There he was to receive an education, and he did if being beaten, locked up, punished, mistreated and controlled and then finally, when broken, trained to be a servant was an education. He learnt to work, learnt to obey, learnt the religion of his captors. Most importantly for the Settlers, he learnt to fear them, to respect them as his betters.
Now again, many years later, the mission did not look any different. There were the clusters of buildings, with smaller clusters of children, all Natives, moving between them. They were herded from behind by beings in robes of charcoal, strange square heads he knew to be hats. He knew they were the nuns, he also knew to fear them.
This, the closest thing he had ever known to a home was also the scene of all his most terrifying nightmares.
He could not risk approaching that place, not in the light of day, yet he could think of no other way if he wished to find his real home, his parents, his family. Somewhere in that place was someone who knew where he had been taken from. In that place, that terrible place, was the information he needed but fear and indecision kept him frozen.
His courage rose with the failing light as if the daylight itself had been sapping it. The knots of children slipped into the barracks. If things were the same as when he was there the doors would be locked. For a time, the slender, taller, robed figures moved about like strange black wading birds, searching before them for tasty morsels of fish. Some time after the departure of the sunlight, under the nearly day-bright light of an almost full moon, they too went inside, into the building of wood and stone, with a roof of slate, rather than tin, next to the stone church.
When the pregnant moon slipped behind a cloud he made a move, steeling himself, fighting his fear, for there was nothing else he could do but give up the hope that he held with his entire soul. Moving silently through the trees, he dumped his shoes under a tree and ran barefoot, for hard soles make too much noise. He slipped over the fence into the compound. The dormitories of tin were a pointless destination, there would be nothing there of use. The building near the church where the nuns lived, to go there would be suicide. That left the church, the school and a third building that he shuddered even to look at.
That smaller building, between the church and the dorms, was the most terrifying of all: the office where punishment was meted out. Nobody was ever taken to that building for a pleasant reason. Shaking with terror he thought, had hoped, he would never feel again, Jacky crouched in the shadow of a silent dormitory, staring. If it was not for the fact that he was certain the building was empty, there was not a force that could have made him move. If there had been any other way at all he would not have moved, except to flee into the woods and at least the feeling of safety.
There was no other choice, in fact no choice at all. He forced himself to stand, forced himself to sprint the short distance to the other building. The door was locked, of course it was, and so were the windows, as they always were in the past, and in his nightmares. Panting, terrified, he hid in the only shadow he could find. In his memory, almost gone, almost there, was something he was missing, if only he could remember it, he was sure it was important.
It came to him in a rush and he crawled and skittered around to where there had been a loose board all those years ago, a loose board he and the other children had used to break into that building. They had always been hungry at the mission; food could be stolen from the building before him. There was a pantry full of the food the nuns ate, food that the Natives never saw. They were all scared of that building, yet in desperation they were always trying to get in.
A miracle, the board was still loose. He pulled it free, wincing at the creaking noise it hadn’t made last time he had gone in through there, back when he was a child. The hole it left did not look large enough to squeeze through but, desperate, he lay on his belly and tried.
Jacky was always small. After the abuse of the mission and the settlement, he was visibly malnourished, he was tiny. A larger man would never have made it through such a gap, made by children.
The room through the hole was silent, empty, the only light a watery patch of moonlight cast through the thin curtains covering the window. It was not enough to see by so he crawled in silent caution towards where the door must be. Then a hallway, even darker than the room, the door clicking, almost silently, shut behind him.
The room he wanted, he hoped, was the main office – there must be records there. He remembered paper, lots of paper, there in the great wooden chest of drawers that covered the entire length of one wall. It was difficult but he walked past the locked pantry, ignoring the screaming of his stomach, towards the office.
The office was too dark, he could not see to search, yet a warm glow was cast from the fireplace on the opposite wall. Above it would be the iron kettle – the nuns liked tea, he remembered that. There were papers on the desk in the middle of the room, he could not see to read them but snatched at them in desperation. Twisting a few loose sheets into a rough taper he lit it from a coal in the fireplace.
By the flickering red light he tore into the cabinets looking for some sort of clue – was there a file in his name among all those others? They were in order, the alphabet they had forced him to learn. He dug into the ‘Bs’. There he found it, Jacky Barna, that was the name he had used at the settlement, but the rest of the file he could not hope to understand.
Here, in this place, he had learnt to read, he had worked hard at reading so he could better himself, be as good as a Settler, which he never seemed to achieve. The words in the file seemed to flow, to swim in his vision in the flashing light. There were too many words, in a tiny cramped handwriting; he could not begin to decipher them.
His taper ran out, the flame and light disappearing without warning into the room’s sickly moonlit glow. He quickly fashioned and ignited another one, and another. So many words in his file were words he did not understand, had never read or even heard. Bent over the file, eyes watering with the attempt to read, he did not hear footsteps in the hall, did not hear doors open, did not notice anything until the doorway behind him was lit with the glow of a lantern.
