The Narrow Road to the Deep North (43 page)

One evening he was called back to the hospital late for an emergency appendectomy. The young patient’s name was Amy Gascoigne.

Amie, amante, amour, he murmured as he scrubbed up.

The head nurse at the next sink, used to the surgeon’s recitations, laughed and asked what poem that came from. As they walked into the operating theatre, Dorrigo Evans realised it was the first time he had consciously thought of Amy in several years.

I’ve forgotten, he said.

He had stolen light from the sun and fallen to earth. For a moment he had to turn away from the table and compose himself, so that the rest of the team would not see his scalpel shaking.

IT WAS DURING
these years that Dorrigo Evans renewed his relationship with his brother, Tom. He found in this some salve for the loneliness he otherwise felt, even with—and sometimes most particularly with—Ella and their children. He found in the time he was able to spend with Tom—by phone once a month and what became after a time an annual visit to Sydney in midwinter, and then, as his reputation grew and he travelled to Sydney more frequently—that special closeness that siblings sometimes have. It was an ease of company that allows for most things to be unsaid, for awkwardness and error to be entirely unimportant, and for that strange sense of a mysterious shared soul to be expressed through the most trivial of small talk. If beyond their blood relation they had almost nothing in common, Dorrigo Evans still increasingly felt with Tom that he was but one aspect of a larger thing, of which his brother was another, different but complementary part, and their meetings were not so much an assertion of self as a welcome dissolution of it in each other.

Their father had survived their mother by only a few years, dying of a heart attack in 1936; as the youngest of seven, Dorrigo had little to do with his older siblings, who had scattered around Australia in the years before the Depression looking for work. Four sisters went to the woollen mills in the western districts of Victoria; he never really knew them, and he attended their funerals through the 1950s as they passed away, broken by life. He looked at their children and husbands as strangers, but he still helped them all when they came to him. The last of them, Marcy, who was also the oldest and whom he supported entirely for more than a decade, died in Melbourne in 1962 of an undiagnosed cancer. His eldest brother, Albert, who had found work as a cane-cutter in far north Queensland, had died there in an explosion in a sugar refinery in 1956. Tom had ended up in Sydney in a childless marriage, a labourer in the vast works of the Redfern railway yards, and after retiring had spent his days tending his vegetables in his Balmain backyard and playing darts at his local pub.

In February 1967 Ella planned a week’s holiday in Tasmania with the children at the home of her sister, who had recently moved there with her husband. These planned holidays, conceived and booked without Dorrigo’s involvement, under the pretence of being a high point of their shared lives, were rather the last vestige of them as a family. Accordingly, Ella created them and he agreed to them and they all loathed them as a form of corrective punishment known as
family time
.

On the Saturday they were to fly to Hobart, he thus took a phone call about his brother Tom’s heart attack with mixed feelings. On the one hand he was upset; on the other it gave him good reason to evade at least the first day or two of Tasmania. He managed to get a flight to Sydney that evening, but Tom was too heavily sedated on the Sunday to make much sense. It wasn’t until the Monday that Dorrigo was able to talk at some length with him.

Tom told him how he had the heart attack that felled him in the Kent Hotel, just as he was about to throw a bull’s eye.

A bull’s eye?

Had it in the bag, Tom said. Bloody embarrassing way to go, though. In a puddle of piss on the floor with a dart in your mitt. Would have preferred somewhere private, like the tomato patch.

His brother seemed unusually talkative, and Dorrigo soon found himself deep in reminiscences about their childhood in Tasmania. Tom was an endless song cycle of Cleveland stories, some of which Dorrigo knew, many of which he had never heard. Doughy Yates’ name came up, and Tom recalled how Doughy would frequently boast that he could outrun the train. Challenged to prove it, he stripped to his long white underpants and raced the Launceston to Hobart express through the peppermint gums and silver wattles of the Cleveland bush. As the train disappeared with a whistle round the bend heading toward Conara Junction, Doughy fell to the ground scratched and exhausted and had to admit defeat.

He was into everything, Doughy, Dorrigo said.

Still dancing solo at eighty-five, Tom said. Collected Leyland P76s at the end. A car you couldn’t give away. Had them bury him lying on his stomach so that everyone would have to kiss his arse forever after. But I always think of him running through the bush in those long white underpants. It’s like life, isn’t it? You think you’ll outrun it, that you’re better than it, but it makes a fool of you every time. It runs you into the ground and steams off whistling away, happy as buggery with itself.

