Jon looks round; Megan’s eyes are boring into him.
‘What look?’
Megan shakes her head. ‘Never mind.’ They sit, warm wind flurrying behind them. Then, when the silence has lasted so long that Jon dare not break it, she asks, ‘Is it like this … in England?’
‘Like what?’
‘Beautiful.’
Jon Heather says: ‘I really don’t know.’
‘What do you think you’ll do? When you get back?’
Jon picks up a piece of red rock and lifts his arm back to pitch it high. ‘Megan, please …’
She shifts back, rises onto her haunches as if she might stand. ‘Jon, we can go, if that’s what you …’
He lets the rock fly. ‘No,’ he says through gritted teeth. ‘It isn’t that.’
‘Then what?’
‘It’s …’ To say it would be stupid, and he doesn’t want her to think any bad thing about him — and, as soon as he realizes that, he knows it is already too late. ‘Let’s not talk about England, OK?’
‘I’d like to see it one day. That’s all.’
‘Megan …’
She sits back down, inches closer this time. ‘What do you want to talk about then?’
Jon takes his eyes from the horizon and looks at her. He reaches out and takes hold of her hand. He closes his eyes and draws her into him, finds the corner of her lips. Something softens, the pair relaxing, and they kiss, almost without moving.
Sometimes, you don’t want to talk at all.
By the time evening approaches, Cormac Tate and Pete are out on the great dirt oval in front of the Old Arabia, deeply entrenched in a contest of cards with the bush blacks who gather there. Pete’s eyes, heavy with drink, are fixed on his hand — he has not noticed for six rounds that he is holding the Queen of Hearts back to front — when Cormac Tate drives an elbow into his ribs. Yelping, he looks up to see the ute gliding back over the rise of red. Suddenly, Dog hurtles from the hotel’s veranda, and launches himself onto the flatbed while the truck is still running.
Jon and Megan step out of the ute.
‘Jon Heather!’ Pete bawls, showering the deck of cards. He turns, oblivious to the invective hurled at him from the crowd. ‘Jon Heather, get yourself a beer!’
Pete tosses him a tin, hot as if it has been roasting in an oven. With a sideways look at Megan, Jon cracks it open. Instantly, she snatches it and takes the first pull.
‘Get in on this, Jon Heather. They’ve taken just about every penny I got. And I got them from Cormac Tate.’ Pete spins, sloshing beer into the lap of the man sitting next to him. ‘Listen up, you rabble! There’s a new game on. It’s called …’ He looks, wildly, back at Jon. ‘Stones!’ he declares. ‘And this is how it works!’
The beer hits Jon, hard and fast. He looks at Pete’s eager eyes, as wide and lovelorn as Dog’s. There is little a man can do when his friends look at him like that.
‘You don’t have to stay,’ he says, looking at Megan.
‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world …’
The circle parts and Jon and Megan take their places. As Jon ferrets in the grass for stones, Pete needles at Megan’s arm.
‘You two been out all day,’ he slurs.
‘We have indeed,’ she replies.
Over her head, he catches Cormac Tate’s eye. Both of them nod sharply, like men might do at a job well done, and then return to the party.
On the tenth day before Christmas, Jon sees Mr Cook going into the lock-up with an old aboriginal man, much darker than the girls he is going to see. Sitting in the ute on the edge of the dirt oval, Jon begins to fantasize that the man is the girls’ grandfather, come to barter for their release.
Half an hour later, Cook and the black man emerge. Cook chatters like he is the old man’s friend; that the old man does not chatter back only lends weight to Jon’s theory: the childsnatcher is selling back the children he has taken. When, at last, they part, they shake hands. The deal is complete.
He decides to follow the black man for a while. The trail does not go far, only to a canteen on the bay, where he sits alone to eat, throwing coins onto a counter. Jon orders food to take out, his back to the black man at all times.
Back at the ute, he gives half of his food to Dog and looks at the problem sideways. He thinks how his own grandfather might have looked, had he ever known him, walking up to the Mission to make a pact with Judah Reed. In his mind, the old man rages. Surely, that is how it should be done. But Jon thinks: once upon a time, that is what I would have done too. Now, though, I have rules; everything else is buried inside — and perhaps I, too, could serenely shake hands with the childsnatcher if, in the end, I got what I wanted.
