Bereft (16 page)

Later, Quinn lay awake as long as he could, but finally succumbed to sleep. In the night he woke gasping for breath, the remnants of unpleasant dreams still cobwebbed about his hair and neck. His first thought was that she had stabbed him. He unbuttoned his tunic and expected to feel the dull stick of blood on his fingers. It was dark. Hot and dark. Dark and hot. A churning pain in his guts. He curled up as tight as he could on the wooden floor, made a fraying ball of himself, the way he'd seen injured men do. He heard the dull
pad pad pad
of the girl's bare feet. The mad girl, whatever was her name. Sadie. Shit. Coming for him. Imagine surviving all he had survived to be stabbed in the stomach by a crazed orphan girl.

He floundered about for something he might use as a weapon but could find nothing. He was hopelessly disoriented. He bumped his head against the iron leg of the stove. He slithered over the boards, aiming for the corner. The revolver. Where was his revolver? Still he fumbled in his pockets. That's right. The revolver was lost.

Then she was beside him, visible at first as an outline, the dull shine of her face against the greater darkness, saying things he couldn't hear above the clamour of his breathing. He shuffled backwards and flung out a hand to ward her off, but she was stronger than he would have thought—or he, weaker—and, as his breathing slowed and he gave up struggling, he heard beyond the roar of his partial deafness that she wasn't saying anything in particular, at least not words, just a soft
shhh
shhh shhh.

The girl scampered away and returned a minute later. She lit the candle and stirred liquid in a tin mug with one finger. She held the mug to his mouth. “Drink this.”

The mug contained a murky fluid that smelled of nothing in particular, perhaps the slight whiff of a chemist's.

“Bicarb and water,” she said. “Best thing to take if you've been gassed. I heard Tom Smith talking about it. I got a whole box of it for you.”

Quinn sniffed it, then drank. The mixture was mildly bitter, but the pain in his stomach eased. Sadie had a hand cupped against the back of his head to help him drink. Her hands were still redolent of the orange they had eaten earlier, her breath a freshly watered orchard. Weeping now and spluttering, he gulped the concoction. His gratitude was pathetic. He could not recall the last time anyone had cared for him in such a manner. Even the nurses at Harefield were brisk, their English jolliness stretched tight across the wards. And fair enough: men died all the time, were trundled out daily under sheets or sent back to France as soon as they could walk.

Some minutes passed before Sadie shifted herself free of him.

“Thank you,” he said.

She shuffled across the floor and he heard the granular strike of a match as she lit another candle. A halo of light pooled around her and threw her shadow high onto the wall behind. The knife was still in her fist.

“Now you have to do something for me,” she said.

14

Q
uinn kneeled on the floor, bare-chested, his dirty singlet beside him. Sweat collected in the folds of his stomach. With his left hand he pulled his chest skin taut against the hull of his ribs. Sadie, girlish again, squatted nearby, watching him, chin cupped in her hands. He didn't know why he had agreed to her request but hoped it might, at least, ease her evident distress. He held the knife in his free hand and motioned with it, two quick strokes above his shining chest. “Here? Like this?”

She nodded.

“Are you sure I need to do this? Can't you take my word—”

“No.”

“This is rather strange, that's all.”

“Come on. Do it.”

Bats squeaked in the trees outside. He imagined an ancient man rapidly opening and closing dozens of tiny cabinet doors on rusted hinges, seeking something he had misplaced. Very little was out of the question these days. He pressed the blade to his skin and carved a jagged cross into his chest. Nothing for a second—then black blood.

On the troopship to the Middle East for training, soldiers had carved designs into their skin and filled the wound with a paste made from soot and oil, a scrimshaw tattoo forever on their bodies. They engraved the names of their sweethearts, their mothers, the town they were from or the battalion to which they now belonged. But this, what Sadie demanded of him, this was different—part punishment, part promise.

He gestured for her to pass him the moist cloth she had ready to wipe away the blood, but she shook her head.

“You got to say the words or it doesn't mean anything.”

Quinn was reminded of Sarah and the way little girls always had elaborate rules for things that were impossible to know in advance. Often, games were only excuses for a new set of behavioural guidelines, and often stalled on the finer points of the correct way to play hide-and-seek or snap. One spring day, Sarah refused to eat or drink until Quinn and a furious William had dressed as sprites so they could act out a poem she had written about a troupe of acrobats who encountered a mysterious tribe. As always, the thought of his sister prompted in him an odd sensation, as if a trough had opened inside him, one so deep it might swallow him altogether.

By now the blood from his two cuts had dribbled down to his stomach. Still on his knees, he straightened to prevent it staining his trousers, but it was too late. The wool at his waist was already darkening. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said. “Now pass me that cloth.”

Sadie grinned and crawled over to him. From a shallow tray of water she drew the soaking cloth. This she applied to his skin, tenderly at first, barely touching him, then harder, wiping away the blood that had begun to coagulate in the hair of his chest. The wounds were not painful and felt to Quinn like some sort of release. As he watched Sadie bent to her task, he half expected to see steam sighing from the two raw gills now carved into his flesh.

