Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

It is not far to go, but every step deeper in is another step he will have to travel back. Every time his foot falls, he hears Cormac Tate imploring him. His voice intones: there’ll be snow on the Nullarbor Plain … His eyes dart back and forth. In the distance, he sees the sketchy silhouette of one of the men in black. He feels himself tugged after George. It has been an aeon since he was afraid of a man in black, but the old chill returns to him now.

  George leads him boldly and, for the first time in his life, he realizes that George might just be the braver of the two. To his relief, they do not have far to go, only across the untilled field and up and over an ill-hewn stile. On the other side they find Jon in a dairy, with his hands elbow-deep in the belly of a billy goat.

  When he sees Peter, he is not taken aback. His face sets in a deep scowl and he whips his hands out, splattering gore across the earth. ‘What on earth are you doing, George!? McAllister’s kicking around here!’

  George’s face flits between Peter and Jon.

  Jon wipes the thick gore off his hands with a dirty apron. ‘Here,’ he says, scrunching it up and hurling it at Peter. ‘Get this on. With any luck, he might think you’re one of the new boys.’ He looks Peter from top to bottom, can’t quite believe his eyes. ‘And Peter, you’ve got to get those boots off! They give you away a mile off!’

  Peter sits on an upturned bucket, squirming into the apron, while George gleefully yanks his boots off.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Jon demands.

  ‘Shit, Jon Heather, king of the Crusade!’

  At Peter’s feet, George erupts in laughter.

  ‘This isn’t a game, Peter. You can’t just waltz in here …’

  Peter nudges George. ‘He’s getting real bossy, George. Don’t tell me he’s pushing you around like this?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jon snaps, ‘well, it isn’t you who’ll get the beating if you’re found, is it? You’ll just hurry off home. Back to Cormac Tate.’

  It is a more vicious accusation than Peter realizes. Jon said home with as much of a curse in his voice as he could summon up.

  The silence stretches. Then, slowly, the corners of Jon’s lips start to twitch. As soon as he sees it, Peter bounces back into life. He ruffles George’s hair and leaps from the bucket. ‘There it is!’ he says, watching Jon’s smile finally break. ‘Jon Heather, it’s good to see you.’

  ‘You too, Peter.’

  On the ground, George beams.

  ‘Jon, there’s something I’ve got to ask you …’

  Still on edge, Jon pokes his head out of the dairy doors.

  ‘Jon, it’s about my sister.’

  ‘Your sister?’

  ‘You remember I told you about my sister.’

  Jon shrugs. He remembers he tried to tell Peter about the sisters of his own, but Peter wasn’t interested.

  ‘The thing is, Jon, I’ve been talking to Cormac Tate and …’

  He produces the photograph, the Children’s Crusade from the late summer of 1923. If it stirs anything in Jon, that the childsnatchers have been at work for generations, he hides it well. There seems something curious about Jon Heather today; it’s as if there is a glass pane between him and everybody else.

  ‘You think she might have been here,’ Jon breathes.

  ‘I haven’t seen her in five years. But Jon, if she was here …’

  ‘Then she’s still in Australia,’ Jon concludes. ‘Boys to be farmers and girls to be farmers’ wives.’

  ‘She’d be nineteen now.’

  ‘Too old for the Children’s Crusade.’

  ‘But they must know …’ Peter insists, his voice suddenly hushed. ‘Jon, Cormac Tate thinks there’ll be records. Registers. Going all the way back, even to when he was here.’

  It dawns on Jon, what Peter’s asking. He turns a pirouette in disbelief. It is more believable that that dead goat will rise again than that Peter’s really asking him to do this.

  ‘There are pictures!’ George pipes up.

  They both look at him.

  ‘In Judah Reed’s office,’ he ventures. ‘All up on the wall, big and black and white. Old pictures, Peter. There’s pictures of boys building the dormitories. Maybe Rebekkah’s in one of those?’

  Momentarily, Peter is touched that George remembers his sister’s name. Then, a deeper thought strikes. ‘You’ve seen these pictures, Georgie?’

  George looks, suddenly flushed red, at Jon.

  ‘It’s OK, George. It isn’t a secret,’ Jon says.

  ‘What’s not?’ demands Peter.

