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Fire in the Sea

The waves lap in gentle persistence not far from my feet. The Spring sun warms the sand around me. A few gulls squark into the murmur of human chatter raised by other adults on the beach. I am alone. There are no children, it is a school day. I come alone every year.

The sea stretches out to the horizon. There is only a gentle breeze topping lazy waves. Far away there is the outline of a container ship. There is a yacht moored near a jetty several kilometres North, otherwise, sea, sea, endless sun-touched sea.

Daniel is out there somewhere. My Daniel. Three boys went into the water, two came out. He was twelve. Nothing appeared in the water to cause alarm. There was a wave slightly bigger than the others, but nothing to raise a parent's concern. It was somewhat more powerful than those before, which brought the boys out. Without Daniel.

There was the usual search with Police and Paramedics, Lifeguards and helicopters.

No trace of him was ever found. It was ten years ago, They tell me that grief goes through stages but I have no idea what that means. I have an emptiness inside me that never goes away. I mask it, I have a wife and two children in their teens and a career.

But it is a mask. Daniel growing up was the most amazing kid. I can remember one time the expression that developed on his face.

“Dad, what’s calculus?”

I took some paper and drew a shape and then filled it with little oblongs and base lines to show what it was about, Then I introduced him to formula. His face lit up like the victorious winner of a battle. “I can do that!”

After a while he said, “It gets more complicated, doesn’t it.” But the glow still lit up his face.

“It gets a lot more complicated, “ I told him, “and you won't do the maths you need in school for a couple of years yet.”

His younger brother Charles and his sister Jenny are good kids, but they didn’t develop the sparkle that ran through Daniel’s life. Everything was a mad adventure with enjoyable and interesting results. He broke his arm when he was nine, and acted as if he was part of the medical team all the way through his treatment, insisting on examining all the x-rays and discussing with the doctor as to how it should be set.

Dr. Sommerton said afterwards, “You’ve got a right one there!”

I had.

My wife, Angela, knows I am here, and she knows why. Well, why to some extent. No doubt there are other people in the world who have experienced a loss as I have. I can’t communicate the hollow inside, the eternal loneliness of a part of my inner self. I have read other people’s description of their grief after the death of a child, the memories as images in the mind, voice and warm touch, rebellions and intense love. I use words to myself but they never encompass my feelings.

I sit in the sand and gaze out over the sea. Daniel is out there. Someone kindly said that his body had returned to the Nature from whence it came. It was not his body I remember so much as the sparkle. And now in the sunlight on the ocean my awareness shifts through several dimensions and I see him sparkling in glory, caught up in a light and love beyond knowing. He is twenty-two now, sparkling in another world. Can you enliven Heaven? I guess he does.

I had not given much adult thought to Heaven until Daniel died. As I child I was taken to church and just accepted the beliefs I was given. In my teenage years I drifted. The whole church thing related to my experience less and less, although we kept the social connection. We were married in church and the children were baptised. We didn’t otherwise attend.

Since Daniel died, I have formed an image of him in heaven, and that has spread to a movie which contains many other people. There are also birds and butterflies and beetles backed by a Welsh choir, but that is just colourful background. There is other background I am shy of approaching. Heaven means God and Jesus. I have not quite got there yet.

I am a literary editor. The years have given me sufficient seniority to avoid dealing with the flood of manuscripts that overflow our mailbox. Even with all the facilities on the internet, there are hoards still wanting to publish a book in print with an engaging cover and mostly with astonishing sales. I now receive proposals that have passed through the filter and help make text marketable.

I have read the Bible. It is a complex document. The New Testament is remarkably compelling, but my mind is a turmoil of quantum physics, the huge universe, human history, evolution and uncertainty. And then there is the human mind.

My mind is distracted by an elderly couple walking by on the firmer, damp sand. They are very old, their clothing shared in matching tones of faded browns, supporting each other hand-in-hand. They must also be here for the memories; I doubt they could achieve anything else.

We had a memorial Service for Daniel, at the school. The whole school turned out for a Year Seven boy. I didn’t think he could have had higher praise. I almost collapsed when two girls and a boy thrust a note into my hands at the end of the Service and ran away. The note was handwritten. A  big red heart, and ‘Thank you, Dan,’ and ‘Love you, Danny.’

