3 AMELIA

3 Amelia

‘Men are dicks,’ Amelia confided to her co-pilot. ‘Not their fault, though. It’s genetic.’ The outburst was a result of the argument she’d had with one of the other pilots at the Keith Airfield. Mark was the kind of guy who knew everything, even if most of it was via hearsay. And he reckoned he knew how she should look after her aircraft. The Jabiru manufacturer might have been in agreement with him: they recommended running the plane on AVGAS. But Amelia knew from experience that the AVGAS available in South Australia was different to the Queensland version, and she wasn’t about to have her engine burned out: normal high-octane fuel was perfect for her Jabby. The disagreement had been two days ago, but like Dad said, she was a silent brooder, capable of nursing a hurt for a few days before reacting.

Ignoring her outburst, Biggles huddled further back into her fur-lined hood.

Amelia squinted as the glare through the windscreen of the Jabiru made it hard to pick out whether the possum’s eyes were even open. She caught a tell-tale glinting reflection of sky, though she’d never know whether Biggles was paying attention or merely blinking in annoyance at the too-bright daylight.

Despite a couple of years of practice, moving to the next town was becoming increasingly tricky. Though Biggles flew in zen-like silence, Dusty was a backseat driver, generous with her criticism, and currently making it clear that she thought it time they touched down.

Dusty had been a dehydrated, barely feathered ball of grey fluff when Amelia picked her up on the side of a dirt track more than a year ago. There were neither trees nor magpie families anywhere nearby, so Amelia suspected the chick had been taken from the nest by a raptor and struggled free only to succumb to heat and starvation, alone on the road.

Twice Amelia had returned to the area with the rehydrated chick, hoping Dusty’s strident outrage at being held captive would summon the parent magpies. Unsuccessful, Amelia had set a cage in the backyard of her rental and opened the door before hastily retreating to the house. Dusty had tottered across the parched grass, hopped onto Amelia’s foot and, using claws and beak, determinedly ascended to her shoulder, nestling into the crook of her neck. Despite Amelia’s best attempts at not humanising the animal, Dusty had been determined to adopt her.

Eventually, elegantly clothed in her black and white feathers, Dusty had learned to fly. As she had become more confident, she’d roamed further and occasionally stayed away a couple of nights. Regardless of the weather, Amelia would leave the back door open, so she’d hear the bird come home. Not that there was any risk of missing her arrival: she’d fly to Amelia’s shoulder, rubbing her beak and head against Amelia’s face in a cat-like manner as she chirruped and piped her news.

Initially, Amelia had prided herself on travelling light: no possessions meant no memories. But with the addition of Biggles and Dusty, not only was the minute rear hold of the Jabby crammed full, but she’d had to accept Gavin’s offer to run some of her belongings to Settlers Bridge. Though it meant a slight detour, Gavin was passing through on a six-hour round trip to the hospital in Adelaide. Amelia’s jaw tightened. Since their flight over the whales six months earlier, Gavin had steadily declined. The hospital visit was irrefutable evidence that he was getting worse and that meant she needed to distance herself from him. But accepting his offer of help was a way of prolonging their contact without breaking her own rule—that she mustn’t allow herself to care. She had to cling to the fact that her heart was nothing but a pump, a muscle, pushing blood around her body so her lungs could crack apart with each unwanted life-giving breath. It no longer existed to love, to care, to hope.

Amelia scanned the ground for landmarks. And dams. Always dams and watercourses. She liked the look of this land: sandy and arid, the sheep troughs in the paddock would be plumbed to the mains. The porosity of the ground and the low rainfall would make it impossible to keep water in dams. The perspective from the plane flattened the hills and shortened trees into bushes. The land became a playmat of gold, green and brown squares, the farmhouses and sheds a child’s toys.

She swiftly cut off her thoughts and banked left. Dusty carolled loudly. ‘All right, hush up back there,’ Amelia muttered, adjusting her headphones, which she wore over one ear only. In the uncontrolled airspace over the patchwork of farming land there was no need to radio in her position, but the Pallamana Airfield wasn’t far away. After years of flying in the vast openness of the far north, even a little air traffic made the sky seem congested and she’d kept half an ear on the constant radio chatter as pilots called in their intentions.

The iPad wedged in front of the utilitarian control panel showed her flight details, along with satellite images of the runway she was looking for. She hadn’t needed the device to navigate from Keith: while Gavin’s Cherokee utilised IFR—Instrument Flight Rules, which pilots colloquially referred to as ‘I Follow Roads’—navigation for the Jabby relied on Visual Flight Rules. The Dukes Highway between Keith and Murray Bridge was almost dead straight, the best flight plan a pilot could want. From there, the Murray River had been a spectacular landmark as she followed its course to Settlers Bridge, where her newest temping job lay.