They laughed.

You know Doughy was Jackie Maguire’s cousin? Tom said.

Dorrigo didn’t. He spoke fondly about his memories of reading poetry and Aunty Rose’s advice columns for Tom and Jackie Maguire.

Old Jackie, said Tom. Good fella. Best of blokes. Knew the bush. His wife was a blackfella, you know?

For a moment or two Dorrigo couldn’t place Jackie Maguire’s wife at all. Then a long dormant memory—a memory that had in some way troubled and shaped him far more than he knew—pushed its way to the front of his mind. Though he had heard vague tales of aristocratic Spanish blood, one of the traditional Tasmanian alibis, Dorrigo hadn’t known she was an Aborigine, and it led him to questions he had always wanted to ask.

Back then, all those years ago. Just before she vanished. I saw you with her.

Mrs Jackie Maguire?

You were kissing her.

Kissing? Where?

The old chook shed behind St Andrews Inn.

I weren’t kissing.

I saw you both. She was holding you.

I was coming back from shooting rabbits. She was hanging washing. I had nothing doing so I gave her a hand. Looking back, I can see she must have been in a bad way. But it didn’t feel quite that way. We were just talking. Stories of family. People. And I started saying what I hadn’t really said to anyone. Things I had seen. War things. And then it was too much. I remember that. I just started panting and not able to speak properly. Lost. And she held me like a child. That was it, more or less.

You had your face buried in her neck.

I was crying, Dorry. Crying, for Christ’s sake.

What happened to her, Tom? Why did she vanish? I’ve always wondered what became of her.

Old Jackie, he used to knock her about a bit. He loved her, but she was twenty years younger, she wasn’t happy and he knew it. Well, what could you do? Aunty Rose wasn’t going to help you. A good fella, Jackie, but then he’d touch the bottle along and give her what for. That much I knew. But where she went I never knew. Not for many years. Then a letter from her found me here in Sydney. She had gone to Melbourne, then later New Zealand. She married a brickie over in Otago. Said nothing more about him. The letter really said nothing more about anything. There was a note with it from her daughter over there saying her mother had asked her to post this to me after her death. And that was that. I guess because others were going to read it there was no mention of old Jackie, or of her family here in Tassie.

The conversation swung to footy matches they had in Cleveland, to Jo Pike’s dray, to the day Colonel Cameron’s man came into their kitchen with his rifle after Tom’s dog because, he said, it had been killing Colonel Cameron’s sheep, and Tom had come out of his bedroom with his rifle, saying, Shoot my dog and I shoot you.

Tom was wearying now. Dorrigo said goodbye, made his brother comfortable, told him he was in the best of hands, and left. He was in the corridor when he heard an old voice rasping from behind.

Ruth!

Dorrigo Evans halted and turned around. In the arsenic-green glow of the ward, his brother, trying to push himself back up the steep slope of pillows, suddenly looked not like Tom at all—a man who, in his younger brother’s mind, had until that moment remained fixed as the very image of youthful vitality and strength—but a very old and sick man.

Her name was Ruth.

Dorrigo Evans stood there, staring at the stranger who was his brother, unsure what Tom meant or what he wanted. He went back into the ward and sat down next to Tom’s bed. Tom sucked his mouth in and out, readying it to speak again. Dorrigo waited. Tom drew his body up from its slump into something firm, and when he next spoke, he did not look at his brother but at the distant wall.

Mrs Jackie Maguire. Her name was Ruth, Dorry. Ruth. And Ruth had a baby.

Here he halted. Dorrigo said nothing. Tom hauled himself up on the pillows again, grunted and coughed.

Yeah, a baby. July 1920. It was her third. How she kept it hidden I don’t know. But she did. Jackie was away, trying to get work on the mainland—I think he was getting some work up the Diamantina, he had a mate up there. Jackie never knew about the baby. No one in Cleveland knew. She dressed all baggy like—well, you remember how it was there, it wasn’t Paris, it was the bloody middle ages, you could get away with whatever. So she did a good job, I reckon. She had the baby in Launceston. A boy. And they sent it to Hobart. That day I, sort of, well, broke down about the war, she held me like I said. And she told me about the baby. She had just found out what had happened to it.

