Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  ‘Every foreman’s the same,’ he says, ‘all the world over.’

  ‘Every what?’

  He catches himself, and shrugs off the question.

  At last, something in her softens. She hasn’t been to the pictures in weeks, she says, so this is a treat. She begins to ask him questions and, with each one, Jon feels his hackles rising. He had a system for this once: bat the questions back; ask them about their life, and you don’t have to tell them about your own. It takes a little while to get the conversation back on track. By that time, he has concocted a past for himself, something to explain the strange vowel sounds she sometimes struggles to understand. He has, he says, just been working in London. That is probably as alien to this girl as Australia ought to be to Jon.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, seemingly disappointed. ‘I thought you might have been an American.’

  ‘No,’ Jon mutters. ‘Just boring old Leeds.’

  She kicks her heels. ‘Sometimes I wish everything wasn’t just boring old Leeds.’ She sits up straight, swivelling to face him. ‘Do you know, one day I’d like to get away. Somewhere where it’s sunny. Somewhere where there’s … wine.’

  ‘Wine?’

  Such a thing is patently absurd.

  ‘Somewhere they have fun. Anywhere but … here.’

  Up on the screen, the pictures start flickering. Jon settles into his seat, grateful not to have to listen to her voice any longer, that asinine dreaming of hers: as if anything was better than being right here, right now, where they’re both supposed to be.

  In the film, a ridiculous man with a voice he can hardly understand plays a soldier and hillbilly both. Beside Jon, Emma laughs and hoots like all the other girls scattered across the picture house. A beat behind them every time, Jon joins in. Come the end of the story, he can judge when to laugh and not laugh. The final scene is fading to black before he realizes he has not absorbed a single scene; he has been too busy watching the other patrons instead.

  Outside, the rain has already begun. Jon cringes into it, walking close to Emma as if to protect her. They drift along the street. A motorbus rolls past, spraying up puddle water and sludge.

  ‘Well,’ she looks at him, ‘I should be getting back.’

  ‘Not on your life!’ exclaims Jon. ‘Don’t you want a drink?’

  She steps back. He is darkly aware of the way she is holding the flowers, loosely by the stem, their heads drooping down.

  ‘I thought we’d get some food,’ says Jon.

  Emma trudges on. Three feet behind, Jon follows.

  ‘We could find a canteen. I’d order for you.’

  At this, she turns around. ‘You’d order for me?’

  Jon knows now he has said something wrong. ‘What did I do?’

  ‘The film was lovely,’ she says, ‘but you’re a … strange boy.’

  This, Jon has heard before. ‘I’d drive you home,’ he begins, ‘but I haven’t got a ute.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A car,’ he stammers. ‘I’d have driven you but …’

  At least she laughs. ‘I didn’t expect a boy like you to have a car.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You can walk me to my bus stop if you like. You don’t have to wait.’

  At the bus stop, he kicks his heels for a few silent minutes. Then, he looks up to see he has kicked his way ten yards along the street. He looks back to say goodbye, but she is not looking in his direction. It seems easier just to walk away.

  Jon does not want to go home. Instead, he finds a public house and empties his pockets of the money he was going to spend on the girl. When it is all gone, he sets off again — and, this time, his roaming leads him home.

  At the bedsit, all he can hear is fucking through the wall. He sits and listens. This, he supposes, is how his own night should have ended. He closes his eyes, but the sounds only seem to intensify. He has had too much to drink — the men at work would say he has hardly touched a drop — and images cavort across the backs of his eyes. Some of them he thinks are memories, others contorted visions of things that might have been: a night in the shadow wood; taking the little boy Luca to a hospital; holding Megan’s hand as they climb the red rocks at Cable Beach.

  It is the last image that sobers him. He can taste salt, suddenly, on his lips — but it is not until he feels hot tears that he understands this is not merely a memory of spray from the sea.

