Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  ‘That isn’t a picture of any old little boys,’ says Cormac. ‘Pete, that’s a picture of me.’

  He brings the yellowing photograph out of his back pocket.

  ‘I keep meaning to get rid of these things but, damn it, I just never do. I ought to have burnt it all years ago, every last thing.’ He pauses. ‘There,’ he says, prodding it over the dust, ‘take a look for yourself.’

  The same faces peer at Peter. ‘You?’ he asks, finger dangling over some soul starving beneath his smock. ‘Hardly,’ Cormac replies. His thumb lands, leaving a thick smear, on one of the bigger boys, standing at the right hand of the man in black. ‘I was a stroppy little bastard, but I kept my head down, got on and got out. That picture’s taken three years before I left. In those days, they made you stick on until you were seventeen. We’d get given dormitories to look over. They called us Head Boys, like it was any old English boarding school.’

  Peter looks at the younger Cormac. They must be about the same age. A thought spears him: would he and Cormac have been friends, if they had both been part of the same Crusade?

  ‘You was in a Home back in England?’

  It is the same old story. A son waits for his father, fighting in some foreign field — and when his father stays there forever, there is suddenly no place for him in England any more. They sailed in 1919, Cormac and a hundred others from the devastated English towns.

  ‘I didn’t know the Children’s Crusade was that old …’ Peter says. The boys here must all be men now. Real Australian men, mustering cattle and raising boys of their own.

  ‘It’s older,’ says Cormac. ‘They said we were the Second Children’s Crusade. The first was thirty years before. Street boys from London, proper orphans and urchins … That’s why it killed me, letting your pal Jon Heather go back like that.’

  ‘Jon Heather’s all right,’ Peter says, without any real conviction.

  ‘Look, I’m an old fool. And every fool’s got a reason for feeling sorry for himself. Here’s mine.’ He picks the photograph back up. ‘I’m sure as hell sorry I snapped at you like I did. Even if you were snooping, I shouldn’t have snapped. You got a questing mind, Pete. That’s one of the reasons I like you.’

  ‘I always knew you was English.’

  Cormac shrugs. ‘There’s only one sort of fella you can really count as an Aussie.’ He pauses. ‘Booty and the rest of the blacks — and even they must have come from somewhere, once upon a while. Can’t have just sprung out of the sand, no matter what they reckon. Thing is, Pete, you give it a little bit of time, and you stop asking the question. You’re just a mongrel, like Dog over there. Maybe you wasn’t born that way, but you end up like it, a bit from here, a bit from there. I haven’t thought about England in twenty years — but, damn it, I still keep these old things.’

  Peter’s never thought about being English before. He’s just been Peter, little brother to a sister he’ll never see again, shuffled from Home to Home until he strikes lucky and ends up with the wastrels of the Children’s Crusade. He remembers the first time he saw George, shivering in his blankets with a look like confusion all over his face. Here’s a boy, he remembers thinking, who needs instruction. Here’s a boy who might make this place all right. It’s not about needing anybody else, Peter concluded that day; it’s about being needed yourself.

  ‘There’s something else I want you to see,’ Cormac begins.

  This picture is different from the last. It might be of England, because there’s snow everywhere, deep drifts and trees blanketed in white. In the picture, there is a house of timber and boys in fur and mittens. They are gathered, grinning, around a big wooden cart with what looks like a giant, shaggy cow reined to it. In the back of the cart, there are little ones piled high — and, among them, another man in black.

  ‘Where is this, Cormac?’

  ‘Farm School of the Children’s Crusade,’ Cormac Tate recites. ‘March, 1924.’

  It isn’t Australia. Peter’s about to blurt out as much, but manages to stop himself; he doesn’t want Cormac thinking he’s stupid.

  ‘Some place called Ontario,’ Cormac says, as if reading Peter’s thoughts. ‘Canada. That little one up front of the wagon — that’s my brother.’

  Men in black in the terraces of Leeds is one thing; men in black in Missions in this arid scrubland he can just about contemplate; but to think that there are men in black up there, in the snowy north, sets the dominoes toppling in Peter’s mind. Peering into the picture, he doesn’t just see the boys of a Canadian Crusade — he sees a flotilla of galleons, piled high with lost children, leaving England under the cover of darkness, each one of them bound for some distant frontier. North, south, east and west they go, finding uninhabited shores where kidnapped boys might fell timbers and raise houses and start again.