Some people suggested a memorial plaque with the Traditional ‘RIP’ Rest in Peace. I rejected it. I couldn’t imagine any place Daniel ended up in remaining peaceful.

I stand and stretch. Memories. I open my wallet and look at the photo there. It is the head and shoulders of Daniel coming fast over a high crest on his mountain bike, his face radiating sheer ecstasy.

At the School Principal’s suggestion, a larger version of this photo hangs in the school foyer. Under it are the words:

Daniel Andrews

2001 – 2013

And a quote, one of his sayings,

“Life is a sort of fire.”  

LEON ATKINSON

I rarely play chess. Martha, my wife, and Grace, my daughter,  aren’t interested. But my son, Michael is an expert. He is an odd boy. He is now fifteen but when he was eleven the school wanted him assessed for autism. The psychiatrist would not accept this and suggested he might be ADHD but they couldn’t diagnose that either. He doesn’t talk much and isn’t keen on crowds but settle him in his own space with a chessboard or a mathematical problem and he is happy.

One weekend at the local Chess Club, his only crowd scene apart from school, he beat a man my age named Leon Jackson, who had said he was very experienced. Leon seemed good-humoured about it, and while other games continued, Leon and I went out for coffee.

Leon said he was a migrant from Poland. He was rather pathetic looking, bespectacled, slimly built and clad in shades of brown. His Polish name was unpronounceable in English, and he had settled on Jackson. His family had been foresters, and he maintained an interest in trees and the development of healthy forests. He worked for a shipping company. I felt sorry for him.

I love the bush, so conversed easily. I told him that I was an official in the Department of Trade and in my spare time I was attending lectures at the university on Nietzsche, a famous German philosopher who wrote ‘Beyond Good and Evil’. When he heard that he laughed.

“Is that where your son gets his aggression from, his desire to dominate?”

“I doubt that he knows anything about Nietzsche. It seems that you do?”

His grin was back. “ I grew up as a wimp, bullied, a shy solitary boy. I escaped to the library in our town and read everything that I could. I read some Nietzsche and was a convert. I would seek power and domination. What that meant for me was that I was no longer bullied. I started to use my brain, to think. I chose chess to develop my thinking. I was a natural. I became the school champion and the bullying stopped because chess is respected in Poland and the teachers let it be known that I was protected, indeed, honoured. I didn’t need to show power in any other way. But life in Poland was hard. When I left University, I decided to migrate to Australia, and here I am.”

I was surprised. “What did you study at University?”

“Economics, which is why I am a modest manager in Australia. You must have done Philosophy, Paul.”

“Of course.” We chatted on. He seemed innocuous. 

A week later I received a frightening message. Michael had been knocked off his bike and was in Casualty at the Children’s Hospital. I arrived at the same time as Martha. He had a broken arm and leg and grazes. His helmet had saved his head. Otherwise, a little cheeky and maybe a month in hospital.

We took him in a chess set, laptop, and a collection of schoolbooks, and altered our routine so that one of us visited every day. Grace, who is seventeen, made a long dog leg of her trip home after school to visit every few days.

On my second visit, I found Leon Jackson sitting beside Michael, playing chess. He smiled apologetically. “I had some free time, so I thought you wouldn’t mind if I entertained him for a while.”

Eight days later Leon was there for the third time, and I asked him to break off the game as I needed to talk to Michael. “There is schoolwork to arrange and family stuff.” He thanked me and wandered off.

When he was gone, Michael said,” There’s something strange about him. He’s a bit over-friendly, and he knows all the openings in chess, but his mid-game is shaky, and he has no finishing attack. I don’t think he’s an experienced player at all. There’s more. He did something silly today and I checkmated him very fast. He was so surprised he swore, I’m sure it was in Russian. I’ve watched a lot of chess games on YouTube, and it sounded Russian.”

