David toddled off, minor injury forgotten. Vic looked up to see Jane’s eyes on him. They were serious, not smiling but seeking, as if trying to find some tiny fragment of another self. As he caught her eyes she looked away.

  It seemed all too soon when the night was ending, no late night revelry here. He had found no chance to talk to her in anything approaching a private setting. Now he saw her walking towards him bringing her two little children, one holding each hand.

  She stood before him, in a simple and unassuming manner, saying. “I am sorry, I need to take my children home to bed now, they are both tired. I just wanted to say thank you for minding David, particularly when he fell over.

  “I am not sure if you can manage it in the morning, before you leave, but if you can it would be really nice if you could come to church. Service starts at nine o’clock and our choir has been practicing some songs to sing. I would like it if you came.”

  He wanted to jump up and escort her home, but something restrained him. He had a sixth sense that he had to take it slowly, allow trust to grow and give her time to open up when she was more comfortable. He still did not know if this lady was Susan or someone else, but it no longer mattered so desperately. He just wanted to know her more, the face of the enigma. So he stilled his impatience and watched her walk out the door, knowing that he was destined to be at church in the morning.

  He looked up to see Rick looking at him in an appraising manner, “I don’t pretend to know what is going on inside your head, but there is something happening there. And not just for you, our Jane has shown more animation tonight than in the year and a half she has been here.”

  Vic nodded, “You could be right. I promise I will tell you soon. I need to do more work around here, so as to have a reason to make some more visits. Make sure my name gets to the top of the list if you hear of helicopter jobs going, hell I can even drive a bull catcher if it comes to that.”

  Rick nodded. “I get it, jobs north, south, east and west of here with ferry stops and overnights here. I might need a commission to act as your local agent, but I will see what I can do.”

  Chapter 5 - Monochrome

  Jane dreamt of lying in bed, without memory, with the unknown man, again that night.

  It was a broken night of sleep. David was restless and irritable with the cut to his lip. In the end, she brought him into bed with her to help him settle and, of course, Anne would not stay alone without her inseparable brother in the crib next to hers. So they both ended up sleeping in her bed; fortunately it was a big double bed so they all had space to stretch out. She put them on the inside where the mattress was hard against the wall. That way she knew they would not fall out of bed and wake up screaming.

  So, for a couple hours after she came to bed, she lay there in a restless state, soothing her children until they finally settled. After that she found her own mind was wide awake and active as it relived her remembered life, the almost eighteen months since her memories had begun in April last year, just at the end of the rainy season, with her children born in early May. It was now late September and the nights were getting hot, she could feel sweat on her skin from places where her children were touching her despite the ceiling fan whirring away. The covers, which her children needed to settle, seemed too heavy on her skin and made her hot.

  She found herself wondering about David and why he had taken to this strange new man, the one that looked at her with such piercing eyes, as if she should know him, though she had no idea why he thought that.

  He was just another stranger who she had seen for the first time earlier today. The funny thing was he had begun to have a colour in her imagination this night, a nut brown colour, not all of him, but the bare skin on his arms, those strong arms which had effortlessly picked David up and hoisted him into the air, sitting on his shoulders. She found herself smiling as she remembered the way David had chortled as he sat on top, loving the view and patting this man’s head like a pet dog.

  Every other time a man had reached for David, to pick him up or restrain him, David had cried out in fear and she needed to take him and comfort him. Even now, after well over a year, he would barely allow Pastor Doug to touch him though he went happily to his wife Ruth and to other children. Yet he had gone straight to this man, Vic, without hesitation. When he offered she had intended to give Anne to Vic to hold, knowing she would be fine. Instead he had picked up David before she had a chance to suggest that.

  She felt a small bit of worry about David, Anne was resilient and outgoing but David was very shy and dependent on her and his twin sister. She would have liked him to be a bit more confident. When she was out with other people he mostly just clung to her skirts. Maybe it was a stage he was going through. She had no one else to compare him too. While she loved her importance to him, she wanted him to become braver and less dependent. So yesterday had been a big step forward. She really hoped this man would come to church to see and listen to her sing. Singing was the one time she felt complete, as if she had something of value to give to others.

  It was funny, but when she had first come to this place she had no real sense of a missing past, just an empty place before her memory started and a new reality began. But she knew there must have been a past somewhere, a man to father her children, a mother and father of her own. She did not miss not knowing them, but she did feel a vague curiosity about who these people were, most particularly her mother.

  It had come to her clearly one day when she wanted to know when her babies would be able to walk, people had told her that most children learnt to walk at about a year of age but some learnt early at nine months and some took up to a year and a half. She found herself wondering how old she was when she took her first steps. Then the thought occurred to her that, if she had a mother nearby, then she could ask her. So she wondered what had happened to her own mother so that she did not know her.