  ‘We were together in the Home,’ Cormac Tate begins, kneading his hat in his hands. ‘Three of us. Me, Finbar there, and Thom. He was the youngest. They said our old Dad died fighting for a mountainside in Italy but, to be honest, I was the only one who remembered him. I didn’t think a thing of it when they put us in those motorbuses and took us to the docks. I just thought they’d be there. But I searched every cabin — and nothing. I never saw them again.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘It was Finbar tracked me down, Pete. Left to my own devices, I’d have died without ever hearing from them again. We wrote a bit. Never did come to nothing.’

  All at once, Peter is back on the HMS Othello, watching the girls with pinafore dresses mill about the quarter deck. Jon and George bicker over atlases and charts, but Peter’s thoughts are elsewhere. Because Peter used to have a sister — and, if she was sent to the Children’s Crusade too, perhaps his sister is out there, even now, stitching furs in a shack squatting on the endless tundra, playing mother to a horde of little ones who shiver and freeze at night.

  He cannot think about it. Rebekkah is gone. He has managed not to cry in five years, and he won’t cry now. Leave the crying to Jon Heather and George; all of this, it’s water off a duck’s back to Peter. He can weather any storm.

  ‘You ever go home, Cormac?’ he suddenly asks.

  ‘Pete,’ he says, ‘it never seemed worth it. I never even tried …’

  He steers Peter from the fence and back towards the house; the sun is already setting, gold and red, over the roof.

  Jon Heather pauses, breathing in the stink of the latrines. Night flies buzz mercilessly. There are other boys flitting about the compound tonight, sneaking out of the dorms long after lights out. The cottage mothers will flap and the younger men in black will deliver punishments, but nobody cares. These months of late summer are the only ones the boys might enjoy without the shadow of Judah Reed.

  With so many other boys on the prowl, it was an easy thing for Jon to jimmy open the dormitory boards, drop onto the hard-packed earth, and follow the harrowed land around the Mission’s edge until he reached the bedwetters’ dorm. He has been thinking on George’s fairytale for long nights now, not knowing if he wants it to be true or not; thrilling as it is, if there was a wild boy, that would make Jon Heather a coward — because Jon himself turned right back round and came back to the Mission. No, what George and the little ones saw can only have been one thing. It’s Peter, sneaking into the Mission to see his old friends, just like he promised.

  There is a vantage point he searched out two days before, a crook between a sudden outburst of scrub and the remains of a stone outhouse, and Jon fashions a seat out of branches so that he might sit there unnoticed. At midnight, a trio of little ones sneak out of the bedwetters’ dorm and descend to take their last piss before morning. They are all holding hands and, in the middle of them, stands George. The little ones worship him, their very own bigger boy, but the idea has never irritated Jon more.

  Only minutes after the midnight piss, the wild boy appears. He is slight, a boy of bones, and he drops awkwardly out of the boughs of a low eucalyptus. When he skirts the latrines to find
the can the little ones have left, he drags his left leg behind him, leaning heavily on the right. At the can, he crouches, sniffs and promptly upturns the contents into his mouth.

  Jon is certain, now: this is not Peter. The boy stands there, head craned forward, keen to every rustle. He scuttles forward — but, when a light flares on the other side of the compound, he hurtles for the cover of the undergrowth.

  Jon waits until he is gone, then creeps out of his hiding place. In his haste to disappear, the wild boy has left footprints running through the soft earth around the latrines. Finding the shovel the little ones use to dig the trenches, Jon flattens away the trail.

  This runaway might not be Peter, but any boy who mocks the men in black is a friend of Jon’s.

  In the dairy the next day, he wants to tell Tommy Crowe all he has seen. Tommy Crowe has a way about him that makes you want to spill everything. But still, Jon gulps it back down. He’s been careful not to share anything ever since the day he got hazed, and he doesn’t want to lapse now. Once you make one exception, you’ll make another. You have to have rules for yourself in a place like this. Build those rules like big brick walls and the men in black can’t touch you.

