Clancy of the Overflow, page 12
But he was conscious all day now or, rather, slept much of the day, but it was natural sleep. He could swallow again, and slowly feed himself and speak, though it tired him to talk too much. He could even push a walker to the bathroom, though the stamina to walk by himself was still far off.
Dr Rogers and his father and even Scarlett’s professor had invited various experts down from Sydney. Each gave a different diagnosis: undiagnosed meningitis after his surgeries, with the brain swelling slowly and unevenly reducing; or perhaps it had been hypoxia from those terrifying minutes when he ceased to breathe, lack of oxygen causing brain damage — but since then the brain, being flexible, had made and was still making new neural pathways.
He might have suffered a long-lasting concussion, or even cardiac arrhythmia triggered by blood loss, so that when his pulse slowed too far he lost consciousness again.
And though each expert was eager for Sam to be taken to Sydney for further tests to prove their varied diagnoses, all, when pushed, agreed that diagnosis would not change the outcome. All too gave the same prognosis: they simply did not know what would happen. Sam might continue to improve, or he might not. He might live to a hundred and four, or his injuries might have left a weak spot in his brain, his lungs, his heart or another vital place in his body. A burst blood vessel might mean sudden death.
They simply did not know.
Jed found this almost as hard to accept as his initial injury. She’d had certainty then, or at least probability. Sam would still be lying there when she came back each day, alive, perhaps, or dead. It was even harder to leave him each night now, in case he slipped away from her again. She kept looking up from her notes as Nancy spoke, checking that Sam was conscious, attentive, happy.
Alive.
And better there in hospital, though it was hard to admit it, with expert help in the moments he slipped into delusion, trained hands to help him to the toilet and the shower, or if emergency resuscitation was needed. But one day . . . Jed carefully tried not to calculate the time . . . one day Sam would be, had to be, he would be home again. In their bed again, once more smiling from the kitchen table, feeding the chooks (now boarded at Moura to save her the work). And one day the pools that had been a river would flow once more, and Sam’s pale body would float with hers by moonlight, watching for the platypus, or they would dive and play together in sunlight as they taught Mattie how to swim.
Meanwhile, she was back to writing the book put aside during this last year of small rehabilitation triumphs and melodramas — like the day he spent propped up in a strange stroller-like affair so his feet could learn walking movement again on the ground, or the night the hospital had called her to say he had lost consciousness again, after four months of improvement: three hours that had stretched into a nightmare till at last he woke, suddenly smiling, unable to remember his name or hers, but once more calling her ‘Darling’.
A man got a lot of points for remembering that word, even if he forgot the rest.
The doctors had warned there might still be brain damage, that he might never recover fully. But even if Sam couldn’t articulate much, Jed knew he understood everything, from Mattie’s gurgled stories of how she and Clancy ‘climbed the big tree, Daddy’ to the articles she read him from Ecos, for he still found it difficult to focus on print for long. He even seemed to remember some of Nancy’s reminiscences. Or perhaps, Jed realised, much of this story was already familiar to him, for Joseph or even his Aunt Flinty might have told him stories of their past.
Jed interpreted his question with the ease of practice. ‘Why hadn’t Clancy warned Flora what Overflow was like?’ Outside in the garden, Mattie shrieked as young Clancy slid with her down the slippery dip. The boy seemed to take it for granted now that he would spend Sunday afternoons entertaining a small girl.
And Sunday afternoons were all that Nancy could spare for stories of her grandparents now. Overflow’s grass was finally exhausted, even in the channels. They had moved the remaining sheep to the house paddock, leaving the rest fallow or to the roos, so that only one area would be compacted and need revegetating when this drought finally broke.
But this meant carting sileage twice a day. Its sweet rotten stench even reached Dribble. Nancy too smelled faintly of fermented lucerne, turnips and molasses. Probably she’s too used to it to even notice, thought Jed.
