Affection (16 page)

It was airless in the hollow and things kept brushing my cheek.

A butterfly flickered past and off into the tree tops. Turner’s net twitched in his hand. There was another, closer, and the net snaked out from his body and swallowed the insect. He and Allan examined it carefully.

‘A Blue Tiger, Row.’

Fancy that.

There were more, I noticed, and Allan wandered further until he was out of sight.

‘Dad!’

I took a few hasty steps and my foot – boot, socks and all – plunged into mud.

‘For the love of God.’

‘Around here.’ Allan’s voice echoed through the trees. I hobbled over, annoyed.

And then I saw the butterflies. They were hanging in their thousands from the bush like glossy black fruit.

Turner was already there. ‘
Here
are your Tigers, Row.’

Allan took a step closer with his bag and they took flight, most of them, creating a black cloud around the bush. Turner then walked over and stepped into the vortex.

Where the man ended and the swarm began became blurred. He held his arms out and the butterflies settled on them like a black cloak and he turned slowly and faced me, a strange bird. The insects had also perched beneath the brim of his pith helmet, obscuring his face,
and the effect was like a mourning veil and a little grotesque. And then he flapped his arms and they rose in a cloud and began circling again, and he stepped away.

Allan clapped, Turner bowed, and I tried to dislodge the mud from my shoe.

‘The survivors of your little pretties blown across the bay,’ Turner said. ‘Aren’t you glad you found out where they went to?’

‘Are you going to catch some?’ said Allan.

‘They’re not actually my cup of tea,’ said Turner.

I told Allan, ‘Dr Turner’s cup of tea is coffee.’

‘Very droll, Row.’

I left Allan with Turner and returned to the clearing. Then I climbed the bank. Halfway up I stopped and looked around, savouring the quiet. Tree trunks rose around me like the columns of a Greek temple.

My eye was drawn to a stick. It appeared to be moving. A sinuous shape. I couldn’t see the beginning or the end of the snake, but its body threaded through the litter on the slope. I turned and strode uphill. It was impossible to run. I didn’t dare look back. The bush became a thick tangle and swallowed me. I pushed, it grabbed, and then with a snap it let go and I stumbled into the clearing. I backed away, panting, checking myself for spiders.

The waterbag was cool and I drank from a tin mug, sitting on the buggy’s footplate. I’d removed my shoes
and socks and cleaned them as best I could, scraping the mud with a stick and plucking at grass seeds. The insects hummed. A sea breeze blew at my back. It wasn’t such a bad place to be laid up, I thought.

I walked down to the sea, mindful now of snakes. The entire sweep of bay was in front of me. I traced the horizon from West Point to the tall ships and steamers at anchor in the middle of the bay, and then to the dark line of the harbour and the whitewashed houses at the foot of Castle Hill. The tide was out and I walked down on to the firm sand, filling my lungs with clean sea air.

There were worse places to die.

I found Turner up a tree.

He’d taken his jacket off and was lying along a branch like a stick insect, waving a bread knife in front of him and expressing his efforts with small grunts.

‘Hold the dashed thing still now, Allan. Almost there.’

Allan gazed up at the little man with his mouth open in serious concentration, steadying the open bag beneath Turner. Ants were swarming all over the Government doctor, biting his bare arms and face.

‘Uh. Uh. Hold it, boy. Up. Up. That’s it. Unh. Unh.’

Allan tightened his grip on the pole and the bag seemed to sway all the more.

‘Here we go.’ The small branch fell away and into the bag, remarkably. Allan lowered it to the ground.

‘Get that cord around the end, Allan.’ Turner dropped the knife and slapped the ants from his face, before pushing himself backwards along the branch. Within seconds he was on the ground and madly brushing his arms, head, and clothes.

Allan had removed the bag from the end of the pole and cut the twine that held it to a wire hoop, tying the open end with cord so the nest and the raging horde were sealed inside. He seemed to know what to do. Amazing. He was picking ants from his arms when Turner came over and slapped him on the shoulder.