Taylor Hartmann had arranged for her to hangar the Jabiru at a farm a few kilometres out of town. Although Amelia could now afford the hangar fees of around seventy dollars a week, old habits died hard, so the offer of free parking for the Jabby was too good to refuse. The thought of rekindling her friendship with Taylor tightened Amelia’s grip on the joystick, so she pulled the trim lever all the way back and let the Jabby go into a glide. The plane would hold altitude for about five kilometres, giving her plenty of time to get the lie of the land. They’d met more than a decade earlier, when Taylor had briefly interned with the Royal Flying Doctors and made a call at the cattle station. Somehow, the city-turned-country doctor and the dyed-in-the-wool station hand had clicked, and they’d corresponded ever since. They’d shared their stories of falling in love, their plans for weddings. And, more recently, news of deaths.

Amelia pushed her nervousness away. Taylor wouldn’t pump her for information. Besides, it had happened three years ago. A lifetime. For some.

‘Righto, ladies, I’d say this is the strip we want,’ she announced as she spotted the tell-tale T-shape of the four-hundred-metre-long runway. Like many private country strips, this one was marked every fifty or so metres by twenty-litre ag chemical drums, the white plastic easily visible from the air.

She banked left again, doing a circuit to check for obstacles, and glancing at the ragged grey remnants of a dirty windsock for direction. Sheep grazed the edge of the strip, and Amelia did a second, lower pass, making certain they ambled away from the runway, moving in single file along a narrow-trodden path toward the dark smudge of scrub.

The nearest farmhouse was probably a kilometre distant, the unpainted silver roof a bright splash surrounded by a circle of beaten red earth driveway. Amelia did a flyby, getting her bearings as she checked the sky and the radio for other aircraft. The roof on the house must be new: the sheds in the yard were stained and patterned with stripes of rust blood, and she could see straight down into a circular stone tank that would once have supplied water to the property but was now likely used for rubbish disposal by burning off. In the town-before-Keith, newly countrified hobby farmers had been outraged when they realised there was no rubbish collection service. Amelia didn’t have much empathy. On the station, you made a mess, you disposed of it. No one waited around to pick up after you.

Apparently, there was also no one to pick you up when you were that mess.

Tall patches of last year’s wild oats edged each stubble-filled field. The wind brushed the willowy plants in a golden comb-over, so there was no need for a windsock as Amelia brought the Jabby lower.

She lined up the runway, bringing the throttle back up a touch to lift over the fence that paralleled a dirt road. Pitched the nose a little so she wouldn’t go in too steep. With full flaps down at about fifty knots, the wheels kissed the ground smoothly enough. But the short runway was rough, the red dirt corrugated and potholed, and Amelia didn’t need Dusty’s backseat protests to let her know it wasn’t her finest landing ever. She gritted her teeth, praying that neither of the fat rubber tyres hit a ditch deep enough to slew them sideways, or even flip the small plane before she had it slowed. Though she’d learned to fly on rough bush strips, the airfield at Keith had spoiled her; she was a bit out of practice and the jolts and bounces shot darts of alarm though her.

Using the foot pedals to control the aircraft on the ground, Amelia taxied toward the hangars that gleamed dully against the surrounding olive of the scrub. Both massive roller doors were shut and the place looked deserted. Amelia glanced at her wristwatch: she was a little later than she’d planned, yet there was no sign of Taylor. As her friend had both a medical practice and a baby to wrangle, that probably wasn’t surprising. And Amelia was in no rush, though Dusty had changed her song from a melodic warble to the harsh, strident call that demanded food, her go-to soothing mechanism whenever she was unsettled.

Amelia cut the engine and unlatched the door, letting in a wash of welcome warmth. Up high, the pristine blue sky equated to an icy chill, and the temperature on landing never failed to catch her by surprise. She unzipped her jacket, then twisted to kneel on the utilitarian, barely padded seat, reaching behind it to unlatch Dusty’s cage. The bird strutted free, made a clumsy leap onto Amelia’s shoulder and touched her strong, cruelly pointed beak to the woman’s lips.

‘Kisses,’ Amelia said with a grin. ‘Forgiven for the dodgy landing, am I?’