Nancy shrugged. ‘Clancy hadn’t seen much of the world, remember. Overflow, then school at Parramatta — even at the King’s School many of the boys would have lived in homes as humble as the cottage in Paddington. The only country mansion he’d ever known was Drinkwater, and he probably thought that was pretentious. Overflow was comfortable, by the standards of the day, even slightly luxurious. Servants, carpets. Just nothing a girl from a well-born English family would have expected.’
‘But still . . .’ said Jed.
Nancy smiled. ‘Gran always told me that Flora really thought she was “rescuing” her. She even liked Flora too. I don’t mean she was happy — it was bad, especially in Sydney. Dad could never persuade Gran to go to Sydney even for the Show or when Flinty had a horse running. But Gran said that Flora was genuinely kind.’
‘But chaining her up!’
‘Used to do that to children in orphanages who’d misbehaved even when I was a kiddie. Things were different then. Actually, they were very different even twenty years ago. I wish Gran had lived long enough to get the vote.’
‘So did Flora and Clancy take your Gran back to Sydney with them after the next wool sale?’ asked Jed.
‘No,’ said Nancy flatly. She glanced out the window at the patch of drought-painted sky. ‘Because for the next thirty years or so it forgot to rain.’
Chapter 18
How to make a quill pen
Cut the tip off a large wing feather with a sharp knife. Bury the quill in very hot sand baked in the oven or under a fire for the count of ten. Scrape off the shrivelled outer membrane with a knife. Clean out the inside membrane with a piece of wire or tough grass stalk. Harden the feather by drying it in a slow oven for ten to thirty minutes. Trim the end of the feather with a sharp knife, splitting the end to make a reservoir of ink so you can write several words before you have to dip the pen again. Wipe well after each use.
OVERFLOW, 1878
CLANCY
Drought had already bitten much of New South Wales and even Victoria. By the time Ezekiel accepted that the sky refused to turn grey, there was nowhere they could afford to agist their stock. Even sending the sheep to market would cost more than the animals would bring, with so little feed along the way and dry creeks.
If the animals were going to die of thirst or starvation, Ezekiel declared, they could do it at Overflow.
Rogers was ‘let go’ and so was Logan. Neither, probably, could get work as stockmen, but Logan’s wife might well find employment in Sydney, for cooks and housekeepers were scarce, and Maria had written her an excellent reference.
Clancy had planned to join Flora and Margaret Drinkwater in Sydney as soon as the shearing was done. But that year, with so few stock still after two years of poor lambing — and such a poor clip on them — Ezekiel declared that they would do the work themselves.
It was hard, hand blistering, back wrenching. Clancy could shear, of course — any boy who had grown up on a sheep property could shear. But not sheep after sheep, day after day. Many nights he simply grabbed bread and cheese and dropped to his bed and was glad Flora was not there to see.
He was glad . . .
He did not miss his wife, he realised as he lay, his boots still on, on the bed they had shared, bread and cheese in hand. He could not tell when his adoration for his wife had become duty. She was no longer the shining girl he’d adored. Nor was he the wealthy grazier, smiling as he’d indulged her in whatever fancy she might wish. Whoever the two of them had become, they were no longer ‘in love’, to use the phrase from the novelettes he had heard Flora read aloud to Rose. He was not sure he and Flora still shared respect, or even affection.
He realised all too well that she now looked down on him as a bumpkin who was comfortable with men far below his ‘station’. He saw her simply as a burden.
He thought of the other women he knew, from Margaret Drinkwater to Maria to Mrs Taylor, who worked in the main homestead, then went back to the hut whose walls were pasted with cut-outs from the illustrated papers to tend the dinner she had left slowly simmering on the fire she had lit and banked that morning, to feed her husband and son. These women did not just make the best of their own lives, but diligently forged the best life they could for those around them. That was how you thrived — or at least survived — out there. You worked hard, and you worked together.