‘Good show,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we damaged it at all.’

Turner’s face was a rash of bites and one of the Lilliputians clung to an eyebrow. He looked delighted.

‘Something Dodd had mentioned,’ he said. ‘A little surprise sometimes inside these nests. I’ve been keen to take a look.’

I noticed then that there were several butchered nests nearby, and ferocious ants everywhere.

Allan was holding out his hand. In the palm was something that looked like a coin or a flat nut, brown and round.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘I have no idea,’ said Turner. ‘The larvae of some moth, perhaps. Won’t know until it hatches.’

It just lay there. ‘Is it dead?’ I said.

Allan turned it over and pointed to where he said its little legs were.

‘It lives inside the ants’ nest, Dad.’

Turner said, ‘The ants might actually protect it from other predators. Remarkable.’

Allan put it back into a paper bag.

Turner said, ‘We’ll try to hatch one, and then we’ll see what sort of creature it is.’

‘We’re going to put it in this nest,’ said Allan, pointing at the bag, ‘and keep it in a cage in the back yard.’

I said, ‘Not in our back yard.’

Turner and Allan looked up at me, their faces scratched and bitten.

‘Those things bite,’ I said.

They glanced at each other.

‘Just don’t tell your mother.’

We pulled up outside my house and Allan furtively vanished around the back with the bag of ants. Turner had suggested making a cage of an old meat safe under the mango tree. It was somewhere even Maria avoided. The mesh on the meat safe would let the ants out, but trap anything that might hatch. The thought of it made me shudder.

Back at the Town Hall, the corridor was full of chatter and pipe smoke.

I escaped into my office and shut the door, wishing I could take a bath, knowing I should see the dentist. I’d just sat down when there was a knock at the door and Mr Willmett entered.

‘You look terrible.’

‘I think I’m coming down with something,’ I said. He looked startled and I said quickly, ‘Toothache.’

Willmett was elderly and always looked a little unkempt. His eyes were hooded so that he gave the impression that he was very tired and somehow doubted everything you were telling him.

It was Willmett though who, as head of the Townsville Joint Epidemic Board, had appointed me the board’s physician. It placed me in a difficult position. What the board decided often was at odds with what the council wanted, and I was first and foremost a council employee.

Willmett, with a foot in both camps, was my best ally. As an alderman he could speak his mind; as a council employee I had to be diplomatic. Fortunately, he backed everything I proposed.

‘The Mayor called an emergency council meeting this morning,’ he said. ‘He had someone chasing you all over town.’

My heart sank. I told him where I’d been.

‘Dr Turner put the wind up him last night,’ he said.

‘He told the Mayor he was going to have the town declared.’

‘I wish Turner would talk to me before he makes those statements. The Mayor’s saying that it’s Brisbane’s meddling. We need him
for
us, not against us.’

‘I tried to get Turner to wait.’

‘Well. The Mayor would like a word, anyway. When you’re ready.’

McCreedy’s door was open. I knocked anyway and heard the Mayor’s voice say, ‘Come in, Dr Row. Good of you to come so quickly.’

The curtains were drawn, the room dark, the way I, McCreedy, ghost moths and vampire bats seemed to like it. There was a little light behind me, and a small lamp on the mayoral desk. I found a seat and sat. A shape hovered in the corner, its single eye red in the dark.

‘You know Mr Dawson, I take it.’

The red eye glowed brighter as I heard Dawson draw on his cigar, the sound of a small creature having the life sucked from it.

‘Whisky?’ said McCreedy.

‘All right,’ I said. My tongue probed the aching tooth. The whisky might do it some good.

McCreedy stood and poured it himself, Northern style: no ice, no water. There was a glass only because good manners demanded one before noon and indoors.

The Mayor brought it over and watched as I sipped the warm fluid, sloshing it around. It was the good stuff. From Melbourne. I nodded gratefully. The pain actually subsided.

