‘I brought you some things …’
Pete and Jon share a look. Of course, he’s brought them some things. He’s been bringing them presents every time they’ve met, ever since they stopped rolling together.
Cormac Tate produces two parcels, each wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ they both say in unison.
‘Get on with you and open them. I haven’t got all day.’
Jon carefully unfolds the paper, while Peter tears his apart. In the package is a clothbound book. The title is stitched, in red thread, into the spine: Saucers Over the Moor.
It is one of the books Jon doesn’t have. Most of his collection are, of course, presents from Cormac Tate, Peter Duck and Strangers at Snowfell and Valley of Adventure, but that doesn’t make this one any less precious. He’s certain they’d all have lined his shelves in England if he hadn’t been shipped away, and Cormac must have gone to great lengths to find them.
Pete strains until the string finally snaps. Most times, Cormac brings him new editions of those stupid Black Chaparral comics he reads. This time, there are no comics inside the package, no new adventure with which the hotchpotch family who own the homestead might wrestle. Instead, there is a single piece of paper, wrapped up so well that Pete thinks he might be playing a children’s party game. He lays it on the table, where it promptly starts soaking up grease.
Five Rivers Road, Kununurra
‘Cormac,’ he breathes. ‘You did it …’
‘What the hell’s Kununurra?’ Jon Heather interjects.
‘Kununurra new town. Pete’s sister’s husband’s up there, working on the new dam. Thing is …’ And here, Cormac Tate leans over the table, as if to savour the reaction. ‘… it’s not far, Pete. It would be a long day’s drive, but we could do it.’
Pete marvels at the piece of paper. He has been hunting for these four words for what feels like an eternity, ever since Cormac Tate told him about the different Missions in all the corners of the world. Back then, he had thought it would be an easy thing to make the dream come true. The Children’s Crusade had to have records, he remembers thinking. And you, Jon Heather, you can steal them for me, tell me where my sister has gone.
He has never spoken with Jon about that night. There doesn’t seem to be anything either of them could say. Later, he did investigations of his own, wrote to the Crusade itself, demanded information — but when they would not write back, he had thought it was over. Of all the people pouring into Australia, how could anybody hope to find a single person?
‘Wait a minute …’ he breathes, eyes darting at Cormac Tate. ‘You said husband?’
Cormac Tate has organized a room for them. It has two beds — which can, Cormac notes, be pushed together, should the occupants so wish — and a view of the old town. The windows are netted, but the room still buzzes with mosquitoes.
‘Can we sleep with the lights off?’ Pete asks, finger itching at the electric light. ‘Them damn mosquitoes will get everywhere if we don’t.’
Jon nods, though he’d like it otherwise. ‘Lights out!’ he mutters, with a hint of something Pete still doesn’t understand.
Long after Pete is merrily snoring, Jon Heather prowls up and down, reading Saucers Over the Moor by the light of a little electric torch he carries. He’ll be damned if anybody, friend or not, is going to tell him when to go to bed ever again.
Dog knows they are coming before they have even rounded the corner. He leaps out of the truck, careening along the street to the muttered disapproval of locals walking by.
When Cormac Tate rounds the corner, Dog bowls him over. Smothered in the beautiful fish stink of Dog’s saliva, he wrestles his way back upright, steadying himself on Pete’s arm. Dog barks and scrambles up.
It’s been a while.
In the back of the ute, Pete finds the mangled remains of some sort of tern. Feathers litter the flatbed. With a guilty look into the mangroves, he sees that the terns are plentiful and heaves the carcass back.
‘You’re right,’ says Cormac, his head in the engine. ‘Shot to hell and back. I thought I told you never to take her over sixty?’
‘We wouldn’t have got here ’til 1974,’ Pete answers.
‘I could have waited.’
Pete kicks the bumper. ‘How are we gonna get there?’
Cormac Tate thinks long and hard, finally ending with his familiar sanguine shrug. ‘How’d you think I got here? Road coach. Hitching. Horses, if we have to. The old ways.’
‘Here’s me thinking we was moving up in the world.’
