Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  He looks sideways at the man lounging in the passenger seat, head slumped as if they are on yet another mindless jaunt to some station or fence. He thinks: how I hate him for his ease; how I hate him for the way he can scoff; how I hate him for being him.

  ‘Jon Heather, stop!’ Pete lunges forward, driving his right foot down as if it is him with the pedals underneath. Instinctively, Jon does the same. The ute skids in the dust, bouncing Dog around violently in the back.

  Through curling dust, Jon sees the two aboriginal women standing in the middle of the trail. That they did not run from the skidding ute is madness enough — but Jon sees that they have rocks in their hands. Their eyes are wide and they glisten with tears.

  The little girl is nowhere to be seen.

  Jon leaps out of the cab, but the women start screaming at him. One lets fly with a rock. He goes to them, hands raised, but every step he takes only ignites their ire.

  ‘Peter!’ he bellows. ‘Pete!’ he repeats.

  Pete comes between Jon and the two women. He is better at this. Jon has never had the ear for it; when they worked with black stockmen in the year of 1957, Pete could talk with them for hours, ease his way in and chatter about endless nothings.

  ‘They threw them out of the ute,’ says Pete.

  Jon could have surmised that himself. He tears back towards their own ute, bellowing for Dog.

  ‘They’ve still got the girl.’

  ‘Tell them to get in back,’ Jon says.

  Pete turns, tries to explain. They look at him dumbly: you two, you’re with the childsnatchers.

  ‘Tell them to shut their mouths and do it now! If Cook gets to the highway, that little girl’s gone.’

  Jon kicks the engine into gear, thrusts the ute forward, throwing open the passenger seat for Pete to slide in.

  ‘Now!’ he roars.

  He keeps the ute rolling while the women climb up the back. Then he pounds his foot to the floor.

  One mile; two miles; three miles; four. They pass the station’s trail markers with terrifying regularity: the highway cannot be far.

  Up ahead: rising dust. Jon kneads the accelerator, releasing his foot only when he feels the ground soften beneath them; he cannot afford to slide into a skid now. The police ute does not know it is being followed, but still it keeps its speed up. When you are in the business of childsnatching, Jon notes, you do not want to stay in the same place long.

  He closes the gap, until he is certain they have been seen. One hand off the wheel, he hammers on the glass behind them, and the women crouch low. One of them holds onto Dog, muttering petitions.

  ‘Jon,’ Pete finally whispers.

  ‘Can you see the girl?’

  She isn’t under the caged flatbed; she must be riding up front, like a good little darling, bouncing on Daddy’s knee.

  ‘Jon Heather, please …’

  It takes achingly long until they are close enough that he can see the girl, sitting in the black man’s lap, on the back seat. His hand hovers over the horn. He leaves it there for a second, if only to be a reasonable man.

  Rule one: when you are angry at them, don’t let them know you are angry.

  New rule: to hell with rule one.

  Jon hits the accelerator hard and smashes into the back of the wagon.

  The police ute was built for harder things than this, harder than their own vehicle — but that doesn’t matter; Jon has surprise on his side. Pete flails out, as if he might grasp the wheel himself and push them into the scrub, but Jon thrusts an elbow sideways and batters him off. Up ahead, they know that something is wrong. If the shunt did not give them a clue, they must certainly hear the screaming. Jon tries to blot it out: that little girl is screaming too; she’ll be screaming for days and nights to come, if he loses his bottle now.

  He forces the ute to the left, rides up and smashes the police ute again, this time catching it in the corner and forcing her into a sharp turn. In front, the old copper wrestles with the wheel, manages to right her. Jon sees the little girl turn round. Her face is pressed to dusty glass. Her mouth is wide.

  There is enough space now that, if he rides the scrub, he can draw alongside. While they are still casting around, clawing to understand what is going on, he lurches forward, until they are almost level. Then, blotting out Pete’s muttered invective, he pushes hard to the right. The police ute resists, but its driver is not quick enough; Jon Heather rams them off the road.

