The Amazing Spencer Gray (10 page)

Mum and Pippa were in the car, bulleting towards the hospital. Mum broke out in a hot sweat as she replayed in her head—again—the moment when she, Pippa and Reg, huddled around the radio in the hangar, heard that the
Drifter
had been found, when a voice blurted from the two-way.

‘Bell Rescue to Skippers Cove. Come in Skippers.'

‘Copy, Bell Rescue, over.'

‘We've located the crash site, Reg. Repeat: We have located the site of the crash.'

As if it were a news-bite on the radio, about another family, someone else's child, Mum heard the pilot say his position coordinates.

Reg swallowed. ‘Roger, Bell Rescue. Any sign of_____'

‘Just winching Rich down now to check it out. It's the glider. It's belly up, Reg. I'll radio again shortly. Out.'

Oh. And then the longest wait.

And then Rory found—injured, but alive. But no Spencer. No Spencer. No Spencer. No Spencer.

Not for another horrible hour did they find their Spencer.

Mum willed the car to spirit them there, rather than this interminable, slow-motion torture. She needed to get to Spencer.

‘Just putting the drip in now, Spencer,' the nurse said to his closed eyes. ‘A bit of a sting coming up.'

Spencer didn't care what they did to him. All he cared about was how unbelievably comfortable and
warm
he finally was. Whoever said that being in hospital sucked?

‘Is Mum coming?'

‘She's on her way. She was waiting at the airstrip but the police told her to meet you here.'

‘Is ... my dad okay?' he said to the nurse. ‘He was in the plane—I had to leave him.'

He felt a hand on his. ‘I don't know. He hasn't arrived yet. Your mum will know more. How are you feeling?'

‘Good,' he croaked.

‘We'll treat those scratches of yours in a moment, get them cleaned up.'

Spencer opened his eyes a slit. She was inspecting
his face. ‘They're fine—really. Just scratches!' he laughed, and once he'd started, he chortled on and on like someone had told him a great joke.

She smiled gently. ‘You're exhausted, Spencer.'

His face hurt. Smiling really hurt the scratches. He felt slightly mad. Tears surged into his eyes as suddenly as the laughter had come. They flowed out and down and the saltiness stung the cuts in his skin.

‘Owww,' he moaned, crying wetly.

‘You're all right,' she said quietly, sitting on the edge of his bed. ‘You're all right, now, Spencer. Everything's going to be all right.'

Spencer must have been asleep when Mum and Pippa arrived. He woke to the special, familiar voices, but could barely prise open his gluey lids.

His voice was hoarse when he finally spoke, like he'd been shouting for the last couple of days.

‘Mu-um?'

‘I'm here, Spence,' she said, reaching for his arm and holding it with both hands.

‘Spence!' Pippa said. ‘You're in
hospital!'

He laughed weakly. ‘I know, Pips.'

‘Are you okay?' she asked. ‘You walked the
whole way
down Bluff Knoll, Spence,
on your own.'

Spencer said, ‘How's Dad? Is he here? Is he okay?'

Mum was rubbing his arm over and over. He could barely look at her, because she was trying hard not to cry, and Mum didn't cry very often.

‘Mum? How is he? Have they got him down? Mum?'

She nodded, whispering, ‘He's—okay.' Her tears came, finally, and then just rolled and rolled down her cheeks. ‘He's having some X-rays done_____'

‘His head. At the back, there's a hole—a big gash, Mum. It bled a lot ... I didn't know what to do.'

‘Don't worry, they're working on it. He might end up with a bit of a dent in his head there, apparently.'

‘I saw blood in his hair but I didn't check it straight away because of The Leg_____'

‘The leg?'

‘The
Leg.
The Knee. It looked horrible. And it totally distracted me. Is it broken?'

‘Oh, yes, I see, yes, his knee is broken in several places. He'll have to have surgery on it. But they need to rehydrate him and just generally stabilise him before they can operate.'

‘I tried to give him water, Mum, but he was unconscious, so I could only sort of smear it on his lips_____'

She looked at him and wiped her eyes. ‘You poor
thing.' She shook her head and tried to gather herself. ‘I'm so sorry you've had to go through this, Spencer. What you did, how you managed_____'

‘I'm all right, Mum,' he said, giving her an encouraging grin. ‘See? Just a couple of scratches.'

She smiled but looked like she might burst into tears again.

