If Blood Should Stain the Wattle

by Jackie French

  ‘Thank you.’ I should be grateful, thought Scarlett. I AM grateful. The thought of an unknown mother clutching her back to live with strangers in a suburban Sydney house, leaving the people and the land she loved, the true home and family she had at last achieved, was unbearable.

  But what if her mother DIDN’T want her back? What if there was never any more contact? What if there was never any further word, if she was rejected again . . . ?

  Leafsong dumped a tray on the coffee table. A pot of tea in a crocheted tea cosy shaped like a chook, four mugs, a milk jug, sugar basin, teaspoons, four tarnished silver cake forks, all on an old embroidered doily from Drinkwater. Among them reposed a ginger sponge roll, oozing cream.

  The smile came of its own accord this time.

  ‘Dig in,’ said Jed. ‘And thanks,’ she added, to both Leafsong and Carol.

  ‘No worries,’ said Carol lightly. ‘I enjoyed it.’ She carefully looked down at her piece of sponge roll as she added, ‘I might go and see McDonald and Sons in town. See if they’d like another associate.’

  ‘There’s only one McDonald,’ warned Jed. ‘He’s the son, and he’s about a hundred years old. I’m pretty sure he only does wills and property sales. That’s why the Thompsons use a firm in Sydney. I have a feeling Old McDonald doesn’t think the female brain could manage writing a will.’

  ‘Worth a try. He might still like a hand, even if it’s a female one . . . And maybe some more interesting cases.’ Carol forked up her cake.

  Scarlett glanced anxiously at Jed, in case she said something along the lines of, ‘So you’ve decided to join the bourgeois capitalist Protestant work ethic lackeys?’ But Jed just looked pleased, forking up her cake too, even if it was closer to dinnertime than afternoon tea. But there was one thing Scarlett still had to do.

  ‘Jed?’

  ‘Yes, brat?’

  ‘Mark asked me to visit their community. The Chosen of the Universe.’

  Carol spluttered ginger sponge over her plate. ‘The Chosen of the Universe? You’re kidding!’

  ‘Well, you call yourselves Halfway to Eternity,’ Jed pointed out.

  ‘That’s irony. A joke.’

  ‘Is this lot joking?’ Jed asked Scarlett.

  ‘I don’t think so. But I owe him a visit.’

  Jed considered, then nodded. ‘Only if I come with you.’

  Scarlett didn’t say that that was what Mark had wanted, all along.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said instead.

  Chapter 36

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 31 March 1973

  The Gazette Bids Goodbye to Mr Miles

  The Gibber’s Creek Gazette and all its readers bid goodbye today to long-time editor, Mr Bruce Miles.

  Mr Miles has been the editor of the Gazette since 1938. He intends to spend more time with his grandchildren and going trout fishing, a sport in which he is the holder of several trophies. We wish Mr Miles every success and all enjoyment in his retirement. May he earn more trophies still!

  The new editor will be Ms Cheryl Gladstone. Ms Gladstone graduated from the Queensland Institute of Technology with a degree in journalism in 1971. She has since worked at the Moreton Bay Advertiser in sunny Queensland. Welcome to dusty Gibber’s Creek, Ms Gladstone!

  JED

  The Chosen of the Universe’s community was on the other side of Gibber’s Creek. Jed tried to analyse her feelings as Boadicea crested the hill out of town.

  Anger, protectiveness, both of which she needed to hide from Scarlett, so proud of her almost-independence. As well as her new flared jeans, disguising her thin legs, her new pale lipstick, and the mascara and eyeliner she probably shouldn’t have let her use, but couldn’t bring herself to refuse.

  Jed Kelly would not allow anyone to hurt her adopted sister. Someone who tried to convince Scarlett that she could walk had the potential to hurt her deeply — especially if that person was a charming young man.

  Scarlett might say she didn’t believe the promises of a cure, that she was simply curious, that she wanted to thank the young man she thought of as her rescuer. But coming here might very easily increase the young man’s hold on her.

  Scarlett was the first family Jed had known, before she had discovered that she did indeed have relatives, who came to love and accept her even before their biological relationship was proved. If that young man or his guru hurt her little sister, she would cut them off at the knees. Metaphorically only.

