Pool (9 page)
Authors: Justin D'Ath
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Health & Daily Living, #General, #Social Issues, #Juvenile Nonfiction
26
Wolfgang packed the wing in a CD mailer and took it to the post office. He paid extra to send it registered mail, then hesitated when filling out the slip. Value of goods: $10, he wrote. Even though it was registered, Wolfgang felt insecure as he watched the counter attendant push the slim package containing the precious black wing down a chute in the wall.
I should have written
Priceless,
he thought.
It was his day off from the pool. His
life off
from his other job. He wasn’t having anything more to do with Audrey after the way she behaved the other night. She was too weird. Lying about her headache, then sneaking off to the cemetery and staying there past midnight. What was she, a vampire or something? Her father could have his four hundred dollars back. It had never felt right accepting the money anyway. Mr Keith ‘Furniture King’ Babacan would just have to learn that some things could not be bought at any price, and a boyfriend for his daughter was one of them.
The day was sunny, not too hot, and windless. Wolfgang persuaded his mother to drive him to Milkmaid Flat, halfway out the Maryborough road, and drop him off. He had only been there twice before, both times with his father back when his father still collected butterflies (and still had a mind). There was a swamp, dry at this time of year, and several hectares of scrubby grassland ringed by wattles, ironbarks and yellow-flowering gum trees – good butterfly country.
His mother left him at the roadside and promised to be back at four o’clock. As well as his collecting bag and the big bamboo-handled net that had been his father’s, Wolfgang had brought two traps. He baited them with strips of cloth impregnated with his special formula and left one of them at the edge of the trees. He put the other one among the pampas grass in the centre of the dry swamp. Then he went off with his net.
He’d brought sandwiches and an apple, which he ate sitting in the shade of a grey box eucalypt shortly after midday. As he chewed, he found himself thinking about Audrey, wondering if she was back at the pool today. He pictured her lying under the big peppercorn tree with her hat over her face. Hippo-girl. No wonder she was overweight – all she did was lie there all day listening to music. Why did she even bother going to the pool?
It became quite hot in the afternoon. By three-fifteen Wolfgang had had enough for the day. Despite the promising weather, he had not caught anything of interest – a few little blues, a grass yellow, a well-travelled monarch – all of which he released. There was an admiral in one of the traps, but like the monarch it was not in good condition. Wolfgang expanded the funnel leading into the large, wire-framed box with its translucent skin of mosquito-netting and flushed the insect out.
‘Hope you don’t get a hangover,’ he said, watching the admiral fly jerkily off through the reeds.
His mother was twenty minutes late.
‘Sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘Dad had to go to the doctor and we waited nearly an hour to get in.’
‘Is he okay?’ Wolfgang asked.
‘Nothing too serious. One of those rose thorns yesterday left its tip in his thumb.’
‘I told him he should be wearing gloves.’
Sylvia sighed and ran her fingers along the inside of the steering wheel. ‘You know your father. Stubborn.’
Senile, Wolfgang thought.
27
It wasn’t until after dinner, while they sat waiting for the news, that Wolfgang’s father told him someone had phoned him.
‘When?’ Wolfgang asked.
‘Today sometime. This afternoon, I think.’ Leo stared hard at the television. ‘You weren’t here.’
‘Who was it?’
The old man stretched one of his rubbery ear lobes. ‘I can’t recall, exactly,’ he said, frowning. Then his face brightened. ‘Maybe I wrote it down.’
Wolfgang went to check the message pad. Two words were scrawled on it in his father’s spidery handwriting.
‘What’s a comma girl?’ he asked, returning with the pad.
‘I wouldn’t have a clue.’
‘Dad, you wrote it!’ Wolfgang said, frustrated.
‘Let me see that,’ said Leo. ‘Ah,
coma
girl. Her father rang.’
‘Whose father?’
‘You know.’ Leo gestured towards the television. ‘The furniture man.’
‘You don’t mean Keith Babacan?’ asked Wolfgang.
‘There was a phone call from him.’
‘For me?’ Wolfgang said, even though he knew it must have been for him. He certainly wasn’t going to ring back. ‘What’s this coma girl thing?’
‘His daughter. She was the one who was in a coma.’
‘Audrey Babacan’s in a coma?’
Leo dragged his eyes from the television. ‘That’s her name, yes. Audrey Babacan.’
Wolfgang’s heart bounded. ‘Has there been an accident? Has something happened to Audrey?’
‘She nearly drowned.’
‘Oh my God!’
‘But she woke up after twenty months,’ Leo said calmly.
What?
‘Dad, I saw her two days ago.’
‘Yes, she still lives in town. I’ve had to treat her dog once or twice.’
Wolfgang took a deep breath. ‘So this accident – when she nearly drowned – it happened quite a while ago?’
‘Ten or fifteen years,’ his father said. ‘She woke up the day you were born.’
Wolfgang found his mother on the back patio watering her pot plants. ‘Mum, is it true,’ he asked, ‘that Audrey Babacan – the daughter of Keith Babacan, the Furniture King – was in a coma or something years ago?’
Sylvia turned the hose-nozzle to a fine spray and moved to one of her ferns. ‘It was so tragic,’ she said, feathering the spray back and forth. ‘She was only a toddler when it happened. Everyone thought she’d die but she held on for nearly two years. And then, snap, one morning she just woke up.’
‘On the day I was born?’ Wolfgang said.
‘That’s right.’ His mother nodded. ‘I remember all the fuss – the nurses all talking about it. It wasn’t until the next day that we heard she’d lost her sight.’
