Too late, Jon realizes that the swag, with all of Megan’s treasures, is still at his feet. He bends to grab it, but his fingers will not do his bidding; his arm, he knows, is definitely broken. Quickly, he snatches out with his other hand, rips the swag onto his shoulder and starts to run. The policeman thunders for him to stop — he is already under arrest, he is making it worse, he’ll be put away forever — but Jon is deaf to it. He scrambles up the sandbank and takes off into spinifex and stone.
He stumbles on, oblivious to the heat pounding in his arm. Before he has gone ten yards the road has disappeared. All is silence and scrub. It was like this once before: a world without fences, as he fled from the Mission. Like then, he has no idea where he is going. He stumbles. He falls. He gets up and runs.
A light arcs across him and he turns, realizing that he has been following the same dirt trail whose jaws the policeman was using to turn the ute. On his right, the wagon is gaining fast. He turns to flee it, but finds he is pointing directly at Broome. He needs to be on the other side of that track.
Throwing himself into the scrub, he lets the wagon roar past. Once it has gone, he bolts over the trail, leaping through low mounds of red. He hears the wagon skid to a stop, its engine screaming as the policeman kicks it into reverse and prepares to sail around. Its headlights swoop high and then low — and fix on Jon Heather. He launches himself forward, as if the light itself propels him — but there is no good in hiding; he has already been seen.
The ute pounds through the scrub, bucking like a wild brumby who will never be broken. Already it is on top of him. He darts to the left, deeper into the desert, but the ute banks that way too.
Think, Jon Heather, you useless Pommie bastard — just think!
To his left, he sees an outburst of scrub taller and denser than all the rest: a shadow wood. The ute will not follow in there.
He hurtles towards it. He does not have to look around to know that the ute is rapidly closing, for the headlights grow in intensity. At last, he reaches the line of the trees. He claws his way inside, listens to the skidding of tyres as the ute slews to avoid a crash.
Now there are footsteps — big, heavy footsteps — gaining on him. He is a lost little boy, running from the childsnatchers again. Yet, this time, it is different. This time he knows where he is running. He has the means to get back to England. He has treasure in his swag. A few more weeks, another voyage at sea, and he’ll be there. Twelve years too late, but he’ll be there still …
A hand swipes at his shoulder, and lightning bursts along his broken arm. Pain drives him to a halt. The hand comes up and clamps around his chest, pinning him in place. He drops the swag and, as it falls, it flies open. Starlight spills through the sweet-smelling canopy, illuminating all the treasures Megan gave him.
‘Take it!’ Jon cries. ‘Take it all, just please … don’t take me in …’
The policeman drops him, deliberately, onto his broken arm. The world explodes in a myriad of colours. He can feel nothing — no agony, no pounding, not even the texture of the earth where he has landed.
‘I don’t think you understand,’ the policeman says. ‘You ran me off the road. You beat my mate to within an inch of his life. And you snatched a little girl from us, her rightful guardians. You don’t make the decisions here, Mr Heather.’ He crouches, picking up a string of pearls and peering at them in the starlight. ‘You’re in a lot of trouble, Jon.’
Before the world fades to blackness, Jon hears the policeman’s words over and again: you snatched a little girl, Jon Heather, from her rightful guardians: the government of Western Australia.
You can’t run away from the childsnatcher, Jon. He’s already here. For now and ever more, he will be everywhere you turn. All you’ll have to do is look in the mirror.
BOOK THREE
THE THREE CHILDSNATCHERS
XVII
They are met at the gates of the home, and a prim white woman, whose perfectly poised accent does not suit her meaty demeanour, tells them how glad she is that they could come. It is Pete who shakes her hand, while Cormac Tate lingers behind.
‘I reckon I might stay with the truck, Pete,’ he mutters.
The red-haired man nods gruffly. He has been expecting as much, ever since the letter first landed at their station. They pored over it together for long hours — hours in which nothing much was said, but no less vital for that — before deciding to make the trip. The ute, now four or even five years old, has seen better days, but at least it got them this far. Perhaps Cormac can tinker with it further while Pete is inside.