  Sitting on the end of the bed, he kneads his eyes dry like a little boy in his dormitory at night. If only that girl — Emma, Emily, whatever her fucking name was — might have come home with him. At least, then, he would have had something to hold onto tonight, something to beat back whatever is in his chest, straining to get out. He realizes he would give anything just to be ten years old again, with George huddling up to him at night and pissing all over him before morning.

  Perhaps it is thoughts like these that make him go to the dresser and pull out the envelope that George pressed into his hands. 19 Mayville Place. He hardly needs it; he will not forget the address.

  He is holding the envelope when he goes to sleep at night, and holding it still when he wakes in the morning.

  Mayville Place is a short walk from where he has been living. In England, one coast is a short walk from the next, with a multitude of kingdoms cluttering the hills in between. Another of the nondescript terraces, its houses have little yards where people have lined up terracotta pots for flowers. Number 19 has a tree overhanging the doorway. Jon Heather puts one foot in front of the other and knocks on the door.

  When there is no reply, he beats a retreat around the block, following the thin alley behind and counting off the houses until he finds the right one. He knocks at the back door, but when there is no answer, he has no hesitation in trying the door handle. If anybody asks, he will tell them: it is a family home.

  The door is not locked and opens into a small kitchen with crockery piled high. A pantry has stairs leading into a cellar, and a second door crosses a tiny hallway to the living room. In here, there is a television set and an upright piano.

  Jon stands in the doorway, looking in like a man in a museum. The wallpaper has a floral pattern and bubbles where it has been inexpertly hung, and there are photographs in frames: a collage of scenes, two girls and their mother.

  Jon recognizes his sisters at once. His mother, he finds, is harder somehow, as if her face has always been clouded in his mind. He stares into the photographs and thinks: it is before I was born. His sisters are younger than he was when he joined the Children’s Crusade. He paws at the glass that separates him from them, leaving a sweaty smudge behind. These twins are not identical, yet he cannot tell them apart.

  He closes his eyes. Concentrate, Jon Heather. You didn’t go through all those years of waiting, of silence, for nothing. Your sisters are called Rachel and Samantha. Your sisters helped you groom a toy horse. Your sisters … He opens his eyes. They glimmer back at him from the photograph, but it is useless.

  He turns away. On top of the upright piano, there is another photograph: his mother and father, on the day that they were married. He wanders over, lifts it up — but this man has light, sandy hair, not the dark mop his father had, and the woman is years older than the one who wished Jon goodbye outside the Home.

  He whirls around. There has to be something, somewhere, to tell him what has happened, what has gone wrong. He opens a cabinet behind one of the settees, scrabbles there to pull out wads of papers, until he finds what he is searching for. It is a photograph album, one he has never forgotten.

  His sisters — those strange girls up on the wall — once sat with him and showed him pictures of his true father: a man with wild black hair glowering into the camera. Those same girls are here, but there are no pictures of his father. He tears through the pages, a record of the girls growing up. They are eleven, and then they are thirteen, and then they are the sisters Jon Heather can remember: eighteen and nineteen and twenty years old. Now, at last, he can tell them apart.
He rears up, victorious against himself — until a terrible thought dawns.

  There is not a single picture of you, Jon Heather, in any of these albums.

  His sisters, here, are of an age when they looked after him, put him to bed. Once, there were photographs of all of that, but not any longer. His mother, of whom he dreamed, every night, must have believed the very same thing as the Children’s Crusade: if you are going to live in the present, you have to eradicate the past.

  There is noise behind him: the clicking of a key in a lock, the shuffling of feet. He spins around, the photograph album still open in his hands. All around him paper is balled up and trailing out of the cabinet. He is like a dog whose master has come back to camp and found him with his snout in the tucker bag.

  He stands up, showering the photographs everywhere — but then he reins himself in. He is Jon Heather. He has come thousands of miles. He has come, he thinks, thousands of years.

  Every boy to grow up the boy they were supposed to be, said Luca, and not a single boy left behind.

  The door opens and a tall man with sandy hair appears. He is looking down when he enters, so he does not see Jon at first. Instead, he sees scattered papers and a picture of himself looking up from the ground. His eyes rise. If Jon really was a cut-throat, he could have killed him where he stood.