‘This plague issue, I think there’s been a misunderstanding.’

McCreedy lit a cigarette then and puffed before continuing, ‘We should get things sorted out. Nobody’s worried more about the welfare of this town than me. Except perhaps Mr Dawson here.’ The red eye glowed bright again. ‘You follow me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr Dawson by the way is staying in Townsville for the duration of this…this issue. With Mr Philp not able to be here, well, he’s left it to Mr Dawson to keep an eye on things and report back to Parliament and such.’

That seemed unlikely. Even I knew Philp the businessman and Dawson the Labourite despised each other over just about everything, and especially the question of kanakas. I couldn’t see the Premier asking Dawson to keep his seat warm.

‘Who’s looking after The World?’ I said, using the nickname for the city of Charters Towers. I never knew if The World was supposed to be a boast or an ironic slur, but everyone used it.

‘Mr Dunsford’s there,’ said McCreedy with a wave of the hand. ‘He’ll take care of it. Now look, I’ve just this morning had council appoint a special inspector to carry out the rest of your recommendations. I’ve arranged for five thousand handbills to be distributed, free rat poison’s being handed out to anyone who asks for it, and there’s that bounty you wanted. What do you think of that?’

I said I thought it was timely. Dawson grunted from the darkness.

McCreedy leaned forward. ‘It seems Dr Turner has something against me and Mr Dawson. I don’t for the life of me know why. If the leaders of the North getting together for a project to benefit the North is a conspiracy, then so be it. It’s Turner who’s behaving
unreasonably. I can’t even speak to the man now without being attacked. You follow me?’

McCreedy wanted me to say something. I said I thought Dr Turner was a stickler for regulations.

‘Yes? Yes? Is blackmail in the regulations?’ McCreedy was getting agitated and took another sip of whisky.

I was wondering about Dawson’s dark presence. Humphry told me later that it was still all about the railway. McCreedy the boodler and Dawson the unionist had formed an alliance. Each desperately wanted railway contracts, McCreedy for his sawmill and Dawson for his workers. Both also wanted North Queensland to become a separate state to further their political ambitions. Joseph Chamberlain, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, had apparently told them they’d have a better chance of getting what they wanted under a Federal flag.

But I knew also that Humphry blamed Dawson, and Dawson alone, for the ‘Commonwealth catastrophe’, as Humphry called it – the coming Federation. Humphry’s convoluted reasoning.

McCreedy was saying, ‘Doesn’t need people like Turner spreading malicious rumours.’

I said I didn’t think Turner had any intention of doing that. ‘Dr Turner is interested only in stopping the plague.’

‘Is he? Well, fair enough. But you keep an eye on him. The man’s a damned nuisance. That’s an order, by the way, from the Mayor to an employee.’

Dawson came out of the shadows through a haze of blue smoke and leaned close. ‘Just warn the pommy runt not to slander anyone.’

I said I’d pass the message on. I swallowed the rest of my drink and left.

At my desk I sat with a report on the plague hospital. It already had McCreedy’s blessing, and the surveyor’s peg at the site confirmed that. Approval should be a formality. The hospital could be up within days. Whatever Turner’s faults, he had things at a gallop.

Bacot, to his credit, had already arranged for tents from the local garrison to be at the site the next day. Turner had also shown me a note from Bacot confirming the staff roster for the plague hospital.

Dr Routh’s name headed the list, and he would be the medical officer in charge.

‘My word,’ said Humphry. ‘Bacot has a sense of humour after all.’

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Matthew 6:19–21

MCCREEDY
,
HOUNDED BY
Turner, had employed a team of rat catchers, and the Foreman of Works started sending scores of rats daily to the incinerator. Rat catching became both a pastime and an industry, and at sixpence a rat was costing the council a small fortune.

‘Is that how much a rat is worth?’ said the Mayor. ‘Maybe we should start farming them.’

