‘I’ll hop up back.’
The man seems to be disgruntled, but all the same he waits until Megan has clambered onto his flatbed before he takes off again.
As dark shapes thunder past, she sinks into herself and, for the first time, holds herself tight: there is, she knows, no going back. It is exactly the way Jon Heather lives his life.
And there it is — the thing she has been looking for, the dull outline of a man sloping along the road, pressed to a rockface high up on the bank.
Megan reaches round, hammers at the glass separating her from the cab. ‘Stop!’
A hundred yards on, the driver understands. When Megan leaps from the flatbed, he calls out to her, but she is already running. The cab sits there for a time; then the driver climbs back into his cab, the headlamps illuminate the sandstone, and off he goes.
Megan flails, her feet finding scant purchase on the stone. As she flies, mosquitoes smear her face. She squints, sees the dim outline on the road ahead. He has stopped moving. He knows what is coming.
Twenty yards from where he stands, Megan stops. A stitch burns in her side. ‘I thought I could let you go,’ she says. ‘If it’s really what you want, I will. I’ll find a way back to Broome. I won’t breathe a word of what happened here. But Jon, I have to know what happens to you …’
Jon Heather drops his suitcase, his swag. ‘Megan …’
‘Don’t, Jon. Don’t fill me with your stories. I don’t care. I don’t care about who you are or where you’re from or … I only care about where you’re going.’
‘England,’ he whispers, a petition, a prayer.
Jon comes to her, in fits and starts, just the same way as she was running. Megan, still taming her breath, stands still — until, at last, his arms are around her. Then, he is kissing her face.
‘I want you to say it to me. I want you to tell me to go, to disappear. Say it, and I’ll never see you again.’
Even in the black of night, he can see the greenness of her eyes. Imperceptibly, Jon gives a shake of his head.
Slowly, Megan releases her grip. Though she is still holding his face, now she is stroking him, drawing a finger along the line of his jaw.
‘It’s useless anyway,’ says Jon Heather. ‘Peter was right. I’m as far away as ever I was. Just about all of the money I saved, I poured into that ute.’
‘All for the sake of that little girl …’
Uncertain, Jon tenses. ‘I wouldn’t take it back,’ he utters.
‘I know,’ Megan says, breath escaping in a ridiculous laugh. ‘You wouldn’t give anything up, would you, Jon? Except, perhaps, for me …’
He wants to tell her that isn’t fair, but this girl can see through it every time he tells a lie.
‘It doesn’t mean I don’t want it. It never meant that. It’s only … What do you do if you want two opposite things?’
Megan looks down. Jon Heather’s suitcase has opened where he dropped it at his feet. The books are haphazardly piled within; between them, a single roll of banknotes, barely enough to find a bed for the night.
‘You make it so you can take both.’
Jon lifts his eyes.
‘How much,’ she says, ‘would you need?’
‘It took us years to get that stake. That’s with Pete eating away at it, of course. Out there, it was always two steps forward, one step back. I think … A year, and I could do it, Megan. If the work was right.’
Gently, she lifts each book and slides it back into place. Strangers at Snowfell and Seven White Gates and The Sign of the Alpine Rose. After she is done, she lifts the roll of banknotes and tosses it in her palm.
‘What if there was a way you could go tomorrow?’ she breathes.
‘We weren’t that close, even before we came to Broome.’
‘What if I said I could get you … could get us a stake? Enough for a passage to England.’ She hesitates. ‘For both of us, Jon.’
Somewhere above, a bird breaks, in a frenzied cacophony, from where it has been roosting, hurtling, unseeing, into the dark.
‘Do you remember what I showed you, back in Broome? The things my mother left for me. Her necklaces. Her wedding ring. My grandmother’s pearls …’
‘Megan …’
‘It would be enough, Jon. It wouldn’t be luxury, but if I pawned them, it would get us there.’
It would, Jon Heather decides, be the bitterest kind of trade: Megan’s mother, in exchange for his own.
‘I can’t …’
‘Can’t, or won’t?’
