He ran after her and caught her shoulder.
She had cut her hand on the barbs and he saw the blood on her nightdress. She took his hand and put it to her wet cheek. The sight of her blood brought tears to his eyes. His own blood surged through his body and he shivered though the night was not cold.
“We have to go back to the house.”
“Why?’ She turned away from him. She faced the western plain.
“Because we can’t stay here all night.”
“I can.”
“Look there.” And he pointed to the south where a green-flickering storm had shut out the stars. “These are games for children, Irene.”
She shook her head.
He held her shoulders. She stood on her toes and reached up toward him but he caught her face in his hands and squeezed her jaw as though he were a beast trapping prey. He stared at her with eyes she had never seen. She shuddered. She cried and pulled out of his grip. She stood trembling before him and he must do something to reassure her.
“It’s just that you’re a little girl, Irene. I’m nothing big like you think.”
The awful look on his face was gone, and his words made her smile through her tears. She choked and laughed.
“When did I say you were anything big? I know who you are, little boy.”
She had spoken from out of an almost forgotten dream, sounded an echo that time had almost obliterated, that now
obliterated time. He held her shoulders again. Again she was frightened. Again he stared into her deep sad eyes. He felt her trembling.
“Don’t send me mad, Irene. I won’t be mad.”
He let her go and turned his back on her and walked back across the grass. She stood still and watched him go and put her face in her hands.
He turned again at the fenceline. The wind tore at his words.
“I’m going home,” he said. “You follow me.”
Vanessa woke when he came in, but soon returned to sleep, and in her dreams his strange movements were forgotten. He watched Eccleston’s from the window of his room. He did not see her come in, but guessed she soon would. Outside the wind kept up and then came the storm. Inside the house the storm was all he could hear.
IX
SHE MIGHT HAVE SAT UP ON THE STAIRS, OR GONE TO sleep in a chair on the veranda. The storm had lasted until dawn and he could not have heard the absence of her steps on the floorboards. He told himself he could not have known she did not return.
He drove Vanessa to Highway 54 and put her on the bus and went looking for his sister. When she was not at Amy’s, nor the bend in the creek, nor the lake, nor anywhere within calling distance of them, he began to fear for her. The storm had grown fierce through the night. She was only a child, but she was solemn and resolute. She might have struck off anywhere. And in such a storm, in the dark, she might have been blinded and fallen. He looked across the calm water of the lake that belied the night gone.
He told his father and then called the police. Bill North, the local sergeant, a constable from Toogoolawah and the Mary Smokes boys set about finding her.
By midday a dozen townspeople were added to the party, persuaded by the sergeant. Most said the girl was a fool and was likely only hiding. But by late afternoon there was still no sign of her.
It became dark and the official search was called off until morning. A car would patrol the Valley Highway through the night.
The sergeant stood with Grey on the road outside the plywood station and rolled a cigarette.
“Does she know anyone in the near towns? In the city?”
Grey said she did not. He had to tell the sergeant she was in the habit of walking off, even at night. The townswomen would only say the same. The sergeant nodded and lit his cigarette and the valley wind sent ash and sparks flying from its end into the dark.
“She’s probably been caught in the rain. Stayed in some abandoned hut in the hills.”
But Grey knew she could find her way back from anywhere in this country in a day.
Later even the townswomen became concerned. At the town hall a group of them who would normally not have seen Grey or his father fit to speak to offered them supper.
“We’ve got to keep looking,” Grey said to Eccleston over a plate of thin stew. Eccleston nodded.
THE BOYS RE-CHECKED the road that went into the D’Aguilar Range. They stopped Grey’s truck at every creek and gully that ran beneath or beside the road and walked along it in pairs up and down stream. They walked to the sources of streams then came back to the road. If she was lost she knew to keep to the creeks, though it seemed impossible that she could ever be lost in the woods of the valley or the mountains.
