Somewhere around the Corner (16 page)

‘Thellie rang,’ said Jim.

‘Thellie?’

‘That was her daughter, Julie, down by the creek, and her grandkid. You remember, Sara?’

‘She was Thellie’s grand-daughter?’

‘They were going to have lunch with her. Sara told Thellie all about you. This peculiar girl all muddy in the creek. Thellie guessed it was you as soon as she heard the name. She drove straight up to the bus depot, looking for you, but you’d just gone. Julie thought she was crazy! I’ve been waiting. Hoping,’ said Jim.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ Jim leant back against the pillows as though the shock was too heavy for his shoulders to bear. One hand trailed awkwardly across the bed. ‘You reckon you’ve come to the end of your life, then something happens. I was just lying here
thinking there was no more to my life than what they’ll bring me in for tea: sloppy custard and burnt chops, or sloppy fruit and half-cooked sausages. Then you walk in, calm as a kitten in a basket, as if you’d walked around the corner.’

Barbara smiled. It seemed like years since she’d smiled, not hours.

‘I did,’ she said.

‘I always knew you’d come back,’ said Jim. His eyes were the same, still sky-blue, the colour of the sky above Poverty Gully, not the smudged city sky outside. His hands were old, swollen and wrinkled and big-knuckled, with brown splotches on the skin, but his grin was just the same.

She was sitting beside his bed. He’d made the nurse bring her a cup of tea and a plate of sandwiches, the same bossy Jim as years ago, and he’d watched her sternly while she ate them, not letting her speak until she had.

Barbara put the plate down. The world was coming into focus for the first time since she’d seen the bank crumble into the channel.

‘The others didn’t believe me.’ Jim tried to put the magazine back on the table by his bed. He fumbled, and it slipped. Barbara picked it up for him and slipped it onto the shelf.

‘Oh, they said they believed me,’ Jim went on. ‘They didn’t want to upset me, or Thellie either for that matter. Thellie refused to believe you were dead too. She must have cried for days after you left. Every time someone came through the door she expected it to be you. As for me—well, boys that age don’t think they can cry. It’d have been better for me if I had.’

‘Why did everyone think I was dead?’

Barbara sipped the last of the tea. It was very strong and sweet.

‘Because the flood had swept you away, of course.’ Jim peered at her over his glasses. ‘There were search parties looking for your body for weeks. They must’ve poked around every square inch of the creek, and the hills too, in case you’d managed to crawl up looking for help. Then they all looked again when the flood went down, hoping to find your body.

‘I don’t think Ted Ryan slept for three days, he was so upset. He organised every able-bodied man in the district.’

Jim looked out the window. ‘They couldn’t understand why I wasn’t out there helping them. Put it down to shock, I think. But I was looking down, remember. I saw you go. One minute you were there, with your eyes shut and the next you weren’t, wham
bam, nothing. I hardly had time to blink, then the flood water was swirling round where you had been.

‘I knew you hadn’t drowned. None of the others had been watching, they hadn’t seen what I had. They thought I just didn’t want to face that you were dead.’ He looked at her for a moment. ‘That was, what—sixty years ago now. I don’t suppose there’s been a day since when I didn’t think of you and wonder what had happened, wonder when I’d see you again. I believed I would, you know. I knew you would be somewhere in the future, waiting for me. Somewhere around the corner.’ He glanced at the mud on her face, at the mud on her hands. ‘I reckon it wasn’t so long ago for you, was it? You’ve just got here.’

Barbara nodded.

‘Struth, love, it must be hard for you, straight from there to here. How did you get here—to the hospital, I mean?’

‘A policeman drove me here. A young one, he was nice. Jim, what happened when I left? Is everyone still there, down in the gully? Did you all move to Gully Jack’s? What about the school?’

Jim nodded vaguely, as though he hadn’t heard. He seemed to be thinking. His face looked tired, older than when she had come in, as though the strain of meeting her had exhausted him. Finally he reached
into the drawer beside the bed. He drew out a set of keys and handed them to her.

‘What are these for?’

‘The keys to my place. Go on, take them.’

‘But I can’t.’

‘Where else are you going to stay then?’

Barbara was silent.

