Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  Without daring a joke, Pete takes the driver’s seat, but Jon does not complain. He swings into the seat alongside and then Pete pushes the ute onto the road.

  On the other side of the dirt oval, the highway broadens, leading inland. That is the road they will have to take.

  As they glide around the oval, Jon quietly asks, ‘What about Cormac Tate?’

  Pete shakes his head but does not look up from the wheel. ‘I don’t think you ought to be asking about Cormac Tate.’

  They are banking around the far side of the oval, where the road merges with the highway, when Jon sees Pete’s eyes linger in the mirror. The ute slows, though there is no traffic to slow it, and Pete remains transfixed.

  ‘What?’ Jon breathes. ‘What is it?’

  He reaches to angle the mirror so that he too can see, refusing to risk a look backwards in case they are, even now, being pursued. Before his hand gets there, Pete grapples it, tries to push him away. For a moment, that is all it is: they are holding hands. Then, when Pete finally gives in, Jon twists the mirror and peers into it.

  On the other side of the dirt oval, the doors of the Old Arabia are open. On the veranda, there stands Megan, watching them leave.

  ‘She probably thinks we didn’t pay up,’ Jon says.

  ‘You know it’s not that.’

  They are both frozen. Behind them, Dog seems to know something is wrong. He climbs to his feet, turning in a circle. It is only when he begins to bark that Jon realizes Megan has crossed the road, is already striding over the red dirt and hard grass.

  ‘Jon,’ Pete says. ‘What do you want to do?’

  Jon cannot look in the mirror any longer. He turns it back to Pete, buries his head. ‘Drive, Peter.’

  ‘Jon?’

  ‘I said just drive …’

  The ute slides forward again, banking right around the edge of the oval. There is only one other truck on the road. It blasts past them at high speed.

  Pete’s eyes are still in the mirror. ‘She’s still running, Jon.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well …’ Jon looks the other way. ‘It wasn’t for ever, was it, Peter? There’s been girls before. For both of us. Only, you always know it’s not forever.’

  ‘Forever’s one thing, Jon Heather. But here and now’s another.’

  ‘Forever can’t start until we get back home.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Jon Heather rears. ‘I said I was sure, didn’t I? Drive, Peter. Please just drive.’

  With a sigh, Pete pushes the ute out onto the highway. For a hundred yards they track along the edge of the dirt oval, running parallel to the Old Arabia.

  Something tugs Jon’s eyes back to the mirror. She is still coming, pounding across the earth now, kicking up red sand from her heels. The air ripples between them, so that it seems she is on the other side of a veil. Then, when she is only a stone’s throw away, the heat haze seems to die. Megan, it seems, has stepped out of that other world, right into Jon’s.

  ‘Stop,’ he says. ‘Peter, stop …’

  The ute jolts to a halt. Without a word, Jon Heather kicks open the door, jumping down onto the highway. In the middle of the road he shuffles along, until he can look over the flatbed.

  On the other side, Megan is still. ‘Jon,’ she says. ‘What’s going on? I saw Cormac storming away …’

  Jon grips the edge of the flatbed. ‘I can’t tell you, Megan. I haven’t got time. I’ve got to …’

  Her face changes, almost imperceptibly. ‘You’re … leaving …’

  ‘I didn’t want to.’ He thought it would sound hollow, but it does not. With something approaching horror, he realizes that it was what he said to Peter that was hollow, not this. It wasn’t forever, was it, Peter? You always know it’s not forever. ‘Megan, I don’t have the time …’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘We’re … going to find Peter’s sister. But, Megan, you can’t tell anybody. Not which road we’re taking. Not which …’

  He pauses. He keeps telling himself to climb back in the cab, to bury his head, to tell Pete to plough on. That is what he has been teaching himself all his life, ever since Luca, ever since Judah Reed. One foot in front of another: that is how you get back to England.

  ‘Come,’ he whispers.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Megan, come with us. Come with me. It’s what you said you wanted. Like everybody else. Up and out of Broome. Up and out of the Old Arabia.’

