Bereft

by Chris Womersley

  “So, you have a brother?”

  She hesitated, as if caught out in a lie. “Yes. He’s a pilot in the war. But he’ll be back soon.”

  By now Quinn had gathered his things together. “Good. Then you’ll have someone to take care of you. Well, I need to go. There are things I have to do. Cheerio.”

  “Are you going to see your relative now?”

  He wondered what to tell her. “I’m going to see my mother. She is sick. Good-bye. Good luck.”

  The girl began to cackle and then, in a high-pitched voice, unable to contain her giggling, said: “There there. I won’t hurt you. That’s what you said to the lamb. I’ll protect you.”

  Quinn halted. No one could have heard what he’d said to that creature. The child was standing a few feet from him, out of reach. He considered grabbing her and, as if reading his mind, she stepped back and cocked her head to listen.

  Quinn watched her. He strained to hear, too. There, faintly, the sound of someone clattering across dry leaves and through the undergrowth further down the hill.

  The girl looked stricken. “It’s Mr. Dalton.”

  Quinn’s blood tightened. His uncle. He swore and bent down to pick up his bag, and when he turned back there was no trace of the girl. She had dissolved, like smoke or water. He wanted to call out for her but thought better of it. He hefted his swag and plunged into the undergrowth.

  He jumped and bounded and ran, slipping on rocks and stones, managing to maintain balance only by some miracle. Behind him on the ridge, a man’s voice yelled out. No doubt his uncle had discovered the fire. Quinn slithered down a dusty slope on his arse. Galahs flung themselves from trees and rose shrieking into the air.

  His swag was awkward to carry while running. Branches snagged on his uniform and spider webs gathered in his hair. He came to a dry creek bed overhung with low branches and dotted with leaf-dark puddles. The air was filled with the euphonic throb of cicadas, hidden from view but everywhere, making themselves known to those who could hear. He panted and turned to look back up the ridge where he glimpsed his uncle blundering through the trees a few hundred feet away.

  Quinn considered his options. The incline on the opposite side was far too steep and overgrown. Robert would surely catch him and drag him back to Flint, to his father who longed to hang him for what he thought Quinn had done. The only thing was to scramble along the creek bed and hope it led somewhere safer. With one arm raised to shield his face, he ducked beneath a tangle of branches to his left.

  The bed was uneven, potted with holes and littered with dead branches. His breath came in coarse, leaden clumps. He bent to crawl beneath the lowest branches, his face only two inches from the ground, and came face-to-face with what looked like a thick and gleaming turd, but revealed itself to be a brown snake curled on a rock.

  Quinn froze. Rivulets of sweat poured down his face and neck. He held his breath as best he could. He could feel the dry heat rising from the sun-baked rock, the same warmth that had doubtless attracted the snake. It was a fat King Brown, had probably been living here for years. Quinn and the snake stared at each other for several long seconds. Snakes never blinked, gave nothing of themselves away, might as well have been hollow.

  Then, luxuriously, like a drowsy bohemian after a mid-morning nap, the snake uncoiled. Its blue-grey tongue flickered about, tasting the air, making its reptilian calculations. Quinn knew a sudden movement would prompt it to strike. His heart thrummed and his skin itched beneath his uniform. The creature began to flatten itself out and prepare for movement. The world around Quinn drained away. The abrupt disembowelment of sensation reminded him of that split second before the shell landed near him at Pozières. That same knowing and unknowing.

  He reached into his kitbag for his revolver. He would shoot the creature, even if the sound of firing gave away his position. He had to. Then run. He would shoot it and run. Keeping his eye on the snake, he rummaged gently in his bag. Nothing. The revolver was gone. It must have fallen out when he fled. Bloody hell. Bloody hell. Still the snake unravelled. He began to shuffle backwards but his stuttering progress was stymied by a branch that snagged on the shoulder of his uniform. He felt faint. He mumbled a prayer.

