If Blood Should Stain the Wattle Page 3

  A vision in a purple-fringed micro mini skimming the tops of legs made even longer by sheer purple stockings and silver stiletto sandals stared at her with Cleopatra eyes outlined in glittery purple eyeshadow.

  Jed grinned. ‘Home.’ It was such a lovely word. At last she had a home.

  Julieanne put her hands on her hips, sending the bells on her bracelets ringing. ‘You mean Deadsville?’

  Julieanne had visited Gibber’s Creek with Jed just once, after the girl in a silver 1920s fringed sheath and headband had sat next to the girl in green velvet hot pants and matching long boots, giving the finger to the wolf-whistling boys in the back of the lecture theatre.

  It had been love at first fight, when Jed and Julieanne argued over Descartes’s theory of knowledge and what if a brain kept alive in a bottle only thought it was alive, making ‘I think therefore I am’ totally unreliable, while the blokes looked on, uncomprehending.

  Julieanne had as little respect for ‘normal’ as Jed. She was an embassy brat, born when her father had been third undersecretary in Ghana. He was now first secretary in New York. Two days in Gibber’s Creek, with no discos or boutiques, and where discussions centred on cattle prices and ‘How much rain did you get last week?’, had been enough.

  Instead she had brought Jed into her world: demonstrations against the visiting South African Springbok rugby team; marching in moratoriums against young conscripted Australians being sent to the Vietnam War; arguing about Germaine Greer and should women lead separate lives from men to free them from inevitable tyranny; drinking coffee and eating raisin toast at Gus’s till midnight.

  The only place Jed refused to accompany her was the union bar, with a fake ID to prove she was over twenty-one. Alcohol for Jed would always be associated with drunkenness, violence and fear. And Julieanne, being Julieanne, had listened with sympathy and understanding to the parts of Jed’s life she wished to share.

  ‘Back to Deadsville,’ agreed Jed companionably. ‘Want to come?’

  Julieanne gave an elaborate shudder. ‘Let me guess. Mrs Matilda Thompson has instructed you to be with her for the end of the world. But Gibber’s Creek is the end of the world already.’

  Jed laughed. ‘I can’t see Matilda believing a plague doctor’s ancient prophecy.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Julieanne. ‘It’s all a beat-up. Nostradamus’s prophecies are so vague they might mean anything. Just promise you won’t come back engaged to a sheep farmer.’

  ‘I promise. Cross my heart. I’m not getting engaged to anyone. Ever.’ Jed pushed back a flicker of memory: Nicholas’s lips on hers. If she had never mentioned marriage, would Nicholas have pushed her away? Her father’s two disastrous marriages should have taught her that for her ‘wedded bliss’ was poison.

  ‘What is there for someone like you in Gibber’s Creek, except sheep and marriage?’ demanded Julieanne, who planned to head to swinging London as soon as she graduated — Carnaby Street, Mick Jagger concerts, and a network that would with determination, brilliance and a few buckets of mascara help her become a lead reporter or possibly a columnist for a magazine like Rolling Stone, and not ever ever ever a writer for the women’s pages.

  ‘Gibber’s Creek has everything,’ said Jed, grinning, because there were some things that even Julieanne could never understand. Or at least not until she had got the magic of ‘going overseas’ out of her system. ‘Anyway, I like sheep.’

  ‘Me too. With mint sauce and gravy.’

  Jed took the corner out of the car park a little too fast, just for the fun of it, waving as Julieanne waved back, smiling, exasperated, the sunlight shining on her bracelets and fifteen rings, one of them a Catherine de Medici poison ring from which she would sometimes slip a little white powder into her coffee, to shock the others at the table. Only sugar, of course. Shocking people was fun, whether it was with fake arsenic or a sports car.

  But Boadicea is a lovely car anyway, thought Jed, turning the radio up so that Leonard Cohen sang at full pelt along the road past the CSIRO. Extravagant, especially with the customisation to cope with Scarlett’s wheelchair and the bar that helped the crippled girl hoist herself in and out of the low seats. Impractical too, because the Canberra weather either fried you or spat at you with ice, and by the time you had her roof up Boadicea was half filled with hail and the leather seats still felt damp a week later.