“OK,” I said. “Russian and Polish may sound the same. I’ll have a think about him. Now, how is this Zoom tuition working out” We chatted on. On my way out of the Hospital, I opened my iPhone contacts and called Zoe Ponder. I didn’t know who Zoe Ponder was this week, but I told her the whole story, and gave her a description of Leon Jackson and all of his contact locations with us. She said she would attend to it.

Two days later I had a call from a more mature Zoe Ponder. “Leon Jackson. A minor Russian player, probably moving onto you because of the Department of Trade rather than the real thing. He is on his way home. Thank you for your advice, Sir.” And hung up.

When I next visited Michael, I said, “Leon Jackson won’t be visiting again. He has had to go home.” I leaned over and whispered, “You were right!”

Michael wrapped his hand around my head and pulled me close. “Dad, I always knew you were a spy. Will I get into ASIO after Uni.?”

I wrapped my hand around his head and pulled him close. It was as intimate as you could get with a teenage son. I whispered,” Keep playing chess.”

IN THE WIND

The warm northerly breeze drifts across my skin rippling the hair of my body. I wriggle my toes in the dry soft sand and feel alive—a man on a lonely beech in comfortable sunlight. I lift my arms and twitch my shoulders in the magic air. The beech is lonely but I am not. My twin sons play wrestle in the sand, exploring the texture of the sand as much as the strength of their arms. They have exhausted themselves rolling down a sand dune and consume their remaining time at my feet. They are eleven. We do not swim here. The water is treacherous, which maybe why this beech is lonely. I have been coming since I was twenty and have only once seen others here. They were surveyors. It is a secret beach.

I am a photographer. I take no pictures here. The light is a stark brilliance but there is nothing on record to hint at the existence of this place. It doesn’t even have a name. But I have a photographer's eye, and I love the awesome radiance of where the sea meets the sky at the horizon. Just occasionally there is the image of a ship against the terminal haze.

My feet are in gorgeous sand, and behind me tussocks, a few plants, tea tree and a scattering of wildflowers. Screeches of gulls and the chirping of tiny birds in the bushes behind me create a steady symphony with the roll of the waves and the chatter of my boys. Christian and Aiden shout phrases in their own secret language. It is strangely similar to the secret language of my childhood school, but I don’t let them know that, and pretend total bewilderment. They are both curious, aware and observant, which makes parenting as comfortable as riding a dirt-bike blindfolded. Andrea and I used to pretend we had given birth to aliens.

The gusts of wind stir little eddies of sand. This is a special place. The boys were conceived here, though they don’t know that yet. Alison died five years ago to breast cancer—months of gut-wrenching life dominated by a medical madness. We shared in preparing the boys for her death, and did it well, and they survived and grew away from the memory as children can. I was left with the heavy weight of black loss which is still part of me. Some psychologists say that there are stages of grief. Either that’s psychobabble or I’m stuck in one, but it is only a part of me. My work and the boys make up a fantastic life. Alison’s ashes are buried on a mound about forty paces South. She had a lively sense of humour.

“Carl, I want to be buried with just an ancient piece of mining timber to mark the place, with my name burnt in, without a date. My ghost will hang around until some wanderer discovers the post and thinks it is a pioneer's grave.” She grinned.” Perhaps there would be attention from the Heritage Register. And no flowers, leaving a letter sometimes would be nice.”

The boys find letters too difficult, so each time we come we bring a prayer written on rice paper. The boys wrap it around a stone to ensure that it will perish without litter.

We are mostly over the hurt and celebrate being alive now. There are scars of the past. Welts across my back are the ever-present reminders of a whip in a disastrous childhood. I have told the boys that they were caused by a bicycle accident at school and they should always ride carefully. The truth they will never learn. This is a burden of knowledge they will never carry.

I was bullied by my father mostly because I wasn’t a perfect boy and he declared  that I looked sweet. That probably meant that I looked like my mother. Sweet boys grow up, but enough of that. I have boys now and no one would call them sweet. Maybe Riders of the Black World or Foreshadows of the Apocalypse. I have some jokey thoughts. I am free as a breeze. And my mind comes back to the present.

Aiden came across this in a book, “Daddy, what’s all this mean? ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou heareth the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.’”