  Then, in an instant, a hand swooped to grasp the snake about its neck. The girl stood before him with the flailing serpent in a slender, two-fisted grip. The snake spat and writhed and looped its long body around her forearm. Grimacing with effort, she unwound it from her pale arm, stepped past Quinn and—measuring the throw several times before she released it—tossed the snake back down the gully in the direction Quinn had come. Her face was flushed with fear and delight when she turned to him, as if the experience were a lark from the Boy’s Own Paper. “That should put him off,” she said and laughed.

  Quinn was stunned. He ran a hand across the mangled portion of his lip. His mouth was dry and his skull buzzed with heat and fatigue, as if in concert with the flies and cicadas in the trees around them.

  The girl began to clamber up some rocks through a narrow break in the undergrowth he hadn’t noticed. She paused to address him. “You should come with me.”

  He heard Robert Dalton advancing up the dry gully and scrambled after her.

  9

  The noises of pursuit soon fell away. His uncle had probably stumbled across the furious snake and retreated. Quinn smiled at the thought. He followed the girl with difficulty, crawling up steep slopes through dense bush litter into which he sometimes plunged as far as his knees. At times he lost sight of her altogether, but she would materialise nearby, chewing on a twig or peeling bark from a tree, quietly urging him on.

  After Europe’s perpetual autumn, which had been made worse by the clammy dust of war, the dry air of New South Wales scorched his lungs. He was forced to stop often to cough and catch his breath. The girl grunted with effort, hitched her dirty dress. They pressed on.

  Quinn had once been acquainted with every gully and rise in these ranges, but the tracks along which she led him felt as if they belonged to a different part of the district altogether. He attempted to pinpoint a tree or another landmark by which to orient himself, but there was nothing recognisable, and he was too exhausted and too fearful to think clearly. The landscape afforded little in the way of a view. There were only the ragged regiments of trees with sheets of bark unravelling from their trunks, their oddly angled branches clutching at the air. Cockatoos screeched overhead.

  They went on like this for more than an hour and then they stopped. The shack the girl led him to was so thoroughly encrusted with ivy and overhung with vines and trees that they were standing in front of it before Quinn even realised.

  He looked up, panting and sweating. “Where the hell are we?”

  Through the foliage he could see the place was a ruin. The girl wrested his bag from him, stepped onto the crumbling porch and went inside. Quinn bent over with his palms braced on his knees. After a few minutes, he followed. There was little else to do.

  Despite the sunny weather, the interior of the ruin was dark and claustral, pierced here and there with fingers of light. There was a kitchen and one other room. Skeletal branches brushed up hard against the side of the cottage. Dust had collected along the skirting boards and on the few items scattered about. There was a filthy shelf of empty bottles and jars, discarded tins of food, a pile of bricks and rubble in one corner, and the unmistakable stink of animal droppings. A faded print torn from a magazine or annual was pinned to one wall. Apple peel, piles of chicken bones and other food scraps were strewn over the floor. Quinn had seen some curious sights in the years he had been away, but this house reminded him that the world was indeed full of strange and wonderful places. There was little doubt the girl lived here alone.

  He shrugged off his coat and leaned against a doorframe. A fly droned about his eyes. He unbuttoned his grubby tunic and was overcome by a burning cramp in his guts. He felt as if he had swallowed broken glass. He doubled over and slumped halfway to the rotten floor, splutte
ring and groaning. The girl vanished and returned a moment later with a tin mug, which she pressed into his hand.

  Quinn took the mug. The water tasted of mildew but eased the pain in his throat. He thanked her, this girl who was at times childish, and at other moments seemed prematurely aged. Sweat pebbled on her upper lip, which she wiped away with the back of one hand.

  Now recovered, Quinn wrestled himself to standing and loosened the remaining buttons of his tunic. The girl explained that Quinn could sleep in the kitchen. He could make a bed of his coat, she told him, adding that no one would find them because no one ever came up this way and, even if they did, they never noticed this place. “It’s a complete secret,” she said.

  Quinn shook his head. “I can’t stay here. Maybe only tonight, I don’t know.’

  “What do you mean? Why can’t you?”

  “I can’t.”