There were rumours of a gang prowling the streets at night pinching rats from official traps. No one apparently considered it a dangerous thing to do, even though only official rat catchers were inoculated. It might have been amusing, but for the boys queuing for sixpences with rats hanging from their belts.

‘Can I go rat catching?’ said Allan.

‘
Mon dieu!
’ said Maria, glaring at me.

I promised him sixpence for any Hercules moth he could find, but the deal was off if I saw him with a rat.

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union organised its own gangs. Germ parties went about knocking on doors, telling housewives to throw open their windows, burn rubbish, boil down bones, seal poultry scraps in containers and lay poison.

And it appeared that all these things might work and there’d be no use for the plague hospital.

I slept badly.

I visited the boarding house, but Mrs Gard hadn’t returned.

I sat through another Townsville Municipal Council meeting and gave my report, the plague now item ten on a list of twenty-five. Council obviously believed it had done its bit and it was time to move on.

Dawson came out only at night to address union meetings. The Bowen to Charters Towers spur line had run into obstacles again – of the Brisbane kind, said Humphry, whatever that meant. Humphry thought Dawson was plotting a strike.

I was in my own office, with the door closed. In the dark I ran my palms over the cool silky top of my table and then laid my head down. I would just close my eyes for a moment. I swam across the smooth surface and floated over its depths, hoping this time they’d take me down.

Someone was knocking on the door. When the clerk entered the room he seemed to think it was empty and turned to go out.

‘What is it?’ I said from the darkness.

‘Dr Row?’

‘Yes.’

Dr Bacot at the hospital wanted to see me, said the clerk, who obviously couldn’t.

I sat up slowly. ‘Are you sure it’s me he wants and not Dr Turner?’

He took the message back out into the hallway and held it under a light, and came back in. ‘It doesn’t mention Dr Turner.’

I called him over and took the message from him. On his way out he started to close the door.

‘Leave it,’ I said.

Turner wasn’t in his office when I passed, so I went into Flinders-street and found a cab.

When Bacot saw me at his door he stood and strode towards me, and then marched straight past.

‘This way,’ he said, and I managed to keep up without breaking into a run, but the rapid squeak of footsteps down the corridor accompanied my anxiety.

Bacot didn’t break his stride as he entered one long ward where two dozen beds, all containing patients, were lined up militarily against the walls. Someone was moaning and a few stopped chatting as we passed. Their
eyes followed our march with hope born from fear and boredom.

We stopped at the end, before the doors that led to the verandah.

In the bed was a girl with a wet cloth on her head. A nurse was sitting beside her. Bacot went to the girl, who was not much more than a baby, took the towel away and replaced it with his hand.

‘How are you?’

The girl opened her eyes, but they didn’t seem to focus. Bacot turned to me.

‘She has a fever of a hundred and four. Chills. Vomiting. You wanted to see any patient with a fever?’ He waved a hand over the girl, hey presto, and stepped aside.

I took his place. The little girl must have been about three and reminded me achingly of Lillian. She was curled into a foetal position but was conscious. Her skin was pasty, the hair matted. I gently tried to force her mouth open and she moaned at the touch.

I pulled down the sheet and she flinched. Her thigh was bandaged and I started to undo the dressing and she produced a long wail. I persisted, unable to block out the sound or stop my own fear from rising.

The glands were enlarged, the swelling firm and fixed, and beginning to break the surface of the skin.

‘Hush. There, there,’ I said, replacing the bandage, but her sobbing continued even after I stood back. Perhaps she’d done with screaming. She must have been in terrible pain.

‘When was she admitted?’ I asked.

‘This morning.’

I looked around at the full ward. ‘You’ll have to move her.’

‘I know what I have to do.’

I wondered if it would always be a battle with Bacot.

‘You sent for
me
,’ I pointed out.

‘Well, what do
you
think then, Dr Row.’

I leaned forward and whispered hoarsely, ‘It looks like bubonic plague.’

