Affection (19 page)

I prepared the syringe.

‘The captains,’ he rambled, ‘leaders of society and civilisation, people needed to keep the ship off the rocks. You follow me? Some don’t want it. I could name names. They don’t believe it’s plague at all.’

‘Mr Dawson?’

‘He’s just one.’

I took a teaspoon of yellow serum up into the syringe. Where was Dawson? He seemed to appear just before a disaster. I should be thankful I hadn’t seen him.

‘No point protecting yourself against something that doesn’t exist, I suppose,’ McCreedy was saying, and his hands did a little spidery dance on his stomach. ‘People aren’t always aware of what’s good for them.’

‘Please undo your trousers, Mr McCreedy.’

I didn’t give him the choice. The Mayor took his jab in the flab of skin above the hip, talking throughout.

Must hardly be a blasted rat left alive in the town, he was saying, the money being dished out to grubby boys for…
ow
…the bounty. And what were Turner’s intentions now? Was he still on about the blasted railway? He was here to scuttle it on Mr Philp’s orders, that’s what Dawson thought.

I said I didn’t know. I supposed I wasn’t a good spy.

McCreedy did up his trousers and collected his coat.

‘Dr Row, your future is very much tied up in this business, you follow me? You’re a servant of the town’s ratepayers, just as I am. They pay your salary, and it’s your job to protect them from blasted quacks.’

And the plague, I would have thought.

‘Turner’s anything but a quack. Zealous, perhaps,’ I said.

‘Well, just keep an eye on him. I’m relying on you to let me know if he has anything in mind that might jeopardise this town.’

He sailed off.

I sat. For some time. On a whim I fetched Gard’s bag from the cupboard. I stood it behind my desk in case someone came in, but all I could do was stare at it. And what if I did open it? What if I found something that somehow explained Mrs Gard’s death, the plague that seemed to have visited the entire Gard family? Wouldn’t I be even more culpable, by not having opened the thing in the first place when there was a chance to prevent it? There was a world of opportunities in the bag, but the time for them had passed and I couldn’t face knowing. I put the bag back and locked the cupboard and sat, waiting for something else to happen. My tooth was giving me a holiday. I hoped it was a good omen. I put my head on the table, but couldn’t sleep.

There’d been no sign of plague in Mrs Gard’s kidney and she was buried in the Presbyterian section of the West End
cemetery. I didn’t attend. As it turned out, the Reverend Kerr and the undertaker were the only ones who did.

Turner had examined the woman’s child and said she had signs of anaemia, probably caused by leech worms in the bowels, which would complicate her recovery. He took a faecal sample for microscopic examination. I went back to Three Mile Creek and stayed there late in the evenings, risking my neck with a bicycle ride home in the dark.

It seemed for a few days that the child might be the first and last patient for the plague hospital, but the next Saturday the
Bobby Towns
returned from Picnic Bay with an English Church minister so delirious with fever that the people with him thought he was possessed.

He let go a stream of obscenities when Humphry examined him at the hospital, and as soon as plague was confirmed Bacot packed him off in the middle of the night to Three Mile Creek.

Humphry and Bacot had a falling out over this. The Reverend was a friend of Humphry’s and Bacot was probably just being his acid self.

I was more worried for the girl. The Reverend Ward in the condition Humphry described would be bad company for her.

This second case worried Turner more than the first.

The Gard child fitted neatly with Turner’s theories about overcrowding and filth. Her disease was more
logical if we discounted the link to West Point, said Turner. There were rats in town with plague in their blood. The child was three and inhabited an unsanitary boarding house. Beneath the house flowed an open drain and there was barely room between the earth and the floorboards for a cat.

The Reverend Ward, though, had no business catching plague.

He lived in a clean house on Melton Hill. If he had any connection with infection it was an arm’s length one with his parishioners, and they should be the ones to succumb first.

When Turner had Humphry and me inspect the
Bobby Towns
, the rectory and the church, we found no rats, at least none we could catch. We laid baits, had the launch and church fumigated, and the parishioners who’d been at the picnic with him were told to report the first signs of fever. We didn’t quarantine or inoculate them because their contact was slight. It was unlikely they shared the minister’s mystery flea.

