Taking advantage of his momentary confusion, Quinn snatched Edward’s rifle from him, made sure it wasn’t loaded, then handed it back.
“Is your mother still alive, Edward?”
“My old mum? Course.”
“Still living alone down the end of Main Street there? In the little green house?”
“Yes.”
“Good. If you tell anyone you saw me up here today, I’ll go down and kill her. Do you understand me?”
“Why would you—”
“Do you understand me?”
Edward’s bottom lip trembled. “Yes.”
Quinn lingered in the cathedral shade of the hillside pines, where the air was soft and scented. The war had taught him to mistrust open spaces and it was only among such trees that he felt suitably inconspicuous. He felt ashamed for having threatened Edward Fitch in such a manner, but it was crucial no one knew he had returned to the district. The fool was certainly right when he said they would hang him if they found him.
The town of Flint was arranged a mile below in a shallow valley. It comprised little more than half-a-dozen proper streets spread over an area of about three miles, criss-crossed with numerous cart tracks and alleys furrowed between properties by the scampering traffic of children and animals. The business district, such as it was, slumbered on a slight rise leading up from the flatter environs of the Flint River, beside which hunched a number of willow trees. The more prosperous citizens lived in the elevated section around Orchard and Alexander streets, a leafy area bordered by lush apple and nectarine orchards on one side and the grounds of the Anglican church on the other. Dotted along Gully Road were the wrecks of long-closed businesses—a tailor, Kilby’s photographic studio, a fancy gift shop—that had flourished during the rush but struggled to remain viable once the big-spenders had decamped.
During the gold boom, the population had seeped into the surrounding bushland. The Flats, which sprawled along the north-west shoulder of Flint, had once sustained almost one hundred shabby miners’ tents and dwellings, but was now little more than a few haunted acres of blackened stumps, treacherous ditches, broken glass, shards of crockery, rusted cooking equipment and rotted clumps of clothes. When the miners left the Flats for goldfields further away or for more salubrious accommodation, the more forward-thinking citizens of Flint were eager to clear the land and make use of its proximity to the river, but nothing was ever done and the Flats remained squalid, prone to flooding in winter and restless with snakes in summer. Even the children of Flint, who were generally an adventurous and fearless bunch, avoided the area and preferred to take the long way to the river rather than risk being grabbed about the ankles by the bunyips and yowies that lurked in its waterlogged gullies.
Quinn recalled his father once telling his children how he’d witnessed an Irish woman giving birth unassisted on a patch of muddy grass near the river amid the chaos; and how, afterwards, when the woman had staggered away with her mewling baby, a dog sloped from the shadows, snatched up the many-veined, bruise-dark afterbirth and fled with it twitching in its jaws. That’s the bloody Irish for you, would be his father’s laughing postscript, a comment guaranteed to prompt a fierce Hush, Nathaniel from Mary Walker.
From his eyrie, Quinn could see his family’s farm on a low rise at the town’s fringes. It consisted of a stone house built by his father, a stable, a chook pen, and a paddock for a few sheep and goats. The tin roof of the house gleamed in the midday sun. A glimpse of dirt road lay like a fuse through the elms.
Around him in the trees near and far, in the bracken that littered the bush floor, animals and insects whispered and thrilled, atwitter at his return after all these years. After a while, he lay down and dozed on the ground. He thought of what Edward Fitch had said: They all say how they’d love to string you up. Kill ya all over again. He checked his revolver and tested its weight in his palm, prepared for anything. Shapes stirred on the outskirts of his memory, yawning and stretching, casting about for him. It was not a comforting thought.
Quinn watched over his father’s property for most of the following day, but saw no one arrive or leave. The apparent abandonment disturbed him. Had everyone fled the influenza? He gnawed at a thumbnail. He rolled and smoked cigarettes. From habit, he checked the linings of his coat and trousers for lice. Reading your clothes, they had called it in France, as if they might ennoble the practice by imagining themselves scholars seeking meaning in tattered manuscripts.