I told him, “In lots of languages the word for spirit is the same as the word for breath and wind. This is from the old translation of the Bible. Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit of God, saying it’s like the wind. So bloweth is blows, of course, and listeth means, wants, desires. The spirit can go wherever it wants and you only know by the results, like the wind. Mum’s spirit is here. You can’t see but you can feel.” I didn't tell him that listeth came from the same root word as lust. That could wait.

It is interesting how we anthropomotize (am I allowed that word?) spirit. Lots of us picture God as a human-like splendour in the sky, and this is enhanced by the human Jesus as God, but we can only use symbols for the Holy Spirit. It’s a bit of a mind boggler, but I can sense Alison here on this beach.

The boys are identical twins, very identical. I can tell them apart, of course, but most people can’t. We have always had problems with the school. Teachers wanted them distinguished in some way, and we gave in and provided different coloured tops. I’m sure the boys swapped them sometimes just to enjoy the confusion. Last year there was strong pressure to separate them into different classes but I resisted that successfully. Mind you, it wasn’t helped when the school psychologist suggested to the twins that they be separated, and Aiden said, “Why, we’re the same person?” An alarmed psychologist called me to arrange a conference.

I spent an hour educating a school psychologist on the structure of eliciting meaning from children instead of leaping to conclusions based on text-books written by people who had not fathered twins. The boys stayed in class together. They will grow their individual ways as they mature. Puberty looms.

There is one feature of their identity that is ever before me. The boys have Alison’s eyes and nose as if in sculptured relief. Just looking at them is a morph of grief and glory. I am well pleased.

Here we were now, on the sand in the wind. And it is Spirit to me, enlivening, restoring, vitalizing.

The thought of lust comes back. I have a consuming lust for old books. I love the leather and cloth binding, the marbling of the edges, the smell, the old fonts, and the spelling more attractive to my ADHD mind. I have fourteen ancient books, one modestly valuable. Alison shared in this devotion. We had met in a conservator’s book shop.

The boys stretch out on the sand and sun themselves. They know they have only minutes left. A flock of seagulls descend on the beach chasing whatever the receding tide exposes. They peck and squabble over prizes, some edging towards the boys in the hope of remnants of human food. They will be disappointed. We don’t feed birds—a sign of changing times. As a child I would have fed the birds, now we must not interfere with nature. The seagulls haven’t learned that yet.

I don’t take pictures of birds often. Most of my enjoyment comes from beautiful scenery,  family pictures and portraits. I was trained in the hard world of press photography. We worked on scenes that the editor wanted, taking lots of photos from which he could choose. I provided thirty faces of a politician from which he could pick an outstanding leader or a stupid idiot all from the same seven-minute photoshoot. He liked a group of twenty-five people packed together with bodily edges out of the frame to be headlined, ‘Massive crowd protest stirs country’. I got out of it. Lying for a living wasn’t my ambition.

“It’s time to go,” I shout to the boys. They stand up and brush sand off themselves. There is no argument about leaving. They know that the time in the sun is not negotiable. They can negotiate everything else. I suspect the skills are secretly taught at school, but I am old enough to manage a situation so that my real decisions prevail into a disguised win-win. They don’t understand melanoma, but they know I don’t want it. I toss them their beach-towel hooded ponchos, pull on my matching poncho – I did mention we were identical,  and pick up our gear.

It was a good time to move, in any case. I detected a faint change in the margin of the horizon as the azure begins to darken. The wind is turning to the West, and that will bring wilder gusts. We trot up the faint track towards the car, leaving behind moments of grief and joy, love and memories, history and a glorious present, all left as spirit in the wind.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MEMORIES

I was struck by lightning when I was fifteen years old. Walking home in the rain after a soccer match was an enjoyable experience, and that is the last thing I remember. I can’t tell you anything about the event. I don’t remember it. Eleven days later I came out of a coma and faced the medical world. I was tested for everything known to man and a few guesses. I appeared to be normal except for burns on the feet which were healing. However, I was a matter of great interest to the hospital Psychiatrist. I was his first lightning strike. My brain appeared to be normal, but this guy had read that a lightning strike could cause unusual states such as suddenly becoming musical. He drove me mad wanting me to try all kinds of skills, and I said so repeatedly until the Surgeon reluctantly barred him. He was a Doctor, after all.

