The White Earth (6 page)

Towards the end of the week, however, William discovered several boxes piled outside the office. They were stuffed with sheets of paper, all fresh and new and smelling of ink. Hovering as close as he dared, he saw that the sheets were stapled into bunches, and covered with dense print. Behind the office door the typewriter and the other machine had fallen quiet. Instead there were voices, not the radio, but two people were talking. To his amazement William realised that one of them was his mother. William couldn’t hear what she was saying to his uncle, but he was sure he heard his name mentioned. He stole away again before he was discovered, and the next day the boxes were gone and the west wing was silent, as if the old man had completed his labours and now, finally, rested.

Thus the days inched by. At the end of each one William would retreat to his bedroom, which was no refuge at all, and try to sleep. It wasn’t easy, with the great weight of the House pressing down around him. Sometimes a chill, dry wind blew outside, but at other times there was only a ringing quiet in which every tiny sound stood out. The settling of timber, the rustle of small creatures in the creepers outside his window, the lowing of cattle far off across the hill. And footsteps, always footsteps, muted, as his mother, or Mrs Griffith, or perhaps even his uncle, moved around on the old floors, until the House sounded full of restless, wandering feet. Only above him, on the second storey, was there utter silence. Nothing and no one moved up there, not even rats or possums. He would stare at the invisible ceiling, and think of the weight of masonry and timber that hung above him, a rotten pile ready to fall and crush him in his bed.

Chapter Five

T
WO DAYS BEFORE SCHOOL WAS DUE TO RESUME, WILLIAM WAS called to the office. His mother went with him. She seemed to have been expecting the summons. ‘This is important,’ she warned, and William readied himself to finally meet his uncle. But instead, waiting at the doorway was a fat man in a baggy corduroy jacket. His face was mottled, and he held a black bag in his hand.

‘Ah,’ the stranger said, fleshy eyes wrinkling.‘So this is the boy.’

‘William,’ his mother announced,‘this is Dr Moffat.’

The man was quite old, with thin wisps of hair combed across a shiny red pate, and he wore big dirty gumboots. He smiled at William genially.

‘I’m your uncle’s GP. He’s asked me to have a look at you.’

William glanced up his mother, confused.

‘It’s a check-up, that’s all. Just do what he says.’

‘That’s right,’ the doctor chimed in.‘Nothing to worry about.’ And he ushered them into the office.

The first thing William noticed was a fire, and the smell of smoke. Then he was struck by the size of the room. It was easily the largest he had seen in the House, taking up an entire corner of the wing. A thrill of recognition ran through him, because this was right, this was what the House was supposed to look like; even the high ceiling seemed in proportion here. In fact, on closer inspection, William realised that the office, like the rest of the building, had once been subdivided into several smaller rooms. The partitions had left ugly marks on the floor. But in an act of restoration the fibro walls had been removed, the fireplace cleared and the mantelpiece re-installed. Winged leather armchairs now clustered about the hearth. There were high windows in two of the walls, with deep bookshelves between, and at the far end of the room stood a huge carved desk, thickly cluttered with magazines and documents, and there were three other tables, chaotically piled with boxes and newspapers and mysterious shapes that bulked under plastic sheets.

The only thing missing was the old man himself.

‘I thought John would be here,’ William’s mother said.

‘He’s resting. That newsletter always takes it out of him. It doesn’t matter. I can find my way around.’ Dr Moffat was busy at a small cabinet that held multicoloured bottles. He filled a glass with something golden, then settled himself noisily in one of the leather chairs before the fire.‘We discussed it all over the phone,’ he said, eyeing William benignly across the rim of the glass.‘A quick examination.’

William looked at his mother. ‘But I’m not sick.’

‘Just go on over. It won’t take long.’

Baffled, William crossed the room. The doctor swigged from his glass, then dropped a hand on either of William’s shoulders and pulled him close, studying his face. Returning the stare, William could see the enlarged pores on the doctor’s nose, and the white stubble on his cheeks. The man smelled of old clothes and alcohol, and his puffy eyes were etched with red.

‘How old are you again?’

‘Nine.’

