Affection (26 page)

One hundred prominent citizens were on the platform.

‘A hundred?’ I couldn’t believe there’d been such a set against us. Turner said nothing as Humphry described what happened.

I felt uneasy hearing things said about me that were plainly untrue. We were described as if we’d attacked the town to tear it to pieces. One man had apparently stood to say we’d forced the Reverend Ward at gunpoint to the plague hospital, in the dead of night.

Humphry said he’d made a courageous attempt to correct this, but was booed down.

The meeting had gone on in this vein for a while. The Cockerill case came up and McCreedy told the crowd Dr Bacot would not have been shot if the health officers had simply let him visit his patient. No one said that Bacot was shot
because
he was trying to do just that.

Someone moved that a collection be taken to buy Cockerill a new pair of glasses and a Snider rifle so he could hit the right doctor next time.

I must have looked horrified, but Humphry appeared to be enjoying himself. ‘Don’t worry, the motion was lost.’

Humphry said the whole event to that point was restrained. I looked at him with frank disbelief.

‘Comparatively restrained,’ he said, as he lit another cigarette. ‘The best is to come.’

Everyone must have been saving their voices for the next item, said Humphry. The burial of plague victims. It seemed everyone knew someone who had died and been buried at the plague cemetery. They seemed to think that the doctors were doing this simply to throw around their misplaced power, and that we enjoyed torturing the grieving families.

‘Your name came up, Lin, over some affair involving the landlady of the Commercial Hotel,’ said Humphry. ‘Did you really bring her down in a tackle and drag the poor woman away from her poor husband’s coffin? That’s something I wish I’d seen. Mind you, having seen you rush an armed man I’m not at all surprised.’

Well, then. The meeting, he said, had erupted in a chorus of
Shame!

When that died down, Mr Ogden took the floor and told everyone he’d been in the funeral procession of poor Mrs Duffy when the health officers arrived and threatened Watt the undertaker with arrest if he didn’t take the coffin out to Three Mile Creek immediately. This, despite a grave having already been dug in the family plot at West End, and the mourners left standing around with no body to bury. If he was the woman’s husband, Mr Ogden told the mob, he’d have horsewhipped Dr Turner.

‘You can imagine how that got them going,’ said Humphry. ‘I thought they might rush out, there and then, to find an appropriate whip.’

‘I’m glad we weren’t invited,’ I said, my face in my hands.

‘That’s about it,’ said Humphry, crushing the stub of his cigarette. ‘Oh, and they resolved that Doctors Turner and Row be removed from their positions. Unanimously.’

‘Unanimously?’

‘I missed that vote. Call of nature.’

The Mayor unwisely sent the Home Secretary a copy of the meeting’s resolutions. Foxton was furious and told Turner to bring charges against anyone who’d breached the regulations.

I was all for it. Bacot had broken quarantine, and McCreedy and probably Dawson had encouraged him. I was about to lose my job, although strangely that still wasn’t worrying me.

It was Humphry who defended the Mayor. I was astonished.

‘He believes he’s protecting his town,’ Humphry said. ‘That’s his job. You have to give him that.’

In the end, even Cockerill senior escaped gaol. Sergeant Moylan didn’t want a trial because the police either believed the shooting was the reasonable response of a father protecting his son, or
that it was an accident. Moylan charged him with resisting arrest, confiscated the Martini, and let him go.

Bacot was already pacing his corridors, no more contrite than before.

I went out to Three Mile Creek. I took the Carbine along the sandy track, which had deteriorated so much that I had to walk it the last half-mile.

There’d been no new cases since the Cockerill affair. The few rats trapped by councils’ rat catchers in the previous week showed no sign of plague. It was too soon to declare the epidemic over, but that was enough for the Epidemic Board, despite my objections, to order the plague hospital closed when the last patient was discharged. It made political sense, I supposed. The siege had given everyone a fright, and even the police would baulk at packing anyone else off to Three Mile Creek.

It already had an abandoned look. The ropes had loosened and the canvas snapped in the sea-breeze.

Cockerill junior was sitting on the edge of his bed smoking, and raised a finger in greeting, thinking I was just another medico.

I asked about the girl and he shook his head. ‘Not here.’

‘Where?’

He shrugged.

I went to Routh’s office and pushed open the flap.

‘Row?’ He was sitting on a box. ‘Good of you to come. Packing,’ he said, his sad face nodding to a box in front of him. ‘Losing my last patient today.’

