The Girl for Gillgong Page 2

  Kerry studied the effect in the narrow mirror before her. She hesitated a moment, then took a pink lipstick from her bag and carefully rouged her mouth. That was better! In the heat, one could look pale and a little bit washed-out, and a pretty pink mouth could add a certain gaiety. She didn’t want the people at Gillgong Station to entertain any doubts as to her health, as the wool firm man had done. She was very strong really. It was just that with being inside Miss Prissom’s house so much lately, getting it ready for sale, she hadn’t had the benefit of that Australian summer sunshine that the girls she saw walking in the Sydney streets appeared to have had. Soon she would acquire the same golden-brown bloom to her skin, but in the meantime, that bright touch to her mouth would have to do instead.

  Kerry checked the contents of her case, picked it up and carried it downstairs to wait for the taxi she had ordered. That final, extravagant gesture would go off with the remainder of her savings, but she couldn’t risk being late at Bankstown. It would be too awful if Mr. Hunter went without her!

  As it turned out, she was much too early, and when Mr. Hunter came over and introduced himself, she was walking up and down in the open air—summer heat and all!—unable to keep still. The day was perfect, no clouds in the harsh blue dome of sky, scarcely any breeze either, since the orange windsock barely moved in the airstream. Only sunshine, golden, hot, a little glaring, so that the silver of the plane’s fuselage had a bright, hot metal look as they walked towards it. It had pretty red and black stripes on its body and wings—a gay little plane, as gay and bold as Kerry was feeling this morning. Soon they would be inside, winging their way up there in the blueness all the way to Gillgong Station—or at least, nearly all the way, amended Kerry, remembering the wool firm man’s advice about ‘arrangements from the other end’.

  Mr. Hunter was fortyish, a squat, thick-set sort of man, with nice eyes and a pleasantly generous mouth. He wore shorts of palest khaki, white knee-socks and a white open-necked shirt. Kerry thought it was an odd rig-out. She felt more formal than ever. Was she overdressed? she wondered anxiously, as she hurried over to greet her pilot.

  ‘ ’Lo. You the girl for Gillgong, eh? Kelvin Hunter’s the name.’ He held out a big brown hand that felt reassuringly firm in Kerry’s own small gloved one. His big, loose mouth hovered on the brink of an awkward smile.

  Why, he’s shy! thought Kerry discerningly. Maybe he doesn’t often find himself with a passenger in that funny little plane of his, or maybe he just isn’t used to girls.

  ‘How do you do, Mr. Hunter,’ she said politely. ‘Yes, I’m the girl for Gillgong Station. My name is Peyton—Kerry, that is.’

  ‘Kerry, eh? Well, I’m Kell. I don’t answer to anything else, so we might as well begin by being cobbers, eh? Kell and Kerry.’

  No, it wasn’t that he was shy, she realized now. It had been more a sort of surprise that had made him awkward a moment ago, but he seemed to have got over that now. She liked the way he spoke. It was slower and more nasal than her ear was accustomed to, and there was a funny little twangy lift to his voice each time he said that ‘eh?’ It wasn’t a question the way he said it, but a sort of final sound, like a spoken full-stop at the end of each sentence.

  ‘Well, that all you got for freight, eh? You aren’t going to be a heavy cargo, exactly,’ he added, appraising her slender form with masculine candour. ‘Give me your port, and you take some of these parcels for me instead.’

  He passed Kerry an assortment of boxes, all different shapes and sizes, some done up with string, others encased in brown paper. There seemed to be an alarming number of them. Kerry took as many in her arms as she could carry, while Kell Hunter slipped a blunt brown forefinger through the strings of the remaining ones, eased her own case right up under one armpit, and nodded to the runway.

  They walked together towards the small aircraft waiting there.

  ‘Things for the nippers, mostly,’ he explained briefly, indicating his many packages.

  ‘The nippers?’

  ‘Yeah, the kids. I’ve got three. They don’t half come up with ideas when they know their dad’s off to the Big Smoke, eh? That’s the lot for a good long time went off with half the wool-cheque!’

  Kell didn’t sound as though he minded. He was sort of rough and bluff, kind and casual. Kerry found herself liking him straight away. He was a comfortable person to be with.

