Day Boy

by Trent Jamieson

  The fire’s burning. A bonfire bright and huge, and they’re throwing logs into it, stuff the size of big tree trunks, and tossing them with an ease that only the Masters possess. And they’re singing to the fire. Singing in some language I don’t understand.

  The song is sad and pure in the cold air. It’s everything I feel whenever I stare up at that clear starlit sky.

  All of them are there below.

  Building the fire, dancing around it. And when the ash rises they let it fall where it will, no matter how it burns their flesh.

  And in this light I can see Thom’s face, see the curl of his lip. And then the understanding; well, the first crack of it.

  They’re singing to the Sun. They’re mourning it. They’re yearning for it. But all they have is the night, and the flame—which could kill them just as proper. And now, and here, they’re not being the Masters, but folk bereft. Folk who’ve given up their past for something else.

  There’s weakness and sadness here. There’s all the things that the Masters hide. And it makes your eyes well, you feel something rare towards them, and it’s pity.

  Poor lost men. Poor yearning men, with just their stars and moon while we have everything, all of it spread out across the night and day. Some things don’t have a substitute. Some doors closed can’t be opened anymore, because in their closing they become walls.

  I can see the pity in Thom’s face too. But we’re not done yet. I can feel it coming close. The song bunching up, filling the dark, and then there is a moment of silence.

  They bring in the man. Dain does it, leaving the fire for the shadows, and leading him back in. The man stumbles, and Dain is gentle in his handling. He whispers something like you might at a frightened animal. There’s no cruelty in this, that’s for later.

  The man is short, not much taller than me. But he stands there steady, still some strength in him. I can see he’s frightened, but he’s like the mouse the cats catch and play with. There’s no chance for him and he knows it.

  Egan’s the first, and I see it because I know where to look. His mouth widens, and with sudden movement, he’s by the fire, metres crossed so swift it is like they weren’t metres, like the world made a mistake of measurement and is cruelly readjusting. Then he’s biting the man’s neck. The man howls, and the rest are at him too, all those distances corrected. And there’s no singing, just the sounds of feeding. The slaughterhouse sounds of bone cracking and muscle being ripped apart.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ I whisper.

  But Thom doesn’t, and I’d think less of him if he did.

  I didn’t either when I came here, dragged awake by Dav, who showed me this, because we need to understand.

  It’s not pretty, but it’s the truth of them.

  There’s another victim, and another.

  I don’t recognise any of them, but that doesn’t make it any easier. We watch those two, and then Thom’s tugging at my hand. And I understand and we leave the Masters to their feasting. Dougie and Twitch coming with us, grinning like loons.

  Thom’s crying. And I let him cry. I don’t feel all that good either. But some things must be done.

  ‘Shut up,’ Dougie says. ‘Shut up little cry baby.’

  And I’m ready to backhand him when there’s a distant detonation, and another.

  In the heart of Midfield, a bell starts ringing.

  Dougie and I look at each other, then down into the town where the noise has come from and there’s a flare blooming in the dark. Bright enough that we can see each other’s faces clear.

  ‘The Night Train,’ we say, both at once.

  And we’re, all of us, running into the night, towards fire and doom.

  CHAPTER 33

  WHEN I SEE the ball of fire, rolling up into the sky, I can almost feel the heat of it. I cover my eyes to shield them from the light, but it passes.

  Others are with us, more boys. Thom’s by my side, panting from his run. There’s confusion everywhere, it’s not just us. Unsettled men failing to settle their horses, a few guns visible, but no one with any idea where to point them. Constable Mick’s there too. Looking at that fire on the horizon.

  ‘What’s been done here?’ Dougie stands next to me, brings one hand to his slack mouth. He shakes his head, like that will tug loose the image from reality. ‘What’s been done here?’ he says again, and there’s another great bang.

  We have our ideas, but still we run and run, and we get to those tracks and the bridge over the river, only it isn’t a bridge but a twisted wreck dropping into the brown water, a scattering of debris, and there’s the flaming ruin of the Night Train.

  ‘Look,’ Dougie says, finger pointing at the river.

  Black forms float there, shapes moving in the river and the river itself on fire. Smoke rising, mingling with the river’s mist, then the wind tears it open a crack. And I get a glimpse of a world’s ending. Death I’ve known, but not so much of it, not all at once.

  There are screams. Dark shapes lifting, lit and blazing, along the bank.

  Me and Thom stand there, both of us steady and stupid. But we can’t stay here long.

  We turn a bend in the tracks, crawl a little more and then we run, back into town: the light behind us. From the thinning screams of people dying.

  The Masters are there, coming down out of the hill. Swift and silent. And they stop when they see us. Dain gives me a hard look, a suspicious look. He doesn’t say anything.