It was worrying.

So was my tooth. The ache came, and I swore I’d get it pulled, and then it went, and I found any excuse to put it off again.

‘Are you all right?’ Humphry and Turner would ask.

I was spending the evenings at the plague hospital, as was Humphry now. The fever kept the Reverend Ward blaspheming and the nurses sometimes had to cover
their ears and flee the tent. On his hands, feet and face were many light red spots about the size of peas, which Routh insisted were mosquito bites.

While the Reverend burned, the girl hovered more peacefully between life and death. She would not die of plague, but she might well starve to death or one of her organs might give out.

Humphry and I sat one whole night beside our patients at opposite ends of the tent.

By this time, Turner had developed a set against Flinders-lane and now that he had two plague patients, he decided to act.

Chinatown was a place I had been ignoring as much as possible. It wasn’t somewhere I wanted to investigate, but Turner insisted it had to be disinfected, and one stuffy and overcast morning we gathered a small company of council workers and armed them with kerosene, matches, shovels, brooms and buckets of lime wash, rat poison, and sulphur.

We stood at the Denham-street end, literally a stone’s throw from the rear of the Town Hall and Post Office. I could see the closed and covered window of my office.

Turner gave a small speech.

Behind him was a jumble of rusty lean-tos. A greasy kind of smoke wafted down from corrugated-iron chimneys, drifting through the lane. A small muddy trench dug by a hand or a heel oozed grey water. There
was little sign of life, except for a dog with three legs that limped carefully around the potholes away from us.

Turner said the lane was a possible source for infection. Did each man have his instructions and did he understand them?

There were a dozen workers dressed head to toe – in boots, white overalls, and hats – and they nodded as one. Each carried a white gauze mask and looked as though they might have come from the moon or the deep sea.

‘If you come across any person, please explain what you are doing and ask them politely to leave,’ said Turner. ‘If they protest, explain that under the Health Act the police have the power to force them to leave. If they put up any resistance, call for the police.’

The two jaunty constables, Clark and O’Donnell, stood behind him with their batons on display.

We didn’t expect to find many people. No one was supposed to live here, and most of the business went on at night, when Flinders-lane apparently seethed with slinky Chinamen who ran opium and gambling dens, sly grog shops and prostitutes.

It looked nowhere near as exotic by day.

It had been relatively easy to get support for that morning’s raid on Chinatown, simply because it confirmed what many people believed about the plague – that is, if they believed in the plague at all. The consensus seemed to be that it was incubated by Chinamen. And ‘Chinamen’ meant anyone with Asian
features. In Townsville, many Chinamen were actually Japanese.

Opinion was more divided over how the plague should be contained. A few people had fled. Some were burning drums of oil in their yards to ward off miasmas. Quarantining, inoculation and rubbish disposal were viewed with suspicion bordering on hostility.

But no one opposed ransacking Chinatown.

Turner and I led the team into the street, and the now masked workers fanned out behind us.

On our left was Ross Creek. I couldn’t see it, but the air felt heavier on that side. The lane was supposed to run in a straight line in front of us, but I couldn’t see the end because of the jumble of shacks and gin stalls shoehorned into such a small space. The effect was a labyrinth of walls made of crates, iron and flattened kerosene tins. There were obviously many others in the council who’d turned a blind eye to the place.

‘It reminds me of Shanghai, Row,’ said Turner, sniffing the air. I had my mask on as we stood in the middle of the lane. There was a lot of crashing behind us. Turner’s white coat was stippled with little black flies.

‘Happy memories?’ I asked.

He nodded. I supposed smells could have that effect, but the only memory I associated with something that smelled like a corpse was of a corpse. The creek was undoubtedly choked with dead fish, faeces and rotting fruit, perhaps punctuated by a bloated horse.

‘That smell, like burnt sugar,’ said Turner. ‘Opium. Don’t you smell it?’

Thankfully, no.

Turner walked over to one shack and peeled back the corrugated-iron door.

