‘Thanks, weatherman.’
She thought he said something, but he didn’t put his microphone on.
Then his voice came through again. ‘Blanche thought you might like to go out to the sandhills on the way back. Have you climbed one yet?’
Did Blanche? ‘No. Saw them from the road. They weren’t as big as I thought they would be.’
He spread his fingers each side of his ears to show he hadn’t heard her. Geez. She pushed the button and said it again.
‘You’ll see. She sent a basket for lunch.’
He leaned across and she tried not to lean away to avoid him or blush but he just checked her seatbelt was tight enough before settling back in his seat.
‘Right then. Let’s go.’
The craft vibrated and then the tail swished first one way and then the other as they started to rise. The butterflies swayed backwards and forwards in her stomach as well. The sparse grass of the airstrip flattened as they rose swiftly into the morning air. Red dust ballooned under them.
She looked down to where her feet were pushing hard into the transparent floor and saw the ground receding. Eve eased off the pressure. She wasn’t sure whether she liked the view or not, but either way she didn’t want to push through the perspex.
Lex’s voice startled her. ‘Good view of the pub from here.’
She looked across to where Sylvia’s house sat in its little patch of green, one of two double-storeyed buildings in town, and nodded.
‘How is Sylvia?’
She remembered to press the button. ‘Thinner. And she has a pain in her hip that Callie and I are worried about but Sylvia plays down.’
‘Sounds like Sylvia.’ There was definitely sympathy in his voice, and she was glad he could see she really did care about Callie’s mother.
She looked again at the long, low building of the pub and the trellised beer garden that lay behind it, green from the pump Sylvia used from the creek. Eve saw the little thread of brown river that ran along the back of the town.
He must have seen the direction of her gaze. ‘Have you been down to the river?’
‘No.’ She remembered to use the mic. ‘Haven’t had a lot of practice climbing through fences. Maybe Callie will take me down.’ She paused. ‘I hadn’t realised it chewed so many hollows through the land. There are quite a few erosion runs that look like dry creek beds?’
‘When the Cooper runs it spreads out like ribbons. That’s why they call it the Channel Country. Last proper rain was a year ago. Last flood two years.’
A year? She nodded. ‘And that’s when you get the wildflowers?’
He frowned at her. ‘That’s when the cattle put on condition. Ground goes green overnight.’ He shrugged. ‘Most roads are impassable and if it’s storming you can’t fly.’
My mistake. Cattle, not flowers.
He gestured with his hand towards the front and side windows. ‘So what do you think?’
It was vast. Empty. ‘Amazing.’
Lex was staring straight out the front windscreen, his large hands confidently directing the little craft like he was holding the reins of a very familiar horse. She could feel the muscles in her neck relax. She was safe in his hands.
It was a shame there were muscles elsewhere she could feel limbering up. An ignition switch in her belly she hadn’t used for a while lit up and glowed. In an understated way, unlike his exuberant brother, Lex McKay was a very sexy guy.
Then he smiled directly at her so that his teeth shone white in the early morning sunlight and his eyes glinted with a sudden joy.
‘God, I love this.’
It was totally unexpected and gave Eve a bigger kick because of that. A great big glad-to-be-alive grin that had her blinking and blushing. The heat of it rushed under her skin. Good grief.
She jammed her tongue against the roof of her mouth to make some saliva but still her voice squeaked when she got it to work. ‘I can see you love it.’
He couldn’t hear her. She pressed the stupid button and repeated it. Then decided the comment had been lame. Sheesh. She nudged herself back into normality.
The smile had gone but the moment lingered in his eyes as he narrowed them at her. ‘Yeah. Wouldn’t be anywhere else.’
Lex pointed out landmarks. There weren’t that many of them, but she had to admit that the incredible ribbons of colour were growing on her. The way the pale-blue sky met the orange and brown and downright red of the earth was surreal, and the chocolates and yellows explained the colours used in a lot of Aboriginal art.