The following morning, Quinn noticed an odd bundle strung from one of the eaves, the unravelled remnants, or so it first looked, of a bird's nest. Closer inspection revealed the package to have been constructed from several thin bones, indeed perhaps those of a bird, bound together with black hair and lengths of dried wheat grass. The frail, prehistoric-looking object crackled in his hands. He scanned the porch eaves and located two more, each hanging like the first by a length of cotton from a beam. Sadie was out somewhere. He had not seen her since he woke. He took down the bundles and pondered them in his palm before putting them back.

When she returned later that afternoon, he asked her about them, but she offered no explanation. She stared at him with her sooty eyes. “You didn't do anything to them, did you?”

“No.”

“Don't touch them. They're important.”

“But what are they?”

She put down the apple she had been eating. “Leave them exactly where they are. Don't even touch them.”

With his vision now attuned to the offerings, he began to spy them everywhere. She must have been fashioning them for years. Here and there in the bushland around the shack, he stumbled across Lilliputian cairns of rocks and stones. Clumps of hair, fingernail clippings and torn shards of photographs leaked from the gaps between them. He found clusters of bones arranged in patterns on the ground, the cuticles of insects. Once, even a brass candlestick, its stem stuffed with wax and shredded cloth. An old medicine jar crammed with animal teeth and kangaroo paws. Arranged on windowsills and the shack floor were patterns of string and dry grass, mounds of desiccated snail shells. A red marble hung from a tree on a length of twine where it glowed in the afternoon light like a globule of blood.

One day, several hundred yards from the house, he found a wattle tree adorned not only with its brushy yellow flowers but also with what he took to be dozens of children's fingers. He remembered what his mother had said about Mrs. Fox's involvement in witchcraft. He approached with trepidation and was relieved to discover the pale cylinders to be rolled pages of the Bible, bound with hair. The ends of each were crimped shut.

He stood there for some time admiring her handiwork, which must have taken hours to accomplish. The air shrilled with cicadas. He plucked a tube from the tree, picked apart the seam and poured the contents into his palm. It contained ash, seeds and pebbles, an empty silver locket. The page was from the Book of Jeremiah.
I will not cause mine anger to fall upon
you: for I am merciful, saith the Lord.
Mindful of her warnings, he placed it back as carefully as he could. Sweat coursed down his face and dried gritty as salt on his lips.

Sadie stole some civilian clothes for him. A white shirt, dark trousers and a jacket. Each item was worn, faded in places, but in reasonable condition. The clothes were light against his body, insubstantial. He didn't ask where she got them.

He visited his mother every day. Her health continued to deteriorate and mostly she was unable to carry on any conversation. He read to her, as she had to him and his siblings when they were ill, but it was unclear what she understood or whether his visits were beneficial. Often they sat without speaking, and it was these occasions that Quinn feared the most. Not only was he terrified for his mother's health, but during these grim silences he was most aware of phantoms pressing against the outer panes of his memory.

At dusk, Quinn and Sadie sat outside to catch the last of the light. It was the best time of day. Birds frolicked through the air and the hot afternoon grew sleepy and docile. Sadie often sat on a stump with her chin cupped in one hand and told him stories: of the blackfellas she had once seen dragging the carcass of a kangaroo through the bush, how they gibbered and menaced her; that Kimberley Porteous talked every night to a photograph of her late husband, Reginald, who was killed by Germans in France; how Billy Davis sometimes met Miss Haylock by the river on summer nights. She knew everything private of the townsfolk, hoarded lives, could see into the very chamber of people's hearts.

Later, when the moon rose, they went inside, lit candles and devoured whatever food they had. Quinn still slept on the bed he had made of his trench coat while Sadie, he'd since discovered, nestled in a crawlspace she had dug out beneath some broken floorboards, with a blanket and a knife for comfort.

He still feared this mysterious whelp, this Sadie Fox, in ways he was unable to define. In the middle of the night he heard her talking to herself, praying, whispering phrases she had half heard from church services.
Pray my soul to keep. Though I walk through the shadow of the valley
of death. Lord is a shepherd.
Sometimes he lifted the broken board and watched her sleeping among the scraps of clothes and apple cores and chicken bones. He observed the twitch of her brow and the flex of her toe, the Morse code of her dreaming that played along her body.

But she watched him, too. Sometimes he opened his eyes at night to see her, visible at first as two large, milky pearls blinking in the dark. Then, depending on the size of the moon, perhaps the outline of her jaw or the dull shine of her hair, the glint of her knife. The first time this happened they watched each other in silence: Quinn on his side on the floor; she, a dislodged gargoyle by the door with her arms wrapped around her knees. Although he was certain she knew he was awake, they didn't acknowledge each other then, or the next day.