Bereft

by Chris Womersley

  He felt a draught of night air and understood at once that Sadie had opened the back door behind him. There was the intimation of movement from the bedroom, followed by a muffled query. Robert.

  Evelyn Higgins was still speaking in her plaintive voice. “Dick, you had been gone so long now, for so many years I thought …”

  Quinn spun on his heel and ran straight out the door and onto the veranda. He leaped onto the lawn, lost his footing and tumbled forward onto his face with a dull grunt. Blood blossomed in his mouth. There was the smell of bruised grass in his nostrils, grit coated the end of his tongue. Sadie was up ahead urging him on. Her limbs glimmered beneath the apple tree.

  From behind him in the house he heard footsteps, raised voices, a curse. No, please don’t … .

  Quinn stood. Sadie glided across the lawn from right to left. “This way,” she hissed, and vanished through the wooden fence.

  Heart fumbling for rhythm, revolver in hand, Quinn staggered after her but was unable to locate the gap in the fence through which she had gone. He floundered on his knees in the garden bed. The ground was spongy and moist and stank of chicken shit. A branch scratched his cheek. At last he found the break in the fence and fell through to the other side. Sadie hauled him to his knees and sprinted across Fletcher Street and skidded around the corner.

  From the other side of the fence, Quinn heard Dalton’s querulous voice and Evelyn Higgins’ placating one. There’s no need for your gun … Robert! Dogs barked all around.

  Quinn tried to get to his feet but was hampered by something tugging on the sleeve of his army tunic. He thought of the malevolent creatures that lurked in the puddles of the Flats, but it was only a rusted strand of barbed wire nailed to the fence. He twisted this way and that but was unable to detach himself. A knot of wire cut his knuckle.

  Dalton’s furious voice again from the other side of the fence. His uncle was getting closer, kicking through the undergrowth, seeking the intruder. Get here, you little bitch …

  Quinn shrugged out of the tunic, staggered to his feet and bolted around the corner, where he almost collided with Sadie coming back the other way.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered, out of breath.

  “I got stuck.”

  “Where’s the revolver?”

  He showed it to her, still wrapped in its strip of oily cloth.

  Her eyes glowed. “Now’s your chance. Go back and shoot him. Do it now.”

  But Quinn just stared at her. He didn’t move.

  When it was clear he was not going to act, she pulled him by his shirt sleeve. “Come on, then.”

  They fled through the lower part of Flint. Dogs yapped and threw themselves against fences. They kept to the grassy verge. Quinn imagined wives waking their sleeping men, creeping to bedroom windows, wondering at the noises they heard so late at night. He and Sadie jogged past orchards and continued until they crossed the soggy pastures at the edge of town and plunged into the bush.

  They made it back to the shack an hour later. Exhausted, nerves jangling, they collapsed to the floor. Quinn lay and stared at the ceiling. Neither of them spoke. Sadie sat against the wall.

  Quinn fell into an uneasy sleep punctuated by dreams of tangled tree limbs and muddy fields. Then the hollowed-out room, Sadie, a guttering candle flame, the taste of mud and blood in his mouth.

  She gripped his upper arm. “Wake up,” she was saying. “Wake up. Where’s your tunic? Quinn? Where’s your tunic?”

  He sat up and rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “What?”

  “Your tunic. Didn’t you bring it back with you?”

  After a stunned silence, he said, “I left it by the fence. I told you. I was caught on barbed wire.”

  Sadie sat back on her heels and put her face in her hands.

  “What?” Quinn asked.

  “That’s how they’ll find us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s how the tracker finds people for Dalton. And his dogs. They track people by their smell. On clothes and things. If there’s no tracks. They can find anyone like that. You should have killed him when you had the chance.”

  Quinn swore to himself. The girl was probably right. How could he have been so stupid, so cowardly? At least he had ripped his name tag from the tunic. At least he had done that. The taste of blood prompted him to run a finger along his front teeth. Sure enough, his left eye tooth felt loose. He waggled it, and it broke off between his fingers. He wiped it free of blood and held it out in front of him, where it gleamed.

