Bereft (22 page)

“What's that? Inquity?”

“In
iq
uity. Evil.”

He couldn't make out her response.

“What?”

“Why doesn't God stop him from doing bad things? If he's so powerful, that is. He could have stopped the war, no one would ever get sick or die. My mother would still be here, Thomas would be back. Even your sister …” She trailed off.

Quinn sighed. “I don't know. I don't remember. I mean, there is an explanation. I don't … It's been a long time since I went to church. The war, you know, interrupted everything.”

This was not quite true; the auxiliary hospital at Harefield conducted services every Sunday in a nearby hall but the few times he'd attended he had been unable to concentrate and instead found himself staring out the windows, at the pretty nurses, at the backs of soldiers' heads. At the Front, too, there had been chaplains assigned to battalions. Once he might have been able to recall some Bible passage by way of explanation, but no longer. After all, it was an excellent question.

“I don't remember,” he repeated.

She appeared dissatisfied with this stuttering response but waited politely. Clearly, she expected him to solve this problem for her.

“Why do you want to know, anyway?” he snapped.

“Oh, you know. It's in that song.” And she spun on her bare heel and left the room.

Quinn had no idea what she was talking about. Which song? He picked up one of the knuckles from the floor. His ankles throbbed from squatting for so long. He lit no candle or lamp. Darkness silted around him, gathering in drifts along the windowsill, in the folds of his clothes and in his hair. Dusk was his favourite time of day because there was always a moment when he could imagine it might soon become lighter, not darker.

But the moment was brief and when it was almost too dark to see, he opened his hand and held his palm to his face where he could make out, much faded, a pen marking on one side of the knuckle.
SW.
He stared at it, relieved, disquieted. The girl began singing again.

Pack up your troubles in an old kitbag

And smile, smile, smile

While you've got a lucifer to light your fag

Smile, boys, that's the style

And, indeed, like a river creeping its banks, Quinn smiled. Somehow, in ways probably best not imagined, they had conjured each other. He shivered with strange pleasure.

19

L
ater that night, after eating a meal of tinned meat and stale bread, Quinn was sitting outside on a log, smoking a cigarette, when Sadie materialised beside him. As usual she was wearing her grimy dress and no shoes. Her brown limbs were almost invisible, and she initially resembled no more than an indistinct face atop a hollow dress. She had taken to wearing his abandoned khaki satchel slung over one shoulder. It gave her an idiosyncratic air, as if she might at any moment ask him for identification to process his entry into her childish land.

She handed him his army tunic, flaccid as an animal pelt in her grip. “Here. Put this on.”

“What? Why?”

“I need your help. We need to go get something. We need to be prepared for anything. It's an adventure, a mission. Like in the war. And if you wear this you can't be seen.”

Quinn drew the last from his cigarette. He could hear around him the persistent whine of mosquitoes. Despite himself, he felt a thrill. An
adventure
. He put on the tunic. “Alright. Let's go.”

Sadie clapped her hands in delight and, perhaps for the first time since they had met, she smiled with joy rather than suspicion. To Quinn's further surprise, she leaned down and pecked him on the cheek before yanking him upright. “Let's go.”

“Where are we going?”

But she had already spun on her heel and run away, legs flashing in the dark. He had difficulty keeping up with her and lost sight of her on several occasions, but she always reappeared to guide him on until, after about half an hour, they emerged onto a low hill where they slumped to catch their breath.

It took Quinn a while to orient himself, but after several minutes the bulky, indistinct shapes of Flint emerged from the gloom to his right. He made out the spire of the Anglican church on Main Street and the mechanics' institute. He heard the trickle of the river and saw lamps burning in windows. They must be on the north-west side of town, between the river and the old shafts. A dog barked, then another.

From her satchel Sadie produced an army-issue water bottle from which she sucked a noisy draught, then held it out to him.

“Where did you get that?”

“Jack Fraser. Want some?”

“You stole that, too?”

She turned to face him. Water glistened on her chin. “Mr. Fraser died in the war. It's been in a drawer for ages.”

She announced his death as if it were of no more importance than, say, if poor Jack had lost a loaf of bread. He supposed it was more unusual these days to hear of a young man alive and well.

He took the canister and drank. “Who else died? In the war, I mean.”

Sadie made a world-weary face. As a girl might skitter about in her mother's shoes, it was an adult expression she was yet to master, and it could have been comical were it not for the fact that it indicated the dead were too numerous to name.

“Well,” she began, ticking the names off her fingers, “Billy Quail got shot. Robert Sully. Mr. Gollings from out near Jersey Creek. Jack Fletcher and Graeme Fletcher, the butcher's boys.” She clamped a hand over her mouth to smother a nervous giggle. “One of the Williams boys came back, but his face is all
melted
. I saw him and he looked at me, and I screamed and ran off and tripped. I hurt my wrist.” She held up the underside of one hand to show him.

Quinn recalled seeing similar cot cases. Men with pummelled faces. Gowned creatures being wheeled down halls. The limbless and the mute. The wards at Harefield were kept dim, but he sensed the swaddled creatures watching him with their begging eyes as he passed. He had heard doctors were fitting masks of tin on which were moulded and painted with those features blasted off—eyes, noses, chins, cheeks, ears—and he was appalled at the thought of men being transformed into likenesses of the very machines that had mutilated them.

