Day Boy

by Trent Jamieson

  ‘I am the very bloody model of circumspection in all things,’ I say as correctly as I am able. Certain gives me a clip under the ear, affectionate even if I’m dazed.

  ‘And watch your swearing.’ He looks to the back of Rob, and sighs. ‘What a world this is to make men like him and boys like you. Thought I’d seen the last of him, and here he is back like a ghost.’

  ‘You know Sarah too?’

  ‘Sarah’s here?’ Something passes across Certain’s face, I don’t know what it is, but he looks all of a sudden like a man who might be given to drinking tonight.

  ‘You better be away,’ Certain says.

  And I know enough not to say anything.

  ‘And keep to your caution. Round him, and round her. Don’t want you on the end of no rope, not until the western fence line’s finished.’

  I give him a bit of a face.

  He doesn’t even smile. Just looks down at his hands as he rolls another smoke, careful as if he’s never done it before.

  When they’re done with their questions, they pack their horses, and ride with the dawn. The Sun at their backs, like they’re chasing their shadows. But they’re back early that afternoon air beginning to chill with a man tied up and walking behind them.

  Mr Stevens. It’s Mr Stevens, the Signalman. He’s been crying, his eyes are red, his nose running.

  ‘Get the other boys,’ Rob says.

  And I do.

  Certain’s right. Rob is gonna get his hanging. Not until Stevens is bloody and toothless, though. Sarah’s there too, and while she don’t join in, she don’t stop him. Rob hits that man hard and harder. He don’t heed his cries. Pulls him close to listen a few times, but he’s not satisfied with whatever the man says.

  His fists find their way past his raised hands, and only when he’s done and Stevens is panting and breathing like he’s broken inside does he rope the man’s neck from the tree in the centre of town and yank him up slow and long. Mr Stevens’ feet shivering in the air. Not going to forget that. I’ve seen worse, we all have, but still.

  We’re all there to watch, because those we represent can’t. Doesn’t pass much for entertainment. But we’re called, and it’s done that afternoon so the Masters have no say in it.

  ‘This is what you can expect,’ Rob says, just loud enough to hear. But he doesn’t need to speak any louder, every ear is straining. He taps Mr Stevens’ leg, still dangling and twitching. ‘Ain’t no mercy for insurrectionists. Just death, brutal and quick.’

  Not quick enough, I think, but I must be learning a little something because I don’t say it. I don’t say nothing.

  Rob cuts the rope, lets the body fall. Walks over to me, face so blank it might as well be stone.

  ‘We’re done here,’ he says. ‘Well. Not quite.’

  Rob turns to Mick the constable. Rob’s shorter than him by a handspan, but he don’t look it now. It’s like Mick’s shrunk in his shoes.

  ‘I’ve half a mind to put you up there, Mr Constable,’ he says. ‘More than. We come back here for some other reason, some other darkening plan hatching, and you will hang. Should never have happened; when we come, we come too late.’

  Rob spits at the constable’s feet and turns nice and slow, and I can see that Mick is battling with the urge to hit him. Hard. But sense prevails, I guess, or fear, which is just another sort of sense. I can almost respect that. Strike an auditor and you might as well strike Death herself.

  Rob winks at me. ‘C’mon, boy,’ he says. ‘We need to talk, you and I.’

  I walk and Thom follows until Rob raises his hand. ‘Ain’t a talk for you, Mr Thom. This is just between me and him.’

  Thom doesn’t look happy about that, he kind of hovers there, looking at me.

  ‘I’ll see you at home,’ I say.

  Thom nods, and starts on his way back.

  ‘A man don’t need a second shadow,’ Rob says. I nod my head. And we walk awhile in quiet. Heading back to the Master’s house, down these familiar roads made strange because of the fella I’m walking with.

  ‘Don’t like this town,’ Rob says. ‘A fella like Stevens killing all those folk. Don’t excuse what I done, mind. That was right and proper cruel, ain’t proud of a bit of it.’

  ‘But you did it.’

  ‘Do it again if I had to, you can’t have people getting thoughts. This is the world we live in now,’ Rob says. ‘That man killed three dozen people. He destroyed the train line. He got his due. But it leaves a ruinous taste, for sure. Taste a man might need to drink away. Not here, won’t let none of these bastards catch that.’

  He stops and I can see the tears on the edge of his eyes. ‘You think I didn’t start all nice? He could have spoken then; he chose not to.’ He sniffs once, long and loud, and spits again, in the direction of the tree. ‘But I ain’t walking with you for forgiveness.’

  He looks at me, then gestures west to the end of town. ‘Not everything begins and ends here. What do you say? You want to come with us, boy? I’ve the authority to offer such a boon. I know the measure of things. I can read a boy and see what he will become.’

  ‘And what will I become?’

