Affection (21 page)

I believed she’d taken good care of him, save for the lack of proper medical attention. There was a bottle of Owbridge’s Lung Tonic on the dresser.

‘How long has he been ill?’ said Turner, gently probing the man’s body.

‘Three days. Don’t want any sawbones near me, he says. I says it’s more than a blooming cold, perhaps you should let someone take a look, and he says over my dead body, Kathleen. Over my dead body he says,’ and she gazed down at him and patted his hand.

I looked at Turner who shook his head, and I shook my head at her, and she just sat there crying silently and holding his hand.

The stretcher bearers arrived, but Turner ushered them out and asked me if I could wait. I sat in a chair on the other side of the bed and waited.

I thought how peaceful the room was, the unsteady shallow breath of a dying man, a dresser clock ticking his life away. The sprawling wooden hotel stretched in the heat of the day and a buggy passed in the street below. Someone somewhere far away coughed, and there were footfalls downstairs. How different was this death to the Reverend Ward’s, I thought.

McLean died in that timeless room between a tick of the clock and a creak as a cloud cooled the iron roof. I was staring out the window and when I looked back at the bed nothing had changed except the man had stopped breathing and Mrs McLean had her mouth open in a silent wail.

When Turner returned he had the two constables with him, the dray with the yellow flags and the rope, the containers of phenyl.

He examined the dead McLean and sent for the mortuary wagon. Then he drew me aside.

‘I want to have a look at his lungs.’

Mrs McLean had recovered some composure and was using the telephone to make funeral arrangements. One constable stood at the front door and the other began locking the remaining doors and pasting up the quarantine order.

‘What?’ She looked at the constables, and Turner led her by the elbow away from the telephone and sat her down at the bar.

He explained there could be no funeral arrangements as such, that unfortunately Mr McLean may have died of plague and that, once it was confirmed, he must by law be buried at the plague cemetery at Three Mile Creek.

‘But his family’s all in West End.’

‘Unavoidable. Do you understand?’

‘What will his mother say? She’s too old to go all the way out there.’

Turner tried to explain what would happen next and she nodded at something in the distance. He asked me to fetch her a brandy, the only time I’d ever heard him prescribe alcohol. The other guests were rounded up
and addressed in the bar, and the constables said they’d turn a blind eye and there was sherry all around. Some women wept, and a couple of men looked as if they might cheer at the prospect of being quarantined for three weeks in a hotel.

We left them all in the bar consoling Mrs McLean. But the shock wore off when we had McLean’s body on a stretcher and were taking it to the wagon. His wife must have realised then that she wouldn’t see her husband again.

‘But there has to be a funeral,’ said one of the men from the bar, fortified by sherry and suddenly protective of the newly widowed landlady. The constables tried to explain that there’d be a funeral but no one could attend apart from the hospital chaplain.

Turner and the wagon were fifty yards down the road when Mrs McLean broke through the line and ran after it. It was left to me to grab her and bring her back as the constables threatened the crowd with batons.

A few of the guests threw insults at me as I brought her in, and as I left one threw a glass, which smashed against the wall. The constables rushed in behind me, but I told them to leave the man alone.

Turner had had to go with the mortuary wagon and I was left alone to walk back to Flinders-street. I heard the woman’s screams even as I crossed the bridge.

The police closed the bar and that was the last straw for public opinion. We were officially ‘hard-hearted monsters’ in the papers, although Humphry said they
were simply jealous of those lucky enough to be at the hotel when the constables came.

A morgue needs no windows.

Turner and Humphry were preparing for the autopsy. The publican’s skin looked yellow in the gaslight.

‘Why don’t you go home, Row,’ said Turner, washing his hands in a basin. ‘You must have other things to do. We can manage here.’

‘That’s what I’ve been telling him,’ said Humphry. ‘Man needs some recreation.’ Humphry had returned to town that morning. ‘You should get a pipe.’

We were babbling, I was sure, from exhaustion. These were the conversations we had.

‘What do you suggest?’ I asked Turner.

‘Allan’s already put together a remarkable collection of butterflies, you know,’ said Turner, wiping his hands with a white towel. ‘You should see it. There are some beauties there.’