  Now, as she lay tossing in bed, her mind wandered to another place, thinking affectionately of her best friends the church pastor and his wife, Ruth, who seemed to have adopted her. She remembered them coming to the hospital the day after her babies were born, introducing themselves, and offering to make a prayer for her babies’ health and happiness. She had accepted, thinking this must be the normal thing people did with babies. It had been nice, hearing them say kind words for her and her children.

  Then Pastor Doug had suggested she have her babies baptized a few weeks later. She assumed this was also part of what one did so she said ‘Yes’ again. He had asked her if she wanted to invite anyone, like parents or family. She said she did not know where her parents or family were. So he suggested an aboriginal man and woman from the church to stand in as god parents. She accepted that too as they seemed like nice people and they now were also her friends.

  As she looked back on her remembered life she thought about another thing she had since discovered about herself which was peculiar. Her life had no colours.

  People often talked about the colour of things, the green of trees, the blue of the sky, the brown of the earth. She saw shades which she thought were those colours. But, a few months ago, she had been having a cup of tea at Ruth’s house while her babies played. She was looking at two books on the coffee table there; they both had pictures of people and places. To her the pictures in both books looked much the same, nice but nothing special.

  Ruth had come and sat alongside, looking with her. Pointing to one picture, Ruth said, “Isn’t that sky the most beautiful blue colour?”

  She had replied, “It looks the same to me as that other picture,” pointing to a picture with sky in the other book.

  Ruth said, puzzled, “But that is just a black and white picture, how can you tell they look the same?”

  Jane said, as if it was normal, “They both look the same to me.”

  So they had turned a few pages of both books together and Ruth had pointed out different colours which all looked the same shade to Jane. Gradually they had both come to realize that Ruth was seeing something that Jane could not, a thing she called colours.

  Jane had thought, before, she was seeing colours too. Since then she realized that what she was seeing was shades of grey. It had not seemed a big deal to her, she could see just fine and she could work out what things were from the shades she saw, even if Ruth seemed a bit concerned.

  Soon after that she started to go to church each weekend, at first to keep Ruth and Doug happy. But it was nice. Pastor Doug mostly told happy stories which she liked.

  But what she discovered, which she most liked at church, was the music. The church had a choir; she really liked listening to the choir. One day the choir sang a new song which she had never heard before. It was an aboriginal song by a blind man called Gurrumul. He lived at a place called Gove; it was somewhere towards Darwin in the part of Australia called the Northern Territory. This day, someone played a new song which Gurrumul sung on CD music player. The church choir sang along.

  “I was born blind, I don’t know why.

  God made me blind, because he loves me so.”

  As they started to sing, suddenly this beautiful blue colour started to come out of their mouths. She had sat there crying, it was so beautiful. The music was really beautiful; it had the most exquisite notes and melody. And the words were really beautiful, as if they had been written just for her.

  She realised that, like this man, Gurrumul, she had a part of her that could not see; she could not see the past and she could not see the colours of the world. But now she knew it really did not matter because God had made it so and he loved her anyway. But what made it so special was that, as Gurrumul sang and the choir sang, and as the words and music came out together, she could see a colour too. It was just one colour but it was the most beautiful blue and, because it was so, so very beautiful, it made her cry.

  That day she had joined the choir and loved to sing all the songs, but particularly this song. When she sung the other songs, she felt she could almost see some colour, like the sun trying to break through a thick cloud, when it was raining heavily, and she would see tiny glimpses of colours flash. But when she sang or heard this song, then the purest and most beautiful blue colour came out. She could see it so clearly even if other people did not seem to. That made her feel really, really happy, all over.

  Then yesterday, not when she first met him, Vic, but when he picked up her baby, David, and put him on his shoulders, and again after he cut his lip, suddenly Vic had a colour too. It was not an all over colour but it was a colour to his arms where they were wrapped around her baby. It was a rich brown colour; she called it nut brown in her mind, it was so real and warm.

  If she could see that colour on him then perhaps he would see the blue colour she saw when she sang; she really hoped so. So she had she had invited him to come and hear the singing. It was not something she had ever done before, to invite anyone to anything, though Ruth had organized and invited people to a couple things for her, like the baptism and birthday party of her children. But this time it was she who had wanted him to come and the invitation popped out of her mouth. Now she was glad it had. She hoped he would come to see and hear the singing and that he would like it, his opinion mattered to her.

  She was feeling comfortable and happy thinking about this as she finally drifted off to sleep in the late night, with her children’s bodies pressed into her. Then she woke with the dream, like she had before, where there was another body in the bed and she did not know it or anything else. She had felt the shape. I was a hard and angular shaped; a body of elbows and bony protuberances. It must be a man.

  This time she really wanted to see it, to see a face and to know who it was. But she was so afraid, afraid to know this person and the story that went with it, lest it tear her apart and destroy her. So her fear had stopped her. Instead she had buried her face in the pillow and tried to hide it from her mind. But, in forcing herself to pull away, she was so lonely, so utterly alone; her insides feel desolate.