He follows the woman through the gates. On a plaque against the black grille a legend is spelt out. Even though the woman is chattering on, Pete stops so that he might take it in:
Mogumber Native Settlement
A home for the homeless, the forgotten in our midst, the desperate ones who deserve a new world
Down the hill, Pete sees wooden shacks, sitting on stilts, arranged in a horseshoe around a clump of low, sprawling trees. There is a wooden lattice table close to the gates, and at it an aboriginal man is sitting, smoking a dark cigarette.
‘We’re so glad you could come. You’ll see, for certain, that our girls are well prepared for life on a holding like yours.’ She pauses, halfway down the hill. On one side, separate from the rest, there is a bigger building, with three utes lined up outside; on the other, a patch of scrub has been harrowed, with poles put up for growing beans. The plants look straggly and untended. ‘What was your station called, again?’
‘Black Chaparral,’ Pete says, absentmindedly. ‘It used to be East Hermitage.’
They seem to be ignoring the shacks built in the horseshoe, and head towards the broader building instead. There are faces in the doors of all the huts they leave behind, some of them as young as five or six. An ancient memory stirs in him, and he remembers sneaking through a place Jon Heather called the shadow wood. He has, he thinks, slipped back in time — only here there is not an English boy in sight; all of the faces are black.
The building, it turns out, is a hospital of sorts. A nurse scurries from partition to partition. For all her work, Pete does not see any patients, only a pale-looking aboriginal girl with a thermometer stuck in her mouth and yellow crust around her eyes.
‘This way,’ the woman says.
The office is a simple thing, a desk and a cabinet and nothing else. The woman takes a ledger from the desk, opens it, and runs her finger down lines of dates and names.
‘Our girls deserve the brightest start in life, Mr Slade. They are studious and willing to learn. They’re eager to leave behind the degradations of the past. We work hard here to give these girls the skills they need.’ She throws him a smile. ‘We have a chaplain, now, who has been no end of help in delivering moral lessons. Morality, you see, is not something that comes easily to these girls.’
‘Why’s that?’
She doesn’t seem to hear.
‘In the end, you know, their rehabilitation is a long, slow process. So we must look to members of the community to complete their training, to give them roles that might best service the society they’ve joined.’ She pauses. Perhaps she senses something in Pete, because she begins to steer him back outside. ‘Perhaps you’d like to meet some of our girls?’
Out in the sunshine, Pete stops. He is, he thinks, beginning to understand why Cormac Tate would not come through the gates.
‘Where do these girls come from?’ he asks.
‘They are rescued, Mr Slade.’
‘Rescued?’
The woman nods. ‘I shudder to think where these girls might have ended up, if it hadn’t been for good works like this.’
‘Where from?’
‘All over, Mr Slade. It used to be we’d just take girls from the south, but some of them here, they’re from the Kimberley, the Pilbara.’
‘Way up north.’
She nods.
‘North of Broome.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘
The ends of the earth!’
He is taken into one of the shacks in the horseshoe. It is, he sees, a dormitory, though not like the dormitories of the boys’ home, nor the ones Jon Heather used to describe. This one has been scrubbed clean. The beds all have pillows and the blankets are freshly laundered. It is not, Pete decides, a dormitory for the girls living here; it is a dormitory set up especially for him.
‘I’ll be back shortly.’
Left alone, Pete wanders to the airy window. From here, he can see the neighbouring hut, a trellised building with a ditch of deep slush at its feet. It is a moment before he realizes what is wrong; on this hut’s windows, there are bars.
‘Mr Slade …’
He turns to see the woman has come back, shovelling before her two pale aboriginal girls. The elder, perhaps fourteen, has an arm on the younger’s shoulder. They stand silently, dressed in demure little frocks, with no shoes upon their feet.
‘Say hello, girls.’
The younger buries her head; the elder speaks, but it is not any language Pete can understand.