‘Exactly what you need, Lin,’ said Humphry. ‘A hobby.’

Allan
collected
butterflies? ‘How do you know?’ I asked Turner.

‘He asked if he could borrow my net. Bright boy there, Row.’

‘Never be bored with a butterfly net,’ said Humphry. ‘And a pipe.’

But I couldn’t go home. It required more energy than I had, to fix all the things that now needed fixing.

I told them they might need me, that they were just as tired surely, and I stayed and watched, as they must have known I would.

Turner was fast. He had sheared the breast open and had the lungs out in seconds. There was a good deal of interest in the lungs, which when spread out resembled a large scarlet butterfly themselves.

‘We’ll take a sample anyway,’ said Turner, and Humphry slit a small piece from the middle and put it in a glass tube with a cork stopper.

It wasn’t long before Turner had blood up to his elbows, and Humphry tipped water from a bucket into the man’s stomach to wash away some of the dark fluids so they could see the organs better. Turner lifted them out and displayed them around the cavity, telling Humphry to get a sample from the spleen and liver for examination later.

They, too, were bright red.

It was hard to tell from where I stood whether there was anything else abnormal, and Turner simply grunted here and there, and poked around. Humphry looked bored, if anything.

Last of all, Turner took a scalpel and cut the hard little buboes from the man’s groin. He and Humphry repacked the organs and two inoculated orderlies cleaned the body. I watched an orderly try to shut the mouth. The tongue had turned black and now seemed to be stuck to the palate and the gums had drawn back from the teeth.

Turner said, ‘The disease stopped his heart. It’s become a little faster.’

A blessing for Mr McLean, but a curse for us.

Both Humphry and Turner insisted I take the afternoon off. Neither would leave off about it, so in the end I gave up arguing.

I didn’t go home, though.

As John McLean began the journey to his final resting place at Three Mile Creek, I was in McKimmin and Richardson’s store to look for a hat to replace the one I’d lost overboard weeks before.

I had to admit I felt a little more human for being out in public as an ordinary bloke, even though a few people stared.

I was trying on some English boaters, victims of a ‘gigantic slaughter’ in Drapery, Clothing, Hats, Boots and Shoes.

‘Prices reduced’ didn’t cut it. There had to be blood on the hands of the store owner, his own blood, if customers were to be persuaded. Perhaps this was the sort of thing people expected nowadays, and a leaflet that merely said
Plague
! was probably a bit of a yawn.

I was tired and this was the direction in which my mind was drifting, when I thought I saw Dawson as a shadow in Shoes. He was accompanied by sulphurous fumes and a cloud of bats; more of an impression, I supposed.

A short time later I was standing at the counter having my boater boxed, when his dark shape flickered
at the corner of my eye. I turned and might have imagined it, but for a swirl of blue smoke lingering around a tie rack.

I turned back to the counter and suddenly Dawson was at my side, displacing the air like a thunderstorm. He was swaying slightly, as if getting used to solid ground.

‘Where’s Humphry?’ he said.

‘Graveyard.’

He put his cigar to his lips and inhaled hugely. ‘Dead?’

I glanced at him sideways as he produced an enormous billow of smoke that obscured his features.

‘Burying the owner of the Commercial Hotel.’

‘Damned shame,’ and stared at the ceiling for a moment. I looked up half expecting to see something malicious hanging there.

And he walked out of the store as if he were flesh and blood.

I told Humphry later.

‘Another boater? You need a boxer. More a man’s hat.’

The next day things got worse.

It was the Reverend Kerr who had telephoned, and left a message for me to meet him at the home of Mrs Duffy.

Mrs Duffy who handed out the Bibles.

Mrs Duffy had no family except a rumour of a husband – a fireman on the trains. He had never
shared the back pew with us and I never could quite believe he existed.

I pedalled over the Victoria Bridge through South Townsville until I found her street. There were a dozen people, mainly women, gathered in front of the house, but still standing
in
the street. Children ran about, but they all fell silent when they saw me. I might have been the next act in the Tragedy, and they seemed to be expecting some speech as I leaned the Carbine against the fence and took my medical bag from the basket.