‘Moving on, but not moving up, Pete. You remember how it is.’ At once, Cormac quietens. Lifting his hat from his head, he presses it to his chest. ‘Listen, Pete. I heard from Booty. He’s been working down Moora way again. Says that holding’s still just sitting there, stagnant, waiting to be sold.’
Pete makes eyes, as if they’re talking about a bank heist and might be overheard.
‘I just had to say it, Pete.’
‘And I just had to hear it. I been thinking about it a lot. But if Jon Heather hears us talking like that, well, he’s about certain to throw a fit. You know how tetchy he gets. He thinks we’re plotting, it’ll be 1958 all over. Maybe we won’t see him ever again.’
Cormac nods. He presses his forehead to Dog’s muzzle. ‘You won’t tell him, will you, boy?’
‘Don’t you bet on it. That dog’s about Jon Heather’s very best friend. Do you know, the two of us aside, I don’t think there’s a single person in the world Jon Heather might call a friend.’
Cormac swats a mosquito out of his eye. ‘What do you reckon he’s doing now?’
Pete thinks of Jon, in the Old Arabia, and the girl behind the counter. ‘I can tell you what he’s not doing,’ he grins.
Jon Heather does not rise until he is sure Pete is already gone, off to show Cormac Tate what a ruin they’ve made of the ute. Nine years pounding the roads from one ocean to the next, following rumours of work and even vaguer rumours of riches, were always going to take their toll — but Cormac and Pete won’t see it like that. They’ll see it as dereliction of duty.
Jon is almost at the end of Saucers Over the Moor and, though he wants to push through and turn that final page, he knows he should savour it. He opens his suitcase to put it in with all the other books — he has never found another copy of We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, and isn’t sure he would want to — but, before he does, he ferrets down, and lifts out the bundle of banknotes hidden there. It has taken so long to get this far, but he judges he might only be a few months of hard work away. Australia is a strange kind of vortex: it can cost an Englishman ten pounds to sail over, but it takes a lifetime to save enough to escape.
He sneaks a guilty look at Pete’s haversack. Pete spends far too freely — the bloke needs three square meals a day, for God’s sake! — to have saved anything near as much as Jon. Still, he resists the urge to go ferreting; if Pete is as much of a pauper as Jon thinks, he doesn’t want to know.
Downstairs, the hall is desolate, all but for the city men eating breakfast. The girl from the counter deposits a jug of water at their table and, crossing back over, notices Jon. For the first time, Jon looks at her: she has green eyes and, this morning, her thick brown hair falls around her shoulders. She is, perhaps, taller than Jon, as tall as Pete.
‘Your mates went out bright and early,’ she calls. ‘Prone to leaving you behind, are they?’
Jon nods. As Pete would testify, it’s Jon who is prone to leaving them behind, but the girl doesn’t need to know that story.
He orders breakfast and takes a seat at the counter, where he can keep a sidelong eye on the city men hunkered around their table. Breakfast is a plate of steak and eggs, and he eats it slowly, methodically.
‘Who are they?’ he asks, between tiny mouthfuls.
‘We don’t get many city men up here,’ she says, as if acknowledging some unspoken jest between them. ‘But it’s good tra
de for my dad when they do come through. They’re Protection Officers.’ She leans, her elbows on the bar. Jon can smell the flowery scent of her perfume. ‘There, at the head of the table, that’s Mr Cook. He used to come, sometimes, to carry his master’s cases.’ She says it with a grin, as if carrying cases isn’t something anybody ought to do for anybody else. ‘Seems he must have got a promotion.’
He might only be Pete’s age, twenty-four or twenty-five. He has blond hair, trimmed in a military fuzz, and his cuffs are clipped with what look like silver brooches. Definitely a city boy. The men with him might once have worked on stations and fences; they have the look — sun-burnished skin and forearms tougher than they ought to be.
He realizes the girl has been watching him, waiting for him to reply. He stutters over a piece of steak.
‘What’s your name?’ she asks.
It is an inoffensive enough question, so Jon will answer.