  She was a little breathless by the time they reached the plane, and her pretty delphinium suit had got a bit crushed with lugging all those parcels. She felt very warm and she knew her forehead was shiny with perspiration. It had been silly to walk up and down in the sun while she waited. She should have sat patiently in the shade, conserving her energy, if she had been sensible.

  ‘O.K. You sling them up, eh?’ Kell stowed the case, and reached for the parcels. Finally Kerry got in herself.

  It was even hotter inside—a build-up of heat, because the plane had been sitting in the sun ever since sun-up waiting for its passengers. It was much more roomy than she had supposed could be possible—roomy and comfortable and very businesslike, with a control-panel so full of knobs and instruments that her eyes widened. Kerry was beginning to wonder if this thick-set, slow-speaking, gentle bushman could possibly know how to read them all.

  As if he guessed the direction her thoughts had taken, Kell looked her over curiously.

  ‘First time up, eh?’

  She nodded. Her heart was beating, suddenly, very loudly. It seemed to reverberate right round the stillness of the stifling little cabin. Could he possibly have heard it?

  ‘You’ll be O.K.,’ he assured her kindly, perhaps guessing a little at her moment of panic.

  You’ll be O.K., Kerry kept telling herself the same thing, over and over under her breath, as the revs of the engines got louder and louder until her own ears seemed a part of that deafening droning. She held her breath as they taxied gently along the runway, only letting it go when the plane lifted into the air, banking away from the ground beneath.

  Kerry leaned back in her seat, and emitted a small, pent-up sigh of relief. At last she was on her way to Gillgong Station.

  Not quite, though.

  Kell had circled, and was now leaning over, speaking to her.

  ‘You’ve never seen it from above yet, eh? How about that?’ He jerked a thumb down.

  Kerry looked out obediently.

  The city was spread out beneath them, shimmering in the heat. The harbour looked like a huge, untidy inkblot sending sprawling fingers over the mottled parchment that was Sydney. The skyscrapers reached upwards, and the Opera House was a fragile, giant-winged, distant moth on an arm of sapphire sea.

  ‘She’s beaut, eh?’ That was Kell, watching her wide-eyed gaze appreciatively.

  ‘Beaut,’ repeated Kerry solemnly.

  So it was. Really and truly beautiful. Funny that she didn’t mind a bit, though, leaving it all behind, away down there. Understandable, in a way. There was no one down there, for Kerry, no one at all. Nobody to miss her, or even to wave good-bye, as the silver plane winged away to the west. No one to need her—not like they needed a girl for Gillgong Station.

  ‘Did you overland it the last time, eh?’

  ‘The last time?’ Her thoughts were brought back to Kell.

  ‘Sure. The last time you went to Gillgong?’

  ‘Oh!’ Her brow cleared. ‘I haven’t been before.’

  ‘Haven’t been?’ Kell was astonished. She could see that, by the puzzled amazement in his nice kind eyes.

  Kerry grinned, and held up her thumbs.

  ‘First time up, remember?’ she reminded him lightly.

  Kell’s large mouth smiled, but his eyes didn’t quite.

  ‘Does Tad know you’re coming?’ he asked curiously.

  ‘Who’s Tad?’

  ‘For crying out loud! Who’s Tad, she says!’ mocked Kell, rolling his eyes in comic despair. ‘Tad Brewster, of course—at Gillgong.’

  Kerry looked at her gloves pr
imly, and then decided she had better peel them off. Her palms had become oddly clammy, just in the last couple of minutes.

  ‘The people at Gillgong Station are expecting me,’ she informed Kell carefully. ‘If this—Tad, did you say?—if Tad Brewster lives at Gillgong Station, then he’ll be expecting me too.’

  ‘Dear girl, dear Kerry girl, Tad Brewster not only lives at Gillgong. Tad Brewster is Gillgong. Everybody this side of the black stump knows that!’

  Kerry stared at him mutely.

  ‘Everybody but you—is that it, eh?’ Kell was suddenly gentle, suddenly, perceptively, kind. Was apprehension beginning to show in her eyes? Maybe, because they felt wide and worried, stretched just as far as they possibly could be, in big anxious circles in her face.

  ‘Want to tell me?’ Kell invited her.

  Kerry did. She told him everything, about the orphanage, and Miss Prissom dying, and the trustees selling the house, and about the wool firm man and the advertisement that had said ‘Wanted, girl for Gillgong Station.’