  The next morning, wearing only trousers, Quinn filled a bucket with water from the tank and stood outside to bathe. Dragonflies darted about, trapping the sunlight in their blurring wings. The morning was cool but held the promise of another scorcher. Cupfuls of icy water shattered across his head and coursed down his face and chest. He inhaled short, stabbing breaths and washed his shoulders and shrugging neck, folding his arms about his head as a bird might do its wings.

  He heard the door slapping shut and turned to see Sadie standing several feet away watching him. Her blinkless eyes flickered across his wet torso. Who knew what went through her mind? They observed each other for several seconds before she picked her way over to him through the long grass, raised a hand and, in a movement at once tender and savage, tore loose the vertical scab of the cross he had carved into his chest some days ago. So shocked was he, and so sudden was the act, that he hardly registered what had occurred until he noticed a dollop of woolly blood unravel from the wound and make its way down across his ribs. The pain was brittle, exquisite, and he shuddered with it. Something loomed at the edges of his memory, vanished, then returned. Blood. Sarah’s blood, on her, on him. The weight of her, the dull coins of her eyes. By the time he thought to look up again, Sadie had returned inside.

  21

  When Quinn woke the following morning, he was alone. He lay on the floor with his trench coat for a pillow. He felt weak; he suspected the water they were drawing from the rusty tank was poisoned; that perhaps a possum or a koala had died in there. Their diet of scrawny rabbits, old bread and stolen tins of beans didn’t help. He heard the dull chatter of artillery in his head, but the war now seemed a million miles away, in the way that winter was unimaginable in the height of summer. A mouse skittered across the floor and vanished into a hole. Gone, just like that.

  He lapsed in and out of sleep for most of the day and was woken by a coughing fit that racked his body. When he was again sensible to the world, Sadie was crouching over him holding a cup of bicarb and water to his mouth. She always showed up when he needed her. He gulped the mixture and, when he could sit up, she took his hand and led him outside. There, tethered to a tree by a length of ragged rope, was the lamb he had seen when he first arrived. The creature bleated and shook its bony head. Sadie kneeled to kiss the lamb’s face, untied it and led them—Quinn by one hand, the lamb by its length of rope—into the bush.

  Although he didn’t protest, the girl must have sensed his hesitation. She tugged his hand until he was bent almost double. She fitted her lips to his ear and the words she uttered circumvented his sense of hearing and instead plumbed his heart.

  “Pim,” she whispered. “You need to trust me.”

  Quinn stared at her face, her cherry-black eyes and the slice of her mouth. She licked away pearls of sweat that had already formed on her upper lip. She let go of his hand, muttered encouraging words to the lamb and led the creature into the undergrowth. Quinn waited a minute before hurrying after them.

  They tramped for two hours, rising higher and higher into the hills, panting with the effort of it. The way was rocky and steep. The lamb was reluctant and had to be cajoled to make the ascent; it suspected, perhaps, that something unpleasant would be required of it. They arrived at a cave set high into the rock. A wind hummed through the surrounding trees, and when they stood on the granite lip of the cave they could see the pattern of the earth normally denied them, right over th
e western plains of New South Wales. Fields and roads; dozens of brown dams; clumps of trees; the wink of sunlight on tin roofs; the shiver of streams.

  The cave entrance was massive, had perhaps served as a handhold for God as he clambered about the earth inspecting his handiwork all those years ago. Quinn wondered what it might be like to have the vision afforded God: to see the whole planet and all its people, their futures and pasts in one single moment. It was a terrible and magical thought. The cave’s prehistoric air cooled the sweat on his back as he and Sadie stared out over the horizon.

  “This is the Cave of Hands,” she said when she had caught her breath. She tethered the lamb to a tree. “I used to hide from Mr. Dalton up here.”

  Mesmerised, Quinn watched the girl. She was so capable, so certain of her place in the world. She kicked away some bracken. The lamb gazed around with its wayward eyes and expelled the occasional quavering bleat.

