Outback Sunset (25 page)

Grinning, Nova began to sing the lyrics.
‘She was sitting cross-legged on the hood of the Ford, filing down her nails with an emery board … ’

During a lull in the constant rain — the wet was on its way out — everyone who lived and worked on the property sat clustered around the television set watching an excerpt from the Tamworth Country
Music Festival. The presenter was about to announce the starmaker award for best new country and western talent and had read Nova Morrison’s name out as one of the five nominees.

Reg was so nervous he couldn’t sit still. He fidgeted, sipped his beer, and tugged, semi-constantly, at his right ear lobe. Tony and Warren sat on the floor, their fingers curled around beer cans. Curtis perched on the arm of one of the chairs and Vanessa, Fran and Bren were sharing the sofa.

‘Nova has to have a real chance,’ Tony remarked as he watched a clip of one of the nominees, a young man strumming an electric guitar. ‘Geez, he’s singing off key.’

‘Nerves,’ Reg sympathised gruffly. ‘Even the best get nervous.’

Nova’s image came onto the screen and Bren let loose a piercing wolf whistle. ‘Doesn’t she look fantastic!’

Vanessa stared at Nova and made her own silent assessment. Fantastic? Different maybe, but not fantastic by her yardstick. Nova had lost a considerable amount of weight and her black, straight hair was curled and wild-looking. She had developed an air of sophistication though, which was reflected in the clothes she wore. A short, fringed black leather skirt with a tantalising side split, a white body hugging top with an open V neckline and filmy scarf-like sleeves — very funky — and long, dangling earrings that matched the choker pendant around her neck. Embossed black and white leather, calf-high boots completed her outfit.

Listening to her sing, Vanessa gave credit where it was due. Nova was good. Better than good, she decided, and that the song was her own composition — Reg had said it was — was another plus in the talent stakes. Still, she wasn’t sure, though she wouldn’t say so, that her performance was professional enough to take out the top award. The first nominee, a tall, constantly smiling young girl with blond hair, had exceptional talent and that rare attribute, television charisma. She would be stiff competition for all of them.

‘Nova’s pretty damned good,’ Curtis gave his opinion honestly. ‘I watched her audition in Sydney. She’s improved one hundred per cent since then.’

‘I wouldn’t want to be the judges,’ Fran was nothing if not diplomatic. ‘They’re all terrific.’

‘Nova’s a shoo-in,’ Bren said confidently. He held up his empty can. ‘Anyone for another?’

The presenter’s face returned to dominate the screen. ‘And the winner is …’ He paused, grinned maddeningly to lengthen the tension, ‘right after the break.’ His image faded as an advertisement came on screen.

‘Bloody annoying. They always do that,’ grumbled Reg.

Vanessa smiled at his nervousness. ‘They call it a dramatic pause.’

As if on cue, Kyle began to cry lustily from the nursery.

‘Talk about timing,’ Bren muttered. ‘My son has an absolute talent for crying at the wrong times.’

‘Is there a right time for a baby to cry?’ Fran asked dryly.

‘He shouldn’t be hungry, I fed him an hour ago,’ Vanessa said as she got up to check on him. As she did her glance included Bren and she saw his annoyed look. As a new father, he wasn’t coping well with the crying: it got on his nerves and made him irritable. He didn’t like to change nappies either or help to bathe their tiny son, much to her disappointment. She made excuses for him, to Fran and the others. He wasn’t used to a baby being around but then neither was she, yet she accepted that babies cried and when they did they were attended to. Bren said she was spoiling Kyle, giving him too much attention and that she should just let him cry and, unfortunately, Kyle cried a lot.

Quelling her irritation with Bren’s impatience she went to the nursery. Kyle was wide awake, and he smiled as she spoke to him. She picked him up, changed his nappy and took him out of the room. He was a sociable baby who enjoyed being with other people and when thus occupied, he usually stopped grizzling for a while. The Flying Doctor nurse had said he had colic, lots of babies got that in their first three months and it didn’t bother him all the time, thank goodness, but struck mostly at night, and when it did he took a lot of pacifying before he settled.

Even so she wasn’t entirely satisfied. She believed there was something more — she just hoped that a serious problem wasn’t developing. There was something else about him too, his skin tone … When he’d first come home from the hospital he had been jaundiced. The doctor said that would fade quickly but it hadn’t. He was now four months old and, though she hadn’t mentioned it to Bren because
he’d think she was being paranoid, she was becoming concerned. If he was no better in a month, she intended to take him to Darwin to have him checked out thoroughly.

