by Lucy Walker
Now was the time to drive away ‒ together and alone. Silver shone everywhere ‒ on the pointed leaves of the magic mulgas, on the iron roof of the pub, round the curves of the massive water-tank. But mostly in people’s eyes.
‘Guess you’ll have to wait to start that honeymoon till you get to Skelton’s,’ someone fresh from champagne celebrations called out. ‘Mind the snakes in the spinifex, Dr John! It’s their rousing time. No bedding-down in the bush!’
John, having packed everything in the back, and then checked that Kim was comfortable, hefted himself in the driver’s seat, and revved up the engine. Kathy was the last to put her head in the window.
‘Lots of love, Kim,’ she said. ‘Look what you’ve done to me and Don. We’ve nearly decided to get married. Well, maybe ‒ Dad’s gone in to open more champagne ‒ in case!’
‘Oh Kathy, I’m so glad!’
‘We’ll sure make out better than you two!’ Kathy said with a grin. ‘Mr Soames’ll have known us both for the legal nine days. More’n with you two. We’ll be married good and proper! Very legal! No mistakes about us! Not to worry Kim. No one’ll let on about you two ‒’
Kim was very tired by this time. Too tired. Half her mind was taking in the medley of good wishes from the other side of the car. Yet some semi-dormant self inside her pricked a listening ear. What had Kathy said? What did she mean about Mr Soames knowing people a legal nine days before he married them? That frightening word ‘legal’:
‘Good-bye ‒ good-bye ‒ good-bye!’
‘Good-bye Bratto!’
‘Good-bye Jeff darling!’
‘Bye-o Dr John! Take care of her. Don’t lose her in the sand dunes! Put a leg-rope and halter on her.’
All the good-byes were said, and Kim leaned out of the window, waving till the last moonshine figure was lost amongst the shadows of the old pub.
John swung the jeep on to the track leading away to Skelton’s. Kim wished he would stop the car and kiss her. She waited and hoped for it. She was too diffident to make the first gesture. That was his right. She was also very tired.
She leaned forward, pulling her feet in a little, and wrapped her arms round her knees.
‘Are you tired too, John?’
‘A little.’ He glanced at the huddled figure beside him, the moonlight putting a silver halo round her head ‒ the hat-ridiculous was back in its rightful place. ‘It was a good wedding, wasn’t it? Are you happy, Kim?’
‘I’m nearly happy.’
‘Nearly?’
‘Why did we get married, John?’
‘We’re right for one another. Moreover ‒’ He peered into the stream of light shooting rays from the head lamps, the better to see the track. He was driving very fast.
‘You were saying something,’ Kim prompted.
‘We have a long time in front of us in which to get acquainted,’ he said.
There was another silence. Kim unwrapped her arms and leaned back. Inch by inch she edged herself sideways towards him.
‘John?’
‘Yes?’
‘What did Kathy mean about Mr Soames knowing them ‒ meaning Kathy and Don ‒ more than nine days? Something about making sure of being legal: better than us. Better than us about what?’
Her head nearly touched John’s shoulder. She felt his arm muscles stiffen. Then he was, all of him, taut.
‘Kathy was excited, and had a fair quota of champagne. She was talking rot. Nine days’ notice is needed for a special licence. Mr Soames had that for us. Jeff saw to it. He went out there to Binni-Carra.’
‘Oh. That was the day before the day before yesterday? I wondered where he had gone. I was doing my drawings snowed under by Kathy’s oatmeal. Did my skin look all right, John? Not so dreadfully burned?’
‘I like your skin burned.’ He slowed down to a crawl to manage a bad twist in the track.
Now, Kim thought. He might stop altogether ‒
But he didn’t. The jeep was safely out on to the straight again, and going fast.
‘You managed to finish all the records, and the drawings, while Kathy had you walled up in that bedroom?’
‘Yes. Every one of them. The duplicate for Myree too. They’re locked in the Number Four case. I’m glad I finished them. I was lonely, in a way. I wanted … well ‒’ she couldn’t add ‒ I wanted to be with you. He hadn’t said anything about missing her in those last few days.
