Stretching from the white beaches of the Indian Ocean to the banks of the broad Swan River, there was a city. At the top of the city was a hill, covered in the natural scrub and low trees of the Australian bush. And at the top of the hill there was a huge park – a mixture of lawns, manicured gardens, and large expanses of bushland. Kings Park rose above the clean skyscrapers of downtown Perth, above the freeway interchange, and over the beautiful river. The avenues of the park were lined with towering eucalypts, planted in memory of soldiers who died in the First World War. Those quiet roads now played host to families who came on weekends to ride bicycles, buy ice creams, and throw coins into the wishing well.

Most of the tourists would go to the war monument, a great obelisk at the park’s edge, to take in the stunning views of the city and of the many sailing boats at play on the water far below. But those who knew the park well knew there was a better place.

Hidden in the interior of Kings Park was a spiral lookout tower, a winding staircase of silver steel, four storeys high. It crowned a grass fairway, half a mile long, which ran from a quiet garden up a gentle slope to the highest land in the park, at the base of the tower. On either side there was dense bushland, so the fairway itself made a long slash of bright green, when viewed from the tower, running down the slope and pointing away from the city centre to the quiet suburbs in the west. The tower was a little too inland to get a good view of the ocean, but the rolling, pretty suburbs, seen over the bushland of Kings Park, were reward enough for the climb. One could look east, instead, to the city skyline, or south, to the branching expanse of the river. This was the place to come to appreciate the beauty of the city and all the promise that it held.

Kings Park could be a quiet place during the week, especially away from the tourist places. Early in the morning, before the dull groan of traffic on the freeway would begin, there was tranquillity and solitude to be found in the park’s interior. It was a favourite with joggers and walkers, somewhere to find a route less frequented by others, somewhere to keep fit and to take in the fresh park air at sunrise.

And so it was, one summer morning in February of 1996, that a young jogger took her usual route, starting at her home in Nedlands and entering the western edge of the park. It was very near dawn when she began her run. By the time she had reached the bottom of the fairway and was preparing for the long run to the top, where she would climb the spiral tower and rest before running home again, the sun had already risen above the eastern horizon. The jogger would be running towards the light. She paused, summoning the energy to attack the long incline. At her side, her dog waited obediently.

Dogs were not allowed in Kings Park, but Perth, for all its youthful innocence and optimism, was not as safe a city as it once was. Young women had recently disappeared from the nightclub districts, so the jogger had decided to flaunt the rules and take her large dog running with her. It made her feel safe. The big, red Irish Setter was glad of the exercise and it bounded excitedly around her feet, eager to move on.

The jogger began her long run up the fairway. It was the most difficult stage of her route, every morning. She was dressed in a light pair of shorts and a T-shirt; it was too warm for a tracksuit. In a few hours, the day would reach thirty degrees Celsius, and by the afternoon, closer to forty. Even at first light it was uncomfortably warm. The jogger began to sweat as she trudged up the long incline. It would take a few minutes to reach the tower.

The dog, let off its leash, bounded ahead with long, effortless strides, then looped back behind the jogger and ran beside her for a while before racing ahead yet again. The fairway was deserted, for which the jogger gave silent thanks. It was the solitude of running that she loved the most.

At last, the jogger reached the spiral tower and stopped. It was her custom to rest here, to climb the tower and look out over the city. She told the dog to stay and stepped onto the steel staircase. She climbed quickly, jogging up the tight helix, pulling herself along with her outside hand on the smooth safety rail as she went. The tower moved slightly under her, reverberating with every step, and swayed, just barely, in the warm easterly breeze. It was an odd structure to climb: sturdy enough, but with a life of its own, moving just a little, as if to let the jogger know it was aware of her presence. At the top, the jogger turned slowly to take in the full compass of the landscape around her. It was always special, being up there. She never grew tired of it.

The jogger was suddenly annoyed to hear her dog barking. She looked down, to the bottom of the tower, but the dog was not there. Then she looked west, along the fairway, and saw him. He was two hundred feet or so from the tower, on the southern edge of the fairway, running into the trees and then out again, trying to attract her attention.

Worried that someone might hear the dog’s frantic barking, the jogger cursed under her breath. “Oh, bloody hell. Here we go.”

She made her way down the stairs as quickly as she could and ran onto the fairway. It took her nearly a minute to reach the dog. She was sure someone would have heard him by now and that she would get fined. This time, she spoke loudly. “Sam! Shut up! Come here! What’s wrong with you?”

The dog would not settle. It bounded up to her and barked furiously, ignoring her commands. Then it ran into the trees, where it had been before. The jogger followed, annoyed. She was determined to retrieve the dog and put him back on his leash.

And then she stopped, suddenly, and went no further.

The dog had brought her far enough.

Lying in the scrub was the body of a young woman, still dressed in an old pair of jeans and a red pullover. The lifeless head was slumped to the side and there was froth at one corner of the mouth. The dog nuzzled and sniffed at the body, which was half-sitting up against the trunk of a small tree. The eyes were open, blue and vacant. It was an horrific sight.

A woman’s scream rang out across the park as the jogger realised what she had found. She felt sick. Months later, she would tell friends that she should have stayed, should have checked the body for a pulse, but that it would not have made any difference, for the girl was dead. At the time, however, the jogger was gripped with such terror that all she could do was run. She feared the killer was still nearby. She didn’t see the scene clearly. She didn’t notice any of the obvious clues, which the police would later point out made her fear unjustified.  All she did was turn and run, run as fast as she could, away from that place of death. She ran east, past the tower, onto the bitumen road that led down to the war memorial, to the places where there would be people. The dog followed her.

The jogger ran down the road for three frantic minutes, before she came at last upon a cleaner working near one of the still-closed food kiosks by the war memorial. She tried to tell her what she had found.

The cleaner, a portly woman, twenty years older than the young jogger, at once told her to calm down. It took a minute or two for the jogger to blurt out a description of what she had seen. Then the cleaner made her sit down. She telephoned the police while the jogger cried – more tears of fear, and of the relief of fear, than of sadness.

When the police arrived, they could see the jogger was too distraught to revisit the scene. A young policewoman stayed with her, while the other constable called for support and for an ambulance before driving quickly to the spiral tower. He knew he needed to check if the woman was dead. It was the worst part of police work.

By the time the constable had parked the police car and run down the southern edge of the fairway, he already doubted he would find the woman alive. It would be another nightclub murder, he supposed, another abduction. He went two hundred feet past the tower, like the jogger had said, looked into the scrub, and found the body.

He felt for a pulse. There was none. The body was still quite warm and not rigid. She could not have been dead for long, perhaps only half an hour. But there was something wrong, for a murder. There was no blood. There was no wound. Instead, there was a plastic intravenous drip bag, connected by a long, clear, snakelike tube to a catheter in the vein of the woman’s forearm. The bag was half-empty. It contained a fluid, an ugly, dark green colour. The constable pulled the dead woman away from the small tree she rested against, thumped on her chest twice in a vain attempt to restart her heart, and began CPR. It was not up to him to pronounce her dead. He knew it was futile, but he blew air into her dead lungs and compressed her chest over the heart between breaths, until the ambulance arrived.

The ambulance drove straight down the grass fairway and parked only metres from the body. The medics, two serious young men, asked the constable to step aside. The shorter of the two took over the CPR, pressing an oxygen mask over the dead woman’s face, but he shook his head to indicate there was no real hope.

“What’s happened here?” said the taller medic.

“I dunno, mate. Looks like some kind of drug overdose. I thought it was another murder, at first. But then I found this.” The constable indicated the intravenous drip set, still hooked up to the woman’s arm. Since he had removed it from the tree, where it had been hanging from a sturdy twig, the drip bag was on the ground next to the body.