  The girl mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “Where else you going to go?”

  He couldn’t think straight. “I don’t know. I’ll camp out, find a room.”

  She laughed. “What do you mean? You can’t go back to Flint. You can’t camp because Mr. Dalton will find you.”

  “I’ll leave town, then. I can’t stay here.”

  “You can’t leave.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because why did you come? What about your mother?”

  Quinn hesitated. “Yes. I need to be somewhere closer to her. She’s very sick. How do I get down to Flint from here?”

  “I’ll show you a hidden way. No one will ever see you. I’ll take you tomorrow.”

  “Can you take me now?”

  The girl shook her head. “It’s too dangerous with Mr. Dalton walking around.” She was right.

  “What is this place, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Been empty for years. Old miner’s shack, I suppose.”

  “Why don’t you stay at your father’s house? Somewhere better than this.”

  “I told you, my father left. My mother is dead. Mr. Dalton knows my old house. This is better, safer. He’ll never find us up here.” She crossed her arms and leaned against a crumbling wall. “You know what he’s like.”

  Quinn did indeed know all about Robert Dalton. His mother’s younger brother was ill-suited to life in a town as small and rudimentary as Flint. He thought the people were fools. He was always bothered by the heat and the flies, and would talk fondly of his former life in his beloved England, a life to which—for reasons that were unclear—he was unable to return.

  “You should stay away from him,” said Quinn.

  “Oh, I do.” She twisted her fingers. “He used to come around even when Mother was alive, when Thomas had left for the war. Said he was seeing if he could help us, but Mother told him we were fine, thanks all the same, no one’s taking my daughter away from me. Bloody do-gooder, she used to call him. He came around a lot. I used to hide.”

  “Hide up here?”

  “Other places, too. I have very good hiding places. He came again after Mother died but I ran off. Tried to catch me. Said he’d take me to a church place in Bathurst. He’s been up in the hills searching for me. He can’t find me by himself, but that tracker Gracie is away in Bathurst hunting for a bloke that killed his wife. He won’t be back for weeks, they all reckon.”

  “When did your mother die?”

  She grew pensive. “Couple of weeks ago. She was sick for only five days.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sadie Fox,” she said, but without conviction. She pushed greasy hair from her face. “You’re Quinn, aren’t you?”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Quinn Walker,” she said with relish. “Everyone knows about you.”

  “What do you mean? I haven’t been here for years.”

  “I know. They all think you’re dead in the war.”

  Quinn thought of the telegram that his mother had shown him. He sighed and crouched to pick burrs from his khaki trousers.

  “Do you know what they call you?”

  He glanced up. “Who?”

  The girl was thrilled at what she knew. She stepped from foot to foot in excitement. “In town. People in town. What they call you? They still talk about what you done. I hear them.”

  Quinn paced about, picking at the peeling walls and jabbing shards of broken wood with the toe of his boot. “What?” he asked, trying in vain to sound uninterested.

  “There was even a reward, I heard them—”

  “What?” he hissed. “What do they call me?”

  She shrank back but remained defiant. “They all call you the Murderer.”

  He halted at the cold stove, partly sunken into the rotted floor and peppered with animal droppings. He ran a finger over its rusty surface. In fleeing this town and traversing the world he had imagined, foolishly, that he might be able to escape the major fact of his life; but there it was, contained in the prison of two words. It was both the reason he had never come back, and why he had now returned. The Murderer.

  “They say you stabbed your sister,” the girl went on. “Years ago. And other things, too. They say you did worse things to her—”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Then who did?”

  He hesitated, wondering whether to tell her the truth he had never told anyone. “God, I would never do anything like that …”

  Still she watched him, waited.

  “You can’t tell anyone. If I tell you, my mother can’t know.”

  The girl took a step forward. “I won’t tell. Promise. Cross my heart.”

  “It was my uncle,” he said eventually. “And someone else. Another man, I don’t know who”

  Sadie did not look surprised. She cleared her throat. “That’s what Mr. Dalton wants with me, isn’t it?”