Seen like that, Jon can even convince himself that the black man is indeed the girl’s grandfather — because the only alternative is too terrible to imagine: the childsnatcher has the girls’ people on his side.
At the Old Arabia, he tells Megan what he has seen. There are few guests in the hotel this week, and they sit together in the shade at the back of the grounds, listening to the sea.
Megan listens but he wonders if she understands. She does not, after all, know about childsnatchers and men in black. He wonders: what would she say if I was to tell her?
‘Jon …’ Her fingers dance on his arm. At his feet, Dog looks up, considers if he ought to let this go on, and then slumps back down, too hot and exhausted to care.
‘How many times has he come here before?’ he demands.
Her fingers chase his. ‘The Protectors have been coming here since I can remember, Jon. Since I was a little girl.’
‘Just like the men in black came for us,’ Jon says. He finds that his fingers have stopped retreating. He turns his palm to take her hand. ‘They came for Cormac Tate and they came for boys long before that too, boys who’d have been dead before I was born. And they’re still coming, Megan. Every year the ships set sail.’
The silence demands to be filled. Once, there was a time when Jon Heather could have sat through a year of silence, could have driven a thousand miles with Pete and Cormac Tate and not breathed a word. Now, when he looks at Megan, he isn’t certain how long he can last.
So he tells her, every last thing. He used to imagine telling his mother this story, but he has not pictured that in so long that it feels strange — dangerous even — to be telling the truth. All the same, he spills it all: the Home, the snows, the letter, the sea; the scrub and the Mission, Tommy Crowe and … he checks himself; he does not tell her how he sold the wild boy back to Judah Reed.
For a long time, she only strokes his hand. Then, she goes to him and his lips brush hers. That is all. She lies back in her seat.
‘How long would it take?’ she asks. When Jon does not answer, she says, ‘To save the money and get back home.’
Another aeon, thinks Jon, now that we have the new ute.
‘I could ask my father — when trade’s right, we take on help. We could find a use for you, I’m sure. I was barely walking the last time this place got a lick of paint. And …’ She runs her hand up and down his forearm. ‘You wouldn’t have to pay, Jon. You could lodge here. And then …’
Jon rolls to his side, facing her.
‘I don’t know,’ she smiles, ‘but I’ve got used to seeing you moping around.’
He can picture it: long days out on some fishing boat; long nights painting and fixing and cleaning the hotel. In every frame, he sees Megan. He sees them lying together at the end of a heavy, hot day, drinking sour lemonade and ice; climbing, again, to that secret place on Cable Beach and bathing in the deep tidal pools; stolen moments between shifts.
Tonight he is weary. Perhaps, if he was not so tired, he would stop there — but, instead, he allows his imagination to reel on. He pictures going through the doors into the family quarters, Megan’s father long gone, and waking there every morning, Megan at his side.
Megan’s eyes drop and Jon realizes how long he has been silent. He squeezes her
hand to draw her eyes back to him.
‘It will be over soon, Jon,’ she says, as if such a thing might soothe him. ‘Cook and his colleagues, they’re checking out tomorrow. They paid up in full tonight.’
Jon’s hand tightens in hers. ‘Leaving?’
‘Back south,’ she says. Suddenly she knows she should not have said a thing — but Jon’s eyes compel her to go on. The moment is already gone, like an apparition seen in the corner of your eye; as soon as you focus on it, it vanishes. ‘They have a boat readied in the harbour.’
‘A boat?’
‘They’ll sail it down the coast. I think …’ She pauses. ‘Gerladton … and Perth.’
Jon twists so that their arms are no longer interlocked. He swings his legs from the chair. ‘They have some place for them there, don’t they? All the little black bush girls …’
‘Jon,’ Megan says, ‘I don’t know …’
It does not matter — because Jon does. He stalks back through the hotel, watching over the dining room. In one corner, Pete and Cormac Tate, deep into another night’s drinking; in the other, Cook and his officers, conspiring like a coven.