  ‘Who in hell are you?’ the man demands. It amuses Jon to hear his voice thundering so, when every muscle in his body twitches and hauls him back.

  ‘I’m Jon,’ he says. ‘I’m Jon Heather. Ask me again,’ he insists. ‘Ask me again who I am.’

  At the man’s side there is movement, another figure bustling him out of the way, until they stand, two abreast, in the doorway. She is older than Jon has imagined; her hair has turned grey, her jowls are starting to sag — but her eyes are the same vivid blue, her lips still the thin red lips that kissed him goodbye.

  She is ugly, thinks Jon. She wears make-up, so she must think she’s pretty, but she drips in ugliness like a fat Sunday roast, stewing in its own juices.

  ‘Hello, Mother,’ he breathes.

  The doorway is hardly broad enough for them both to stand there: this stranger and her husband. Though the man is raging at him, Jon barely hears a word, barely even sees him. He is just an amorphous mess of colour on the edge of his vision, for he is looking only at his mother.

  She is tiny, diminutive where she once was tall and statuesque. She has grown into a stoop, and her eyes refuse to meet his.

  ‘You might say hello,’ Jon says, his words swamped beneath the man’s incessant questions.

  ‘Jon …’

  When she whispers the word, lifting a cupped hand to her mouth as if to hold back more, her husband is suddenly hushed.

  ‘Annie,’ he says. ‘What …’

  She flings her arms up, to hold onto him. ‘It’s him.’

  ‘You’re certain?’

  ‘Of course I’m certain …’

  Jon might be watching a puppet show, for they are not addressing him. He takes a step, then another. He could cross the room with a third. This is England, and he is a giant.

  He thinks he is going to hold her, yet before his foot has landed, he knows it is not true. She shrinks back, half behind her husband, into the doorway — but it is not only that that stops him. He realizes he does not know how. It would not be the same as holding Megan. It would not be the same as holding onto Dog, late at night. It would not even be the same as clapping Cormac Tate on the shoulder and beaming ‘bastard good’. He does not know which arm to lift, whether he should hold her under her arms or above; whether her head should be buried in his shoulder or his in hers.

  None of it matters, because she is saying ‘No, no, no,’ over and over. The words repel him more powerfully than any of the commands her husband utters — empty threats circling a thousand feet away.

  ‘Jon … How long have you …?’

  ‘Fifteen and a half years,’ he whispers.

  ‘I mean … in Leeds?’

  ‘Weeks. A month. Two. I wanted to come before. I had it in mind. I got your address …’ His voice cracks. He hates it. If they were going to cry, they should be in each other’s arms. ‘… on a piece of paper. My friend found it. I left them behind and I came to …’

  He holds George’s envelope up, as if she might take it. It flutters to the ground on the carpet between them. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. I shouldn’t have bothered.’

  He turns side-on to shoulder between them, back through the door. Yet, he will not touch them. They stand, uncomfortably close. Jon can smell her perfume. It is heavy, and smells of being a scared little boy.

  ‘Jon,’ she says. ‘It’s not that … It’s only — I wasn’t expecting it, Jon.’

  He manages to break past, out onto the doorstep. ‘Ever?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Were you ever expecting me, Mother?’

  Her husband envelops her in his arms, but a shudder courses through her body and she casts him off.

  ‘Jon,’ she breathes. ‘I just don’t know what to say.’

  ‘No?’ Jon’s laugh is full of spite. Of all the times he pictured this day, every time he shut his eyes at night to dream of it, not once did he think it would feel like this. It is, he decides, exactly the way he felt when he brought back his fists to pound Cook’s face into the dirt. ‘Well, I do.’

  He reaches into his back pocket, pulls out a scrap of a letter that a little boy once wrote. He holds it up, puffs out his chest, clears his throat before he reads. ‘I’ll be your best boy,’ he chokes, ‘if only you come and take me back. I’ll get you anything you want — and mother, if I haven’t got it, why, I’ll go for and get it.’