But why, Tom?

Tom’s watery eyes grew sharp, his frail body tensed, and Dorrigo felt that something of the man he had so admired as a child was again present.

I was the bloody father, that’s bloody well why.

And Tom finally turned to look at his brother. His eyes bore into Dorrigo’s; the pupils were strangely small and empty; they looked like holes burnt in old newspaper with a matchstick.

A family called Gardiner was bringing the kid up. Well-to-do people. It upset her. Upset me. But what could you do? Not that it was being looked after, but that we weren’t doing the looking after. No one was going to chase after him and claim him back and bugger up everyone’s life—his, theirs, hers, mine, Jackie’s. No. No bugger was going to do that. It was just one of those things you had to live with. After the last war I ran into a Hobart bloke who knew the family. They called the boy Frank, apparently. He died during the war. My only son, and I never even met him. One of those bloody awful POW camps that you were in up in Thailand.

SYDNEY WAS FULL
of American GIs from Vietnam on R&R. It was late afternoon, the city was sweltering, and to escape the heat and the GIs, to somehow come to terms with what Tom had just told him, Dorrigo Evans, who advised his patients that walking was the best medicine, decided to take his own advice.

He walked from the hospital to Circular Quay, and then he found himself setting out to walk away from the overly pressing crowds there, across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, with the aim of visiting a surgeon friend in Kirribilli. The sauntering sightseers were pleasant to lose himself among, the bridge walkway wide, and the views of Sydney from it he found expansive and reassuring.

He stopped in the middle of the bridge. A light easterly was blowing a cooling sea breeze in, and he gazed at the water far below coughing white and blue waves. On a near point, ochre-red tower cranes stood like sentinels around the giant unclad sails of the new opera house, its intricate skeleton reminding Dorrigo of the fine lace veins of dry gum leaves. Beyond, the late sun was folding the city into hard and bright bands of light and shadow. It was when he drew himself up from the side rail and resumed walking that he first glimpsed her in the distance, momentarily stepping out from one such bar of slanting darkness into the light.

A few moments later he saw her again, coming towards him, framed by the arch of the great sandstone pylon that supported the northern end of the bridge, her head bobbing like flotsam on the rolling swell of the walkers all around her. He was on the outer side of the wide walkway, in the shadow thrown by the bridge’s vast ironwork. His whole being was concentrated on this stranger who was approaching him on the inner side, a ghost walking in the sunlight, when she again disappeared from his sight.

The third time he picked her out in the crowd she was closer. She was wearing fashionable sunglasses and a sleeveless dark-blue dress with a white band around the hips. She had two children with her, small girls, each holding one of her hands. The traffic noise reverberating in the riveted iron ribcage of the bridge meant he could see the children, laughing, chattering, and her replying. If he could not hear, he still knew: she was no ghost.

He had thought her dead, but here she was, walking towards him, noticeably older, though to him time had made her more, not less, beautiful. As though, rather than taking, age had simply revealed who she really was.

Amy.

The abyss of years—with their historic wars, their celebrated inventions, their innumerable horrors and miraculous wonders—had, he realised, all been about nothing. The bomb, the Cold War, Cuba and transistor radios had no power over her swagger, her imperfect ways, her breasts longing for liberation and her eyes rightfully hidden. Her lighter, bleached hair seemed to him more becoming than her natural colour; her body, if anything perhaps a little thinner, making her more mysterious; her face, slightly gaunt with its defining lines, seemed to him full of some hard-won self-possession.

Over a quarter of a century after he had first seen her through dusty shafts of light in an Adelaide bookshop, he was shocked by how little her changes meant to him. So many feelings that he thought he had lost forever now returned with as great a power as when he had first known them.

Would he stop or would he walk on by? Would he cry out or would he say nothing? He had to decide. So few moments to weigh lives known and unknown, his life now, their life then, her unimaginable life now. He could see the children well enough to recognise in them what he felt to be her unmistakable features. And something in them that was not her and which pained him far more than he thought possible. Perhaps she was happy in her marriage. He was finding it hard to breathe. A thousand mad, maddening notions ran through his mind as he kept on walking towards her. He told himself that he could not barge into her life, causing chaos; he told himself he must, that all was not lost, that they could start again.