An Extract from Under the Skin, by Caroline de Costa

Chapter One

Far out to the east, above the warm waters of the Coral Sea, close to Vanuatu, Tess was gathering strength.

That she now had a name, Maud thought, was significant. The Met Office, having acted, albeit distantly, as midwife at her birth –plotting the isobars, observing the delivery pangs of a tropical low - now felt justified in christening this gusty and passionate female. A cyclone watch had been issued at midday for the whole of the coastline from Cooktown to Cardwell.

At Tess's heart there spiralled inwards large amounts of moist and tepid air. In a clockwise direction, Maud recalled from previous years. The same as the bathwater down the plughole. The opposite to Ireland, since this was the Southern Hemisphere. The wind speed rose, to eighty, ninety, one hundred miles per hour. Tess grew in size, she spread herself insistently across the ocean as she moved parallel to the coast and deliberated about coming ashore. She whipped the waves beneath her into frenzied peaks and blackened the sky with dense squalls of rain. Shipping moved intently from her path. A dense ring of cloud five miles high surrounded her single, central, eye. Within the eye were light breezes, there was calm, but that eye could deceive. It could watch over you, lull you, make you believe Tess had done her worst and moved on. You might emerge from your refuge, relax and laugh, only to find yourself battered again with flying debris and violent winds as Tess's will reasserted itself on her far side.

Maud was standing in the kitchen of her house, which was on the Red Cow side of Cassowary Creek, and thus more than a mile inland from the beach on the bay where Tess might come ashore. Maud wore a sleeveless Indian cotton dress dyed a brilliant lime-green. In one hand she balanced her coffee and the eighth cigarette of the day. With the other she flicked over the pages of her Cyclone Action Guide, taped inexpertly to the fridge with a dozen other dog-eared papers: reminders of rates, Red Cross barbecues and residents' meetings. A Tess, Maud considered, should really be a fine solid Anglo-Saxon girl, with dark good looks, a bit wilful and unpredictable perhaps, but ultimately reliable. And after all, the watch meant only that she was out there somewhere. Quite possibly she would expend her wrath over the sea before ever reaching the island continent. That had often happened. A watch was nothing much really. Only a cyclone warning was worth worrying about.

The airport was still open, anyway. She'd just rung to check. And even if a cyclone did arrive, that wouldn't put her visitor off altogether. Maud couldn't hope for that. The girl – Sinead, that was her name, after all, she must start to think of her as Sinead - the girl would simply turn up afterwards. Maud knew this from her phone conversation last week with Veronica, down there in Sydney. A cyclone would merely postpone something Maud couldn't prevent. It would be tedious though if Tess did arrive and she was trapped for hours in her cyclone shelter with … Sinead. But at least Miro would be here. He'd promised to be.

Only Veronica Murphy would do this to me, dammit, Maud thought, glancing through the cyclone guide, and of course, only stupid Maud Murphy would agree. I don't want this girl in my house. Prying into my past, raking it all up. Veronica could have answered it all for her. It's been enough for me just to hear of her turning up, to have thought, to think…no Maud, don't think that.

Tess at the moment was Category Two. That meant, Maud read, a risk of minor home damage, more major destruction of trees and crops (round here, sugarcane and marijuana), power failure, and the breaking of small craft from their moorings. Nothing too dangerous. Though Cyclone Justin, in 1997, also Category Two, had caused forty deaths. But mostly off the coast of Papua-New Guinea, the guide added. Not white people then, apparently. Just a statistic.

Well, OK, she told herself, it's not true that Veronica can answer everything. Vee's story, her views, are all quite different from mine. Neat, filed, compartmentalised, put away. Like neat, pert, organised Veronica herself. Lucky neat organised Veronica. After twenty-five years, as well as everything else Veronica has, the girl just reappears, grown, fully formed, well brought up, and eager to meet her biological mother. You had to hand it to Veronica.

