Forgotten Places

by Johanna Craven

  He moved towards her, but she turned away. She lifted the pieces of the gun and carried them inside.

  Rain had made its way down the chimney and soaked the ashes. No fire tonight. Their wet feet and the seeping rain were turning the floor to mud. They ate hunks of bread and drank the rainwater, sitting opposite each other at the table. Around them: the smell of soaked linen, wool, and the clean mint fragrance of the wet bush. Rain pattered rhythmically in the doorway. Rivulets of water drizzled onto the shelf and bathed the carved faces.

  Grace in her petticoats, Dalton bare-chested. He was dimly aware he ought to have been cold, but felt lit up inside. He breathed deeply, enjoying the coarseness of the bread on his tongue.

  “You got two stools,” said Grace. “Why? Were you expecting me all along?”

  Why two stools? He had wondered that as he hammered together the second so many years ago. Maybe a part of him was expecting her.

  She wrapped her fist around the handle of the knife they had used to cut the bread. Something tightened in Dalton’s chest. He stood. His stool toppled and thumped against the dirt floor.

  “Sit.” Grace clutched the knife. He reached down and lifted the stool upright. Sat. She stood over him, droplets of rain falling from the ends of her hair. The bare skin on her neck and arms glistened. She slid the blade of the knife beneath Dalton’s chin and used it to tilt his face upwards. His eyes to hers. When was the last time someone had looked at him so closely? He couldn’t turn away.

  She held his chin between her thumb and forefinger. Human contact. A precious thing.

  Could she begin to imagine the coldness, the sense of isolation that comes over you when you go eleven years without touching another soul? When the only life you ever feel is an animal thrashing in your hands before you break its neck?

  She pushed the knife into the wiry hair beneath his chin. Dalton held his breath. What was she doing? That blade, it was far too close to his throat. Was she after retribution for Violet? For the first time in years, he felt a flicker of panic at the thought of death. He couldn’t die now. He’d only just come back to life.

  She slid the blade across his cheek. Whorls of black hair fluttered to the ground. Dalton saw it had become flecked in grey. He was beginning to grow old. What a gift. To sprout a grey hair had seemed so unachievable when he was waist deep in water hauling pines at Kelly’s Basin. He was sure he’d be dead by twenty-five.

  The blade moved over his chin. Dalton sat motionless, heart thumping, entranced by the touch of Grace’s hands on his face and the wet, white skin at the top of her shift.

  He watched the hair fall from his cheeks. What would he hide behind now? Did he want to hide any longer? He was afraid of what Grace might see.

  He flinched at the thought and the blade caught on his skin. A flash of pain. Grace pushed her finger against the cut. A bead of blood hung on her fingertip.

  Dalton touched his cheek. The skin felt silky, raw, like a gum that had just lost a tooth. The remains of his beard were scattered around his bare feet. Grace smiled faintly. Wet hair clung to her cheeks and a thick, ropey strand had worked its way into the corner of her mouth. Dalton thought of reaching out and lifting it off her skin. He played that simple action out in his head.

  His finger curling around her hair. His skin to her skin. A gentle pull. And she would say thank you, Alexander.

  You’re welcome, he would reply.

  But when he raised his hand, her smile disappeared and the strand of hair came free. Her eyes fell to their sleeping pallets, which were soaked in black mud.

  “Oh,” she said. “Alexander…”

  He wanted her hands against his cheeks again. There was so much life in her. He wanted to feel it. And so he said: “You missed a little.”

  Grace stared at him. The knife teetered in her fist.

  Dalton was surprised by the pitch of his voice. Didn’t sound like him. And that odd vibration in his throat, he’d forgotten that.

  Eleven years since he’d last used his voice.

  Go n-éirí leat, mo chairde. Coughed out to Kennerly and Brown, as they crawled their way back to Macquarie Harbour.

  Good luck to you, my friends.

  Grace kept staring, her mouth opening and closing around unformed words, as though he’d passed his voicelessness onto her. Suddenly he wanted his silence back. She’d ask questions, expect answers.

  He stumbled out into the orange dusk. He paced across the clearing with his hands behind his head. The rain was cold against his cheeks and reminded him of their nakedness.

