui told her. ‘We weren’t together.’

  ‘Magnus Clark was there as well, Arthur mentioned.’

  ‘Was he?’ As though she found it hard to remember who Magnus Clark was, let alone what he’d been doing after school. ‘Maybe he was with Brett,’ she said.

  She felt Judy give her a look; she took care not to catch her eye.

  ‘I hear Brett and his father are going back to Western Australia,’ Judy said.

  Jacqui stared. ‘What?’

  ‘I expect Mr Shaughnessy wants to get back to mining.’

  ‘When are they going?’

  ‘The end of the term, I believe.’

  Three weeks to go. It was the best news Jacqui had heard for yonks.

  3

  There was always a party at the end of term.

  ‘Alleluia!’ Jacqui sang as she walked down the road on that last morning. The thought of Brett Shaughnessy back in Western Australia was enough to make anyone sing, end of term or not. She was on a high: by comparison, even the Cloud Forest seemed less important.

  Mrs Davis smiled as she passed her. Jacqui knew she thought she was singing because it was the end of term, but she wasn’t.

  Mr Bastable the school inspector had said it was a disgrace that the pupils did not know the words of ‘Advance Australia Fair’, so all the teachers had been instructed to make sure that the children were word-perfect by the end of term. They had rehearsed until even the dumbest had been able to parrot the words somehow.

  ‘With about as much feeling as a parrot, too,’ said grouchy Mrs Tarquin the music teacher, who still hankered after ‘God Save the Queen’.

  Even so, she was confident that, with feeling or without, the children of Goorapilly would not disgrace themselves. They lined up on the platform. From the body of the hall the parents looked up at them. Mrs Tarquin played the introduction on the school’s rattletrap piano, and the singing began.

  Australians all let us rejoice,

  For we are young and free …

  Smiles all round.

  ‘Home and hosed,’ said Arthur under his breath.

  ‘Shhh!’ said Judy.

  We’ve golden soil and wealth for blah …

  Everyone heard it and looked surreptitiously at their neighbours. Right on cue in the middle of the third line, the voices had begun to peter out, exactly as they had in the past.

  toil,

  Our home is girt by sea …

  Mrs Tarquin’s defiant soprano scratched holes in the rafters but to no avail; the voices blurred into a bumbling rumble of non-words.

  Our land dedumdedumdumdum

  On and on. Mrs Tarquin’s solo made it worse. Until the final line and a sudden re-emergence of intelligible sounds.

  Ad-vance Aus-tral-ia Fair!

  The last chords crashed; the pupils blinked owlishly into the lights; Mrs Tarquin buried her face in her hands.

  One or two unfeeling parents laughed.

  There were those who were heard to say afterwards that it had been worth it just to see the expression on Clarrie Bastable’s face, but Mrs Tarquin tore strips. Unpatriotic … Letting down school and country … It seemed that the Commonwealth of Australia and its relations with the rest of the world, the rest of the universe, had been ruined by the behaviour — the arrant, inconsiderate selfishness — of the pupils of the Goorapilly Primary School. Some of whom, perhaps, were duly chastened.

  ‘You riding home with us?’ Judy asked Jacqui.

  ‘Nah.’

  She felt the need to hang around with the rest, that by going off she would somehow be disloyal to mates who, like herself, had been on the receiving end of Mrs Tarquin’s taipan-sharp tongue.

  ‘Solidarity is all,’ Arthur said. ‘The child will undoubtedly make a good unionist.’ Whatever that was supposed to mean. ‘Want a lift?’ he said to Jeff Toms, who usually turned up at these things, despite some sideways looks from parents who thought he should be locked up but who, mercifully, lacked the guts to say so.

  No takers there, either. Jeff mumbled something about things to do, nice evening for a walk, and wandered off into the gathering dusk. Thanks all the same.

  Arthur and Judy drove home alone while Jacqui fooled around with the rest of the kids and with them stuck out a collective and metaphorical tongue at Mrs Tarquin’s tirades.