‘I had an uncle Jon,’ she muses. ‘Worked on the highway.’ Apparently, this is an endorsement that Jon Heather, too, must be all right. ‘What do you boys do?’
Jon couldn’t formulate an answer, even if he wanted. He and Pete, and at one time Cormac Tate, have ridden the roads and coasts all over this continent. It is more vast even than he had imagined in those first months when he was shipwrecked here. They brought him, he knows now, to a port called Geraldton in the west, and from there inland to the farm school of the Children’s Crusade. He remembers those vast emptinesses of his youth now with a hint of irony — for, if he had known where to look, he would have found wheat farms and, further inland, more cattle stations of the sort Pete was tossed into. Begrudgingly, he will admit that the Children’s Crusade performed their mission well; if he is not yet a farmer, with his own smallholding, he does at least know how to butcher a goat and harvest a field. In the first months, they found work along a vast fence being constructed up and down the western coast, following its lengths for days on end so that they might patch holes and fill ditches. There is nothing, Jon has decided, that Australia loves more than an enormous fence or wall: only, instead of keeping out marauding Picts and barbarians, as an Englishman might have done, here they marshal all their resources against dingoes, emus and rabbits.
‘We came looking for Peter’s sister,’ he says, because the silence has to be filled. ‘Peter always thought she might have been out here …’ He says ‘out here’ like it might mean something to her; she thinks he means the Kimberley, somewhere bush, anywhere that isn’t Perth. ‘… but we were never certain. Sort of just a gut instinct, I suppose. But Cormac — that’s our old mate — he had this daughter, Maya, see. He hadn’t seen her for years, but it turns out she worked in a registry, down in Perth. So, after he started seeing his family again, he started talking about Peter and me, and she reckoned she could help. She was searching for a Rebekkah Slade for months, no luck at all — until one morning, it just hits Cormac, like a bolt from the blue. What if she got married? So they start on marriage licences — and then, well, Peter and I, we got our summons …’
It has always been like that with Cormac Tate, ever since Pete heard the full story of Cormac’s lost family and persuaded him to head back to Fremantle and find his daughters. One day, a telegram will arrive or a message will find you: Cormac is going to be in Jurien Bay, or Cormac is going to be in Narrogin, and off Pete and Jon will go.
‘So your friend Pete, he’s …’
‘Peter,’ interjects Jon, stressing the last syllable.
‘… just going to walk in there and say hello?’
Jon does not understand the question. They’re brother and sister; of course, he’ll just walk in and say hello. ‘I suppose he might knock first.’
The girl breaks into a smile. ‘You’re making fun of me,’ she says.
He really isn’t. Still, she just stands there, regarding him like an exhibit in a museum of natural oddities.
Jon is probably supposed to say something, ask her about her background, where she grew up, whether she’ll always be in Broome, does she have brothers, sisters; where is her mother, if she even has a mother? That, Jon Heather has observed, is a rule of conversation. You have to bat the questions back. Another day, he might even indulge it. There is no better way of not having to talk about yourself than making somebody else fill the conversation with stories of their own. In that way, Jon’s proved time and again, you can get through months of knowing somebody, have learnt everything there is to know about them, without having said more than a few words about yourself.
Once, somebody saw through this. Lying in bed, she said: ‘I don’t know anything about you.’
It pleased him. He said: ‘That’s because there isn’t anything to tell.’
He realizes, suddenly, that the girl is no longer standing there. His plate, too, has mysteriously vanished. ‘Hey,’ he calls, when she has almost disappeared through kitchen doors. ‘What do they … protect?’ he asks, eyes lingering on Mr Cook and his posse of starched shirts.
‘The black fellas,’ she replies, as if he ought to have known. ‘You know, out on the stations. They’re here to look after their kiddies and …’ As if a sudden idea has occurred to her, she delves into the kitchens and re-emerges with an extra cup of coffee, which she slides down the counter. ‘I’m Megan, by the way,’ she says, as if by way of reproach, and turns to disappear.
