Page 2 of Wings Above the Mallee

2

Heath

Heath’s father insisted that the woman who ran the local IGA—Lana, Lisa, whatever—was unfailingly friendly. More like unfailingly nosey, Heath thought, batting aside the sticky PVC strips that hung across the doorway, waiting to strangle him. It was typical of Sean Brennan to look for the best in everyone. Everything. As though life wasn’t intent on shitting all over him.

‘You like the new rainbow flystrips?’ the magenta-haired owner called after Heath as he fought to untangle himself. ‘Sharna brought them up from Adelaide. Make a nice change, don’t they?’

Like he knew or cared who Sharna was, or what colour the useless pieces of plastic were. Pretending not to hear, he strode along the deserted cement footpath, his arms wrapped around his haul of chips and sweet biscuits. On the rare occasions that necessity forced him out of the house, he preferred to do his shopping in the anonymity of Mount Barker. Settlers Bridge was too small; the localsinsatiable in their incestuous need to know the intimate details of everyone’s life. They assumed that Heath moving into the district gave them some sort of right to his story and his privacy. So that meant it was easier to stay the hell away from them all.

But today he’d screwed up, somehow lost track of the endless, miserable days, and not realised that Charlee was due home. He could have spared the extra hour, got Sean to run him to Mount Barker to get a supply of the junk food that might tempt his only child to eat. But Settlers Bridge was closer, and the less he changed his routine, the better he could deal. Today—like every other day—had been set aside for sitting in front of his computer. There’d be hours of listlessly paging through the finance updates, making a few disinterested trades as though he actually gave a damn whether he made money, lost money. And then hours dedicated to watching downloaded videos, hunching over the screen like he was a teenager secretly watching porn. Not a forty-five-year-old man trying to cling to his own wife.

‘You right then?’ he called as Sean appeared from one of the narrow alleyways that joined Main Street to the road behind. He didn’t want a rundown, didn’t want to hear what the local doctor, Taylor Hartmann, had said about his dad’s health. Quite literally, all he wanted to know was that his father was all right. Because he couldn’t deal with anything else.

Sean waded through the shade that lurked beneath the bullnose verandahs fronting the few shops. ‘Right as rain,’ he said chirpily, not allaying Heath’s concerns at all. ‘Sunday clinic at the local GP.’ He shook his head in wonder, the thick, black hair that knocked twenty years off his seventy flopping across the Irish blue eyes. ‘Tell me where you can find that in the city.’

‘At any of the bulk-billing clinics, I’d assume,’ Heath said dryly. ‘The doc’s only in today to make up time, isn’t she? You had to wait long enough to get an appointment.’

Sean fell into step with the slightly rolling gait Heath had learned at rehab to favour his left leg. The handful of other shops in Settlers Bridge were all shut on a Sunday morning and the footpath was almost deserted.

‘Aye.’ His father often adopted an Irish brogue, despite being in Australia for most of his natural-born. ‘Sure, bulk-billing clinics. But it’s not like you get to see your own doctor at one of those, is it?’

‘Wouldn’t know. There wasn’t one back home.’

‘Points for Settlers Bridge then.’ Even after all these months, his father was still trying to extol the advantages of their new location, but Heath had moved to the district with his eyes wide open. It hadn’t been for love of the area, or convenience, or work. He’d needed to escape regional Victoria, and Sean had had a hankering to leave the city and see out his retirement on a hobby farm. His dad had found the property, pretty well halfway between where each of them lived, and Heath had signed the papers without even bothering to look at it. Then he’d called the removalists to pack up what was left of his and Charlee’s lives.

The lives that, more than a year later, were still in boxes in one of the spare bedrooms of the old farmhouse he’d bought.

‘Though perhaps country life isn’t so good if you’re a medico,’ Sean continued. ‘The doc’s run off her feet, the poor lass. Said they couldn’t get a locum in to backfill her while she was on maternity leave, so now she’s putting in an extra day each fortnight to play catch up.’

‘Sounds like a recipe for burnout.’

‘Seems you’d know something about that.’

Heath shrugged. ‘I’m so laid back I don’t even log in till near lunch time.’ Not that he was awake much before that: the dark of night gave his brain far too much cavernous room for thinking, for reassessing his choices, for trying to find a solution to the insoluble. Sleepless nights had to be caught up somewhere.

‘Emotional burnout is a thing,’ Sean said quietly.

Heath pretended not to hear him. He’d become good at that. Or perhaps he’d always been good at it. Maybe things would be different if he’d listened more, been more connected.

‘In any case,’ Sean said, obviously working to keep the conversation upbeat, ‘the doc said her practice is looking to put on a new GP.’

‘Isn’t that because Doctor Clarke retired?’ Seemed that no matter how he tried to stay out of it, local news managed to filter into his brain.

‘Doc Clarke’s not practising anymore, but they’re looking to replace him and add another to give Doc Hartmann a break. Guess the town must be growing.’

‘Not so you’d notice.’

With the shops closed, the main street had a desolate air, somnolent despite the chill that suggested autumn was moving in. Come pension day, though, the town would be fairly hopping with older folk in from the farms to get their groceries. The seniors made a day of it, the broad main street lined with utes that had been birthed in the previous century and the four-wheel drives of retired farmers who were doing all right out of their superannuation plans. They’d shop, then lunch at one of the two pubs, with the Settlers known for its deep-fried heart-attack menu, and the Overland, directly opposite, boasting an actual chef and catering to the more discerning. In the afternoon, the oldies descended onthe bank, which, despite taking up the entirety of one of the two statuesque, double-storey sandstone buildings at the top of the street, was only open one morning and one afternoon each week.

‘There’s the new hardware shop,’ Sean pointed out.

‘To replace the old hardware, directly across the road. That’s not growth.’ Replacing something wasn’t moving forward or moving on; after two years, Heath understood that. ‘Hey, watch it,’ he snarled as a group of teens rolled past on skateboards. His reprimand was unnecessary; the walkway was wide enough to ease a car along.

One of the kids deftly angled his board so it slid along the high edge of the gutter, the timber squealing at the contact.

‘Sorry, dude,’ another boy said, leaping off his board and tapping the tail with his toe so it jumped into his hand. ‘Nowhere else to cruise, though.’ He gave a semi-mocking two-fingered salute before dropping the board, stepping onto it and gliding down the hill toward the bridge.

‘That thing seems like an extension of him,’ Sean marvelled. ‘Remember back when you were into skateboarding?’

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