Dusty gave a low squawk of apparent agreement, fluffed herself up, then launched out of the open door, eager to explore their new surroundings. Although Dusty was technically unreleasable, having become too familiar with humans, Amelia knew that—provided she wasn’t foolish enough to expect it to happen within any timeframe that might actually suit her—the bird would come back when she chose.

‘And you, missy,’ Amelia said to Biggles in the passenger seat. ‘Time for you to snug down. How about you borrow Dusty’s cage for a while?’ She lifted the hood from the seat, taking a moment to tickle the possum under the chin. Biggles wrinkled her pink nose and blinked her dark eyes sleepily. Amelia carefully closed the soft cocoon inside the magpie’s cage. Like Dusty, Biggles never wandered far, but there was always the risk of a predator taking a fancy to the grey bundle of soft fur.

Biggles had come into Amelia’s reluctant care two towns back, saved by a dog attack. Clinging to the possum injured in the attack was a tiny, wide-eyed, scrap of fluff. Amelia had bundled both animals in her shirt and flown them to the nearest vet clinic, several towns away. A post-mortem revealed that the adult possum had been dying an excruciatingly slow death from internal bleeding caused by bait poisoning. That meant there was a grave risk the joey had been poisoned through the mother’s milk and would need long-term daily medication to combat the slow-acting toxin. As Amelia was the only wildlife carer for hundreds of kilometres, Biggles’ best chance at survival was in remaining with her until she was big enough to release back into the wild.

Two years later, the possum was still with Amelia.

The air outside the small aircraft was pungent with the smell of sheep. Amelia didn’t mind—sheep, cows, horses; she’d take the smell of any of them over the bitumen and petrol stink of towns. Or the city. She rarely set foot in one, and had no interest in increasing that frequency.

The breeze had stiffened, bending even the short stalks of the crops, so she reached across to the centre console and pulled the small T-shaped knob that engaged the handbrake. She eyed the tie-down kit: an excess of caution never hurt anyone, but she could tell it wouldn’t be easy to screw the spiral-shaped peg into the limestone soil. She’d have to get the Jabby hangered before the wind picked up anymore. As she retreated from the cabin, her gaze swept across the vast reach of the paddock to where the road met a dirt track into the property. Still no sign of Taylor. Amelia took her phone from her jacket, realising with a frown of annoyance that she should have checked it ages ago. With no satellite coverage on the family property, she’d been accustomed to relying on a CB radio, so a mobile phone was nothing but a novelty. She’d never get used to the way that everyone south seemed to live on their phones.

Taylor had messaged hours earlier—before the Jabby had even taken off from Keith—suggesting Amelia confirm what time she was heading over, as there was a good chance her surgery hours would run late. Date-stamped several hours later, a second message asked whether Amelia had left Keith yet.

Amelia grimaced at her own disorganisation, tossed her jacket onto the Jabby’s seat and dialled her friend. There were no bars of reception, which didn’t surprise her in the least. She had been warned that Telstra was the only carrier with any chance of showing up in regional areas, but she’d gone with a cheaper provider. After all, she had no real need to stay in touch with the world. It was too late, now.

She clicked her tongue in irritation. There was no choice but to head to the farmhouse and hope they had a landline. She’d tuck away the Jabby first, though. The three-metre-wide door on the first hangar opened reluctantly, screeching on unoiled rollers. The hangar was empty except for small mountains of red dirt in the corners, where rats had evidently burrowed beneath the concrete slab and up against the galvanised metal in search of food or shelter.

‘This’ll do nicely.’ Amelia often joked—to herself—that she’d taken on Dusty and Biggles only so she wouldn’t be talking to herself. But that wasn’t the whole truth.

She stepped back outside, taking a moment to survey the land, appreciate the silence that wasn’t. There were no sounds of humanity , but the mallee scrub was alive with other creatures: a cartwheel of noisy galahs spun above her head and the sheep grumbled, shuffling through the crisped remnants of a crop.

Her chest eased a minuscule amount as the openness embraced her. It was a slower pace out here, closer to nature. But that also meant there was nowhere to hide from her thoughts.

Perhaps that was all right. Maybe sometimes she needed to allow the memories, hold them close when she knew she was alone—because she refused to share them. That would be like lending a book or photo album that would be returned crumpled and dirty, no longer solely hers. Anyway, it was easy to avoid telling anyone what they didn’t really want to know. Or perhaps they did, but only so they could revel in the fact that her reality wasn’t theirs.

Amelia took a deep breath, her gaze searching the hectares where pewter stubble blended perfectly with the last hour of April evening sunshine. The platinum hour.

An unearthly scream rent the air.