‘You get a taxi there. They’ll call you one from the front desk. You ask the sister in charge. Look, I know it’s not the best staying there on your own, but it’s only for a few days. With luck they’ll let me out soon, and if not—well, we’ll work something out. But you go home and get yourself cleaned up. Struth, Ma would say you looked like something the cat dragged in. And here,’ he said, handing her some notes from his wallet, ‘you get yourself some clothes too. Hell’s bells, that’s still Dulcie’s skirt you’re wearing, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have thought I’d remember it, but the memory’s still as plain as day. Oh, and get some decent shoes. You buy some tucker, too, there won’t be much that’s any good in the house by now. No, don’t argue!’

His eyes were the same bright blue eyes of comfort and determination. ‘You just keep the home fires burning till I get back,’ ordered Young Jim, ‘and if you feel up to it, you come and see me in the morning. We’ll tackle all your questions then.’

It was a lovely street—old-fashioned houses were just glimpsed through gardens, the scent of the sea beyond. The taxi pulled up by a white-painted fence.

‘This is it. Number 56.’

Barbara opened the taxi door and held out the money. ‘Thank you.’

The driver glanced at the house. It had an air of desertion; blank windows and shaggy grass. ‘You sure this is right?’

‘It’s right,’ said Barbara.

She opened the gate. It was metal, painted white to match the fence, but cracking now in the sunlight.

Lavender and rosemary shrubs brushed against her as she moved up the path. She remembered them from Dulcie’s garden. And, what was it again? crepe myrtle—even an apple tree like Dulcie’s there at the side of the house, laden with over-ripe fruit that should have
been picked weeks before. Soft apples squashed into the grass all around it. The house looked like it was dozing, all alone.

Barbara turned the key in the lock and opened the door.

A gust of old air toppled through the doorway, bringing scents of floor polish, old carpets and shut-up rooms.

The house felt like a house she knew, almost, but also a stranger’s house. The floors creaked as though talking to a friend. She turned the TV on to have a voice in the echoing rooms, as she wandered from room to room, looking for things that might tell her about Jim.

Photos by his bed…two women who looked vaguely familiar; children somewhere at the beach, years ago, by the look of their swimming costumes; a kid’s birthday party with a house behind. The house looked familiar, too, and then she recognised it. It was Gully Jack’s house, but freshly painted, with flowers on all sides and a black and white dog—surely not the same one—up on the verandah.

Books in nearly every room. Novels in one of the spare rooms, where she’d made up the bed for herself. Books on economics, politics, philosophy, thick and dusty, in the room that must be his study, with a desk
looking out into the garden. A pile of magazines and newspapers, all more than three weeks old, on the coffee table in the living room. A cup and saucer, and a plate with two stale crusts on it, unwashed by the sink. She washed them slowly, and dried them, then found where to put them away.

She found the phone in the hall. There were menus from take-away food shops that home-delivered up on the wall. She chose a pizza from the list, then rang and ordered it. She ate it sitting on the floor watching TV. It was great to eat a pizza again. She hadn’t realised she’d missed them, there in the past. She hadn’t realised she’d missed so many things. She took out the wooden lizard and put it on the table by the bed, so she could see it when she woke.

Jim’s house was almost like a home. Almost. When Jim came back, perhaps it would be.

She went to the hospital the next day, dressed in new jeans and T-shirt and white sandals that clicked on the shiny floor. Jim was waiting for her, his face bright and expectant as she came in the door. He looked at her with approval.

‘That’s better. You looked like you were going to drop if you took another step yesterday. Sleep well?’

Barbara nodded. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘My dreams were too bright.’ She sat down on the chair by the
bed. ‘Jim, what happened when I left? I’ve got to know everything.’

Jim settled the pillows behind him more comfortably with his hand. ‘I don’t know where to start,’ he told her. ‘You have to remember it’s sixty years for me, even if it’s just yesterday for you.’

‘Did you move down to Gully Jack’s?’

Jim’s grin flashed. ‘Yeah, we all moved down to Gully Jack’s. He told us it was your idea. Ma cried when she heard that. We didn’t go for a few weeks, though. We were all out looking for you.’

Jim’s face grew lively with memory. ‘You should have seen Ma down at Gully Jack’s. She was like a dog with two tails, couldn’t work out which one to wag first. I think she spent the next month at the stove—sponge cake, apple cake, orange cake, mutton pies—if you could bake it she made it. Gully Jack even took to stopping work early just to get more time to eat.’

‘Did he find the gold? The nugget?’

Jim stared at her. ‘So there really was a nugget! Thellie kept saying there was, but you know what little kids are like. We thought she imagined it, or it might just have been the light shining on a bit of quartz.’