  When George shrugs, Jon knows it’s down to him. Damn George, but it’s always down to him. ‘George was in Judah Reed’s office when … when I ran away, Peter. It was while he was … waiting for a beating.’

  George might be about to start crying again, but a look from Jon forces him to hold back. ‘I’m sorry, Peter … It just keeps happening. They moved me in with other boys like me …’

  Peter’s look says it all. He’d hated sending Jon back here, but now he knows he was right. It’s positively flowering on his face. Jon boils. It’s been a whole year, he’s been doing his best, playing stones and telling stories and … He knows it’s not good enough — but when could it ever be? As if it’s Jon’s fault George can’t cross his legs at night! That’s just like Peter. Don’t blame George because George is just a baby — oh, but don’t call him a baby, Jon, or then the baby will cry.

  ‘You’ve done it before, Jon. When you went looking for your mother’s letter …’

  Jon wants to kick the dead billy goat, send its insides splattering out of the hole in its chest. Already, he knows he can’t say no. And it isn’t just that Peter’s asking. It isn’t just that Peter’s his friend. It’s that the men in black won’t want him to do it. That’s the real reason he’ll say yes.

  He sits on a crate, then stands back up again. He wishes he had a rule for this — but he hasn’t got rules for how to deal with his friends. Not yet.

  Then it strikes him: there’s something he wants too.

  There’s a wild boy. He escaped from the Mission, but now he’s back … Every night, Jon has left food out for Luca. Sometimes, when the moment arises, he has even sneaked just over the Mission’s edge, to listen to his stories in the scrub. And he’s started to notice those horrible, vivid colours on his leg — they’re not disappearing; they’re spreading, bleeding out like drops of ink in a pool of water. He eats everything Jon brings, and more — but the only part of him getting any fatter is that pot-belly, rock solid and tender to touch. Once, Jon saw him in the waning daylight — and he had no whites in his eyes, just a kaleidoscope of bloodshot yellow.

  Bit by bit, Jon has been able to piece together Luca’s story. He comes from Malta, was shipped out with a glut of English boys from Acton and Coventry, places Jon doesn’t know. Back home he had been in an orphanage — but it wasn’t until he boarded the HMS Othello that they told him his mother was truly dead. Yet there was something in Luca that didn’t believe a word these new men in black said. At the Mission, he held to that, hoping against all hope that his mother had survived. He ran and got caught at a ranch. He ran and was brought in by black trackers. He ran, and he ran, and he took his beatings every time, his whole body wearing the history of the times he tried to get home. And when, at last, they threatened to send him south, to a place called Bindoon, where more men in black held sway, he ran away and never came back.

  At first, it was difficult being a wild boy — but he learnt tricks wherever he could, from farmhands who took pity on him, from bush blacks bonded to a station at which he begged. Roaming far and wide, he came to the coast. Here, there were easy pickings to be had. You could plunge your hands into a tide pool and come out with enough fish to last a week’s worth of dinners.

  Then, high up on some rocks, stealing eggs from the giant terns he so admired, he fell.

  He was one moon and more, holed up in a seaside cove, dragging himself out to find crabs and shells and seaweed — but, even when
he could walk again, it was never the same. Something stirred inside him. He began to roam — and soon he could see familiar stations, familiar rocks and patches of scrub. He knew it was the Mission calling out for him, but though he skirted its boundaries, nothing — no man nor boy nor insidious thought — would make him ask for their help.

  In truth, Jon doesn’t want him to come in. Late at night, it is not the thought of Luca dying that fills him with anger; it is the thought of him walking, meekly, into Judah Reed’s office, pouring out his apologies and begging to be saved.

  ‘I want to get him to a doctor,’ Jon begins. ‘A hospital. Somebody who can help. Maybe you and Cormac …’

  Peter nods. ‘I hear you, Jon Heather. That sounds fair dinkum.’

  Jon shoots him a look. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s something Cormac says.’

  ‘Well …’ Jon feels he might explode. ‘It shouldn’t be.’

  ‘Look,’ says Peter. ‘Are you going to help me or not?’

  George interjects, ‘I’ll do it, Peter!’