  ‘So I’m going to be the girl for Gillgong Station,’ she finished, with returning eagerness. She had forgotten those flutterings of apprehension already.

  ‘Gillgong, Kerry. You just say “Gillgong”, or Tad’ll know straight off you’re not a bushwhacker.’

  ‘It did say “Station,” Kerry defended herself doubtfully.

  ‘Maybe, but that’s just to let you know it’s a big place, you see. Not a farm, or a holding, but a property, and a very large property at that. A station, but we don’t say it. We just say Gillgong. Get it?’

  ‘I get it,’ she hastened to assure him. ‘I’m the girl for Gillgong. Is that better?’

  They smiled at each other.

  ‘Much better.’ But was it? she wondered. Was it really? Or was there something else? Kell’s ugly-kind face still had a worried look about it.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Kerry, anxiety returning. ‘Don’t you think—won’t they think I’m—well, suitable? Oh, they must, Kell. They just must.’

  Kell’s eyes slid away. He rubbed one of his ears, uncomfortably.

  ‘Look, Kerry,’—how awkward he sounded! Embarrassed, almost—‘Look, Kerry, who am I to say? Tad wouldn’t thank me for interfering in what is his business, eh? I’m just the pilot on this trip! I don’t know a thing about it, anyway. That’s the first I’ve heard of any advertisement. My instructions were just to pick up a passenger a girl bound for Gillgong—and take her as far as I go.’

  ‘And how far do you go?’

  Kell smiled at her, still ugly-kind, still reassuring.

  ‘Tad’s my neighbour—a good one, too. A bloke can’t risk falling out with his neighbour, eh?’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘About a hundred and fifty this side,’ he admitted almost ruefully, watching her astonished expression with some misgiving.

  ‘This side of—Gillgong?’ Incredulous though she was, she managed not to add that “station”. She was learning, but she would have to learn fast, so that this Tad Brewster would think of her as a bushwhacker. Perhaps that was what he had meant when he asked for ‘country-bred preferred’.

  Kerry’s chin lifted defiantly. There was no need for Kell to be concerned for her, no need whatever! She hadn’t realized Gillgong Station was quite so remote, but of course she had been clear that it was out in the country. What really mattered was not its location, but the fact that it was going to be her home. She was needed there, and she would very soon show them how good she was at fitting-in, and ‘belonging’. That was what she wanted most of all, just to belong.

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ she said to Kell, feeling calmer now that she had reviewed the situation once more in her mind. ‘Of course, a hundred and fifty miles is quite a distance between neighbours, isn’t it, but one sort of expects that when one gets out into the real—er—country. Anyway—’ she began to sound almost gay—‘I don’t suppose that’s very far when you all fly about in planes to visit each other.’

  Kell scratched his ear again. He seemed to be debating whether to say something or not.

  Finally—

  ‘Look, Kerry girl,’ he pleaded, no one said anything about visiting, now, did they? I just said that Tad and me are neighbours.’

  Kerry’s eyes met his. What could she see there? Surely it wasn’t pity?

  ‘You mean, you don’t visit?’

  ‘Not with Tad—not in the kind of way you mean.’

  ‘Because it’s a hundred and fifty miles to go?’

  ‘Nope. Not that either.’

  She was silent a moment. Then—

  ‘Don’t you like Tad, Kell?’ she asked, very carefully, very politely.

  ‘Sure I like Tad, Kerry,’ she was assured vigorously. ‘Tad Brewster’s a good cove. Everybody likes Tad.’

  ‘Well, why don’t they visit him—his neighbours, I mean?’ she persisted.

  Kell gazed at her a little blankly, lost for a reply. Eventually he seemed to find one, but it was one that Kerry just couldn’t believe in, somehow.

  ‘I guess,’ he said slowly, ‘that Tad doesn’t exactly encourage visiting. He doesn’t rely on anyone but Tad Brewster for anything at all. There’s not a more respected man out where you’re going than Tad there at Gillgong, but he doesn’t need neighbours in the way you mean, Kerry—the social way.’ He caught her eye, and there was an odd sort of unspoken message in his look, a sort of warning. Wrapped up with the warning was a faintly apologetic expression, as though he felt he had said too much, been guilty of some sort of disloyalty to the man whom he obviously liked and respected. ‘What I mean to say is, Kerry girl, that Tad Brewster doesn’t need anybody.’