‘Today? I didn’t think he was due to leave until tomorrow.’

‘Don’t start that again.’

‘No, no. I came to see the girl.’

‘Sarah?’

‘Her name’s Sarah?’

‘Sarah Gard. Gone, I’m afraid.’

‘She can’t be gone. She has nowhere to go.’

‘Oh, some woman showed up from The World and said she was an aunt. She sent papers out from town. I released the child,’ said Routh. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘No.’ I shook my head, my heart in my throat. ‘On the contrary. I suppose I just wanted to check that everything was all right with her.’

‘Good as gold when she left. I suspect the aunt waited. You know, until…’

I nodded.

So I knew, suddenly, that this would be my last trip out here. And that I’d never see the child again. I wheeled my bicycle to the cemetery; not to pay my respects, more to get some sense of what had happened. The graves were marked by wooden crosses that were already leaning in the sandy soil.

But I felt no connection with the mounds of blowing sand in front of me, and I even found it hard to conjure up the once familiar face of Mrs Duffy.

I knew it would have been easier to believe it was an Act of God if I’d been lying there myself.

Turner was right. It’s all a matter of perspective, and the victim’s often the last person to see what really hit him.

Fifty years hence our atrocious treatment of plague patients will cause our successors to wonder what sort of thick-headed, hard-hearted monsters their ancestors were.

North Queensland Herald,
10 September, 1900

A GREAT CRANE LIFTED TURNER
’
S
trunks over our heads. Allan watched the bulging net, fascinated.

‘That would kill someone if it fell on them, wouldn’t it?’

Humphry said, ‘I’m sure they’re insured.’

Turner looked on, a little worried, too. He carried his brown leather medical bag. Allan held Turner’s best butterfly net.

We stood at the bottom of the gangway. Turner appeared to be the only passenger from Townsville heading north.

‘I’m told the Mayor of Cairns is holding a ball for you,’ said Humphry. ‘Heard of your marvellous work in saving Townsville from itself.’

‘Weally?’ said Turner.

‘No. I should think if anything he’ll have an armed garrison waiting to repel you.’

Turner seemed cheerful enough to be going. There’d been no sign of plague for weeks and any rats we could find were the healthy kind.

He shook our hands. Allan handed him his net, but Turner said, ‘You keep it. Send me some specimens.’

The ship groaned against the ropes and the planks beneath our feet trembled.

He had said he was pleased to leave Townsville, but I think that secretly he had relished the fight, although McCreedy’s accusations and the hostility had hurt him.

‘Public health is the future, Row,’ he’d told me. ‘Perhaps we need to be more flexible, though.’

We watched him walk up the gangway, a small translucent figure, and I was sad to see him go. He turned at the top, took off his pith helmet and waved it in the air.

It was the last I’d see of him for two decades.

Months later, it was I who was packing.

McCreedy stopped by the door. He was dressed for the holidays and had his hands in his pockets, puffing on a cigarette. The Town Hall was largely deserted. He stood there almost politely, waiting for me to acknowledge him.

‘So you’re off then?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

When the plague was officially over, the Townsville Joint Epidemic Board had let me go and I’d gone back
to being merely the local medical officer for health. So I had handed in my resignation as soon as the Board of Health in Brisbane confirmed I had a position to return to at Moreton Bay.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ said McCreedy.

‘You’re the Mayor. It’s your building.’

‘I suppose it is,’ and he stepped into the office and closed the door behind him.

‘Just wanted to say goodbye. You did your job, I’ll give you that. Probably too well.’ He started to laugh and stopped. ‘You follow me?’

‘Yes.’

He stared at me for a while and took another deep drag of a rapidly diminishing cigarette. ‘Well, damn it, I told you to keep that blasted Turner under control. Look what he did.’

‘I resigned.’

‘Yes, yes.’ He walked over to the window and opened the curtains. He looked down on to Flinders-lane, ‘Dear God!’ and closed the curtains again.

I had a tea chest beside it half full of medical books and items from my desk. ‘You’ll need someone to lift that for you?’

‘They’re coming to take it to the wharves this evening.’

‘Your ship sails…when?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘I suppose it’s appropriate. New start and all that. I never said this and I probably should have, but
I think it was a damned thing going in to fetch Bacot like that. Took courage. Could have been shot yourself.’ He puffed and stood there waiting for me to thank him. ‘Look, you can stay on if you like. Why don’t you, eh?’