  Possibly.

  The dusty road cut through flat land, over the hill from the river, overgrazed paddocks snaked with orange erosion gullies, demarcated with barbed-wire fences, and then another kind of fence, made of tall thick mesh with the top sloping outwards, more fitting for a commercial site at the edge of the suburbs than in the paddocks of Gibber’s Creek.

  The wire mesh gate stood open, the gravel road giving way to bitumen. Expensive, thought Jed. You didn’t put in a fence like that and tar a road unless you had real money. Even the Drinkwater drive was gravel.

  Boadicea topped a slight rise. Fruit trees appeared, in neat rows, with long black strips of polypipe and drip irrigation, familiar because Sam had just put them in for the new trees at Dribble.

  Clear plastic greenhouses stretched behind them on one side of the road with long green dapples of what might be vegetable crops in the distance. On the other side, a series of circles and mandalas held what Jed assumed to be herbs, though far more varied than the parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, basil and mint for mint sauce that she was used to.

  The building in front of them was incongruous in the autumn grass landscape: an almost blank concrete rectangle painted blindingly perfect white, with two blocks attached one on either side that had rows of windows, each with metal shutters. The single door in the wall of the central building, with four concrete steps up to it, was as white as the concrete.

  Jed parked in one of the neatly marked-out parking spaces. A white station wagon and a white ute were the only other cars there. She looked down at her knee-length green silk dress, the outfit completed by a straw hat with a green velvet rose. ‘Do you think that they’ll paint us white too?’ she asked as Scarlett manoeuvred herself out.

  ‘Nope.’ Scarlett looked at the steps with slight trepidation. ‘There’s no ramp here.’

  Even as she said it, the doors opened. Two figures appeared. The younger one ran towards them. ‘Welcome! I’m Mark,’ he said to Jed, holding out his hand.

  Jed shook it, glancing at the older man on the steps. It was the man she had met on election day: the face that looked tanned but not weathered, teeth that could blind you at forty paces, the same glaring white he had worn before, but this was a kurta and loose cotton pants instead of a suit. She looked back at Mark. Handsome, and probably always had been, and had relied on his good looks to ease his way through life. The embarrassment of the unexpected and very public epileptic seizure, the realisation that his body was not perfect, must have been a shock, enough to make him easy prey for a confidence trickster.

  ‘Do you have a wheelchair ramp?’ asked Jed, a bit abruptly.

  ‘No, sorry. Ra Zacharia and I can carry Scarlett up the stairs.’ Mark looked down at Scarlett with both affection and protectiveness.

  ‘I don’t like being carried.’ Jed heard the protest in Scarlett’s voice.

  Mark grinned at Scarlett. ‘We won’t drop you. I promise.’

  He doesn’t understand, thought Jed. Maybe no one who hadn’t worked with young people like Scarlett — or who hadn’t been helpless themselves — could really understand.

  Ra Zacharia turned the brilliance of his teeth towards Scarlett. ‘One day you won’t have to be carried anywhere. Several of our members were once in wheelchairs, just like you. We don’t have ramps here, because ramps mean you accept you will never walk.’

  He held out his hand to Jed. ‘Miss Kelly? I believe we have met before. I’m Dr Zacharia, though here we prefer the term Ra.’ His grip was firm and professional.

  ‘Yo
u’re a doctor of medicine?’

  He smiled at her. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you should know not to make promises you can’t keep.’

  Ra Zacharia met her eyes. ‘I never do. Every person here is a testimony to that. One day Miss O’Hara is going to walk up those stairs. Most humans have no idea how far we will all walk in the decades to come. Mankind has finally stepped off its planet . . .’

  ‘I know,’ asserted Jed. ‘I worked at Honeysuckle Creek during Apollo 11.’ She carefully omitted to say she had only washed dishes. Let Ra Zacharia assume she was a computer scientist or astronomer.

  He evaluated that, then nodded. ‘Then you’ll understand. The older scientists and technicians said the moon landing couldn’t be done. But once humanity puts its mind to a task, it succeeds. We’re eradicating smallpox worldwide, growing crops in deserts with the Green Revolution. One day Miss O’Hara will be able to walk.’