  Today is butchering day. By afternoon, they’ve got through two goats, a sheep and half a dozen scrub chickens. The little ones have to be shooed away from the chickens during summer — otherwise, they’ll pilfer all the eggs and there’ll be no chickens with necks to wring later in the month. Tommy is kind enough to let Jon do the chickens while he deals with the bigger fare.

  At the back of the dairy sheds, the carcasses mounting at his feet, Jon corners a seventh chicken and, expertly, pops its head off. It is a stringy little thing that won’t be missed, so he pushes it behind one of the milk crates and gets on with the day’s work. The boys in the Mission will be joyous tonight; chicken is prized almost as highly as an illicit rabbit.

  As soon as the lights are out that night, he levers open the loose floorboard again, and makes haste for the dairy shed. Once he has collected the chicken, he slopes around the harrowed land, reaching the bedwetters’ dorm by the longest route. By the time he gets there, George and the little ones have already been on their rounds, leaving another tin can full of scraps set down in the earth.

  Tonight, though, Jon Heather has a better treat.

  He bolts across the harrowed land. The first tree is low and sprawling — and, in any case, too near the border to be safe from tell-tales. The next tree, however, is perfect, just tall enough so that the chicken might be safe from rodents. He takes a piece of twine, ties it like a noose around what’s left of the chicken’s neck, and dangles it from a branch.

  He keeps watch for almost three hours before the wild boy appears. Stars cartwheel across the sky. The moon rises over the shadow wood. And there, moving towards the dangling chicken like a cat stalking one still clucking, is the wild boy.

  Jon supposes he has been there for a long time already, lying in wait to see what ambush is being sprung. If he were a wild boy, that’s exactly what he would do.

  Tonight, however, there is no ambush. The boy jumps up, yanks the chicken down and whirls around, expecting to fend off some would-be assassin. When there are only shadows to confront him, he stalls. He looks perplexed. He limps forward, until he’s as close to the border fires as Jon has ever seen. He is twelve or thirteen, and his face is tiny and soft-featured. His skin is dark, but he’s certainly not like Booty or any of the black men back home. Only when he is certain there is no trap does he turn and disappear.

  The next morning, George and the little ones are outraged. Nobody emptied their tin can last night.

  Jon performs the same trick two days later, this time bundling up a loaf of bread and wedge of cheese that Laura smuggles out of the larder. She calls him her greedy pig, but Jon doesn’t let on what he really wants the food for. That’s another rule: keep your intentions to yourself; don’t ask for advice, and don’t let on.

  The wild boy takes the bread and cheese and disappears into the scrub, only to reappear minutes later to sit on the bank beyond the harrowed land and eat it furtively, peering into the Mission. In his hideaway, Jon feels a pang of guilt, like he’s a snatcher of stray dogs, luring them to a cage with pieces of bacon rind. Wild boys, he tells himself, are not for taming. They’ve got to stay wild. Otherwise, they’re just any old boy from the Mission — and that way the men in black win.

  Worried that he might be luring the wild boy into the Mission, Jon doesn’t go the next night, nor the night after that. Yet, when he goes to play stones with George after work the following day, there is uproar in the bedwetters’ dorm. The wild boy, it seems, has left them a present.

  Jon follows the little ones. It is laid out on George’s bed, slit from neck to tail with its innards taken out and a cross of sticks pushed through the flesh, ready to be toasted over an open fire.

  ‘What is it?’ Jon asks, peering close.

  ‘A lizard!’ George proudly announces. ‘Like a baby dragon. What do you think, Jon? Maybe the wild boy slays dragons …’

  That dusk, the little ones abscond with the lizard down to the banks of the shadow wood, and cook it like they would a rabbit. George reports that it tastes too salty, but Jon doesn’t join in. Alone among them, only he knows what the lizard means: the wild boy wants to talk.

  The next day, he risks wringing an extra chicken’s neck — only, when he strings it up on the other side of the harrowed land, he doesn’t take up his usual vantage point, but burrows down in some scrub beyond the chicken instead. He does not have to wait long. Tonight, the wild boy is less wary. An hour after the dormitory lights die, he creeps between the stunted trees.

