‘You can breathe a sigh of relief if she manages to reach the age of say … hmm … seven years,’ he added, feeling maybe he had been too harsh after all and perhaps he should offer a shred of hope. He walked over and put the cup and saucer on Paul’s oak desk and it balanced uneasily where the leather met the wood. He put his bag on the floor, unclipped it and pulled out his stethoscope and put it against the baby’s back. ‘Hmmmm,’ he said noncommittally, then added, ‘Babies dehydrate quickly and get brain sickness, especially in this merciless heat,’ and he flipped Gracie over while she was still on Paul’s lap. He listened to her chest and put his hand against her head. ‘Is she lifting her head?’
Paul nodded no.
‘Is she holding her own weight at all?’ and again Paul nodded no. This was a concern.
‘Has she lifted her head at all?
‘I told you already John, no, she’s so tiny. I don’t remember Edie at this age. Maybe it’s too soon for head-lifting.’
He could hear the panic in Paul’s voice and said calmly and quietly, ‘Well Paul, it could be just that she’s small and she was early. But I’ve seen this before in the early ones.’
‘Come on, John, spit it out,’ said Paul.
‘There’s nothing to spit out — not at this stage. We just need to wait and see, but she could be damaged from the early birth.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Paul emphatically. ‘She’s perfect.’
‘I hope so, Paul, I really do.’ John left his cup and saucer on the desk, picked up his bag, put his stethoscope in it and walked to the doorway.
Doctor John Appleby turned to leave and as he always did he stopped and carefully put his bag on the ground as if he had just thought of something very important. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his brow. By God it was hot this year. He rested his hand against the door jamb to harness its strength and said, as though he had only just thought of it and it was the very first time he had ever made any comment on the subject, even though he said the same thing every week and Paul had become so accustomed to the words that he mouthed them in unison with him:
‘Don’t you think it’s time, Paul, to take the ugly timber boards off her mother’s room?’ He tried to say it in his kindest voice, knowing he was picking at an open wound.
Paul snapped, ‘No John, I do not!’ As he always did.
So John shrugged his shoulders, as he always did, because what else was there to do?
The sun fuelled itself on Paul’s anguish and aching and by afternoon it was blistering the tar and scorching the trees, incinerating the leaves to dust and showing no mercy to the gasping earth or the people who tried to live on it. It dried up the mines and shrivelled their walls, making them brittle and chalky. Choked dry by the sun, the mines no longer breathed their cold air into the town in the afternoon. At four o’clock the men emerged coughing mine dust from their lungs, their eyes red and stinging with grit and their clothes drenched in sweat.
Paul had to keep the sun out. It sucked the breath out of his lungs, and if the heat got into the house any more it would suffocate him and kill the baby. He felt that every breath he took was a breath stolen from Lucy, a breath denied to her. He couldn’t lose Gracie as well, no matter what the doctor said. He couldn’t lose the last gift Lucy had given him and something had to be done. The doctor was right, the heat could kill a tiny infant and Gracie even more so because she was weak and ill. But Paul couldn’t say any of this to John. Paul looked away from the doctor and stared out the window at the hazy air.
John Appleby sighed. The man was losing his brain. His wife dying and a sick child was too much for him. Such a shame in a fellow who had once been so smart and quick.
‘Have you ever been to Coober Pedy, John?’ asked Paul, looking back at him.
‘No, can’t say that I have.’ Yes, the man was losing it. If that baby survived, which it wouldn’t, it was likely to be an orphan.
‘No, neither have I,’ said Paul.
John sighed, picked up his leather bag, shut his concerns safe inside, secured the clip and set off.
Paul watched from the window as the doctor walked down to the front fence, his bag swinging in one hand, the other hand wiping the sweat from his neck with his handkerchief.
When the doctor had reached the letterbox and headed off down the street, Paul dipped his nib into the ink and wrote:
I am advertising for four miners and I am willing to pay good wages.
He leant back and looked at what he had written. That would do it. That would get him workers straight off. He had never come across a miner who would take tributes if he could take wages. He kissed Gracie’s soft downy head and scratched out what he had written and started again.
Wanted.
Four Miners.
Immediate start.
Full day’s pay — no tributes.
Monday 18th, 7 a.m. Cottingham Residence, Webster Street.
Then he crossed out the four and wrote eight. Tomorrow he would get his clerk Jensen to pick it up, copy it and run over to The Star and The Courier.
Eleven
The Miners
18 December 1905, when it is agreed that Mister Cottingham has lost his marbles.
They wouldn’t come down the pathway even though he’d gone out and beckoned to them from the front verandah. They just shook their heads and then one of them called out that they were right to wait where they were. Paul, Beth and Edie stood watching them