Jon Heather steps back. ‘I can’t ask it.’
‘You didn’t ask. I gave. But …’ She takes hold of him. ‘If you want this, if you really want it, more than anything else, more than never having come here, more than never having seen the Children’s Crusade or the Mission or met Pete and George and Cormac Tate, more than that filthy dingo you cart around … If that’s what you want, you have to promise me.’ She kisses him. All else is gone; he kisses her back. ‘Promise me you’ll never leave me again, Jon Heather. Wherever you go, wherever you end up, England or Australia or anywhere in between … Don’t you ever walk out on me again.’
XVI
When you are hitchhiking, Jon Heather discovers, it is better to be a pretty girl than it is to be an unkempt down-and-out with no boots on his feet.
They have a ruse and it hasn’t failed yet: Megan stands at the edge of the road, a hopeful smile on her face, while Jon Heather hides himself and his swag in the scrub above the road. Only when a truck has stopped and Megan has engaged the driver in some banter, tempting him with the promise of more to come, does Jon emerge to climb, without waiting for permission, into the cab. In this way, they have covered five hundred miles.
Tonight, even though the truck would plunge them straight into the heart of Broome, they ask the driver to leave them on the side of the road. Megan, who has been sitting in the cab, dances a hand on his shoulder as she says goodbye. Probably that is payment enough. Meanwhile, Jon Heather crashes out of the flatbed, only just managing to snatch his suitcase and swag before the wagon lumbers away.
This year the Wet has lasted too long. Though it should be fading, the sky is still swollen, and Jon knows it will not be long before it returns. Being cold and wet is nothing to Jon Heather, but he would rather not see Megan sitting out in it.
‘How far do you reckon?’
She ought to know this road better than him, but she is uncertain. Broome might be a mile away and there would still be no sign. This terrain can swallow towns whole.
‘We should find you a place to camp, Jon. Somewhere warm.’
That will not be so difficult.
‘Somewhere dry,’ she adds.
Jon shakes his head. ‘Let’s settle for somewhere I won’t drown.’
The road here is banked by steep rises of rock. The scrub that clings to them is verdant, the trees in full leaf. Somewhere off the road, Jon finds a depression in the land and sets his suitcase down.
‘How will I know where to find you?’
Jon scrabbles in coarse grass, and picks up a piece of crumbling red stone.
‘X marks the spot,’ he says. ‘I’ll mark it on the road.’
She plants an ungainly kiss on his cheek.
‘It’s going to be all right.’
Rather than risk taking Jon Heather into town, he will remain here, while Megan returns to the Old Arabia to rescue her tea chest. If she is lucky, she might be in and out in only a few hours. After that — England awaits. They will hitch a ride south, find a pawnbroker in Perth and head for the docks.
Jon is not true to his word. Something inside him, the same thing that made him give George his birthday, wants to know that she is safe. So, as Megan drops back to the road to wait for a ride, he finds a vantage point and watches.
The roads are empty. When trucks pass at all, they come out of Broome, heading out on runs to Katherine and Darwin beyond. One slows, winds its window down, seems to be asking Megan endless questions, and th
en stutters off again. Megan finds a rock to prop herself against and, patiently, she waits.
Pete used to tell Jon that they had to be patient, that things would come good in the end. Patience, Cormac Tate would decree, is a virtue. How wrong those two were. Patience is what caught them out in the end. It turned them into Australians, much more so than any Mission or Children’s Crusade. Keeping watch from his nest up in the scrub, Jon Heather knows now that the only real virtues are impatience, restlessness and resentment.
A truck appears on the horizon. From where he is perched, Jon sees it long before Megan. A plume of red dust is coming this way. He thinks about calling out for her, but it will not change anything, so he settles in to watch.
Once she is gone, there is nothing to do but wait.
He settles down for the long haul. He takes a book from his suitcase and tries to get lost in its pages, but it is not the same; his eyes can hardly follow the lines. He tries another book, but it happens just the same. Intermittently, another truck passes on the road below, utility trucks on their way to some station; once, a police ute patrols up the highway, and then back into Broome. The sun rises and the sun sinks.
