A Distant Land

by Alison Booth

  At that moment she was distracted from her reverie by the banner that was being stretched out across the back of the dais.

  ‘Beaut flag, isn’t it?’ Chris said.

  It was the Vietnam Moratorium logo, a white sunburst on an orange background. Chris raised his camera and began snapping. Zidra pulled her notebook out of her bag as the applause began and the first speaker, a Labor Party politician, stepped up to the lectern. She knew what he would say. He’d said it again and again and still it was worth repeating: ‘Democracy begins on the farms, in the factories and in the streets, and if people will not, often at risk to themselves, stand up for their rights there will be no democracy.’

  Chapter 2

  The Paddington terrace house that Zidra shared with Lisa and Joanne was in darkness. None of its daytime shabbiness was visible. The street lamp faintly illuminated the best features of the terrace: the triple-arched windows to the living room and the intricate cast-iron lacework bordering the first-floor balcony. How fortunate, Zidra decided, that Lisa was staying with her boyfriend tonight and Joanne having an early night. She led the way up the stairs, past the first floor, where Lisa and Joanne had their bedrooms, and up to her bedroom on the next level. On the last half-flight, Hank put his hand on her backside.

  ‘Gorgeous ass,’ he said.

  ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’ She was pleased nonetheless.

  I wish I’d made the bed properly, she thought as she opened her bedroom door, but it’s the papers I have to check first. Quickly she gathered up the pages littering her desk and shoved them into the top drawer. There were certainly several things that she didn’t want Hank to see, especially her opinion piece on the policing of the moratorium marches. In her typewriter was a sheet of paper on which were written a couple of paragraphs; she spooled the page out and put it away.

  Meanwhile Hank had parked himself on the edge of the bed. After pulling the desk chair around to face him, she sat down. He didn’t say anything, just stared at her – an intense stare that she found disturbing, though she gazed back anyway. After a few moments she got up and knelt on the floor in front of him. Reaching out her arms, she framed his face with her hands. He leant forward and kissed her. He tasted of whisky and something else, something that she wanted to get a lot more of.

  Zidra was paying the price for not drawing the curtains the previous night: the sunlight glared in at her, harsh and unforgiving. Her mouth was dry and her head aching. She rolled over and was hit by the lingering scent on the sheets, of Hank’s aftershave or deodorant or God knows what else he anointed his body with. Not to mention his anointing of her own flesh. She sat up. The clock on her bedside table indicated that it was already eight. Hank hadn’t wanted to stay the night and that had been a relief. She was never at her best first thing in the morning and she doubted he was the sort to bring her a cup of tea in bed, even if he had been able to locate the tea things in the kitchen.

  The sound of music drifted up from the floor below: Leonard Cohen, Joanne’s current favourite. For a moment Zidra wished she was at Ferndale, her parent’s property near Jingera, which she still viewed as home. From her bedroom there you only ever heard the distant crashing of the surf and the birds calling, or the wind sighing through the trees, and maybe clattering from the kitchen signalling delicious things for lunch. In two weeks’ time she’d be heading south to Ferndale for a week’s holiday. She could certainly do with a break.

  She threw back the sheet and slipped on a kimono. Her nightgown was in the laundry basket, along with a host of other things. The sheets would need washing too, she decided – she didn’t want to carry Hank’s scent with her for days. It was disturbing that in appearance he reminded her of Jim. Although Jim didn’t have those deep-set dark eyes, he had the same olive skin and straight brown hair. Yet she had to move on from this, just as Jim had.