  “No one knows about this place except me and the blackfellas. It’s the unknown terror.”

  “The what?”

  “You know. Terror incognito. Means unknown.”

  He laughed. “It’s terra—spelt T-E-R-R-A. Means ground. Unknown land.”

  She looked at him askance for several seconds before allowing herself a sly smile. She took his hand. “You’re funny. Come on.”

  She led him about fifteen feet, to the rear of the cave. The rocky ceiling sloped, and they were forced to waddle for the remaining few feet. The light of day didn’t seep this far, and the recess was cool and dim. Quinn’s head brushed the ceiling. They sat on the cold ground and waited for their eyes to adjust. The girl was beside him, picking at a scab on her bare shin, absorbed in her childish task. Quinn could scarcely believe the truth of her and, as if compelled by an inner force not his own, he reached out one hand across the few feet separating them. She stopped what she was doing and glanced up. She didn’t move. She allowed him to caress first one cheek, then the other, to run his fingers through her long hair. He sensed, percolating up within him, the urge to weep.

  He withdrew his hand, coughed into his fist. His ankles were aching from kneeling. Then, there, right in front of him, as his eyes acclimatised further to the darkness, he made out a galaxy of painted hands all around them. There were dozens of them spread over the walls and ceiling—not only hands but kangaroos and snakes, all daubed in ochre and black. He laughed with sudden recognition and scanned the hands until he located one proportionate to his own and pressed his palm to the cold rock.

  He took his hand away and smiled at Sadie. “But what are we doing up here?”

  “We need to find out when the tracker is back, like you said. Especially now Dalton has the tunic. There are magic ways to find out these things, but you have to help me.”

  She scrambled from the cave, only to return a minute later with the lamb in tow. She insisted Quinn grab the lamb around its shoulders with one hand cupped beneath its chin. Like a hirsute infant the lamb struggled against his chest, wrenching its rocky head this way and that, bleating.

  With a nub of chalk, Sadie drew a circle on the ground around them. “Holding tight?”

  Quinn smirked. The whole thing was ridiculous, but he nodded anyway. He would indulge her for the moment. “What happens now?”

  With eyes screwed half shut, Sadie mouthed something and plunged her knife into the lamb. She sliced open the creature’s belly with a sound not unlike the shredding of a canvas sack. A humid smell of shit and innards filled the cave. Quinn’s thighs became warm with blood. He swore. The lamb struggled against him, bucked desperately, until it lurched free and stood a few feet away and stared at them with an expression of startled reproof. Its intestines ploppered to the cave floor, followed by other, purpled innards. The creature collapsed to its front legs then its hind and, after emitting a plaintive ruckle, fell over, stiffened and died. The entire episode only lasted a minute.

  Quinn rubbed at his bloodstained trousers. He attempted to stand and banged his head against the low ceiling. He kneeled again. “What in hell are you doing?”

  But the girl, herself blood-spattered, was already squatting beside the dead lamb with her back to him. She commenced her divinations, nodding to herself as she separated the innards with her fingers and clucked with recognition or surprise. She raised a finger at him to forestall interruption and, discomfited, Quinn shuffled back into the light of the late afternoon.

  He sat on the shelf of rock, scored with odd symbols—perhaps even illegible words—that did not appear to have been done by the same people who did the cave paintings. He noticed objects littering the ground around the cave mouth. There were piles of stones and bones, pieces of string, hair, even a pair of cast-iron soldiers wedged upright between stones with their rifles pointing out across the land. He shook his head. Sadie.

  It was getting late. There was a fizz in the gloaming. It was his favourite time, when it was possible to see those things not usually visible in the flattening light of day: whorling clouds of insects; flecks of pollen; feathers gleaming; tiny parachutes of dandelion eddying in the wind. Smoke rose along the horizon from a distant bushfire. How amazing, he thought, to be in the world. To be in this world. Where nothing was out of the question, where anything was possible. He felt a curious and liberating exhilaration. Far below him sun glinted on metal, and he imagined if someone were to scour the side of the mountain with a telescope at that very moment, they would not even notice him, a rough beast crouching in the shadows.