‘I think it was a nugget,’ said Barbara slowly. ‘It was down in the mud. We were looking at it when Thellie slipped.’

Jim shook his head. ‘Well, if it was there, no-one ever found it. The walls collapsed in the flood and Gully Jack didn’t have the heart to repair them, not after what happened to you. He built another channel a little way down, but he didn’t find much in it—a few ounces, when all was said and done. He dug another channel a few years later, and then more after that. He finally found a decent seam the year before he died, but he was so stiff with the arthritis that he couldn’t do much with it.’

‘When did he die?’

Jim rubbed his chin. ‘Must be twenty years ago now, bit less maybe. Ma and Dad were still living in the house when he died. He left the house to them in his will, and the rest of the farm, though Dad had bought most of it from him by then. Dad started growing peaches after the war. You ever heard of gully peaches? Sweetest in Australia. They became real close, those three. Did you know Ma was the first woman on the local council? She ran against old Nicholson and beat him. You should have seen Dad and Gully Jack campaigning for her. Dad’s grin was as wide as the creek when she won.’ Jim smiled at the memory. ‘They’re all in the cemetery down in the gully. I reckon on good days Gully Jack can still hear the creek.’

Barbara was silent. Of course they couldn’t be alive. She’d known it, really. How could you cry for someone dead so long ago? She felt a warm hand on hers. She looked up. Jim nodded, his face full of understanding. They sat quietly for a while.

‘How about Dulcie?’ Barbara asked. ‘She didn’t marry Gully Jack then?’

‘Dulcie? She’s up in town, in the hospital. The oldest resident.’

‘She’s still alive?’

‘Too right she is. Still got all her wits about her, too. They don’t make them like Dulcie any more. You should have seen her last birthday party. The whole valley must’ve been there and enough candles to start a bushfire.

‘She’s been widowed about thirty years now. She married Sergeant Ryan a few months after you left.’ Jim smiled to himself. ‘They had two kids. Mark, he married Thellie’s daughter, Julie. You met Julie by the creek. They had a daughter, too. Jean, that was her name. You should have seen her hair in those days—heaps of red curls on her head, like snakes arguing among themselves. Her dad said his mother had hair like that.’

‘It sounds like you liked her,’ said Barbara.

‘Yeah, I liked her,’ said Jim. ‘She was just like her mum, though. If there was an orphaned lamb or
wombat she’d be looking after it.’ He grinned. ‘I married her after the war.’

Barbara stared. ‘But—wasn’t she much younger than you?’

‘Fifteen years. It seemed a lot when we were growing up. She was, oh, she must’ve been about seven when I went off to war in 1940, just a kid with grubby feet and teeth all crooked where her big ones were growing in. She wrote to me all through the war. She was a good kid.

‘I met Muriel, my first wife, in New Guinea. She was a nurse. Muriel died in ’49. It was one of those things that hit you out of the blue. We’d both survived the war and then a car swerved around a corner, up on the footpath and hit Muriel. A couple of years later I noticed that Jean had grown up. We had three kids. They’re grown up now, of course. Michael’s a computer engineer overseas, Angie’s still studying, and Helen, she’s the oldest, is a doctor now, down at the gully. Helen and her family live in Dulcie’s house at the old dairy farm, though it’s all beef cattle now.’

‘What about Elaine, and Joey and Harry, and Thellie?’

Jim’s face grew shadowed. ‘Joey died. Polio. It was bad that year. Kids don’t die from polio any more but they did then.’ Jim was silent for a moment

‘He said he wanted a thousand sausages!’

‘Well, he got those at least. Gully Jack got him all the sausages he could eat for his birthday, the one after you left. Maybe not quite a thousand…he was nine when he died. Harry’s an engineer, he’ll be retiring soon. Elaine? She’s still working. Elaine’s like Ma. She’ll work till she drops. She’s a paediatrician down in Melbourne.’

‘A children’s doctor? But she said she never wanted to see another lot of grubby brats in her life.’

‘Well, she changed her mind,’ said Jim drily. ‘She’s got two kids of her own and her husband’s a doctor as well. That’s probably where my Helen got the idea from, her Aunt Elaine. I remember when she was about ten she found Elaine’s plastic skeleton under the bed, the one she’d used for anatomy. She’d got half of it put together before we found her at it. She’s like Elaine and she’s like Dulcie, and I reckon there’s a bit of Ma in her as well.’

