Bereft (13 page)

His mother coughed and held out a hand flecked with her own blood. “Hush now. It's alright. You can't bring her back, Quinn. It's a long time ago. Let's talk of happier things,” she said with enforced cheer. “The war is ended, at least. We are here together. That is good enough for now. Why don't you tell me how you came to be here.”

Quinn collected himself and wiped his eyes. “I was in Sydney.”

She attempted to sit up. “Oh, how lovely. It is many years since I was there. The harbour? Is it still beautiful?”

“Of course. It was crowded. There were many boats on the water. People are glad the war is over. They can get back to their lives.”

“And were you there long? What did you do there?”

Quinn blew his nose and allowed himself a shy smile. “I tried to find an orange.” His mother laughed. “But without any luck.”

“An orange. You always adored them. For a time you lived on them. But I haven't seen one in a good while. Yes, an orange would be lovely. The war, you know. It's meant there's been little to eat. Farmers off at war. Killed, I suppose.”

She closed her eyes again. It was now obvious to him she was dying. She was right: half the country was stricken with this influenza. In Sydney, the newspapers had been full of predictions of further outbreaks, of mountains of dead. As if a war were not enough for the world to endure. Quinn stooped to take her muggy hand in his own. She dozed, and in the ticking silence he wondered what he could tell her of the war, of his life. He became aware of a distant rumble through his boots on the wooden floor. Horse hooves. Horses approaching. He straightened.

His mother muttered something.

“What?” Quinn asked.

“What day is it?”

“Monday, I think.”

“That might be Doctor Fraser with your father.”

Panic squirmed through Quinn's chest. Even with his limited hearing he could tell the horses were close, perhaps at the front gate. He wondered if he could leap through the curtained window and escape unseen, but his mother reached out to him.

“Quinn. Hide next door. In your old room. Quick. Your father won't come into the house.”

“You won't tell him I'm here?”

“Of course not. Quickly now.”

Quinn did as she told him. Like a trespasser, he stood behind the closed door of the room he had shared with Sarah and William. His heart pounded and he strained to hear. Woolly voices, his father's and that of Doctor Fraser. There came a knock on the front door. The doctor calling out, his footfalls along the passageway, his mother greeting him. Quinn pressed his ear to the wooden door but could only make out mumbles, a forced cough, the jingling of glass bottles being placed on the dresser. Soon, Doctor Fraser went back outside and chatted with Nathaniel for a moment before leaving.

Quinn relaxed enough to consider his surrounds. His mother was right; the room was unchanged. It was as if he had been transplanted into a memory. There was the same chipped dresser, a shelf with several tattered children's books and Sarah's Lucy Doll. Everything was furred with dust, which floated through the light in curlicues. Under the bed he saw a sack of tools. On the floor beside her low bed was Sarah's cigar box in which she stored her treasures. The box exerted a strange magnetism.

Quinn had never resolved himself to Sarah's spiritual whereabouts now she was gone. Even though he found it impossible to imagine the pastoral version of heaven people talked about, he was even more uncomfortable at the thought of his sister cold and alone in her rotted coffin. He had often found himself narrating out loud the particulars of, say, tying a knot or checking a sail as if for her benefit. Mostly, he imagined her in some way to be alongside him—twirling her hair, trying to balance on a fence, leaning down to whisper a secret in his ear.

He squatted, picked up the cigar box and opened it. It contained a stamp, a rock shaped like a kangaroo's head, a length of barbed wire, an imitation pearl, three pebbles of gold, the magpie feather his mother had mentioned, and a large red button. The button Quinn recognised immediately as one of three or four that Sarah had insisted their mother sew onto her dresses—including the white dress, in fact, she was wearing on the day she died. He stared at these things in horror, as if they might assemble against him. If he could have fled at that moment, he would have done so.

From the box he took the red button, held it to his lips, then his forehead. “
I had a dream which was not all a dream
,” he whispered. “
The
bright sun was extinguish'd and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal
space.”

He dropped the button into the cigar box and returned the box with its other treasures to where he had found it. He crept to the window that overlooked the veranda, careful to remain invisible to his father, who was sitting on a chair by Mary's window with his head in his hands. He appeared confounded, and the shock of seeing him like this infused Quinn with a fierce melancholy. His father had shrunk in the intervening years, had become altogether more human in scale.

His father raised his head and spoke into the open window. “The doctor says you are both better and worse today.”

Mary's response was inaudible.

“Agitated,” Nathaniel went on. “What? … Well, you should do as he says. He is a doctor … Of course he knows what he is doing. Mary? Are you wearing the camphor? Mary? They say it works. Do you at least have it close by?” He paused to listen. “Very well. I won't go on about it but make sure it is nearby at all times … I know it smells. I expect it cleanses the air. But there is something else I have ordered from Sydney. A new product should arrive any day now. Hearn's Bronchitis Cure it's called, and they assure me that it will help with …”

Quinn could see his father's face was smeared with soot and his arms were ripe with muscle. A moustache darkened his upper lip. His elbows were slack on his knees, fingers knotted in an attitude of exhaustion or prayer. He raised himself every so often to adjust his position or speak more clearly into his wife's open window. In his father's slumping shoulders, in the expressions that flitted across his weathered features, Quinn saw something of their family's terrible story, the way wind was visible when it ruffled a field of wheat.