  ‘A deadset killer, if you don’t get yourself killed. You stay here, and what have ya got? Just fences to fix and monsters to feed and the boredom, that cold crushing boredom. You know what I’m talking about. You look to the sky and yearn. Them like us do. We ain’t ever going to become like your Master, but that don’t mean we can’t find something better.’

  He gestures at the sky. ‘You ride with me and Sarah and you’ll see the heavens dance at night in the far south, all colour and movement. You’ll come to broke-down cities filled with haunts and haunted, and seas as dark as that beneath the City in the Shadow of the Mountain. Ain’t a long life, and it’s hard, but it’s good and beautiful. You’ll see the great wide land.’

  I look at him. Not even sure what to say. But I can feel the pull of it. Rob hesitates a little, then the words spill from him.

  ‘Don’t know much of the world yonder. Just the sea, and the odd island or two near enough that a boat might make the crossing. That’s a vast border, an unwalkable one. The world curls away from us in all directions. And it’s got bigger, like it shrugged its shoulders, got itself a spurt of growth and wildness. The storms are madder even than when I was a kid. The dark’s darker. We didn’t need the Masters when the world was small, but by crikey we need them now.’

  ‘I hardly even know what an auditor does,’ I say.

  ‘We’ll teach you just what we are,’ Rob says. ‘We’re the thread that binds the land together. We’re tenuous, and frail, frailer even than that Night Train. But without us, without the line, and the law, we’re not a country, just a bunch of towns, sliding into each other, drowning in their own meaninglessness, waiting to be devoured by monsters.’

  ‘Monsters enough in this town,’ I say.

  ‘Not like this, not like you’d believe. Once saw a thing, big as a train. Smoke pluming from its great toothy face, saw it streak across the sky as if it was hunting for something. I hid. Couldn’t have been hunting me, something so small? But I hid anywa
y, fear so deep within me that it ate at me like a sickness. And the next town I came to was torn apart. Devoured. Even the Masters dead, like it had hunted them first, dug them out, like an echidna digging out white ants.

  ‘Only ever seen such a thing once. Far south and west of here. But you don’t forget something like that.’

  ‘What you trying to do, scare the boy?’ Sarah’s caught us up, just outside of Dain’s house.

  ‘I don’t scare too easy,’ I say.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Rob says. ‘But you should. There’s dark times coming for you, hungry and wicked.’

  I give my chest a puff. ‘Got my own wickedness to match.’

  Rob scratches his beard, then pats my arm and walks inside.

  Sarah chuckles. ‘He’s a poet, can’t you tell?’

  ‘He don’t like me,’ I say.

  ‘He does,’ Sarah says, voice low. ‘He likes whatever Certain does. You come with us, you’ll break that man’s heart.’

  And she says it like it’s a fact not good nor bad, just something lying there for me to either pick up or discard.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I made my choices. Ain’t for love, that’s sure. Hearts break, they’re about the most fragile thing we’ve got.’ She shrugs. ‘I made my choices, and so did Certain. Don’t let anyone tell you choices are easy. But what Rob says is true. It’s a wild beautiful world out there. You get in your heart to travel, you find us out if you can. Ain’t no life like it.’

  She gives the town a longish look. ‘Sometimes it’d be nice to—’ She shakes her head. ‘No, it wouldn’t. Sleepy towns are for sleepers.’

  ‘Not too sleepy,’ I say. ‘When there’s a fella set on blowing up the tracks. ‘

  ‘Sometimes sleep is troubled,’ Sarah says. ‘Don’t mistake it for nothing else.’

  ‘I know restlessness, and I know sleep. This town’s stirring,’ I say, and it is, I can feel it, even in this winter cold. And it scares me a little.

  She reaches out, grabs my face with her rough hands, and looks me deep in the eyes. I can’t help but turn away. ‘Maybe. Or maybe it’s just you, kid.’

  That stings a little: I’m no kid. But her laughter softens it. There’s generosity, not mock. My face burns.

  Rob and Sarah leave without me. I can hear Sarah’s laughter on the wind, the warmest sound in the winter air. Rob gives me one last hard look, but he accepts my decision.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ Thom asks.

  ‘Do what I’m supposed to do,’ I say and head off to Certain’s place to help out.

  He nods at me when I arrive.

  That’s all he needs to do. And we work at the fence by the creek, rewiring it—the damn thing broke, all his cattle finding their way to green and dangerous pastures—getting them to come back into Certain’s land is the hard part.

  But it’s good work, turning thoughts from miseries to the actions of the hands, and the back, the joy of work met and accomplished. We finish it by late afternoon. All stock accounted for.

  Certain swings the eastern paddock gate shut, resting his elbows on it, staring at the field below, and the mist that’s rising as the Sun falls. ‘Glad you made your choice,’ he says.

  ‘For now,’ I say.