“Ah, Jesus,” said the medic, in disgust and sadness. He pulled angrily at the clear plastic intravenous drip set tubing, ripping it away from the catheter in the dead woman’s arm. “Jesus Christ.”

The young constable didn’t know what the medic was talking about, but before he had time to ask, the medic spoke again.

“Okay, let’s move her.”

The tall medic and the constable lifted the body onto a stretcher, while the second medic continued pumping the oxygen mask. In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, they would intubate her, they would shock her heart to try to make it start, and they would go through all the motions of trying to revive a person that was long since dead. Sometimes, they knew, you could be lucky and pull someone back to life, but the tall medic knew that would not be possible in this case. All because of the dark green fluid.

The constable was left alone at the death site. Just after the ambulance left, a second police car drove down the fairway and parked where the ambulance had been. A police sergeant got out and walked over. The officer with him stayed in the car, working the radio. Detectives had to be called and the scene would need to be quarantined and photographed.

“Is this where you found her?” said the sergeant.

“Yeah, Sarge. She, uh, was probably already dead.”

The sergeant nodded. “Show me what you found, then.”

The constable looked a little pale. “She was here, against this tree, sitting up. There was a ... a drip in her arm.”

“An intravenous bag?”

“Yeah.”

“What was in it?”

“I dunno, Sarge. Take a look.”

The sergeant took the drip bag from the constable. He held it up against the sky and looked through it. The dark green fluid was poorly transparent. “Any sign of a struggle?”

“No. She was just lying there.”

“I didn’t think so. This isn’t murder. It’s suicide.”

“You mean, a drug overdose?”

“No, son. What would a junkie be doing out here? Nah, I’ve seen it before. This lot’s a suicide rig.” The sergeant held up the drip bag.

“Sarge?”

“They call it green dream. It’s a concentrated anaesthetic, pentobarbitone sodium. They make it green, to make sure nobody uses it by mistake. She must have known what she was doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you get the dose wrong, you go into convulsions. It’s pretty ugly. Smashes up the body up pretty bad. She must have known exactly what she was doing. Look at the ground – she went peacefully.”

“Jesus,” said the constable. Now he understood what the medic had been so angry about. There would have been no chance of reviving the woman, with her body full of an anaesthetic overdose.

“Are you all right, son?” The sergeant put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “This your first suicide case?”

“Yeah. Sorry, Sarge.”

The sergeant spoke with sad irony. “You’ll get used to it.”

 

 

When the two policewomen knocked on the door of Ruth MacDonald’s large home later that day, it was to bring the kind of sad news they were trained to bring, that the old woman’s granddaughter had passed away that morning. She had been declared dead by doctors in the Emergency Department at Royal Perth Hospital, after prolonged attempts to revive her. The cause of death was an overdose of pentobarbitone sodium.

          Ruth would later discover a letter, the last one that her granddaughter, Sally, ever wrote. It would arrive in that afternoon’s post and it would confirm what the police had suspected, that it was suicide. But when Ruth answered the knock at her door and spoke to the policewomen, she did not yet know any of that.

Strong, as always, Ruth replied simply. “Oh, no. That can’t be.”

Then she asked them inside.

That day broke her heart more than any other day in her long life.

 

Chapter  2

 

Where the broad expanse of the Swan River branched to the south and briefly narrowed to a humble channel under the old Canning Bridge, it ran into a quiet body of water too shallow for the big boats from the wealthy sailing clubs of the north shore. This was the Canning River, which snaked gently south and then east through the southern suburbs of the city. It was a river that Ruth MacDonald had known most of her life. She had taken many quiet walks along its shores over the years and found much peace and reassurance there, first with her husband so many years ago, then with her young family which fate had stolen from her, and, in the end, after her husband’s death, she walked the riverside path alone.

It seemed to Ruth, after seventy-five years of living, that life had led her slowly and relentlessly to being alone. She still remembered the happy day when, as young woman, she had met Fred MacDonald, her future husband, almost fifty years ago, in Melbourne. Ruth had been a simple girl and her family had no money, but they had prized her education. She had risen to become a schoolteacher, a profession of which she was proud, and had met Fred at a community dance, held in the gymnasium of the school at which she worked. The dashing young man had an honest optimism about him, which Ruth had liked, and when she got to know him, she soon knew that she would love him. It was just after the war and Fred MacDonald spoke of business, of moving west and building a new life there. After the wedding, they had left the city of their birth and come to Perth, which, at that time, seemed like a country town compared to the sophistication of Melbourne.

At first, things were hard, but Fred kept his promise and after a succession of lowly jobs he found a future for himself in printing. His business expanded over the years from one tiny print shop to a chain of modern copying centres. MacDonald Printing allowed Fred and Ruth to live a comfortable life. Ruth was able to stop teaching and to raise the family she had always wanted. Eventually, they moved to a stately home in Mount Pleasant, a quiet suburb on the western bank of the Canning River. Ruth had walked the banks of that river for more than three decades, before the fateful day that two policewomen had come to the house and informed her that her beloved granddaughter, Sally Johanssen, was dead.

Ruth was a survivor. Her experience with grief started early. Although each successive blow seemed like more than she could overcome on her long path to loneliness, she had in fact become stronger with each passing year. As a young mother, she had lost the eldest of her two children, James, to influenza, before his first decade was out. Some kinds of pain are too great even for words and Ruth became silent and withdrawn for a time, after that first great loss. She always suspected that the death had forever traumatised her only remaining child, Claire, who had been eight years old when her brother passed on. The second blow came unexpectedly and cruelly, when Fred had died of a heart attack, nine years later. He was barely forty-five years old and he was the only love Ruth would ever know. When he died, a part of Ruth died along with him, never to return.

Fred had left a sizeable estate. Although Ruth would not be rich, she was able to keep the large riverside home that she so loved. But as Claire grew from a child, confused by grief, into an angry young woman, she became more and more alienated from Ruth. When Claire married and left Perth with her new husband, a Dutchman named Karl Johanssen, ironically it was to return to Melbourne. The family history had gone full-circle. Ruth had lost Claire, almost as much as she had lost James. And then she was alone, with her house, and the river.

When Sally was born, although the child was on the other side of the vast continent that is Australia, the news was a joy to Ruth. Claire did not prevent Ruth from having contact with Sally, and over the years, in letters, and in occasional trips, Sally came to love her grandmother as her favourite relative. And Sally needed every ounce of that love, for the man Claire had married, against Ruth’s wishes, was a violent alcoholic. It nearly made Ruth’s blood boil, when she heard the stories from her granddaughter about Mummy being hit by Daddy, about the smell of booze on Daddy’s breath, and about the nights when he would not even come home at all. Claire had seemed, to Ruth, to have become a lost woman many years before, but when Karl turned his drunken anger away from Claire onto his defenceless daughter, Ruth lost all respect not only for him, but for Claire, the mother who would let her daughter be beaten. Claire did eventually separate from Karl, but not before Sally had been forever traumatised by the beatings that came senselessly and unpredictably from her father.

Ruth was a compassionate and strong woman, but when Karl died, drunk as he had lived, taken by a car accident, she found she could shed no tears for the man. And then, one of the happiest things that had ever befallen Ruth came to pass. Sally came to live with her.

In the turmoil of her violent home, Sally had found an expression for the love she craved, in the love of animals. Sally liked horses and dogs, although she had neither for herself, and her mother had let her keep a cat. As a teenager, Sally dreamed of becoming a vet. She was a good student at school and she wanted desperately to enter veterinary college. Claire had met a wealthy Canadian engineer, after Karl’s death, and had set her mind upon marrying him and emigrating, but Sally could not bear the thought of going to some strange new country with a mother she could never trust to provide her with even the most basic things a child needs: safety and love. It was then that she hit upon the idea of going to live with her grandmother, in Perth. Sally was eighteen, a little older than her classmates, and she could make her own decisions. Claire seemed almost not to care, but Ruth was overjoyed.

