Zac glanced at the profile of the woman beside him. He didn’t know her, but he had to admit he was attracted. Hopefully he hadn’t slept with her. Surely he wouldn’t have – it was too soon after Roslyn’s passing.
It seemed they’d developed a friendship. A strong rapport, he could feel that. Ava looked capable – according to the other nurses, she was supposedly super skilled at emergency midwifery and nursing – and from her point of view, it must be awkward that she had a man in her car who had completely forgotten her. From his point of view, it was a little hard to believe he’d actually got close enough that she felt responsible for him. Maybe even moved on her a little. He ran his finger around his collar at the thought.
Speaking of moving … ‘Have you ever been a dancer?’ he asked, more to distract himself than her.
‘You’ve said that before.’ She smiled at the road ahead as if he’d said something amusing. Good, then. His tense shoulders relaxed a little in relief.
‘I did actually promise to tell you about that. So, when I was five, I fell in love with ballet. I dreamed of it, I thought ballet dancers were princesses and I wanted to be one sooo badly my mother sent away for DVDs of ballet tuition because I wanted to learn. To expect to find a ballet teacher would be impractical on a cattle station four hours from Alice Springs. Anyway, I used to spend hours practising in front of the TV and would follow the steps. My grandfather fixed a ballet barre to the wall in the house. I haven’t danced for ages but I loved it for years.’
Wow, a torrent of words. He sat there watching the expressions cross her face like clouds across the sky on a windy day. Then blinked at his own poetic thoughts. Good grief.
She looked across at him for the briefest moment and he saw her shrug away a tinge of embarrassment. ‘You seem to think it shows.’
‘A dancer in the middle of Australia is taking me to her home.’ He sat up straighter. ‘Life is very strange.’
He heard her breathe in and hold it for a moment. As if she was going to say something and wasn’t sure. Then she said, ‘I’m taking you home because I hope that spending time together will bring back your memory. But I won’t harass you. If it doesn’t work out I can accept that, too. Until we get to that point, well, we can look after you properly and show you the outback.’
He was impressed with her level tone, and his mouth kinked upwards. ‘Thank you. I know where I stand with you. Nothing airy-fairy about Ava.’
‘Except the dancing,’ she said, and he could see the dimple – the cute dimple – at the side of her smile. The tension between them had lessened again, and he was glad.
‘So you’re a legendary midwife, I’m told. Do you always work in Alice?’
‘Not that legendary. I work for the Alice and Elsewhere Nursing Agency. Most times I travel between Alice Springs and Katherine communities as a midwife, but I work as a nurse as well.’
‘I think the staff on the ward had a vested interest in me remembering you. They all had a tale about you and some medical drama in the outback.’
Her cheeks turned pink and he smiled. She said, ‘They exaggerated.’
She wasn’t used to compliments. He didn’t know why he found that endearing, but he did. ‘I don’t think people out here are into exaggeration. There’s some major respect held for you.’
She lifted her chin at that. ‘That’s very kind of you to say.’
He studied the way she kept her eyes on the road. Avoiding his? ‘So, where and how did you gather all that respect and experience at such a young age?’
‘Right.’ She made a rude sound. Obviously, she was not taking his sincere compliments seriously. ‘You sound like an old man. How old do you think I am?’
He studied her dusting of freckles. Such smooth, unlined skin. The vibrancy that was inherent in her seemed to shine. ‘Twenty-five?’
‘Spot-on. So, five years since graduation, you get experience.’
‘True, but you don’t always get respect and deference. The staff at Alice love you. Jade came to see me and we talked about that crazy first night in the ER. She thinks the sun shines out of you.’
‘Bull.’ She tossed her head, still not taking her eyes off the road. He liked the way she drove. Just under the speed limit, both hands on the wheel, scanning ahead and watching for animals and potholes, yet she was relaxed.
‘They’re a good crew,’ she commented. ‘But that’s not love. They like me because I do the night duty they don’t want to do. And I know where everything is and how it works. That’s always good for making friends. I know how to troubleshoot the machinery and monitors and follow procedure and guidelines. I offer to help out when I can. It’s just common sense when you don’t work there all the time, and I read the communication book so I know what’s going on. It’s not hard.’
It’s the extra stuff, he thought. Communication would be important to her, and collaboration. Getting the best out of other people. Anyone who worked on their own or worked remotely in communities had to know how to communicate and collaborate and demonstrate respect for others. He couldn’t look away. He should turn his head, look out the window, but he couldn’t. Was he remembering or was he just thinking there had to be risks in her job with the isolation between outposts? Car trouble, weather issues, tiredness, travelling as a single woman. He wondered how long she thought she could do it for. The concept left him unsettled with wisps of a dormant, protective instinct he didn’t know he had.