As she held Kyle up over her shoulder and made her way down the hallway to the living room, her niggling disappointment because of Bren’s attitude accelerated. He had been considerate and affectionate during her pregnancy but since Kyle’s birth, little quirks — impatience and even an immature sulkiness — were emerging. Fran believed he was jealous of the attention she gave Kyle but Vanessa found that too incredible to be true. He was a grown man, albeit one who’d been indulged by his mother and probably his father, more so than Curtis and Lauren had. He should understand that babies had needs. That he didn’t was beginning to seriously irritate her.

She sat on the sofa as the presenter returned to the screen and announced: ‘And the winner is … Chelsea Talbot.’ The blond. ‘And 1992’s runner-up is Nova Morrison.’

Amaroo’s living room erupted in a noisy cheer. Kyle, frightened by the sudden noise, began to cry in earnest.

‘For God’s sake,’ Bren turned towards Vanessa, ‘can’t you shut him up?’

‘The noise everyone made scared him,’ she defended staunchly, attempting to placate Kyle with his dummy. He spat it out and kept on wailing.

‘A man can hardly think with all that commotion,’ Bren continued to rant.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Curtis tried to diffuse everyone’s embarrassment at Bren’s cranky display.
‘You’re making as much noise as your son, and you’re a grown up.’

Bren glared at his brother. ‘You’re the one with the baby experience, you keep him quiet.’

Incensed by her husband’s outburst, Vanessa rose and moved towards the kitchen with Kyle in her arms and Sandy trotting faithfully behind. She went through the kitchen and because the rain had stopped she continued on to the back verandah. She sat and stared at the outbuildings and, beyond to the wide open paddock that blurred into the horizon as twilight deepened. The most marvellous sunset she had ever seen was occurring.

Set against the near-black silhouette of a large gum tree and the boundary fence, the roiling clouds were dusted with the fiery red and orange of the setting sun. Smudged and temporarily lightening the clouds, which were heavy with impending rain, the sunset stretched across the sky in a superb panorama of colour. For a little while Vanessa held her breath at the magnificence of it, then began to talk quietly to Kyle, pointing out the spectacular colours. His little body was stiff with pain caused by the colic. There was little she could do other than try to distract him until the pain passed.

She wasn’t there long before Curtis joined her. ‘You okay?’

‘Of course. Isn’t it a wonderful sunset?’

‘Yeah, you only see that kind of sunset during the wet, when the clouds are laden with rain.’ Then he cleared his throat and said, ‘Bren doesn’t mean it, you know,’ trying to excuse his brother’s behaviour. ‘He loves Kyle. Talks about him all the time when
we’re working, ad nauseam, in fact. What he’s going to teach him, how he’ll groom him to run Amaroo as he grows up.’

Vanessa glanced up at Curtis, who was leaning laconically against one of the vertical verandah posts with his thumbs hooked into the waistband of his jeans — a habit both he and Bren had in common. ‘The way he carries on about Kyle’s crying, I find it hard to understand.’

Curtis shrugged. ‘Some men never get it. They don’t understand that that’s what babies do. Eat, cry, poo and sleep. Not necessarily in that order.’

The straight-faced way he said it made Vanessa chuckle. She and Curtis, since she’d come to Amaroo had, over time, come to a silent understanding of sorts, based on growing, mutual respect. In many ways they got along well now, were in some ways better tuned to the running of Amaroo than Bren, and they had similar tastes, in reading and music.

‘Let me have him for a while,’ Curtis offered.

He took Kyle off Vanessa and went and sat in one of the wooden armchairs scattered about the verandah which doubled as a sleep-out when the weather was abominably hot. ‘Regan was a fussy baby too and Georgia didn’t have a lot of patience with her.’ Resting Kyle across his lap, he turned him onto his stomach, supporting his head and neck with one arm, while the other hand massaged his back, from his shoulders down to his tiny hips. ‘Sometimes this helps.’

After a couple of minutes Kyle’s cries became less frequent, his arms and legs stopped flailing. Seeing
the change, Vanessa’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. ‘Amazing. He’s settling.’

‘Can’t promise that it always works,’ Curtis admitted, ‘but it’s worth a try.’

In the night’s silence beyond the lights of the homestead and the stockmen’s quarters, it was pitch black. A dingo began to yip and was answered by another dingo. Sandy, dozing at Vanessa’s feet, stirred. His small head went up, his ears twitched. He stood, trotted to the edge of the verandah and began to growl, then bark.