He didn’t mean it, but I supposed it was a compliment.

‘It’s a bit late now.’

He nodded, finishing his cigarette and looking for somewhere to put it. I fished out an ashtray and he ground the stub into it.

‘I won’t be seeing you tomorrow before you go?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, good luck, Row.’ And he leaned across the table and offered me his hand.

I took it. For auld lang syne.

The list of deaths I’d started charting more than a year ago was the last thing on my desk. The bound ledger seemed a folly now, the list unfinished. I couldn’t bear to open it, so I left it there and turned to the storage cupboard.

I had to face the blue duffel bag, but felt unable to drag myself one last time back into that misery. I thought of little Sarah Gard, gone to Charters Towers with her aunt. I had asked the Reverend Kerr if there was any way to check on her, and he’d asked the Reverend Galloway at The World to look in on the family.

‘A positive report, Row,’ said Kerr.

The family were regular churchgoers, the uncle was at the cyanide works, and there were five other children. Sarah seemed to fit in and he was sure she was being well cared for.

I couldn’t have asked for more, I supposed.

Now I opened the cupboard door and sat down again. The bag was still there, slumped over, with its chin on its chest, amongst the reams of carbon copy paper and requisition forms.

I sat for a while, and then got up and pulled the bag into the middle of the room, undid the drawstring and upended it. Gard’s life poured on to the floor, sending out a cloying wave of phenyl and camphor.

It was as I’d expected, but also disappointing.

I raked aside the linen uniform, trousers, boots, shirts, belt and collar, and was left with a pile of personal things the man had accumulated. I had an image of Walter Gard’s crooked face in my mind as I picked at them.

There were playing cards with furry corners, their torn packet, loose cigarette cards. A cheap watch with a scratched glass face had stopped. I set the time, wound it, and put it aside.

There was a stiff leather strop, and a razor in its case. I opened it and tested the edge.

In a leather pouch was a pipe and tobacco.

I was left with a biscuit tin and an envelope with handwriting, and I took them to my desk.

I opened the tin under the light. Inside was an eclectic jumble of little things a boy might find valuable, but which really had no use. One pearl cufflink, a glass marble, some used stamps, keys, a tiny blue glass bird with a broken leg, a whistle, and something in a cloth. I unwrapped a small, shiny tin tiger. It hardly had a scratch. Finally, there was a miniature Bible and a crucifix.

I set them aside and picked up the envelope. It was unsealed and held nothing.

I had trouble reading the writing on the front and so I held it under the light. It was a hand I recognised. It said simply,
For darling Sarah
.

I could imagine him propped up on his sick bed at West Point, struggling with the paper and pencil. He’d had to press hard and had gone over the words a few times.

I slumped wearily back into the chair. My first emotion was, as always, a purely selfish one: that I wished I’d never opened the damned bag.

For darling Sarah.

I leaned forward and picked up the tin tiger again, turning it over. The more I looked at it, the more certain I became that this was what the man intended to give his daughter. He’d bought her something he thought she might like. He may have told her stories about tigers he’d seen in far-off places.

It wasn’t something I’d wanted to consider. But having done so, I couldn’t now believe that the man had meant to harm his only child.

The thought stung me. I looked around my bare office and was touched again by a deep sadness, the inconsolable grief of losing a child, because Gard had lost his daughter as surely as I had lost mine.

I stood at the mouth of the council furnace watching the flames. I should, of course, have thrown the bag unopened into the furnace in the first place, to join the ashes of the rats.

‘There you are.’ From the back door strode Bacot. ‘I wasn’t sure I would catch you before you left.’

We stood side by side looking into the swirling flames which, thankfully, obscured the things they were destroying. I was still wary of the surgeon. His wound had obviously healed, but I assumed he still blamed me for his brush with death.

‘I suppose I should have thanked you,’ he said. ‘Earlier. Been meaning to. God knows how long the police would have let me lie there. Probably bled to death by then.’

We watched the flames.

‘Clearing the decks?’

‘Last of the plague contacts,’ I said. ‘Just a precaution.’

He wanted to shake my hand goodbye, too, and then he left.

I went back up to my office, took a last look and left the door ajar behind me, the smell of Gard’s tin and tobacco still on my hands.