She said, ‘I know they liked your work in ED and maternity as well, even if you don’t remember it.’
There was something about her that touched him. On a different level to anyone he knew. But he didn’t understand how he could have been so thoughtless, to expect her not to be hurt when he left Central Australia. A relationship between them would never work. What had he been thinking, trying to get involved with her?
Now, by forgetting her – even though he couldn’t help the amnesia – he’d hurt her, and that wasn’t his intention either. He was hopeless at not hurting women, wasn’t he? He’d hurt Roslyn in the worst possible way.
‘I’m sure my memory will come back,’ he said, but he wasn’t really. He shook off his intensity in the guise of resettling himself in the seat, then he turned slightly towards her so he was primed to amuse her. She deserved that. ‘I was going to talk about Weipa.’
‘Yes. Tell me about it.’
‘I always wanted to be a storyteller, with people sitting around listening to my tales.’ His wife had rolled her eyes and gone off to repair her make-up whenever he’d started one of his stories, but he’d drawn kids and older people to laugh with him. He hoped Ava laughed.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Tell me a story about Weipa. For some reason, the idea of flying into the Top End like that captures my imagination.’
He marshalled the memory of that morning when he’d flown to the top of Australia for his first outreach locum. He closed his eyes and let himself sink into the memory. It wasn’t as hard as he’d thought it would be. And it was nice to have some memories. Or maybe that was the audience.
‘So, imagine you are flying into Weipa with me. It’s bumpy through the humidity and the clouds, and then you soar in over a ridge that opens up onto a river delta with a forever amount of red dirt and grey-green shrubs and trees.’ He paused. ‘Got it?’
‘Got it.’
‘Okay. There’s a gleam off the water. Apparently it often looks like a deep steel grey, like the day I landed, and there are islands in the delta and outcrops of rocks catching shade. And the borders from the mining demarcations look stark and harsh against the curves of the landscape, despite the areas where they’re attempting the regeneration of the land.’
‘The water glitters over Albatross Bay with the angle of the sun when you fly over the railway bridge above the river, and the plane completes the figure-of-eight shimmy it needs to do to approach the strip. Then you see the Mapoon community on the tip, a dot on the peninsula surrounded by ocean, then closer to the ground you see the height of the termite mounds near the airfield, the green of pandanus palms, and the shine of beach hibiscus trees.’ He opened his eyes and looked at her. ‘We’ve landed. Are you okay?’
‘It was a bit bumpy,’ she murmured as she drove.
‘Always bumpy, stumbling into a roll along the strip because the air pockets are tricky and the plane always wobbles, or so I’m told.’
‘Don’t stop,’ she said.
He grinned to himself. ‘We can see the airport building coming up now – actually it’s more of a shed – and there’s a wire fence at the side, and Indigenous kids behind the wire are jumping and waving at the plane. A dozen people are waiting out the front. Waving. Excited to greet passengers coming home.
‘Finally, we stop adjacent to them with a little jerk.’
‘Are we the last off?’
‘We are. We’re the last off, and the heat hits us like that oven door has just opened and the blast of it almost singes our eyebrows. You don’t notice the humidity for a while. Just the heat of it.’
‘Worse than here?’
‘I haven’t felt it like that here.’
‘Don’t let me stop you. Go on.’
‘Through the fence the kids are screaming with enthusiasm and families gather and hug and laugh, but we don’t know anyone, so we follow the tide through the shed and out the other side to the lawn behind it to wait for the luggage. It takes a good fifteen minutes. There’s one big frangipani tree that offers the only shade and we all move like cows in the heat to find a position under the branches.’
‘You might have moved like a cow, but I moved like a dancer.’
He laughed. He loved that answer, he reassured himself. But suddenly he was unsure, jolted out of the game. He would be leaving, there was no doubt about that, so why was he was flirting with this woman?
‘Your turn,’ he told her. Please. What was it about her that drew him? Had drawn him in the time he couldn’t remember. ‘Where is your favourite place to work?’
‘Yulara.’ She glanced at him very briefly. ‘Except when dust storms hit and accident victims with head injuries remain unconscious and threaten to die on me.’ The answer came promptly, ironically, and he had to smile.
‘Yes. I imagine that would have been stressful. Just keeping you on your toes.’