I could discern nothing different about myself. The doctors said that I was lucky that I couldn’t remember the strike as some people had reported immense pain. They put me into a rehabilitation unit to make sure that I could walk and perform other essential bodily functions, and I was sent home and back to school.

I thought that I had returned to normal, but late that year I had an experience that shocked me. Frank Dabroski was a smaller boy who was slightly crippled and was bullied by some older kids. They called him unpleasant names and threw rubbish at him. One Tuesday after school I found him slumped against a fence crying. I felt intensely sorry for him and flopped beside him, put my arm across his shoulders, and hugged him.

I was flooded by memories. Not mine, but his. I could remember being hit by a bike when I was five and being in hospital; the pain of it. I could remember a series of occasions when my father (his) expressed disappointment in me that I would never be a footballer. I could remember and feel a succession of belittling behaviour from other children. It was awful. I shrank back and Frank was further hurt. I realised what was happening and apologized and held him again. I couldn’t tell him about my experience.

I said to Frank, “Come home with me. You’ll be alright with me.” We went to my place. My mother wasn’t home, but Jean, my older sister, was. I told her what had happened. She is tough, she is the Head of Basketball and widely regarded as dangerous. She picked Frank up and hugged him, then kissed him on the forehead. I was stunned. There were boys in Year 12 who would kill to be hugged by Jean. She said, “Let’s get you a drink.”

Then over the top of Frank’s head she said to me, “I’ll fix the bullying.” Over the next few days the word spread through the school that if anyone bullied Frank, their head would be used as a basketball, without due regard for any body attached.

I said to Frank, “I’ll walk you home, and pick you up in the morning to go to school.” Then I retreated to my room. I sat on the edge of the bed and shuddered. What was going on inside me? What if I knew what everybody remembered? 

I shut down and didn’t touch anyone or feel for anyone. But after a month of this I decided to risk some experiments. I hugged a variety of other boys and girls, and a few adult relatives, The memory flood only came if I was compassionate. Even that was a new development for me. The consequence was simple. I decided not to feel compassionate for anyone.

My brain, however, was not in sync. And every now and again I was caught. It was worse when I touched the person, and, of course, if I felt sorry for someone, I put my arm around them. That’s the way my brain works.

I wasn’t going to a psychiatrist. We had an English teacher in Year 11, Mr. Walker,  who was a really open, friendly guy, so I asked to have a private chat with him, and then told him the whole story and asked him what I should do. His best advice was that either I should steel myself to a life of no compassion whatever, or go into an occupation like counselling where I could use my ability.

I ended up as a Clinical Psychologist. I had a collection of clients for whom I felt no compassion whatever, but quite a few for whom I did. I learned too much about people and abuse and traumas I can’t tell you about, so I achieved a reputation for being very insightful and so I had more clients with complex problems. All of this was distressing because I didn’t only get their mental memories, I experienced their feeling.

The time came that it was overwhelming, far too much for my mind. I was driving home with my mind enmeshed in the horrible distress of human life when I crashed into a light pole.

I woke up in hospital after several days with severe concussion, broken ribs, and a broken leg. Bit by bit I was allowed to move about. I talked with other patients and gradually came to the realization that I was not flooded with other people's memories. I exposed myself to huge compassion, and there was nothing. I was free. I have never felt so much relief in my life.

After a fortnight I was moved to a rehabilitation centre. We had a lounge area where patients gathered and I was happy to sit and chat. One day a man sitting nearby uttered a groan, and I asked him, “What’s the matter?”

He said, “I ama maths person. I have been trying distract myself from the pain by doing maths in my head. I was trying to work out the cube root of 7950 in my head.”

I said, “19.9582.”

“What?”

“That’s the cube root you wanted.”

“How did you do that?”

I thought. “I don’t know. Is that right?”

He regarded me curiously. “Do you do that all the time?”

“I don’t think so, I don’t know.’ I was puzzled myself.

“OK,” he said, “What’s seven factorial?”

“5040,” I told him.

He was showing me close attention. “How much maths have you done?”

