It's OK Now
As Yvonne switched off her bedside lamp for the night, her troubled
mind could not turn from thoughts of her younger brother who lay seriously ill
in a Manly hospice, his body wracked with cancer. She knew Fred was in the last
stage of his physical and mental struggle. He had lasted six months longer than
the doctors had predicted and in the last few weeks with the aid of morphine, he could feel no more pain. He had requested some months ago that nobody come to
see him. His sister, living some 150 kilometres away, could hardly bear to stay
away but had respected his wishes. Yvonne's sole communion with her brother now
lay in her heart and mind.
She tossed and turned that night. Her thoughts cast back to her
brother's first day at kindergarten and how they had walked some distance to
school hand in hand at their mother's insistence. No sooner had they turned the
corner than Fred had torn his hand from his sister's grasp and he raced off
ahead up the street. This set the pattern for the rest of his life, the
headstrong child later becoming the single-minded adolescent.
At seventeen when Fred came to announce over dinner one night that he
had enlisted in the army to go and fight the Japanese, Yvonne well remembered
the look on her father's ashen face. Fred cautioned his father that if he
dobbed him in for being under-age, he would go as soon as he turned eighteen
anyway. No stranger to human conflict himself, Yvonne's father had fought in
the 'The Great War' in Egypt and France. He had been riding on a horse and
carriage with two mates in France when his two companions rendez-voused with a
mortar shell. All things considered, Pop got off rather lightly. For the rest
of his life, much of which was spent with a nervous condition and deafness in military hospitals, nights turned to nightmares where he saw his two mates
paying the ultimate sacrifice while he managed to escape.
A curious thing happened just prior to Fred's departure for the
Pacific. He had been expecting his call-up notice while waiting at his Manly
home and on the day it finally arrived Fred was told to report to the military
command in the city immediately. Yvonne at the time was on the other side of
the city at Sydney Teachers' College. After her last class, she caught the
ferry from Circular Quay as usual and walked almost all of the three kilometres
to home. About 200 metres from the front
door, however, she was suddenly overcome by an urge to run back to the Manly
Wharf to search for her brother. At the gates she pleaded with a security guard
to allow her onto the ferry to see her brother one last time before he went off
to war because she was sure he was somewhere on the ferry. The guard relented
and a tearful sister met up with an excited brother in an emotional farewell.
Yvonne to her dying day never knew how she could tell Fred was on that
boat - she often maintained she had a sixth sense when it came to her
brother. She always seemed to know when things were troubling him or he was
upset.
Eventually sleep, albeit a fitful affair, overwhelmed her. Her mind
drifted again and Fred returned. This time he appeared as she had known him
most of his adult life. The hair was a little greyer but his body bore no sign
of the curse that had tormented him during the previous eighteen months.
"Yvonne", he said, "come with me!" He called her by
the name she rarely heard these days. Her husband and friends called her 'Von'
now but Fred and her parents had continued to use the fuller version of the
name her father had brought back from the war in France. Her mother, on the
other hand, had resisted her only daughter having 'Yvette' as a second given
name. 'Yvonne Yvette' was a little too close for comfort for her! "Come
with me, I'm frightened!" Fred repeated.
Yvonne had walked down that road before. As an eleven year old child at
the old Manly Harbourside Pool, she had been swimming leisurely with friends in
the warm summer waters when a boy jumped from the diving tower and knocked her
unconscious. Yvonne almost drowned. As her rescuers brought her back to life,
she could remember not wanting to leave the temporary serenity of her
subconscious state and she actively resisted all attempts to resuscitate her.
Nevertheless she slowly drifted back to the land of the living but after that
experience in her later life she now strongly insisted that she held no fear of
death.
Yvonne's brush with the supernatural extended to her mother as well. After
her mum had died, probate on her will took some six months to be granted. In
this time, work on her mother's gravesite could not proceed for want of the
necessary funds. One morning while driving to work along the old Recession-built
concrete road linking Cessnock and Abermain, Yvonne had a rather unpleasant
experience. As she turned a gentle bend in the road, she felt another hand being
placed on top of hers. She reacted instantly snatching her hand from the steering
wheel, a movement that caused the car to veer temporarily from its path. Just
as quickly the hand withdrew. That afternoon Yvonne told her husband, Ron, about the
incident and she maintained vehemently that the hand had belonged to her
mother. A week later a letter arrived telling her that the headstone on her
mother's grave had finally been put in place on the morning of her recent
encounter in the car.
Yvonne took Fred's hand and they walked some little distance down the
road. After a time she turned to her brother and said: "I can't go with
you all the way Fred, you know." "It's okay now, I'm not frightened
any more", he replied and with that he released her hand. As Fred walked off
down the road alone, she watched him for a while and her mind skipped back to his first day in kindergarten.
Yvonne woke with a start and looked at the clock. It was 2:16 a.m. When
she sat bolt upright in bed, the sudden movement woke her husband lying beside
her. "What's up?" Ron asked.
"Fred just died", she murmured and slumped back on the
pillow.
At 6:30 a.m. that morning the phone rang. It was Trixie, Fred's
wife....
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