  ‘My mother says it’s got a nice tune but the words don’t make sense,’ said Anne-Marie Jones of the national anthem. Anne-Marie was known, like her mother, for speaking her mind. ‘Old Ma Tarquin can take a jump, far as I’m concerned.’

  And so say all of us.

  Although the tune was indeed a nice one and sticky as glue in the mind so that, when eventually Jacqui packed it in and decided it was time to mooch home with some of her mates, it was still ringing in her head.

  Go’ night, Mavis; go’ night, Jane; go’ night, Anne-Marie.

  Jacqui was left to cover the last half-kilometre alone.

  ‘Ad-vance Aus-tral-ia Fair!’

  Like a kookaburra at full throttle.

  Suddenly she was silent. She’d heard something behind her, or thought she’d heard something.

  She quickened her pace, telling herself it was nothing, telling herself she had imagined it, but knowing very well what she had heard.

  ‘Jacqueline …’

  Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. She looked over her shoulder. It was almost dark and she could see nothing.

  ‘Jacqueline …’

  There it was again. She knew who it was. Brett Shaughnessy, whom she had thought she’d seen for the last time, who was going back to Western Australia and good riddance, but who had obviously decided to settle old scores before he left.

  ‘Jacqueline …’

  Never mind putting on a brave face, not letting him see how much he scared her. Jacqui took off.

  She ran flat out, hearing footsteps behind her, footsteps getting closer, feet slapping on the gravel, a jeering voice saying over and over again scaredy cat, scaredy cat …

  The corner was just ahead. She sensed him behind her, could even hear his breath, the giggling burble as she imagined him reaching out to grab her, stop her, bash her and bash her …

  The corner, not far ahead now. Reach it and she’d be right. Twenty steps. Fifteen. Ten. Get round it and she’d be right.

  Perhaps Brett thought so, too. Perhaps he saw her getting away. Perhaps he’d never intended to do anything but scare her. Perhaps that was all it was or, Brett being Brett, perhaps not. Whatever the reason, he’d been carrying a large smooth stone that just about filled his palm. He pulled back his arm and let fly at Jacqui’s fleeing figure. Brett wasn’t the greatest cricketer in the universe and he was puffed with running, maybe that was why the stone flew straight. Or perhaps it didn’t; perhaps it had never been intended to hit her at all.

  What happened was that the stone cracked Jacqui full on the back of the head. She went down as though she’d been shot and lay sprawled and still, arms flung wide in the dust.


  4

  That was what Jeff Toms saw. Minutes later, words tumbling in his mouth, he was telling Arthur and Judy what he’d seen. If he hadn’t been by, this man who some said was dangerous to children, nobody might have found Jacqui until much later. Doc Lewis said in that case she might never have recovered at all, that if she’d been left lying in the dirt the concussion might have done for her. Because Brett, perhaps scared by what he’d done, had taken off, and Jeff, stumbling and inarticulate, had run to bang frantically upon the door of Arthur’s house.

  At first they hadn’t been able to understand him but, somewhere within the tangle of frantic sounds, they heard the name Jacqui and Arthur, frightened, ran with him at once to find her sprawling where Brett’s flung rock had left her.

  The local cops packed it in at five o’clock and the emergency services had fifty kilometres to drive; a lot of good they were.

  Arthur phoned Doc Lewis who said to leave Jacqui where she was, he’d be right over. Judy stayed with her while Arthur and Jeff piled into Arthur’s car and went roaring down the road to knock up Luke Shaughnessy who told them that Brett had been asleep in his bed for the past hour.

  ‘You’re a bloody liar!’

  Jeff would have gone for him but Arthur held his arm.

  ‘Fetch him, please,’ Arthur said.

  ‘No way!’

  ‘You don’t,’ Jeff threatened, ‘I’ll drag him out of bed myself.’

  Luke was a miner and physical but not willing to take on Jeff Toms in this mood. Eventually, after more threats and an eternity of waiting, Brett emerged, yawning and stretching, swearing blind he didn’t know what they were on about. Was willing to be truculent about it, too, which did not conceal the terror that leaked from him as he stood and shook. But he would deny everything, they saw, would go on denying everything forever, and his father would back him up.