‘I had much to do. I needed to check and repack the specimen cases. Make my own notes and bring the official diary up to date,’ he was saying. ‘I thought you were busy at wedding preparations. I’m glad you managed to get your records done.’
Kim gingerly rested her cheek against the sleeve of his jacket. He took one hand from the steering wheel and slipped his arm around her.
She expelled a long breath of relief, and closed her eyes.
Nearer, nearer, nearer, she thought. Soon, if I’m ever so careful … ‘subtle’ they call it in marriage-guidance circles … I might break down that barrier.
The moon was shedding a cold light everywhere, making the world very beautiful. It was signalling the hard fact that temperatures dropped a long way down out here on the fringe land. Blazing hot at noon, but three-blanket cold at midnight!
‘You must have been too busy to be lonely,’ John said thoughtfully.
‘Oh, I had one visitor. That Mr Harold-tycoon-Smith.’
‘Smith! I wondered about him. Why did he make a present of the champagne for the wedding Kim? I was uneasy about that. Was it a gift to you personally?’
‘To us both, of course. Well, he’s rich and some rich people like to throw their money around. Make a fine gesture and all that! He wanted to do that for the wedding, so I let him.’
‘You let him?’
‘Yes. I let him,’ she smiled to herself at her own airy but low cunning. ‘It was easiest that way.’
Against her cheek, down her side where his body touched hers, she felt those muscles tauten again. The arm round her was no longer nearly caressing her. It stiffened. Then he withdrew it. Both hands went on to the steering wheel again. He bent his head forward as if to see the track better.
‘You let him, Kim?’ he repeated carefully. ‘Is it wise to let strangers be so generous?’
Kim sat up straight.
‘You think I’m not very sophisticated, don’t you John?’ she asked in a not so small voice. ‘You really think I’m like that school girl you met at the Mount, and who would not go home and be good? If she had done that she wouldn’t be here in this jeep now.’
‘And married to me,’ he added quietly; thoughtfully. ‘I’m glad you came back that day, Kim.’
Why didn’t he stop the car and say so with his arms round her? How did she ask to be kissed? Did she have to make all the moves in this barrier-breaking exercise?
The old Kim in her woke from a temporary slumber. Hers had been the listening ear that had cocked when Kathy had said something about getting married good and proper. Legal, not like herself and John.
‘Do you know?’ this other self said in a voice light and inconsequential, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if what Kathy said didn’t have a point. We weren’t married in a church because there wasn’t any parson: or any church. Do you think we’re really married? I mean, tight and for ever more? Were we supposed to have gone and seen Mr Soames ourselves?’
‘I shouldn’t raise sleeping dogs, if I were you, Kim,’ John said abruptly. His voice had a chill in it. This turned Kim to ice as suddenly as if she had been plunged from heights into a snow heap, though she realised she had brought it on herself.
Out of her deep-freeze her voice came almost sadly.
‘I always seem to say and do things the wrong way. I always have. Even now ‒ I can’t even get married properly: legally ‒’
John pulled the jeep over to the edge of the track and braked to a stop. He leaned back in his corner and looked at the moonlight flooding Kim’s face. It shone in her eyes giving them a si
lver glint, making the infinitesimally unfocused way she looked at him utterly beguiling, tweaking at his heart strings where before the only heart he had ever had had been for plants ‒ wild, mysterious and unknown. What was it about her? Her absolute candour?
Perhaps it was the unique expression in those very beautiful eyes. Childlike, yet paradoxically deep with hidden thoughts and ideas that were perhaps unique too. Ideas were the most precious jewels in the world.
‘Perhaps you do things the right way for you, Kim,’ he said soberly. ‘It is we workers, with too much on our minds, who miss the points of contact that make us known to one another. What strange quirk of your very generous heart would make you see anything worthwhile in a man like Mr Harold Smith, for instance?’