Maud stubbed the cigarette butt in the sink and, taking her coffee, moved onto her veranda, which was simply a continuation in timber of her open kitchen. She gazed out over the garden, making a small mental checklist for the cyclone. Candles, batteries for the torches and radio, all packed in plastic canisters, tins of moderately palatable food, kerosene, barbecue fuel. The electricity was always the first thing to go when the wind hit. Wine: most important. A thermos. Matches, once she'd forgotten matches and the corkscrew and she and Sara had spent a damp and miserable eighteen hours with cold baked beans and firmly corked Cabernet. The washing was off the line and the outdoor furniture stowed in the garage. She hadn't seen Miro yet this afternoon but he would look after his own belongings – the boat he'd put out of the water and up under Lonny's shed near the beach. The cats would bring themselves in as soon as a storm started in earnest. Her mobile phone was fully charged. Though it didn't always work up here after a cyclone. No need to tape the windows or move the furniture off the veranda yet –that could all be done in twenty minutes if the watch became a warning. In Sara's room, of course, the windows were already sealed, the shutters in place, the door locked. Her books and posters, her journal, her laundered clothes, were all neatly sorted and packed into trunks. As they had been for years. The hair Maud had so lovingly picked from her hairbrush, in springy dark strands, was in a golden box on her dressing table.

The girl would have the spare room. Not Sara's. Of course not.

"She wants to meet you, Maud," Veronica had blundered on into the silence on the line to Queensland, the silence that had followed the news of Vee's own discovery, six weeks previously, of Sinead's existence. Sinead. Maud tried to get her mind around the name. Always before, on the few, the very few occasions on which Veronica had mentioned her own baby to Maud, she had called her Rose. "By chance, Maud, she'd been planning a trip up north anyway, with a friend she'd met nursing in Dublin last year. She'd like just to talk to you. She wants to understand how it was. How it was for you."

Not could she, or would you mind…no, that was not Vee's style at all, just, how it was for you, Maud.

Below the veranda, the patchy buffalo grass of the lawn and the scarlet hibiscus bushes straggled down towards the edge of the rainforest. Up at this end of Red Cow Road, there was as yet little sign of a big storm brewing. A light breeze lifted the fronds of the palms edging the muddy driveway but barely disturbed the canopy of the rainforest. Certainly the sky was mostly overcast in the east, but westward were small patches of washed-out blue, and watery sunshine, and tiny clouds scudding overhead. Fine showers moved so often across the garden that the air itself seemed liquid, and every surface - of the fridge, the tablecloth, the curling pages of the cyclone guide - was damp to Maud's touch. Though it was still very humid, the temperature had dropped since morning, and the heat was no longer oppressive. The sweat, clinging to her eyelids above their coat of peacock shadow, trickling down her spine, seeping into the cleft between her breasts, was cool and not unpleasant.

In fact, Maud loved this warm dampness, loved its reappearance at the start of every Wet season. Once, as a child, she had been brought from Wicklow, hurriedly, in the back of her uncle's Morris, to the Children's Hospital in Harcourt Street, suffering from croup. From the cold greyness of south Dublin she had been lifted in a blanket into the welcoming vapours of a steam tent, and her choking fear had suddenly left her. Much, much later, stepping from the Sydney plane onto the tarmac of the Cairns airport, in mid-December, on her first visit to Far North Queensland, she had recognised at once the warmth, the healing moistness, and felt immediately an enormous sense of belonging. Now, standing on her veranda, she breathed in deeply the humours rising up from the forest floor.

Before the rainforest itself began, past the mango tree, and the lime she'd planted with Sara, was a stand of bamboo, and beside this Maud could see the mound of the scrub turkeys, a six foot high steaming heap of twigs and earth and birdshit, and the two birds themselves, scratching contentedly in the dirt for morsels. Where would the birds go if the cyclone came? Dig themselves into the mound? Curl up in the protective nooks of a strangler fig?

Immediately beyond the bamboo clump the rainforest trees rose high and dense, their canopy on a level with her veranda though their roots were embedded in sloping ground fifty feet below. The canopy was a dense interlocking mass of their evergreen crowns. Below, light-hungry vines and staghorn ferns held fast to the giant trunks, reaching for the sunshine far above, and velvet-green mosses clung to every possible niche. At ground level, the lacy tree-ferns and scalloped palms jostled for space with the taller eucalypts and figs. The forest floor itself was a succulent mush of decomposing leaves and litter.