  ‘The Night Train,’ I say. ‘Blown up on the bridge.’

  Egan looks to us. ‘All of you boys. Home with you all. This is not work for you.’

  ‘Home, the two of you, home,’ Dain says, straight in my ear, and he’s gone before I can even say yes, or tell him to be careful.

  And then they’re all gone and going, rushing past me like an ill wind, so fast I hardly see them.

  And there are other boys coming.

  ‘Back to bed, we’ve been told,’ I say. ‘Back to bed.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ Twitcher asks.

  ‘Insurrection,’ I say, not knowing anything, not knowing anything at all. The night is lit with that fire. People already rising, the rest of the town coming to life. Shocked awake and hurrying to the river.

  ‘What do we do?’ Grove says.

  ‘Nothing to be done. We’ve been sent home,’ I say. ‘Let them find out for themselves.’

  Dain is late coming back, almost with the dawn. His lids are heavy, his lips droop. He smells of smoke and ash, and there’s blood beneath his nails that he’s quick to wash away in the sink, as though he’s embarrassed.

  I wait for him to speak. Watch him work at scrubbing his nails and brushing the ash from his hair. He cleans his face but half-adequate. This night’s had its taxing of him.

  ‘Didn’t save a single one,’ he says, soft and low. ‘That river, that fire, and we on the other side of it.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ I say.

  Dain just shakes his head.

  He leaves me then to go to his rest, and Thom and I do something we’ve not thought to do, n
or ever considered needing to. We make sure our knives are close at hand, and we guard our Master’s house.

  And in the brief times that I let myself drop into sleep, all I can see is those flames, and the dark shapes rising, and all I can hear is the echo of those screaming voices.

  No one comes that day. Nor the next. But that’s the way of change I reckon. You think you see it when it’s coming, but you don’t until it’s done. Maybe not even till long after.

  As it is, two nights later there’s a shifting and roaring to the west—the sound of engines and energies—and I wake, and Dain is standing over me.

  ‘Stay here, boy,’ he says. ‘Do not dare to leave this house until the morning.’

  His eyes allow no space for insubordination.

  Next morning we’re all at the river, and there it is. A new-built bridge entire. So much for rebellion or whatever it was. The night after that the Night Train comes through, and it’s like it never happened at all.

  But it did.

  CHAPTER 34

  IT’S COMING ON late but a few days after the bridge grew itself anew, twilight near enough, there’s a knock on the front door and I know it’s no one that I know. Small enough town and you can recognise any knock. Most of them sound the same: a little hesitant, a little forced.

  But this was confidence, even threat. Don’t ask me how I can tell, but I just can. I nod to Thom and he’s got his knife clear and so do I. Uncertain times and it don’t hurt to be too careful.

  I’m the one that answers the door and there’s a man with a beard down to his chest—like some bushranger of old—and he flashes a smile that makes me even more wary.

  He’s holding his hat in one hand, gripping it tight with hard fingers and scarred knuckles. The hat’s about as beat-up a thing as I’ve seen, patched and re-patched. His face isn’t much better.

  ‘You Thom or Mark?’ he says.

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  That ugly smile only gets wider; he aims a spit back onto the ground. ‘Mark, may I enter?’

  I don’t move, and he lifts the chain around his neck. A gold Sun: there’s a Sun tattooed on his wrist as well. ‘I’m one of them that serves,’ he says. ‘I’d speak with your Master.’

  ‘You know he’s not up yet.’

  ‘I know, but I’m not waiting out here when there’s in there. Neither’s Sarah.’

  ‘Don’t intend on it,’ comes a warm voice from behind him. I look past him to a woman in shirt and pants stained with dirt. Sarah smiles at me from beneath a brimmed hat.

  ‘Hello Mark,’ she says.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘We’re the servants, like Rob said. Auditors. The ones that keep the wheels turnin’,’ Sarah says. ‘We’re just like you.’

  ‘But you’re a girl?’

  Thom snorts at me like I don’t know anything. ‘Women can be servants,’ he says.

  Sarah’s grin turns a bit wry. ‘The Masters aren’t as particular when they need things done,’ she says. ‘Now, let us enter.’

  Still I stand there, knife in one hand.

  ‘Let them in,’ Dain says from behind me. His eyes are wide with first evening, hazy even, but they narrow when they focus on me. ‘Hurry to it, boy.’

  So I do, but I don’t lower my knife. The bearded one looks like he might pat my head, but he reconsiders at the last minute, and it saves him a finger. Sarah stops when she gets to me, and gives me a steady, studying sort of look.

  I can’t help it. I feel myself get blushing. ‘I wouldn’ta let me in either,’ she says, and her eyes are flashing with humour.

  ‘Then you’ve not changed,’ Dain says.