‘Shush, Sandy,’ Vanessa ordered, concerned that Kyle would start to cry again. Sandy’s response was to race down the steps and into the blackness, barking as he disappeared into the moonless night.

‘Get him back, Vanessa. Those dingoes aren’t far away, around the hangar from the sound of them. We’ve found dingo tracks around several buildings, including the chicken coop. I’ve put Ringo on a long chain to guard the coop at night, in case they try to burrow under the wire,’ Curtis told her as he changed Kyle’s position. ‘If Sandy gets near those dingoes they’ll make minced meat out of him.’

Hearing that, Vanessa didn’t hesitate. She flicked on the floodlights that illuminated the wet ground and puddles as far as the breaking-in fence and raced down the steps into the darkness, alternatively whistling and calling Sandy to her. She had to chase the Jack Russell as far as the large machinery shed before he came to heel.

‘You’re a bad dog,’ she scolded and, before he could shoot off again, she scooped him up in her arms. Sandy, she had discovered, had a problem.
The little dog believed he was as big and fierce and as brave as Bubba, Kimbo and Ringo, the station’s dogs.

When she came back to the verandah Kyle was asleep in Curtis’s arms.

‘You must have a way with babies,’ she whispered, her tone a mixture of amusement and admiration.

‘I do. Kids, dogs and old people love me. But I strike out with young, beautiful women.’

She looked him up and down. ‘You’re not so bad, and I have seen you in a suit. You scrub up okay.’ And, she reminded herself, there was at least one beautiful woman — Nova — who was more than willing and able to accept his attentions. Curtis simply wasn’t aware of her adoration, more’s the pity. Nova had tired of waiting and had embarked on a new life with a lover named Leo and was, one assumed, over Curtis. The outback man would never know what he had missed. Her mouth quirked in a smile as she thought that it was funny how things worked out.

‘I’ll put him to bed, if you like,’ Curtis offered.

He stood up with Kyle and, with Vanessa following him, they returned to the nursery and put the sleeping baby down …

Vanessa studied the face of her seven-month-old sleeping son. Kyle was curled up in his seat with the seat belt fastened, with airline blankets and two pillows around his small body to support him. The commercial flight from Kununurra to Darwin was relatively short but she couldn’t nod off. She was
too uptight, in more ways than one. The argument with Bren over Kyle’s declining health had started it all off. Her husband couldn’t or wasn’t able to see that their baby boy wasn’t the healthy bouncing child he should be. His skin tone had remained yellowish since birth, he had problems with his bowels and with digesting food. Finally Vanessa had had enough and insisted they take him to the doctor they saw in Kununurra, Dr Adam Strong, for a consultation.

She glanced at Bren who sat across the aisle. His eyes were closed, but she knew he wasn’t asleep. After Adam had examined Kyle, his expression and words had been the wake-up call Bren needed and now, like her, he was intensely concerned about their child’s health.

Adam thought Kyle might have a viral infection that was affecting liver function which was why he was jaundiced, but the doctor hadn’t sufficient paediatric expertise to correctly diagnose it, hence the referral to a specialist paediatrician in Darwin. Hmmm! At times, Vanessa thought cynically, doctors tended to label some ailment that wasn’t easy to diagnose as a virus, in the hope that the patient would be satisfied. After the surgery visit, Bren had phoned his mother and she’d insisted they stay with her while they were in Darwin … a mixed blessing as far as Vanessa was concerned.

As Vanessa’s hand reached out to smooth the short, fine blond strands of her baby’s hair her heart swelled with love but simultaneously, a frown creased her unlined forehead. Kyle was not well and she could no longer rest or allow herself to be
fobbed off by any doctor who implied — as Bren initially had — that she was being paranoid and over-protective. A sensible mother knew when something was wrong with her child and, for months the signs had been growing and could no longer be ignored. What was affecting Kyle was much more serious than a mysterious virus that he would eventually get over …

Vanessa watched the white-coated doctor shuffle then tidy up the papers in the file, and adjust the gold-rimmed glasses on his nose. He cleared his throat and, finally, began to fiddle annoyingly with the pen set on his desk. She was at the end of her tether! She, Bren and Kyle had spent a week in Darwin. Kyle had seen three specialists — a paediatrician, an immunologist and an oncologist — and undergone a plethora of medical tests — blood tests, x-rays, a CT scan and an MRI, a sophisticated electronic test that showed bones, organs, tissues …