A while later they flew over the township of Quilpie, and below, the thin strip of bitumen road glowed from the shimmering brick-orange soil around it.
The flight showed, more than anything, the remoteness of the homesteads, the tracks that curled around scrub, and the lack of water. Lex offered more commentary than she’d expected and her questions were answered thoughtfully. Once she even found herself the recipient of an approving nod.
After the longish flight they landed at the airport, and were in and out of Charleville in less than an hour.
Fifteen minutes after that Lex had a brief discussion with the control tower and they took off again. Eve decided she could get used to the perspex floor window as she watched the airfield recede further beneath them.
Her headphones crackled as Lex spoke. ‘Flying doctor service down there.’ He pointed to a pair of houses on the outskirts of Charleville. ‘They take the calls there, and the other one is the museum.’
She remembered to push her own button. ‘They do an amazing job.’
He nodded. ‘Blanche had toxaemia when she was in labour with Henry. They flew in, scooped her up, and she delivered twenty minutes after they landed in Longreach.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Eve muttered. The memory of a young woman she’d nursed who almost died flashed vividly in her mind. ‘I’ve seen that too.’
He nodded with unexpected understanding in his eyes. ‘Of course you have.’
For a ridiculous moment she felt like crying because she wasn’t used to people getting her. But she forced herself to look away and concentrate on the line of black tar slicing across the red earth below. Both ends were hidden by scrub so there was just one little straight stretch.
Eve switched on her mic and pointed to the road. ‘It looks like a burnt match on a plate of oranges.’
He grinned and she was happy.
The sun shone from behind the helicopter, and the expanse of ochre and brown land disappeared into the horizon.
Two and a half hour hours later they landed beside a brick-red sandhill shaped liked a low pyramid.
The wind-carved side angled steeply and had been rippled in perfectly symmetrical corrugations by the wind. The other side lay smooth, as if waiting for the brush of an outback artist on its unpainted red canvas.
Up close, fascinated, Eve kept shaking her head. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Yes.’
Man of few words. She glanced at him. ‘Can we climb it?’
‘Sure.’
She bent down and picked up a handful of the glittering red particles of sand and the tough crystals ran through her fingers like tiny jewels. ‘I can’t believe the colour.’
‘That’s why they called the town Red Sand. This is the start of the big sandhills that stretch across the Simpson Desert all the way to Uluru and beyond.’
They started to climb, feet sinking deeply into the coarse sand, and Eve was conscious of marring the previously untrodden perfection of the surface with their footprints. It was like they were the first people to walk on the moon.
To her left she saw a thin pattern of imprinted diamonds in a line across the surface. Something had been here before them. The tracks were sharply defined and precise, like an artist had stick-drawn them in a slight arc with care. She turned to Lex, who was climbing behind her.
‘Snake,’ he said laconically.
She blinked. Glanced around cautiously.
‘Gone.’
‘Stop. Wait. He might just forget you’re there. Back away slowly.’
‘How could he forget I was there?’
‘Snakes have short memories. I was told about forty seconds. So don’t move. Don’t frighten him.’
‘So if I moved after forty seconds I could frighten him twice, you mean.’ Who’d frighten whom twice?
A little later on, she pointed out a spot with a thin line followed by another.
‘Beetle,’ he said.
The next one was easy. Tiny Ys in the sand.
Eve glanced at Lex and imitated his voice. ‘Bird.’
He didn’t smile but she was looking for the change of expression in his eyes and hugged the flash to herself when she saw it.
A brilliant lime-green desert bush with hard, shiny leaves sprouted in isolation halfway up the side of the first hill, framed by the luscious red sand, and she wished she had her phone to take a picture of the contrast.
When they reached the first rise, the majestic sweep of the next sandhill drew her on, and when she got to that one the next beckoned. She turned back to survey the way they’d come, their helicopter a flash of reflective metal out in the paddock. Now that she looked she could see the cattle spread out in all directions.
‘How many cattle do you have, Lex?’
