New Guinea Moon (19 page)

‘Well, if you're absolutely sure,' says Barbara over the phone. ‘Don't bother about cleaning the place. When you're finished, I'll send Koki around to take care of all that.'

‘There's no need —'

But Barbara has already hung up.

When Julie lets herself inside the unit, it's exactly as she left it, almost two weeks ago. The dishes from her last meal are unwashed and crusty in the sink; a coffee cup with a deep brown ring still sits on the bench. Fruit has rotted in the bowl. The musty smell and the rich, sour odour of decay wash over her. For a second, she is tempted to ring Barbara and hand over the responsibility to her, but then she straightens herself up. Everything in this flat belongs to her, Allan said. It's up to her to decide what to do with it; it's her job, her last duty to her father.

She flings all the doors wide and yanks open the window louvres in every room, pulls back the curtains and lets the sun flood in. Clouds of dust motes dance in the disturbed air. Then she gathers up all the food that's gone off, from the fruit bowl and the fridge, and dumps it all on the compost heap at the bottom of the garden.

The next job, because it's the easiest, is to go to her room and pack her own suitcase. There isn't much there, because she'd taken most of her things to Teddie and Andy's in her overnight bag that first night when Tony went missing. There are a couple of books, some clothes she wasn't wearing anyway — a spare pair of jeans, the thick jumper Caroline had insisted on — and a few stray toiletries in the bathroom, her shampoo and conditioner. It doesn't take long to shove everything into her suitcase.

Julie stands in the centre of her room. She gazes at the Holly Hobbie poster, the girl in the bonnet, her face turned away: the picture that Tony had so carefully fastened to the wall to make the room pretty and cosy for her, when he was expecting, somehow, a younger daughter. A sob closes around Julie's throat like a tightening hand. She peels the poster down and carefully creases it and lays it in the bottom of her suitcase, buried beneath everything else, flat and safe.

Sorting out Tony's clothes isn't too painful. Because she's known Tony for such a short time, there are few memories attached to the things he's worn. He has hardly any casual clothes — a couple of loud shirts, a pair of slacks, baggy shorts. Barbara had suggested putting those aside, along with the sheets and towels and kitchen equipment, for Robyn and Graham to distribute through the mission. The underwear drawer she sweeps into a garbage bag, for the incinerator. No one wants to wear a dead man's Y-fronts. A picture flashes unbidden into her mind, of Tony's red jocks beneath a
laplap
and
arse-gras
, and a snort of laughter bursts out of her.

And then all that's left is his pilot's uniform — the crisp white shirts that he ironed himself every Sunday night, the dark shorts, the cap with the HAC badge that she's never seen one of Allan's pilots actually wear. All this goes in a box, for Gibbo and Andy, if they'll fit. Tony's epaulettes and his wings, retrieved by Allan from the body, Julie has already set aside to keep.

He has hardly any books. Julie finds
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
— flying, of course — and a copy of
Chariots of the Gods
. There are spy stories and books about aeroplanes and war, and a collection of Pidgin phrase-books. Well hidden in a box under the bed are some copies of
Playboy
, which Julie leafs through curiously at first, then drops, feeling slightly sick. Quite likely Ryan might appreciate those, but they go into the incinerator bag. The spy novels she puts aside for Simon.

She tucks the Pidgin phrasebooks and dictionaries into her suitcase, as well as one of the flying instruction manuals.

On top of the wardrobe, thickly coated with dust, she finds a model battleship. She lifts it gently down with both hands. It must have taken months to build. Every gun turret, every miniature railing, every lifeboat has been meticulously constructed, carved from balsa and glued painstakingly into position. He must have laboured over it night after night, in a pool of light at the kitchen table, while the flying ants bumbled into the globe. The ship is carefully painted, with only the slightest wobble of a stripe or a stray brush-hair to show that he did the job by hand. It's light in her hands, floating in the air as it would on water, perfectly balanced, sweet and true. It's magnificent, labour and craftsmanship to be proud of. But when it was finished, he shoved it on top of the wardrobe, as if he was ashamed, ashamed, perhaps, of the lonely nights that produced it.