‘Damn right it does. But
I’m
not allowed to make that diagnosis.
Now
we can get her isolated.’

The nurse may not have heard our words, but the exchange clearly frightened her.

‘Perhaps we can discuss this somewhere else,’ I said.

I followed Bacot into the corridor where he turned, folding his arms across his chest, glaring at me.

‘Well?’ As if he knew all along I was going to cause trouble.

‘We have to test her blood for the bacteria first.’

‘We can do that now.’ He cocked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘I have a microscope.’

‘It has to be done by Dr Turner.’

He sighed. ‘Well, bloody hurry up.’

‘Who brought her in?’

‘Her mother, of course. She’s waiting.’

I looked back into the ward and everyone who could was watching the door. The nurse was standing at the end of the child’s bed and turned away.

‘We’ll have to isolate her for now,’ I said. ‘I need to take some serum from a gland, and I can’t do it in there.’

Bacot raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘All right. All right.’ He flapped off down the corridor and began poking his head through doors. He disappeared through one and yelled at someone.

In the end, bewildered patients were wheeled or limped past and the girl’s bed wheeled to the vacated ward where she looked even smaller.

I filled a syringe with her fluid and the girl’s screams bounced around the empty room. Even Bacot looked uncomfortable.

Feeling already like a man who was collecting too many ghosts, I went off to find her mother.

Mrs Gard wasn’t as surprised to see me as I was to see her. In fact, it knocked the breath out of me.

I looked around the waiting room, but there was no other candidate for the girl’s mother. I took a moment to absorb the implications.

Then I sat down next to her with what must have been a look of confusion on my own face, because she read that as something else.

‘Oh Holy Mother of God,’ and she started to wail, ‘Oh my God.’ She looked at me with horror and covered her mouth.

I told her as firmly as I could that her daughter was alive.

‘She has a high fever. We’ve had to move her to another ward where she’s not bothered by anyone else, that’s all.’

She coughed and seemed to have trouble catching her breath again. Finally she managed to say, ‘I want to see her.’

‘I’m afraid she has a contagious disease. We can’t let you see her until we’re sure what it is and that she’s better.’

‘What do you mean? I want to see her,’ but she made no move to stand.

‘You can’t.’

She shook her head and her words were punctuated by sobs. ‘What?’

I almost formed the words, but stopped myself. It sounded bizarre, even silly.

I said,
‘Pestis.’

It didn’t save me of course. She just looked confused.

‘Plague.’

Quand on parle du loup, on en voit la queue
, as Maria might say. Speak of the wolf, and there’s his tail.

I don’t think the word meant that much to her, though. What could it mean? She may not have ever heard of it, except in some childish stories. I managed to get her to tell me that, yes, she’d been away, visiting a sister in Charters Towers. The girl developed a fever on the train.

Had she been back to the boarding house?

She nodded.

Then Mrs Glendinning must surely have wasted no time telling her that her husband was dead. I looked into her eyes and they stared back in fear only for her child. It was a look I knew well.

‘My baby,’ she sobbed. ‘Will she be all right?’ ‘Of course,’ I said, but I could tell that she didn’t believe me. Perhaps foolishly, but with good intentions, I decided to leave this bad news until the morning.

I left her with a nurse and went to Bacot’s office.

‘This isn’t a dispensary,’ but he gave me something he said he kept for hysterical women. I took it back to the waiting room and Mrs Gard, already in a swoon, drank it without a murmur.

I examined her; her body felt as light and fragile as one of Turner’s desiccated moths. No fever, no swellings. Her pulse was strong, and her breathing strained and steady.

Bacot reluctantly found Mrs Gard a bed and I left the hospital carrying her daughter’s serum and more bad news for Turner.

Mrs Glendinning was unhappy to see me, but the sight of the constable appearing out of the night struck her dumb. I left them at the door as he explained in a low, firm voice that no one was to enter or leave the boarding house before the doctors returned in the morning.