A crow on a nearby branch harked and shrugged its neck feathers before turning its gleaming gaze on him. Again the bird cried out in its language. Was it a greeting? A warning? They watched each other for some minutes, two creatures of God’s earth, before the crow shuddered as if displeased and launched itself into the air. It landed on the next gum tree and set about preening itself jerkily while keeping a beady eye out for food or danger. He wondered if it could see the ocean from its vantage point, other countries, the desert? The future, the past? This was the bird that Noah dispatched from his Ark to check if the waters of the great Flood had receded from the lowlands: surely it knew everything.
Every now and again, Quinn’s stomach and chest were racked by burning, and he was forced to stop whatever he was doing and double over until it passed. His eyes watered and unstrung hammocks of saliva hung from his lips. The gas. The bloody gas was what did it. It was in him like a disease. There was no doubt it would infect him forever.
Holding up a shaving mirror to his face, he practised speaking from the right corner of his mouth, the undamaged side, making a flattened circle of his lips as they had instructed him at the hospital all those months ago. My name is Quinn Walker. Ring a ring a rosie. Fee fi fo fum …
Sometimes he wept, just wept, would wake from drowsing with a damp face and a leaf or twig pressed into his cheek.
Towards the end of the day, smoke began to unfurl from the chimney of his parents’ house. Twenty minutes later, borne on a rising wind, Quinn detected its scent. He saw no other sign of life until a lamp was lit inside the house and set the kitchen window aglow. Although unable to hear any of it, he knew dogs were barking down there in the twilight, screen doors were slamming shut, and mothers were calling in their children from the streets and orchards. Soon the house was swallowed by the creeping darkness.
He scooped out a hole in the ground, made a modest fire and sat hunched with his hands clasped around his knees, a blanket over his shoulders, shaking. A fire was a greedy luxury. Back there, during the war, there was rarely a chance to light a fire, even in the coldest months when snow dusted them.
He cooked the rabbit Edward Fitch had given him. The lean creature, skinned and rammed through on a stick from mouth to arsehole, dripped its juices into the fire. After devouring it with his bare hands, cracking open each sinewy piece and placing it morsel by morsel into his mouth, he balled his trench coat into a pillow and lay down to watch the flames. The coat smelled of foreign places, of mud and, faintly, of chlorine. The darkness beyond was made deeper by its proximity to the flames, and the trunks of nearby trees twitched in the flickering light. He tried to calculate how many days since his arrival back in Australia. Four? Five? Beneath him was the dense meat of the turning earth, going on and on for thousands of miles. He imagined fires down there, the screech of metal, those goblins and devils with their peculiar industry.
Something shouldered through the nearby undergrowth. He sat up brandishing his revolver and waited for the snuffle of a wombat or the hoarse cry of a possum, but nothing was forthcoming. Then, dimly, moored in the fog of his partial deafness, the snap of a twig. He raised his weapon and waited for several minutes. Surely that idiot Fitch would not have followed him? Had he told someone of their meeting? He tilted his head to favour each ear in turn but heard nothing more. Probably a kangaroo.
After half an hour he relaxed and went to sleep. But in the middle of the night, when the fire was embers and the world was otherwise silent, he heard the distant lull of artillery, almost a heartb
eat, as he knew he would. Then the sound of the gong from deep within his dreams.
He woke immediately and scrambled for his cotton satchel, usually right beside him but not tonight for some reason. Damn. Damn. He was getting lazy, and lazy soldiers die. It was hard to see in the meagre moonlight. The night was unusually warm. He tried to stay calm, remain low to the ground, to keep movement and breathing to a minimum, the way he had learned. He glimpsed the satchel, partially hidden beneath his coat. Gas, gas, gas, gas, gas. If you taste it, it’s too late. His fluttering fingers pale as moths. The fabric strap snagged on something. Christ. He tugged, to no avail. A rock dug into his knee. He tore his way into the satchel and fitted the mask over his face—straps across the back of his head, clamp tight on his nostrils, then the rubber mouthpiece. Breathe through your mouth only. Always worried the mask wasn’t the correct size, or that he had in his haste picked up the wrong one, that he would wind up dead and swollen like that poor bloke from Melbourne, face down in the mud. The goggles rendered the world glaucous and vague. Move it, move it, move it. The interior of the mask reeked of rubbery sweat, of his fraying lungs. God help me, he thought. God help me.