Julie doesn't know what to do with the battleship. She can't bear to think of destroying it. She lays it on the table, where it must have sat during all the hours and months when Tony was working on it, and leaves it there.

She lifts down the giant carved shield from the wall. It's hung there so long, the paint is a different colour behind it. She wishes she could take it home with her, but it's far too big to smuggle into her hand luggage. Then there's the fistful of spears, fanned out on another wall, and a penis gourd. Tony had put that in a cupboard before she arrived. She's definitely not taking
that
back to Australia.

She picks up a wooden lamp base, carved into two faces, with shells set into it to make blind eyes. The two faces look rather like forbidding Easter Island heads, frowning grimly. On one side of the base, a flaw in the wood makes it look as if a dribble of snot is escaping from his nose. It's as ugly as hell, but somehow Julie feels perversely affectionate toward it. Surely this guy will fit in her suitcase.

As she weighs it in her hands, something wobbles on its underside. She turns it over and works with her fingertips, and a section of the base comes loose, revealing a hollow space inside. Julie reaches in, her heart thumping, and draws out a tightly wadded roll of banknotes, secured with a rubber band. The bundle of colourful Australian notes falls apart in her hands, orange for twenties, the new yellow fifties, like autumn leaves. She is holding about five hundred dollars in her lap; it's more cash than she's ever seen in her entire life. And it's hers.

She doesn't know what to do; she stares at the money, mesmerised. At last she rolls it up again, stuffs the bundle inside a pair of socks, and thrusts it deep in her shoulder bag. Some instinct warns her to keep this secret.

In the bottom drawer in Tony's bedroom, she finds a single photo album. If only she'd known about this before he died! If only they could have spent an evening together, sitting on the couch, while he told her the stories behind the photographs — the friends he'd made, the places he'd seen, some of those funny stories like the ones he'd wheeled out at the Crabtrees' dinner table. She could have taken notes, made labels
. . .

She flip opens the album. Then she sinks onto the bed. This isn't the book of Tony's life. It's her own.

Inside this volume, neatly arranged, is a copy of every school photo: Julie with a gap-toothed smile, Julie with a freckled nose, Julie with pigtails, with a fringe, with a single ponytail, smiling, frowning, eyes sliding away from the camera, growing older with every photo, her cheeks thinning out, her eyes more serious. And there are other photos of her, too, dutifully slipped inside Christmas cards by Caroline: on the swing in their backyard, sitting on Nana's steps, under the Christmas tree unwrapping a box of Lego. And in the back of the album, arranged chronologically, is wedged every carelessly scrawled Christmas card and note that Caroline had made her write, each year, to the distant stranger who was her father.

Reading them now, they seem so perfunctory, so thoughtless, each word is like a blow.
Dear Tony, Happy Christmas. We went to Luna Park. It was fun. From Julie. Dear Tony, I hope you are well. We are well. School is okay. Next door have a new baby, he cries a lot! Well, that's all. Have a merry Christmas! From Julie.
Each one filed, dated and tucked away.

Why hadn't she ever bothered to write him a proper letter? And why hadn't he ever written one to her? Or sent her a present? Never anything for Christmas, nothing for her birthday. She's always assumed, and Caroline has encouraged her to assume, that he just wasn't interested, that he didn't care. But now she realises the truth: he was too shy. Too afraid of sending her the wrong thing, of saying the wrong words, and so he'd stayed silent. Also, there aren't many shops up here. Maybe he was afraid that whatever he could buy at the market, or one of the Chinese trade stores, or at Carpenters or Beeps, wouldn't be good enough. Safer to send nothing at all.