  The ute spins with them, cutting a full circle in a tempest of dust. When the brakes grip and they skid to a stop, Jon can see, through the parting red veil, that the police ute has dived, nose first, down a bank where the scrub grows thick. It will not stay there for long. You have not destroyed it beyond repair, Jon. A moment to gather their composure, to rub bruised joints, and they will drive out of here as happily as they drove in.

  ‘Stay here,’ says Jon.

  ‘Jon, you …’

  ‘I’ve been doing what you told me for ten years, Peter. Do what I want once, and you can have another ten: just stay where you fucking are.’

  Jon jumps out of the ute, runs across the dust to reach the police wagon. In the front seat, he can see the policeman slumped with his head against the wheel. Beside him, Cook too seems to be reeling.

  He reaches for the door to the back of the wagon, but before he can grasp it, it flies open, catching Jon full in the chest. The blow winds him, and he staggers back.

  The aboriginal man rises. If he was injured in the crash at all, Jon cannot tell. He barks out, and Jon bites back. Then, he sees him lifting something: the shotgun he was carrying when they rode out.

  Throw a punch, Jon Heather. Not a simpering thump as if you are hazing your best friend. Do it properly. Do it now.

  The black man’s head snaps back. Instinctively, he lets go of the shotgun. Jon kicks it underneath the ute, brings his fist back, piles it again into the man’s jaw. He does not drop like a sack of potatoes. He reels back, dizzied. It is enough that Jon can kick him down and push past. In the back seat, the little girl is huddled, head buried in her knees, against the far door. He reaches in to take her.

  ‘Jon, watch out!’

  Jon whirls around.

  Mr Cook is out of the front of the wagon. He rests, an arm outstretched on the wagon’s roof, and looks Jon up and down. ‘Who are you?’ he breathes, gulping back air.

  He seems to think Jon is a robber, some common old highwayman. Once, a jolly swagman camped near a billabong.

  ‘I might ask you the same question,’ Jon replies.

  Pete can hold them back no longer. Over Cook’s shoulder, the women leap from the back of the ute and tear over the track. Past Jon they scramble, over the aboriginal man nursing his jaw, grappling to take the girl out of the back seat.

  At last, Cook understands.

  ‘She’s a ward of the state.’ He stops, wipes his bloody lip. ‘I have an authority.’

  ‘Whose authority?’

  ‘The authority of the State of Western Australia,’ he returns, as if there might even be magic in the words. ‘We are here to protect these children.’

  Jon is still, remembering one of his rules: if you don’t have to, don’t breathe a word; you’ll never be able to say exactly what you think. He steps to the side, is about to shoulder past when Cook puts his hand out.

  ‘You don’t know what you’ve done,’ he says. ‘Look at you, you stupid station boy, and you don’t know what you’ve done …’

  Jon knows exactly what he’s done, and he knows exactly what he’ll do. The second Cook’s hand touches him, something blossoms inside him, black and beautiful and no longer in thrall to every rule he’s ever made up.

  He swings out, catches Cook on the chin. When that does not fell him, he brings his other fist back, cuts up. Cook sprawls onto the crashed bonnet, but Jon hauls him upright. At first, it might be that he wants Cook to fight back — but, in truth, he couldn’t care. He thrusts a foot around the back of the man’s knee, th
rows another punch — and watches with glee as Cook falls into an eruption of red dirt.

  Now Jon is on top of him. He straddles him like a lover and begins to pound: first left, then right, switching fists as ably as a man in black might switch the hand in which he holds his half hockey stick. Soon, Cook no longer protests. His legs stop thrashing and his body stops bucking. His eyes swell as Jon watches, his whole face purpling under each blow.

  Jon feels arms clawing underneath his own. Too bent on watching Cook’s face shine, he does not fight back as somebody hauls him off. His own face must be purpling, because suddenly he feels an incredible heat. He is faint. All of the world is very far away.

  In the corner of his eye, he sees the red-haired man standing, ashen-faced. ‘I thought,’ he says, ‘I told you to stay where you are?’

  Pete stands over Cook’s inert body. ‘You’ve killed him,’ he says. ‘Jon Heather, you’ve killed him …’

  Before Pete can fall to his knees, Cook’s chest heaves. Jon is about to swing round with his boot, but Pete stands between them. After everything, he still does not want to hurt Pete.