Two sulphur-crested cockatoos flew, squawking, across the veranda roof and down, down, beneath the canopy, fighting over a minute bush mouse one held in its beak. Well, there was no shortage of local colour for her prospective visitor. A tiny, bright yellow sunbird flitted between the branches of the crimson poinsettia near the veranda stairs, and a male Ulysses butterfly, his wings as iridescent as Maud's eyelids, floated carelessly amongst the passionfruit vines entwining the veranda posts. It was the setting for a tourist poster: Welcome to the Tropical North.

She must go. There was no time for another cigarette. She drained the last of her coffee, dropped the cup in the sink, picked up her car keys -attached to the tiny figure of the leprechaun Sara had carved for her in Year Seven - and banged the back door. The inhabitants of Red Cow Road never locked their houses. She let the LandCruiser slide, slowly, down the muddy drive, only lightly touching the brake so as not to skid. Beneath the palms that edged the drive red torch ginger grew in profusion, and Heliconia, the black and orange flowers as chic and groomed as tiny geishas. A slender green snake darted into the protection of a clump of leaves as Maud, her mind still on her conversation with Veronica, turned right, onto the main road. Up at this blind end of Red Cow, the road was simply mud, and subject to all the caprices of the Wet season, despite the best efforts of the Shire Council.

How it was for me? She wants to know that? Maud had thought, hanging up after Veronica's call. And to stay here, in this house, asking questions, about me, about Sara and Raj, about our life so long ago in Dublin? Shit no, had been her immediate reaction. I don't want any of that. It's busy. It's a bad time of year, post-Christmas. It's the Wet season. Before agreeing to Veronica's request, as Vee had known she would. Well, she supposed she would have to meet the girl some time. She was a part of Vee's life, now, apparently.

The road led on for a mile down to the village, through the original old-growth forest, dim, dense and cool. Yingin people liked to say this forest was a million years old. Great spider webs stretched between the trunks – occasional beams of weak sunlight, breaking through the canopy above, caught the raindrops, shimmering silver on the filaments of the webs, and dazzled the spiders. Steam rose in bursts from the forest floor.

It had been a good Wet this year, Maud thought. In some years, the Wet came late, and suddenly. The warm, dry days, the crisp nights of August, lasted on and on, the heat grew, the lawns were parched, and in October, November, as still the rain did not come, the leaves of the big trees, instead of forming a damp comforting rug underfoot, crackled and curled up and threatened to smoulder under the heat of midday. Lizards and spiders came indoors searching for water, sometimes tree snakes as well; emerald frogs, the pools of their billabongs dried and cracked, perched motionless on the shower rails and in the bowl of the outside dunny. The cats stretched out on the cooler concrete of the garage floor. And as each day passed and the Wet was postponed, the people of Cassowary Creek became niggly and short-tempered with each other. They drank more beer, but moodily, leaning on the counter of the pub; they smoked weed under fans in back rooms, but grew dejected instead of mellow. They broke up longstanding relationships and backed out of business deals, arguing that the quality of the dope had been affected by the drought. They were sharp with their children, who in turn fought each other more at school. Everyone waited, increasingly on edge, for the rain.

In those years, there would be a huge, sudden change of mood as the drought broke, and great surges of water poured down, sweeping away sticks, leaves, tiny rainforest animals and pent-up emotions. The old arguments were forgotten, people slapped each other on the back and stood beneath the veranda of the pub, sharing a beer or four, passing joints, watching the rain pour down the corrugated iron of the roof and swirl away in the fissures of the drains cut from the red clay. They splashed through the wide puddles in the main street of the village in Akubras, shorts and bare feet, grinning broadly. They could settle back now for Christmas.

In the past, Maud had looked forward to Wets like that, to the great and sudden change between drought and flood, like the movements of a symphony, and the accompanying scenes and emotional turmoil. She had enjoyed the clashes with Miro, and the reconciliations. This year, though, she had been grateful for the gentle easing-in of the Wet. Soft showers at night in October. The gradual renewal of the buffalo turf on her lawn, the re-appearance of succulent plants and the flowering of the creamy frangipani and golden peanut grass. This year, there had been enough to think of, with Veronica's announcement of the girl's re-appearance, and her impending visit. There had been increasing amounts of rain during the day in November and December, but it had been even, soothing. Nothing abrupt or violent. Tess, if she came at all, would be the first big storm this year. It had been wonderful to swim in the sea during this early wet-season rain – there had been no stinging jellyfish until the end of November – and then to walk for miles on the beach, sometimes as far as Yingin if the tide was low, so that the rain washed away the sea salt. Swimming like this, walking on the beach, was one of the things she still loved to share with Miro. After November, when the marine stingers began to swarm, they had to go far inland, high up where crocodiles couldn't climb, to mountain pools, if they wanted to swim.