  He pauses, but he does not mean to pause. There are too many words clogging his throat. ‘I am your son who loves you,’ he says. ‘Jon Heather.’

  It is late when he leaves. There have been tears and there has been silence; there has been storytelling, of a sort, and an invitation to return — but: fuck this, thinks Jon, I don’t need an invitation.

  He pounds the beat from Burley Park to Woodhouse Moor, cutting over its tamed heaths and reaching his bedsit before full dark has come. He does not go home, but prowls into the city instead, walking the length of the canal and back again. He drinks beer in a public house where the men look at him askance, as if he has walked into some private room in which he does not belong. When the glass is half empty, he sets it down and prowls on, finding himself again at the doors of the basement bar in which he first met Emma.

  Inside, he buys another beer — but his pockets are empty and, when he cannot produce any change, a lumbering man wearing a long black coat asks him to leave. Jon tells him, I’ll just sit; I don’t have to drink. Yet apparently this is not allowed. He stands, makes as if he is about to leave, but drops into another seat instead. Music is playing, deep and tinny, through speakers that rattle and gyrate.

  ‘Look,’ the ogre says, looming above, ‘you think I like this job? You think I want to spend my nights here, pushing people around?’

  Jon would take a draught of his drink if he had one, just to keep himself from lashing out. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d like it at all.’

  ‘Then do me a favour, won’t you, and get the …’

  The man does not have the chance to go on, for suddenly somebody is at his side. At first the figure is obscured. Then Jon hears a familiar voice.

  ‘I’ll buy him a drink,’ says Emma. ‘He’s not going to cause any trouble …’

  The man steps back. In the cavernous light, Emma stands there, in a dress her mother has stitched, flowers tracing up and down her arms.

  ‘It’s your funeral, love.’

  As the man knuckles away, Emma squints at Jon, her head angled slightly to one side. ‘What are you doing here, Jon?’

  Jon doesn’t even have an answer. He stands. He does not want to push past her, but she gives him no other choice. He goes towards her with his shoulder; i
t will hurt less that way and, even now, he does not want to hurt her.

  ‘It wasn’t so bad, you know. I could get you a drink …’

  ‘It wouldn’t change a fucking thing.’

  She laughs, off-key and nervous. ‘It would for a couple of hours.’

  ‘It would at that,’ admits Jon — but he does not look at her as he tramps out of the door.

  In the small of the next afternoon, he is busy burning the shreds of his passport in the bedsit sink, when somebody hammers at the door downstairs. In the basin, his face melts. George did well to obtain the documents to get him back home, but he cannot suffer to have his place of birth marked as Geraldton, Western Australia, for very long.

  He stumbles out of the bedsit to find a postman standing irate on the step. The old man presses an envelope into his hand and then retreats, muttering invective.

  It is the first letter Jon has ever received that was not written on the back of a biscuit wrapper. He retreats back to the bedsit and flings it onto the bed. There is no knowing what is written inside, but until he opens it, it could be anything. He circles it warily, like a cat waiting for its catch to try and escape. There is a stamp on the front that leaps out at him. He had hoped never to see that sort of stamp ever again.

  Dear Jon,

  I heard from Captain Matthews that you have found a home and got yourself into work! Pete and I are not surprised. You always worked so hard, Jon Heather, and you deserve it. We’re proud as hell (Pete has made me promise I would write this).

  It seems you are adjusting far better than I ever could have done, Jon Heather. England was a terrible shock to me. I sometimes think it was a worse shock than Australia. At least, then, I didn’t think about it so much. Things seemed to just happen when we were boys. I think you will understand what I mean when I say — it’s the thinking that can catch you out …

  I am writing, Jon, not just because I miss you! (Pete says I am to tell you this also.) There is a girl in the Mission, named Martha Gray, who I have taken an interest in. She is five years old and came to the Crusade last year because her mother passed on — but she speaks freely about her grandmother, to whom she thought she was coming to stay. For a long while, I thought that her grandmother must have been somewhere in Australia, but I know, now, that I was wrong.