Sally came to live in the old house by the Canning River, finished her final year of high school and did well in the university entrance exams, gaining entrance into the veterinary studies program at the local university. The day she got the letter confirming her acceptance into the course, she was ecstatic. She had run into the house and hugged Ruth. It seemed to Sally that the misery of the past was at last behind her. A new life could begin.

In Ruth, Sally had found the family love she had always wanted and never had. In Sally, Ruth had found a living part of the family that had been taken from her years before. For a time, the future seemed bright. They lived together, as the only family they truly knew, for almost six years, before Sally graduated and left to begin work as a veterinary surgeon.

When the police officers had told Ruth, barely a year later, that Sally was dead, they could have had no comprehension of just how great a loss it was to Ruth, of how it seemed like the crowning sadness of a life of many sad events, and of how it left Ruth more alone than she would ever be able to express. Nor could they fully understand the crushing pain that Ruth felt at the knowledge that Sally’s bold determination, to move beyond the violence and the heartbreak of the home she grew up in, had failed, that the innocent young woman had not been able to escape the past, and that, rather than moving forward to a better life, she had stumbled, fallen, and ended it all. The cruelty of this fate was more than Ruth could bear.

She had not cried in front of the officers. She had been polite to them, thanked them for their time, and seen them out. Then she had locked the front door, gone to her recliner chair in the library, sat down, and wept. In the evening, she had checked her mailbox and found the suicide note, which Sally had written and posted the night before. Reading it, Ruth wept so hard she could barely breathe.

Nearly two years had passed since that awful day, and Ruth had her own demons to deal with now, in both her mind and body. She had not blamed herself for Sally’s death, but she always wondered if there might have been something she could have done to prevent it. And when one day she had gone to see her doctor, complaining of chest pains, and he had sent her to have X-rays done, and CAT scans, and MRIs, and when all the scan results were in, and a surgeon told her she had to have a biopsy done, and when the biopsy came back as cancer, Ruth was almost relieved. It was not that she wanted to die, for she wanted to live, but that at least the uncertainty of when and how her death would happen was taken away. Ruth was a practical woman and she knew, at that time seventy-four, that she was not getting any younger. The news of her cancer at least gave her something tangible she could fight. She knew that her lymphosarcoma would be the final act in her life story. But it seemed that not even this malignant cancer could defeat Ruth MacDonald, for the disease went into remission. For the last twelve months, she had been relatively well.

The knowledge that the end of her life was coming made Ruth want to change a few things. She was lonely and she didn’t see the point in living out her last little while by herself. It was true that she liked solitude and that she enjoyed her quiet days working in the garden, or reading, or walking by the river, but there was also something inside her that made her want to help someone other than herself. Perhaps it was the feeling of helplessness, that she could not save her beloved granddaughter now, or perhaps it was just Ruth’s practical nature, that she wanted to, in some small way, do something to help her fellow man. In any case, she decided that she would contact an aid agency and offer to take in a boarder, perhaps a young student needing a safe place to stay, or a foreign student come to learn something of Australia, or perhaps someone recuperating from a hospital stay, needing a halfway house before they launched back into the world at large. As fate would have it, it was someone in the latter category the agency suggested. Ruth made the agency promise not to reveal that she herself had cancer, because she wanted to live as normal a life as possible, as long as her remission lasted, and anyway she wasn’t given to discussing private matters with strangers. The agency agreed.

And now, on a boiling-hot November afternoon in 1997, Ruth watched a taxi pull up at the front gate of her riverside home. A man got out and opened the gate, with some difficulty, then hobbled down the path to her front door using a walking stick to steady himself.

Ruth stood on her front verandah and waited for him.

She saw a handsome man with a sun-browned face that was creased with lines of laughter and lines of grief from thirty-nine years of living well. He had short, dark, straight hair, flecked with grey, and a tallish, athletic figure, now crippled. He looked the kind of man, Ruth thought, who must have wooed many admiring women in his day, with his movie-star looks, but there was something pathetic about him now, as he limped up the front steps of her home and onto the verandah, resting heavily with every step on his walking stick, held in his right hand. And as he finally greeted her, Ruth could see that there was much hidden behind his well-practised charm and much belied by his boyish smile. He seemed immediately complex to her.

The woman that Michael Andrews saw standing by her front door, waiting for him as he painfully made his way towards her, had a strong, dignified face, deeply wrinkled and without make-up, and the look of someone dressed for work in the garden, with sensible, green slacks and a big, white shirt. She had a thin figure and was a little taller than average but her back was straight and she was not frail. Her hair was a uniform silver grey, it was long and straight, collected back and wound into a bun. She looked more like someone in her mid-sixties than the aging old woman the agency had described. She was obviously still a very active person, whereas Michael himself found it a tremendous struggle merely to walk. He liked her, at once.

“G’day. Mrs MacDonald?”

“That’s right. And you must be Michael Andrews.”

“That’s me. Pleased to meet you. How you going?”

Ruth took Michael’s outstretched right hand and shook it. “Fine, fine. Looks like you’ve got some luggage coming.”

Michael leaned on his walking stick. He turned a little to see the taxi driver pulling bags out of the cab, a white Falcon sedan.

“Where do you want these, luv?” said the driver to Ruth, when he had made his way up the path and to the house.

“Second room on the left, thanks.”

“No worries.” The driver took the suitcases in, then went back to the cab and collected the rest of Michael’s things: a couple of cardboard boxes packed with books and mementos, and a large, soft suit-bag which the driver layed out on the single bed in Michael’s room. When the driver had gone, Ruth led Michael inside.

“Well, this is your room, Mr Andrews.”

“Call me Michael, please.”

Ruth smiled. “I’m Ruth. Breakfast and lunch are up to you, but I’ll serve dinner every night at seven. You’ve got your own bathroom, at the end of the hall, and you’re welcome to use the sitting room, over there. You can see the river from the front windows. There’s a big garden out the back, that’s my hobby. I’d like to think someone other than myself could enjoy it. You’ve been indoors, in hospital, quite a while, the agency said.”

“About three months.”

“Well, summer’s on the way. It’s beautiful out in the garden. And there’s the river, just across the road.”

“It’s lovely,” said Michael. “You’re very lucky to live here.”

Ruth thought for a moment. “The agency told me about ... your accident. I just want you to know, I’m very sorry.”

Michael felt uncomfortable. “Thanks.”

“But I won’t pry. If I know hospitals, you’ve probably had every nurse and social worker in the place asking you about it. They’ve probably even sent you to a shrink.”

Michael grinned. “Every Wednesday. I still have to go.”

“Well, you won’t get any questions from me.”

Michael said nothing.

“Right. Come and I’ll show you the rest of the house.”

In truth, the agency had warned Ruth to keep a close eye on her boarder. The doctors at the hospital, concerned by his slow recovery, had called in a psychiatrist. Michael was under therapy not just for his physical injuries but for post-traumatic shock syndrome and clinical depression. Although Michael was a good man who would never be a danger to anyone, he might well be a danger to himself, after what he had been though. It was probably this very warning that made Ruth agree to take him on. She still thought of Sally often, and this was as close as she could get to helping her.

The house was a big, quiet, stately home. It had only one storey, which meant no stairs for the disabled man to climb, other than the steps which led up to the wide front verandah and those which led down from the back door to the peace and privacy of the rear garden. From the verandah and from the big windows of the adjoining sitting room, there were pleasant views of the Canning River. The high ceilings of the old house, the heavy, red clay tiles sheltering its roof, and the cool, polished floorboards underfoot, made for comfortable living in the melting-hot summer. There was an old kitchen with a pot-bellied stove to warm it and the small dining room beside it, in winter, and there was a library at the back of the house, to complement the sitting room at the front. The rest of the house, Michael did not venture into. He assumed the other bedrooms and storage rooms would hold secret memories for the old woman, into which he would not want to pry. He had been impressed by Ruth’s not invading his own privacy – it was a courtesy he wanted to return. After the tour of the house, Michael excused himself and went to his new room, to rest. He felt constantly tired, in those days.