‘Oh, I didn’t see anything in him,’ Kim said, immediately more cheerful. At last, at last, she and John were going to talk heart-to-heart. ‘Actually he wasn’t at all a likeable man. Too squeazy. But he liked me. At least, he liked my drawings. He said they were exquisite work. Quite an expression, wasn’t it? I mean for a man like him to use?’
John straightened up. The air around him ‒ like some preamble to a thunderstorm ‒ was suddenly electric.
‘He liked your drawings? You showed them to him?’
‘Oh yes! He saw my record book on my bed. He borrowed it for a whole night to look at the drawings.’
‘God in Heaven!’ It was a prayer, not a blasphemy.
He put his elbow on the steering wheel, and his head in his hand.
Kim sat still, suddenly terribly cold.
‘Get out and walk home, Kim,’ John said through tight lips. ‘Otherwise I might thrash you.’
She stared at his head where it rested in his hand.
There was a long dreadful silence.
If I weren’t miles and miles and miles from anywhere I would do just that, she thought.
She would need a compass in her hand, a water-bottle over her shoulder and her hat on her head. Endurance too!
She had thought that once she was married to him, she could make it work!
Well, he had never said he loved her. Much worse, now he didn’t trust her. Then why had he married her?
She knew well enough why she had married him. Love. Oh what a wounded word was that!
Maybe they weren’t properly and legally married, after all. Like Kathy said. He was the one thinking up excuses not to love her ‒ well heart-to-heart anyway!
So what had it all been about?
With all her will Kim tried not to be frighteningly miserable.
It was her wedding night!
Moon shining out there ‒ go away: and stay away! I want to cry!
But crying is something I never do!
Chapter Fifteen
They sat there in silence.
John had lifted his head from his hands long since. He edged back into the corner. He had taken out a cigarette, then later killed the butt dead in the ashtray.
Kim sat sideways-on, her knees hunched up on the seat between herself and John. Her cheek rested against the leather of the back-rest.
It seemed the moon would reach its zenith and wane in the wake of yesterday’s sun before they could find a way to communicate again.
To Kim it was an aeon of time since they had spoken. And this was her wedding night! She knew the silence was of her own making, because she could have explained. Yet something inside her would not let her speak. Pride? Stubbornness?
Both!
Degree by degree, the temperature fell, as it always did at night. Her eyelids drooped over her eyes. She was so tired that not even the black band round her heart could keep her from beginning to doze off.
Here, in this car, there was only John’s silence. She could not bring herself to explain to him ‒ anything at all. He had built up the barriers, not she. She hadn’t the will power, or even the wish, to break them down. She was too hurt.
He did not trust her! Unreliability was a more deadly matter for a member of a scientific expedition than for anyone in any other situation.
John and his duboisia hopiwoodi!
It occurred to Kim, on the point of drowsing right off, that she was jealous of a wild plant. Strange, because she had always loved them ‒ the wild things and the bush flowers!
Near-sleep almost took the barb out of her pain. Even so, a jhingi must have walked over her grave, for she shivered.
John moved, and lifted his head. The moonlight was so clear he could see the eyelashes lying on Kim’s cheek. He had felt that shiver ‒ across the distance that separated them.
‘I’ll get the rugs,’ he said.
Kim did not answer. She had settled for sleep as being her only armour: a panacea for her woe.
He turned the door handle silently, then moving quietly inch by inch, he edged himself out backwards and dropped to the ground. He reached in the cabin for his torch above the dashboard. Still Kim did not move.
He went to the rear of the jeep, and pulled out the rugs, also the basket containing the Thermos and snacks that Mrs Barker had provided. He tied down the back-flap of the jeep and brought the rugs and basket round to the cabin.
Still Kim had not moved.
John stood quite still and watched her. The light washed her face gently with its soft opalescent glow. She looked very pale and very young ‒ all silvered over by the moon.
He could see the rise and fall of her gently rounded bosom as she breathed.
John pushed his fingers through his hair. He could not keep the small muscle at the corner of his jaw from working.