  ‘Jon, I can’t …’ All the same, she has started moving again, lurching down the banks of the dirt oval. Now there is only the ute separating them, Dog lying indolently in between. ‘I can’t leave my father. Not just like that. I’ve got … ties. I’ve got …’

  ‘Well, I don’t, Megan. I don’t got nothing but this truck and this stupid mutt. And …’ He seems to have to wrestle each word out of his throat, like dragging a rabbit from its warren by its hind feet. ‘… you,’ he says. ‘I’ve got you, haven’t I? A truck, a mutt, and you.’

  She is silent.

  ‘Megan …’ Jon’s eyes dart at the highway. ‘I haven’t got time. It’s been ticking, ticking, ticking ever since I was a little boy. Now it’s all running out.’

  Megan nods. It is a tiny thing, almost unseen. She lifts a leg, about to climb onto the flatbed.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, Jon Heather.’

  Jon nods. If Megan doesn’t know what she’s doing, well, neither does he. One foot in front of another: that has always been his mantra. Don’t touch them and they can’t touch you.

  Rules, he is finding out today, are there to be broken.

  He slides back into the cab, heart thundering, pale as the southern sands.

  Pete looks at him and nods.

  ‘Snow on the Nullarbor,’ Jon says, shivering. He breathes out long and hard, erupting halfway into a strange, high pitched laugh. ‘Just like snow on the Nullarbor Plain!’

  XIV

  It is the youngest man in black who sees England first. He must have been looking out for it ever since they sailed out of the Suez Canal, but now, at last, it is here. He is certain it is England and not some silly rock sticking out of the sea, because it is raining: thin, grey drizzle, of a sort he has not known in more than a decade.

  He is nineteen years old — but don’t tell Judah Reed; Judah Reed and the others think he is already twenty — and finally he is coming home.

  They come to port in Liverpool, the same port from which he once set out. He has sea legs and he staggers along the docks, carrying a suitcase of crocodile skin at his side. He feels silly as a little boy, and is thankful when Judah Reed takes charge and leads him away.

  They spend one night in lodgings at a Home in the city. It is not a Home of the Children’s Crusade, but perhaps they share something: a poster on the wall shows Australia in all its sandy glory, and pictures of little boys traipsing to school in smart bush hats. He is given a room to himself, a godsend after his bunk on board ship, and he spends the evening writing up his journal and filing away, in precise order, the sketches that he made during the voyage. He likes order and he likes neatness.

  In the morning, he wakes early, though the train is not scheduled until after noon. He writes again in his journal, detailing everything he can remember, everything he has dreamed, about the place they are going to. He finds space also, to write about companions who have fallen along the way, boys who might never get as close as he is now.

  They reach Leeds. He had planned on walking from the railway station so that he might breathe in some of the old city — but, to his persisting bewilderment, he finds that he has absolutely no idea which way he should go. Judah Reed will laugh if he tells him; it will be a pleasant, fatherly laugh, but nevertheless he does not want to hear it. He lingers around the railway station, watching people on their daily trudge and giving thanks that, today, he has not had to wear his black clothes. He is wearing a pair of slacks and an overcoat,
and for that he is still as much out of place as he ever wants to be.

  The Chapeltown Boys’ Home of the Children’s Crusade is being rebuilt when the taxicab drops him at its gates. There are builders in a yard full of bricks, and boys watching keenly. Snow ices the slag heaps where the digging works have stalled — and the newly felled trees that were once a fortress of thorns, keeping boys in and mothers and fathers out, are roped together in pyramids, ready to be taken away.

  He walks underneath the iron arch and follows the path. When you are a child, the blanket with its nose sticking out from under the bed is a serpent that will devour you as soon as you fall asleep; when you are an adult, it is only a blanket you should probably pick up. All the same, he stops at intervals, terrible shivers running through him: here was the place your first ever friend used to play hide-and-seek; here is the place he picked you up when you fell and told you not to be a baby, ruffling your hair gently all the while.