Turner and I went back to the hospital to tell Bacot, who immediately demanded the girl be moved to Three
Mile Creek. We persuaded him to wait. The plague hospital wasn’t quite ready and the girl was far too ill to travel.

In fact, it seemed unlikely she’d live through the night. I sat by her side for a while and then saw it was growing lighter outside. I felt her fluttering pulse and reluctantly left her.

‘“The Rat is the concisest tenant. He pays no rent”.’

‘That so?’

‘“Repudiates the obligation on schemes intent”.’ Turner held the dead rat by the tail. ‘Emily Dickinson.’

‘Bloody show-off,’ Humphry muttered.

Humphry was looking behind a cupboard, rattling the crockery. Turner dropped his rat into a bag for examination and incineration.

It wasn’t our job to catch rats, of course, but Turner decided we should take a quick look while we were there. He had found the dead rat behind the ice box.

I’d been there since dawn. Mrs Glendinning was in the kitchen.

‘I’ve got eighteen bloomin’ mouths to feed now for three bloomin’ weeks.’

I asked her when she knew that Mrs Gard was back from Charters Towers, and she said she didn’t.

‘And now you tell me I’m quarantined.’

I’d waited outside with the constables until Humphry and Turner arrived with the prophylactic.

We’d examined the surprised guests in the dining room and none showed any fever. The mood then, if anything, was jovial. One of the male boarders walked out on to the verandah and was cheered by a small number of people who’d heard the news and had come to have a look at this place where plague had broken out.

‘There’s not enough entertainment in this town,’ said Humphry, and he plunged the needle into another guest.

‘Cripes,’ said the man, rubbing his arm. ‘And what good’s this going to do for us?’

‘A precaution. So you don’t get sick. Don’t worry.’

‘Don’t worry? And how long before this stuff works?’

Humphry hesitated. ‘Eight days.’

‘Eight days? It’d all be a bit late by then, wouldn’t it? I mean, if we were going to catch it, we’d have got it by then.’

‘Next!’ yelled Humphry.

‘Cripes.’ The man stormed off.

He was right. The vaccine was probably pointless in their case, but there was no questioning the regulations in front of Turner.

Unfortunately, scepticism was already spreading like a disease itself. Dawson for instance had produced the steward, Storm, when the
Cintra
, which was again plying the coast, returned from Cairns.

‘Here’s your plague,’ he told a meeting of waterside workers. ‘Plague be damned.’ Cheers.

Circulating around Townsville was a pamphlet entitled ‘Twenty-five Reasons Why The Australian Epidemic Is
Not
Plague!’, by a Brisbane doctor, T. P. Lucas. Turner had been furious when shown a copy and sent a telegraph off to the man rebutting each claim. Perhaps it made him feel better, but I doubted it did any good.

‘Lin?’ Humphry waved a hand in front of my face. ‘Are you all right? Turner’s going back to his office.’

The crowd that had grown outside the boarding house booed Turner as he left. I didn’t tell him a guest appeared to be missing.

‘I want to take another look around,’ I told Humphry.

The boarders were meeting in the dining room, now loudly complaining and drawing up a list of demands, by the sound of it. Humphry poked his head around the door jamb and quickly withdrew it. ‘They seem to be enjoying themselves.’

He loitered in the hallway looking at a curling calendar while I went to fetch the keys from the kitchen wall.

‘What’re you after then?’ said Humphry, nodding at the keys.

‘None of your business.’

‘Is it any of yours?’

There was no one on the stairs so up we went as if inspecting the place, which I suppose I had every right to. I was relieved, though, to have Humphry following along.

I looked up and down the hall. Everyone seemed to be downstairs. I tried the door knob first, and it opened. I walked through. Humphry hesitated before stepping in. I closed the door behind us and locked it this time.

The room was more chaotic than I remembered. There was an open suitcase and clothes were scattered over it, and around the floor and the bed. There was a child’s cloth doll on the dresser.