  Now, as she woke in the morning and as her new memories came back, she knew it was only a dream. Yet the sense of a great loss of something remained. It was a something she must find. But she knew she could only reach it through this dream and this dream caused her terror.

  Her children were now stirring. So she washed and fed them then dressed them for church. As she was getting ready to leave her house she heard a roar of something which was flying overhead. David rushed to the window, pointing, making a sound for some unintelligible word. She realised he was trying to say, helicopter, helicopter. She glimpsed it flying away.

  She felt sharp disappointment. She had invited the pilot, Vic, to church to hear her music and she thought he would come. He had not said he would come but his demeanour suggested it. Yet he was already taking off and leaving, so he would not be there. The colour in her mind faded back to grey.

  Chapter 6 - The Choir

  Vic went for an early morning walk in the dawn to still his impatience to see Jane again. He found his mind had given a new identity to this person, the name she wore. Perhaps she was Susan still, but his mind had begun to call her Jane. As he walked he found the surrounding bush with its screeching parrots and the thump of kangaroos, which hopped nervously away as he came into shooting range, helped soothe his jangling nerves. This was like how he felt at the outset of a new romance. He thought of this woman as a blank canvass waiting for the painting to be drawn.

  As he walked past the petrol station and shop on his way back to town he could see a light on in her cottage and hear little children noises. It gave him an inner glow of anticipation. He went back to his room and packed up his things and found some breakfast which he ate. As he had nothing more to do he decided to go to his helicopter and do the pre-flight checks. He worked his way through the list. As he did he noticed a small gathering of black bodies, first three then four and soon there were eight. They were watching him with bright eyes and questions.

  He found pleasure in their enthusiasm, like when he too was a child at stations around Alice Springs, remembering how these magic machines would come and go. With this came the memory of his first ever helicopter ride as a child of eight, around the age of this little gang. He remembered the way the world below had unfolded, as if seen through the eyes of a bird, a new picture seen from the helicopter that took him into the sky.

  He looked at his watch. He had full fuel, more than enough to get to Normanton where he would top up. He had half an hour free before it was time to go to the church. He would treat these kids to the same treat he had been given all those years ago.

  “Anyone want to go for a ride?”

  All nodded furiously. He separated them into three groups, two groups of three smaller children and one group of two larger ones. He told them they all had to stay together where he could see them, only those coming for a ride could come closer. He loaded the first three and started up, going skywards with a cloud of dust. Five minutes a trip gave him time to fly over the houses, sweep down along the creek for a mile before coming around over a small hill behind the yards and setting down again. He swapped the children and did it twice more. He checked his watch, realizing he would have to hurry to get to the other end of the town in time for church.

  He remembered there was a clear area just next to the church. It would be faster to fly there and it would also speed up his departure. As he came over he saw the figure of a woman with two small children walking along the road, coming towards him, a hundred yards away. He landed and walked to meet them. The greeting was a big smile from one big and two little faces.

  Jane looked at him seriously and said, “When I heard your helicopter take off before I thought you had decided not to wait, I am so glad you are still here.”

  He shook his head, “No, I just took a few of my local admirers for a joy flight. If you have time I hoped you might come for a quick one too before church begins.”

  Her face came alive as she nodded. He brought them over and showed them their seats, strapping David in tight with a belt in the middle while Jane held Annie on her lap. Then he looked across to her asking if she was set. Her face was tense but she gave him a mouthed, “Yes.”

  He pulled a straight up climb until they reached a couple hundred feet, the helicopter effortlessly soaring in the cool morning air. He looked across, she was wide eyed with enthusiasm, so like that day more than two years ago when he had soared skywards with Susan and Mark. Just for this instant he had an unshakeable belief that it really was her. He looked at them all questioningly and asked, “Ready?”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “For the thrill of your life,” he said.

  She nodded; eyes serious.

  With a flick of his hand he turned the helicopter sideways and plunged towards the ground, like a falcon diving. As the ground rushed towards them he dialled on the power, using all his mustering trick skill to zoom amongst the trees as if chasing a bull. As he raced forward, skimming the ground he pulled the stick up, using power and speed to pull hard into the sky. He felt the weight in his stomach. Then down amongst the trees again as he wove his way along the creek before breaking skyward to come back around over the town and land smoothly alongside the church.

  She was breathless and flushed. The children were clapping their hands. He worried he may have scared her. She turned him, eyes glisteningly bright and oh so blue. Her smile was radiant. “I think that was the most exciting thing in my life. Thank you so much.”

  Vic took a deep breath to calm his own breathlessness. “When you look at me and smile like that, I think that look in your eyes is far more exciting than a helicopter ride.”

  She blushed and looked away, uncertain.