‘By the Grace of God this new Nation,’ said the Reverend Kerr, ‘will take its place amongst the Great Nations of the World. Australia will stand Proudly beside Canada, South Africa and India, in the Service of the Great British Empire.’

We all attended church that evening. The Reverend Kerr had organised a New Year’s Eve service starting at eleven o’clock. I imagined most churches in the other colonies were doing the same, nearly four million people up past bedtime.

The Twentieth Century and a new Australia were about to be born and Queensland would be suddenly elevated, or, as Humphry said, demoted, from a colony to a state.

Reverend Kerr read from Ephesians: ‘
And you hath He quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins, wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world
…’

I didn’t think many people appreciated the implications of Federation, but in the lamplit Presbyterian Church at that moment everyone believed the next day would be tangibly different.

Allan’s head rested heavily against my arm. I felt Maria against the other.

‘…
that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace, in His kindness toward us, through Christ Jesus. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of
yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.
’

Amen.

The church bells sounded all around Castle Hill and we sang ‘God Save the Queen’; twice, for good measure. The English Church down the road were giving us some competition.

Once outside, the congregation gathered amongst the flicker of moths around buggy lamps to wish each other Happy New Year. Men produced hip flasks and in furtive groups toasted the many things there were suddenly to toast. Allan had a new lease on life and was trying to catch insects to bait his sisters.

I’d been looking about for the Reverend Kerr to say goodbye, and then he was suddenly at Maria’s side.

‘My word,’ he said, ‘the pair of you at the same service again. I hope this becomes your habit.’ And did I like the reading?

Indeed I did.

‘Your ship leaves tomorrow?’

‘Today.’

‘Oh yes, it’s today already. How silly of me. You know, Row, I’ll miss our chats. I’m sure God has His plans for you, though, and knows what He’s doing.’

Allan’s voice in the dark started complaining about a knee, and Maria went off to see to it.

I handed Kerr a pound note and a package, sealed, Sarah’s name on it.

‘My word.’ He looked at the writing. ‘Oh yes. How thoughtful. What’s in here?’

‘Something from her father.’

‘From her
father
?’ He looked unsure, but decided not to ask. ‘I’ll make sure she gets it. I’ll give it to Galloway when he’s next here.’ He shook it. ‘Might get damaged in the post otherwise.’

I thanked him and we shook hands. I could see the reflection of the harbour lights in his eyes and he grabbed my arm and squeezed it with genuine warmth before turning away.

I turned and took in the view. Below us the gas lamps were blazing along Flinders-street and boats in the creek had every lantern lit. We could hear singing and cheering as Maria gathered the children. We all walked home together.

Humphry collected us late the next morning.

The girls had been moping around the empty house, moaning about leaving their friends, and then running tearfully to their bedrooms. Allan was already at the gate and eager to get going, looking forward to the ship.

They all still seemed like strangers to me and I realised only then how much I’d squandered my brief time in the North.

‘You know, Lin,’ said Humphry, as we stood for a moment beside his buggy, ‘you should stay. There’s plenty of opportunity up here for a young doctor with your experience. A modern private practice is the go.’

From the town below came the banging of many hammers and some cheering and whistles that seemed to be left over from the night before.

‘Do you think people would come to my surgery?’

‘There is that. But look, you could stay on in this house. It’s a pleasant enough life. I might even join you in practice.’

I could see in his eyes that he was serious. He wanted me to stay. I was touched. I might even have taken up the offer under different circumstances, or given more time.

‘Our ship leaves in a few hours.’

‘Does it? Best get moving then.’

Most of our boxes and trunks had already been sent to the wharf. We had just a few bags with us. The girls and Allan climbed on to the back of the buggy while I squeezed next to Humphry and Maria sat beside me, and then we rattled down through the town for the last time.

This first day of the century was hot and steamy. Maria wore her broad hat and she held the rim daintily between her index finger and thumb, swearing as the buggy plunged down Denham-street through the dust of the other traffic.

‘
Maudit!
’

‘Sorry,’ said Humphry, but we hit another bump.

‘Oh,
merde!
’

‘Hang on back there,’ I yelled, but we slowed as we came to Flinders-street.

Celebrations were already under way, it seemed. A stage bristling with Union Jacks and Federation flags took up most of the intersection.

‘I’m told there’ll be many speeches,’ said Humphry, as we crept around it. ‘You’ve really cut it fine again, but I think we can make our escape before they start.’