“I did statistics in psychology, but that was nothing much.” I was stuck with a curious knowing, or not knowing. How did I do that?

He sprang another question at me. You can’t possibly have prepared this. The phone number here starts 932, Square it.”

“868,624.”

“Jesus! Statistics and mental calculations. You must be able to predict probability in your head.” He buried his head in his hands. But I could have done the same. The car crash had flushed out other people's memories and instead, I was a mathematical wizard. What were the odds of that? I immediately knew, but I won't tell you because I don’t want to be in the Guinness Book Of Records.

As I continued to heal, I began to wonder what I would do with my life. I didn’t want to go back to counselling, but I would have to research for a profession that used probability. I began to imagine: insurance clerk, supermarket buyer? My mind wandered over a list of uninteresting occupations. I began to explore Google.

I first explored betting on the horses, so I can tell you of certain trainers and jockeys to put your money on over a defined pattern of days. There is a high probability of a win every time. I don’t place bets because this is probably unlawful. But I won’t spoil the fun for you. Have a go. Good luck.

Having resisted that I thought of cards. It took me a while, but I am now sitting in an unmarked room in the Casino. There are seven other men at the table: three Chinese, two Malaysian, and an Australian of distinctly Italian extraction. They are all High Rollers, and probably money launderers. They are also very good at probabilities, but not quite so good as I. 

I don't play often, but I win a great deal. We are sworn to secrecy so I can’t tell you about the bets but I can say that $99,000 won’t buy you a chip.

Much of my time is taken up with the study of Quantum Mechanics. The probability of particle activity is lots of fun, and we may yet discover how my brain works.

CURRAWONG   Chapter 1

I was leaning against the veranda post on the family home, drinking my first coffee. We were in the Western District of Victoria, not up to the top social level but our property had survived generations and we had all been to good schools. The veranda was a little faded now. The handrails were patternated by generations of hands, the boards a dusty grey, which I noted and decided to sweep later. There were no staff in the house anymore. Who could afford them?

Beyond the veranda, the brown grass stretched away to the horizon. If you used your imagination, you could see the faintest hint of green, the first shoots of spring grass. There was a large area of bush behind the house. I had played there as a child. I encouraged my children to play there, even though my wife envisioned spiders and snakes in abundance. I had never had more than scratches as a child. I had hunted for beetles. I loved beetles.

Off to the left, I could just see the Matthews house. There was movement on their veranda. That would be Julie Matthews. A woman coarse in features and personality but with a heart of gold. She was tough. Her husband had drunk himself to death, leaving her with two girls and a boy. The boy was twelve, and I gave him a few jobs about the place. They needed the money, though I organised it so that young Greg kept some of it for school and fun.

My grandfather and father ran cattle and cultivated miniature goats. I had left the property to pursue my interest in botany and entomology, which you may have guessed is the study of insects. Aside from my university post, I devoted attention to the furthering of good farming.

The front flywire door banged and my son, Aiden, emerged. He was nine, and always wore pyjamas screwed up as if he had just finished all in wrestling. There was a swell of dust at the bottom of the long drive. In a few moments, a police vehicle came into view. No doubt, Constable Lawrence Twist. His vehicle pulled up outside the veranda, and he climbed out with a grin. “Hi there, just here to check on your guns There has been some shooting down by Harrison’s place. Probably kids, but the Sergeant has me checking all the guns in the district.”

I said, Hi, and tossed him the keys. “You know where the gun safe is. Have a go.” Aiden had produced a slice of toast, “What is he checking on our guns for? We haven’t been shooting anything.”

“It’s his job They can’t just only go to the Conners and demand their guns. It’s probably them though. Maybe someone from the city.”

Lawrence came out a moment later “All good. How’s your brother getting on?”

My younger brother was a bit of a mess. He’d studied philosophy at the university. All that had done was mess his mind. He really was a confused and depressed man. “Look,” Laurence said, “It’s none of my business really, but people have been saying there’s a man over at Cobberton who can really help people sort their heads out. I don’t think he’s a psychologist or anything, but anyway, that’s what people say. I’ll give you his address.” He scribbled some stuff on a page of his notebook, tore it out and gave it to me. 

