13

Holly woke feeling tired. All night the sound of bawling cattle had kept her awake. She flipped out of bed and helped herself to breakfast. As she sat at the small table eating cereal, her father stepped into the kitchen. Jake and Brandon followed him in, stooping to fit through the door, and last came Eva.

‘What’s going on?’ Holly said. ‘Is this a family meeting or something?’

Her mum appeared from the bedroom and put her hands on Eva’s shoulders. ‘I’m going to Sydney to have some tests done.’

Holly felt suddenly cold. Mum wouldn’t have called everyone in here if this wasn’t serious. ‘Is this about the stomach pains you’ve been getting?’ she asked.

Her mum nodded.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Jake.

‘They don’t know. That’s why I have to go down to Sydney.’

‘Can’t you see a doctor nearer here?’ asked Holly. ‘Sydney is a whole day’s drive.’

‘No, I need to see an oncologist,’ said her mum in a voice so tiny Holly barely caught it. She looked out the window, as though she couldn’t face her children.

‘Isn’t that a cancer doctor?’ Holly whispered.

‘They found some sort of growth and recommended a biopsy. It might just be nothing,’ Mum said.

‘Is Dad going too?’

‘No. He has to stay here with the boys and work.’

‘Can I come?’ asked Holly.

‘No, I need you to stay here and take care of the family for me.’

Holly felt her heart sag.

Eva squeezed her mum tightly. ‘What about me?’

‘You’d be bored stiff sitting in a waiting room, little one, and there would be no one to take care of you.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ said Brandon. ‘No way are you going alone.’

Holly was relieved when her father agreed. ‘I think that’s a good idea.’

Mum shook her head. ‘You have to help your father start on the building site.’

‘I’m sure Dad’ll cope fine.’

‘I’ll take you to the train station this morning,’ her dad said firmly. ‘Brandon, pack some things.’

‘Maybe we should just move back to Blue Gum Flats?’ said Holly. ‘The job’s been delayed here anyway.’

‘There’s no work on the coast. Besides, I have a building contract to fulfil. We’ll have to stay here for the moment. Once we know what treatment Mum needs, we’ll work out what to do.’

Later that morning, Holly carried her mum’s case to the truck for her. ‘This is just for a few days, right?’

‘Yes, if all goes well.’ Mum stopped and cupped her hands around Holly’s face. ‘It’s very easy to imagine the worst with these things, babe. But it could be nothing; cysts, old scar tissue, anything.’

Holly nodded.

‘Try not to trash the place while I’m gone. You’ve got two weeks holidays before home-schooling starts. You may as well try and enjoy the place. Go for a walk.’

Holly briefly wondered if the growth had entered her mother’s brain. Enjoy this place? It was a wasteland.

Marley whimpered and Mum dropped on one knee to give her a hug. ‘Good girl, you take care of everyone, okay?’

Later, Holly sat in the tractor shed with all sorts of images whirling through her mind, of her mother with no hair and a gaunt face. Would she need chemo? The thought of Mum being sick turned her inside out. The thought of being so far away from her while she went through it was even worse.

Pieces of pain slowly knitted together and became one aching, numb sorrow. By the afternoon, she was fed up with feeling miserable. ‘Let’s take Penny for a walk,’ she suggested to Eva. Maybe Mum was right. A walk would clear her head. ‘We might see a koala.’

Holly walked alongside as Eva rode Penny away from the shack, and Jake followed with a small fishing-tackle box. Marley trotted after them, panting, as they made their way along a sloping hillside. The waving, rustling grasses brought the land to life with motion and sound. They stood on the top of the hill, between land and sky, earth and heaven; the space in between the two infinitely big and open.

‘I can see the river,’ said Eva, pointing to a line of trees in the distance.

‘Let’s go,’ said Holly, breaking into a run. It felt good to stretch her muscles and make her chest heave for air.

‘Race you,’ Jake yelled, sprinting past her.

The riverbed contained more sand than water.

‘Look, a beach,’ said Jake. He ripped off his shirt, scrunched it up and lay down with the shirt behind his head like a pillow.

‘Damn, I forgot my boogie board,’ said Holly in a droll voice. She sat next to him and stared at the limp trickle of brown water that flowed past her toes. Marley dropped her belly into the water and lay there cooling herself while she lapped at the water. Eva let Penny stretch down and take a drink.

Holly ripped off her shirt, shimmied out of her shorts and lay back in her underwear, sunbaking. She closed her eyes, listened to the wind moving through the willow trees above and whispering over her skin, and tried to imagine she was at the beach.

The sun felt good. She pushed her feet down through the sand into the warm water. For a moment she stopped fretting about her mum’s health. It was intensely peaceful. Her aching for home eased and her soul filled with something new.

Later they headed back to the shack.

‘Blackberries,’ said Jake, as they walked past several big mounds of prickly bushes. He picked a handful of the plump, dark fruits and crammed them into his mouth.

As Holly leaned into one of the bushes to retrieve a particularly juicy berry, she saw another one of those strange rusty pipes sticking out of the ground. ‘What is that thing?’ she asked, showing it to Jake. ‘I saw one at Rockleigh too.’

Jake peered over her shoulder. ‘An old borehead?’

Holly shook her head. ‘It’s too big.’ Whatever it was, it seemed to cap off some big sort of underground pipe. She pushed some of the prickly branches aside, wincing as she scratched her arms. At the base of the pipe, alongside a ring of rusty bolts, were a set of letters and numbers stamped into the steel along with the word, BAUHALA. Next time she saw Jerry, she would ask him about it.

An hour later, they returned home with scratched arms and purple hands and faces. Holly felt renewed. Something about the place, the way the ground crunched under her feet and the way she could reach up and touch the sky from the hilltop, eased the tightness in her chest and let her heart beat with a new kind of energy.

Penny lifted her head and Holly followed the mare’s gaze to a rocky hillside where two kangaroos grappled and boxed and thumped at each other with their powerful hind legs. She thought of the joeys her mum had rescued over the years. Did people bother out this way? There were so many of them and they competed for the grass with the livestock. Would she ever get to nurse a baby joey again?

Maybe. All she had to do was get her family through the next twelve weeks.