The road into the village passed several establishments like her own, though most of these were set well back, only a coloured mailbox marking each muddy driveway. Rainforest people were a retiring lot – they built for themselves, with their own hands, their houses of mudbrick and timber, roofing them with corrugated iron, paying little regard, this far north of the ferry, to the planning regulations of the Shire. They hoed their vegetables, tended their fruit trees, harvested their marijuana and brought up their children, sometimes schooling them at home, all well away from the appraising eyes of the rest of humanity. The river and the ferry kept the town of Cairns, and most other things, at a distance. The road north of Cassowary Creek was impassable in the Wet and anyway most people now preferred the sealed road inland for travelling up to Cooktown and further north. Water fell free from the sky, and was stored in iron tanks. Outside dunnies had pits or were linked to septic systems. A few houses were connected to electricity and landline telephone – mostly those of refugees from city jobs who sat in their mudbrick homes trading commodities on-line. Real rainforest people stuck with kerosene lamps and candles.

Maud had electricity, and the phone. A doctor had community obligations, after all. She had been here fifteen years, knew nearly everybody in Cassowary Creek as patients as well as friends, though she was well aware her advice was often tempered with herbal remedies, homeopathy and charms.

How it was for me? She couldn't get away from it, she was on her way to meet the girl, she might as well get her thoughts in order. Holding the steering wheel steady with her knees, she found another cigarette and lit it. Admit it, Maud, you'll get through a pack today. As she drove she turned on the windscreen wipers for the haze misting her vision, and addressed in her mind a Sinead who resembled the young Veronica.

How it was for me? Dublin in 1975? Well, she could, she supposed, start with the mouse, the rabbit and the toad. That had been near the beginning.

She was still in her pre-clinical years when she'd missed her period at the end of March. Raj was in final year but she couldn't tell him. Not just yet. Nor could she walk into the main library of the College where the textbooks of obstetrics were kept and assess her chances of pregnancy – every head in the room would turn towards her. She had to be content with the pathology texts in the pre-clinical reading room as the days dragged on, six days, seven, without a drop of blood on her knickers. It needed ten bloodless days to pass before a test could be accurate, she had learnt. And she could still recall every word of that pathology text.

"There are three well-established tests which depend on the presence of gonadotrophic hormones in the urine. The mouse test (Ascheim-Zondek) in which the urine is injected into an immature mouse at nine hour intervals. The mouse is killed and its ovaries examined. The presence of red spots denotes pregnancy. The mouse test takes five days." "The rabbit test (Friedman). Ditto for immature rabbits. The rabbit test takes two days." "The toad test (Hogben). The urine is placed in the lymph sac of the South African toad, Xenopus Laevis, and the toad can be used again after two or three months. The toad test takes twelve hours."

She'd been distressed that tiny animals might be sacrificed to give her an answer. She was terrified that she needed a test at all. She hoped that Dr Mc Murtrie was advanced enough to be using toads. Not only would the toad be spared, the answer would be speedy.

She was shortly to find out how appropriate the use of the South African toad would be in her own particular case.

Indian fabrics, Javanese batiks, sequined shawls, decorated the homes of the residents of Red Cow Road, crystals hung above doorways, incense and citronella burned to keep away mosquitoes and midges. Mangoes, bananas and coconuts grew in profusion above rows of beans and corn and wildly coloured orchids. Deeper in the forest were the marijuana patches, unfenced and unlabelled, their boundaries and ownership nevertheless known to all. Few officers of the law ventured north of the ferry. Somewhere in there was where Miro got his personal supplies of grass. Maud preferred not to know, as a registered medical practitioner in the state of Queensland she felt it prudent to confine herself to legal stimulants.