  “You missed a little,” he repeated, listening to the words slide off his tongue. His voice sounded tiny against the slapping rain. And then he tried: “Greenhill.”

  For those men were pushing hard inside his head, begging for attention. She could never know of them.

  He came back inside. Grace was scooping the pieces of the sleeping pallets from the floor. The hem of her shift was covered in threads of brown fern, her toes black with mud. Dalton sat at the table and said: “Grace.”

  *

  “Grace,” he said again, as though testing his voice.

  “Yes?” she said. “Yes, Alexander?”

  She thought: I see you now. You ain’t no old man.

  Thirty-five, perhaps. She saw the sharp angle of his jaw, the wideness of his cheeks. His eyes seemed bigger, darker, dominating a face that still held the last flush and smoothness of youth.

  His hand went again to his chin, feeling, feeling, reminding himself of what was there. He used his wet shirt to wipe away the stray bristles. Rain slapped into the mud outside the door. He pulled the shirt on and it clung to his chest. Grace’s heart beat hard, desperate for answers, yet afraid to hear them. Her thumbnail went to her mouth.

  “Don’t know where we going to sleep tonight. The sleeping pallets all fell to bits. All this rain we had lately. Maybe we can take turns sleeping on the table. Won’t be much comfortable but be drier at least. I suppose you’re used to this. Where do you sleep when it gets so wet?”

  Alexander’s eyes fell to the mess of leaves and grass she’d strewn around the hut. Somehow she’d managed to make more of a mess than before.

  She sucked in her breath. “Why you out here? You hiding?”

  Nothing.

  “You’re a government man.”

  He nodded.

  “No, speak to me.”

  So he said: “Yes.”

  “What d’you do?”

  “Struck my army captain.”

  Grace reached tensely for her cloak and hooked it around her shoulders. She sat at the table and folded her icy feet beneath her. “Well,” she said finally. “You done your time then?”

  He shook his head.

  Oh. I see. So we hide.

  “How long you been out here? You got any idea?”

  He answered in a rusty Irish lilt. “Eleven years.”

  She’d misheard, surely. “You been out here alone for eleven years? I don’t believe you. You would never have survived.” But as she spoke, she began to see the possibility of it. Water from the river. Berries from the trees. Meat from the traps.

  She began to see a possibility for herself. A life in which she might never be forced back beneath the water pipes at the New Norfolk asylum. A life free of James Harris. If Alexander could escape and survive, then she could too. Yes, she believed him. She believed him because she had to.

  “No-one has ever found you? Before me and Violet?”

  Alexander shook his head. He pulled on his coat and climbed onto the table. When Grace thought she’d get no more from him, he mumbled: “No-one goes searching for a dead man.” His voice was thin and hollow. Told her to ask no more.

  X

  Conduct Record of Convicts Arriving in Van Diemen’s Land 1804-1830

  Alexander Dalton, Caledonia 1820

  July 6th 1822: Wilful and corrupt perjury. One hundred lashes and remainder of sentence to Macquarie Harbour.

  As hard as Dalton
tried, there were fragments of the past that refused to be forgotten. A human brain, he’d come to realise, needed madness to truly forget. And so, with another living person in his life, the story had begun to slip out.

  Prologue.

  Convicted for assault at Gibraltar Court Martial. Fourteen years’ transportation.

  Grace had thought nothing of it, surely. In Hobart Town this was every second man.

  Fourteen years. At twenty-three, it was almost two-thirds of his life. But then there were the stories of those lucky bastards who’d made their fortune in this new land. Cast off their leg irons for early pardons and ended up rolling in gold. He’d be one of those men, he’d told himself. Turn up back in Kilkenny and buy the whole bloody town a drink.

  If he’d stayed with his first overseer in Oxley, perhaps he’d have made it through his sentence. Managed a ticket of leave. But he saw the stain of authority in that overseer and took him down with his fists.

  He was sent to Hobart Town to work in the chain gangs, carve this new colony with his bare hands. A miserable existence to be sure, but in Hobart, the convicts still felt part of the world. A working week. Church on Sundays. They had coins in their pockets, rum in their bellies. Friends to laugh with and women to ogle. Yes, their ankles were scarred from the shackles, but they walked the streets with felons who’d been pardoned and rewarded with land. For the convicts of Van Diemen’s Land, Hobart Town brought a speck of hope that they could salvage something from their lives.