  The effort of fastening the kimono worsened her headache. Throbbing temples, dry throat, flashes of light. She shut her eyes. After feeling her way to the window, she pulled the curtains across. Funny to think that she’d known her two best friends, Jim and Lorna, for over two-thirds of her life. She’d first met them when she was only nine, soon after she and her mother had moved to Jingera. They’d befriended her and shielded her from those taunts of being a bloody reffo or the daughter of a commie bastard. And Jim had protected her from the predatory interest of the publican Mr Bates too. She’d imagined, as she was growing up, that she and Jim would end up together. A wrong assumption. By the time she’d gone to university, he was in third year and in a different league. He’d become involved with beautiful Lindsay and had little time for her. Not that beautiful Lindsay stayed with him for long. Barely six months later she’d taken up with a rich lawyer ten years older and Jim had won the University Medal as well as a Rhodes Scholarship. Once he’d gone to Oxford, Zidra had embarked on a series of unsatisfactory relationships with unsuitable men.

  Of course not everyone would view Hank as unsuitable.

  In the bathroom she gulped down several glasses of water and swallowed two paracetamol. After a quick shower she ran damp fingers through her hair; it was no good combing curls like hers.

  She and Jim had continued a close friendship by post. Sometimes it seemed to her that their relationship had deepened through the many letters they’d exchanged over the years. Letters giving details about their lives and their thoughts, if not about their romantic exploits. Jim was a part of the fabric of her life, even though he wasn’t in Australia.

  Inspecting her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she decided she looked terrible; this is what too little sleep did to you when you were approaching twenty-four. Carefully she patted face cream onto her skin. Surely that wasn’t a line appearing on her forehead? No, it was just the skin creasing from her raised eyebrows. Facial immobility was the thing if you wanted to stay youthful – that’s what the women’s page editor had told her in all seriousness. Maybe she’d have to stop raising her eyebrows and revert to wearing a fringe. She laughed and then grimaced at her reflection. Last night Hank had told her she was beautiful, but some people will say anything to get you into bed.

  As she passed Joanne’s room, the door opened. ‘Who was that guy?’ Joanne said. In her too-large pyjamas, she looked more like a twelve-year-old boy than a woman in her mid-twenties.

  ‘Hank Fuller. How did you know he was here?’

  ‘I heard you talking on the way up.’

  ‘Sorry. I thought we were whispering.’

  ‘Stage whispering, Zidra. I heard all about your gorgeous ass. Is he still here?’

  ‘No, he left early this morning.’

  ‘Pity. I’d like to meet him. Cute accent. Is he the one for you?’

  ‘Oh, Joanne, I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Darling, don’t spoil my illusions. I like to think there’s a unique partner for each and every one of us.’

  ‘I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life.’ Zidra was now starting to feel slightly ashamed of using Hank as she’d done last night.

  As she opened the front door of the house, she heard the telephone ring and then Joanne’s voice as she picked it up on the kitchen extension. ‘Yes, Zidra’s here but she’s just about to go to work . . . You’re calling from where? . . . Just hold on a moment.’

  Joanne put her hand over the receiver and shouted, ‘Some guy from Phnom Penh.’

  ‘Phnom Penh,’ Zidra repeated. It had to be from Jim, though calls from him were a rarity – in fact he’d phoned from Cambodia just once before, on her birthday. As she took the receiver, she noticed her hand was shaking. ‘Hello?’ There was only static at first and then Jim’s voice uttering her name. She waited a few seconds, until she could hear that Joanne was well on her way up the stairs, before saying, ‘How are you? It’s been a long time.’

  ‘Did you get my letter?’

 
‘I got one dated the end of August.’ It was in the top-right-hand drawer of her chest of drawers, in a shoebox with all his other letters.

  There was silence. The slight time delay made a natural conversation almost impossible. Her voice had mingled with his along the telephone wires; their exchange was either a duet or a pause in which all she could hear was the hissing of static.

  At last she heard him say, ‘I wrote another one a week ago.’

  ‘I haven’t got that yet. The post from Cambodia’s sometimes a bit erratic.’

  ‘I’m coming home for a visit.’

  ‘Fantastic.’ He would go to Jingera, though, and she might barely see him, for she’d already promised her editor she’d work over the Christmas holiday period. She said, ‘Is that for Christmas?’