Sadie produced a brass tube he recognised as a folded-up telescope. Expertly, she extended the three drawers, lay on her front and scanned the town for several minutes, grunting every few seconds with recognition. Then she passed the telescope to Quinn, who raised it to his right eye.

It took a few seconds to adjust to the vertiginous sensation of seeing the world so enlarged and unwieldy. He saw a blur of light, a bicycle wheel. A limp Union Jack on a pole. Moonlight shone on Sully the blacksmith's roof on Gully Road. Three men were standing on the street outside The Mail Hotel under a gas lantern. One of them laughed and leaned down to slap his thigh. No sound reached Quinn, of course. Another fellow gulped his beer and went back inside with a rollicking gait he would have assumed was of drunkenness but for the realisation the man tottered on a wooden leg.

Sadie stood and brushed grass from her dress. “Come on,” she said as she grabbed the telescope and stuffed it into her satchel. Without speaking, they trotted in the damp shadows of a stand of pines and skirted an open field before sneaking through a paddock and plunging into the empty streets of that village of widows.

Sadie led him along the lower end of Main Street where it dwindled almost to nothing. They cut through the orchard beside the Anglican church. She waited for him to wriggle though the wire fence and, when he was through, took his hand and smiled, twin gestures that prompted in him an almost unbearable stab of joy. He felt like laughing. Her hand was hot and small and fierce in his own. The air in the orchard was heavy with the smell of overripe fruit. Although he had no idea what they were doing, he was having fun for the first time in years.

Hand in hand they moved—over another fence, through the dusty schoolyard, across Church Street and into rambling gardens on Orchard Street. Quinn heard the flutter of chickens. Crickets suspended their chirruping as they passed. Then across Fletcher Street and through another fence. Sadie paused on her haunches and placed a finger to her lips. Quinn crouched beside her and was at once overwhelmed by a sharp perfume. They were beneath an apple tree, and the ground was littered with flowers and fruit.

Quinn brushed a spider web from his face and peered up through the darkness. Beyond the shelter of the apple tree was a lawn that glowed frosty grey in the moonlight. After a minute he made out the pale banisters of some back steps and the glint of a window behind a bulge of a daisy bush. A white chair on the veranda. He turned to Sadie. “Where are we? What are we doing?”

She didn't answer. Instead, she headed towards the house, skirting the lawn by keeping to the ragged flowerbed. Quinn followed. They stopped again on the veranda.

“Mrs. Higgins lives here now,” Sadie informed him. “But she plays bridge tonight with the minister's wife.” She crept forward, opened the back door, motioned for him to follow and slipped inside, as if into water.

Quinn looked around. He was nervous. The cross on his chest itched. Nearby, perhaps only a few houses away, a dog barked. The slap of a screen door, then silence. He stepped into the cool house, closed the door behind him and waited to acclimatise to this fresh darkness.

Mrs. Higgins' house smelled of wood polish and dried roses. Sadie emerged from the gloom, took his hand and led him down the hall. Crockery on a sideboard rattled as they passed. By now Quinn's eyes had adjusted. On a mantel over a fireplace was a cluster of silver-framed photographs. Sadie drew him over to a corner where she tugged at something from underneath a glass-fronted bureau. Their twin shadowy reflections bobbed in the glass in front of them like apparitions.

“See,” she hissed, “it's stuck.”

Quinn kneeled on the wooden floor and grasped a small, brass handle. “What is it?”

“A box.”

“I can see that. What's in it?”

“We got to drag it out to open it.”

“What's inside?”

“Pull it
out
.”

Exasperated, Quinn yanked until he freed the box. Something tumbled off the bureau and rolled behind a curtain. They paused instinctively before wrestling again with the box. When it was free, he undid the metal hasps but discovered it was locked.

From her knapsack, Sadie produced a large screwdriver. “Here. Try this.”

Quinn was impressed. He jammed the tool's narrow point beneath the lid, stood and rested his weight on the handle until the box splintered open. Sadie shuffled forward on hands and knees and rummaged through its contents.

But then, even through his dulled hearing, Quinn heard the noise of a shoe scraping against a step. Then another. Mrs. Higgins, presumably. Sadie must have heard it, too. She stood. He felt the trembling heat of her body. He sensed her watching him, the pale glow of her face in his peripheral vision. She held a bundle of clothes or sheets to her stomach.

“What about that bloody bridge game?” he whispered. The rattle of a handle, followed by a door creaking open, the front door of this very house, only ten feet away. Then, most chilling of all, tittering voices. Not a person. Worse.
People
.

20

Q
uinn looked at Sadie for a clue as to what on earth they should do. Her elfin features were pinched with fear. On the other side of the wall, a woman giggled and said,
Watch out
there.
A low voice. The front door slammed shut and prompted a fresh round of laughter. Again the other, deeper voice. A man's. Quinn was unable to move. An oblong wedge of moonlight fell across the dining table and illuminated a basket of fruit.

Silence. Had they been caught?

Then voices again, shuffling footsteps followed by a knock, perhaps that of a shoe heel on skirting board. The man spoke. Quinn was unable to understand but recognised the sticky drawl at once, and knew by the way her head snapped to one side that Sadie did, too. Robert Dalton. His heart clenched.