He dropped the flaming paper in his hand, yet did not stay to watch it make its slow flickering way to the floorboards. In panic he dashed for the closed window but his frightened fingers fumbled at the latch, hampered by the papers he refused to drop. Trapped, he turned to face the light, backing against the window and freedom he could not reach. Backing as far as he could, as if by willpower he could walk backwards right through the wood and glass, he stared at the light as one terrified of fire.
‘Wha . . .’ a voice stammered. ‘Who are you, what are you doing here?’ He could not see the face before him, the lantern ruined his night vision, but the voice was female. There was a musical lilt to the voice, the voice of a young woman, surely not much older than him. That he did not expect – when he was a child all the nuns were old. Jacky was silent, unable to force words through his fear.
‘Who are you? You are not one of our children, you are too old. There is nothing here but paper, why break in to steal paper?’ She paused in thought, staring at Jacky’s face. ‘This is a school, there is no grog, nothing to drink here, all the food is in the kitchen.’ She was circling as she talked as if to give Jacky an opening if he decided to run. Jacky shuddered with the conflict in his mind between the desire to run in terror and the need to find what he needed. The fact that he had nowhere to run without bowling into the nun in the doorway decided it for him. ‘Please,’ he breathed, barely audible, struggling to find the words to be understood, ‘I need to find my home, I don’t know where it is. I need to get home to my family.’
‘You were here as a child?’ The nun sounded nothing but curious. She stared at the papers in his hand. The paper rustled slightly with the force of his uncontrolled shaking.
She moved closer, she seemed less afraid than Jacky thought she should be, less afraid than Jacky was. Reaching out
she took the quivering file from his hand. ‘Jacky, is that your name?’ She opened the file as Jacky backed towards the door. He was prepared to run, the moment she called for help, raised the alarm. He could not understand why he was not running already, yet this woman, this girl was not threatening. ‘Terrible handwriting,’ she said, ‘who wrote this?’ She looked up at Jacky, shrugged, then her eyes dropped back to the file. ‘It says you were collected from a camp near the town of Jerramungup.’ Jacky did not respond, the name meant nothing to him. ‘Here, let me show you where,’ she said, when he did not move. ‘Here, on the map,’ she said, pointing, ‘here, here it is, east of us.’ Jacky stared at the map, at the strange symbols, wishing that it meant something to him, he didn’t even know what a map was, he had no way to even begin to read it.
The name ‘Jerramungup’ and the direction ‘east’, though, they were burned into his brain. Too nervous even to thank the young nun, he turned to the window and reached again for the latch. It was stuck.
The distant outside door of the building creaked open. Screaming loudly the young nun threw the file on the floor, adding the map and other files from the open drawer. With a terrifying, deafening clatter she swept the contents of the desk onto the floor. Jacky, already standing on the knife edge of his nerves, completely lost any control he had over his fear. Unable to budge the window frame, he dashed to the fireplace and, grabbing the poker, returned to the window. The noise of the glass splashing outwards from his wild swing was breathtaking, it filled the world to overflowing, running over the other noises, leaving silence behind it.
Sound rushed back into the world as Jacky released the breath he wasn’t even aware he was holding. The sound of boot heels on the floor came from the hallway, someone was coming, someone was right outside the door. The once comforting yellow light from the lantern, from the flames of the dropped taper catching on the papers on the floor, flickered and flashed a menacing red. He scraped the bottom of the frame with the poker in a desperate attempt to remove all the glass. There was no time, the sound of footfalls in the hallway ceased. When the door opened to the room he bunched up, threw himself headfirst out the window. He stopped midair, for a fraction of a second, levitating as a hand lashed out and grabbed his ankle. He felt the hand slip on his sweat, letting go, but his momentum was already lost.
He landed outside the window, dangling from one foot still hooked around the window frame, the bare dirt and gravel of the ground outside lacerating his face. Blood ran down his leg from an excruciating glass cut in the ankle stuck in the window. He rolled that leg off the window frame, rolling sideways with the motion, scratching himself on the gravel and broken glass. All around him he could hear the mission rousing – shouts, doors banging, children yelling.
Jacky scrambled to his feet, in his panic feeling like all his limbs were too long, his joints too loose. He dashed towards the waiting, familiar forest as behind him the entire mission jolted awake. He knew, although all the teachers were women, nuns, there were always a handyman and a guard, there was a tracker, they would be after him. Although it was dark he knew someone would soon be running to town to tell what troopers were there of the night’s excitement. His presence was no longer a secret.
Stumbling over slippery branches, sharp rocks and fallen trees, almost invisible in the darkness, he tried his best to run for it. Half running and half crawling, stumbling and repeatedly falling he scrambled as deep into the woods as he could. The moon went into the clouds again and in the darkness he fell and fell again. He tripped, tripped and tumbled, in the end he crawled, it was too dark even to walk. On hands and knees he crawled under a low scrub, into a scratchy dry thicket, tearing his skin on sharp twigs and thorns that had already torn their way into his clothes.
Pulling his kitchen knife out of his pocket he removed the scraps of cloth he had wrapped around the blade to stop him cutting himself. His empty stomach growled its complaints into the silence; it would be a help in staying awake, watching and listening for the inevitable searchers. Not that there was anything to eat even if he wanted to.