At least she knows that now; at least they had these few short weeks. What if she hadn't come? What if she'd never met him at all? How would she have felt when Caroline got the letter, or the phone call from Allan? Would she have cared? She would have felt important, swollen with drama, for a month or so.
My father's died. My father's plane crashed. My father was killed in New Guinea.
But it wouldn't have seemed real; it wouldn't have been real. This — this twisting of her heart, this ache in her throat — it's horrible, but she's glad, glad to feel it. Beneath the photo album is a large envelope with a manila folder inside. Perhaps this will be her school reports, or copies of her best projects; who knows what Caroline sent to him.

But what falls out onto the mattress is a jumble of papers — letters, receipts, carbon copies of official-looking forms. Julie shuffles through them, bewildered. There is a report card — and another — but not from her school. This doesn't make sense. The reports are from a school in Goroka. The name on the top of the card reads
Helen McGinty
.

Julie stares at the words until they begin to dance before her eyes. Then, feverishly, she grabs at the letters, the bills, the receipts, scanning them for clues.

The bills are from the same school. Tony has been paying the fees. The latest receipt is from only a couple of months ago. Julie shakes the envelope and a small black-and-white snapshot falls out. It's a girl, about ten or eleven, staring into the camera. Her hair is thick and curling, tied with a ribbon; her skin is dark. Julie turns the photo over. The back is blank. But she doesn't need a label to tell her that this girl is Helen. Helen McGinty.

She must be Tony's daughter. Tony's other daughter.

Julie's half-sister.

18

For a moment she sits motionless. Her head is swimming; she thinks she might pass out.

Then, with a single clumsy gesture, she sweeps all the papers, the photo, the letters, back into the big yellow envelope. She flies from window to door, locking up. She slings her bag over her shoulder and picks up her suitcase. She finds herself on the front steps, gazing at Tony's keys in her hand, as if she's never seen a bunch of keys before. Tony's little white car sits in the driveway, waiting.

Her hands shake as she inserts the key in the car door. For a second she thinks the engine won't start, but it coughs and turns over, and the car jumps as she sorts out clutch and gears and accelerator and brake, Caroline's lessons flooding back into her mind. She backs out of the driveway and swerves onto the road. Head check, head check. And she's forgotten her seatbelt . . . but the cars up here don't have seatbelts. She can't find the indicator. The windscreen wipers slash madly across the glass, and the gears grind as she wrestles with the stick. It's been a while since her last lesson, and the bumpy Mt Hagen roads are a long way from the quiet suburban crescents of bayside Melbourne.

But soon she's out on the highway, on the way to Keriga. She has to concentrate so hard on driving that there's no room in her mind for her discovery: that girl, the secret envelope. She has to get to Simon; she has to tell him. He'll know what to do. A car comes speeding toward her and instinctively she swerves out of the way — too far — as it shoots past, then swings violently back into the middle of the road.
Calm down, Julie.
Now the image of the girl comes bubbling back up. She can't breathe. She gropes for the handle to crank down the window and gulps in mouthfuls of cool air. A sister, a New Guinean sister. Who is her mother? Why didn't Tony ever mention her? Does Allan Crabtree know about her? No, he can't — he said,
you're Tony's only child, his next of kin . . .

With a start, she realises she's about to drive past the Keriga turnoff. Just in time she yanks at the steering wheel and gravel sprays beneath the tyres. Too fast, too fast — desperately she hauls at the wheel with one hand and shoves at the gearstick with the other. She's spinning, the car is spinning, someone is shouting, swearing, and a tree rears up before her. With one final frantic effort she slams at the brake and drags at the wheel, and the car swings about, bumps once, twice, with a jolt that flings her sideways, and stops. Julie's forehead is squashed against the steering wheel. There is a terrible blaring noise. She fumbles with the key and manages to switch off the ignition. She realises she's leaning against the horn, and hastily rears back. The blaring stops abruptly; the silence that follows seems almost as deafening. The car is in the ditch, its front corner crumpled. That was her own voice, shouting obscenities
. . .
She giggles weakly, and the giggle becomes a sob. She can't move, can't think. Her cheeks are wet, her eyes leaking tears. She leans her arms on the wheel, leans her head on her arms, and closes her eyes.