  A little boy, eight years old with a nose caked in grime, looks up at you and cocks his head. You’re new, he says. I’m really not, you reply, and reach down to ruffle his hair. When he recoils, you are suddenly filled with a guilt you have never known before. You wish you were yourself that little boy, and that your first ever friend, all red hair, buck teeth and freckles, might be here to punch you on the shoulder and tell you not to be such a big girl.

  Watched by a dozen boys, the man approaches the door that was once so much taller and lifts its monstrous knocker. The face that appears does not leer at him, nor conjure a grin to hide its malice. It is only an old man, who reaches out and pats him on the shoulder.

  Surely it is not that man’s fault that he himself recoils.

  ‘Michael Andrews,’ the man says. ‘I’m the caretaker.’

  ‘George Slade,’ the man in black replies.

  Jon Heather’s birthday and Peter’s surname. For as long as you can remember, George, you have been a composite of the people you used to call friends: this year perhaps, back in the old town, you might discover who you really are.

  In February, it is supposed to snow — and snow it does. He wakes up in his quarters behind the chantry, and is delighted to feel the cold in his bones. He takes some time to splash water onto his face before putting on his black trousers and shirt and peering out. At the end of the short corridor, Judah Reed is already in his office. He might have been up for hours; the little boys probably think he never goes to bed.

  Martin is already in the office. He has been here for three months already, working with the boys and telling them of the adventures they might expect on the other side of the world. Martin is the only other boy George knows who joined the Crusade like he did. He left at sixteen like all the others, but he came back two years later, wondering if there was work he might do. George was glad to see him. It made him feel less dirty, somehow — less ashamed of how happy he had become while he was looking the other way.

  George takes a seat. Today, there is a list of chores he must perform. There is story time in the chantry for the little ones; there is a walk to the playing fields and back, with time for the boys to play tag. These were things that did not happen in the Home when George was a lad, but he is glad to see them now. Only a little piece of him twinges, but it can’t mean a thing; surely, it isn’t possible to be jealous of some six-year-old orphans?

  ‘George,’ Judah Reed begins, after Martin has been excused. ‘You might stay behind.’

  There is a new boy, Judah Reed explains. His name is Charlie. He is six years old and has only just come to the Children’s Crusade. Once, he was fostered with a family in Harehills, but it has been eighteen months since the boy had any semblance of a real family. He is an anxious sort of boy, and he has not yet been told that he will be going to Australia to make a better life for himself. It will fall to George and Judah Reed to sit with the boy and break the news: your mother, little boy, has passed away. You are to come with us now, on a quest for something greater.

  ‘In the meantime, perhaps you, George, might spend some time with the boy? We will ease him into the news. Some boys need it that way.’

  George nods. Judah Reed and the other men in black have always admired George’s way with boys who tend towards anxiety. It is said that boys who cry themselves to sleep might spend a few days in George’s company, listening to stories and playing games, and then cry no longer. He tells them strange tales: a story called We Went To Sea But We Didn’t Mean It; another about a family who live at a place called Witchend, which is surrounded by Grey Walls at the head of Snow Fell. The other men in black have no idea where George might have got these stories; he has, they say, a ‘versatile’ imagination. They have watched him teaching little ones the rules of a game called ‘stones’ and wondered how he could come up with such simple things to enrapture the little children.

  George expects there to be some papers about Charlie: a birth certificate or a surname at least. There is, Judah Reed says, a single family photograph: Charlie and his mother, on a sunny day up on Woodhouse Moor, with bothersome students from the colleges basking around. He will keep it on file here, but it would do no good to give it over to Charlie’s possession; such things can upset a fragile little mind.

  George finds Charlie in a playroom. He sits on the edge of a circle of boys, casting marbles. He has a single dragon’s eye in his own hand, but he holds onto it tightly. If he casts it, he might lose it to some boy more talented than him.

  The boys ignore George, but gradually they leave the game to go and find some other sporting ground, outside in the snow.

  ‘Charlie?’ George begins.

  The little boy freezes. Most likely, he thinks he is in trouble. He is the sort of boy, George would wager, who will always be there when trouble starts, but who doesn’t think to run away before somebody comes to deal out a punishment.

  ‘Here,’ says George. ‘I want to show you something.’

