Stillwater Creek (23 page)

‘That was telepathy,' Mama had said at once, almost as if she'd been waiting for an opportunity to bring out this word. ‘One person communicates with another without their being anywhere near each other.'

‘Like a telephone?'

‘Just like a telephone. Only without the handset. Mental communication. Your Papa and I sometimes felt we'd communicated telepathically, but that was before he had become so cut off with his illness.'

Zidra didn't want to hear of Papa's illness again; it made her feel uncomfortable and sad. She wanted Mama to focus, to pay full attention to what she was saying. Then Mama added, ‘Perhaps it's because of Lorna's move. Mr Jones said she's moved from a humpy to pickers' quarters on a farm. I expect she'll turn up soon and no one will tease her any more, because she'll be able to wash herself like all the other children, in a proper bathroom instead of in the river. You're probably worrying too much.' Mama put her hand on Zidra's forehead as if she might have a temperature. ‘Perhaps you felt this telepathy simply because she was thinking of you, and thinking that she loved you.'

Zidra shut her eyes and concentrated hard to send a message back. Lorna, I love you. Lorna, I love you. After that, she started to feel better: Lorna loved her enough to telepath her and she'd telepathed back. She snuggled up to Mama, who put her arms around her and held her tightly. Eventually she carried her back to her own bed again and stayed until who knew when: she must have dropped off to sleep not long after.

Now, cruising up the lagoon, these thoughts of Lorna fluttered again across the surface of her mind, like the flickering sparks of light that danced across the surface of the water.
She sighed. The day was lovely but it would be better with Lorna here.

The boat puttered past the Cadwallader boathouse. The doors were firmly shut and a new and very large padlock held them together. Maybe the boys had told Mr Cadwallader that she and Lorna had been hanging around the boathouse. She turned around to check on the others. Mr Bates was staring straight ahead. Andy and Jim were sitting side-by-side on the middle seat. Andy was leaning over the side of the boat and trailing his hand in the water while Jim was staring into the distance with that faraway look he got sometimes. ‘That boy is a dreamer,' Mama had said of him. ‘And practical at the same time, but I do not think he will follow in his father's footsteps. A butcher he will not become.' Zidra rolled the last sentence around in her mouth. She would love to have spat it out in Mama's voice but, without Lorna here, there was no one she trusted enough to tell. The only person who was allowed to laugh with her at Mama was Lorna.

‘Would you like to steer for a bit, Zidra?' Mr Bates called out. She clambered down the length of the boat and sat next to him. ‘Put your hand on the tiller like this.' Resting his hand on top of hers, he showed her how to pull the tiller to the left or the right, so that the rudder moved and changed the flow of the water. It was easy to do. Although she hoped Mr Bates would move his hand from hers, he didn't. His skin felt calloused and his palm slightly sweaty. Glancing down she saw, between the freckles, golden hairs covering the top of his hand and running right down to the first joint of each finger. Hurriedly she looked at the river lying ahead. Eventually she said, ‘I've got the hang of it now. Can I do it on my own?' Laughing, he moved his hand away.

After a few minutes, when Zidra had negotiated the next bend of the river, Mr Bates whispered to her, ‘You haven't told anyone our little secret, have you? You taking the boat out when you shouldn't have.'

‘No,' she said, her voice quavering. She coughed, so Mr Bates would think it was hay fever rather than nerves, and wished he hadn't raised this, especially with the two boys in the boat. They'd agreed it was to be their secret and here he was whispering about it with Jim and Andy only a few feet away. But she added, ‘Did you see the boathouse is padlocked now?'

‘Can't say I did. It's a good thing if it's going to stop certain people from taking the dinghy out and nearly drowning themselves, but.' He chuckled a bit at this, but not loudly enough to be heard by the boys over the puttering of the motor.

‘Maybe Mr Cadwallader saw us. Or Jim and Andy told him.'

‘Probably just coincidence. They didn't see anything and I didn't tell anyone. It's just a secret between you and me.'

‘You and me and Lorna.'

Just then Jim turned around. ‘Can I have a go now please, Mr Bates?'

After Mr Bates agreed, Zidra changed places with Jim. Watching the dark green water slip slowly past, she started to feel hungry. Perhaps they could have some of Mr Bates' cake soon.

Andy must have been thinking along the same lines. He said, ‘Where are we going to have lunch?'

‘There's a nice little beach further upriver,' Mr Bates said. ‘I thought we could stop there and have our lunch on dry land, and maybe have a bit of a swim after our lunch has gone down.'

‘Mama says you should wait at least an hour after eating before you swim. Otherwise you get cramps.'

‘Then that's what we'll do,' said Mr Bates. ‘We must do as your good Mama says.'

Jim made a sort of snorting noise. Zidra looked at him closely to see if he was making fun of her but he was staring over her head at the river.

Ilona, sitting in the old cane chair on the side verandah of her cottage, heard a squawking and looked up from the book she was reading. Half-a-dozen grey and pink cockatoos flew over the backyard and swooped around the eucalyptus tree before joining a larger flock heading south along the river. Flying low, they soon vanished, hidden by the fringe of dense forest. By now the birds would be flying over Zidra, and she too would be watching them.

Ilona's watch showed one o'clock. Nearly four and a half hours since the boating trip had begun, and only ten minutes since she had last checked the time. Perhaps her watch had stopped but it was still ticking when she held it up to her ear. It was almost impossible to concentrate. It was not that the book she was reading was dull, but more that she was distracted by other thoughts. The heat and the folly of allowing Zidra out for so long, and whether or not she had given Zidra a big enough bottle of cordial to drink.