  Jed glanced at Scarlett. If there was one trace of hope in that small face, she was going to rip off Ra Zacharia’s nose. But her sister was still staring at the steps.

  Ra Zacharia and Mark bent, with what looked like practised action, and carried Scarlett up the stairs together. Jed followed with her chair, then put the brakes on while they lowered Scarlett into it.

  Scarlett looked flushed, embarrassed.

  Jed examined Mark again. Still smiling. He seemed to look at Scarlett with real affection, but Scarlett had said he told her that he liked her because she was intelligent. Jed knew the look of high intelligence, the slightly too-intent stare of someone who drank in data. It was unmistakable. And this young man had no trace of it.

  Whatever had drawn Mark 23 to Scarlett, it was not her intelligence.

  Jed stepped through the door, then stopped. Ra Zacharia smiled at her obvious surprise. She had expected white walls, fluorescent lights. Instead they stood in an atrium, gently lit by clear skylights. The only furniture was a small table made of a polished slab of red gum. Its legs were the randomly curving branches of trees, and it held what looked like a hand-made pot filled with dollar notes and twenty-cent pieces. And, yes, the walls were white, but softened by pots and hanging baskets of what smelled like herbs, certainly basil and thyme, two of the few she recognised. The floor was covered in bright red carpet flecked with yellow.

  Ra Zacharia said, ‘Everything here is carefully designed. We live an intentional life, Miss Kelly, not an accidental one. Greenery relaxes people and boosts their immune systems. So does natural light. A depressed person looks down and so needs to see bright, warm colours. An effervescent personality looks up and so needs more soothing white.’

  ‘Mark told Scarlett that you all wear white to make you careful.’

  Ra Zacharia gave Mark an approving glance. Mark flushed. ‘Exactly. But we also wear white because life itself is discordant and breeds stress, especially in the world outside.’

  ‘There’s no stress here?’ asked Jed with an amused edge to her voice.

  ‘As little as possible. Do you know the works of B F Skinner, Miss Kelly? Walden Two?’

  ‘I studied it at uni.’

  ‘Then you will find a lot here that is familiar.’

  Jed thought of the chaos of the commune. ‘No democracy then?’

  ‘No. Why should those who have no educated opinion control how a community is run? Each team leader is responsible for their area, and they agree — consensus, not voting — on who is our chairman.’

  ‘You.’

  ‘So far. But we promised you lunch . . .’

  They headed along a corridor, again lit by skylights, that opened into a refectory. The floor there was red linoleum. There were six long tables, a hatch that opened into what must be the kitchen, its benchtop stacked with plates.

  More expense, thought Jed. Was this one of those cults where everyone had to give everything they owned to the leader?

  She gazed at the other people in the room, who were focusing on their food, not the visitors. Slightly more women than men, and slightly more young people than older, all silent, all smiling. Two of the women had to be in their late sixties at least.

  But if Ra Zacharia made his money getting his followers to give him all their money, or leave it to him in their wills, why choose someone like Mark, who presumably had no money to give? Or were bodies able to tend the gardens outside and do other hard physical work as valuable as rich potential donors?

  Had everyone there truly been cured of a major illness? Apart from one older woman with dark rings around her eyes, all seemed well. Jed wanted to ask what each had been cured of, but knew she couldn’t. One lesson you learned early at River View was that no one should be defined by their illness.

  ‘Help yourselves,’ said Ra Zacharia. ‘Don’t forget to try the bread. It’s our own recipe. Dried milk, wheatgerm . . .’

  Skinner’s Walden Two had boasted of its bread. Jed had loved the book, had read it three times. So many of its ideas made sense. Walden Two was indeed a far better place to live than the world outside.

  But Skinner’s Walden existed only in his imagination. Could it be made real? And Skinner had definitely not included aliens.

  She followed Scarlett and Mark up to the hatch, took a plate, a slice of bread, looked for butter or margarine and found none, so added what looked like peanut butter instead. Corn on the cob, tofu in a peanut sauce, iceberg lettuce salad with beansprouts, sliced tomatoes. She took her plate back to the table where Ra Zacharia already sat with Mark. They had evidently abandoned their own lunch to meet them. A place had been left for Scarlett’s wheelchair, between Jed and Mark.