  ‘No, much sooner. I’m arriving on Sunday the twenty-sixth, early in the morning.’

  Startled, she said, ‘You mean the twenty-sixth of September?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What a coincidence.’ Abruptly she sat down at the kitchen bench. Her heart had begun to bang against her ribcage and her hands felt clammy. ‘That’s when I’ve arranged to spend a week at home at Ferndale.’

  ‘I know.’ Jim laughed, but his voice sounded slightly embarrassed. ‘Your mother wrote and told me.’

  ‘How long are you staying?’

  ‘A week.’

  ‘Your parents will be overjoyed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I could collect you at the airport and we could drive straight on to Jingera.’

  ‘That’s terrific. Could we get there in a day?’

  ‘Easily.’ She paused. ‘Unless you wanted to take it more slowly?’

  ‘No, I just thought it might be too much driving for you.’

  She would love to do it over two days. They could stop off somewhere such as Ulladulla, have dinner together and stay in a motel – separate rooms of course – and then potter on through those sleepy coastal towns.

  She was about to suggest this when Jim said, ‘A story about Sydney’s fourth march was picked up by UPI. I knew it was yours.’

  ‘That’s the last march ever,’ Zidra said, smiling at the phone receiver. That Jim had recognised her unattributed piece was almost as pleasing as learning it had been picked up by the wire service, in spite of its poor positioning in the Sydney Morning Chronicle.

  ‘That’s what they said about the previous one. But anyway, the troops in Vietnam have been told that most of them will be home for Christmas and won’t be going back. Do you know how they heard?’

  ‘On a radio broadcast in the middle of August over the American network. It was all over the papers here. Your parents must be thrilled that your brother’s coming home at last.’

  ‘Yes. Nui Dat’s a mess if ever there was one. Andy’ll be glad to get out of that.’

  ‘Do you ever see him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who’d have thought when he went to the Army Apprentices’ School that he’d end up serving in the Third Battalion?’ Zidra knew from her mother that Andy’s parents, George and Eileen Cadwallader, lived in fear that he wouldn’t come home, lived in fear that neither of their sons would come home. She added, ‘How are things going up there?’

  ‘Bad, but maybe we won’t talk about it on the phone. You take care, Zidra.’

  Suddenly she felt shy. The moment had gone when she could suggest stopping off somewhere on the drive south. There was a pause before Jim said, ‘Have you got a pen? I’ll give you my flight details.’

  ‘I’ll get one.’ She put down the receiver and burrowed in her handbag for a pencil and paper. Carefully she wrote down the flight number and time, and then could think of nothing more to say. Somehow the conversation had to reach a conclusion, even though she wanted it to go on forever, if only she could overcome her awkwardness and speak as she used to. Though at times she felt his face was permanently imprinted on her memory, now it became elusive and for an instant she couldn’t conjure up his image at all. Then he broke the silence and the memory restored itself.

  ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you any longer,’ he said.

  She laughed tentatively and was relieved when he joined in, though she couldn’t have said what amused her, unless it was simply an impression that her future was altering its course.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said.

  At last the conversation was over and she was replacing the receiver in its cradle. She was alone again, yet not as she had been. She felt lighter; some burden that she hadn’t known she’d been shouldering had been lifted from her. For a few moments she continued sitting at the kitchen bench, smiling at the fruit bowl as she listened to the morning shrieking at her through the open window.

  Chapter 3

  Zidra was surprised when her boss, Joe Ryan, rang her extension. Though she wanted to see him, she certainly didn’t expect to be summonsed by phone. Why on earth ring rather than simply appear in the doorway to his office and bellow to her across the newsroom, the way he usually did?

  ‘Come and see me in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.’

  And I to you, Zidra thought. Like why the hell you shoved my piece on the moratorium march to page seven. To add insult to injury, one of Chris’s photographs had appeared on the front page of the issue, a picture of the well-dressed women with the banner ‘End the Unjust War’. He’d caught the instant when the fabric had filled like a spinnaker, and the angle of the shot lent the illusion that two of the women had been lifted right off the ground. Underneath the photograph was the headline ‘All a Lot of Hot Air?’. Below this was a report on what a Liberal Party parliamentarian had said about the marches and the speakers.