  Sadie emerged half an hour later and squatted to wipe her hands on the rocks at the cave entrance made moist by a trickle of water. She stared out over the darkening country as if digesting what she had discovered, then sat beside him with her head on his shoulder.

  “So,” he said, “what did you find out?”

  “Nothing yet. It’s not always so simple. The information sometimes comes in unexpected ways.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t believe in this, do you?”

  Quinn shuddered to hear an echo of Mrs. Cranshaw in the girl’s words. “We might not have time, that’s all.”

  “The answer will come. I heard them talking at Sully’s yesterday, and they said there was no sign yet of the man who killed his wife. The tracker won’t be back for a week, at least.”

  Quinn sighed. It was hardly scientific. God only knew how he could persuade her to leave this place. He thought of his dying mother down there in the shadows.

  With a bloody finger, Sadie pointed out a smoke-hued mountain range in the distance. “Is France past those mountains? Where you were?”

  “Yes. And over the sea, too.”

  “The sea?”

  “The ocean. Full of water.”

  “You mean like a lake?”

  “Much bigger than that. Larger than you can even see. I was on a boat for weeks to get there.”

  She did not seem convinced but nodded anyway, and squinted out over the plains as if she might spy this mysterious body of water. “Is it nice in France?”

  “Nice?”

  “Not like here.”

  At once Quinn understood. Australia was an in-between place, without order, where trees were forced to grow anywhere they could. Their poor roots clawed the ground. The animals were lumpen, wobbling and slithering. Even the birds didn’t sing but, rather, cackled and hooted and laughed like so many lunatic inmates. And overhead, always, that sheer, blade-sharp sky.

  “No,” he said. “It’s not like here at all.”

  “What about Kensington Gardens? Is that a long way?”

  He laughed. Sadie knew all sorts of esoteric details about the world, but she could be ignorant of basic facts. “It’s in London. That’s quite far. Miles.”

  “As far away as France?”

  “Yes. Why do you want to know?”

  “I thought me and Thomas would go there when he gets back. Mrs. Babcock reads to her children about it. I even dream about it. There is a lake there. Fairies as small as your thumb, a world
under the water. Imagine that. They have parties where all the creatures are invited, all the squirrels and birds and so forth, rabbits and crickets.” She seemed to feast on this memory. “I have prayed that we will get there.”

  Quinn had indeed spied her at night on her knees with her slender hands steepled against her bony chest, a pale and earnest mantis in the moonlight.

  “You could come with us to Kensington Gardens,” she said. “With me and Thomas. The three of us. You’d like Thomas, everyone likes Thomas. He’s very funny.”

  Clouds of insects swarmed in the hot and trembling light of dusk. She draped an arm around his shoulders. A dry wind whipped her damp hair about and at that moment she resembled a girl suspended underwater, patiently holding her breath with waterweed plastered across her face.

  Darkness flooded the land. Quinn gathered wood and built a fire inside the cave. With Sadie’s knife they butchered the lamb and cooked pieces over the fire. She told him that he needed to eat as much of the lamb as he could, that it would help them find out the date of the tracker’s return. He didn’t believe her, but he was hungry and happy enough to gorge himself on the charred meat. Lying on their backs on the cave’s undulating floor, they watched the firelight animate the ancient Aboriginal hands and animals, and Quinn had the sense that, without his having noticed it, a grain of happiness had lodged by his heart.

  In the middle of the night, he heard Fletcher Wakefield’s clotted breath in the cot alongside him. He, too, had been gassed at Pozières. A shaft of sulphurous light fell through the window onto his own bed. The windowpane glimmered with rain. The dormitory smelled of carbolic. There were ten other soldiers around him in the near-dark and he was comforted by their slumbering presence. They were good men, mostly. Those not ruined by it were made decent by war. To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss. But now they had lived through much of the war, many, like Quinn, lay awake at night, untethered from the fear that had sustained them for so long. At the other end of the room a cigarette tip flared and faded, flared and faded.