When Ruth knocked on his door to bring his dinner, a couple of hours later, Michael thanked her profusely. The food was delicious. It was Ruth’s custom, she explained, to eat in the library over a good book or watching television, and she encouraged Michael to make use of the sitting room for his own mealtimes. Something in the tone of her voice made it clear that she preferred to eat alone, and it was a routine that they would soon settle into. Ruth would cook dinner, Michael would thank her for it and he would always take the time to compliment her on her cooking, and then they would eat separately, being the intensely private people they were.

Michael, of course, paid for his room and board, and Ruth was glad of the extra income. She spent it on books or on the garden. But at the end of that first day at Ruth’s home, Michael knew nothing of the routine which would develop, of how comfortable he would come to feel, and of how much he would value Ruth’s friendship. What he knew was that he had had a life and he had lost it, that he was in a lonely room with nowhere to go.

He felt very alone.

Loneliness was a new feeling for Michael, something which he had scarcely known before in his life. He did not like it. It was a kind of emptiness, an inescapable longing, which was so much in contrast with the contentment and love that he had known for fifteen years. He had no idea that a life could go from so good to so indescribably empty, without any warning, until it happened to him. He had heard stories of terrible tragedies which had befallen others but his own charmed life had never made him feel any such unbelievable pain, until now. And were it just the pain, the loneliness, and the loss, that he had to deal with, it might have been something he could cope with, somehow, barely, but greater than all of those things, since the accident, was the guilt which he felt, for he was no good.

The accident – there’s a euphemism, he thought bitterly, as he sat in his quiet room on that first night in Ruth’s home.

There was a big jarrah wardrobe opposite the bed, a small writing desk and chair, and even a comfortable recliner chair, as well, as if Ruth had guessed he might want to spend time alone, reading, thinking, pondering, in this little room. But Michael sat on the bed. He didn’t bother to unpack his suitcases, and only one of the boxes had been opened. Michael had put a framed picture of his wife on the desk, where he could see it from the bed. Three people were dead because of him, and he would never see Marie again, for she was one of the three.

Michael didn’t believe in accidents. He was a pilot, a trained professional, and a professional makes decisions and those decisions count. If a storm is gathering, a pilot should know it, know where the storm is, which direction it’s moving in, what altitude the big storm clouds are flying at and how best to avoid them. A pilot should know his aircraft, what it is capable of and what it is not capable of, and the hard line between the two which separates life from death. Michael blamed himself for not knowing the difference, for pushing his aircraft beyond the envelope of what it could survive, and for ending three lives. Most of all, he blamed himself for not being one of the dead. He had killed his wife and his two closest friends by putting his aircraft on the wrong side of that hard, unforgiving line.

And, that night, it was all he could think about.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter  3

 

Ian and Diane Rogers had known the Andrews for the best part of two decades. They loved Michael for his charm, his good humour, and his rock-solid confidence. Michael was a man who inspired trust in everyone who knew him, an experienced pilot who for several years had flown small and medium-sized aircraft for charter companies and small airlines. Diane even admired him for his rugged good looks and for his turquoise eyes that always seemed to twinkle with the hint of a smile, although she would never have admitted this to her husband, whom she loved dearly.

But no one admired Michael more than his wife of fifteen years, Marie. Michael’s respect for her was equally profound. Her career as a research biologist, studying the insidious process that makes a normal, healthy cell  turn cancerous and how that change might be treated to save a life, had always deeply impressed Michael, as much as his glamorous job as a pilot had attracted Marie. They complemented each other perfectly. Michael’s single friends, mostly young pilots who shared his passion for the sky, men who valued their freedom above everything else, would nevertheless tell him, from time to time, that, “You’re a lucky bastard, Andrews, to have a woman like her.” And Michael would never argue, for he knew that he was lucky, and for fifteen years he had been so.

Ian and Diane were high-school teachers. Ian was a scientist, Diane, an artist. Ian, Diane, Michael and Marie were an inseparable group. Their friendship went right back to their days at university. They had seen each other make the first, tentative steps in their new careers, they had volunteered as best men and bridesmaids at each other’s weddings, and they had travelled together.

On holidays, Michael enjoyed his role as chief pilot and tour-coordinator. He would fly them all down to Esperance, on the impossibly beautiful, remote southern coastline of Western Australia, or to Margaret River, a short hop south of Perth, a fertile district dotted with wineries and lodges and fine restaurants hidden in forest groves or overlooking rolling pasture. He would fly them inland, over the desert, to the old mining city of Kalgoorlie, or out over the ocean to the little island of Rottnest, a diver’s paradise. He would fly them north to Monkey Mia, where dolphins swam along the beach and played curiously with eager tourists, or even further, if it was a long holiday, to Broome, with its stunning beaches and huge tides that left big boats balanced on the sand. These were the many good times the four had known.

But three months before Michael had come to stay with Ruth, when he still had good legs and his characteristic, jaunty walk, when his blue eyes still twinkled with laughter, when his closest friends still trusted him, and when he still had Marie by his side, Michael took them all on the last trip they would ever make together.

It was late on a Sunday afternoon, the tenth of August, 1997, when Michael obtained clearance from the tower, opened the throttle wide and raced down the smooth runway away from the safety of the ground and into the sky. Michael had always loved flying. Marie loved it too. From the first time he had taken her flying, the thrill had never grown stale to her. As the Cessna 172 gradually climbed, Marie looked out over the tiny airport of the southern town of Albany. Ian and Diane were in the back seats, tired after a long day of sightseeing and eager to make it back to Perth for a good night's sleep before Monday morning reared its ugly head.

It was cold and wet. A light drizzle fell from the overcast sky. As a rule, Australian winters are mild – it rarely snows anywhere, except at the top of a few low mountains, and the most that has to be contended with is heavy rain, strong winds, and occasional hail or frost. But the wind coming in off the Southern Ocean in the dead of winter is icy cold, and the air was heavy and damp that evening. Michael had checked the weather forecast carefully before he had decided to fly, and although there was rain predicted, he saw no problem with making the journey back to Perth safely. Michael turned the aircraft north and trimmed for cruise. And the journey began. Marie squeezed his knee and smiled at him. The engine droned. Ian and Diane fell asleep.

Before the flight, Ian had walked around the little Cessna, following Michael as he performed the customary preflight check of the aircraft. Michael had checked the control surfaces, made sure the luggage was stowed properly, visually verified the fuel load was adequate, checked the engine, and even kicked the tyres – an old habit of dubious importance but part of the routine. Michael was a safe pilot and he never took stupid risks and never left anything to chance. It was a philosophy that had kept his flying accident-free for the best part of two decades. And whatever little mishaps had arisen in that time, he had handled with the level-headed, cool demeanour that good pilots cultivate and that keeps good pilots alive. Ian, on the other hand, not burdened with the serious task of preflighting the aircraft, spent his time distracting Michael and making jokes.

“Yellow and white, eh? You’d think they’d come up with better colours for an aeroplane that yellow and white, red and white, blue and white. Who comes up with these colours?”

Michael was checking the engine oil. “It’s an aircraft, mate. Aeroplanes are those wind-up toys kids chuck around in parks. And what colour it is has got nothing to do with it.”

The girls were waiting impatiently to board the plane. Diane spoke up. “Huh. That’s a typically male comment. What’s the most important thing about a car?”

“Colour,” said Marie. “Ask any marketing executive.”

“Well,” said Michael, closing the engine cowling. “Yellow and white will have to do. Anyone who doesn’t like the colour can wait for the next plane. Any takers?”