  ‘Something up?’ said Dave Pringle, the foreign editor, who was passing by as she banged down the receiver. He was thin and overgrown, as if he’d been reared in a dark place and had to struggle upwards to reach the light.

  ‘Not really.’ She liked his habitual kindly expression, although this could have been partly the result of poor eyesight. He’d worked in the Department of Foreign Affairs for fifteen years before becoming a journalist and was well informed about everything. ‘Joe wants to see me, that’s all.’

  ‘Don’t be late,’ Dave said. ‘He can’t abide unpunctuality, unless it’s his own.’

  Precisely ten minutes later Zidra was at Joe’s door. Through the open doorway she could see him sitting behind his paper-strewn desk, his glasses on the top of his head like a black plastic bridge over that shining pink scalp. A fringe of thick white hair around the perimeter of the dome gave him a monastic appearance. Indeed, Joe had started training for the priesthood before his life had taken another direction. Now he was married to both his newspaper and Bridget, and was the father of seven strapping sons, each over six feet tall. How this had come about seemed on occasion to mystify Joe, who was himself a mere five feet eight inches, although in the four years that Zidra had known him the inches had been accumulating around his girth, and the waistline of his trousers dropping lower and lower to accommodate the ballooning stomach.

  She knocked. Joe looked up at once and motioned her to the seat opposite him. It was too high and her legs dangled, only her toes reaching the floor. She’d rather have both feet firmly planted on the ground before beginning the speech she’d been preparing.

  ‘Well, Zidra,’ Joe said, rocking his chair backward and forward while resting his hands behind his head. ‘There are a couple of things I’d like to talk over with you.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said. She took a deep breath in readiness. The story she’d written to accompany Chris’s photograph had been much too pertinent, she was going to say, to be relegated to the bottom of page seven. Why the words of the Liberal Party parliamentarian should displace her story was beyond her, although in her calmer moments she had
to admit that the headline was great and the article’s positioning certainly illustrated how empty was the rhetoric of Bob-the-Shoveller Barrow.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Joe said, giving the lopsided grin that, together with his bright blue eyes, was one of the more attractive features of his doughy face. ‘I’ve been thinking about what to do with you.’

  Her mouth suddenly felt dry and her stomach tightened with anxiety. Maybe Joe was about to sack her or, almost as bad, shift her back to the women’s pages, where she’d started at the Sydney Morning Chronicle. Would he really do that? It had been he, after all, who’d spotted what he termed her potential, after she’d written a humorous piece about correlations between fashion trends and business-cycle fluctuations the week the women’s page editor was away. Had he regretted his decision to give her a trial on the news section two years ago? Surely not. He’d regularly encouraged her and frequently invited her to Sunday lunch with his family and some other journalists. Over the years she’d come to view him as her mentor. But had she become too partisan of late? She found herself grimacing nervously at this possibility. She was supposed to be a journalist, reporting the truth from all perspectives. Was it possible she’d overstepped the mark?

  ‘Yes,’ said Joe. ‘I’ve given it a lot of thought and I’ve talked it over with the deputy editor as well. And, after due deliberation, I’ve decided to give you a bit of headway to do some more investigative journalism. It’s not a job change as such, or much of a change of duties either, although we’re taking on a couple more cadets, which will free up your time. I want you to think of it more as an expansion, to give you time to explore issues in depth. That Fourth Moratorium March, for instance. That was a beaut piece you wrote, though not really front-page stuff. It was too reflective for that. Maybe you could revise it and we might be able to put it out as an opinion piece. And I want you to do more along those lines. If you get a bit more freedom, you might come up with something hot. What do you reckon? Willing to make a start when you get back from your holiday?’