Inside was another smell even more overpowering: the sharp smell of urine. When my eyes adjusted I could make out rows of empty bunks. The only light came from the doorway behind us and old nail holes in the tin roof and walls. When I walked, the floor gave with a sickly sponginess. I couldn’t see my feet in the gloom. Something scuttled from one corner to another.

I found Turner leaning over a bunk and realised there was someone lying on it.

‘Is he dead?’

Turner poked and the figure sighed. He turned away and picked up something from a beer crate. A pipe. On the crate were other things I didn’t recognise.

I followed Turner back out into the lane and gulped the sweetish air. He called over O’Donnell.

‘There’s a man in there. Get him out.’

I heard the constable swear after he entered the shack. He emerged with the man under one arm and that look of distaste on his face that I remembered from when we opened Gard’s coffin.

‘What do I do with him?’ O’Donnell said.

The man was white, I saw. And reasonably well dressed. God knew what he was doing in that place.

‘Just get him out of the lane,’ said Turner. ‘Put him in
the shade. Try not to let anyone near him. And see if you can find out where he lives.’

O’Donnell dragged the man around the rubbish now piling up in the middle of the lane. Turner wanted it all done before a crowd could gather, but that seemed unlikely. Already a few boys had gathered at the end of the lane to watch these strange white creatures build bonfires in the street.

Even the walls of the shacks were stripped of newspaper. Horse-hair mattresses, crates and bunks, chairs and tables, clothing, anything combustible, was thrown on to the pile. When the first few shacks were emptied and lime wash had been slopped over the walls, sulphur was burned inside and the piles of rubbish were doused with kerosene and lit, to the cheers of the boys. A yellow and black smoke blew about us. I wondered what the Reverend Kerr would make of this apocalyptic vision.

An old Chinaman had come down the lane clicking his tongue furiously and waving his arms. He stood there and then suddenly took a swipe at a passing worker. Clark saw this and charged the man with his baton, chasing him in circles until Turner told him to stop. I could have laughed, but saw the old man was weeping.

With Clark at his shoulder ready to thump him, the old man came up to Turner and began yabbering away. Turner patiently pretended to listen, I thought, and then, to my astonishment, began yabbering back.

The man staggered as if hit. He probably had never met a white man who could speak his language. They
spoke for a short time and the old man ended up bowing and retreating.

‘What was that about?’ I asked.

‘He wanted to know why we were destroying his business.’ Turner looked a little shaken.

‘What’s his business?’

‘He says he sells women.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I told him to find a more honourable business.’

A few disorientated drunks lurched towards us, but seeing the flames and the creatures in white decided to exit the other way. O’Donnell returned to tell us that a fair-sized crowd had gathered at the end of the lane and what should he do with them?

‘Are they causing trouble?’ said Turner.

‘I don’t suppose so. Not yet.’

The work went on and we gradually moved up the lane. It might have been more convenient to torch the lot, but the shacks clung like ticks to the backs of Townsville’s grandest buildings.

Within four hours we were looking back on our handiwork. Our white coveralls were grimy. The limewashed shacks looked ghostly through the swirling smoke, and the feeling I had from the crowd around us, the white and yellow faces, was a disturbing mixture of excitement, fear, and resentment.

For a short time, there was cause for optimism, if one wanted it. We still had our two plague patients, but the
council seemed to have had a change of heart. The effort of cleansing Chinatown would have to be rewarded.

But the conflagration in Flinders-lane might well have had the opposite effect.

People began to fall ill.

Within days, and in quick succession, the plague hospital started to fill. First came John O’Connell from North Ward, James Waldie who sold firewood, Fanny Healy from German Gardens, a married woman Henrietta Walker, John Burke from Cluden, and eight-year-old Francis Hipworth from South Townsville. They took the miserable ambulance ride to Three Mile Creek, their homes were fumigated with sulphur, and their families locked in with the smell for twenty-one days.

The removal of young Hipworth was the first to turn violent.

His mother pleaded, the family cried. They wanted to know if they’d ever see the boy again, but weren’t satisfied with my assurances. The police had to draw their batons as Francis was loaded screaming into the ambulance. His father took a blow to the head. As the ambulance left, the mother turned to me and, with her eyes, wished me dead. It shook me all the more because I’d felt I was beyond shaking.