It had never occurred to Flora that she might work at anything more demanding than embroidery. Flora waited: waited for the wealth to return, waited for the rain that would bring it, the rain Clancy suspected might not come for years, just as it had not through most of the 1840s, when Drinkwater and Ezekiel defied the weather to gain vast worthless properties that became valuable only when the drought broke. Clancy dreaded the moment when Flora realised that there would be no escape from this life handed to her. She would need to work for it.
Flora’s adoption of Rose made him deeply uneasy too. He had chained the girl only because he knew how fragile his wife was mentally. He still could not bear to think how he had done that to a child, even though he knew that children who misbehaved were often chained in institutions.
And the girl was still shackled, even if the manacle was back in the old gaol. Even if her body was free now, she was still bound, for she had nowhere else to go, her people rounded up by Old Drinkwater and his father and sent to the reservation down the coast, where they would be civilised or die. Drinkwater had even organised hunts for any straggler, and Ezekiel joined him. The last time Ezekiel had boasted of getting ‘two bucks and a doe’ Clancy had carefully not asked if his father had meant animals or people.
Was he as guilty of carefully not seeing as Flora?
He had met, liked and respected native men, like Sampson on Drinkwater. They made superb stockmen too — better usually than any white man, despite his father’s hatred of black skin. Sometimes Clancy wondered if convicts like his father — worked as slaves until their tickets of leave — needed to imagine beings lower even than themselves.
It had been a native woman who had shown the young Cecil Drinkwater where to find feed and water for his sheep. As a child, Clancy had watched their small neat fires, had seen how the grasses grew afterwards, the land left clear. Overflow had once had seventy thousand sheep, and yet the natives had speared perhaps half a dozen in all the time he could remember, even though the animals had taken the pasture of the animals they’d hunted. Somehow the land seemed not just lonelier but lost, with the laughter of the dark people gone.
But nothing he said could induce Ezekiel to tolerate natives. Ezekiel dreamed of a ringbarked land, clean of all but men and grass and sheep. Clancy was powerless. Wifeless. Childless, with Clementine lost to him in Sydney. That pained him more than all the rest, for his child was a joy. When they returned — and they would return, for Margaret was as resolute as Drinkwater in turning an already vast holding into a small empire — Clancy dreamed of teaching his daughter how to ride; how to track sheep among the timber; how to climb a bunya tree and use a stick to poke down the nuts, assuming that the trees fruited in the dry.
Dry. His life was dry. Nor could he see an escape.
Chapter 19
Chocolate Peppermint Geranium Cake
Line your cake tin with peppermint pelargonium leaves.
Beat 185g butter with 420g brown sugar; add 3 eggs one by one, 190g plain flour and 70g SR flour, 80g cocoa, 250mL cream, 1tsp peppermint essence — or 2tsp if you don’t have the peppermint pelargonium leaves. You do need to add some either way because the leaves will only flavour the outside of the cake.
Pour in the pan; bake at 200°C for 45 minutes.
SYDNEY, 1980
SCARLETT
Scarlett Kelly-O’Hara steered her motorised wheelchair up the ramp to the flat door, opened it, then abandoned the machine inside. She stood, still careful despite the months and months since her mono, smiled when she realised she could stand, that her legs could safely carry her to the fridge for iced water and William’s mum’s home-made lemon cordial, losing her smile when she remembered it was William’s turn to cook. Because Alex was coming over, both for dinner and to discuss a prac session she’d missed when she’d had to go to physio and William . . . bloody William . . . didn’t mind a bit.
She slammed the fridge door shut, caught the radio that toppled off the top, grinned despite herself — her reflexes were good — then lost the grin as she put it back on top of the fridge.
How could any young woman — a beautiful, genius, young woman who smelled deliciously of gardenia bath salts and was now capable of walking around the flat as long as she conserved her energy in her wheelchair during the day, and had even walked through the sand at the beach last weekend, for the first time in a year, in an entirely stunning bikini which showed she had a gorgeous bosom even if the rest of her was on the small side . . . she gulped the excellent cordial down . . . how could any young woman like her have two, repeat two gorgeous men devoted to her and not one of them . . . not one, not even once, had tried to get her into bed?