The sky began to pale in the east and a cool westerly scattered the clouds in a single dry breath. The stormy summer night that initiated this trouble seemed a thousand miles away. The cool became cold and still they did not find her. They made it to the cedar flats before the climb into the mountains proper. They stopped the truck midway between Red and White Cedar creeks. Raughrie Norman and Thiebaud walked along White Cedar, and Grey and Eccleston along Red Cedar. The trees were thick along the banks and Eccleston and Grey walked through running water in the bed.
Raughrie Norman called out to them though they could not make out the words. They ran back to the road. They ran to where the boy had set off along White Cedar Creek and saw him ducking in and out of trees, coming toward them with Irene cradled in his arms, her own pale arms dangling at her sides like a doll’s.
He said he had found her in the creek. She had been caught and tripped in wire. He presented her to Grey and whimpered like a child at her state. Grey’s relief at finding his sister disappeared. Her clothes were wet and filthy. Her feet were cut to shreds. Barbed wire was wrapped tight around her ankles. The skin was red and hot where the wire bit it. Grey ran his fingers over the deepest wounds that were leaking. Her forehead was like a stove iron. Her breath was shallow. She babbled and then said she was hot and wanted to drink.
Grey wrapped her in his oilskin coat and set her down on the passenger seat of the truck. He cut away the wire with pliers and eased the barbs from her skin.
“I waited for you, but you didn’t come,” she said. “I was looking for home, but I couldn’t find it.”
“She’s delirious,” Grey said to Eccleston. To her, “Just rest and don’t talk.”
Grey held her up and helped her drink from his canteen. With Irene lying down there was no more room in the truck. The boys walked down the road toward town. Having come so far Grey knew he must drive on to Brisbane and to the first hospital he found. He pulled the truck hard around the mountain turns and arrived at the Emergency door at a west-side hospital called the Wesley. He explained to a young triage nurse what had happened and she wrote it down. The nurse told Grey that this was a private hospital. He said it did not matter. She asked for a name and an address,
“One of the girl’s parents. Or a guardian.”
“Grey North,” he said.
But when he could not tell the nurse what allergies the girl had, she raised her eyebrows.
The doctor said Irene had blood poisoning, made worse by two nights’ exposure. The nurses attached her to an oxygen machine. Grey’s eyes met his sister’s through the window of the private room where she lay. She was so sick she seemed not to recognize him. She turned away. A nurse put a cannula in her arm to inject fluid and antibiotics and she did not wince, nor did she when the doctor drained the abscesses and cleaned the wounds on her feet and ankles with tweezers and a scalpel. Grey heard the doctor tell a nurse that the deep splinters must come out with the pus. The nurse wrapped Irene’s feet with gauze. Grey went in and held his sister’s hand and she did not open her eyes.
NURSES FINISHED THEIR shifts and new nurses began and no one at the hospital seemed to recognize his association with the little girl in the room anymore. No one had spoken to him since the brief few words when he admitted her.
Her pathetic little body lay in the room where he sometimes stood at the window and watched the nurses replace the drip and review the machine that monitored her blood pressure. He had never seen a human being so physically incapable of suffering as Irene must have suffered in two wet and cold nights alone in the woods.
He sat in the ward’s waiting room and stared at a picture. A seascape rendered in pastels. He walked back to Irene. She was lying on her back and her eyes were closed. He stood in the corridor.
When one of the attending nurses walked by, Grey grabbed her arm. He apologized.
“Is she all right?”
“Who?”
“Irene North. The girl in that room.”
The nurse looked back over her shoulder.
The nurse must have been conscious of him sitting in the hallway and the lounge and only now knew his purpose.
“You’re a relative?”
“I’m her brother.”
“And her parents?”
He shook his head.
“She was in shock, but not now.”
GREY HELD HIS sister’s hand and now and then her dark eyes opened and spoke to him.