“Thanks.” I said, “We’ll have a think about it.” That was me putting it out of my mind. But Aiden heard it all and went and told Trevor. Trevor thought there might be something in it worth exploring because nothing else had helped him. I agreed to take him over to see this man.

It was school holidays, and I had taken leave. I was able to drive Trevor over to Coverton. It was a twenty-minute drive. I dropped him at the door of an older house with a camelia hedge, and said we’d be back in an hour. Phone me. He went inside. Aiden and I went and had a milkshake and looked the town over. It wasn’t terribly attractive; a sort of rundown country town with a bit of tourist interest, pleasant enough, but not exciting. After an hour, we went back and parked outside this man’s house. His name was Gordon Harris. After about another half an hour, Trevor came out, looking reasonably happy about life. Aiden climbed into the backseat and Trevor sat in the front beside me. “How was it,” I asked. “A bit strange, He almost seemed to easily accept me, as if he knew a bit about me,” he said. “He asked me questions for a little while and then he told me a long story about shepherds in the early Western District. Apparently, there were lot of small flock shepherds, apart from the pastoralists like us. He knows quite a lot about them. The funny thing is, while he was talking, my mind changed, my perspective. My beliefs have shifted a bit, well, taken a better shape. I want to go back in a week and talk with him again.”

Aiden asked, “What’s a perspective.” Trevor said, “It’s the way you look at things. From where you look at things. If you looked at your Dad from overhead, all you could see would be hair and shoulders. Could be anyone. Come down and look at him from the front, you can see his face and all of him, and say, ‘That’s my Dad.’ That’s a different perspective.”

We returned home and I got busy sweeping the veranda. Then I went through into the kitchen and asked my wife, Jean, what she was up to.

“There’s a meeting in town about Long Covid. It’s a bigger problem than they thought and they’re asking for community support for patients. I said I’d go and see what’s possible.” She added that  Aiden had gone out into the backyard with his drone. “Apparently,” she said, “he has to look at the perspectives of everything and he has the drone whizzing around, taking pictures from all sorts of different angles. 

Then he was back in the house. “Mrs. Matthews is walking across,” he said. I was surprised. She wasn’t normally sociable, but after a few minutes she arrived and said, “ I saw your boy playing with a drone. Could he take a picture of my roof? Something’s dead up there and it stinks and I can’t see.” Well, we all trooped over to the Matthew’s house and Aiden put up the drone. “There’s nothing there,” he said. 

I told her, “It’s more likely it’s in the roof space if you can smell it in the house. May I go into the ceiling and take a look?” She let us in and pointed out the manhole. We assembled a ladder, found a 6-volt torch and a big plastic rubbish bag. Aiden wanted to come up too, but I told him I might mistake him for the dead animal in the dark. I went up. There was a large dead possum that had died right inside the tightest edge of the roof. I called down for a hooked hoe or something similar. After a while the hoe was passed up and I dragged the body out and bagged it. When I was down, she had to give us all the cup of tea, of course, and that finished the morning. Julie Matthews was very direct, she looked at Trevor and said to him, “You are looking more cheerful today.”

“Well, yes,” he said. Things are a bit better.” 

“Oh, good, “she said, “my nephew, Benny, he needs something to cheer him up He set off to be a farmer himself away from me. Hopeless. His uncle’s bailed him out and got him a job down in the city somehow.”

She looked at me. “Are you coming back to run Currawong, or are you going to stay down at the university?” I smiled at her. “A bit of both. And some of my work at the university is of benefit to the property and other people’s properties.” 

She screwed her face up. “I need a lot of benefit on my land. And what about the deer? What are we going to do about the deer? The problem is they ruin the fences. I can’t afford to put up higher, stronger fences.”

“I know,” I said. “There is a government plan, but you know what government plans are like. Some of us are having a meeting next week to take some action.” I paused there. Aiden didn’t like culling. “We’ll figure something out.”

When we returned home Aiden asked me, “Is Trevor gay?”

“We don’t discuss that. Anyway, where did you hear about gay?”