  There are four boys left. They sit in a circle with George at its head, the oldest ten, the youngest six. On the floor, nine marbles are left. Nine is nothing; George can do nineteen. With one hand, you must toss them up. In the other, you must catch them in the crooks of your knuckles. If one slides out, you must pay a forfeit: stand on your head, or sit on your hands until they go numb.

  ‘The trick,’ says George, tossing a trio up and catching them between index finger and thumb, ‘is to keep your fingers splayed, just so …’

  ‘You’ve got a funny voice,’ one of the boys says.

  George looks up. ‘I suppose I have,’ he replies.

  When he casts the next round, the boys are all eager to learn.

  At night, you wander the streets you might once have called your own. It is snowing, and though you are not used to the cold, you go out with only shirtsleeves and a scarf.

  The snow is like icing on red bricks and slates. The terraces are still, but you ghost through them, trying to remember if these were the streets in which you played before they sent you to the Home. Somebody mumbles a hello as he passes, his face half-hidden beneath a hood; when you do not reply, he lets fly with all sorts of invective, like you have dirtied his virgin sister. You hurry on, up ledges where somebody has neglected to take down their Christmas lights, along a broad, empty road where warehouses loom.

  You have been walking for hours, wondering if this might have been the house you would have ended up buying, if this might have been the corner shop you stopped at every morning to buy a newspaper and milk, when you realize you have no idea how to get back. The city that might have been yours has been working to ensnare you; it has led you in merry circles, its avenues and lanes contorting behind you. You are a miserable fly trapped in its web, and now you must perish.

  You have no friends to ask what you might do, so instead you knock on the first door where you see light. A middle-aged woman answers, her head haloed by cigarette smoke. Obviously, she thinks you are her daughter’s guest, for she turns and bawls a name up the stairs, and a girl who is
probably your age descends. She is as bewildered as you are, but you manage to get across your meaning. She is pretty, unlike her mother, and as you leave, another thought strikes you: if I had grown up here, might I have had the guts to ask a girl out for an afternoon stroll?

  When you reach the Children’s Crusade, you must sneak in, so that Judah Reed is not cross. Crossing the hall, you see a dim figure scurrying out of the laundry. His eyes are alight, like a kangaroo frozen in the glow of a ute’s headlamp, but you steal past, pretending not to notice. Then you lie awake for long hours, writing a story you will never commit to paper: a little boy whose mother did not die, who has a dull job filing papers in an office, but a lovely home to come back to each night. He never meets a girl, he never marries and has children of his own, but lives instead with his mother until the end of his days.

  In the hour before dawn, you wake. You are chilled to your bones. At first, you roll over, thinking, this is England — this is what I have always wanted. Then you feel the dampness that has already soaked through the sheets and deep into the mattress. You breathe in a familiar smell. It is not fair that such a horrible feeling brings such a rush of pleasing nostalgia.

  ‘There’s a big farm, where all the boys live, and where it’s summer all year round. We’d get up bright and early to go and milk the cows …’ He says cows, though they’ll find only goats; Judah Reed has told him, from past experience, that milking a cow is more appealing to little boys than touching up a grumpy old goat. ‘… and then it would be time for breakfast. And, because it’s summer all year round, there’d be mangoes and apricots, and fruits I’d never even heard of — but all big and ripe and juicy. You’ll like kiwi fruits.’ He leans in, as if he is sharing an illicit secret. ‘They’re not really Australian, but it’s close enough.’ He catches sight of Judah Reed in the corner of his eye. He is nodding, so he must be pleased. George is suddenly shame-faced about last night; it has been a long time since he kept a secret like that from Judah Reed. ‘All the boys live together in big cottages, with cottage mothers to look after them. Oh, there are lessons, but not horrible, stinky lessons like you have in schools here.’ He makes a disgruntled spittley sound. ‘You’ll learn how to grow plants and look after animals. You’ll learn how to go fishing. For the girls, there’s cooking and baking, but …’ Here’s the special part, he thinks. Here’s how you reel them in and turn a frightened boy into an awestruck one. ‘… for the boys, there’s hunting.’