  The words hung in the air between them, and Kerry stared at him so hard, bereft of speech, that Kell gave a shrug of his thick shoulders and looked back quickly to the controls.

  Of course, he was wrong, Kerry comforted herself. He just had to be wrong. Kell couldn’t really know much about this other man, not when he lived so far away—a whole hundred and fifty miles! Why, he hadn’t even known about the advertisement, had he? So how could he be expected to know what she herself had seen, written in black and white it was, too. She knew, even if his nearest neighbour did not, that Tad Brewster needed somebody, wanted one person at least—he wanted a girl for Gillgong.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Kell’s place sprawled in a haze of heat beneath them.

  When they touched down, the hard-baked ground suddenly seemed to be alive with people. Men came up to talk to Kell, to tell him what had been happening in his absence. They all wore the same thing—low-slung khaki trousers and short-sleeved khaki bush shirts, and on their heads they had battered hats with wide felt brims. They didn’t look as cool and comfortable as Kell did in his shorts and socks, because their clothes were dusty, and so were their faces, and some of them sported a stubbly growth on their brown chins. Kerry decided that they must be bushwhackers—the male variety of bushwhacker! And if the male variety looked like that, what in the world was the female variety supposed to look like? she asked herself. She was beginning to have second thoughts about the appropriateness of her crumpled blue suit and neat white shoes. Her blouse was limp, and her gloves had already lost their initial whiteness, so she stuffed them out of sight in her handbag.

  The men gave Kerry friendly smiles and curious glances, as they helped to unload the plane. Kerry smiled back, and took her share of the parcels.

  ‘Come up to the homestead,’ Kell said to her then. ‘Mary’s expecting you. We’ll get some lunch, and then see what the next move is, eh?’

  As they approached the steps, at the end of a narrow dirt path bordered by wilting oleanders, three children and a dog came running round the side of the house to meet them. The children made a concerted rush at Kell, hugging him, kissing him—laughing, giggling, questioning. The mongrel dog, as if divining that Kerry was somehow being left out of the fun, jumped up and gave her a clawing welcome of attention. She felt a warm tongue just
reach her cheek, and a ladder run right the way down one stocking from knee to ankle.

  ‘Down, Blackie!’ Kell came to the rescue. ‘Kerry, these are the kids, the rascals I was telling you about. Nola, Lyn and Gerald. Say g’day to Kerry, you kids, eh?’

  Three brown faces turned her way. Three mouths grinned obediently, and Nola, Lyn and Gerald chorused a welcome.

  ‘ ’Lo, Kerry,’ they greeted her. ‘You staying with us? You staying long?’

  ‘Till after lunch, anyway!’ their mother informed them from the verandah. ‘Come in, Kerry, and get cooled off before we eat.’

  Mary Hunter was a tall, spare woman with greying hair and a prematurely dry and wrinkled complexion. The sun! thought Kerry, looking from their mother to the peach-bloom faces of her children. That sun all the time, over the years, would parch and desiccate anything, even supple young skins like Nola and Lyn and Gerald had now. She, Kerry, must remember to cream hers often! Phew! She had never felt sun so searing, quite so hot!

  Now they were walking along the verandah, behind a trellis of vines. Already it was cooler there in the shade, and inside the house itself there were fans going, and a lovely breeze.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to take your hat off, Kerry, and have a wash and brush-up?’ Mary Hunter’s eyes passed tactfully from the biscuit-straw boater to the flushed face beneath it. ‘Come and I’ll show you where. Children, you go to the laundry and scrub yourselves, will you?’

  ‘Oh, Mum! The parcels!’

  ‘After you’ve washed.’ Their mother stood firm. Kerry guessed that it was an effort to be firm about anything in this heat. Mary Hunter looked as though she had been battling with it for a good long time now. It was an old adversary, a familiar one, and one she knew she could never entirely vanquish, so she didn’t exert an ounce more energy in fighting it than was necessary—just enough to win each round as it came along, but no more. Her actions themselves had the same deliberation as her speech. Kerry supposed you got to move like that because you knew that a long hot day like this day would be followed by another long hot one, and another much the same after that. You wouldn’t expend a speck more strength than you had to, because you had to save it up for the next time.