After ten days, and conscious of her heart thudding in her chest, she had gone between classes to the post office in Dublin's South Anne Street and shut herself in a telephone box, irrationally afraid that anyone who saw her would know immediately what she was about. She had dropped in three pennies after furtively looking up Dr Mc Murtrie's number – she had overheard two girls from Raj's year talking of him as a sympathetic obstetrician. At the other end of the telephone, his receptionist combined the honeyed tones of Cork with the shrewdness of Solomon.

. "It's an appointment you're wanting? And you're a medical student? Would you perhaps be wanting a test first, dear? Yes?

"Bring in a sample then," she continued, "an early morning specimen, in a paper bag. Put a name on it, it needn't be your own, something common, Murphy say. Drop it in to us around nine tomorrow morning, just push open the door and leave it on the hall table.

"And Doctor uses the most up-to-date test so it only takes a day, but as tomorrow's Friday I can't give you an appointment until Monday afternoon. He'll have the result for you then. Just give me your first name, dear. Maud! That's nice! Were you named for Maud Gonne?" Yes, she had said, but didn't add that it was about the only sign of spirit her father had ever showed for her.

Maud slowed down now as she came into the village itself. This was a collection of houses and studios – of potters, weavers, batik makers and painters, not now including Miro who'd moved his work, though not himself, completely to Maud's place. There was the Post Office, the small State School that Sara had attended, the community hall with its weedy asphalt tennis court. On a corner stood the Cassowary Creek Spiritual Centre - a gem, Maud loved its white wooden boards and leadlight windows. It had once been the Anglican church; Anglicans being now in short supply in Cassowary Creek, the building was shared on a rotational basis with Catholics, Apostles of the Lord, and Buddhists, each being allotted one Sunday per month.

Behind the church, the narrow overgrown cemetery spread down towards the edge of the bay; directly across the water, in the distance, could be seen the palm-lined shores of Yingin, the Aboriginal community. Most of the graves in the cemetery were old, mossy, untended; only one, on which a rose bush grew, and a sculpted figure stood, appeared new and cared for.

On the bus from Wicklow, that Friday morning, she had kept the urine sample, in its leaky jamjar, at the bottom of her bag below her lecture notes. She'd been petrified that her aunt might sniff it out. Literally. Her aunt accompanied her to the bus every morning, and met her again in the evening. Ever since the memorable night she'd stayed out, supposedly at the home of her friend Dervla from their convent school days, where she hadn't been the following morning when Aunt Mary rang to say she must come home, her uncle had taken another of his turns and gone into St Vincent's. "As if she hadn't enough troubles, with a sick husband, to have John's daughter turn out like this…" So long as Maud continued to live under her roof, her aunt said sternly on her return in disgrace, steps would be taken to prevent the unthinkable occurring.

Her aunt, it turned out, was unaware, despite thirty years of marriage, that sexual intercourse could take place during daylight hours. The news that Maud was pregnant, when it came, shocked her deeply, but more than that, it astounded her, that it could have happened despite all her precautions.

Reaching Dublin before nine that morning, Maud had pulled her woollen hat over her ears and muffled her face in her College scarf so that no-one would recognise her as she scurried towards Fitzwilliam Square. It was early April and the days, though cold, were already long, with beautiful twilights. Rain dripped off the bursting buds of chestnuts and elms in the Square as she hurried past Georgian railings. The door of number 55A swung easily open, the hall was warm and carpeted, empty at the moment. Already a few other jars rested on the side table. She had added her own, opened the front door again, peered around and, seeing no-one she knew, ventured back out.

Now Maud passed the Moonflower Vegetarian Café and Organic Food Supplies – she waved to Kris in the doorway. Fortunately Kris seemed to have accepted Maud's solution to his recent problem of the bees. Using honey in his culinary offerings, Kris had suddenly decided, just before Christmas, was unpaid exploitation of the labour of the tiny beasts. Maud had provided six potted flowering gums, which were planted now in a row along the Café's back fence, a sort of payment in kind to the bees, she'd said to Kris, and baklava and honey banana cake had returned to the menu. To the relief of most of the inhabitants of Cassowary Creek – after all, there was only so much Kris could do with tofu. Though only yesterday he had confessed to further worries. I think I should stop serving red vegetables, he'd told her. Red? asked Maud. Yes, said Kris, red is the colour of anger. And of wine and roses, said Maud firmly.