  A Simon and Garfunkel song now — ‘I Am a Rock’, her favourite. She turned it to full volume as Boadicea sped over the bridge across Lake Burley Griffin, filled at last with water, what old Campbell had called ‘a bloody waste of a good paddock’; past Parliament House, long and gleaming white, and the shabby tent and bark structure and tiny smoking fire of the new Aboriginal Tent Embassy, protesting for the rights of the Indigenous people to the ancient continent they had inhabited for so long.

  The parliamentary rose gardens bloomed on either side, a ludicrously uninhibited clash of colour and green grass. Boadicea followed the road along the artificial lake and the tree-lined avenues of Kingston.

  Three years earlier, before she had inherited the money that gave her freedom as well as riches, Jed had assumed she’d go to Sydney University on a scholarship. But that had been when she and Nicholas had planned to live together.

  Nicholas would finish his sci-fi book, transmuting the horrors of the Vietnam battle where he had lost his legs into a made-up future warfare. She’d shop, cook, clean and help him write, in between going to lectures. And he would care for her, this girl with no money, no family, no past she wanted to admit to, even to herself.

  Nicholas had once known her better than anyone in the world, even if he did not know she saw ghosts or, rather, glimpses of the past and future in places where time was thin. She had even seen a glimpse of a future Nicholas the first time she had met him, a shock of a love for a man she had only just met. She would love an older Nicholas, and so she loved the younger one.

  But Nicholas had deserted her when he felt her inheritance meant she no longer needed him. Gone to the mountains, to stay with a friend’s grandmother, Flinty McAlpine, who, of course, was also a darling of Matilda’s, because down in this quarter of New South Wales it seemed all good people knew and loved her great-grandmother. Gone to fall in love with Flinty’s granddaughter, Felicity, to become engaged to her. To be, Jed hoped, happy. She had tried to put that glimpse of future love behind her. She hadn’t seen him since.

  There was no reason to go to Sydney University after that, except her newfound Great-Uncle Jim’s offer to live with him and his family, an option both of them were too tactful to admit they regarded with horror. Jed briefly considered the University of Queensland, where some of the girls from her high school would be only one year ahead of her. But there had been no friendships there strong enough for anyone to believe the horrors of her home life, much less support her after her rape by her stepmother’s boyfriend or through its tragic aftermath.

  Jed did know Canberra, or rather Queanbeyan. She had squatted there in those months of wonder when she washed dishes at Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station and had been an insignificant part of the greatest technical triumph of humankind, as Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the moon. She almost decided to try to buy the derelict house she’d lived in then, but a house needed tending, especially a house that was half fallen down, and she had a house, the one Matilda and Tommy had bought for her between Matilda’s Drinkwater property and Nancy’s Overflow, a house Scarlett had cheekily nicknamed ‘Dribble’.

  You didn’t need another house when you had a home called Dribble. And living in college meant she didn’t have to cook — after years of washing up to earn money and eating leftovers meant for the garbage that had, just, kept her from starvation, Jed now had an aversion to anything that hinted of kitchen. College also meant someone else washed your sheets. And ANU was only a three-hour drive back home, now the highway had been upgraded.

  Jed grinned as the car zoomed up the hill out of Queanbeyan. What was home? Her house by
the river? Or the mansion that was Drinkwater homestead? Her great-grandfather, who had lived there with its owner Matilda, his second wife, was dead, but Matilda, though no kin of Jed’s except by love and even deeper bonds that neither spoke of, was family. And family was home, wasn’t it?

  Home could just as easily include Overflow, where Matilda’s son Michael lived with his wife, Nancy, on the property made famous by Paterson’s poem about Nancy’s grandfather, Clancy, who had gone to Queensland droving when neither his family nor society would accept his dark-skinned wife.

  Home was also Gibber’s Creek: the town as well as its outlying paddocks of lichened rocks that looked like dusty sheep, and dusty sheep that looked like lichened rocks; the leaf-strewn billabong sleeping by the river, where she had arrived, starving, almost too scared to keep on living, and met a man called Fred who’d claimed to be a ghost and who had at last become one, in a fight with a psychopath to save girls like her from rape and death.

  Deadsville? For all her experience of the world, Julieanne had no idea.