‘Dolly,’ the woman whispers, ‘you heard what I said. You mustn’t speak black fella language to Mr Slade. He’s here to give you great things.’
It is not something he has thought about in more than four years, but suddenly Pete can feel the sting of swirling red dirt against him and he is watching, with horror, as Jon Heather pounds his fist into the face of the man named Cook, a little black girl huddled up in the back of the ute behind.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘you’ll have to excuse me.’ He brushes between the girls, past the woman, stumbling at the door. ‘Sorry Dolly,’ he says. ‘I’m …’
Up at the ute, Cormac Tate is drinking coffee from a flask. When he sees Pete lope back through the gates, he spits out the grounds. ‘What is it, Pete?’
‘It’s like you said it would be. You want to say it?’
‘Say what?’
‘You’re always right, Cormac, my old mate!’ he beams. ‘You’ve always got one up on me!’
By the time he is in the driver’s seat, ready to wheel the ute away, his smile has disappeared.
‘It doesn’t do no good, though, does it?’ He kneads the steering wheel. ‘Storming out of there’s just as bad as Jon Heather putting his fists in that bastard’s face. Well,’ he demands, ‘ain’t it?’
‘What else would you do, Pete?’
It is no good. Pete kills the engine, climbs back out of the ute.
‘I’m sorry, Cormac,’ he says. ‘I just got to.’
Endless hours later, Pete re-emerges from the settlement. Tramping up the hill behind him come two pale aboriginal girls.
At their sides, each of them carries a little suitcase made out of card.
In the middle month of winter, in the year of 1961, a new signpost could be seen along the inland roadway leading from Northam to Mullewa. It was a crude thing, letters scored by knife into the back of a chair — but even passers-by might have noted with what care the letters had been carved. Now, years later, it has been replaced by a simple, stencilled design: Black Chaparral Station. At the end of the trail, there is neither a real cattle station, nor any chaparral, but little things like that don’t mean a thing to the men who own it. For them, the words are a joke, a secret code, a pair of crooked fingers raised joyfully at the country that keeps them. They say, we can make what we want of this world — it’s all up to us.
It is a long ride from Mogumber, though not nearly so long as the roads Pete and Cormac Tate used to ride. On the way they make frequent stops, fussing over the girls on the flatbed and the sullen, elderly Dog that guards them. For their part, the girls do not seem distressed. This, Pete surmises, is because they have been here before, forced into the back of a ute and told they are going somewhere to live better, healthier lives. So has he, and Cormac Tate; at least, now that he is driving, he knows he is telling the truth.
They reach home just as the daylight is starting to pale. There are no other trucks on the road and they glide through fields of gold — the neighbouring farms — and fields of dirty yellow — their own — before taking a track through the bloodwoods, towards home. This is not the natural country for bloodwoods, but it is not — or so an old friend would say — the natural country for Pete and Cormac Tate either. Over the years, they have both found something to laugh at in the idea.
The first building they come to was once the ruin of a barn. Now it is Cormac Tate’s own lodge, a place to rest his weary bones at night, prop his feet upon the grumbling Dog, and — soon enough — tell stories to the grandchildren with which Pete and his daughter Maya are obediently providing him. At the gate, Pete brings the ute to a crawl, but Cormac motions him to go on, climbing the road until they reach the farmhouse proper. There, Cormac will help the new girls settle, and indulge himself in a long game of cards with Booty and the rest of the blacks.
At the head of the trail, there sits the farmhouse. In the yard, one of the foremen is deep in the engine of the only tractor they could afford, while the housekeeper, one of Booty’s daughters, is beating out a mat against the wall. Black Chaparral will never be like the great wheat farms that surround them, but it doesn’t have to be: it will keep them, and one day it will keep their families. They have a pig and a goat. There are wild rabbits for roasting and chooks in a coop out back. A fox in a pen, just for the sheer hell of it. It is, indeed, a bastard sort of family.