  Jon steps out of the dairy. There’s still no sign of McAllister, but the hairs are prickling all up and down his neck.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, looking back. ‘If you’ll help me.’ He reaches out his hand, still black and red, to shake Peter’s. This very moment might be the birth of another rule: never risk yourself for nothing; always exact something in return, even if it’s from the people you love.

  ‘A bloody handshake,’ says Peter, taking hold. ‘Now, that’s something we didn’t get back home.’

  In bed that night, Jon Heather lies awake, listening to the ferreting of scrub rats underneath the dormitory floor.

  It has been two nights since he was able to bury scraps in the scrubland for Luca to find. He has been leaving them at the slag heaps, where refuse from the construction site now forms a range of miniature mountains — and though, every morning, the scraps have been taken, he is less and less certain that the wild boy is to blame. This morning, there was spoor all around the spot, the trails of some scavenger come to take the wild boy’s food away. Tonight, the images will not leave him alone: Luca, growing weaker and weaker in his bush camp, his skin mottling further, long hours of the day lost to fitful sleep.

  In the dairy the next day, he is scrubbing pails when a man in black ghosts through and takes Tommy Crowe aside. Jon knows not to watch openly, but slows in his scrubbing and squints out of the corner of his eye. The man in black whispers into Tommy’s ear, and then drifts on.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Jon.

  Tommy mutters darkly. ‘See for yourself.’

  They stand in the dairy doors and look deep into the Mission. Up there, the spindly figure of a cottage mother is leading a boy, by twisted ear, across the dusty expanse. She is approaching the sandstone huts, but before she has got halfway, Judah Reed himself emerges and strides towards her. It seems, to Jon, that he takes one mighty stride for every three of hers.

  In the middle of the earth, they meet, the boy dangling between them. They begin to talk, animatedly, as if the creature is not suspended between them, already bawling out.

  ‘He pissed hisself,’ Tommy Crowe says. ‘They’d been helping him hide it in the dorm, but that cottage mother was staking them out. She was going to give him a hiding but …’ At this, Tommy Crowe’s face breaks into a wild, unbidden smile. ‘See the way she’s holding her wrist?’

  Jon nods. A smile is creeping onto his face too.

  ‘That’s right!’ Tommy says. ‘That little lad went and sunk his teeth in.’

  ‘Do you think he drew blood?’

  ‘I’d say so, Jon.’ He pauses. ‘See, there’s going to be a hazing …’

  Tommy leaves the dairy door to go back to the goats but, for the longest time, Jon lingers. Out there, Judah Reed takes hold of the boy’s other ear and, like that, he is marched back to his dormitory: the scene of his shame, the scene of his crime.

  ‘Tommy,’ Jon says. ‘I’ve got another job to do.’

  Tommy Crowe nods. ‘But I’m not carrying these pails for you.’

  Jon hurries. He could approach the sandstone buildings from any angle, but he does so brazenly, crossing paths with Judah Reed as he marches to see sodden sheets and drops of the cottage mother’s blood. He risks a look back, sees other men in black flocking the same way, as if eager to know what their leader might do.

  There will never be a chance so opportune. He approaches the sandstone building, waits outside like an errant boy being made to brood before his beating — and then pushes through the door.

  Inside, he stands in a little cloakroom, the same as at the front of all the dormitories. A big bright poster hangs on the wall, behind a sheet of glass riveted to the stone: Build Your Children’s Future! it cries out, bold letters painted across a map of the continent made up in red brick and mortar. £10 Can Take Them to Australia!

  There is only one hallway leading out of here. It seems to run the length of the long, oblong building, with chambers on either side. He keeps low, out of sight of the windows, scuttling past open doors and pressing his eye to the keyhole of every locked one. Somehow, he knows he is alone.

  The hallway comes to an end — and, he feels certain, he is at Judah Reed’s own chamber. Outside the door there sits a wooden bench, big enough for three boys to sit together, heads bowed, waiting to be lashed. He knows Judah Reed is not here, but still he presses his eye to the keyhole. Then, he puts both hands around the enormous doorknob and turns.

  The same tapestry that he saw in the Home in Leeds hangs against the wall — but, on the other walls, above a big, plain desk, where countless boys have been exposed and taught lessons, it is just as George said: photographs of each generation of the Children’s Crusade. Here is the Mission in its earliest days, with boys piled into the back of a horse and trap; boys draped over, of all things, a camel, with the sun beating down. And, underneath the pictures, legends: the names of the men in black, the names of the boys they have brought here.