Pete and Cormac spend the morning scouring the old town in search of anybody who might have an old wagon to trade. They don’t ask for a lot: if anybody has an engine good enough to get us to Kununurra, and wants to part with it for the princely sum of an old hat and pair of sandals — oh, and if you’re really adamant, I suppose we could throw in this stupid crossbred mutt as well — we’ve got a deal. Though they wander the red roads from creek to port and back again, they have little luck.
In a grim little place, somewhere off the mangrove flats, they order piles of rice and beer. Pete makes this a banquet for a king, relying on the generosity of Cormac Tate’s back pocket.
‘I got … some set aside,’ says Pete, a hailstorm of rice flying from his lips. ‘Not much. Won’t buy us into a new truck — but I know for a fact that Jon Heather has plenty.’
He can say it as confidently as he likes, but the fact remains, Jon Heather isn’t giving those savings up just for a new ute.
‘But,’ says Pete, ‘couldn’t we tell him it’d be an investment? Without a ute, we’ll end up washing dishes in a stink hole like this …’
The patron of this fine establishment glowers. He obviously has good English.
‘… but with a ute, we could be back out there, making hay. Sure, it’d be a little setback — but, in the long run, we’d be better off.’
‘Jon Heather won’t see it like that. Got to keep moving forward.’
Pete flings his chopsticks down, and a fountain of shredded duck erupts. Damn that boy’s logic. His thinking’s as straight as the highway they followed into town.
Cormac produces the photographs of the smallholding he keeps jabbering about. ‘We could keep sheep, cattle, an emu or two …’ He says the last with a twinkle in his eye; Booty once showed them how to cook an emu chick whole, and Pete talked about it for weeks. ‘Mostly, it’d just be wheat,’ he says. ‘But do you know what the market’s like for an ear of wheat?’
‘It’s so precious, they’re selling it by the single stalk now, are they?’
Cormac Tate raises his eyebrows. ‘It’s hardly about the riches, Pete. It’s about … You know, I never had a place of my own.’
Once, Pete knows, he had the house in Fremantle, a gift from his wife’s grandfather. Once, he had two daughters and a yard and probably a dog as well. The Cormac Tate-that-was walked away from all that. He disappeared on walkabouts for weeks, then months on end, traipsing back in with presents and stories, and a hunger for liquor that wouldn’t go away. Then, one day, he just didn’t go back at all.
But what Cormac Tate means is: since I fucked up everything in the whole
wild world, I haven’t had a place. Most times these days he is living in a lodging house in Fremantle, working on fishing boats and maybe skimming a little off the side.
‘It would be a place,’ he says. ‘Our place. One nobody gifted at you or made you fit into. Pete, it would be a place for my girls to come visit. You think they come visit their old dad and his bitching landlady? I meet them in cafés, Pete. In parks. They buy me cake …’
‘You can do it, Cormac. I’m not stopping you. I could come visit too.’
‘It ain’t about your money, Pete. I can borrow the money.’
He has photographs of his family, too. Pete would never tell old Cormac Tate, but he likes looking at pictures of his daughters. It isn’t anything untoward; there’s just something about looking at a pair of sisters that makes him feel good.
Jon Heather says he had twin sisters, once.
Cormac hands the pictures over, talks about them out on his little farm, him showing them the wheat fields, his pet donkey; a proper home for Dog.
‘You’re welcome to him,’ Pete says. ‘All he ever does is moon on Jon Heather.’
Maya is twenty-three and Susanna nineteen. Cormac might have missed out on the long years of their childhood, but he is adamant he won’t miss out on any more.
The whole of life, Cormac Tate says, is about leaving one family behind and finding another — and filling those years in the middle as best you can. For boys like he once was — like Jon Heather and Pete are now — that gulf is wide and deep as the ocean. Not for them the easy glide from mother’s bosom to girl-next-door and wedding day. You cannot be wrenched from one family and be expected to land, sure-footed, in another. His daughters say they understand, though perhaps that is just a kindness for their wandering father. That they are glad he is back, he is certain; that they have forgiven him going, he will never be sure. He was never as good to them as he is to Pete and Jon Heather — that much everybody knows but nobody says.
Little Exiles Page 23