  He must scent that something is wrong. He yanks the chicken down and clings to it like any other boy might his favourite blanket.

  In the scrub, Jon’s heart starts to thud. His fingertips tingling, he reaches out and parts the branches.

  That is all it takes — a flicker of movement. The wild boy whirls around, fending off some invisible shade by swinging the chicken. Loose feathers fly, dusting Jon Heather’s face.

  ‘Please don’t run,’ Jon begins, faltering when he recalls George begging him with those exact words. ‘I only want to …’

  Suddenly, Jon realizes his mistake: he is blocking the wild boy’s route.

  The boy drops the chicken and lunges to bowl Jon out of the way. He is scrawny, shorter as well, but he catches Jon off guard, driving him back into the thorns. Jon crumples, flailing to grab hold of the boy. Sprawled in the dust, the wild boy’s foot rises and catches him in the jaw as he runs. And there, Jon sees black and red flesh, swollen and shining even in this dull light.

  Jon gathers himself quickly, snatches up the chicken. There is only one thought in his head now: if the wild boy gets away, he gets away for good. He gives chase. This isn’t like the last time he ran beyond the bounds of the Mission. This time, he isn’t floating, alive on an idea; this time, his feet find every root and mound of uneven earth, catch and twist against every rock. The branches of a low eucalyptus flay him, the burrow of some scrubland rat jars through his whole body.

  Yet, as hampered as he is, the wild boy is hampered more, heaving his lame leg behind him. On the plain where the scrub has thinned, Jon grapples to catch him.

  The wild boy turns, smashing Jon with the flat of his hand — and now they are on the earth, rolling together, locked in a preposterous playground embrace, a dead chicken pressed between. By some quirk of fate — for he is certainly the weaker of the two — Jon pins the wild boy down.

  The dirty face opens its eyes, lets loose a volley of spittle and phlegm. ‘Get off me!’

  Jon is surprised to hear that the voice is not English. It is that, more than anything else — more, even, than the wild boy’s stench, rank even to a boy longer than a year with the Children’s Crusade — that makes him loosen his grip. It is enough for the wild boy to kick his way to freedom. He skitters to the end of the boulders. Somehow
, he has regained the chicken.

  ‘She’ll still eat up,’ the wild boy chatters, petting the broken bird, now devoid of any feathers. Jon is perplexed. ‘Why did you run?’ he asks, finally able to breathe. The wild boy scrunches his eyes tight. ‘Because you chased! Come on,’ he says. ‘I got a camp.’

  Somewhere sunrise of the Mission, there is a little thicket, and it is here that the wild boy has made his camp. He promises Jon there’s water under the rocks, if you look closely enough, but to Jon it all seems the same dry emptiness. There isn’t a fire, but that isn’t going to stop the wild boy from toasting up the chicken he’s still petting. You can’t light fires after dark, he chatters, because then somebody might come looking, thinking you’re a jackeroo or a swagman or a thieving bush black.

  Jon doesn’t know how he means to cook the chicken, but he doesn’t let on. He waits as the boy ferrets under the ashes of a dead bonfire and sees, buried underneath, huge rocks, still glowing with heat. The wild boy strains to tear the chicken apart and drops it, guts and all, into the rocks. Once he’s kicked sand over the top, and flattened it down with yet another stone, he looks at Jon, grinning with a mouth full of gaps.

  ‘I felt right better after I got that other chicken in my belly,’ he says, rubbing a gut that seems curiously swollen. ‘Even though I sicked some of it up.’ He mimes it, like a pantomime. ‘You like that goanna?’

  ‘The lizard?’

  ‘It takes a few of ’em, but you like ’em in the end.’

  Jon doesn’t have the heart to say he didn’t taste it. ‘What’s your name?’ he asks, because it seems a good place to start.

  The wild boy darts him a look. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Jon.’

  The boy tips his head towards the Mission. ‘You like it in there, don’t you?’ It is almost an accusation.

  Jon shakes his head fiercely.

  ‘I’m Luca,’ he says, after considering it for some time. ‘I used to be in there too.’

  ‘With the Children’s Crusade?’