‘I’ll say.’ She shook her head. ‘Attention seeker. I’ll sleep for a week when I get home.’
Leaning his head back against the seat, he continued watching her expressions. He needed to stop beating himself up about the lack of future between them because she must understand. And she intrigued him. ‘What is it about Yulara that you love?’
‘The proximity to Uluru,’ she said in another prompt reply. There was no hesitation, only a warm, rich feeling in her voice. ‘It’s a magical place. Something people don’t believe until they’ve been there.’ There was no holding back with her. No artifice. ‘The Anangu people are great. I have wonderful friends there. My best friend is an artist and traditional healer, and her husband is a dancer and teaches didgeridoo.’ She laughed. ‘He was born in Melbourne – Uluru is not didgeridoo country.
‘I love all the communities, but I feel connected to the Anangu people for some reason. The artwork, the bush medicine, the desert, the sky at night. Very good friends like Denise, who works at the cultural centre.’ She gestured with one arm to the desert they skimmed along the edge of. ‘This is Albert Namatjira’s country.’ This time she glanced at him and her cheeks were dusted with pink. ‘Sorry. I get passionate about the centre.’
He wished he could feel so enthused about something, but that too would pass, he was sure. It had to, because everything changes eventually. Early on in their marriage, Roslyn used to say she loved his enthusiasm. But that changed. He pulled his thoughts away from that dark hole. ‘There’s nothing wrong with passion. It’s clear in your voice.’ It had been years since he’d had that kind of passion and it was nice to know it still existed. He felt himself being more drawn towards her, and thought, To hell with it, I’m not going to fight it any longer.
Feeling a sort of release, he relaxed even more into his seat. ‘Tell me more about the Anangu people – more about them that you admire.’
She wrinkled her brow. ‘Aren’t you sick of listening to me?’
‘No.’ He wondered if he ever could be, and the thought brought a puzzling mix of fear and hope and guilt: standalone emotions he didn’t need to feel all at once. But that was what he suspected summed up Ava May. Feeling. All or nothing. He’d lost faith that he had the kind of fearlessness she seemed to have.
She shrugged and went on, her eyes scanning ahead, their speed along the strip of tar steady and eating up the distance towards their destination. ‘The Anangu have been the custodians of this desert around Uluru and down south for a very long time. I guess it’s their resilience and ability to change that I admire so much. They believe the responsibility for keeping the land safe lies with them. I do too.’
She slowed to steer carefully around a lump on the hot tar in front of them. When he glanced back, he saw it was an echidna, uncurling to keep crossing the road. She grinned at him. ‘They call him the Tjilkamata in Pitjantjatjara.’
‘Tjilkamata.’ He stumbled a little over the pronunciation, unlike her. ‘Great word,’ he said. ‘Though I like that in the English language baby echidnas are called puggles.’
She laughed. ‘I did not know that.’
‘So tell me more about the Anangu.’
‘Well, as custodians, they guide and welcome those who visit the national park, wishing them safety and helping them with Indigenous teachings to appreciate the sacredness of their world. Uluru and its surrounds are a lot like non-Indigenous people expect a cathedral or mosque to be – sacred.’
‘That’s reasonable.’ But not always true, he thought.
‘The Anangu believe in the creation of the region by ancestral beings, and that they are direct descendants of those beings. They care for the land using their Tjukurpa – Anangu laws.’
He could see from her profile that she was reliving memories and concepts she’d spent time considering.
He considered it too. ‘I still think they must find it pretty hard to get that across in today’s society.’
‘Yes, it’s ongoing, but their people are finding ways to gain support from the government now. Fewer tourists are climbing Uluru – it will be closed completely to climbing soon – and more are hearing the stories and walking the base track.’
He remembered something she’d said earlier and asked, ‘Is that why you walk the base? To respect the local communities?’
‘I have no need to climb Uluru, the same as I wouldn’t want to climb Westminster Abbey. If an elder offers to show me the beauty of a hidden spot, though, I am respectfully thrilled. The Anangu have immense and detailed knowledge of everything in the history of the park. The flora, fauna, habitats, seasonal changes and landscapes. Even today, a lot of this knowledge remains unrecorded. That’s why conserving oral history and tradition is vital to the wellbeing of Anangu culture, and to the ongoing management of the park.’ She waved her hand. ‘I warned you. I get emotive.’
‘You know a lot about it.’
She scoffed. ‘That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Or out here, the tip of Uluru. The biggest part is underground and can’t be seen.’