On his haunches, keeping as low as possible to the ground, he ran his trembling hands around the edges of the mask. He pressed it down into the collar of his tunic, against the tender skin at his throat, his head now a vessel atop his thin frame, sealed off from the world, soundless, in a climate of its very own. Only then did he realise. Bloody hell.
3
The next day, Quinn left the cool shade of the pines. He scrambled through bracken and along dry gullies, beating his way with a stick, gathering about the exposed parts of his body scratches and cuts from passing branches. It was familiar countryside and yet it felt strange, as if he were travelling across a landscape from a much-read book.
Careful to stay hidden, he squatted in the scrub beyond the perimeter of his father’s property. He knew he would be camouflaged perfectly well if he remained stationary. It was hotter down here out of any cooling breezes. Unseen insects bit his ankles and forearms. The house appeared unchanged, built from stone and wood, the very materials of the land on which it sat. A veranda edged by bushes and flowers ran around three sides. Torch lilies and lavender. A limp, yellow flag hung from a makeshift pole jammed into a porch railing. Quarantine. Edward Fitch was right. Someone in the house was infected.
After about twenty minutes, a man appeared from the stable and pulled open its wide doors. He was familiar, but just barely. He moved with awkward-legged steps, as if his feet were made of glass or clay. It was his father, Nathaniel Walker, older, lank hair gone grey, even rangier than Quinn remembered. He shrank deeper into the bushes, and presently his father led a horse from the stable, heaved himself into the saddle and rode away through the guard of cypress trees that lined the short driveway, leaving plumes of dust that took several minutes to settle in his wake.
Quinn remained amid the crackle and hum of the bush. If nothing else, his time at war had taught him to keep still for long periods of time. Flies buzzed about his sweating face. Mesmerised, as if it were constructed from the detritus of an hallucination, he stared at the house, two hundred feet away. It was smaller than he remembered, but things always were. That, or larger. Memory was imprecise, after all, not to be trusted.
When it seemed his father was not returning and there was no one else at home, he crept from the undergrowth and approached the house, scuffing up dust as he went. He paused at the bottom of the steps to run his hand over the bobbing heads of lavender flowers. He broke off a handful of flowers, rolled them between his fingers and held them to his nose. It was one of the few plants, he thought, whose perfume matched its appearance. Musty air wafted from the space beneath the house, bringing with it a flood of memory, the shout of a child at play. In summer he used to crouch with his siblings in the shade there to play hide-and-seek or knuckles. Even now, there was probably hidden somewhere in the dirt a rotted linen bag of sheep bones, along with the names he and William had carved with a knife into the stumps, and the fantastic winged animals Sarah had drawn with her nub of chalk. William had always been pleased that his initials were WW and never hesitated to scratch them into trees or posts whenever the opportunity arose.
Still mindful of what Fitch had told him of those eager to do him harm, Quinn drew his revolver and stopped at the screen door. A sepulchral draught flowed from within. He wondered if he should leave now, before it was too late, then realised it already was too late and had been for many years. No. He had to carry on. After coming all this way. After all these years. He stepped inside.
In the kitchen he inhaled and detected a smell of—what?—something sharp, medicinal, at once homely and strange. Everything here was dry and exhausted, rinsed of colour. Melancholy suffused him, like wine moving darkly through water. Ahead, the scarred, wooden table at which he had eaten hundreds of meals with his family. Where William would leer at him with lips smeared with jam, where Sarah, dear Sarah, would lean across and whisper into his ear her latest idea for their next adventure. Where their father would relate the latest notion he had heard from a bloke down The Mail as their mother urged them to please be quiet and eat.
The table’s accompanying chairs faced this way and that, as if those who had been sitting here had fled, which perhaps they had. Crumbs of bread on a cutting board, a tin of honey. There was a basket filled with plates and jars on the floor by the door. A pearl of sunlight on a teaspoon, a pink daisy broken-necked in a disused medicine bottle. Quinn’s heart ballooned in his chest. He heard a low groan, something creaking, and paused to listen. He jammed a finger into his ear. Again he heard it, the mere ghost of a sound. Then nothing. The house around him, above and below, was quiet. Then again, a soft moan emanating from his parents’ room. He forced himself to creep along the dim hall.