  Jon rushes over, toppling a vase of dried flowers. He rushes to put it back into place, treading dead petals into the ground. If Peter’s sister was here at all, she was here four or five years ago. Jon knows nothing of her: a red-haired girl, tall and thin, prone to sticking out her tongue. His eyes rove over the pictures, but it is too tempting to drop further back in time. 1911. 1920. 1922. The Children’s Crusade have learnt their profession well: there must be a thousand boys who have been dragged, kicking and screaming, through this Mission; a thousand Englishmen arrive, and a thousand Australians depart.

  There, on the wall, is a picture Jon Heather knows — the very same one that Peter brought to show him, Cormac Tate as a little boy, pining for England but doomed never to return. Jon scans the names written below in cursive script. Cormac Tate is listed as Cormac only, as if, like all of these other boys, he has had to shed something in coming here.

  Jon realizes, for the first time, that he has never asked George his surname. He has never asked Peter. They don’t have surnames now — but Jon will always be Jon Heather. He’ll have it carved into his arm with a penknife and a pot of ink.

  Jon is about to look away, when another name catches his eye. He flits between the picture and the register, singling out the boy. He is standing only two boys removed from the young Cormac Tate, his smile as forced as all those around him.

  His name is Judah, and his eyes glower, betraying his upturned lips.

  Jon stands there for a long time. Too long. He is still standing there, trying to convince himself that this cannot be Judah Reed, that it makes no sense, when a shadow falls over the room. He turns around — but he is still alone. A whisper of black moves away from the window, a man moving past and blotting out the sun.

  He freezes. He does not know if he’s been seen. But now there is a door slamming, somewhere in the sandstone building, and footsteps reverberating along the hall. He was trapped like this once before, but he won’t be trapped again. He runs to the window
, heaves and heaves to lift it up. When it won’t move, he panics. Skitters around, desperate for another route. As he turns, he sees the clasp at the top of the window, holding it in place. He scrambles up, leaping the last few inches, and knocks the clasp free. Seconds later, feet kicking wildly behind, he is through the window, landing in a heap on the earth outside.

  He does not wait to find out if, indeed, he was seen. If it was so, they’ll come looking for him soon enough; no sense in walking to them, hands clasped, begging for forgiveness.

  Scratch it into your arm, Jon Heather. Another rule in how to live your life.

  At first, he runs for the dairy, but something draws him round, towards the opposite end of the Mission. George will be there, somewhere; today, the bedwetters are shovelling the latrines. He has to tell somebody. He hasn’t found Rebekkah; he’s found something immeasurably worse: once upon a time, in this faraway world, Judah Reed was one of us.

  By the time he reaches the bedwetters’ dorm, he is out of breath, with a stitch in his side. He rounds the back of the dormitory — but the latrines are the same as they’ve been for weeks. They haven’t been worked today. He spins around, searches the avenues between the shacks in search of little ones out on muster.

  By degrees, Jon’s eyes are drawn to the dormitory shack. There shouldn’t be anybody inside during the day, not when there’s work to be done — but, if he cocks his head, he is certain he can hear voices within. It isn’t just one voice, but a dozen and more, the little ones singing a song. If they’re shirking their duties, they’re bound to join the hazing this afternoon. Jon steals around the shack, treading softly along the latrines and approaching the doorway so that he cannot be seen.

  At the door, he hears another voice among the little ones, and the soft strumming of a guitar. He peeps in, and the first thing he sees are glass bottles, lined up in a milk crate at the door. Except, they’re not the same shape as milk bottles; they are thinner, with long necks, and black writing on the side. Somebody has been bringing the bedwetters Coca-Cola.

  In the dormitory, the beds have all been pushed against the walls and the little ones gather around a younger man in black. In the middle of the circle, he sits on a wooden stool, a battered guitar in his hands. Perhaps he is leading the song, but the boys certainly know it off by heart; this can’t be the first time they’ve gathered for a little singalong. It isn’t a tune Jon knows, but they’re warbling something about swagmen and billabongs and jumbucks, things he doesn’t want to know anything about.