Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 2 December 1972
Correction: The photograph captioned ‘Local boys Angus Sampson and William McWhannel win Rotary scholarships to USA’ in Wednesday’s edition of the Gazette should have read ‘Angus Sampson and his family’s prize-winning bull at the Gibber’s Creek Annual Show’. The Gazette apologises to both families and congratulates both young men on their sterling scholarship achievement.
JED
Moth wings brushed Jed’s face, wings of warm night air as well as of bogongs, fat, flappy and suicidal in Boadicea’s headlights. They drove in silence for a few minutes.
‘Carol left early,’ said Jed, to cut the tension.
‘What? Oh, yeah, they all did. They wanted to celebrate with Greg. He’ll have heard the results on the radio. We probably shouldn’t have left the poor bloke alone tonight of all nights. We just got caught up in it all . . .’
‘Who’s Greg?’
Sam grinned. ‘Mrs Weaver’s alien.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither did Mrs Weaver. Greg’s a draft dodger. He’s been hiding out for over two years now, down in Melbourne and then, when things get too hot for him, up here. Mrs Weaver met him down by the river one day and somehow he ended up doing odd jobs for her, cash in hand.’
‘And he told her he was an alien? That’s cruel.’
‘No, it was all a misunderstanding. He says he told her he was “alienated from society” and she took it the wrong way. Greg tried to correct her for a while, then gave up. Plus he says the old girl really did need a bit of help around the place. The gutters were almost rusted through.’
‘Is he staying?’
Sam shook his head. ‘He hasn’t seen his family for two years. He’ll be heading back to Melbourne on Monday, after he’s said goodbye to Mrs Weaver and made sure she’s booked her car in to get the brake linings changed.’
‘Maybe he should just tell her he’s going home,’ said Jed. For after all, Mrs Weaver had been talking about seeing aliens for far longer than a draft dodger had been hiding at Halfway to Eternity. It might be painful if she was disillusioned now.
More silence, the heaviness of things unsaid. Another vast bogong splattered against the windscreen. Tiny moths fluttered in the darkness. Which meant no rain for at least a week, thought Jed. She glanced at the man next to her. ‘Nancy is matchmaking.’
Sam looked relieved. ‘Yep. I have a confession to make.’
‘Worse than hiding an alien?’
‘Much worse. This morning at the polling booth Mrs Thompson hired me to give you a Christmas present. Solar hot-water panels for Dribble.’ His voice was gentle, as if he guessed her vulnerability tonight.
‘Just what I’ve always wanted.’
‘Yeah. Me clambering all over your roof for a couple of days.’
Jed considered, then grinned at him. ‘I can think of worse Christmas presents. Which Mrs Thompson?’
‘The dragon.’
‘Matilda? I used to think of her as a dragon too.’
‘Not now?’
‘Only sometimes. She’s softened since Tommy’s death.’
‘Maybe to you,’ said Sam feelingly. ‘She’s still Lord High Executioner to the rest of the district. But speaking of worse news . . .’
‘Okay, what is it?’
‘The other Mrs Thompson, Nancy, hired me at lunchtime to build you a chook house.’
‘Another Christmas present?’
‘Got it in one.’
‘They mean well,’ said Jed at last.
‘Sure. I’m a nice local lad from a good family.’ Sam grinned at her from the shadows cast by the headlights. An excellent grin, Jed decided.
‘Even though he lives in a commune and installs solar panels?’
‘They think I’ll grow out of it,’ said Sam easily. ‘They may even be right. Anyway, Mum lived in a sort of commune.’
‘She what?’
‘The circus. I wish you could hear some of her stories. Auntie Mah’s too. They shared everything back then, even clothes. Even we don’t do that. Well, not much. As Mum said, when you had to depend on everyone else in the circus for your life when you were underwater or getting sawn in half, you tended to trust them with everything else too.’
‘Is that why you put the old circus tent up? To remind you that communal living could work?’
‘Nope. Because it was big and waterproof. Well, almost waterproof. We’ve discovered that domes leak.’
‘But mud sticks?’
‘If thrown the right way. What are you going to do now?’ he asked.