‘On Diamond Lake Station we have 28 400. In the Kimberleys we have another 6000.’ His face softened at her round eyes. ‘But there are bigger companies with bigger stations.’
She gazed into the distance and there wasn’t a dwelling in sight. ‘It’s a long way from Brisbane.’
He gave her a hard look and then glanced away. ‘You finished here?’
She’d lost him. Eve sighed and was going to follow him when he turned to go back, but then changed her mind.
‘I’ll be a few minutes. I want to sit.’
‘You’re lucky it’s not summer or you’d be boiling by now. I’ll open the esky under the tree.’
She heard the swish of sand for the first few steps as he began the descent, and then it was quiet again, with just the wind gently blowing and the birds cawing overhead.
She sat down with her knees under her chin, digging her hands into the sand again and twisted them so that the warm particles massaged her fingers as she let the peace envelop her. Out in the distance a windmill was turning. She could imagine the creaking noise she’d come to recognise as the shaft moving when the blades turned.
Up above the flat world on her little red castle she could feel the magic soak into her like chalk soaking up red ink. She’d missed her quiet times, and vowed to make the time to renew each day before she was caught up in the slower but still relentless pace of Red Sand township.
Peace. Strangely, unexpectedly, she didn’t want to leave this spot, didn’t want to walk back down the hill, wanted to stay in the embrace of the red sandhills she’d fallen in tune with today.
But she was thirsty and hungry, and Lex was waiting. All good reasons to come down off the hill.
FIFTEEN
Lex had set up the food under the shade of the lone spotted gum, about 50 metres away from the helicopter. Some time in the past someone had rolled a couple of logs under the shady branches to sit on and the scene was peaceful – as well as promising to settle the embarrassing rumbling of Eve’s stomach.
She eased down on the log and sighed as she glanced around. Bare paddocks, galahs in the distance, a few white Brahman cattle grazing.
‘So you have a lot of lives to look after.’
He frowned. ‘Working families, you mean?’
‘No. Cattle. I’m thinking of your birth rate compared to my hospital’s. It’s lucky cows don’t need midwives.’
He laughed and shook his head like he couldn’t believe she’d said that, then he sent her an apologetic glance. ‘Fair enough.’
She watched the tiny calf under a smaller spotted gun. ‘I’ve never seen a calf being born.’
‘They come the same way. Have to find you a birth to watch then.’
She grinned at him. ‘Likewise.’
‘God, no.’
She frowned. ‘But you’ll be there when your child is born.’
Mocking grey eyes met hers. ‘Which child would that be?’ he drawled.
She shrugged. ‘The one who takes over your thousands of cattle from you.’
He raised his brows and glanced around at the deceptively barren landscape. ‘If we still have a station after my mother finishes blowing money on a pipe dream.’
The crux. Finally, he talks. ‘So you don’t think the centre is useful?’
‘Some will benefit. But most people should have definitive care in a larger centre or phone the flying doctor.’
Well, now she knew what Lex thought. ‘They’ll still do that. It’s just antenatal care well before they’re due. And we still refer calls to the RFDS.’
He looked up and his eyes had hardened. ‘It’s the babies I worry about.’
Thanks for the vote of confidence. ‘That’s my problem. I’ll worry.’
‘If the centre wasn’t here we wouldn’t have to worry. It might make women stay home longer. But my mother doesn’t think that.’ He looked away and then back, and she could see he was genuinely regretting his outburst. ‘Sorry.’
‘Your sister?’
His voice dropped and he wasn’t talking to Eve any more; he was talking to himself. ‘If her baby had lived my sister would have lived. But the baby died.’ His face tightened with grief and she understood now why he’d seemed so cold on the idea of the centre. It wasn’t money at all, though she’d never really thought it was.
He was adamant. ‘No way do I want women to think they can birth here or stay around longer into their pregnancies because the centre becomes the backup plan.’
‘I can see how you could think that. But I don’t see it that way. I think the access means people will ask for help sooner if problems arise. Come and get checked more often. Maybe we’ll save babies that way. And even mums.’