‘Mum,' Pippa said, rubbing her back. ‘Mum, it's okay: they're both safe.'

Dad was okay. He was okay.
Once he knew, Spencer couldn't fight the exhaustion. The pillow cradled his head, and his body sank heavily into the mattress.

Mum and Pippa hugged tightly, sitting on the edge of Spencer's hospital bed, and watched him as his eyes closed.

Spencer stood at the top of a mountain—an icy mountain, like you'd see on the Discovery Channel. He was at the summit of it on his skateboard, waiting to start the long journey down. At the bottom were Mum and Leon. Mum was waiting to take him to the hospital to see Dad, who was in a coma and hadn't shown signs of life since the
Drifter
had crashed; Spencer had been the one flying.

Leon was waiting for him because Spencer had the keys to his house, and his mum was locked out again. Spencer peered down the icy slope. He did not want to go down there—not on a skateboard; not on his hands and knees; not by any method.

Above him silently hovered the Millennium Falcon. It was trying to land—it was there to help him. But there was no room for it. He would have to send it away. The summit was a one-person rock, and everything else was sheer up to it.

Down there, they all needed him. This was the only way down. He had to do it.

Spencer woke, his sheets wet and cold with sweat, his body slick and raging hot.

Spencer had two weeks off school. Doctor's orders. She said his body and mind needed to rest and recover. She asked him if he wanted to talk to someone—‘a professional'—about what had happened, but he shook his head and mumbled, ‘Nah, no thanks.' He thought of the mind-bending dreams he'd been having, but reckoned that was probably normal, even if they were awful. He wasn't having them
every
night, just occasionally. He could live with that. They were
alive,
weren't they?

Dad was in hospital for nearly three weeks. His leg was pretty badly crunched up. He had a long operation and came out a bit like C-3PO he said, with metal rods in him where there used to be bone.

Each visit, Pippa would bring a couple of her latest batch of cupcakes for Dad to try, and Spencer would bring the newspaper. One day when they rocked up,
the physiotherapist was there, getting Dad to walk with a frame in front of him, like old people did.

‘That's it, easy now, just a little bit of weight on that leg, Doctor Gray, not too much now...'

Dad's face was white with pain after those first steps. Spencer had to stop himself from going over and grabbing his arm to help.

‘That's good, very good,' the physiotherapist murmured. ‘Just one more step on each leg, and then you can have a break.'

Sinking down on the edge of his bed again, Dad let out a slow, relieved groan.

‘You did well, Doctor Gray. It will get easier; today will be the hardest. But you're going to have to work at it every day to get that movement back.'

‘So there's no chance I can get out of here early, then?'

‘Early discharge?!' She laughed. ‘Not a hope,' she said, shaking her head as she wrote in the clipboard at the end of his bed. ‘You doctors—you're the worst!'

‘It might come back to bite, you know,' the doctor said to Spencer on the morning he was discharged. ‘Traumatic events do have a habit of doing that. You just keep it in mind, okay, Spencer? Keep this,'—she handed him a letter—‘and give it to your mum if you want to talk to someone. If you start to worry about anything, or if you feel your head's getting, you know, messy. Often it just takes one or two appointments to sort this kind of thing out.'

Spencer reckoned if anyone needed to talk to a professional it was Mum. She had been bristly with Dad since the accident, and she kept bursting into tears for no reason. Dad would go to her, put his arm around her, but that seemed to make it worse.

Pippa tried to cheer everyone up, would say things like,
‘I
know! Let's bake cupcakes! Pink and green cupcakes—hospital green!' In the mornings, she'd go
out the front and collect the paper, carefully peel off the plastic wrap and take the smoothed-out news to Mum to read while she had her cup of tea in bed.

Even at dinner, when they were taking turns with the talking stick, Mum would pass.

Eventually, Spencer decided to talk to her.

‘We should never have let you go up there, Spencer. You're—you're a
boy,
for goodness sake!'

‘Mum, I
asked
to go. I wanted to go. I
hassled
to go!'

‘That's not the point.'

‘Well, sort of, it is. It ... it wasn't Dad's
fault,
you know.'

She welled up then.

He waited awkwardly.

‘I'm sorry, Spence.'

‘Sorry, Mum.' He waited, then began again. ‘You know, even the SAR guys agreed: that storm came out of left field. Even the weather forecasters hadn't picked it.'