“At school. Gender Awareness.”
Oh God, I don’t think I was aware there were genders at his age. Well, boys and girls, mums and dads, I suppose, and uncles and innumerable aunts.

”Aiden, forget about that stuff. I have to take the tractor to the High Paddock to lay feed. Do you want to come?”
“Can I drive the tractor?”

I looked at him. Nine, and he’d probably run the property. “O. K., for a while, with me behind you, then we’ll put on GPS and drop the feed from the trailer.”

“What happens if the GPS goes wrong?”

I know everything. “We’ll probably find we are laying feed on Mars.”

He put on a face that said, all grown-ups are mad, and ran away giggling.

Trevor was poking about in the bookshelves in the living room. “Do we have a copy of ‘The Lion’ the Witch and the Wardrobe’ by C.S. Lewis?”

“Probably bottom left. Why are you looking for that?”

“Gordon Harris said that I should read it for pleasure and then make a note of the perspectives that it changed. Have you read it?”

I smiled at the memory. “Our Headmaster read it to us when I was seventeen. I have read it several times since. Have fun.” Then I made the connection. We had been to school with Gordon. He would have been two years ahead of me. I surprised Lawrence with this, and said that I would visit Gordon, not to talk about Lawrence, but to renew an acquaintanceship.

Later I visited Gordon. He greeted me warmly. After a bit of chit-chat, he said. “You may not remember at school, I was mad about logic, so I went to university and did a degree in it. I was supposed to sail into business with a fantastic analytical mind, but while doing the degree I became fascinated with children’s fiction and started writing it. I publish under a pseudonym but still make a living doing the occasional job analyzing business systems. The truth is, I am more imaginative than logical. What are you up to? I seem to remember there was some drama in your life.”

“The drama was Aiden. When he was born he appeared to be still-born, and we were standing there in the delivery room shocked when a student said, “I think not,” grabbed Aiden and did some complex wriggling of his body, and he was breathing. Well, they rushed him into an ICU, and he blossomed from there. However, the girl who saved his life was disciplined for an intervention in a birth for which she was not qualified, acting without instruction from the supervising doctor, and a few other things.

I only got to hear about this by chance because we were in and out of the hospital. I managed to contact the student doctor and heard her story. She was Hua Liu, in her final year of Medicine, and was born in China. She told me that the women in her childhood region dealt with delivery with a great deal of movement and real stillbirths were very rare. She had automatically done with Aiden what she had observed and done when she was young. I thought that she deserved a medal rather than discipline. I intervened.

I knew a few doctors and lawyers from school, so I set about stirring the pot. They hooked a couple of senior Chinese doctors into the action, and Hua Liu was shifted to another hospital. However, the supervising doctor felt that his reputation had been slighted, and sued me. It hit the media and some journalist asked, was this racist?, and the media development of this was ridiculous.

Fortunately, it ended up in front of Mr. Justice O’Henry,  who ruled that Hua Liu was a member of an attending medical team and that an actual birth was not simply a classroom, and that her action was appropriate and life-saving, even if outside normal procedure. 

This caused a bit of a stink in some medical circles, I believe, but it was over for us. We have Aiden.”

Gordon grinned. “And Aiden functions well?”

“Remarkably. I had better be getting home. I will come over again.”

When I got back to Currawong, Aiden was sitting on the veranda. “Did you talk about me?”

“We talked about me; you received an honourable mention.” He continued to stare at me. “I promise you,” I said, “The words ADHD and Aspergers never passed my lips.” I stared back at him. “Now that I think about it, Gordon Harris probably is ADHD Aspergers himself. You two would probably get on together really well.”

He shrank back. “Is this a trick to get me to see another therapist?”

“No, no. He’s not a therapist. Trevor and I went to school with him. Go and talk to Uncle Trevor about it. He’s just a friendly man. If you decide that you want to meet Gordon, I’ll arrange it.” Nine years old and too alert to the devious moves of adults. I went inside.

I think it was that incident that defined my future. I needed to be here with Aiden rather than at the University. There was my family, and a property to run. There was a whole community from the Matthews to far beyond that needed my input just as I needed it. 

I also had one further mission. I had to get Aiden interested in beetles.

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