CHAPTER
27
Kirsty fed Gus damper and eggs for dinner, and he was now in a food coma pressed up against her leg. Cicadas had struck up their evening chorus and moths were thumping into the new light above the Station Cottage’s planked verandah by the time Kirsty decided her day was done. She sat in her swag, leaned back against the wall and propped Bill’s journal up against her knees.
She’d been half keeping an ear out for the sound of Joey’s ute, checking for the flicker of headlights as the sun’s late shadows deepened into twilight, but so far, nothing.
The afternoon had been quite … something. Robbo collapsing, then the Miles family, all nine of them, voicing their opinions on what should be done. Joey’s devastated face when he realised everyone was in on the news that Robbo was unwell except him.
She’d slunk away to the kitchen then, busying herself with boxing up leftovers and keeping Gus away from the flurry of vehicles that ripped out of the farmyard.
It seemed bad stuff didn’t just happen to Foxes.
To distract herself (again) from thinking about the bad stuff thatdidhappen to Foxes, she looked down at the journal in her hands. Thin yellowed strands of nylon hung loose where pages must once have been. Had Bill written something he’d regretted? Torn out a page to score a game of cards?
A half sheet dangled from one of the threads, its upper edge torn away, and below it a date written in a spiky, sharp-lettered hand:October, 1941.
You’ve never seen a prettier place, Doreen, than Rabaul,she read.It’s a dot on a map on an island in New Guinea, where the local women sell their fruit and veg in little bush stalls by the road, like tomatoes the size of grapes in a basket woven out of a palm frond. The ginger roots are fatter than carrots, and for a shilling, a kid with a whacking great bush knife will scamper up a coconut tree for you and cut you a green coconut to drink. Kulau, they call it.
‘Rabaul,’ she muttered, trying to work out how the word was pronounced. ‘Kulau.’ She was familiar with neither.
She turned the page and found a complete entry, also dated.
‘4 January 1942,’ she read aloud, feeling like a radio broadcaster from a previous century. Gus groaned in his sleep, the fluff on his top lip quivering. ‘This is the nation’s war history I’m reading, buddy. Have some respect,’ she said, frowning at him.
The grubby curls whiffled in and out and in again, and she rested her hand on his head. He felt warm. Solid. Comforting.
She kept her hand on him and kept reading.
It looks like we’ll be copping it sooner rather than later, pet. There’s a coast watcher on an atoll north of here, a chap in a bush hut made out of palm fronds and determination and bugger-all else, most like. He’s radioed in a warning. Dozens of Japanese ships just passed the equator and the pointy ends of their boats are headed this way.
We’ve seen a plane or two sporting the red and white eye nosing around, always quick to duck into the cloudbank if we send one of ours up. They’ve been small, two-man fighters mostly, which means they haven’t travelled far to get here.
Kirsty turned the page, to where someone—Bill, presumably—had stuck a torn-out section of map to the page with yellowed strips of sticky tape.
A jagged line across New South Wales’s northern border was lettered in red:The Brisbane Line. Above it soared the shark-tooth triangle of Queensland, and above that, the green and blue island archipelago that was once, according to the map which hadn’t been current for eighty years, the Territory of Papua and the Mandated Territory of New Guinea.
She’d looked at plenty of maps in her day—as a kid with her mum; as a pilot—but she’d never been overseas. She’d never been in a war zone. She’d never run her fingers over map lines and had to make a decision that could end in life or death.
A red marker-pen cross-circled a speck on the map, and beside it:Bill was here.
The next entry was written in spiky, rushed handwriting.It’s real, Doreen. It’s going to be war here in a day or two. I don’t know what’s going to be worse, this waiting around with my guts clenched, or getting the order to engage in combat.
Kirsty smoothed the page, scratching at the morse code of insect droppings staining the old paper. Carol had said she’d think of something, some plan to keep the bank from getting its mitts on the plane, but Carol was an eighty-odd-year-old lady with a walking cane and a biscuit addiction.
And who was Kirsty?
A pilot (grounded) with a recently acquired medical condition (brain lesion?) whose job was two thousand kilometres away (subjectto getting the all clear from a shrink she’d been too cowardly to contact), and who had a lifetime habit of not sticking around (a.k.a. outrunning the family curse).
All of that didn’t add up to responsibility.
All of that didn’t add up to a granddaughter who should be entrusted with finding a museum to take on the Bluett family legacy, and that fact was—
Well, crap. It wasshameful.
Because, even now, she was reaching out to check her car keys were there, in reach, on the milk crate beside her swag. Her half tank of fuel would get her to Tenterfield or Glen Innes, where she could stock up on diesel and jelly snakes and a paper road map where she could draw her own red felt pen cross:Kirsty the coward is here.
20 January 1942. It’s happened, Doreen. I’m all right besides a banged-up knee but my plane was shot up and my crew—Freddy, the kid from Atherton who I trained with in Townsville—took a bullet. Eight Wirraways against a hundred enemy planes. Love, it was a mess. I set the Wirraway down in a coconut plantation but it was beat up pretty bad. The bloke running the plantation tried to patch us both up (split my eyebrow on the dashboard but it looked worse than it was) but Fred didn’t make it and now Lerew’s got me and the other lads in the back of a truck heading for a pick-up point. If there’s any such thing as luck left in the world, there’ll be a flying boat there waiting for us.