  Two small glasses of something thick and green sat at her place and Scarlett’s. Empty glasses with traces of a similar green sludge sat on the other tables. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Wheatgrass juice,’ said Ra Zacharia. ‘The essence of life in a glass.’

  ‘Though we each have our own herbal mix,’ began Mark. He stopped at a glance from Ra Zacharia. Interesting, thought Jed. Were the members here dosed with herbs as well as ‘oneness with the universe’? Herbs could be as potent as any synthetic medicine. And as deadly, if used incorrectly.

  Jed sipped the wheatgrass juice, then decided that speed was the best attack and downed it in one draught. The muck tasted as if a cow had already digested it, with all of its stomachs, and then chewed it once again as cud.

  She bit warily into the bread. It tasted heavy, and far too healthy. The tofu was tofu, but the sauce was both sweet and spicy, and the corn, tomatoes and salad were fresh . . .

  Suddenly she realised what was niggling her. No talk. None whatsoever . . .

  ‘Are we allowed to speak?’

  Ra Zacharia’s eyes seemed to reward her for being a good girl and noticing. ‘Speaking during meals is permitted, but not encouraged. Silent eating means you truly taste the food. So much eating in the outside world is automatic; so much life not truly lived. We have times for talking, and times for silence. Each in its season.’ He smiled. ‘Earth has its seasons too. We are finishing one, beginning another.’

  Jed had a feeling Ra Zacharia didn’t mean the new federal government. ‘The Age of Aquarius? Brotherhood and understanding?’

  Ra Zacharia gave a thoughtful smile. It was a good one that looked well practised. ‘All the talk about the New Age of Aquarius is humanity’s attempt to make sense of something it only dimly feels.’

  ‘And your messages from space explain it?’

  ‘You think I’m a charlatan. I deal in facts. Every person here,’ Jed could feel each person in the room stare at them as Ra Zacharia spoke, ‘has been wounded deeply in their flesh and spirit. Each one here has been healed. This is fact. The messages from space come whenever Alpha Centauri is visible in the sky. Anyone can see them, or decipher them.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll try tonight if you tell me which star, sorry, spaceship to look for. Your book didn’t give exact directions.’

  ‘I hope you will, Miss Kelly. The ship is travelling, so there
was no point in giving a position in my book. It would soon have been out of date.’

  Plausible. Jed forked up more tofu, trying to work out why she felt so antagonistic.

  ‘You can’t con a con artist.’ Was she remembering the words old Fred had told her at the billabong, warning her not to con those he loved? Or had his ghost whispered them? Jed sniffed for cooking sausages, but there was just the scent of wholemeal bread and a faint herbal tang.

  But the words had clarified her worry. Ra Zacharia was showing them too much, too fast, and answering questions they hadn’t asked. Which meant he was carefully not leaving them time to think of the questions he didn’t want to answer.

  There was a con here. But what?

  Around them, people drifted away as they finished eating, taking their empty plates to the hatch that was now cleared of food. ‘No tea or coffee?’

  ‘No caffeine. Nor alcohol or drugs,’ Ra Zacharia added, still smiling. The man could win an Olympic smiling match, thought Jed, irritated. ‘This is a place where we celebrate reality, not distort it. Drinking fluids with meals can inhibit the absorption of nutrients. We drink in our work areas, living areas, not here — other than the wheatgrass juice.’

  He stood and took his own plate to the hatch. He turned back to Jed. ‘Miss Kelly, I give you my word no one will try to make your sister join our community. Nor will anyone ever suggest again that she can be healed. You understand that, Mark?’

  Mark nodded.

  ‘The offer has been made.’ Ra Zacharia turned to Scarlett. ‘If you wish to accept it, you must ask. Mark will show you around.’ He patted Mark’s shoulder — even his hands were evenly tanned — then strode off to a door on the far side.

  Jed looked at Mark, startled. She had expected Ra Zacharia to try to convince her through the entire tour. Either he trusted that what they’d see would impress her, or he knew Mark would not be able to answer awkward questions. Like how was all this paid for . . .

  Or, just possibly, this might be genuine.