He turned to look ahead at the red earth and scrub that never seemed to end. It felt like the two of them were on a deserted planet of ochre sand and blue sky. Leaning his head back, he mused, ‘What was it like growing up in the centre?’
‘Hot in the day and cold at night. Wonderful. An adventure.’ She gestured with her arm. ‘Being blessed by good fortune despite the constant threat of drought. Great people. Diverse people: on the stations, in the communities, and the travellers passing through.’ She shrugged.
The answer was a good one. Open and giving, like her. Right then, he fell a little more under her spell. ‘So how did Setabilly Station start?’ he asked.
She gave him another one of her smiles. ‘My great-grandfather’s family settled there. Then my grandparents met in Alice, when Granny Mim was nursing. Pops had been thrown from a camel, in a race. She said it was love at first sight. We think he saw an indomitable woman to found his dynasty with and pounced on her. He was second generation on Setabilly.’
He watched her face soften as she talked about her grandparents.
‘My grandmother, Granny Mim, is up to my chin, but she’s the toughest woman I know.’ She laughed. ‘At seventy-eight, she’s tougher even than my mother, who’s a force to be reckoned with. I followed both their footsteps to become a nurse and my own to become a midwife.’
And matched their toughness, he thought, that’s clear. He enjoyed watching her. She made him smile inside, and the more time he spent with her, the clearer his attraction to her became. It was so easy, so natural to spend time with her. ‘What happened when they fell in love?’
She laughed as if it was a much-repeated story. ‘My grandfather took Granny Mim back to Setabilly when it was nothing but a stone croft and a windmill from the bore. Just a lot of barren-looking land that could hold a mob of cattle and keep them alive as long as it rained. She thrived, and anything he could do, she mastered as well.
‘She loves a challenge and says she always will. It’s diverse country. Borderline. Has extreme heat in the summer, a brief wet season like the Top End, and a high mountain range that runs with waterfalls when it rains – though that’s rare. I love the glory of it. With a passion.’
She swept her arm out to the side, where the distance stretched endlessly away from the road into the never-never. ‘Unfortunately, we’ve had a run of poor rainfall years and need a major injection of cash. Mum and I use our wages to help, but that’s still only providing the bare essentials. Plus, there’s a limit my family will let me give.’
They were quiet for a few minutes as he allowed that to sink in. The scope of the past, the trials of the future, the meaning of family supporting family. Someone was missing, however. ‘What about your father? You haven’t mentioned him.’
‘My dad died not long after my brother was born. He was a policeman in Sydney and Mum moved us to Granny Mim and Pop’s after he died, so we grew up on the station. Then, ten years ago, my grandfather was killed in a gyrocopter accident, mustering cattle.’ Her voice softened with the remembered distress.
‘I’m sorry. That must have been devastating.’
She sighed. ‘It changed everything. My brother was only fourteen, I was fifteen. Suddenly, Granny Mim and my mother had to run the station. We would have gone under without the support of the Aboriginal families who worked with us, and the families from the other stations.
‘Granny Mim’s heart hasn’t really recovered, but she certainly stepped up to running the show. And she was doing really well until the big drought eight years ago. We had an extra two thousand head, and winter coming on with no feed. Granny Mim took a crew and my brother, and they went droving for six months. She home-schooled him along the way, but it was hard for her without my grandfather. He was larger than life and as tough as old leather – you had to be, in the times they lived. But they made it through with the cattle, and the money from the sales saved our home.’
He had no concept of that sort of physical determination, and now he’d met a whole family capable of it. ‘It’s a tale of amazing people, and you’re a part of it. You have a proud family history stretching behind you.’ Which was even more reason for him not to pursue her. She’d never leave here. ‘Have you ever wanted to live anywhere else?’
‘No, but sometimes I hanker to join the RFDS and see more of the north. Like Arnhem Land.’ She grinned at him. ‘Like Weipa. But I need to be closer and not away too much as Granny Mim gets older.’
He thought about her in that role. ‘You’d be good as a flight nurse. An asset.’ He’d looked at RFDS too before he’d started the locum gig. But it would have meant commitment, and for the moment he needed to be free to run when he felt it necessary.
Except for some reason, Ava might have made him want to stay.
Just then Ava pushed the indicator and began to pull over. She parked under one of the rare trees at the side of the long-deserted road.
‘We’ve been driving for an hour and a half. Let’s walk for a minute. I make myself do it. It only takes sixty seconds to sharpen your senses again.’