A close, sticky night: Dog at the foot of his bed, chest heaving, feet scrabbling as he mauls some tern in his sleep; Pete whinnying like a mule in the bed alongside.
Jon Heather, lying awake, images moving across the backs of his eyes: what if, on the day Judah Reed took me to sea, some pirate had sailed out, boarded the HMS Othello, and taken me back?
The childsnatcher does not come in the dead of night.
Pete wakes to a firm hand on his shoulder. Pawing out, he sees Jon Heather’s face coming into focus.
‘They’re getting a wagon ready. The black man’s with them.’
It is just senseless words. ‘What?’
‘He isn’t their grandfather. I think he’s showing them where …’
‘Where what?’
‘Where Cook can finish up his business.’
By the time Pete has fully woken up — with a helpful shove from Dog’s wet snout — Jon is at the door, pulling on the boots from his pack. Boots can mean only one thing: Jon is serious.
Pete pushes Dog away, but Dog leaps back onto his bed and starts digging in the sheets.
‘You’re not leaving me alone on this,’ Jon says. ‘This concerns you too.’
‘Sleep concerns me. Finding my sister concerns me.’
Jon slams the door.
Downstairs, Megan’s father is attending to some guests checking out. Jon hurries through and emerges, blinking, onto the street. Dawn has barely come, but the sun already seems high; only a mad Englishman and Dog might go out today.
Dog appears on his heels, scenting adventure — but Pete does not trail behind.
In the yard alongside the Old Arabia, Mr Cook climbs into the same police ute that Jon saw the girls trapped inside; at the wheel, the old policeman sits with his face set in stone. On the flatbed at the back, hunched under the arcs of wire as if he is himself their prisoner, the aboriginal man crouches on his haunches. Jon sees, not without horror, that he has a shotgun in his hands, the barrels broken back.
Don’t let yourself be seen, Jon Heather. He repeats it to himself as he slopes along the side of the building, in shadow until he reaches the new ute.
He is just clambering in when a figure, still hauling up his shorts, careens around the side of the building, shirt splayed open to reveal a chest covered in coarse red hair.
Better late than never, Jon supposes.
‘I’m driving,’ Pete says.
‘The hell you are,’ says Jon.
‘I’m older than you, remember!’
A split-second thought. ‘It’s my ute,’ Jon says, and turns the ignition.
Cook and his companions round the dirt oval and take the highway out of Broome, swinging back south as they follow the coast. It is the same road that first brought Jon and Pete into town. On the flatbed, Dog sniffs the rushing air.
Few cars tread this highway, but the road is straight for hundreds of miles, so Jon is content to hang back, letting them roll on until they are nearly at the horizon. Only when the road banks to follow the swelling coast does he push his foot to the floor: he cannot miss the moment they leave the highway to follow one of the dirt tracks east. Out there, lies the Great Sandy Desert — all of Australia has the names Jon might have used, as a boy, to draw an imaginary world: the Snowy Mountains, Skeleton Bay, Kangaroo Island — but they will not push that far. There are stations between here and there; this, Jon Heather decides, is where they are bound.
Two hours south of the bay, Jon sees the police ute starting to slow, pushing forward in fits and starts as if its occupants were bickering about where the turn-off lies. Careful as Jon is not to mirror their flow exactly, the gap between them grows and shrinks like a tide.
‘You know you’re out of your head, don’t you?’ Pete says. He has said the same thing every few minutes since they set out, but Jon hasn’t once replied. ‘Jon, you don’t want to see this … If Cormac Tate was here, he’d box your ears.’
Jon gives Pete a look like a serrated dagger. ‘Cormac Tate isn’t my father. And he isn’t yours either.’
Up ahead, the police ute banks left, along a red dirt road. Jon brakes hard, approaches the turn-off at a crawl, wary that the police ute might be just beyond. The road, lined in broken fences, disappears into scrub and pitted pastures.
‘How far do you reckon?’
In reply, nothing but stony silence.
‘Peter!’ Jon barks. At his side, Pete rears up. ‘How far?’