He hefted himself up under the steering wheel, bringing one of the blankets with him.
‘Kim ‒’ he said gently. He took one of her hands but she did not move except to take a drawn-in breath that had a tiny break in it.
‘She was too inexperienced to know what she was doing,’ he told himself. ‘That swine Smith! At his age ‒’
John manoeuvred one of the rugs over the top of the steering wheel, then behind Kim’s back. He put his hand under her arm and drew her to a sitting position while he wrapped the blanket around her. His hand and arm could feel the warmth of her young body through its thin cotton shirt. He held her against him while he tucked the blanket round her. He rested his chin on her head so that her face lay curved in his neck.
He sat holding her for one long frightening moment. But she did not move.
Then he folded the sides of the blanket over her breast, tucking it in all round, and let her ease back against the seat.
He slung the second blanket round his own shoulders and leaned back in his own corner. He had left the Thermos and basket on the ground outside. He did not care for its contents any more.
He closed his eyes and fell to thinking.
Then, at long last, he too slept.
At dawn Kim awoke. She was stiff, though not as cold as she had been in the early part of the night. Nor as lonely. She could feel the blanket snuggled round her. John had not really meant her to get out and walk after all. He had covered her, and kept her warm.
Could she have been too stupidly stubborn? Yes, because it wasn’t the first time in her life.
She couldn’t bear to look at his face where he half sat, half leaned across the corner of the seat, his eyes closed. So intimate a view hurt.
She began to feel awfully hollow. When John woke up, he’d feel hollow too.
Kim wormed her way out of the blanket, then out of the jeep. The cold of the night had given way to the chill of the early morning’s east wind. Even as she stood out on the track the wind was dying by degrees, and the warmth from the newly rising sun was brushing her arms and her face.
Then she saw the picnic basket on the ground on the far side of the jeep. The Thermos tea would be hot. Wonderful! The sandwiches and scones would still be fresh as they were wrapped in plastic coverings.
She looked around for a water-hole, then followed the tracks left by generations of kangaroos, snakes and goannas towards a small dip in the land
on the right. There, a few white ghost-gums stood leaning forward as if looking at treasure. Here was a water-hole. It was big enough to wash in. The water was pure and safe because she could see that bush animals had been down here only last night. The tracks were moist and fresh.
Kim cupped water in her hand, and drank a little.
‘If I’m not dying or dead by the time I get back with the billy-can,’ she reflected. ‘I’ll be certain sure this water is not poison!’
She went back to the jeep and unpacked the cups and saucers and two plates. She put these in a pile by the side of the car. She walked a little way into the spinifex, spat on her finger and held it up to the wind. This was to make sure of the wind’s exact direction. Next she scraped some dried leaves together and lit them. She watched to make sure the smoke blew in the direction of the small kidney shaped claypan she had chosen. She couldn’t afford to add a grass fire to her other mistakes.
All was well, so she put more broken sticks to her fire, then dampened them with a fine sprinkling of red dust.
‘Now you make coals while I fetch the water ‒’ she advised the fire: her only friend at this particular moment.
By the time she had brought back a billy full of water, John had woken. He had shaken off his blanket and was removing himself, tousle-headed and stiff, from the jeep.
‘Good morning,’ Kim said pretending not to be nervous: not smiling, but trying to be bright. Her words had to tread gently on tiptoe from now on. ‘Your cook didn’t walk away after all! Here she is; bright and early. You did want a cook and a good housewife, didn’t you, John? Well, fire’s alight, breakfast is set. All we need is the billy to boil.’
‘It’s too early in the morning to be practical, Kim,’ John said, an elaborate quietness in his voice.
‘Me practical? Nobody ever called me that in my life, John.’
‘Perhaps nobody called you by the right names ever ‒ in your life. Is that the water-hole over there by the gum trees?’
‘That’s it, and the water’s pure.’ She hesitated, then added quickly, hoping still to sound bright, ‘The kangaroos, snakes, emus, one goanna, and I ‒ all have had some. We’re still living ‒’