  ‘Every choice is only ever for now. You start thinking anything’s permanent you’re in trouble. Nothing’s permanent about life but death.’ He gives me a rare grin. ‘And that’s coming from a fella named Certain.’

  CHAPTER 36

  THOM LOOKS AT me, up from the thing he’s whittling. A stake—taipan curled about it. He puts his carving down, keeps a hand knuckled around the knife, and listens.

  Singing. Maybe. Wind’s howling, so it could be that. Shouldn’t be able to hear much of nothing anyway, we had a snow fall about a week back, last huff of winter as spring starts to spring.

  But there’s that windblown song, carried to us from the edge of town. Persistent and sweet.

  ‘It’s the cold children,’ I say.

  His face does a little sort of skip, his eyes widen a bit. ‘You’re lying. No cold children around here.’

  ‘No, not often. But they come. There’s cold children everywhere.’ I tap my chest. ‘We’ve a truce and everything.’

  ‘You got a truce with them?’

  I consider. ‘More of an agreement.’

  The singing’s getting louder. It grabs you by the short hairs, faint then loud then faint again. It gets in your blood and plays with the rhythm of your heart.

  ‘How’d you sleep with them singing like that?’

  ‘Best to ignore it,’ I say.

  ‘Where’s Dain?’

  ‘Out on business, they all are. Said he might be gone all night.’

  Which is why, I reckon, they’ve chosen to come here now. The Masters are away. It’s a time for children.

  ‘Best we stay indoors,’ I say.

  I grab my coat.

  Thom’s still holding his knife, a little thing scarcely good for grazing anything but supple wood. And the cold children are hard. ‘I’m not going out there.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ I say. I don’t blame him, last time I took him into the night he saw the truth of our Masters plain and simple. This isn’t much safer; might be the opposite.

  But he comes when I open the door. Scarf around his neck, shrugging into his coat.

  Dougie’s walking down our street whistling.

  ‘You gonna see the cold children,’ I say.

  He smiles, gives an expansive sort of wave. ‘Got an agreement, don’t we?’ His eyes are shining. I reckon mine are too.

  So it’s the three of us that walk along the cold dirt road heading out of town. Why just us, not Grove or the others? I couldn’t tell you. And the singing gets louder and quieter and louder, but gradually the quieter is shorter and the louder longer.

  Past the end of town near the bridge there’s a clearing edged to the west with trees. Old ones, pines as high as anything out of the city beneath the mountain. We stand there and the singing swells and fills our blood.

  I don’t know the words, but there’s hunger in them, and something of the stars and the darkness between. There’s a weariness too. I feel all weepy just standing there, and I catch Dougie rubbing at his eyes with a handkerchief, and I wonder why I didn’t bring one, my nose is streaming in the cold. And a wind’s got up, so loud and fierce it almost drowns out the singing, until it gives way.

  And then, in the dark, the singing stops.

  And it’s silent.

  Thom grabs my hand.

  ‘No need fer that,’ I say, then I realise that it isn’t Thom. The fingers have snatched the heat from me, my teeth are chattering.

  A girl with bright eyes, moon-bright, dead-light-bright, looks up at me and smiles.

  Her teeth are sharp as killing blades, her smile is cold and cutting and about as beautiful and dangerous a thing as you might see.

  ‘Hello Mark,’ she says, all sing-song and radian
ce.

  ‘Mol,’ I say.

  ‘You remember me?’ Mol says.

  Of course I do. I remember when she wasn’t so cold. When she used to pull my hair, when I was younger than her. But now she’s younger than me and more ancient, there’s the timeless weight of star-shine to her.

  I blink. ‘I remember our agreement.’

  ‘Agreements are odd things, Mark. Tenuous. Light as the wind, and as swift to shifting.’

  I clear my throat. ‘We’re bound to them, by law.’

  ‘No lawyers in the woods. Just trees, and the air, and us.’

  And there, in the woods, I feel my throat catch. She’s got that sharpest of grins out, the widest of eyes.

  ‘Where’s Thom?’

  ‘Safe.’

  ‘Safe? Master would kill me if I—’

  ‘Dain is far away, far, far away. And I am here.’ She touches my throat with a fingertip. Mol’s eyes are bright as glass beads.

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘Yes, I am. Shall I sing for you?’

  ‘I think you already have,’ I say.

  ‘Shall I sing some more?’

  I nod.

  And she does, and I remember those days before she was cold. I remember the sadness of it, the death that wasn’t a death but a mistake, a bit of the Change that got in her and spread.

  Masters have a dread of ending those they make—unless they’re born of punishment, like those insurgents marked for a cruel death beneath the Sun. Such mistakes are hard admitted, and feared too, feared almost as much as anything.

  Most of the cold children do die in time, of their own accord. But those that don’t, they call to each other. Like lonely birds or wolves or something mournful and beautiful. And they gather, and they sing.

  Sometimes they hunt.

  But we have an agreement.