Jon shakes his head. ‘I’m staying here, George.’
George moves as if he might pluck the photograph of Megan out of Jon’s pocket. ‘What about her?’
‘Maybe I could go back to Broome,’ he says. ‘Or maybe I could work with Peter and Cormac out at Black Chaparral. Maybe that is home.’ He pauses, thinks about Charlie, the girl in the room, all the other ones who might one day find their way back. ‘But if I wasn’t with them, I wouldn’t be me. And damn it, George, but I’m going to be me.’
He thinks — in the end, the Children’s Crusade really did win. You kicked and you fought and scratched and bit and every time they told you you were one thing, you thundered back that you were the other. But you couldn’t stop them changing you, any more than you could step out of your own skin; without Judah Reed, without Tommy Crowe, without bedwetters and dormitories and McAllister and his goats, you wouldn’t even be Jon Heather.
Then he thinks — but if you weren’t Jon Heather, those boys and girls would be alone. If you weren’t Jon Heather, you’d be useless. You’re Jon Heather, and you’re going to make a good fist of what you’ve got.
‘Do you remember the wild boy, George?’
George nods.
‘There’s a thing he said to me. He was going to leave footprints, ones only little boys and girls could see, and we were all going to follow them, all the way back to London and Malta and Leeds, all the places we were taken from. Every boy to be the boy they want to be, and not a single boy left behind.’ Jon trembles at the memory. He was eleven years old again, cradling his feral friend in the scrub. ‘He was a little boy, and that’s what he was dreaming. How could I be a grown man and dream of anything less?’
Storytime over, Captain Matthews takes Martha Gray by the hand and tells her it is time. She nods, matter-of-factly, and scuttles past George and Jon Heather to find her coat in the dormitory.
Slowly, George and Jon follow. As George hurries down the stairs, whisking Martha along, Jon remains at the top. Here is the banister from which he first spied Judah Reed; there is the door to the closet where he hid to read his book and, instead, found a best friend. Suddenly, he grins, wildly and without thought. His mother, his sisters, the house where he grew up — all of that is dust. This is where his real memories begin.
‘Jon Heather!’ George calls. ‘This little girl hasn’t got all day!’
Jon drops down the staircase and crosses the hall. Before he opens the door, he sees a big winter coat lying in a crumpled heap among piles of boxes. It is January, he thinks; it is winter. He beats the dust from it and slips inside. To his surprise, it fits perfectly. Cold wind rips across him as he steps through the doors of the Home.
‘Are you ready?’
George hops from foot to foot to ward off the cold, nodding sharply at Captain Matthews, who slides into the front seat of the car and coaxes the engine to life.
‘What was it like,’ George asks, ‘when you took Charlie back?’
‘It was,’ Jon proclaims, ‘a sorry mess.’
George nods, as if he expects nothing else. ‘Then I’m ready.’
Together they hurry to the car. As George takes his seat up-front, Jon Heather slides in beside the girl, making certain that her coat is buttoned up tight.
Jon takes the photograph out of his back pocket and cannot but grin. There are two rooms, one at this end of the earth and one at the other, but the world is getting smaller; perhaps there can be a tunnel between the two. He wonders what she has been doing since that last night in Broome, how many wayfarers she has taken pity on, how many men she has accompanied on long walks along Cable Beach. He supposes he’ll have to get a telephone now.
The engine sputters and the car wheels around, rising slowly through the skeleton trees to leave the Home behind.
‘Are we all going home now?’ the girl asks.
‘Some of us,’ says Jon Heather.
Once, there was a boy who ran away. He ran as far as he could run, and when he could run no more, he burrowed down into the baked red earth. There he stayed, perfectly preserved, not growing any bigger, not getting a single day older — until, one day, tired of being alone, he simply rose from the redness and started to live.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to: Louisa Joyner, Cassie Browne and everyone at HarperCollins; Euan Thorneycroft at A.M. Heath; and to everyone who read early drafts, Jennifer Custer, Kate Rizzo, Elliott Hall, Maggie Traugott, Walter Donohue and Susan Armstrong.
Margaret Humphrey’s memoir, Empty Cradles, and David Hill’s The Forgotten Children were particularly useful in opening the world of child migration up, and I’m especially grateful to all those who shared their own stories with me as I was researching this novel. Though Little Exiles is a work of fiction, the world it presents was frighteningly real, and I hope it does justice to the experiences you all shared.
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events, are the work of the author’s imagination.
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2013
This edition published in 2013
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
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Copyright © Robert Dinsdale 2013
The right of him to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Little Exiles Page 41