She should have been back.
Before night, the rain starts to fall. It is thin at first, a mizzen mist, but steadily grows worse. Jon Heather sinks into the depression in the rock. Here, at least, there is some shelter.
Headlamps illuminate the road below. Down there, a ute has stopped. He gets to his haunches, pushes forward into the rain and peers down. A figure has emerged from the truck and is peering into the scrub, but it is certainly not Megan. He watches, carefully, until the man climbs back into the ute and drives away. Sometime later, Jon cannot say how long, the same ute retreads its path, disappearing back into Broome.
He has an ache in his belly, so he fills it with the biscuits he has left in his swag. He collects rainwater in a tin cup and drinks it. Snatches of sleep, and still she does not come. He tells himself: she said that she loves you — but that does not help. He tells himself: she has nothing to gain by ratting you out; this, at least, brings him a little comfort.
All the same, when she has not arrived in the dead of night, he drops out of the scrub, and begins to follow the road.
It is not, in the end, such a very long way into Broome. The highway plunges into the heart of town, and he feels a peculiar rush of warmth. Too late, he realizes that this is how it must feel to come home. The town is achingly familiar. Rain patters on roofs of corrugated tin, seabirds shriek in the bay; the night is close and hot as hell.
In these rain-swept streets not a soul is abroad. He limps on, in a dream, following the line of the mud flats, and sees the big boab tree outside the old lock-up. He means to walk past, but curiosity is a terrible thing. There are no lights inside the lock-up tonight, nor the cries of any captured children. He wonders: might this be the perfect place to sit out the storm?
Somebody has evidently had the same idea, for there is sudden movement in the darkness. A man’s eyes glimmer at him, hunched under a raincoat. He is propped against the corner of the lock-up, where scrub has been left to grow wild.
‘There’s room for two. You don’t have to go.’
The man is genuine, lonely. Still, he turns around. There has to be a better place to spend the night.
He finds his way along the ocean road, to the dirt oval. There are few lights on in the Old Arabia hotel, but there are eaves out back where he might find shelter. He walks to the veranda, climbs the stairs, tries the handle. Under his fist, it turns. Even so, he knows he cannot go in. There are no guarantees that Megan is even behind that door. If he came across some night porter, he might not be a free man for long. Knowing that, though, does not stop him from wanting to go through. It would be warm in there. Dry as well. It would smell of varnish and old paint. He could slope up to the room he shared with Pete, meet Megan for dinner, help around the old hotel …
A gust of hot wind pushes a curtain of rain quickly into his face, making him gulp for air. It came, he knows, at just the right moment; another, and he might have convinced himself to go through those doors.
He is halfway back along the street, when the cone of a torch sweeps across him and traps him where he stands. All of his body tells him to run, that this is some policeman who remembers the last time he was in Broome, but his head tells him different, so he turns around.
Megan skitters down the steps of the Old Arabia, a black raincoat held high over her head.
‘Jon Heather,’ she whispers, half in scold, ‘I knew it was you …’
Jon turns. Where they stand, the rain comes from all directions, drawing a veil that shields them from prying eyes. As it gets stronger, Jon can hardly see the Old Arabia, except as a rippling collage of timber and stone.
Megan squirms out of her raincoat and envelops Jon.
‘You said you’d be back. I thought …’ That you might be ratting me out? That somebody changed your mind? These are things he cannot say. They are like daggers, waiting to be drawn.
‘It’s my father,’ says Megan. ‘When he saw me …’
Jon understands. It is, after all, the way he wants it to be with his mother, when he finally gets home. Megan has been gone from her father for only a few weeks; imagine what it will be like for Jon, with the mother he has not seen in more than half his life.
‘He asked after me, didn’t he?’
Megan nods, jerking her head to avoid another surge of rain. ‘But I told him it was you who made me come back. You who made me see sense.’ She pauses. Jon Heather seems to be drawing away.