‘SAR guys?'

‘Search and rescue. The search-and-rescue guys who got Dad out.'

‘Oh, right. Yes.'

‘We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time when the wind got up.'

Mum was silent.

‘And Reg said he's never seen a glider flip in all his twenty-five years of tow-ups. So we were really unlucky.
And
really lucky.'

She nodded, reaching out to him. ‘You're amazing, Spencer Gray, you know that?'

Spencer sighed. ‘Yeah. I'm just amazing. I know, Mum. So...'

‘So?'

‘So will you give Dad a break now?'

She nodded, and squeezed out the last of her tears.

Reg came over to visit, once things had settled down. He had a newspaper-wrapped parcel with him.

‘What's that?' Pippa asked, wrinkling up her nose.

‘Well, I went fishing this morning and the King George whiting were jumping out of the water to get on my line. Must have been casting into a massive school of 'em. Thought you Grays might like a few for ya dinner.'

‘Oh, Reg, that's lovely of you—thank you!' Mum said.

Dad opened a corner of the package and looked impressed. ‘Nice catch there, mate.'

Mum turned to Reg. ‘Can I get you a cuppa, Reg? We were just about to put the kettle on...'

‘That'd be lovely, Suzie,' Reg grinned. ‘Thank you.' He turned to Dad. ‘Maybe you should ... act a bit more like one of ya patients. If you get my meaning ... Sort of lie around ... Isn't that what you'd be telling
them to do? Aren't you meant to be keeping your feet up?'

Dad fairly huffed. ‘Oh, those bloody health professionals, you don't want to listen to everything
they
say—they're a bunch of killjoys, let me tell you.'

‘He's not a very good patient, is he?' said Reg to Mum.

‘Shocking,' she said. ‘He's itching to get back to work. He puts all this crankiness down to the dent in his head but he's always been like that, if the truth be told.'

Spencer snorted. ‘The dent!'

‘Oy!' Dad said.

‘You do have a bit of a dent there now, Dad,' Pippa said, standing up on a stool to get a close-up look. ‘See? It's like a crater!'

‘Don't worry, Dad, the hair will grow back—some day,' Spencer said, straight-faced.

‘Well it might not,' said Mum. ‘According to the surgeon, it might never grow back. Might always be a bald spot.'

‘Well, you could always have that hair replacement surgery.'

‘Oh, gee, thanks mate. What does a man have to do to get a little sympathy around here? Isn't surviving a plane crash enough?'

When Spencer finally went back to school, Mr Petrich devoted the first ten minutes of athletics to talking about what had happened. ‘Spencer's cross-country technique—because that is what it was, people: that was a
real
cross-country course—was incredible. His stamina, his focus, his commitment, were
amazing.
We could all take a leaf out of his book.'

Charlie whispered, ‘You're a
maz
ing, Spence. Amazing!'

Yep. That was him. The Amazing Spencer Gray.

Leon elbowed him. ‘But you're still pretty ordinary on a skateboard.'

Many thanks to:

Meg McKinlay, who, on a long walk in Balingup, was the first person to hear of the idea for this book and gave me the confidence and encouragement to start writing.

Cate Sutherland, for always insisting on better, deeper, truer, scarier! I'm so grateful for her guidance and unerring support.

Claire Miller, Clive Newman, Jane Fraser, Georgia Richter, gun proofreader Naama Amram and designer Ally Crimp at Fremantle Press, for their enthusiasm and commitment and their warm welcomes when I drop by the office.

Zoe Thurner, for her encouragement and help in working through some of the tricky bits, not just in the book.

KH, for hassling me in the best way possible and getting me into the skies above Narrogin on that glorious November day in 2012 and answering a million questions since; and all the pilots at the Narrogin Gliding Club for their generosity in making me feel so welcome.

Jim O'Toole of the Beverley Gliding Club, for patiently answering my many early gliding queries, and Jean-Marc Rivalland, Mark Adams and Harry Berry who also fielded impromptu questions and generously shared their personal flying experiences.

Stew, who fielded many weather questions and bad moods, gave me time and space, read draft after draft, and still managed to serve us homemade pizzas most weekends.

The friends and family who so generously gave me writing time in 2011 and 2012—bless your cotton-picking socks!

My mum, dad and brother, and my two gorgeous children, Jerry and Pippa—my biggest fans!—thank you for your enthusiasm, and your love and care.