  But then: an Englishman shuffling along in front of Dalton in the chain gang. A staunch royalist with a hatred for the Irish.

  Michael Flannagan, with a mouth like a fucking moocher.

  Dalton’s ticket to the great green hell of Macquarie Harbour.

  While they stood waiting for the chains to be locked, Matthew Brown whispered to Dalton that he was going to rob a man and buy his way off Van Diemen’s Land.

  “You’ll swing for it,” said Dalton.

  “Aye, perhaps I’ll swing. But then I’ll be in God’s kingdom instead of this Englishman’s hell.”

  “I saw it all,” said Dalton, when the police came searching for the thief. “I saw Michael Flannagan rob that man. Said he planned to buy his way off Van Diemen’s Land.”

  They said all men had a chance of making it in this new land. Said even the Irish could rise above the lowliness of their birth. But when forced to choose between the guilt of the English and the Irish, it was always the bog-jumper who would swing.

  Flannagan watched with a grin as Matthew Brown was led to the scaffold. Dalton to Macquarie Harbour with a flayed back and a certainty that any God he may have known did not exist in this backwater of the planet.

  Dalton knew his lies, like all his crimes, had been foolish. He had never set out to live the life of a criminal. He’d just been cursed with a need to see his own perverted sense of justice done. Cursed with an anger that took away all sense and reason. Even back when he was marching in the King’s colours, he felt he belonged somewhere far from civilised men.

  Hell’s Gates, they called the wild swells at the mouth of Macquarie Harbour. And when the ship bucked its way through the whirlpooling sea, Dalton felt the devil at his shoulder. He’d spent five weeks at sea without a hammock or coat, curled up on the ballast with thirty other men. The ship ploughed through winds that howled between the rigging and somehow managed to penetrate the hold. Days passed where they seemed to make no progress, the ship plunging left to right, up and down, but never forwards towards their destination.

  Macquarie Harbour, for reoffenders. The most secure of all the colonies’ penal settlements. At Sarah Island Penitentiary, the pounding heart of the harbour, great purple swells heaved themselves out of the Southern Ocean and made whirlpools of the cove. The rocks were bald and glistening, the bush thick as castle walls. Rivers poisoned with salt and decay. A prison perfected by nature.

  When Dalton stepped onto Sarah Island and felt sleet sting his cheeks, any speck of hope he’d had in Hobart Town was gone. His new world was grey and brown, coloured only by rust-streaked rocks that rose jagged from the water. On one side, a chain of mountains. On the other, a screaming ocean. This was it, Dalton realised. This was where he belonged; living on an island even God had forgotten, among people who were slowly turning wild.

  Most of the prisoners were normal men when they arrived on Sarah Island. There was some rage in them, some bad decisions, but they were able to laugh a little, tell a good story from home.

  From Bill Kennerly, a poteen still that could blow your very eyes out.

  From Tom Bodenham, a girl with tits the size of melons.

  John Mather was a married man with three sons in Edinburgh. He relayed their entire lives to the men while they hacked away at the pines.

  But the stories didn’t last long. Hauling logs back to the boats like they were oxen sucked away the chatter.

  One morning Dalton swam out to the boats with Pearce. Shivering beneath sheets of rain, they waited to be rowed to the logging station. Pearce turned his eyes to the grey sea.

  “Cad atá cearr leat, Pearce?” What are you thinking?

  “Leave him be, Dalton,” said Greenhill. “He’s due a flogging for breaking his axe. Don’t feel like hearing your blathering, do he?”

  Pearce’s silence fell over the rest. Their thoughts turned from women and grog to escape or death. Suddenly that was all there was.

  Escape or death.

  Dalton had not been at the harbour two months and he knew his sentence would kill him. In a way, it already had.

  Eyes would meet across bowls of porridge and in each man’s glance was a dream of leaving Van Diemen’s Land for a paradise across the water. They’d cursed at the rest of the world before they came to Macquarie Harbour. The poverty in London, politics in Ireland, tyrannical leaders in Gibraltar. But suddenly those places were heaven.