‘Go to bed. Alone,’ she added, in case he thought the first was an invitation.
‘I didn’t mean that. Now that you’ve left uni.’
‘Pretty much what you’re doing, I think. Use my body as well as my brain for a while. Lend a hand on the property. Write the odd article for the Gibberer.’
‘Not manage Nicholas’s electoral office here in Gibber’s Creek?’
‘Nope. The Labor Party have picked out a nice girl for that. The niece of the branch president. But I don’t want the job anyway.’
‘Ah.’
‘You’ll swallow a moth if you don’t watch out. I don’t want to manage an electoral office. And, despite what you’re thinking, and maybe Matilda and Nancy too, I didn’t slip out to have a quiet snog with Nicholas tonight.’
‘I never thought you did.’ His tone was serious. He met her eyes as she glanced at him, then turned her gaze back to the road. ‘You went to comfort him,’ he said quietly. ‘And maybe for comfort yourself. A quick snog might be better.’
‘I . . . I don’t know what you mean.’
‘A quick snog might just be celebration. But tonight it was as if . . . as if you and Nicholas felt the same thing.’
‘Everyone in the Town Hall felt the same thing tonight.’
‘Not like that. Everyone else was triumphant. Overjoyed. But you two were . . . sad? Overwhelmed?’
This young man saw a lot. What was he doing, stuck in a hippie commune plastering mud walls? Did he really believe that he was building a new civilisation as well as adobe cottages?
‘Fair enough,’ said Jed at last, as Boadicea turned onto the road to Halfway to Eternity.
‘Not that you owe me any explanations.’
‘No, I don’t. Thank you for that. So I’ll tell you anyway. Nicholas saw things in Vietnam. Did things he’s probably only ever spoken of to me. Tonight he realised now no other young Australian has to go through what he did.’
‘And you?’
Okay, thought Jed. ‘I told you I was raped. I was living with my stepmother, and she had this boyfriend. He bothered me for a long time, but I was careful. Got away from him a lot. But he caught me in the end. They put me in a home for wayward girls when my stepmother discovered I was pregnant. I escaped, ran south. Hitched, got bits of work where I could . . . stole food when I couldn’t. I . . .’ she swallowed ‘. . . I went into labour too early. I was sleeping under a bridge at the time. The baby . . . died, or was born dead, I don’t know. If I’d been able to afford medical care or even had a pension so I could afford to eat and have a roof over my head, she might have lived. And tonight I realised that maybe now that will stop happening to girls in Australia.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sam softly. She glanced at him, then back at the road. There was no revulsion in his tone. No pity either.
‘We both had to deal with hard things three years ago, really hard things, and we had no one else our age to talk to who’d understand. It’s left a . . . bond . . . between us.’
She did not mention the vision of the future she’d seen. No, not a vision: everything she saw, past or present, was real. That deeper love was in her future.
Instead she said, ‘I’m not ashamed . . .’
‘There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of!’
‘Well, anyway, now there’ll be free medical care for anyone like me. And a free place at uni. And equal pay for equal work. If I’d even had that when I washed dishes in cafés, I might have been okay . . . And here we are.’
The track to Halfway to Eternity was chook free, some chooks presumably roosting in their chook house, others on the gumtree branches above them. Chooks were definitely anarchists, thought Jed, no matter what Carol said. She parked Boadicea safely out of pooing range.
‘I think I’d like a chook palace,’ she said. ‘Something magnificent. Why should chooks always have a ratty old shed?’
‘Done. I found an old chandelier at the dump last week. It’ll be perfect. Purely decorative, of course. Probably not safe to wire up a chook house.’
A most suitable young man indeed, thought Jed. And a nice one. A friend. Matilda was a good judge of people, as well as sheep and political parties. Nancy was too.
She looked at Sam’s face, dappled with leaf shadows. A squarish face, even with the beard . . . almost rock-like. But rocks were good things. Perhaps, just perhaps, Matilda and Nancy might be right.
‘Not much time to get panels up and a chook palace built before Christmas,’ said Jed. ‘See you Monday?’
Sam nodded, his face serious. ‘You can count on it.’