“It’s a bit old, isn’t it?” said Ian. “Is this one of the old training tubs from the flight school? Another cheap rental?”

“Don’t knock the 172. I learned to fly in one of these, you know. It’s a fine aircraft. This thing is the Old Faithful of aviation, and there’s one thing about Old Faithfuls: they never let you down.”

“You boys finished yet?” said Marie.

“Yep,” said Michael. “Let’s get goin’.”

The flight had been uneventful, if a little bumpy, until Marie noticed Michael fiddling with the radio. He looked annoyed. Despite barking his callsign and position into the microphone on his headset several times, he was getting no response.

“Ah, shit,” he grumbled.

“What’s up?” said Marie, over the engine noise.

“The bloody radio’s on the blink.”

“You sure? There’s some storm activity. Maybe it’s interference.”

“Nah. Bloody thing’s fucked up again.”

Marie shrugged. “I thought Bert had fixed it.”

“That’s what he told me.”

“It worked fine, on take-off.”

“Yeah. Looked fine on preflight, too.”

“Any chance of getting it going?” said Marie.

“No. Last time this happened, Bert had to take it apart.”

“Hmmm. Well, that’s not good.”

“He reckoned it was gonna be fine, now. It passed the checks.”

“So, we’ve got no radio.”

“Not a cracker,” said Michael. “Shit.”

“It’s not Bert’s fault.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s just, I’m worried about those storms.”

Marie nodded.

“With the radio out, I can’t tell how bad they’ll be, up ahead.”

“You want to turn back?”

“Ah, I’m not sure. Weather wasn’t good at Albany, when we left. Might be worse behind us than in front. It’s a tough call.”

“Hmmm.” Marie was silent for a few minutes.

“Look at that lot. That’s gotta be bad news.” Michael pointed at several towering columns of cloud, ahead and to the left and right. Visibility was poor and it was starting to get dark but what had Michael worried was clear enough: cumulonimbus clouds, great storm stacks reaching up high, white monsters turning slowly dark.

“You think we can go through it?”

“Maybe, if we go around the cells, but if the storm cells coalesce, we’d be stuck right in the middle of it. I think we’d better turn back.”

“Ian and Diane won’t be happy. They’re supposed to be at work tomorrow morning.”

“I know, luv. But it’s just not safe.”

“So, you want to go back?”

“Yeah. We don’t want to take a 172 into that kind of weather, not without a radio. Anything smaller than a jetliner doesn’t want to go through that. The windshear could toss us around like a leaf.”

“I know,” said Marie. “I just didn’t want to disappoint them.”

Michael patted his wife on the knee. “You’d better wake ’em up.”

While Marie woke up Ian and Diane, and told them that they had to turn back to avoid the storms, Michael banked the plane, turned 180 degrees and reversed course.

“Is it really that bad?” said Ian, sleepily.

“Afraid so, mate,” said Michael. “Sorry.”

“What a bugger.”

“It’s okay, Mike,” said Diane. “Better to be safe than sorry.”

Michael had gone quiet. He seemed distant.

“Something up?” said Marie.

“Look at that.” There was a big storm, dead ahead.

“This is getting worse, isn’t it?” said Marie.

Without a radio, there was no way Michael could get an accurate picture of where the bad weather was, of how thick it was in each direction of the compass and of which route and altitude he should take to get out of it as quickly as possible. The light was failing rapidly. Soon it would be completely dark. It was a freak situation, incredibly unlikely, but Michael’s training told him not to waste time thinking about that. He simply had to deal with the situation at hand. There was no time for philosophising about how they had gotten into it. That time would come later, much later.

A flash of lightning answered Marie’s question.

Suddenly, the plane bucked up, then dropped. Diane felt sick. The plane must have dropped a hundred feet without warning.

“Windshear!” Michael yelled tersely, as he settled the aircraft back into level flight. He knew that a violent updraught must have stalled the wing, bleeding them momentarily dry of the aerodynamic force, lift, which kept the plane flying. The engine could be running perfectly, but with a stalled wing, without lift, the plane would drop like a stone until Michael could correct the controls and level it out again. Up here, at five thousand feet, Michael knew this was not such a problem, but down low, near the ground, a drop of only fifty feet might prove fatal. He flew south, trying to maintain five thousand feet, while his mind worked overtime to find a solution.

The sun had disappeared beyond the horizon. Only the afterglow of dusk remained to light the rural scene below, miles and miles of almost flat, gently-rolling farmland, dotted with trees and powerlines, grazing cattle and dirt roads. The scene was just barely, if at all, visible from the aircraft, thick in the storm. Lightning flashes bathed the wings in light between moments of darkness. The horizon was a ruby line, rapidly fading.

“Marie,” said Michael, “we’re in trouble.”

“Mike?” Marie had never heard him say such a thing, in all the years they had flown together. She was suddenly worried.

“Guys,” Michael repeated, “we’ve got a bit of a problem, here.”

Ian and Diane leaned forward, struggling to hear him.

“The weather’s closing in and I don’t see a way out of it. Without a radio, there’s no way to guess which way to fly. It’s getting dark ... and in pure darkness there’d be no hope of landing unless we could make it to a lighted airport.”

“Right,” said Ian.

“What do you think we should do?” said Diane.

“Well, if that windshear was any indication of things to come, it might be too dangerous up here. I’m having trouble maintaining altitude, so we can’t outclimb the storm. If we hit more serious turbulence, it could damage the airframe.”

“You mean ... we could stop flying?” said Ian.

“I’m not saying that. I just think it’s too dangerous up here. There’s still some light, and there’s an airstrip near here, on Johnsons Farm. If we want to take that option, we can ...” Michael stopped talking. The plane had suddenly dropped again. It was a sickening feeling, like being in a lift with a snapped cable, plummeting straight down.

“Hold on!” Michael yelled.

Then he spoke calmly, once he had the aircraft in a long, gentle dive to pick up speed and restore the airflow over the wing after the stall. “We’re down to four thousand feet.”

Marie knew what Michael was going to say. “We can’t keep going like this, can we, Mike? Not in the dark.”

“No. I don’t think so. I think we can’t.”

“Well,” said Ian, as calmly as he could, “we’d better put her down, then. We’d better land, while there’s still light.”

“You’re the pilot, Mike. It’s your decision,” said Diane. She trusted him instinctively. He had never let them down before and it was reassuring to her that Michael was in command. He would get them through this in one piece, that much she was sure of.

“Okay. I think we should land at Johnsons Farm, while there’s still light. Tighten up your seat belts. This could be a little rough.”

“Okay,” said Ian.

Marie said nothing, but shared a private glance with Michael. She, too, was sure that he would get them through safely.

Michael slowly lost altitude, maintaining a steady rate of descent and a safe cruising speed as best he could in the violent weather. At last, he could just make out Johnsons Farm, in the near darkness, and the farm’s dirt airstrip. Fortunately, Michael had landed at this farm several times before, during his charter work, and he felt comfortable that he could find a safe approach to the airstrip, even in the poor light.

As he turned onto the final leg of his landing pattern, lined up perfectly on final approach and sinking past five hundred feet, Michael’s thoughts were calm. He thought only of the task at hand, which was to set the aircraft down safely – a difficult job in the dim light, with strong crosswinds and the rain and lightning of a violent storm falling down on them from above. The other three occupants of the plane were nervous, because they did not have the task of flying to occupy their minds. All they had was hope.

For Marie, it was probably worst of all. Michael hid the seriousness of the situation quite well from Ian and Diane, but fifteen years of marriage allowed Marie almost to read Michael’s thoughts. She could see it in his face: this was serious and they might not make it. There was no time to talk about anything. Things were happening fast and Michael needed complete concentration. Marie simply tightened her seat belt a little more, gripped the seat firmly, and waited.

