New Guinea Moon (26 page)

And then they're there.

She cranes out of the window, but she sees at once that there is no Jeep waiting in the car park. That was it, the last chance; it's too late.

The smell of the terminal, coffee beans and cats, must and sweat, rises around her like a mist. Teddie rushes out of the office and envelops Julie in a vanilla-scented hug.

‘I'll write to you,' she whispers in Julie's ear. ‘And I wanted you to be the first to know. We're going to have a baby!'

Julie hugs her. She knows she should be thrilled, or at least that she should act as if she is; but she is struggling to feel anything at all. She has the sense that she's trapped in a kind of dream which will play out without any assistance from her, rolling on to its conclusion whether she is there or not. In a few minutes they will be on the plane; soon she will be gone, a vanishing speck, spiralling into the sky, disappearing as if she'd never been here at all.

Now Joseph is weighing their bags on the big scales; now Allan comes marching toward them with his pilot's cap pushed to the back of his head. And then, all too soon, Barbara and Nadine are hugging her, and she is walking, dazed, out onto the tarmac, following Caroline across to the plane. She is climbing inside. This is it, the final moment. She says to Allan, ‘Can I sit up front?'

‘Don't you want to sit with your mother?' says Caroline in mock — or genuine — hurt.

‘I can see better from here,' says Julie. ‘Please, Mum. It might be my last chance for a while.'

Caroline nods. ‘All right, darling. I understand.'

Then it's the smell of the upholstery and the shadowy odour of all the human bodies and all the cargo that has shifted in and out of the balus. Julie buckles her seatbelt and twists to stare out of the window, for her last look at the mountains, and the painted cloud backdrop of the Highland sky. Allan slams his door and starts up the engines.

Suddenly Julie grabs his arm. ‘Wait! Wait!' she shouts, and points to where Nadine is racing across the tarmac toward the plane.

‘Shit!' yells Allan. ‘What the hell is she playing at?' He switches the engines off, the propellers hum and slow down and stop. Allan flings open his door. ‘You bloody little idiot! Do you know how dangerous —'

‘Sorry, sorry, Dad,' pants Nadine. ‘I just had to give Julie this. He said she'd know what it meant.'

She hands up an envelope through the doorway, spins around and sprints back to the terminal building.

‘Jesus!' Allan bangs the door shut again. He tosses the envelope onto Julie's lap. ‘What the hell was all that about?' Scowling, he restarts the engines and the propellers whir into life once more.

Julie presses her face to the window. In the HAC car park, a battered Jeep is pulled up at an angle which suggests the driver screeched up in a hurry, the front door flung open. On the narrow grassy slope between the car park and the asphalt, a figure stands, staring anxiously toward the plane. Julie raises her hand; she waves frantically. He has to see her —

Nadine is on the grass, jumping up and down. Allan had stopped the plane for her; he wouldn't have stopped for Simon.

The figure raises one hand — not waving — it's a salute. The plane begins to taxi forward, swinging toward the runway, carrying her away.

Desperately, Julie rips open the envelope. There is no letter inside, no note, no card. She draws out a single slender feather, a lacy feather, tipped with a blue-and-white eye, like a peacock's tail.

A sob tears at Julie's throat. She presses both hands against the perspex of the window, her eyes locked on the figure on the grass, drawing further and further away with every second. ‘Yes!' she shouts. ‘Yes, yes!' She nods vigorously. Half-laughing, half-crying, she blinks away tears. The plane's engines rev and roar, and now they are racing along the runway. The figure stands on the grass, as motionless as the mountains. And now the plane is lifting into the sky, and the figure is dwindling smaller and smaller, but he is still there, gazing steadily into the clouds, as if nothing could ever move him, as if he would always be there.

Caroline leans forward between the seats. ‘What's that, darling?' she shouts above the drone of the engines. ‘What's going on?'

‘Nothing,' Julie yells back. ‘It's a feather from a Victoria Crowned pigeon.' She holds it up to show her mother. ‘They're very intelligent birds,' she shouts. ‘Very faithful.'

She turns away from her mother's puzzled face, and touches the tip of the feather gently to her lips. Below them, the clouds are drifting, as noiseless as a dream; and the mountains are waiting.

But Julie's head is full of the image of Simon, standing there, staring upward.

And this is one of the pictures that will come into Julie's mind in the months to come. Every time she looks at the feather, every time she touches it with her lips, morning and night; and when she sees the Independence parades on the television news, and pins one of the new nation's flags to her bedroom wall, with its stars and its bird of paradise; whenever she creases open one of Tony's phrasebooks to memorise another few words of Pidgin; and every time she deposits her weekend waitressing pay into her bank account: she will think of him, standing on the verandah at Keriga; and of Helen, her head bent over her books in a classroom in Goroka; and of Tony's grave, in the sunlit valley, under the waving grass; and of the planes trundling over the tarmac to the HAC terminal.

And whenever she looks up at the silver circle of the moon, she will knows that the same moon is shining down on New Guinea, and she will hope that Simon is looking up at it, too, and thinking of her.

And she dreams, and works, and saves, and waits, for the day when he will be standing by the side of the airstrip, on the day she returns, when the plane spirals down, bringing her home.

About the author

Kate Constable is a Melbourne writer who grew up in Papua New Guinea, where her father worked as a charter pilot. She is the author of the internationally-published fantasy trilogy, The Chanters of Tremaris, as well as
The Taste of Lightning
. As part of the
Girlfriend
fiction series she wrote
Always Mackenzie
and
Winter of Grace
(joint winner of the Children's Peace Literature Award, 2009) and co-authored
Dear Swoosie
(with Penni Russon). Her novel
Cicada Summer
was short-listed for the 2010 Prime Minister's Literary Award.

Her most recent novel,
Crow Country
, won the 2012 Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award (younger readers) and the 2012 NSW Premier's Literature Award, Patricia Wrightson Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2012 WA Premier's Literary Award and the Adelaide Festival Award for Children's Literature.

Kate lives in West Preston with her husband, two daughters and a bearded dragon.