He paused at the threshold. He could discern little but darkness, a thread of light in the join of the curtain. After several seconds, through the ship-sunk dark, the glint of a mirror and a hairbrush atop a dresser. Motes of dust glimmering and vanishing. A wooden chair. Teetering piles of books on the floor. The rest of the house, indeed the entire world, felt a long way from here. And high on a wall, in a wooden frame, an image of the suffering Christ melting from his cross—shoulders collapsed, blood weeping from the gash at his side, the thin and ruined hull of his ribs. Then, gaining shape, a bed hard up against a curtained window, hotly rumpled, its bedding a miniature mountain range. A hand on the coverlet. Long, thin fingers. Someone asleep. A woman.
The curious smell he had noted earlier was stronger here, almost overpowering. He held the sprigs of lavender to his nose and suppressed a cough. He stood there for several minutes, until he succumbed to the gravitational pull of history, of family, of love, and crept to his mother’s bedside.
She did not look well. She lay in the middle of a large bed beneath a mess of blankets. Her face, which he remembered as round and smiling, was now thin and elongated. Her breathing was thick, bubbly, as if she were half buried in mud. And around her neck, hanging against her sweaty throat, was the source of the unusual smell: a clumsy necklace of camphor balls threaded on twine.
Quinn watched his mother for some time, transfixed. Her long, dark hair sprawled on the pillow. One of the camphor balls nestled in the damp and trembling notch of her throat. The clock ticked. She looked awful, but at least she was alive. The flood of Quinn’s relief swept all before it.
She shifted beneath the pile of bedding and opened her eyes. She focused on him at once, as if she had known all along where he would stand upon his return, no matter how many years later. But still she cowered. “Who are you?” she croaked.
Quinn removed the handful of lavender from his face.
“My God,” his mother said. “My God.” Her eyes dropped to the revolver in his other hand. “Have you come for me, now? I am not ready. Not yet, please.”
Quinn was speechless. He stared into his poor mother’s terrifi
ed eyes and fled.
4
Another day passed. Shocked by the condition of his mother in that gloomy bedroom, Quinn stayed close by his campsite, loose-limbed and agitated, venturing now and again into the surrounding bushland, falling in and out of sleep the rest of the time. From behind his eyelids, the face of his mother reared up at him, gaunt and afraid.
In the late afternoon, when the sear of the sun had lessened, he stumbled on a circular grass clearing. He hovered for a minute in the comforting shade of the trees around the clearing, but then crept into the sunlight. After all, it was not France; there were no snipers here. Even so, he dug a hand into his tunic to touch his revolver as if it were a crucifix that, through his caresses, might alert God to his anxieties. The grass was as high as his knees and long sheaves of it bent and hissed in the wind. He stared up at the blue sky. Crows and other birds, those fortunate creatures unburdened by gravity, drifted high overhead, specks against the blue wash of sky.
He closed his eyes to better enjoy the sun’s warmth. Soon he was startled by a sharp cry. He looked around blinking and saw, at the edge of the clearing, a small, trembling lamb. A farmer must have brought his flock up here to graze and this poor creature had become separated from its mother. Only its head was visible as it stumbled about in the high grass. The lamb saw Quinn, cocked its head and trotted over to him, bleating. Quinn remained motionless, surprised it approached so eagerly. The lamb stared up at him with its doltish eyes and twitched flies from its ears and face. It bleated again and butted his leg. Quinn kneeled to stroke its bony head. He brushed away grass seeds that peppered its frail, white body, its legs so thin. The animal made a sound like a giggle. It gambolled about the long grass for several minutes before returning to where he crouched. He could smell its moist and grassy breath and the scent of it—so warm and trusting, so alive—prompted him, inexplicably, to sob. The lamb nuzzled his shoulder. Quinn found himself consoling the creature in a whisper, saying to it the things one might say to an ailing infant or one who has woken crying from a nightmare.
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