The little 172 stopped bucking and weaving so much, as it neared the ground. At four hundred feet, Michael was reasonably happy with the approach. At three hundred, he decided to go ahead and not to abort the landing. He was lined up well, drifting down to the near end of the airstrip as the altimeter indicated two hundred feet. Silently, Michael gave thanks that the turbulence was smoothing out. He felt confident.

Nevertheless, he still considered the risk of fire. Under ordinary circumstances, in an emergency landing in calm conditions, he would have liked to shut down the engine, switch everything off, and glide to the ground without power on. If anything should go wrong, that would give him the least chance of a spark igniting the gallons of aviation fuel that still slopped around in the tanks. On the other hand, if he cut the engine, he would have no way of aborting the landing if a violent gust were to grab the aircraft and push it off course at the last moment. He might need the engine to go around again. The decision was already made: he would not switch off until the aircraft was grounded and travelling too slowly to become airborne again. It was a decision, along with the decision to attempt the landing at all, which would haunt him for the rest of his life.

The plane gradually lost height as it swooped in at a high landing speed over the long, dark path of dirt that passed for a farm airstrip. And then – suddenly – there was a terrible, malignant jet of wind, violent enough to blow old strips of corrugated iron over the airstrip. Michael would later remember the sight of those bits of tin, which had covered a nearby well, fluttering across the airstrip like silver leaves.

The sudden gust, like the hand of an angry giant, took the small aircraft and wrenched it to the right. It happened far too quickly for Michael to correct. The left wing was pushed up at an absurd angle and the right wing stalled. Michael had the control wheel twisted to the left, pushing forward desperately to try to correct the stall and the simultaneous quarter-roll to the right, but the raised left wing was caught even more effectively by the wind and it went past vertical. For Michael, events now seemed in slow motion. He fought at the controls but knew it was beyond controlling.

They were flying on their side now, plunging vertically down and only an instant away from colliding with the ground. Although the sudden lurch of the plane rolling was a sickening feeling to all the passengers, Ian and Diane, in the back, were probably less horrified than Marie, since it was only Marie who had a clear view of the ground rushing up at them and of how imminent the impact was. She knew, in that split second, that they would probably not survive. And then the instant was over.

The right wingtip hit the ground. And that was the end of being airborne – they were no longer flying. The little plane, wrenched over by the wind, caught by the ground like an animal in a trap, began a sudden, horrific cartwheel. The right wingtip gouged a furrow along the wet ground until the left wing came flipping over the top, spinning the plane end over end like a gigantic toy, and finally turning the whole mangled aircraft upside down, then smashing it into the ground with unthinkable force. It skidded to a halt. The occupants were already unconscious.

 

 

“I’m telling you, it’s a bloody plane!” said the farmer’s grown-up son.

“Get out of it, Jack. For Chrissake, nobody’d be flying in this storm.” Reg Johnson was annoyed. He was trying to watch television.

“Listen, Dad. I saw the strobe light. Somebody just tried to land on our strip. I saw it come down. Come on! Get off your arse.”

Reg Johnson let out a heavy sigh. “Are you sure?”

“Fuckin’ oath, I’m sure, Dad.”

“Well, if a plane did come down in this, they could be hurt.”

“That’s what I’m saying!”

“All right,” said Reg. “Get the Land-Rover, and the first-aid kit. And tell Mum to stand by the radio. We might need to call for help. Bloody hell. Right in the middle of the fuckin’ footy, too.”

By the time the two men had bumped across the paddock in the four-wheel drive and reached the airstrip, in the now-complete darkness and the driving rain, they realised a plane had indeed come down. Caught in the headlights, as they drove along the dirt strip, were white and yellow pieces of debris. Reg Johnson had stopped joking. He looked sad.

“Oh, shit, Dad.” Jack had seen the plane, which the long line of debris had led them to. It was by the right side of the airstrip, shining in the beam of the powerful spotlights of the Land-Rover. It didn’t look an aircraft but like an ugly pile of twisted metal, like a scrap dump. The plane was upside down and mostly unrecognisable.

“Come on, mate,” said Reg. “There might still be people alive in there. Leave the lights on.”

Jack turned off the engine, grabbed the first-aid kit and, together with his father,  jogged over to the wreck.

They came to the pilot’s side of the plane first. Michael, like the other three people in the plane, was hanging upside down by his seat belt, and, unlike the other three, was still alive. His face was pushed against the door window and it was stained with blood. He was completely unconscious.

“I found the pilot!” Jack yelled. He pulled at the door but it was too buckled to open. “Can’t get the bloody door open. We’ll need the winch, Dad.”

“Right, mate. Get back to the car. I’ll set up the cable. And make it quick. This bloody thing could catch fire. I smell fuel.” Reg took the winch hook from behind the roo bar of the big Land-Rover and, as Jack played out the line, ran back to the wreck and planted the winch hook over the bent edge of the pilot-side door.

“Ready, Dad?”

“Ready, son. Let her rip. Gently, now.”

The door buckled further, under the pull from the winch, then popped open. Michael’s head flopped down, hanging vertical.

Reg put his cold fingers in front of the pilot’s mouth. He felt breath on his hand. “Jesus, he’s still alive! Help me get him out!”

Together, the two farmers undid the seat belt and cradled the unconscious man, as gently as they could, out of the aircraft. It was still raining. They carried the man to the side of the Land-Rover. Reg yelled again at his son. “Get a tarp out of the Rover, mate. Cover him up. Keep the rain off him. I’ll check the others.”

Reg stuck his head into the cabin of the wreck. He shone a waterproof torch around, and soon wished he hadn’t. The two in the back, a man and a woman, were obviously dead. The back of the cabin was crushed around them and there was no way to get the twisted bodies out. It was not a sight for the faint-hearted. Even Reg, a toughened farmer, felt sick. He turned his attention to the woman in the front seat. He noticed that the engine block had come back, pushed rearward by the impact, and crushed the lower half of her body. He felt for a pulse. There was none. She was dead.

Reg made a mental note to check the pilot’s legs. They might have been crushed, as well. Then he came out of the wreck and walked to the one man he could still do something for, the survivor. “Right, son. Help me get him in the back of the Rover. Careful of his legs. I think they might be broken.”

At that moment, as Reg and his son gently lifted Michael into a half-sitting position, in preparation for lifting him into the truck, Michael’s eyes opened. He gasped a little, confused and dazed.

“He’s awake, Dad,” Jack whispered.

“Crikey. Poor bastard. Would have been better if he’d stayed unconscious. Nearest doctor’s an hour away. He’s going to need some morphine, or something.” Reg looked at Michael and raised his voice enough for the dazed man to hear. “Okay, mate. You’re gonna be all right. Don’t try to move, eh? Just sit still. We’ll look after you.”

Suddenly, where there had been no pain, there was a searing cacophony of unbelievable pain, a shooting agony that made Michael feel his head was going to explode. He almost blacked out again.

Reg repeated his command. “Don’t try to move. Lie still.”

A moment or two later, Michael managed to open his eyes again. Then he suddenly remembered: he was in a crash. He had crashed the plane!

“We’ll get you to a doctor, mate. Don’t worry,” said Jack. “But first, we’ve got to pick you up and put you in the truck. Okay?”

Michael could barely speak, for the pain, but he managed to croak out a few pathetic words. “The others. You’ve got to get the others. There’s ... four people in that plane. Three people ...”

To Michael’s horror, as he looked past Reg’s shoulder, to the wreck, he saw some small flames starting, despite the rain, near the front of the smashed fuselage. “It’s on fire ...” he breathed.

Reg looked around. “Ar, shit. I was afraid of that. Right, son, we’ve got to move this man and move him quick. That lot could go up any minute.”

Michael tried to protest. “No. You don’t understand ... there are people in there. My wife ... my wife’s in there ...”