In time she took off her oxygen mask and complained about her bed covers being too hot. Grey kissed her soft, flushed cheek. He would have taken her up in his arms but for the apparatus still attached to her and the fear of doing her harm. Instead he slid his chair even closer and put his shoulder against hers and held her hand while she slept.
DUSK GATHERED WITHOUT the window and the city showed him the same sparkling and tranquil and lonely face as those years ago when Irene was born. He stayed with her until ten.
He took a meal of fish and chips at the hospital cafeteria. The only hotels he knew were north of the city near the airport. He left his truck in the hospital car park that had closed for the night and took a train to the north and walked Kingsford Smith Drive until he found a cheap room. He spent a quarter of his money on a simple, clean room for three nights at a motel called the Hacienda.
WHEN HE WAS not at the hospital he walked aimlessly around the northwestern suburbs. He took meals at one or another of the fish and chip shops or kebab joints between fancier eateries, and felt a quiet, slow-burning peace. He was anonymous, and walked the city like a ghost. He had no worldly thing pressing on him. He had a visit to his sister to look forward to, either that
evening or the following day, and the comfort of knowing she was cared for.
At his sister’s bedside they did not talk about what had happened. He wondered at her resolve that night. He wondered how many girls would have the courage to walk through a storm in the dark, to satisfy any obstinacy, through even a little pain… Perhaps their existence in Mary Smokes was ridiculous, untenable. He felt so here in the city, amidst so much material progress and so many people. He felt like a relic of a country that existed only in the dreams of a few old men and lost boys. One day there will be no Mary Smokes, he thought. There will only be the city. Mary Smokes will be a name. Then not even a name.
He looked across her bed, through a window to the twinkling streets.
“Don’t you want more than our life in Mary Smokes, Irene? To be something in the world?”
“I’d be happy to be no one, but you be something if you want.”
How easily she could defeat him.
He had dinner with her that night in the hospital café. She ate potato and leek soup and chocolate cake. After dinner he was sorry to leave her, but the nurses insisted on observance of visiting hours.
Grey left the hospital and walked to the Regatta Hotel at Auchenflower and emptied his wallet on the table and let a waiter take from it and serve him pots of the local bitter. He watched ferries and pleasure boats with festoons of varicoloured bulbs describing their ways along the Brisbane River. No one spoke to him at the hotel and he did not mind. He took the train from Milton to Clayfield and walked across the street from the station to the motel. He could sleep tonight without any trouble in the world to lie down with him. He tried to stay awake to enjoy the feeling. The squalling of city trains stopped at eleven. After that only the occasional freight rushed by. Then the dim drone of trucks on the distant Gateway Motorway. He slept, hardly stirring until morning.
X
HE LIT A CIGARETTE AND LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW AT the haying grass rippled by a sunlit March wind, where Irene and plump little Amy Minh were wading. But for their playful cries and the wind the land was silent.
His father came in from the railway. Grey watched the man’s work-worn hands tremble as he put his oilskin jacket and hat on one of a row of black sleeper bolts in a crossbeam. He watched his daughter and Amy over Grey’s shoulder. Irene grimaced and stumbled a little, as she did whenever she stepped too heavily on the wounded instep of her left foot.
Grey saw Bill North lower his head. Then the man looked back at Irene.
“Damn it. I should do better,” he said.
Grey went to take his father’s hand, but the gesture embarrassed the man and he walked off to his liquor cabinet. He poured himself a Scotch and took the bottle and glass and went to his room and closed the door.
That night, after a shift at the service station, Grey sat in the same chair looking out the window and listening to the radio when Bill North fell in through the door and onto the dining room table and put his head in his hands. The big man’s face was wet and white with torment.
“Grey, we’re in trouble. God, we’re in terrible trouble.”
Grey looked over his shoulder and down the corridor.
“Irene’s asleep,” he said. Her door was shut and her light was off. “What the hell’s happened?”
Bill North whimpered the story:
“It was her damn hospital bill, Grey. That’s what started it. You checked her into a private hospital.”