Their relationship went back to Maud's very first day in Cassowary Creek, when she and Sara had stepped from the glaring sunshine of the village street into the faintly smoky, incense-laden darkness of the shop. They has stood looking at the crystals, the star charts, the Indian jewellery, the open sacks of lentils and beans, while Sara licked a tofu and lychee icecream. Kris, six feet tall, with a silky red beard and little hair on his head even then, had looked down in a kindly fashion upon her solemn little daughter, and in a strong Californian accent asked: "Where do you come from?"

Sara had circled her tongue around a creamy blob escaping down the organic wheat cone, eyed him carefully, and then said: "What you really want to know, isn't it, is why am I brown when my Mammy isn't? Most people do." To his credit, Kris had blushed, then nodded.

"My father's South African, but he lives in America, and I've never seen him. My mammy's from Ireland. I was born there. But now we live here."

"Good. I'm from America too, as you can probably hear. But I live here now too. I'm Kris."

"Sara." She had held out a sticky hand. And for eight years had continued a friendship in which they spoke almost daily, he answered her most preposterous questions seriously, and much free icecream was consumed, but if the shop was busy when Sara passed, she would always pitch in and help.

It was ridiculous that Kris had been suspected, even for a day, of involvement in Sara's case. Just because he had been in Yingin earlier that day… Well, that, and his hippy image. We have to check everyone, Leslie Fernando had explained, apologetically. So often it does turn out to be a man the girl knows well.

Out the back of the café now was Kris's most recent venture, his radio station, FNQ Triple V -Vitality, Variety, Vegetarianism. For the past two years he had run this from his garden shed, where a pile of dance music tapes played continuous sound, interspersed with Kris's own eclectic taste from his youth – Dylan, Procul Harum, the Stones– and that of his friends. Every now and then, when the Moonflower wasn't busy, Kris would wander down the garden path, stop the music mid-track, pick up the mike, and hold forth to his small but devoted audience on a variety of topics: global warming, battery hens, cloning and recipes for flower jams.

Maud turned into the driveway of the cottage that served as her surgery and that of the village's masseuse and spiritual healer, Cleo, who'd lived with Kris for as long as Maud could remember. Clumps of strelitzia at the sides of the driveway supported elaborate red and purple flowers like arrogant birds. A huge rain-tree spread from the street outside to shelter the doorway. Maud parked, ran quickly up the wooden stairs, and pushed open the wire screen door. Her secretary Sylvia, wife of the village's postmaster, sat behind her desk placidly typing the letters from the morning's consultations.

"Hello Maud, back again! You're off? I've got the bloods packed up and ready for you. It's still only a cyclone watch, I heard it just now on the radio"

"Yes, hopefully it will all just blow out to sea. The airport's open. I'll pick her up and drop these into the hospital afterwards on my way back. But we're pretty right here anyway, aren't we? You'll lock up all the windows before you go?"

"Yes, and bring that garbage bin in. And close all the inside doors just in case of flooding. How long did you say – what's her name again? –is staying?"

"Sinead. Irish – Gaelic spelling you know. Must have been difficult for her when they first moved to Sydney - a name like that. Only a couple of days with me, fortunately. Then some friend is coming and they're going to a backpacker hostel in town, doing the whole reef-and-rainforest bit. If the weather allows."

"Well, good luck with her! I'll see you tomorrow afternoon unless the cyclone turns – you've got the Yingin clinic in the morning."

"Thanks. Yes, if the storm does come over the coast it might be days till we're back to normal. But we'll see."

Maud gathered up the styrofoam boxes of blood samples and ran back down the steps, then drove out through the far side of Cassowary Creek village toward the ferry. Several cane toads lay, two-dimensional, on the road – the night's cull. She slowed down automatically at the warning sign for the cassowaries' crossing, though the birds took little notice of their image on the yellow sign, and were just as likely to wander angrily onto the road at any other point, immodestly preening their bright red and blue neck feathers, lifting high their heads with the distinctive black helmets like those of Florentine judges.

Beyond the crossing, the rainforest closed in quickly along the sides of the mile of bitumened road that led down to the Cassowary River and the ferry.