Putting the book on the verandah floor, she went inside and turned on the radio. Too late for the one o'clock news but just in time for the local weather forecast. A fine day. Temperature expected to reach ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit. The bushfire danger level was high and a total fire ban was in force right across the state.

At least Zidra would be safe from fire in a boat. Water water everywhere. No fire danger there.

Hoping to find some music, Ilona twirled the dial of the radio. A church service was being broadcast from somewhere
in Sydney. The singing was appalling, far too slow. Although the organist was playing at the right tempo and the choir following the organ, the congregation had a mind of its own and
en masse
was lagging behind.

She retrieved her book, but knew she would not be able to concentrate on it. A niggling little anxiety gnawed away inside her. Even the beauty of the lagoon, coruscating in the sunlight, could not distract her. It was not really the heat or the fire danger that was worrying her. It was Zidra's sadness, which seemed to date from when Lorna had left, and she didn't know what to do about it.

Last night, when Zidra had slipped into her bed and talked about communicating with Lorna, Ilona had remembered how she used to feel that she and Oleksii communicated by telepathy when they were apart. Just as Zidra claimed she did with Lorna. Her own communication with Oleksii had been nothing concrete, of course; just a sudden deep feeling of warmth and understanding. A sudden intuition that Oleksii was thinking of her with affection, with love. He too had claimed he felt it, that there were times when he had felt that she was transferring her thoughts to him.

But that was a long time ago. That was years ago now.

A fly landed on her nose and she brushed it away impatiently. She should face it; her marriage to Oleksii had ended long before his death. One had to be realistic and confront the truth. One should not
pull the wool over one's eyes.

Sighing, Ilona picked up her book again, and the sheet of paper and pencil that she always kept to hand when she was reading English. There were so many words whose meaning she did not yet understand and she refused to skip over any of them. She gathered them in sets of five nowadays, although to begin with it was in sets of three, and then consulted the
dictionary. Today she had deviated from that practice to look up one single word.
Sunstroke
: collapse or prostration, with or without fever, caused by exposure to excessive heat of the sun.

Again she hoped she had not been unwise in allowing Zidra to spend all day out of doors. If anything happened to her daughter, she didn't know what she would do.

Jim saw the cockatoos screeching over the strip of bush lying between the lagoon and the ocean. Their noise drowned out the conversation of the others as they flew closer. Before heading in the direction of Burford, they traced out a wide semicircle overhead – a mass of pink and grey and white.

‘Never seen galahs this close to the sea before,' Mr Bates remarked. ‘Must be the dry weather driving them east.' The four of them were sitting, in the shade cast by some she-oaks, on a tartan rug that Mr Bates had spread out on the grass. Andy and Zidra were still munching apples; they were such slow eaters. Below their picnic spot lay a narrow strip of white sand and beyond that the boat lay anchored several yards from the shore. ‘Those birds are almost as noisy as the schoolyard at lunchtime,' added Mr Bates. ‘We can always tell when school's out by the din.'

‘That's what Mum says about the pub,' said Andy, who was getting a bit overexcited. ‘You can always tell when it's closing time by the racket.'

Laughing, Mr Bates stretched himself out full-length on one end of the rug with a hat over his eyes. ‘Reckon I'll have a nap for a few minutes,' he said. ‘All this sunshine makes an old cove like me pretty tired.'

Jim was beginning to get a headache and, much as he disliked being close to Mr Bates, decided to stretch out on the
other end of the rug. That way he'd kill two birds with the one stone: keep an eye on old Batesy and maybe get rid of the headache at the same time. Zidra and Andy scrambled down onto the beach and started to play in the sand, constructing a castle with a moat around it.

The sunlight, glittering through the leaves above, made a dancing red pattern on Jim's closed eyelids and he sat up again. Mr Bates appeared to be asleep and the moat the others were constructing was becoming larger. Taking the tea towel in which the fruit had been wrapped, he folded it into a little rectangle, cool and slightly damp. With the folded towel covering his eyes, he lay flat on his back and listened to the soothing sound of the breeze whispering through the she-oaks and the lapping of the river water against the little beach. And the faint murmuring of Andy and Zidra as they endlessly talked.

When he awoke, he was alone in the glade. Thinking for a brief moment he'd been left behind, he sat up too suddenly and, through swimming eyes, saw that the picnic things were still scattered on the rug and the boat was anchored just a few yards off the beach. The sun had moved over though; the trees cast longer shadows across the grass and the beach.

He stood up, and at once felt even dizzier. The trees and the sky twisted around and he nearly fell over. Grabbing hold of the gnarled trunk of a she-oak, he waited until the surroundings stopped shifting before shouting, ‘Andy! Zidra! Andy! Zidra! Mr Bates!' There was no response. His heart was racing so fast he could feel blood drumming in his ears. What a fool he'd been, he should never have fallen asleep when charged with looking after Andy and Zidra, never. Wherever they were now, he had to catch up with them and fast.

There was a narrow, rather overgrown path at each end of the glade. Quickly pulling on socks and sandshoes, he took the
southerly direction, upriver away from Jingera. Occasionally stumbling, he ran along the path, which became even more overgrown the further south he got. Now he started to wonder if it was a path at all, rather than a slight bending back of the long grasses and low bushes that might have been made by the passage of animals, kangaroos perhaps. Slowing to a walk, he fought past the increasingly dense bush. The river he made sure always to keep in sight; it wouldn't do to end up getting lost himself. Just as the point when turning back seemed the only option, he thought he could hear distant voices. Rounding a thicket of low-growing wattle, he saw ahead, in a clearing by the water not five yards away, two bodies lying on the ground.