And my dreams are strange dreams, are day dreams, are grey dreams . . . but my dreams come true.
Henry Lawson, ‘The Wander-Light’
JED
A powerful owl hooted down by the river, a bass note under Sam’s faint snores and Maxi’s slightly louder ones. Jed couldn’t sleep.
Who was she?
Matilda had been an eagle, and Nancy was a swan, and Michael a pelican.
Maybe she was a bandicoot. Or a green ant, the kind who looked so sweet, but injected prussic acid when they bit. Or maybe a mosquito . . .
Impossible to sleep. Something whispered at her. Something had to be done. She felt its pull as strongly as she had after Fred’s death, when he called her to the billabong, to glimpse herself happy in the future.
Would that small boy she had seen be Sam’s too?
She slipped out to the kitchen, poured a glass of Mack’s goat’s milk, guaranteed tuberculosis free, then ambled into the living room, where her movements wouldn’t wake Sam or Scarlett.
Something moved outside: a breath that wasn’t air. She glanced at the study window and stared. The powerful owl clutched the veranda railing with its claws, motionless, larger than any bird had any right to be. It opened its wings, blotting out the stars, its small eyes still intent upon her.
‘Graeek!’ it said, as if slightly impatient she didn’t understand.
Another breath of wings, longer this time. The owl was gone.
Jed sobbed.
But it wasn’t crying like any she had done before: despairing weeping for her poor lost child; terrified tears after Merv attacked her; frightened silent wailing at her father’s death.
There was no fear in her tears now, not even for the empty space in her life and heart. Life would fill it up again. Life did that, when you reached out. And Matilda was still there, and always would be.
An extraordinary life.
The life of a nation, lived through one woman.
We will not forget, Jed promised her. We may never see a government with the courage to change the nation so swiftly again. And possibly that was good — maybe change needed to be slow — perhaps people and governments needed to grow at the same pace. But somehow, I promise, we will keep the candle lit.
She rubbed her face, breathed, looked up. And saw Matilda’s old typewriter, an Olivetti used for writing business letters. Personal letters deserved her fountain pen, according to the old-fashioned manners Matilda cherished.
It had sat unused on Dribble’s bookshelves since the 1972 election and Jed’s last assignments at uni. Writing belonged to Nicholas. Bad enough she had two legs, and had triumphed at university where he had failed, without her writing more successfully than him as well.
She stared at the machine. She had helped Nicholas craft his book. So many of his speeches had been based on her articles supporting his campaign. She had even drafted speeches for him, always drawing back before they were polished so he’d be able to believe he’d written them himself.
Nicholas was a good writer. But at last she accepted she had the potential to be more.
One day she’d tell herself, ‘Thank goodness I didn’t marry him when I was eighteen.’ But now she simply lifted the machine onto the dining-room table, found the reams of paper in the desk drawer, the carbon paper. Sat, staring out the window, till the eagle rose in vast and endless circles above the river.
Jed began to write.
It was midnight in Grinder’s Alley . . .