  Pete forces Jon back. If he is certain that Jon will not hit him, he still flinches every time he has to push Jon in the chest.

  Pete rushes round, skids down the bank and pops open the hood of the police ute. It is all familiar enough. Reaching in, he comes back with a fist full of wires. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  He rushes back to their own ute, forcing Jon to follow. The bonnet wears a dent where Jon rode the other off the trail, but it will not take long to hammer out. Pete lets out a whistle, and Dog bounds over to them.

  Along the track, the two women hold the child between them. Pete bawls at them to run and harries a distant Jon into the passenger seat. ‘I’m driving,’ he snaps, and reaches for the keys.

  They hit the highway at speed, slewing wildly as they bank north. The road is empty; that much they can count as a blessing.

  ‘Where to?’ Pete says.

  It takes a moment for Jon to register the sound. ‘It’s you who normally makes the decisions, isn’t it?’

  ‘Did I make that decision, Jon Heather? Did I tell you to do that?’

  They pass a marker: Broome, a hundred miles north.

  ‘You didn’t think, Jon Heather. You never think!’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ he concedes. ‘If I’d been thinking properly, we’d have bided our time. We wouldn’t have jumped them until they were shipping all three girls south.’ He pictures, dreamily, the lock-up in Broome, the girls peering grimly through their window at the big boab tree outside. ‘Now they’ll have to stay there …’

  Pete slams his hands on the wheel. ‘If we head back into town, we have to get straight out. Find Cormac, and get to the road …’

  Trust Pete to instantly start swooning over Cormac Tate. All the same, Jon nods. Megan is there. He should not have let her take him to the picture house, should not have followed her up the rocks at Cable Beach and kissed her there. He should have kept away.

  ‘We can be in and out in two hours,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just drive, Peter.’

  The redness rushes past.

  Broome shimmers under a heat haze as they plough back onto its ochre roads. Trucks move sluggishly under the sun, a pair of Malays kick their heels in the path of the traffic, but the air is mysteriously still. They reach the dirt oval and skid to a stop in the shadow of the old hotel.

  Pete is the first out of the ute. He lets his foot fly, uselessly kicking the ute’s crumpled bonnet.

  ‘Well?’ says Jon, leaping out. ‘Are we going in, or not?’

  Pete doesn’t say a word. He turns away and vaults onto the Old Arabia’s veranda.

  ‘Stay here, Dog,’ says Jon, fussing him. ‘Don’t go wandering. I’m not leaving you behind.’

  In the Old Arabia, Cormac Tate is waiting. When Jon and Pete barrel into the dining room, he is hunched over a newspaper. Head down, Jon marches past, making for the stairs. It wouldn’t do for Megan to see him now, not when he’s got work to do. If he sees her, he might have to tell her what he did to that man Cook, and even though he knows it was right, he isn’t sure he could stand the condemnation in her eyes.

  By the time he is at the other side of the room, he knows that Pete has not followed. He does not look back but, all the same, he sees a reflection in the glass as he flies through the door: Pete and Cormac Tate, huddled together, just the same as it’s always been. He flings the door behind him and barrels up the stair.

  In their room, his suitcase is open, his books piled high. If there is one thing he won’t rush, it’s packing these books — but, as he begins to slot them inside, he finds that he can’t stomach the sight of them. He sits back on the bed, his head in his hands. Something seems to be rushing out of him, like shit the morning after some rancid desert meal. The books are splayed all around: stupid Witchend and childish Gary Hogg. Suddenly, he realizes that his vision is blurred; there are — he cannot believe it — real tears in his eyes.

  He is sitting there, kneading some sense back into himself, when the door slams behind him. Thinking it some policeman, some Protection Officer, come to corner him, he wheels around, fists raised. In the doorway, it is only Cormac Tate.

  The look on Cormac’s face is enough for Jon. He’s been here before. It felt exactly like this on the day George told tales.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Jon says. ‘He ratted on me, did he? Peter couldn’t stand it so he ran off and told Cormac Tate …’

  Cormac Tate folds his hands, like a penitent. Jon knows it is not a prayer; it is only to stop himself from thrashing out. Rule one: if you’re angry at them, don’t let them know you’re angry at them.