  Home was the smell of sheep droppings on hot soil, the taste of gum leaves in the air, the puff of air from the soft wings of a powerful owl on your skin at night. Home was knowing people loved you, accepted you, needed you as you needed them.

  It didn’t matter exactly what home was. Just that now, at last, she had one.

  River View looked just the same as it had during the uni holidays, the wooden cottages among the flowerbeds, the river snaking between its banks of white sand, abandoned by a thousand years of floods. The cottage where Nicholas had stayed was . . .

  No. No thinking about Nicholas.

  ‘Jed!’ Scarlett’s wheelchair scooted towards her. ‘We’ve been invited to a PARTY!’

  ‘Matilda never mentioned it.’ Jed opened Boadicea’s door and swung the bar out for Scarlett to grab. She knew better than to help her.

  Scarlett heaved, swung, settled, then reached over to press the release lever on her wheelchair. It had taken years for Thompson’s Engineering Works to design a motorised chair so light, so strong and portable. Jed regretted deeply that wheelchairs like this were still available only to the patients of River View. Each chair had to be individually made to suit the body of the one who’d use it: enormously expensive. Perhaps she should start a foundation to supply them to others . . .

  ‘Jed!’

  ‘Sorry. What were you saying?’ She started the car again.

  ‘The party’s at that commune, tomorrow night. You know, Halfway to Eternity.’

  ‘What?’ Jed glanced at her. Scarlett’s short hair flickered in the wind. A lovely wind, rich in sheep and river smells . . . ‘How did you get invited to a commune?’

  She had heard of the commune, of course. Janice on the telephone exchange had told everyone at church and the CWA. The gossip spread across the entire district. Seven young people — none of them married to any of the others — had put down the deposit to secure the McAlpines’ lower paddock, instead of a neat farming family of husband, wife and three children.

  Jed even knew exactly how much they had paid for it. Janice listened to every conversation and always passed on the juicy bits.

  Jed had never bothered to ask more. She wasn’t interested in ‘alternative’ lifestyles. In her experience the only people who wanted any such thing already had extremely comfortable lives to leave. Jed wanted what those people had known and rejected: being part of a loving family, security, deep in an existing community. ‘What do you mean “we” are invited to a party?’

  ‘You and me, of course. And I met a girl. She’s my age, maybe a bit older. Her name’s Leafsong and she can’t speak.’ Scarlett considered, then added, ‘DOESN’T speak, anyhow. I need to discuss disorders of the larynx with Dr McAlpine. Anyway, the party is tomorrow at four o’clock, to celebrate the end of the world.’

  ‘How did this Leafsong girl invite you if she can’t speak?’

  Scarlett looked at her with the gaze of one whose life has been shaped by pain and loneliness and unwavering determination. ‘You don’t always need words to communicate.’

  ‘True.’ Jed had promised herself to Matilda tomorrow as well as tonight, for whatever mysterious reason the old woman had insisted Jed come home now. But Matilda went to bed early. And if she and Scarlett arrived to find themselves among pot smokers and free love — Jed wasn’t having Scarlett exposed to any of that — they could leave again. ‘What else is new?’

  ‘I got an A in English.’

  ‘That’s not news.’

  ‘Huh. Wait till you hear this. I got a C for geography!’

  ‘What? Scarlett O’Hara with a C? Impossible!’

  ‘Mrs Newbry didn’t BELIEVE me when I said Venice was sinking.’

  ‘Did you give her the references?’

  ‘Of COURSE! She said, “That’s the best joke I’ve heard all week,”’ added Scarlett bitterly. ‘And when I insisted that it was true — I might just have raised my voice but only a LITTLE bit — she gave me a C and told me I was lucky she didn’t fail me for rudeness.’

  Jed shrugged. ‘Just get yourself to university, brat. They’ll believe you there. As long as you have references.’

  ‘You don’t need geography to do medicine,’ Scarlett said smugly.

  Jed grinned. The kid had a right to be smug. Jed didn’t need the glimpse she had seen of the future Scarlett to know this young woman was going to become a doctor.

  ‘Do you mind if I drop you off at Dribble? Matilda asked me to dinner, just her and me. She wants to ask me something.’

  When Matilda ordered, you obeyed. And not just for love.

  ‘Of course. As long as there’s food.’