‘They know, don’t they? What I did …’
‘Everybody knows.’
This time, he nods. It was always going to be the same.
‘You’d better come in, Jon, before anybody sees …’
She urges him back across the dirt oval, up and into the hotel lobby. The place is deathly still, not even a night porter wandering up and down. It is an easy thing to cross the barren dining hall, along the bottom hallway, and to a room right at the end. At first, Jon thinks she is taking him to their private quarters — he has a horrible feeling that, this time, he would want to stay cocooned in there forever — but it is only a guest-room, empty and ordinary.
‘You’ll be safe in here,’ she says, flicking on a buzzing electric light. ‘It hasn’t had a sleeper in six months.’
Once she has closed the door, she breathes out, as if she has been delivered from a terrible nightmare. Jon drops his suitcase onto the bed.
‘I’d have come back for you, you know. I’d have been there in the morning.’
Jon nods.
‘You don’t believe it, do you?’
‘It’s got me on edge. Being here …’
She thinks he means Broome, but it is more than that; it is the Old Arabia, these four walls, the corridors she ran down when she was a little girl, the hallway along which they carried her dead mother. The place stinks of her, stinks of memory, and he loves breathing it in.
‘Why don’t we go?’ he asks, suddenly chill. ‘Get your mother’s things and just …’
She moves to him, starts unpicking the buttons of his sodden shirt. Draping it on the back of a chair, she produces a towel from a trunk. When she starts to dry him, his shoulders sag. It is a terrible thing, but he seems to have submitted. To what, Megan is not sure. She dabs his breast, his shoulders, and an archipelago of clean skin begins to reveal itself. Jon watches in a mirror as she makes a strange atlas on his body, like the map of the world Peter tore from a book on board the HMS Othello. Here, he thinks, be monsters. Under here lies Jon Heather.
‘I can’t leave in the morning, Jon,’ she whispers. ‘I need another day. For my father.’
‘You can’t do it, can you? Leave him behind … I wouldn’t hate you for it. If you said you had to stay, I wouldn’t …’
From the look on her face, Jon understands he is dealing her an insult. He did not mean it; he meant only to offer her
— to offer himself — a way out.
‘I said I could,’ she begins, towelling his hair more viciously, ‘and I will. He’ll have to understand.’
She wraps the towel around him, and makes as if to leave.
‘Stay,’ he says. He does not know until after, but he is begging her, like a frightened little boy pleading for his mother to leave a lantern on at night.
‘I can’t. He’ll know something’s wrong.’
She kisses him, tells him she will be back before long. Even though she leaves him alone for only ten minutes, it is enough for Jon to feel suddenly spooked. The walls are bearing down on him, like the cabin of a ship taking him to another world.
When she returns, she is carrying her grandmother’s tea chest. This time, when she sets it down, it is Jon who opens it. The treasures are lying inside, carefully placed between sheets of thin baking paper. He makes eyes at Megan, asking her permission, and lifts the first: the string of pearls.
He asks, ‘How could you just … give it away?’
Megan does not want to reply. She lifts a small brooch, the shape of a peacock, and pins it to the collar of the raincoat she still wears. The two make a mismatched couple.
‘You never wore them?’
‘They’re not the sort of things you wear. They’re the sort of things you … have.’
Each of them, she tells him, has a story. The peacock brooch was a gift to her mother on her fifth birthday; before that, a gift to her grandmother from a dear friend, on the day they set sail for the new world. The silver pendant was the only thing a great-aunt had left from the husband who sailed away with the Anzacs in 1915 and never returned.
‘My grandfather,’ she says, ‘used to say he dived for every one of these pearls himself. He used to sit me down and tell me how deep he went, what he found down there, monsters and mermaids and serpents … all so he could make a necklace for my grandmother.’ She pauses. ‘He was lying, of course.’
‘Really?’ Jon Heather gasps, as if he cannot quite believe it.
Megan sees herself in the mirror. She starts. ‘Jon, I have to …’
‘I know,’ he nods.
Little Exiles Page 33