  ‘Jon Heather, of all the stupid, sorry things to have done …’

  ‘Make yourself useful,’ says Jon, refusing to catch Cormac Tate’s eye. ‘We don’t got long. You can help me pack.’

  ‘You know who those Protection Officers are, don’t you, Jon? You know who they work for?’

  ‘Australia,’ says Jon. ‘They work for Australia.’

  ‘And what? You thought you could just knock out the whole of Australia?’

  He begins to pack the books, one by one.

  ‘You want to know the most pathetic thing in all of this? You haven’t even saved anybody! That boy Cook’ll just patch hisself, get back in his ute, and go and find that girl again. Might be you bought her a few more months with her mother and sisters. But that’s all, Jon. A few more months …’

  Jon’s eyes lift. They are heavy with tears. ‘I would have wanted a few more months, Cormac. Wouldn’t you?’

  Cormac says nothing.

  ‘You old bastard, you don’t even remember. You let them turn you. You can’t even remember what your mother looked like, can you? You didn’t even stay in touch with your brothers. Well …’ Jon pauses. He knows he is holding a dagger. It is time to twist. ‘… you’re no better than Judah Reed, at the end of it, Cormac. You’re no better than that fat bastard George. If you wouldn’t have done the same thing I did, well, I can’t even look at you, Cormac. I can’t even look at you without seeing a man in black.’

  Cormac’s face darkens. His hands, already clasping each other, seem to strain and tear, like a monster in one of Pete’s comic books. When, at last, they release, he lets out a breath. He turns, but has to snatch at the door handle three times before, in his rage, he can take it.

  In the hallway, Pete is still standing, like a naughty schoolboy with his ear up against the wall.

  As Cormac forces his way past, he pauses. ‘You listen to me, and you listen good.’ His voice falls to a low whisper. ‘I’ll be waiting. I’ll be sitting there at that station, ready to make it ours. Me and you and Booty can make a go of that place.’ He puts a hand on Pete’s shoulder, and it seems to be the only thing stopping him from shaking. ‘But you spend too long with Jon Heather, Pete, and he’ll fuck you just like he’s fucking himself. I me
an it. He’s been holding you back too long already, with those sorry notions of his. Home. England. Still being a little lost boy. You find your sister — but then you come and find me. Don’t end up like Jon Heather. I’ve done it, Pete. I know how he’s pinned.’ Cormac lifts his head, but Jon only sees in the edges of his vision; he will not listen, and he will not see. ‘Just another one of the desperate ones, drifting, pretending there’s still a home to go back to, pretending this isn’t home, everywhere, all around …’

  Cormac’s hand lingers a moment longer on Pete’s shoulder. Then, his face paling, he disappears along the corridor, a gentle shoulder barge instead of goodbye.

  Jon closes his suitcase. Perched on the end of the bed, he takes a moment to compose himself. When he looks up, Pete is still standing there.

  ‘You’re still here,’ says Jon. There is, to Pete’s astonishment, trembling in his voice, as if Jon cannot quite believe it.

  Pete looks along the corridor, after Cormac Tate.

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘He’s right, you know. You don’t have anything, Jon. You spent all your money on the ute …’

  ‘We can find more work. We’ve never been short of work.’ Jon stands, heaving his suitcase to the door.

  ‘But …’ Pete stops. Perhaps Jon did not hear Cormac’s talk of the smallholding. ‘Jon …’

  ‘We’ve got to go, Peter. Or …’

  ‘You’re right,’ Pete admits, his voice softening. ‘We can’t be here when word gets out.’

  ‘Peter, look … I’m sorry.’

  Pete rolls his eyes, frustration and forgiveness all rolled up in one. ‘You’d better be.’

  Downstairs, Cormac Tate is nowhere to be seen. They clatter across the dining hall, and out into reception. Jon kicks open the front doors, looks out over the dirt oval, shimmering in the heat. An aboriginal man squints up at him from where he has been sleeping.

  Dog is already on the flatbed of the ute, as if knowing that this is going to be a quick getaway. When Jon flings his suitcase up back with Peter’s bag, the mutt takes up his station on top of it, the proud guardian of a childhood Jon Heather never really lived.