Jack and Reg lifted him up, ignoring his disorientated protests, and lay him out as best they could in the back of the Land-Rover.

Michael was crying now, half from concussion and disorientation, and half from frustration at not being able to get these two farmers to listen. Didn’t they realise his wife was in there? His friends were in there! The physical pain was almost enough to make Michael black out again, as the Land-Rover bumped slowly over the paddock on the way back to the farmhouse, but the physical pain was surpassed by the emotional pain when a loud crack, the sound of an explosion, whipped across the landscape. Michael never saw the fireball directly himself, only a flash of light, but later, in his nightmares, he would imagine it over and over, and no amount of explanation, from old Reg Johnson, or from the counsellor at the hospital, or from the bloody shrink that he had to report to every Wednesday, that Marie, Ian and Diane were already dead when the horrific fire engulfed the wreck, could ever soothe his fractured conscience, that his friends had been devoured by flames. Michael’s pelvis was fractured, and both his legs, but it was the rip in his conscience that came closest to killing him.

Jack worked the radio. “Mum, get on the blower and get an ambulance, fast as you can. This bloke looks like he’s peggin’ out.”

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter  4

 

Time had stopped, in Michael’s world, stopped precisely at the moment the right wingtip of the old Cessna had swung down like an axe into the wet ground of Johnsons Farm, splitting first the ground and then the aircraft itself. Since that moment, time meant nothing.

Michael knew he deserved to be dead. Why should he have been the one to survive? He would have given anything for Marie to have lived. If he could have chosen, he would have laid down his life for her without hesitation. But she was dead. And he had killed her, for no matter what the aviation authority said – that it was a tragic accident caused by a freak gust of wind – he knew only that his wife was dead and his closest friends were dead and that his heart was still beating.

Michael had always accepted that one day he might meet his death in an aircraft, and that was a trade he was willing to make for a lifetime spent celebrating the freedom and beauty of flight, but for flying to have killed the people he loved while he was at the controls was more than he could reconcile. Those people had put their faith and their trust in him. They didn’t deserve to be dead. He did. And so the three months in the hospital, barely able to move, meant nothing to him. And when the counsellors came to his hospital bed, and then the psychiatrists, he would tell them anything just to get them to go away, to leave him alone with his thoughts.

There was still the memory of his life before the accident, his happy life, which he could see in his mind almost as clearly as he could watch the river through the big windows of Ruth’s sitting room. But he could no more get back the life he once had than he could reach through the glass and touch the distant waves. His happy memories were diamonds, beautiful but sharp, and they cut at his tortured mind whenever he thought of them. Yet the happy memories were the only thing he had to hold onto. Without the past there was no reason to live, and he knew that Marie would have wanted him to live. But it was hard.

A month had gone since Michael had come to stay with Ruth. The days passed quietly. Christmas was approaching and it was hot. Michael spent most of his time inside, keeping cool, thinking, reading, sometimes watching television, or just looking out from the sitting room to the river beyond. Ruth went for long walks in the evenings, by the river, and during the day she gardened, or read in the library. She seemed to have an innate respect for Michael’s privacy, as if she must have known what it was like to go through a terrible loss. For this quiet distance, Michael was deeply grateful.

As the weeks passed, Michael became a little more mobile. It was easier for him to walk further before resting, and he did not need to take quite as many painkillers to control the ache from his healing fractures.

One morning he limped down the hallway to the back door and stood there watching Ruth work in the hot sun. He marvelled at the old woman’s stamina. She was watering her roses, carefully spraying the hose at the trunks of the bushes, not on the leaves or the flowers, since the sun would burn these if the water droplets settled on them.

The truth was, Ruth thought often of her own great loss. It had been nearly two years since Sally’s suicide and Ruth still felt the pain of it. As she worked in the garden, Ruth would think back to the happy times she had shared with her granddaughter, to the six years they had together. She remembered the day, after Sally’s fifth and final year of the veterinary course was over, and all the exam results were in, and Sally had passed with honours, that Sally showed her the first piece of mail addressed to Doctor Sally Johanssen.

“Well, you’re a doctor, now,” Ruth had said.

“It sounds strange, you know, Gran.”

“You should be very proud, Sally.”

“I am, Gran. I am.”

It was a happy day. Ruth was very relieved that Sally’s degree was finished. It had been a gruelling and stressful course for the young woman. Although it was wonderful having Sally staying with her, and their life at home was happy, Sally had often returned from a day at the veterinary college looking exhausted and on edge. There were times she would stay up all night studying, and other times that she would not come home at all, when she was on emergency duty. The young woman would do lectures and practical work all day and then study at night, or get up to deal with emergency cases in the small hours. Sometimes Ruth had worried that the stress might be too much for Sally and that she might not make it through the course. Ruth knew Sally wanted to be a vet more than anything, and that Sally would be crushed if she did not make it. More than once, Sally had come home in tears. On one of these occasions, the surgery lecturer had yelled at her during a practical surgery class, as if Sally were not a hard-working student, worthy of respect and courtesy, but a nobody, a nothing, someone who should be lucky to be addressed with anything above contempt if she were to make the slightest mistake. To Ruth, there was something unhealthy about that kind of culture, where one’s whole self-esteem was supposed to come from attaining the title of Doctor, and until one had done so, one was not worthy. But although some of Sally’s friends did not make it through the course, Sally herself weathered the storm and graduated. The greater struggle, sadly, she did not survive, and Ruth could still barely accept that Sally had died only a year after graduation.

One day, Michael wandered into the library. Ruth was outside, in the back garden as usual, and he could see her through the little windows when he pulled aside the crepe curtains. Michael hadn’t spent much time in the library, until then, and now it intrigued him. Ruth must do a lot of reading, he thought. The walls were hidden by big jarrah bookcases, seven feet high, packed with books of every description. There was a whole section devoted to gardening, and another to thrillers—Agatha Christie and the like. The thrillers were in large print. The old lady’s eyesight must have been failing a little. Michael came across another section, three shelves of medical textbooks, or to be more precise, textbooks of veterinary medicine. These were an unexpected find.

Ruth had said nothing to Michael about her family and Michael could only suppose that her husband had been a vet. He turned his attention to the framed family photographs on the sideboard. There was an old black-and-white wedding photograph, which looked like it was from the forties, of a young Ruth and her husband. Another old photo showed them with two young children, a boy and a girl. Then there was one, in colour, of her husband, a little older, standing proudly in front of a shop named MacDonald Printing. This ruined Michael’s theory that he had been a vet. Strangely, there seemed to be no adult photographs of the boy and the girl, who would have long since been grown-up. There was, however, a modern, colour picture, from the eighties, Michael guessed, of a teenaged girl with long, straight blonde hair. Then there was another of this girl, but now grown into a young woman, standing with her arm around Ruth. Michael recognised Ruth’s garden, with the rose bushes in the background, as the setting for the portrait. And then, the final photograph solved the mystery. There was the young woman again, who was quite beautiful, with her long hair tied back and a stethoscope hanging over her shoulders, kneeling by a big German Shepherd. Even the dog seemed to be smiling, its mouth open and panting. There was an engraved plaque on the frame, which read, ‘Dr Sally Johanssen and Emmy. January, 1995.’ Michael guessed the young woman in the photograph would have to be Ruth’s granddaughter, although in the month he had lived here, he had seen neither the woman nor the dog. Silently, he chastised himself for being so snoopy, and left the library.

There were few visitors to the house, and little to disrupt the routine. On quiet afternoons, Michael would relax in the sitting room, and Ruth would read in the library. The week before Christmas, Ruth got out an old photo album and sat in her recliner chair in the library, put on her glasses, and turned the pages, slowly. She came across a picture of Claire and Karl, not long after they had gotten married. Miserable bastard! she thought, and decided she would rather not look at old pictures, after all. She got out another book, a gardening volume, and settled back to study how to grow a better rose. Little things, she had come to realise, meant everything in life.

