Gibber’s Creek Gazette, June 1975
Vietnamese Orphans Leave Hospital
Vietnamese orphans airlifted to Australia after the fall of Saigon have now been released from hospital to their adopting families . . .
JED
‘Me?’ The world twisted. ‘Why?’
Nicholas looked at the night, not Jed. A wallaby bounded softly between the tussocks, glanced up to assess if the humans were a threat, then bent to graze on Blue’s azaleas. ‘I can talk to you. I just have, if you hadn’t noticed. I’ve never been able to talk to anyone as I do to you.’
‘Then you need to! Nicholas . . . Have you told Felicity about what happened in Vietnam?’
‘No,’ he said shortly.
‘Why not?’
‘Because she doesn’t deserve to share my nightmares.’
‘And I do?’
‘Sorry. I meant . . . you already knew horrors happened. You’d faced them. Felicity has just known love and joy.’
Jed thought of the girl’s strong hands capturing the wombat, her certainty, her strength. ‘Happiness creates strong people too. Felicity is much tougher than you think. She’s like Flinty, after all.’
He smiled. ‘You never knew Flinty as a girl. She grew up in the shadow of World War I, saw her parents die, cared for her brothers and sister all by herself, even from her wheelchair. Flinty is like the rock of the valley. Felicity is my refuge from all the bad things. I don’t want to share them with her. She’s . . .’ He hunted for words. ‘Laughter. Gentleness.’
‘You can be gentle and strong at the same time. And you can’t dictate who she’s allowed to be either. You need to talk to her.’ She touched his arm to make him look at her, to force him to truly listen to what she was saying. ‘And I have met Flinty —’ She broke off as Sam came out, then took a quick step back.
Sam looked at them, expressionless, for perhaps a second too long, then smiled. ‘Ready to go? I’m expecting a call from the German suppliers at some impossible hour in the morning.’
‘I’ll get my coat,’ said Jed. She left them both on the veranda.
The wind had teeth on the way home, despite Boadicea’s hood.
‘Should have brought the ute,’ said Sam.
‘Mmm. Sam, what you saw back there . . . I was just trying to tell Nicholas something.’
‘What?’
‘That he should share his problems with Felicity, not with me.’ She suddenly realised that sounded anything but reassuring. ‘Sam, I —’ She braked suddenly as they approached the track to the billabong. ‘Did you see that?’
Sam gazed into the darkness. ‘That flicker? Campfire, I think.’ He blinked into the darkness. ‘No. It’s gone.’
‘Do you mind if we check?’ For some reason no one camped by the billabong these days, possibly because unless you knew the land there seemed to be no good site along the rutted track to pitch a tent. Or possibly because Fred had his own ways of making unwelcome visitors uncomfortable.
‘Hunting for ghosts again?’
‘Of course,’ said Jed lightly.
Boadicea bumped along the track until Jed pulled over and stared into the mirrored stars of the billabong. No fire. No tent. No ghosts from the past or visions of the future.
‘It must just have been moonlight on the water.’
‘No moon tonight. And I saw it too,’ said Sam.
‘Can you smell sausages?’
‘Not this time.’
‘Me either. Fred fed me sausages that first night. Sorry, I’ve told you that before. It . . . it changed my life. Gave me my life. I hadn’t eaten in days. Not properly for weeks. Months even. I don’t think I’d have survived without those sausages. Without Fred. He was an incredible old man.’
‘I read about what he did in the war.’
‘I bet whatever you read didn’t say he survived.’
‘No. But Mum said she was pretty sure he had. We used to ask for circus stories all the time, when we went to bed, or on car trips. The skeleton in the House of Horrors. The trapeze brothers who were really women. Madame and her caravan. Wonderful stories. Jed . . .’
For a moment she wondered if he was going to ask her to marry him again. Instead he said, ‘Do you love Nicholas?’
‘No. I’ve told you that before.’
‘You said you didn’t want to marry him,’ said Sam gently. ‘Not that you don’t love him.’
‘Okay. I . . . what I feel doesn’t fit in any box. Even when we were . . . together, I suppose, I didn’t even love Nicholas the way I love you. I don’t love him now.’ Should she tell Sam that she had seen a future where she did love Nicholas? No. She had to shoulder that one alone.
She met Sam’s shadowed gaze. ‘Nicholas and I have shared a lot. I can talk to him, and he can talk to me. But I love you. And I can talk to you, even if Nicholas is too much of a twit to talk about his problems with Felicity.’ She smiled. ‘You make me happy. Nicholas never did.’
‘I’d better be satisfied with that then,’ Sam said lightly. ‘Come on. Let’s get you home. You look done in. And I have that phone call.’
The campfire flames glinted in the rear-vision mirror as Boadicea made her slow way back to the road through the ruts, as the figure grilling sausages gazed thoughtfully at the vanishing car. But this time Jed didn’t look back.