She plopped down on the sofa and tucked her legs up, proud of her confident flexibility. Okay, Alex was just a friend. She had told him he was just a friend, and he knew William was living with her, which totally made sense as he’d been caring for her, which meant he’d changed his plans for going to ANU and was attending Sydney Uni instead.
But Alex — handsome, irresistible, totally too-charming Alex — still had no other long-term girlfriend, though she suspected he’d had a few one-night stands. He accompanied her to lectures, to lunch — and, yes, it was more convenient if he fetched her food rather than leave her to manoeuvre her wheelchair through the crowd — had coffee with her, spent at least two evenings a week at her dinner table. Everyone who didn’t know about William assumed she and Alex were an item.
But Alex had never made any physical approach to her at all, not since the time she’d demanded why he hadn’t made love to her and he’d admitted he was turned off by her fragility, tried to kiss her ‘just to see’ and she’d ordered him away, because she was not fragile. Small, okay. Weak — yes, in the past, and even just last year, with the glandular fever — but that was steadily decreasing, even if far more slowly than she liked. But she was never fragile, never had been fragile . . . and Alex must have noticed that she and William didn’t share the body language of lovers, as well as William’s use of the second bedroom which, okay, might have been just to store his stuff but wasn’t.
Why!!!!????
She thrust away the suspicion that William was just grateful to her for standing by him after the disgrace of the inquest, his involvement in the manslaughter of Ignatius Mervyn, his tactical resignation from the police force before any formal internal investigation of his professional misconduct. It had been Scarlett who had persuaded him to come back to Gibber’s Creek, to face the gossip, even to get the part-time work at the Whole Australia Factory.
You didn’t kiss a girl — not like he had done — just because you were grateful. Then why hadn’t he done it again?
Maybe she should set the table with candles tonight; put on her favourite mood-music tape; call the florist for a dozen rose petals so she could sprinkle a helpful path from the table to her bed . . .
. . . except that wouldn’t work either, since Alex was coming for dinner. Bloody Alex too, except she didn’t want him, she wanted William, and . . ..
She looked around as she heard the key in the door. William filled the doorway, textbooks in one arm, a shopping bag over the other. ‘Hi. How was your day?’
She kept her voice neutral. ‘Fine. Interesting. I found urethral scarring in Dr Fisher’s corpse — you know, that nice man who used to give a guest lecture on frontal lobotomies once a year and left his body to the uni. The hospital said he died of kidney failure, but the urethral scarring was so severe he’d have had almost complete urinary retention and it was post-surgical too after a prostatectomy . . .’
Scarlett felt complacent once again at the memory. ‘The prof was delighted. There may be a paper in it for him and he said I can be an associate author, plus Dr Fisher was his friend and would have been thrilled that someone found something significant from his corpse.’
William frowned as he too poured himself a cordial. ‘Why is it significant?’
‘Because no one thought that post-surgical urethral scarring could cause kidney failure. If they had, they could have put him on a catheter and saved his life.’
William looked stricken. ‘The poor man lost his life for nothing?’
It had taken her the first two years of her course to see a body as just a body and not break her heart over each one, so that now she sometimes forgot other people hadn’t been through that process. ‘No. Well, yes, technically, but he was ninety-six and he’d had two heart attacks, and heart failure might have led to kidney failure anyway, or at least be a contributing cause . . . What’s for dinner?’
‘Moussaka.’ He took out the frying pan, slopped in olive oil, put it on low and began to chop eggplant.
‘Yum. Why don’t you ever cook any Maori dishes?’
‘I am. Mum’s Maori and she makes moussaka. I brought up some of her chocolate peppermint cake too.’