Pete shrugs. ‘Fences this close to the highway?’ he says. ‘Shouldn’t be far, Jon Heather …’
The scrub thins. This is certainly grazing land, but there are no cattle to be seen. Grass grows in full colour, drinking greedily of the recent rains. There are no stock routes over the desert, but Jon knows that old routes, pioneered by other English boys cut adrift here, skirt it to the east and south.
‘You see that?’ says Jon.
Pete resists for as long as he is able. ‘I see it,’ he says.
Somewhere south of the trail, there is smoke. There are barns in one of the fields, but no station house that either of them can see. If drovers come here at all, perhaps they sleep with their animals like the shepherds of old. Further on, Jon sees other tracks going into the scrub, two rises of land, not quite hills, and a causeway of undergrowth between.
At the side of the road, there sits the police ute. At first, Jon brakes. Then, he rolls slowly past. There is nobody in the cab, no one imprisoned in the caged flatbed. He thinks, I could let down its tyres. I could smash up its windows, drain out its gas.
His eyes drift to the causeway between the rises. Where there is smoke in the Wet, there will be people. That is the way they will have gone.
Jon noses the ute off the track and into scrub where it might not be seen, unless somebody was already upon it. When he steps out, the heat hits him like a furnace.
They move slowly back to where the police ute is parked. All around them is still; only the buzzing of insects and the alarm of rainbow birds disrupts them. Jon peers into the cab, sees a sheaf of papers bound in leather, a little memo book in which orders might be made in triplicate: take the children; take the children; take the children.
He takes hold of the wire cage, tests it for strength. It is bolted fast onto the flatbed, built for thugs and drunkards.
‘You bring the tools?’
Pete shrugs. ‘I’ve got them in my back pocket,’ he mutters.
Jon stands at the apex of the trail. They could be anywhere out there. If it is blacks working the cattle, they might have camps all around.
‘We’ll wait,’ he says.
They bring the ute to a spot where they might see Cook and the policeman coming back, without themselves being seen. In the blistering heat, they loiter. Morning becomes noon, noon becomes high noon; the sun cuts its arc above.
‘Merry Christmas, J
on Heather.’
‘Shut up,’ Jon breathes. ‘Someone’s coming …’
There are no shadows at this hour, so it must just be a feeling Jon gets. They sit in rigid silence, the glass steaming around them — until, at last, they turn to one another. There are voices: not one, or two, but a whole host.
Mr Cook is the first to appear. His fair complexion is already bull red, his scalp screaming with sunburn under his short hair.
Next comes the aboriginal man they brought from Broome. He is carrying his shotgun, but using it like a walking cane, a simple stage prop.
Next, a tiny girl, three or four years old.
Jon pitches forward, hands gripping a red-hot steering wheel. Pete snatches at his shoulder, but is quickly thrust off.
‘Easy, Jon,’ he says. ‘We didn’t come here looking for a fight.’
Something is wrong. The little girl should be crying. Instead, she is holding somebody’s hand, gazing up, perplexed at those around her. For a second, she smiles.
There are two women behind, darker than the girl: her mother? Her aunt? They bustle along like they are taking her to a market, careful that she should not stray too far from their sight.
Lastly comes the old policeman. He opens the ute, allows Cook to climb in, and then ushers the girl and the two adults around. If they are perturbed to see the cage at all, they do not show it. The policeman opens the back seat of the ute, and shows them where they are to sit. They slide in without complaint. The policeman takes his place behind the wheel — and it is left to the old aboriginal, one passenger too many, to slide into the cage.
‘Jon Heather, you dumb shit. They’re not capturing anybody. They’re taking them to see those other girls. Probably they were found wandering, didn’t know how to get home.’ Pete lets out a braying laugh. ‘Look at you! It’s like somebody stamped on your favourite toy …’
Jon waits until the ute has pulled away, hiding itself under clouds of dust. His hands loosen on the steering wheel.
‘Come on, Jon. I’ll drive back.’
Jon ignores him and starts up the engine. He remembers something he has not thought about in ten long years, that last night in the Home in Leeds, when a certain red-haired boy looked at him and said: I’m not happy Jon, and I’m not sad. This place or some other place — it just doesn’t matter to me.
Little Exiles Page 26