Page 10 of Down the Track
Ethel sloshed a little more wine into everyone’s glasses. ‘The “needing it” bit, that’s what sounded iffy. And why would she need our scrapbook to refresh her memory? She must have taken a thousand photos of her own when she was on Corley, and collected bags of dirt and I don’t know what else besides.’
Jo knew what else. Soil tests, fossil fragments, GPS coordinates … none of which Jedda had a) mentioned or b) provided to Jo. So, yeah, whatever Jedda was up to sounded iffy to her, too. Not to mention the ‘needing it’ bit being patronising and humiliating. Not to mention totally, embarrassingly, true.
‘I wonder why she didn’t come with you?’ said Dot.
Jo’s irritation winked out. They didn’t know.
‘Jedda’s ill,’ she said. ‘She has been for months. She has a dicky heart, and—’ Heck. Was it okay for her to be blabbing like this? ‘I just mean, perhaps she’s been so crook there have been some little communication failures.’ And by little, she meant huge.
‘Being crook can mess with you, that’s for sure,’ said Dot.
Ethel put her hand on her sister’s and gave it a tiny pat. She moved it away swiftly when she noticed Jo had seen the movement.
‘For sure,’ Jo echoed, wondering what else she didn’t know.
Not that it mattered. She didn’t need to know because she didn’t need to be here.
But Dot and Ethel were expecting dinner, and they were sitting right there, all sparkly-eyed and excited to see her. The least she could do was to show some interest in their fossil fossicking stories before she told them—as gently as she could—that there was no point in visiting Corley Station if the site had already been investigated.
She pulled the dog-eared exercise book that the girls had referred to as their dirt diary from her backpack. Bought at a newsagency from back-to-school stock, by the looks of it. Dusty fingerprints marked the pages, and old photographs had been sticky-taped in, but the exposure on the photographs had either darkened to the point where the image was meaningless, or bleached so that just splashes of colour remained—a scarf around Ethel’s hair, blue plumber’s tape around a knitting needle which had found new employment as a dig marker—images more personal than an aid to scientific enquiry.
The notes were what made the diary interesting; pages and pages of a thin, wavery cursive, like on the letter Jo had received inviting her to sit herself down by the Queen. They spoke of days of tramping through browned-off paddocks, the fun of turning over a stone and discovering a fossilised leaf or fish, the excitement of finding something much, much more than what they were expecting, but scanty on the details of the what and the where and the proof.
As source material went, the diary was a slim pretext on which to organise a dig. Digs were expensive, both in labour hours and in transport costs of excavators and shade. So what else had Jedda used last time to gain funding for a dig? The cleaned-up femur remnant was indisputably an important find and her own fierce reputation had probably been enough. But the fact remained that nothing else had been found.
Jedda had sent Jo out here on a fool’s errand.
Dot pulled the scrapbook over to her side of the table. ‘The hours I put into this old thing,’ the woman said, fondly.
The Dirt Girls had only sent the scrapbook off to Brisbane a little while ago, but now here was Dot looking at it like a long-lost child. Did it really mean so much?
‘Is it your writing, then?’ Jo said. ‘I’ve tried to read every page, but there’s some notes where the words have faded, or the cursive runs together so I can’t quite decipher it.’
‘Ethel’s the scribe. I liked to hog the digging in case we turned up something exciting. Wanted to have my hands on the fossil first.’
That was something Jo understood.
Ethel looked a little smug. ‘I did all the research. On the ammonites, the conifer impressions, the shark teeth, the—’
‘Oh, stop your boasting, Ethel. She’s like that with everything. Has to be the first one down the stairs. Has to win a ribbon at the Yindi Creek show for her woodwork. Has to—’
Jo let them continue their sortie down memory lane while she came to terms with what she’d learned. The news that Jedda had conned her was a setback, and the rational part of her brain was sayingPull the pin, Jo. Head back to Brisbane, try to get a refund on the helicopter charter and start writing your resumé. But Dot and Ethel were splashing champagne around and laughing, and were so obviously thrilled she was here, the irrational part of her brain was getting emotional.
When was the last time anyone had been thrilled to spend time with her?
A long time. A long, horrible, lonely time.
Rational brain was saying that taking a week’s annual leave and hiring a helicopter for a charter flight she could not afford just so two old biddies could make her feel good about herself by treating her like she was important, like she mattered, was totally asinine … but.
Irrational brain spoke up before she could shut it down. ‘Ladies,’ she announced, ‘I’ve booked a helicopter charter to fly over Corley Station tomorrow morning to see if we can find the spot where you found the fossilised bone with the croc tooth embedded in it. Do you think that if the three of us go through the dirt diary together, you can show me where you wrote down the directions to where you found it?’ Actually inspecting the site herself would be thorough, not desperate. At least, that’s what she would tell herself when her credit card statement arrived in the mail.
Dot blinked.
Jo narrowed her eyes.Come on, girls, she willed them.Give me something that’s good news. Anything. It’s been a long shitty few years.
‘You do know where you found the partial femur. Where Jedda and her team returned to dig ten years ago,’ she said. Not as a question, so they couldn’t contradict.
Silence.