  ‘Oh, I’ve changed all right,’ Sarah says. ‘Not in them fundamentals. But I’ve seen a thing or two.’

  ‘Good,’ Dain says. And that’s where the conversation stops. He turns to me. ‘Get them dinner,’ he says.

  It’s the weirdest supper I’ve ever had. Thom and I sharing our table, a little out of practice.

  Rob sits there eating in silence, Sarah talks of the long roads, and how they’re longer now. How they once chased a man to the gates of Death, and how he wasn’t a man anymore. And once, they were stalked by a tiger, or something like it down the Namoi way. She knows the stories we boys like.

  She has a scar that runs from her wrist to her elbow on her right arm, and she catches me looking at it, and gives me a wink. ‘Tough job we have.’ She runs a finger along the scar. ‘The road’s long and full of them sort of things that would kill you, and not just insurgents. Be dead but for Rob. He could say the same for me.’

  ‘We’ve scars all of us. Ain’t that right, boy?’ Rob says.

  ‘Got my share,’ I say.

  ‘I bet ya do.’ Rob gives Thom a long pale stare. ‘You don’t look like you’d scar easy.’ Thom just eats his supper. Not one for eating and talking. I’m not either, to be honest.

  ‘How long can we expect your company?’ Dain asks.

  ‘Till we’re done,’ Rob says. ‘There’s a host of unhappiness beneath the mountain. You don’t blow up train tracks and leave Them skipping for joy.’ And he gives me a look that says he knows that I know what he’s talking about, like I’m the cause of it all somehow, which seems strange and unfair. Then he’s gazing up at Dain. ‘Don’t worry ’tall, you’ll hardly know we’re here.’

  After supper I’m making up the spare rooms. Rob helps with the sheets, and looks into Dain’s room.

  ‘So he don’t sleep down beneath the earth?’

  I’m noncommittal, and Rob laughs.

  ‘No need for that. You ain’t responsible for the choices of them that lords above us, no matter how peculiar. Not the safest of things for one such as him, though, is it?’

  ‘There’s nothing safe in this world,’ I say, thinking to the time I told Anne just that. ‘Anyone thinks so is a fool.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ says Sarah, all of a sudden leaning on the door. ‘Amen to that, I say. There’s nothing safe, and no one. We’re all monsters lurking under someone’s bed.’

  I offer to make up the other room, and Sarah shakes her head.

  ‘Just one bed for the both of us,’ she says, and I’m all at blushing again. ‘Now, to sleep with you. Rob and I can take care of ourselves.’

  ‘And then some,’ Rob says, and he gives Sarah such a look that I just have to be gone and out.

  I don’t sleep so well that night. Tossing and turning, thinking of scars and miles, and those long dangerous roads Sarah spoke about. Thinking of her smile and her wink.

  If Thom has similar trouble he don’t show it.

  Late I hear the Master come in, and then talk. Low and a little heated, but it don’t last long.

  Later I find some dozing. Just as the night’s shifting, and there’s colour edging its way up the ridge, driving the shadows before it and pulling the new day behind.

  Seems a moment later when Rob’s knocking at the door.

  ‘Up,’ he says, and I know my sleeping’s done.

 
CHAPTER 35

  I’M TIRED AS, leading them around the town, Rob catching me yawning twice, making Sarah laugh at his mock of it.

  They talk to all us boys, talk to the men and women in town. Rob has me take him out to Certain’s farm alone, and while Certain gets me at choring—and there’s always an endless lot of them, and can’t he see I’m damn well knackered—he shares a smoke with Rob. And when I’m done with finding eggs in the henhouse and fixing a gap in a fence, they’re sitting in the verandah, hands cupped around their ciggies, an old tin full of the ash of those they’d already had.

  Rob’s laughing and so is Certain. But there’s an air of formality to it, of pretend. And something I don’t understand. Like they’d much rather be putting away their smokes and their banter and punching each other. But they don’t because they know they can’t. Maybe because I’m there?

  ‘Took up a lot of your time,’ Rob says. ‘You still need the boy?’

  ‘I’ll send him along after you,’ Certain says.

  Rob straightens his hat, and saunters to the gate, looking back just once, to nod at me as though Certain’s not there beside me.

  ‘He’s looking for someone to hang,’ Certain says. ‘You be careful around him.’

  ‘He’s friendly enough,’ I say.

  ‘He’s friendly enough, but there’s a venom in him. Was a time I wanted what he got, was a time I was ready to fight him for it.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Certain looks down at his hands, and rubs a thumb over the scar above his knee, like it’s bothering him. ‘Bloodied noses, and me finding that I didn’t want it. Still not sure if he made me see it, or I came to my senses. Either way, it was the right decision. You be careful like you’ve never been careful in all your life.’