‘What about Thellie?’

‘She still lives at Gully Jack’s,’ said Jim. ‘Her boys mostly run the farm now. Mark and Julie live up in town with Sara. Funny, people still call it Gully Jack’s. I suppose they always will. It’s one of the biggest peach orchards in New South Wales now.

‘You know, Thellie was the only one, besides me, who wouldn’t accept that you were dead. All those
stories you told her—she believed every one of them. She knew she’d see you again one day. Just like me. I can’t wait to see her face when she meets you. You know, she’s got eight grandkids now? I think Sara’s the most like her of all of them, and not one of them would be alive if you hadn’t saved Thellie from the flood.’

A trolley rattled somewhere down the corridor; morning tea and biscuits travelling from room to room. Jim stared out the window, as though there was something more to see than walls and gutters.

‘There were good bits in those days as well as bad,’ he said quietly. ‘I reckon you didn’t see the bad bits, not in those weeks you were with us. The hunger in the beginning, and the cold in winter, and Dad growing more and more despairing, and Ma just harder and wearier. You changed things, just by knowing it could be different.

‘I reckon you were a catalyst for all of us. You were so convinced there was a world around the corner, you convinced us too. That’s what we needed, someone to say another world was possible.’

‘You think that’s why I was able to go back?’

‘I dunno,’ said Jim slowly. ‘Maybe it was a lot of things. All of us so desperate for another way of living; you so scared and wanting somewhere else as well. Maybe it was just all of us reaching out, vulnerable—’

‘And yesterday by the creek—except it wasn’t yesterday for you—I stopped wanting to stay, the terror and wanting to survive brought me back.’

‘And I was desperately wishing you were somewhere else as well, somewhere safe.’

‘So here I am.’

They were both silent for a minute. Another trolley wheeled past, click, click, click.

‘You know, I reckon I got as good an education in that washhouse as I’d have got anywhere in Australia,’ mused Jim. ‘I learnt more from you, and Ma and Dad, and Dulcie and Sergeant Ryan, than I’d have learnt anywhere else. Ma showed me how to keep on going, no matter how hard things get. Dad showed me how to confront people to fight for what you think is right. I learnt how dreaming of a better world is the first step in making it happen. Learnt how much you can do if you all work together.’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe Gully Jack taught me how not to let your dreams take over. It was a good life we had in the valley, for all that things seemed crook at the time.’

‘You sound like you miss it,’ said Barbara.

‘Yeah, I miss it,’ said Jim. ‘Not the hardship. Not the things like polio, not the ’30s so much. It’s the valley itself. That’s what I miss.’

‘Didn’t you ever want to go back…’

Jim looked out the window. ‘Yeah,’ he admitted slowly. ‘Sometimes I feel as if the valley’s a knot in my heart that won’t unravel. It’s tied up and won’t let go. But somehow, something always kept me in the city, some cause or other that needed to be fought, and I kept thinking, maybe next year, or the one after that…’

Jim’s voice trailed away. ‘Perhaps I needed you to take me back,’ he said. His head slipped back against the pillow.

‘I’d better go,’ said Barbara. ‘You’re tired. I’ll come back tomorrow if I may.’

Jim shook his head. ‘I’ll just have a nap. Didn’t sleep much last night. I was so excited, that’s all. You come back this afternoon,’ he ordered her, the old Jim resurfacing. He met her eyes. ‘You know, I used to try to go around the corner, just like you. At first I thought I could follow you, bring you back. Then I tried again, when Muriel died, and a couple of times in New Guinea, when things were tough. It never worked for me. Finally I realised I go around my corners by working for them, not by shutting my eyes.

‘Then yesterday, just lying here thinking my life was over, things were as bad as they’d ever been. I reckon it was me who went around the corner yesterday, as well as you.

‘It’s funny—when I saw you in that demonstration I didn’t recognise you. It was only when Thellie rang that I put two and two together.

‘Now I’ve got a new life, something to live for. I reckon the two of us have got other corners to go around.’ He touched his plastered hip. ‘Give me a while and I’ll even have this working again.’ Jim grinned at her gently. ‘You come this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a nap and be right as rain. There’s something I want to show you then. All right?’

‘All right.’ Barbara bent over and kissed his cheek. His whiskers felt like prickly paper. ‘Sleep well,’ she said.