  ‘Matilda asked Anita to leave supplies. Cold roast chicken, apple pie, egg and bacon pie for breakfast, one of her ginger sponges, and a salad that just needs the dressing added.’ Jed had no compunction about leaving Scarlett on her own. River View was as good as an institution could be for children with disabilities, but the one thing it couldn’t give them though was time by themselves.

  Scarlett sighed with happiness. ‘That means I get to chew chicken bones while watching TV with no one saying mind your manners. AND there’s a decent movie on tonight. And you NEVER say, “Don’t stay up late. You’ve school tomorrow.”’

  ‘Stay up as late as you like. It’s good to see you, brat. I’ve missed you.’

  ‘I’ve missed you too.’ They grinned at each other as the sheep ignored the small blue car and its occupants. Sports cars never brought hay. In a sheep’s world sports cars were supremely unimportant.

  The long dinner table at Drinkwater was set with just two places, and one vase of autumn roses from the garden, their perfume as sweet as the lemon polish Anita used to shine the sideboard. At each setting were placemats, butter knives, entrée knives and main course knives, soup spoons, dessert spoons and three forks. Two wine glasses for each woman, and a water glass, even though both would probably refuse the wine. When Matilda Thompson asked someone to dine, it was done properly.

  The only out-of-place note was a plump black and tan dog, lying on its stomach in the doorway, her nose two centimetres into the dining room, as if to say, ‘I am a good dog. I am not allowed in the dining room, but noses do not count.’

  The Doberman puppy had been a gift from Jim and his family three years earlier, after Tommy died. A nice thought, a puppy to keep his newly widowed mother company and be a watch dog too at night, now that no servant or nurse lived in, but Jed had watched the slight horror on Matilda’s face before she assembled the proper look of delight for son, daughter-in-law and grandsons.

  Had Jim become such a city man that he had forgotten dogs stayed outside at Drinkwater? And did a Doberman belong in that land of kelpies and border collies with odd mixes of dingo?

  ‘A Doberperson,’ Jed had said to try to break the tension.

  Jim blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Well, she can’t be a Doberman. So she has to be a Doberperso
n.’

  Jim’s expression showed exactly what he thought about saying Doberperson or, for that matter, chairperson instead of chairman, not to mention a great-niece who wore vintage silk and lace and had chosen ANU where, for all he knew, she might be attending anti-Springbok demonstrations or hippie love-ins, instead of finding a husband of ‘our sort’. But Jim, despite his stuffiness (‘Too much boarding school,’ Matilda had sighed. ‘But there was no choice.’), was also kind.

  So a Doberperson she remained. Matilda named her Maxi, after cleaning up her third puppy mistake, short for ‘Maximum Mess’.

  Matilda sat in her usual place at the head of the table, her posture still erect, her face in the gentle light of the candles showing few of the wrinkles of her ninety years, spooning up her consommé. Jed spooned too, careful to scoop towards the far side of the bowl as Matilda was doing.

  ‘How did the shearing go?’

  ‘It went,’ said Matilda dryly. ‘Which is the best you can say about shearing. And shearers. The wool classer is a vegetarian now! Have you ever heard of a vegetarian wool classer? Come one more centimetre into this room,’ she added to Maxi, ‘and you will not get any leftovers.’

  The Doberperson moved infinitesimally backwards.

  ‘But your father was a shearer!’

  ‘And I knew him for two days.’ Matilda’s father had been a union organiser too, killed at the billabong just beyond what had been the Drinkwater boundaries in a set-up to get him arrested for sheep stealing, to calm the escalating violence of the shearers’ strike.

  The small tragedy by the billabong had eventually led to his daughter becoming the largest land owner in the district and to the song ‘Waltzing Matilda’, sung at first in defiance and then with sentiment across the nation, as its origin as an early labour movement song was almost forgotten.

  ‘I’d like to be here for the shearing one day though. Maybe next year.’

  ‘You’re not staying on at uni after you get your BA?’

  Jed shrugged. ‘No. I’ve enjoyed it. But I don’t want to do Honours or a PhD.’ Julieanne had urged her to try for a scholarship to Oxford. And she did love history and philosophy. But enough to spend her days in academic offices, libraries and lecture halls?