  “The boat,” said Greenhill, “gets left unattended.” And then he was too careful to say more. The men’s eyes went back to their porridge. Hands in bowls, bread chewed with open mouths.

  Look at us.

  Turning into animals long before they escaped.

  Is it really any wonder we did what we did?

  A drizzly day at Kelly’s Basin. Eight desperate men waist-deep in water, arms aching from hauling pines. The boat unattended outside the coal miners’ hut.

  They eyed each other silently.

  A chance.

  Greenhill motioned for them to wade ashore. He used his axe to crack open the miner’s chest. Sacks of pots, boilers, flint. Bread and flour. Salted meat.

  “Take it all,” said Greenhill. He emptied the boiler over the fire to prevent the miners making a signal. Smoke hissed and plumed. Dalton slung a sack over his shoulder. The food felt heavy in his arms. He felt a burst of optimism he’d not experienced in years. A boat would get him off Sarah Island, past Hobart Town. Hell, if he rowed far enough, a boat would get him back to Ireland.

  A rustle in the trees.

  “Go!” Greenhill shouted. “Hurry!” Eight men leapt into the boat, water cascading over the gunwale. Bodenham grabbed one oar, Pearce the other. The boat crawled along the rocky coast; Sarah Island disappearing behind a wall of trees.

  Columns of smoke began to spiral up along the waterline. The miners had built new signal fires, alerting the settlement of escapees. Dalton began to laugh. They were playing with death and it made him feel dazzlingly alive.

  Greenhill grabbed Dalton’s slops and wrenched them hard around his neck. “Shut your fucking mouth, flogger. You want them to hear us?”

  Dalton swung furiously, but Bill Kennerly grabbed his arm before he could make contact. Greenhill stumbled and the boat seesawed wildly. Dalton glanced over his shoulder. A cutter was approaching from the harbour. Marines. Dogs. Rifles.

  “Leave the boat,” Greenhill said suddenly. He grabbed the oar from Bodenham and began to pull furiously towards the shore.

  “You lost your mind?” spat
Kennerly.

  “We can’t out-row them. I ain’t letting the bastards put a rope around my neck.”

  “Where do you plan to go? There’s nothing out there.”

  Greenhill pointed to the tallest of the purple mountains that cut into the horizon. “That there is Table Mountain. Other side is Hobart Town.”

  Dalton stood and felt the boat pitch. Five weeks at sea between the town and Macquarie Harbour. Surely Greenhill was mistaken. “He’s wrong,” he said.

  Kennerly nodded.

  But Greenhill and Pearce had thrown down the oars and were splashing their way to shore. Dalton swung the pack from the boat and followed Greenhill into the bush. Behind him, Kennerly’s aging legs slipped in the ankle-deep mud. Dalton grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet.

  “Madness,” hissed Kennerly. “You hear me, Alexander? This is madness.”

  As far as Dalton could tell, no one came after them. No one wasted their time. This was wilderness in which few could survive. Certainly not eight foreigners for whom the land was an unreadable maze.

  Leave the fools to fight the forest and the darkness that lies within themselves.

  XI

  She started making plans. The other girl. Nora.

  Christ Almighty. He’d forgotten there was another one.

  He woke to find her beating the dust from her cloak with a stick. Her petticoats were laid out in the clearing, drying in the bright morning sun. The boiler and canteen had been filled and a fire was crackling in the pit. Two loaves of bread lay baking in the coals.

  There was something about the way she carried herself that morning. Her shoulders had straightened. Her head was up. There was a newness about her.

  “I made a decision,” she said. “I got to go back to Hobart Town for Nora.”

  Dalton raised his eyebrows. Back?

  “I can’t stay here forever. I’ll go mad.” She slapped the stick rhythmically against her cloak. “This forest does things to your mind, don’t it. The way the light gets trapped, it makes you imagine things that ain’t there. I imagined three or four times now I seen Violet coming out of the trees. But there’s never anyone there.” She stopped beating. “Don’t know how you done it, Alexander. Lived out here so long. Don’t know how you ain’t barking at your own shadow.”