  Quinn didn’t answer. It was grotesque a girl should have even the barest inkling of what such a man would want with her.

  “What happened? What did you see?” she persisted.

  He shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Are you here for revenge?” she asked.

  “No—” He caught himself. “I don’t know.”

  “You should be. Especially if everyone thinks you did it.”

  He waved her away. “Maybe I’ll go to the police. I’ll tell them what happened. Who it was.”

  She gave him a queer look and shook her head. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “What?”

  “Robert Dalton is the police.”

  Quinn’s heart grew limp. “I don’t believe you.”

  She stared at him. Her eyes were lit with a fierce glow. “Robert Dalton is the constable in Flint. For the whole district. He took over from Mr. Mackey ages ago. No one will ever believe he killed your sister. You know that, anyway. They love him. They think he is honourable and upstanding. I have heard them. All of them. Even though he drinks grog. They talk about him like he was a saint. Even your mother. Especially your mother.”

  Quinn sat in stunned silence. He felt sick, as if the air had drained from the room.

  “You were there, though,” she continued. “That’s what your father says.”

  He bent down until their eyes were level. “Why aren’t you afraid of me then, if that’s what they all call me? If I’m the Murderer?”

  She stood her ground. “Because. Because I can tell you are as afraid of Mr. Dalton as I am.”

  When it was dark, they ate cold beans and dry bread, and Sadie told Quinn of other things: Mrs. Taylor, who wept every night over the deaths of her three sons in the war; the McClaren boy, who died from the plague and how a slug of blood leaked from his ear when they carried him from the house; how the Reverend’s daughter Casey Smail got pregnant by a travelling salesman and they took her to the Chinaman to drink a potion that dissolved her baby; the Harman boy, who came back from the war possessed by the Devil; tha
t his uncle Robert Dalton sometimes visited the widowed Mrs. Higgins late at night. Who was dead, who married—the events that tangle and weave, over time, to make a town’s history.

  The girl spoke quickly, laughing, barking out details at random, as if desperate to divest herself of the information she had gathered. “I go down into town at night and peek in the windows,” she said with a shrug when Quinn asked how she knew so much of the town’s happenings. “I have for years. I listen to things. People don’t even know I’m there. I hide under their house or in a bush. People talk about all kinds of things. I’ve heard all sorts of secrets. That’s what I mean when I say I can help you. I’m good at finding things out.”

  She told him about her brother Thomas, who took care of her when their seamstress mother went to Bathurst for supplies or to run errands. He had gone to fly planes in the war. “I have to wait for Thomas to get back. The war’s over, isn’t it? He’ll know what to do, he’ll look after me. He’ll be back any day now, I reckon.”

  Quinn tore off a hunk of bread and placed it into his mouth. “Yes, the war’s been over for a few months.”

  She beamed at this. She said she had no other relatives she knew about, perhaps an uncle in Perth but she didn’t know his name, and Perth was such a long way away, wasn’t it? There was nowhere else for her to go. She had to wait here for Thomas, who must be delayed by this plague, that was why things were taking so long.

  Later that night, as he lay in the darkness on the floor, Sadie began singing a hymn in the next room.

  In the sweet bye and bye

  We shall meet on that beautiful shore

  In the sweet bye and bye

  We shall meet on that beautiful shore

  Quinn thought back to the evening of the séance when he had been trapped in that Marylebone parlour. Mrs. Cranshaw assured the gathering that the Lord was with them in their endeavours, reminded them not to approach her girls at any stage and launched into a ramshackle version of that very same hymn, turning from her piano keyboard to the audience with encouraging smiles at the start of each verse. The mixture of the theatrical and the pious was unsettling and powerful; by the time the last notes had died away, one or two ladies were weeping. Then Mrs. Cranshaw, formal, head bowed, stepped aside and vanished into the shadows, leaving the three girls at their table. Quinn’s view was blocked momentarily by a shoulder, then by the ostrich feathers of a lady’s hat. A young man whispered something to his companion. Fletcher stood with his hands at his sides and a hopeful light in his eyes. The room hummed with anticipation.