Wolfgang thought about returning Keith’s call. He was not looking forward to telling him their deal was off. Keith wouldn’t take it well. And with good reason. They had moved Audrey’s surprise birthday party to tomorrow night just so Wolfgang could be there; but now he wasn’t going. Wolfgang wanted nothing more to do with the Babacans, father
or
daughter. He went to bed that night without having made the call. It took him a long time to get to sleep, and when he finally drifted off he dreamed he was in a coma.
28
Audrey paused outside the ticket window.
‘Good morning,’ she said brightly.
Wolfgang had been hoping she wouldn’t speak. Normally she held up her season pass and walked straight through.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Oh, it
is
you.’ She broke into a smile. ‘You weren’t here yesterday.’
He looked at her closely. Something was different about her. Something had changed but he was not sure what. ‘It was my day off.’
Audrey hesitated, fiddling with her pass. ‘Are there people waiting, Wolfgang?’
‘No.’
‘I just wanted to say something – to apologise, actually, for the other night.’
‘You had a headache.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Audrey said, a tide of pink moving slowly up her neck. ‘I wasn’t nice to you and I’m sorry.’
You say sorry a lot.
‘It’s okay. Forget it.’
‘Can we do something tonight?’
She still didn’t know about her party – the surprise party that he wasn’t going to. ‘I’ve got something else on, actually.’
‘Tomorrow night, then?’ Audrey asked.
Wolfgang could see Michael watching them from the side of the pool. He took a deep breath. ‘Audrey, I don’t think we should do this any more.’
‘Do what?’ she asked in a small, scared voice.
‘See each other.’
‘Oh.’ Her face muscles worked. ‘Is it because of the other night?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Well, yes. It’s about that and everything else. It just isn’t working.’
‘I thought it was,’ Audrey whispered.
‘It isn’t. At least not for me.’ Wolfgang took another big breath. He felt terrible. ‘I’m really sorry, Audrey.’
She turned to her dog. ‘Come on, Campbell, let’s get out of here.’
Rather than going in through the wheelchair gate, Audrey pulled Campbell around and hurried back out the way they had come.
It was only after she had gone that Wolfgang realised what was different about her. Audrey had been wearing lipstick.
29
After work Wolfgang rode to the public library. With the help of one of the librarians, he found the edition of the
Advertiser
published the day after he was born. On page three there was a large photo of a much younger Keith and Bernadette Babacan crowded one on either side of a doll-like child lying prone in a hospital bed. Despite its large headline, the accompanying article was brief.
Coma Girl Wakes
A young Loddon Springs couple is rejoicing after their daughter emerged from a twenty-two month coma at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne yesterday.
Audrey Babacan (3) slipped into the coma after she nearly drowned in the Loddon Springs Pool on 22 February 1990.
Her parents and elder sister drove to Melbourne last night to be reunited with Audrey.
A hospital spokesperson described Audrey’s awakening as unexpected. ‘Comas are still a mystery to medical science,’ she said. ‘Victims can remain comatose for as long as thirty years and some never regain consciousness.’
‘We never gave up hope,’ said Keith Babacan, father of the coma girl.
Audrey’s mother, Bernadette, said the family and friends had prayed every day for her recovery.
Audrey, who was 13 months old at the time of the accident, is to remain in hospital for several days while tests are carried out.
There was no mention of her blindness, nor were there any details of her near-drowning. Wolfgang searched through the 1990 issues of the
Advertiser
until he came to the 22 February edition. There was nothing about Audrey’s accident. Surely it would rate a mention, he thought.
‘Stupid!’ he muttered aloud, clapping himself on the forehead and attracting censorious looks from two grey-haired women poring over a yellowed newspaper at a nearby table. If the accident happened on 22 February, it would be reported the following day!
He found it on page six, a brief account titled ‘Toddler nearly drowns’. There was not much detail, just a few centimetres of column space reporting how Audrey, thirteen months old, had fallen into the pool and been rescued by her father. She had been taken to hospital by ambulance, where she was ‘recovering’. The reporter seemed more interested in the pool than in Audrey, and the final paragraph referred the reader back to the cover story. Wolfgang turned to the cover.
‘POOL DEFIES GRAVITY!’ screamed the huge headline. Below was a photograph of the pool cordoned off with what looked like crime-scene tape. Three men in suits stood inside the tape peering down at the sloping water with bemused expressions on their faces.
A smaller photo showed a close-up of the pool edge, with a spirit level being held just above the waterline to demonstrate its deviation from the horizontal.
The article, as the headline and photographs suggested, was all about the pool’s famous sloping water.
So this was when it started. Wolfgang recalled seeing the pictures before, perhaps in primary school, and he had known that the historical event happened in February 1990, but to see the original newspaper reportage brought it alive. It was like being there, being part of history.
The pool had been sloping all Wolfgang’s life. Like most of his friends, he’d grown up with it and took it for granted.
There were a number of theories: a seismic shift directly below the pool had warped a tiny area of the earth’s magnetic field that acted, for reasons unknown, only on water; the natural spring which fed the pool, and after which the town had taken its original name, had once been a powerful Aboriginal sacred site; it was the work of angels.
Wolfgang had considered all the theories but he didn’t know what to believe. All he knew was this: one day the pool had been level like any other body of water, the next day it was sloping.
No wonder they made such a fuss about it when the extraordinary phenomenon first occurred back in February 1990. No wonder the
Advertiser
had devoted three whole pages to it, including a full-column editorial.
No wonder a tiny story about a toddler nearly drowning was pushed back to page six, where it was almost lost beneath an article about a proposed set of traffic lights at the bottom of Acacia Street. Her awakening nearly two years later was more newsworthy – it made page three. Wolfgang spent another half hour in the library scouring old editions of the
Advertiser
from cover to cover but found no further mention of Audrey. Once she woke up – once she ceased being ‘the coma girl’ – the town seemed to have forgotten about her.
