23 May 1973
Sharon Taylor
River View Nursing Home
Dear Sharon,
I hope you are well. We are all well here.
I am sorry I didn’t write straight after we met. It was a terrible shock seeing you in that café. I did not know what to say, but I have been thinking of you ever since we met. Those people at River View should have told us you are able to get about and everything. It wasn’t fair to your father and me to keep us in the dark.
I thought you might like to see a photo of your family. Your Auntie Rita took this last Christmas.
Your father and Bruce send their love.
Your loving mother,
Mum
(Mrs Ellen Taylor)
SCARLETT
Scarlett waited till Jed had come back from her morning walk. Sometimes they went together, along the road or on the track Sam had made that was level enough for her four-wheel-drive wheelchair. But other mornings Jed walked alone, up to the billabong and back, as Nancy had often slipped out alone during the times Scarlett had stayed with her at Overflow.
Nancy had taught all the River View kids ‘land stuff’ — how ant castles meant a big or long rain; flying ant queens meant SOME rain, even if only seven drops; how when the cockatoos or magpies flew in circles, not knowing where to land, it meant storms coming from two directions and that, when they met, it would be bad.
Good things to know. Interesting things. But only knowledge that could be observed in gardens or along roads or flat, artificial tracks.
A year ago she had longed simply to get out into the real world, away from the safe prison of River View, and to one day be independent of daily help. Now she was beginning to understand how much of the world was barred to her. She had been nowhere! Well, okay, to Canberra with Jed a few times, to the beach four times, to stay in a camp for ‘people like her’, with someone to hold her as she pretended she really was boogie boarding in the shallow waves. And one day — a soon one day — she would visit other cities too, and even live there, at least for a while.
But the places she most longed for, the ones she knew Nancy and Jed and even Matilda were too tactful ever to mention, were the ones all around her. The wombat track from Dribble to the billabong. The gullies at Moura, Halfway to Eternity and Overflow, where there were deep rock pools and boulders tableclothed in orchids and cliffs where eagles nested, their white droppings streaking the rock below, where you might climb if you had a back as well as hands and feet that worked.
‘Hi, brat.’ Jed took off her shoes at the back door, then padded into the kitchen. She stopped and looked at Scarlett more closely. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I went through yesterday’s mail.’
‘Anything interesting?’ There rarely was, apart from the odd postcard from Jed’s old friends at uni. They didn’t even empty the mailbox every day.
‘A letter from Mrs Taylor.’ She read it aloud to Jed, then pulled the photo out of the cheap envelope. It showed a man with grey hair with his arm around the woman she had seen at the café. A young man stood next to them. Behind them sat a house in what Jed called the ‘spotty brick with lace curtains’ style, a white concrete path and carefully pruned rose bushes blooming either side of the front door.
She should feel something. They were her genetic family. That young man was her brother. But they not only looked like strangers — they felt strange too, even weirder than the community of the Chosen. At least the Chosen lived among the paddocks and hills she had known almost all her life. This suburban family was as alien as the spaceship the Chosen waited for.
‘Chin up, brat. At least the Taylors aren’t demanding you live with them. It’s a nice letter,’ Jed added gently. ‘Letting you get to know them.’
Yes. Nice. Scarlett didn’t want nice. She wanted an apology for abandoning her. She wanted them to weep, to scream, to say, ‘We cut you from our lives and have always felt the wound.’
Not . . . nice.
She hadn’t even known her older brother was called Bruce. Or that she had an Auntie Rita. And if her mother . . . that woman . . . had wanted to know how she was, she had only had to write to River View.
She carefully ripped both letter and photo, then wheeled over to place them in the bin.
‘I take it you’re not going to reply then,’ said Jed dryly.
‘No,’ said Scarlett.
‘Your choice, brat.’
Yes, thought Scarlett with sudden satisfaction. Her choice. Because she finally did have choices. What to study at university, where and how to live while she did. And she had other choices too.
‘I’m going out to the community of the Chosen for lunch this afternoon. I rang them up and Mark said I’d be welcome.’
Jed stared at her, but bit back whatever she was about to say. ‘Why?’ she asked finally.
‘What else am I supposed to do?’ said Scarlett bitterly. ‘Read a book? Watch TV? Do you know how many things I CAN’T do?’
‘Scarlett, darling, I’m sorry. Come to the pictures with me.’
‘I wasn’t hinting for that.’
‘I . . . I hadn’t realised. How about next holidays we do something different? Interesting? We could drive down to Melbourne. Even along the Nullarbor Plain. Or we could —’
‘No!’ Jed stopped, startled at the yell. ‘I need my own life. Mine. Not arranged by you.’
‘I didn’t think.’
‘People don’t,’ said Scarlett. ‘Even you.’
‘I’m sorry. Go out there if you really want to. But, Scarlett . . . why do you want to go there? You don’t really think this Ra person can help you walk?’
‘I want to go because I can,’ said Scarlett simply.
Jed paused. ‘Fair enough,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t drive you though.’
‘Why not?’
Jed flushed. ‘I’m going to the pictures with Sam.’
Excellent, thought Scarlett. ‘Then you definitely don’t want me there too. I hope he buys you popcorn.’
‘I can pay for my own popcorn!’
‘Mark will pick me up,’ said Scarlett.
Jed gave her a look that said, ‘I want to warn you that those people are flakes, that they are after my money, but I hope you are intelligent enough to see through them.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Scarlett. ‘They’re interesting, that’s all. Probably more interesting than the pictures. What’s on?’
‘Alvin Purple.’
‘Is that the one everyone’s talking about where they show a bloke with no clothes on?’
‘Yep.’
‘Maybe not quite as interesting then,’ said Scarlett.
Jed looked at her with love, concern and worry. But even so, thought Scarlett, she was going.