The doctor turned to William’s mother. ‘Has he ever been sick with anything serious? Spent any time in hospital? Any broken bones?’

‘No.’

‘Hmm.’ He held up a stubby finger. ‘Follow this with your eyes, Will.’

The finger waved back and forth. William watched it. It made his eyeballs ache.

‘Stand on one foot. Your left foot.’

William did. It was difficult to keep his balance.

‘Touch your nose with your right finger.’

William touched his nose.

‘All right. Good. Now take off your clothes for a minute.’

When William was in his underwear the doctor began to prod and probe him, making his muscles twitch. A stethoscope appeared from the black bag and was applied, freezing, to his back and chest. A small hammer was knocked against his knee. A clammy hand scooped his testicles briefly as he was asked to cough. The examiner hummed and muttered throughout.

‘Okay, you can get dressed.’ Dr Moffat returned to his glass for a moment. Then he addressed William’s mother. ‘Well, he seems perfectly healthy to me.’

‘That’s what I told his uncle. He’s fine.’

The doctor mused.‘You know what John wants.’

‘But what about school?’

‘A few months off doesn’t matter at Will’s age.’

‘Isn’t there a law about missing school?’

‘Not if you have a medical certificate. I can take care of that.’

‘A certificate saying what?’

Dr Moffat pondered some more.‘How about glandular fever? Kids are always missing a year here or there because of that.’

William was dressed again by now, and had listened to the exchange in bewilderment. ‘Is something wrong with me?’ he asked his mother.

She sighed. ‘Of course not. This is just … an arrangement.’

‘You’re going to have a holiday,’ the doctor added. He was pouring himself another drink. ‘For the rest of the year.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not? Most kids would jump at the chance. And this way you’ll have time to get to know the place. And your uncle too. Without having to run off to school every day. It’ll be fun.’

‘Oh.’ William wasn’t sure how he felt about the news, only that he didn’t understand it. Then he remembered something.‘My ear. I forgot. It hurts sometimes.’

His mother glanced at him.‘You never told me that.’

William said nothing. There was an ache that came and went, but he hadn’t told her about it because it was the ear she had hit, on the night of the fire.

Dr Moffat beamed.‘We’d better have a look then, hadn’t we?’

He pulled an instrument with a pointed eyepiece from his bag and inserted it into William’s ear. William winced.

‘Doesn’t hurt that much, does it?’ The doctor was squinting into the eyepiece, and the smell of alcohol was cloying.

William steeled himself.‘No.’

‘Well … it’s a little red and inflamed in there.’ He was talking to William’s mother. ‘Probably just a bit of an infection, kids get them all the time.’

But as he spoke he pushed the instrument a little further inwards, and suddenly an incredible pain ignited deep in William’s ear, making him gasp and pull away.

‘Whoa,’ said the doctor. ‘All right. I’ve finished.’

William’s ear throbbed and twitched hotly, and his vision swam with black dots. He needed to sit down. It felt like someone had stabbed his eardrum with a needle.

‘Does it need antibiotics?’ he heard his mother ask, sounding strangely far off.

‘Keep an eye on it. If it gets any worse … Look, I’ll write you a prescription. You can fill it whenever you like.’

William walked away gingerly, and sat in a chair near the desk. Why did he feel so dizzy? Was that what an ear infection did?

Dr Moffat was packing his bag. ‘I’ll drop Will’s medical certificate down at the school sometime next week. I have to visit there anyway to give a few inoculations.’

‘I thought you were retired.’

‘Oh, I am. But I still do little things like that.’

‘Where was your practice?’

‘In Lansdowne. That’s where I met John.’

‘You’re part of this organisation of his, aren’t you?’

‘Oh yes. Have been for years.’

His mother and the doctor talked on, but William’s attention wandered. He gazed around at the walls. Old photographs hung there, brown and faded under their glass. It helped to fight the dizziness if he focused on them. Faces stared out of the frames, men and women posed stiffly for the camera. People from long ago — William could tell from the clothes. One picture showed a breakfast scene on a sunlit porch, a husband and wife and child seated around a table. Another showed a crowd sprawling across a manicured lawn, the trees behind them hung with streamers.

