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.
9
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.