Just before he fell into darkness, he remembered: he had forgotten his shoes.
Sergeant Rohan was not far behind. The message had arrived with surprising promptness, he was in the middle of nowhere and would not have expected to be contacted at all. Finally, he felt like he was doing something, doing his job, rather than just getting lost, thirsty, hungry and frustrated. The legendary tracking ability of his tracker, Mick, had turned out to be exactly that – a legend. He could track Jacky when he had, for example, been running over mud leaving tracks that even Rohan could see, but beyond that they were relying on news and hearsay.
The trooper and his little posse arrived at the mission and could not find a single soul. They must have all been at lunch. The Natives had already eaten their morning porridge – the only thing they would be eating before their evening meal near sunset – and without supervision they had reverted to type. Lazy, idle, they were playing in the trees, talking in half whispers or just lying about in scraps of shade. They were lucky to be there, lucky they were being fed at all. When the posse arrived they at least staggered to their feet, meandering over to touch the legs of the men, or examine their mounts.
Approaching the mission office he noticed, with jealousy, it was far better built than the dump where he was forced to live and work. Riding slowly, they were followed by a moving crowd of Native children; they crowded the mounts, dangerously close to getting under foot. Clean – well, at least the nuns took care of that – they were still a disturbance, untidy, unkempt, smelly. They were also loud, talking loudly and without a shred of discipline, a high-pitched riot of voices in a shabby pidgin. Rohan could see clearly the hate, the disgust, radiating from the faces of the young men, his reluctant deputies, as he dismounted and entered the office with the nun who had come out to meet them.
The office, one of the most soundly built buildings he had seen in years, was tidy, clean, far more so than most of the Settler houses. Barely a speck of dust was visible, not a paper out of place, except where they could see the Native had been. Paper had scattered in his wake, ash dusted the floor, his footprints meandering here and there, marked out perfectly in ash on polished wood. Ash evidenced where he had tried to light a fire with the scattered papers.
‘I don’t know how he got in but he got out through that window –’ Sister Bagra indicated with an imperious wave of her hand. ‘He threatened one of my sisters with a knife and then tried to burn this building down.’
‘Any idea what else he wanted,’ Rohan questioned, ‘beside the obvious, beside his desire to destroy the building?’ It was hard to fathom, usually, the motivations of these savages, if they had motivations at all. They were destructive, seemingly without reason, rebellious to no purpose. Why this building, why such hate, to break in just to seemingly start a destructive frenzy?
Sister Bagra was clearly of the same mind. ‘Who knows what they are thinking? It doesn’t matter what we do, we try to help them, try to elevate them. They might never be our equals but at least they can be better than they are born.’ The calm in her voice gave scant clue to her exasperation. ‘We educate them so they can have a place in our society, a place as lowly as they deserve, we even give them faith, give them purpose.’ She walked over to the window with a curious stiff walk; Rohan recognised it as the side-effect of her attempt to maintain iron control. ‘Their minds, what minds they have, are completely unfathomable.’
‘Maybe he just likes fire,’ said Sergeant Rohan, with a laugh in his voice. In response to that Sister Bagra merely snorted as if humour was somehow inappropriate, always. There was an uncomfortable, loaded silence both seemed reluctant to break. ‘A lot of the Natives like fire,’ he amended eventually.
There was a moment of silence, slightly too long.
‘You are sure it was the fugitive Jacky?’ Rohan finally said, sounding bored and eager to get the
distasteful job over with.
‘Of course I am sure, he was a student here, and I remember every student.’ Her voice rose at the end of the sentence, a sure sign of exasperation.
Rohan doubted that; it would be a truly impressive feat of memory considering there was little to remember, little difference in features from Native to Native. Yet he said nothing, it would not help to antagonise her. ‘We will get underway as soon as you find us something to eat and fill our water bottles. We have not had breakfast and we are quite low on water.’
‘You cannot eat with us; our dining room is out of bounds to men. We will bring some food to the verandah.’ She left, her demeanour almost but not quite covering and controlling her anger. Sergeant Rohan suppressed a laugh, remembering his religious education, the worst time of every week, remembering the nuns and how hard it was to break their composure. Sister Bagra must have been quite close to the edge already to be pushed off it so easily. That he could tell without even knowing her personally.
The Settler boys were outside, leaning lazily against their mounts. Rohan could see their eyes flick from side to side as they studied the Natives while trying not to show it. The contempt they felt for the Natives they were not trying to hide, or if they were trying they were not trying very hard. They were no longer as cocky; instead they looked slightly scared, more nervous, far more cautious. It had not rained where they were for some time, so their mounts and their legs were covered with a thin veneer of dust.
‘C’mon, boys, the nuns are going to feed us,’ he shouted, holding back a smirk as two of them started. They looked guilty as if they were not proud of the hate for the Natives showing on their faces. The other two, one of them Mick the tracker, were proud of their hate or just didn’t care. ‘Let’s take a seat on the verandah here and see what they bring us; we need to eat and drink whenever we can.’
Terra Nullius Page 5