‘…three or four hundred members by now.’

‘And he runs it all by himself?’

‘Well, there’s a committee that helps. I’m on it myself. But he’s always been the driving force.’

‘And the money, that comes from him as well?’

‘There’re the membership fees, of course, but they don’t cover everything.’

‘I didn’t think so…’

The dizziness wasn’t going away. William’s eyes moved from the photos to a large framed map that hung beside them. The paper was yellow and looked brittle with age. William studied lines and boundaries that meant nothing to him, until at the bottom of the map, in ornate writing, he saw the word ‘Powell’. Landmarks began to fall into place. The Condamine River came winding along the left-hand side of the map. On the right side were the Hoop Mountains. Towards the centre of the frame crept the line of a creek, and along it was a small representation of a building, labelled ‘Homestead and Village’. And across the entire empty centre, in letters so big he hadn’t even noticed them at first, ran the words ‘KURAN STATION’.

‘…this place does better than most, even with things dry as they are. John has money, don’t concern yourself about that.’

‘But the House, it’s so … Why does he keep it this way?’

‘Ah, well now. He did restore this office, when he first moved in, and he certainly planned to do the rest. But then there was the business with his wife.’

‘I only heard rumours…’

Another map hung beside the first, this one on clean white paper. It showed the same region, only now the map was crowded with lines. Roads and railways struck out in all directions, unerringly straight, and between them was a dense spiderweb of thinner lines, marking out numbered allotments and farms of all shapes and sizes. Kuran House was merely an anonymous dot, but a sliver of land around the House had been shaded with pencil. It was long and narrow and ran back towards the mountains.

‘…very sorry to hear about your trouble, of course. Must have been hard.’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘Fire is a horrible thing.’

‘Thankfully we could come here.’

‘Well, I know he’s taken a keen interest in the boy…’

William’s vision blurred and he felt he might vomit. When his eyes cleared he saw an amazing thing upon the wall. He’d thought that its splotched look was due to age, but now he realised that in fact the surface had been used as a giant canvas. The images depicted there had been clouded by years of grime and smoke, but he could make out the suggestion of a white horse, and then others, their legs stretched in a gallop. The horses bore ghostly riders dressed in faded red coats. One of the men held a horn to his mouth. Painted fragments of dogs swarmed. And in the background were green patches of countryside, rolling hills and hedges, and something that looked like the ruins of a castle. William understood that he was looking at a painting of a fox hunt. In England.

‘…and you really don’t feel you can cope without it?’

‘It’s just been too much, since the fire, with William and everything else.’

‘I understand. I’ll write you out a script.’

‘I wouldn’t ask, I usually go to the clinic in Powell, but since you’re here.

‘Of course. Prothiaden, was it?’

‘Tryptanol.’

William turned his head and looked at the wall behind the desk. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, like staring at a magic picture puzzle, but then he saw another painting, as indistinct as the first. There were white blobs that he thought must be dogs again, but no, this time they were a flock of sheep. Horses grazed on long grass nearby, their riders leaning easily upon their backs. The colours were different too, brown and muted, and instead of rolling hills and castles in the background, William could discern the vague outline of the House itself. This wasn’t England any more. And off in one corner of the painting, so faded as to be almost invisible, was a collection of shapes recognisable as people only because of their white eyes and teeth. Black men, looking on from the shadows, their expressions impossible to read. Hostile? Fearful?

Phantoms. He blinked and the vision was gone. So was the dizziness, and the pain in his ear had receded. He looked around, feeling as if he had slipped back from a dream. The doctor was scribbling on a prescription pad. He finished with a flourish, then tore off two sheets of paper that he handed to William’s mother.

‘Thank you,’ she said, oddly fervent.

‘A pleasure.’ Dr Moffat glanced happily at William.‘Glandular fever. That’s what you’ve got, that’s what I’ll tell your uncle.’

‘If anyone else asks,’ his mother added, ‘you’re too sick for school.’

‘Glandular fever,’ William repeated, testing the words. He understood that none of this was quite the truth. But on the other hand, why had he felt so dizzy? And what was he supposed to do for the rest of the year, if he wouldn’t be at school?