Maude’s mother chimed in. “We agree with everything she said. This is unexpectedly wholesome.”
“Bit early to jump to that conclusion, love. I don’t need your permission to?—”
“Well! Look at that! That’s time!” the lawyer interrupted, tapping her watch. It had been an hour. “Isn’t this a little slice of heaven?”
Maude pulled her aside, out of Rainbow’s earshot. “I mean this in a respectful way, so don’t be offended, but are you on the spectrum?”
“Not as far as I know. Do you want me to be?”
“I don’t care. I’m just glad you’re not her usual type. She’s dated some real assholes. You’re the safest person she’s shown interest in.”
“She did date you, after all. We’re not... But thank you for bringing all these people into my house to laugh at my friendship with your daughter, to try to put a box around it, to make it something they can understand.”
“Be careful,” Maude warned. “I’m not the one who’s going to hurt you.”
35
CRANE COUNT
Friday night the South Cairns Cutters Women’s team battled it out in their finals round one match against the Manunda Hawks for a place in the semi-finals. Nev watched the match on telly at the pub in the Lionheart Hotel with owner Peggy.
It was Debbie’s night off and her nephew hadn’t arrived so Nev was bartending.
The camera crew and whoever was editing in the booth that night had a bit of a spank on Ron; the camera loved her. It kept catching her at just the right moment, sliding a daisy cutter to steal the ball, running backwards or sideways, winning a ruck by slapping down the ball over her opponent’s head. Ron looked good in a uniform, but she looked especially good in her footy uniform because it showed off her knees.
Nev was not disappointed when the Cutters lost, because now Ron would have free time again.
As usual, eighty-year-old Peggy wore a sleeveless purple batik sundress down to her calves. Nev refilled Peggy’s plastic cup with the cheap rosé they sold at the pub. “On the house, engaged lady.”
“Cheers.”
“Have you an idea what song you want us to play when you walk down the aisle?” The Wild Drovers had volunteered to play her wedding for free as a present to her and her fiancé, Tom.
Peggy’s eyes got a misty look in them, and she touched the back of Nev’s hand. “Do you know the Scottish folk song, ‘Mairi’s Wedding’? My parents walked down the aisle to it eighty-four years ago.”
“Of course.”
“They were a beautiful couple. He was a pilot, you know, died in the war. RAAF. Such a shame. It’s always the good ones. My mum never remarried. Mother-in-law planned my first wedding sixty years ago. I always said if I married again, I’d have that song.”
“You got it, sweetheart. You’ll have a gorgeous day.” Peggy deserved a perfect wedding. She deserved a good man like Tom, the retired corporate man who now painted ceramic figurines of mice for a hobby, after her first husband brought an explosive temper back from Korea.
The next evening, a warm breeze stirring the new grass in the pasture, Nev walked down from the lower paddock through waist-high sedge until she reached the edge of the lake. Reg’s annual Crane Count team stood gathered in one of Johnson’s cattle pastures. Towering over the others, Ron was impossible to miss. This was not their first time counting for the conservation survey, but it was the first time they had invited her to join them.
Luckily, she had remembered binoculars, and to jump over the barbed wire fence. Lake Tinaroo looked odd—as the manmade product of a dam it wasn’t strictly speaking supposed to be there—but what the human eye found strange about it was that it was young. Sixty years hadn't been long enough for erosion to shape the banks, so where the field met the waterflowed as seamlessly as a dream. There were no real edges to this lake. It looked, Nev decided, like lowland that had been flooded. It looked temporary. Perhaps that was why it was so beautiful.
Climate change made storms stronger and more unpredictable, floods in Queensland bigger and more destructive every decade. It was dangerous to live near the Barron River, which flooded December to March.
Ron and Rainbow sat on either side of her in the tall grass. Rainbow clutched the binoculars Ron had given her for Christmas. The four of them waited statue-like for sunset to fall over the western mountains, forced by the covert nature of their mission to admire the scenery in silence.
Cloud-split rays moved across the valley until grass warmed like glowing blond hair.
In 1959 the Queensland State government completed construction of a forty-five-meter concrete dam on the Barron River, raising water levels forty-two meters. Water inundated the valley so rapidly that the flood swallowed heavy construction equipment, including trucks. In the center of it all, the small township of Kulara disappeared under the surface of the lake. A few hundred villagers had relocated to the nearby town of Lionheart.
Tinaroo lay bright and still as a mirror. Like the wreckage of some sunken fleet, the gum trees of Kulara broke the water's golden surface with hundreds of crooked black arms. Kulara's underwater forest would be rotting and reaching for the sky as long as Nev was alive.
The hillside leading down to the lake felt like a graveyard—not a crypt, but a cool breeze and a final resting place, no souls in sight save Johnson’s cattle and a lone pelican on a dead tree.
Suddenly the valley became dark and cold.
