Page 5 of Wings Above the Mallee

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 ofhumanity, 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.

4

Heath

Heath closed his fingers around the cool steel barrel of the rifle. With blatant disregard for South Australian law, he kept it against the wall alongside the back door instead of locked in a gun safe, the ammunition and bolt separated from the firearm. What did he care for the law? It hadn’t done right by him, provided neither protection nor justice. The living continued and the innocent were gone.

He almost made himself grin with that one. Sophie would have given him shit about calling her innocent.Sophie.So vibrant and alive. Full of quick wit and caustic replies.

And now, so dead. Because that was life: it was all about death, just one long, downhill slide to a fucking inevitable end that probably felt something like relief when it finally came along. Though Sophie hadn’t looked like she’d greeted death with relief. Hadn’t sounded like she appreciated the liberation from a life that she occasionally complained about.

It should have been him.

Hand around the barrel, he jerked the rifle up, catching the timber stock. He didn’t shoot often and never for fun. But the screaming had to be taken care of. It was doing his head in.

To his surprise, as he stepped outside, he realised the day was drawing to a close: the gloaming, his father called it, apparently happy to swap his Irish ancestry for Scottish when it suited. Where had the hours gone? And did it matter? It was just another day in an endless, joyless, pointless series.

Heath caught himself, shook his head grimly. He knew he was glorifying his marriage, ignoring the fact that Sophie had suggested, only a couple of months before he let her die, that they consider divorce. Not because they hated each other; no, it had never been that. But because their marriage was ordinary.Theywere ordinary. Over more than twenty years they’d had dreams, fights. Budgeted some years, splurged others. Sworn undying love and been tempted to stray.

But now he was no longer ordinary, he was different, special: a widower, piteous and pitiful. Did embracing that status, never allowing himself to move forward, somehow atone for failing to appreciate what he and Sophie had had, mundane as it had seemed?

‘You taking care of that?’ Sean rounded the corner of the house as Heath stepped from beneath the low verandah into the last of the daylight. He knew his dad loved the house, thought it was something special, but as far as Heath was concerned, the place was fairly standard. The old farmhouse had been remodelled sometime in the 1960s, the raw stonework rendered and painted cream, the window trims a cool olive green, which mirrored the surrounding scrub. The traditional small, double-sash windows—designed to keep summer heat out and winter warmth from the open fireplaces in—had been upgraded, and now large, slidingglass windows looked out on to the farmyard, where Sean would have been pottering, playing at his dream of being a farmer.

Heath hefted the rifle, as though his father hadn’t noticed it. ‘Yep. On it.’

Sean held out his hand. ‘I’ll do it if you want.’

‘It’s okay.’ A sudden impulse seized him—a longing for fresh air. ‘Wouldn’t hurt me to take a walk.’

‘I’ll join you.’

Sean looked unusually grim and Heath scowled. ‘Don’t need to babysit me, Dad. I’m not thinking of topping myself.’

‘Not always about you, son.’

Heath winced. When had he become so self-absorbed? His father’s loss was at least as great as his own. Dad hadn’t lost only his daughter-in-law but, in the cruellest twist of fate, it had been on the seventh anniversary of the death of his second wife, Jill. Yet still grief hadn’t driven Sean back to the bottle, a demon he’d vanquished more than half a decade ago. Heath had momentarily considered suggesting going to the cafe rather than the pub when they’d been in Settlers Bridge a couple of days earlier, but he’d backed off. Dad knew how to handle his own issues, didn’t need Heath mollycoddling him.

Both men grimaced as the scream echoed from the stone buildings. Sean tipped his head toward the paddock beyond the sheds. ‘Better get on it then.’

They strode down the yard, Heath pretending to himself that his limp didn’t make him slower than his seventy-year-old father, then struck out across the rutted ground of a paddock, toward the hazy line of the scrub. A plane buzzed low overhead and Heath realised he’d been dimly aware of it circling. Like so much, it had failed to penetrate the thick fog of grief that greyed his days.

‘That’ll be the doc’s mate,’ Sean said.

---