Once a fortnight, Michael would write out a cheque for his room and board, and every Wednesday he would leave the house by taxi to see the psychiatrist and to have physiotherapy. The physiotherapist wanted him to go more often, but the psychiatrist counted herself lucky that Michael came at all. The psychiatrist, a wise young woman who had seen men like Michael before, made him take antidepressants, and he duly swallowed down a pill every evening with his dinner. She also asked him probing questions about his inner thoughts and about how he felt, questions which Michael skilfully deflected with his charm and with a wry smile, giving vague answers designed to keep the woman out of the private sanctuary of his pain, his guilt, and his grief. He never showed his annoyance with the psychiatrist’s questions, but it was obvious to her that he was the most dangerous kind of patient: one that did not want to be helped. And so she had the agency request that Ruth keep a close eye on him, for he might well be suicidal.

To her face, Michael always referred to the psychiatrist by her first name. He tried to circumvent the power structure of the doctor-patient relationship by turning things into a friendly chat over a cup of tea, where no really important questions could be asked. He was invariably successful at this. But behind her back, Michael referred to the psychiatrist only as, “That bloody shrink.” Psychiatrists, Michael knew, were like any other group, a mixed bunch, some of them were good and many of them were bad. Actually, this one seemed to be good, but he still did not want to have to see her. What could she possibly know about what he had done? What could she possibly know about how it felt? Medicine was irrelevant.

“Are you taking your medication?” the psychiatrist asked, one Wednesday afternoon, eight days before Christmas.

“Yeah,” said Michael, nonchalantly. He hated being in that little room, with its padded leather swivel chairs, its immaculate carpet, and its cheerful pictures on the walls. It reminded him of being in hospital, and anyway, as a pilot, he had always had a healthy distrust of doctors. With a signature on a medical report, they could stop you flying. The only difference now was that he didn’t care whether he ever flew again or not. It didn’t matter any more.

The psychiatrist looked at him. “How are you feeling?”

Michael flashed a smile. “Oh ... good as can be expected.”

Sometimes silence was more effective than a question.

Michael felt uncomfortable. “How about a cup of tea, eh, Kathy? I don’t suppose you’ll give me a beer.”

The psychiatrist laughed. She pressed the button on her intercom. “Mandy, could you bring us some tea?” Then she turned in her chair and faced Michael once more. “Have you been walking?”

“Not much. I’m still a bit stiff.”

“So, you’re living by the river?”

“Yeah. In Mount Pleasant.”

“Must be nice, there. Maybe you can go walking, soon.”

“Maybe. Another couple of weeks, maybe.”

“If you can walk, maybe you can fly.”

Michael nearly lost his composure, but he kept himself in check and answered the question as calmly as he could. “No.”

The secretary brought in the tea. Michael was glad of the interruption. Then she left them alone again.

“That’s good tea, Kathy. Irish Breakfast tea, for an Irish girl?”

“Hmmm. So, how are you feeling, Michael?”

Michael looked at the clock. “Quite good, actually. Time’s up.”

 

 

When Michael arrived home that evening, Ruth greeted him at the front door and led him through to the kitchen to give him his dinner. She got his plate out of the oven and put it on the large kitchen table. Michael watched her. He was in a desperately bad mood. He felt morose, far too much so to be charming, so instead he hid his sadness behind exasperation.

“That bloody shrink! She thinks she can read minds.”

“If you don’t like your doctor, you could get a new one.”

Michael felt ashamed. “Ah, sorry, Ruth. I’m just tired.”

“It’s okay.”

“Thanks for dinner. It looks nice.”

“You get some rest, Mike. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Yeah. I suppose I will.” Michael picked up his plate and started to walk away.

“Oh, and Mike ...”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t like shrinks, either.”

Michael nodded, but he couldn’t manage a smile.

Ruth watched him trudge up the hallway to the sitting room. She was becoming increasingly concerned about his grim moods. Sally had moved out of Ruth’s home shortly after she graduated, to live at the veterinary clinic where she had worked, so Ruth had not seen, first hand, the kind of moods that a suicidal person exhibits. When Sally had come to visit Ruth, she had seemed all right, just a little distant, and although she complained bitterly of the stresses that her new job involved and seemed very disappointed with it, Ruth had never suspected that her granddaughter would soon be dead. It seemed to Ruth, now, as Christmas approached, that Michael was more depressed than ever, and she was worried about him.

Christmas, Ruth knew, was one of the hardest times for anyone who had lost someone dear. It was not a matter of religious faith, for neither Ruth nor Michael were religious people. They both came from secular families and they both saw life in their own ways, with their own personal dignity and their own secret faiths that no religion could define. Ruth was a kind-hearted woman, strong in spirit and practical in her approach to life, and she believed that life, apart from all the tragedy and behind all the suffering, was fundamentally good. She had a kind of intangible faith, that it was good to be, good to live, and good to care about others as well as about oneself. She had no particular fear of death – it was just the natural way of things – but she was glad to be alive, glad despite everything that had happened to her, glad despite the countless times her heart had been broken, and glad that she could help another person, before the end. Michael was also a person who valued love, and he thought it enough reason in itself to live, and enough reward. He didn’t know what happened after death, and he was prepared to accept that he didn’t know. Somehow he couldn’t believe, like others did, that one particular religion was correct and that all the others were wrong, that one particular segment of humanity was worthy of being saved and worthy of greater respect because of the particular faith they held, while the rest of humankind was doomed to perish or to suffer or to be lost, simply because they held some other faith or none at all. Michael was a peace-loving man and he could never accept the countless wars and violence caused by the clash of different faiths. Now that he had lost the three people who meant more to him than anyone else in the world, and now that his beloved Marie was dead, he sometimes thought it would be easier if he were a religious man. At least then he would have some kind of reassuring belief in where his dead wife now was – in the salvation of her soul or in the continuance of her consciousness. If it was true that it took courage to have religious faith, Michael thought, it was also true that sometimes it took courage not to have it. Michael had to find the valour to face these three deaths alone. So it was not the religious significance of Christmas that made it such a difficult time, but rather the absence of loved ones.

As the twenty-fifth of December drew closer, Michael remembered the many Christmas barbecues he and Marie had held for friends over the years. He remembered the happy times, the friendship, the laughter, the gifts, the tradition of it all. Fifteen long years he had loved Marie and his life had been full of the joy of her genuine love. That was all gone now. His two closest friends were dead, with her, and Michael could not face up to seeing his lesser friends after what had happened. This would be the first Christmas in over a decade that he had been alone.

Ruth might have been equally sad but she was older and wiser than Michael by three decades. There was a sadness in her heart which never left her, yet she had come to the time in her life where she deeply knew the truth of the old expression, that it was better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. At seventy-five, and with the secret knowledge that her cancer must surely soon come out of remission, and having seen people that she loved come into her life and then leave her life so many times, Ruth knew that all good things came to an end and that the endings did not make those things any less good. Ruth held on to the things which had been, to the love which she had known, and to the memory of the dear people who had been part of her life. Ruth was sad and happy at the same time, sad for the endings and happy for the beginnings and for the good things that came from those beginnings. She knew that Christmas was going to be much tougher for Michael than for herself. And it worried her.

When Christmas Day arrived, Michael received a telephone call from his brother. Christopher Andrews explained that business was going well, Sydney was as busy as ever, and that more cars were rolling out of the manufacturing plant than in any previous year – he might even be going to New Orleans, on a bonus trip. Then he asked how Michael was holding up. Michael replied that he wasn’t doing too badly, and changed the subject by saying he hoped Jessica and the children were well. Chris said they were fine. Michael was not close to his brother and he found the phone call uncomfortable. The two brothers always spoke at Christmas, since their parents were no longer alive and they were all the family they had.