He shook his head and she could see the wall. She guessed he had the right but she felt sad he wasn’t 100 per cent behind them. She was beginning to see how much having Lex as an ally could mean.
‘Well, your mother thinks so too. But everyone’s entitled to their opinion.’ She gestured to the open expanse in front of them, changing the subject. ‘And I used to think lunch at the Botanic Gardens was good.’
He nodded. ‘This land is me. My life. But I see why women who aren’t used to it wouldn’t want to stay. Why they could be tempted to run as fast as they can, back to the city.’
Lex put a tin mug in front of her and poured tea from the thermos. He passed across a huge slice of thick-crusted spinach quiche on a metal plate and one of two small bowls of salad and some cutlery.
Eve fell on it with passion. ‘This is so good.’ She spied a semi-unwrapped tea towel exposing date scones and a round plastic tub of butter.
He laughed as she unwrapped the scones and put one at the side of her plate. ‘You love your food. I like that in a woman.’
‘Lucky.’ She rolled her eyes and groaned as the last of the quiche went down. ‘This food is almost as good as in the best restaurant in Brisbane,’ she teased.
‘But not as good?’ He shook his head. Let his breath out with exasperation. ‘Of course it’s not.’
That was a bite. She frowned at him. ‘Boy, do you have baggage.’ She shrugged, picking up her knife and the butter with relish. ‘Your problem, not mine. See,’ she paused thoughtfully, ‘I’m more of a live-for-the-moment sort of girl. So what’s here and now is the best.’
She could feel his scrutiny but was determined not to let him spoil the moment.
‘I’m sorry if I find it hard to believe you’re not comparing the facilities here to where you are from.’
‘My fault for mentioning Brisbane.’ Sheesh. ‘Why on earth would I ruin this moment by lusting af
ter something I haven’t got?’ She shook her head at such stupidity. ‘Is this real butter? It tastes divine.’
He glanced down at the little plastic tub. ‘Blanche makes her own butter.’
Eve wanted to lick her fingers but guessed she shouldn’t. ‘The woman is a marvel.’
‘She can be a pain.’
Eve laughed and took a bite of the scone. ‘All great people can be.’
He sighed again. ‘I’m sorry.’
She chewed the piece of scone in her mouth – she should not have taken such a big mouthful – and looked at him as she tried to keep her mouth shut. Finally, she swallowed.
‘Sorry for what?’
‘Being anti-Brisbane. It’s not your fault my ex-wife lives there.’
Darn. Ex-wife and hang-ups. No one had told her Lex had been married. What a mood killer. It looked like she wasn’t going to snuggle up to that white R. M. shirt and have a nice little cuddle. She looked away and ground her lips together to stop herself from grinning.
‘Something funny about that story?’
Oh, Lord. When you’ve dug a deep enough hole, the truth was the only way out. ‘No. Was thinking I’d better not imagine myself plastered to your chest, then, seeing as how I’m from the city too.’
She could tell he was struggling not to laugh. Nice pastime, Eve decided, watching that mouth.
‘Be careful.’ He stood up and tipped out his tea. ‘I might decide I’m up for a little short-term plastering.’
She could feel the heat in her cheeks so she was glad he was walking towards the helicopter. She called after him. ‘You can’t be finished. I haven’t had another scone yet.’
‘Take your time. I need to make a call on the satellite phone. Then we’ll head.’
Wednesday morning saw Eve close the back door of the big house quietly behind her, as she stepped out to where the cockatoos were raucous on the telephone wires. Sylvia and Callie had been up in the night with Sylvia’s upset stomach, so getting out a bit early seemed a good idea. With Sylvia unwell today Callie wouldn’t come in to the clinic; Eve was happy to deal with whatever came through the doors.
As she stepped with a leisurely pace along the street a young ringer in his dusty ute waved at her as he drove past and she remembered his grinning face from her first emergency suture experience on Monday.
Red Sand Sunrise Page 11