His parents ceased talking. His father fidgeted and glanced about. Quinn's legs grew stiff from staying still for so long. After about fifteen minutes, Nathaniel stood to leave. “Did you see the food the Auxiliary ladies left for you? … Will it be enough? … Are you sure? … And you
are
eating it, I trust? You need your strength. I should go now. Oh, I nearly forgot. Your brother said he would call by today. Said he's been busy. Some orphan girl up in the hills he wants to find.” He slapped his hat against his dusty thigh and laughed. “He told me he saw her a few days ago but that—listen to this, Mary—he said that she turned into a
snake
. Probably dreamed up the whole thing, you know what an imagination he has. It might have been rabbiters or something. Lot of people moving about these days. Anyway, he fell and cut his hand so I expect that held him up a bit.”

Mary said something Quinn couldn't hear.

“Course he's alright. Your brother is charmed. But I'll tell him. I'll make sure he stops by. Don't worry, Mary. Save your strength.”

Quinn heard his father step off the veranda and he sat up to watch him retreat back up the road on his horse. When he was sure he had left, Quinn slunk from his former room, down the dim hall, and out into the afternoon that was bursting with sunlight.

As promised, Sadie was waiting for him in the shade of the bloodwood tree. He was unaccountably pleased to see her and had to restrain himself from embracing her. Together they tramped back through the afternoon heat to their shack, but only when they were halfway there did Quinn realise she was not carrying anything.

He stopped. “Did you not find any food?”

Sadie paused with her hands on her hips. She shook her head and wound a strand of hair behind an ear. She looked exhausted. “I couldn't take anything. Too many people about. Tomorrow I'll go out even earlier. Don't worry, I know what I'm doing. Come on, let's go.”

11

T
hat night Quinn lay on the floor of the shack bundled in his trench coat, his thin hands a cushion of twigs beneath his head. The cooling night creaked outside, and the years he had been gone didn't feel quite so long. He was hungry. He listened out for footsteps, for voices, for those who wished to hang him from a tree. After some time, the night settled and grew quiet. Wherever she was, the girl made no noise.

Spikenard
, he thought suddenly. Was that the name by which lavender was known in the Bible, the word his mother had been trying to think of earlier that day? It was unlike her to forget; for a time he had been certain his mother knew everything there was to know: the names of King Henry's wives, of all the planets, the dates of the French Revolution. She herself was a curio in these parts where, by and large, people understood little of the outside world and cared even less about its goings-on. When asked how she knew the Latin for
Men learn as
they teach
or that the first governor-general was a chap called Hope, she would smile, tap her head and say she had slept with the encyclopaedia under her pillow as a girl and the information had seeped, entry by entry, into her brain.

Of course this was just another fanciful story. In fact, she'd worked her way through her father's substantial library after her wealthy parents perished on a boat to Hong Kong when she was nineteen. Quinn remembered her balancing an open dictionary on her palm as she carried the laundry to the line, or fetched flour from the pantry. “Listen to this, children,” she would announce before declaiming a line of poetry or an obscure historical fact. “
You'll
like this, William. Do you see this fellow hanging upside-down from a crane, above a road? See that? Houdini, or some such. Good God. Breaks out of padlocks, you know.” She alerted them to the wisdom potentially contained in books. “A story is a wondrous invention,” she would say. “A glimpse into another place altogether. I like sometimes to escape from here.”

She had moved from Sydney to western New South Wales early in her marriage, although she would have preferred to stay in the city, and it was naturally to such environs her imagination drifted. While she had never visited them, she told the children tales of watery London and darkly smoking Cairo. She read to them anything that came to hand—the Bible, newspapers, stories of the Trojans, incomprehensible poetry stuffed with
thee
and
thou
, even advertising pamphlets she picked up in Flint (
Life drops are the great household remedy for asthma, bronchitis, colds
,
dysentery, fevers, spasmodic affection, toothaches etc
). Even when baking or sewing she passed on to her children a thousand curious odds and ends, and—although Sarah was by far the most adept at retaining facts and figures—Quinn often found himself, such as now, regurgitating a scrap of information or line of poetry that was almost certainly told to him by his mother on a distant summer's afternoon.
My spikenard sendeth forth
the smell thereof.

The next thing he knew it was dawn. Glimmers of light flitted through the interior. It reminded him of swimming in a deep and muddy lake. The barrage had stopped some time in the night and for once he couldn't even hear the distant lolling of artillery. He resolved to take advantage of the silence and lie there as inconspicuous as a rock beneath his coat. Soon enough someone would stumble over him, curse him or otherwise rouse him, and there would be no more sleep until God only knew when.
Come on, Walker. Come on, Meek.

He was aware of his breathing, but from within. The moist pull and draw of his ragged lungs. He loosened a splinter from the wooden floor. On the ground in front of him an ant zig-zagged in and out of his focus. It amazed him that such a tiny creature should have its own shadow. He heard the click of his blink. He squeezed the splinter lengthwise between his thumb and forefinger until the skin of first his forefinger and then his thumb was pierced. Twin balloons of blood swelled and burst under their own weight. What a thing. To be alive. To be alive in a time of war was to be charged, as if with electricity, with light, with violence and mercy, all those things of which men were capable.

Then he heard the sounds of birds and realised where he was. The war was over. They had won. Of course. Now anxious, he sat up. He wiped his mouth, which was spongy with drool on the damaged left side. Where was the girl? She'd told him there was a price on his head. Dear God. Of course.

He detected something moving around outside. Footsteps, voices. Sadie, if that were even her real name, had probably told them where he was. Told Dalton. They would kill him. His uncle would string him from a tree. He was a fool to have trusted the child. He was addled, that was the problem. What with the heat and everything, his distress at seeing his mother in such an awful state.