‘They’re inside,’ said an elderly, portly woman dressed all in black. ‘Haven’t come out since.’

Mrs Duffy’s house was one of those spidery cottages high on stilts. It had a red iron roof and steep straight stairs front and back. The most practical thing about this sort of housing was that in the Wet, hammocks were spun like webs underneath where it was cooler during the long steamy days.

The house sent mixed messages: the door was open but the windows shut, curtains drawn. A dog was barking around the back.

‘Someone should go get that bloomin’ dog,’ said the woman.

‘Someone should shoot it,’ said another, but no one moved.

I said, ‘Who’s with her?’

‘Just the Reverend.’

‘Where’s her husband?’

‘Between here and The World I’m told. He don’t know yet.’

The gate screeched and the crowd was quiet as I climbed the steps. The house breathed hot foetid air over me as I put my head into its dark throat.

‘It’s Dr Row,’ I called out.

Inside was quiet.

‘Too damned late again,’ someone yelled from the street.

I put my hand on the doorframe and felt the wood warm as fever. The dog barked incessantly.

I stepped down the hall. There were only two doorways, one each side, and in the room on the right was a figure on the floor, another on the bed. I hurried to the Reverend Kerr’s side. His eyes fluttered open, but rolled upwards so I gently laid him down again. The kitchen was at the back; there was a water bucket on the sink, an enamel mug nearby and I dipped it in the bucket and took that back.

The water was warm, but I kept flicking it on his face until he shook his head and struggled to move. I slapped his cheeks. Just a little.

He moaned and blinked.

‘Drink,’ I said, and I held the mug to his mouth. I helped him up and out of the charnel room and into the hallway. The back door opened with a tug and cooler air passed around us. I fetched a chair and sat him in the draught and put the mug in his hands.

‘My word.’

‘Just sit for a moment,’ I said. His eyes wandered, trying to focus. ‘You fainted, that’s all.’

‘Cold.’ Shock.

‘I have to go back to Mrs Duffy,’ I said.

‘Dead.’

I went back into the room and stood for a moment at the door. She lay as if killed by one terrible blow, arms flung out, one leg off the bed, her head lolling sideways and her tongue out.

I opened the window with great effort and a breeze came through and rippled the curtains, dropping the temperature straight away by several degrees. The damned dog, though, was louder and wouldn’t shut up.

Taking a deep breath, I turned to look at Mrs Duffy. Her forehead was still warm to my touch, the skin at her throat taut and lifeless. She hadn’t been dead long. Hours perhaps.

I went to the other side and moved her leg on to the bed, brought it together with the other, straightening her dress. There was the smell of lavender and perspiration and urine, but the breeze made it bearable. Had she suffered long? She might have died from the heat, but for the blood on her tongue, her chin, and the bedspread.

I felt beneath her armpit and my fingers came away wet. I wiped them on the bedspread, and then folded her arms across her chest and tried to put her tongue back in her mouth and had to wipe them again.

Her eyes were closed. Thirst had played a part, and she may have lain unconscious and convulsed at the end. The disease had taken her violently and quickly, but perhaps it would never be fast enough.

Closing the house up was what many people did during an illness, especially an air disease. To protect her neighbours, perhaps, or to sweat out the initial fever.

The room was clean, neat, a Bible open on a table, a dark wardrobe closed, a lamp out of kerosene, a framed photograph on the wall. I took a closer look at the two faces, a man and a woman, and then back to Mrs Duffy. How different to Mrs Gard’s room and yet how similar. No one should die alone, be left alone, be lonely.

I sat down at the end of the bed and felt a wave of grief sweep over me.

I felt a sudden need to see Maria and my babies and to hold them tight. Death had come into my life and wouldn’t leave and I now felt a terrible fear, seeing what had happened to Mrs Duffy.

Could I protect them all from an Act of God?

‘Lord have mercy.’

The Reverend Kerr was at the door and I tried to pull myself together. I nodded to him, afraid my voice would betray me.

‘She looks peaceful.’

I nodded again.

‘A shock, you see.’

‘I understand.’

‘I’ve seen worse.’