Booty emerges from an outhouse as they approach, trudges down to receive them at the gate. While they are still a distance away, his face seems to crumple, as he considers the two unexpected passengers up back. Climbing out of the cab, Cormac tells him to stop his staring.
‘We’ll have to make up a couple of bed rolls,’ he says, reaching out to help the girls down. When the elder sister shakes her head, he steps back, lets them help each other to the ground instead. ‘There’s a spare room out back, girls. Your room. Booty here’ll show you, get you settled down. Then, I hope you’ll join us for dinner.’ He looks over his shoulder. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Pete?’
‘Got to get some grub in them,’ he says. ‘They’ll have been wasting a …’ Pete stops, for Booty is still rolling his eyes. ‘What is it?’
‘You better come, boss,’ says Booty. ‘They’s a man.’
‘A man?’
‘I tell him he can wait.’
‘He didn’t want to wait inside?’
‘Some fella don’t like inside.’
Pete follows Booty’s eyes along the edge of the yard, where straggly ears of wheat ripple in the evening breeze. Out back, the land is still opening up. Some of it was scrub when they came to Black Chaparral, but every season another stretch gets harrowed, and every season there is more to till and harvest.
The evening redness in the west is setting his bedraggled fields to a burst of life but, though his eyes are drawn that way, he cannot stop from seeing the fat man bent over the railings, watching the sunset just the same.
Pete coughs, flamboyantly loud.
Up ahead, the fat man startles, turns around, his cheeks flushing at the embarrassment of being sneaked up on. ‘Peter …’ he begins. He is not wearing black today. He is wearing jeans and a checked shirt — it does not suit him — and has a little case at his side. His face, plump and ruddy, is hidden behind a boyish fringe. ‘It’s me,’ the fat man whispers, ‘George.’
Pete idles to the fence. He sets one foot on the rail and gazes out over the fields he has worked, the scrub he has reclaimed: the years of his life.
There are only a dozen yards between them. The last time they met, it too was across a field of upturned earth; there were a dozen yards between them back then as well, but George flew across them so urgently he felt as if he might take off. Now, nobody moves.
‘George Stone,’ he repeats.
Pete tilts his head, and for the first time George can look into him. He is stronger, fuller. Even so, he is shorter than George has always imagined; as grown men, G
eorge is the taller of the two. It is wrong that he should ever be able to look down on Peter Slade.
‘I recognize you, George.’ His voice is different, too; it does not chip and dive as once it did. ‘I never knew that was your name.’
Though they stand beside each other, they are not really together.
‘It’s a place you’ve got here, Peter. Black Chaparral …’ He ventures a smile, careful not to let it grow too big. ‘I remember those comics.’
‘I remember reading them to you.’
In the backdoor of the farmhouse, a woman with cropped blonde hair appears. Her dungarees are stained and she looks exhausted. Pete makes eyes at her, and she turns back into the farmhouse.
‘That your … wife?’
Silence — long and sticky.
‘That your baby crying up there?’
Something in the question seems to smart with Pete, as if it is something George should not have asked. For the first time, he turns to face the fat little boy. ‘We came to get you, you know. Jon Heather rode out and told me what you were doing, and I made old Cormac Tate drive right back to that Mission so I could see for myself. I just wouldn’t believe it, George. But we kicked up dust all night — and there you were, just drinking coffee with Judah Reed.’
George lets the silence stretch out, unsure if he should go on. ‘Peter …’
‘Actually, it’s Pete.’ He kicks back against the fence, jumping forward only when a goat emerges out of the wheat to investigate his backside. ‘George,’ he says, ‘it’s been hellish good to see you, but if you don’t mind I’ve got a whole heap of shit to be …’
He is striding across the yard, towards the open door of the farmhouse, thinking of those girls, when George calls out.
‘Peter … Pete … It’s …’ Words seem to be failing him — but, then again, they always did. ‘It’s about … Jon Heather.’
Another second, and Pete would have gone up the steps, walked in to find his mismatched family waiting, and not looked back.
Little Exiles Page 35