The Secret River (27 page)

Squatting down beside Dick, Thornhill shook him gently by
the shoulder.
Just joking, lad
, he said.
I beat you once, that were enough
.

The boy looked up at him, his eyes still distrustful.
Let’s try this
savage’s trick
, Thornhill said, and picked up the sticks that Dick had been rubbing away at. The first difficulty was to hold the bottom stick securely. Long Bob, or Long Jack as he was now, had sat cross-legged and held it with his feet, but Thornhill did not think his legs would bend like that, or his feet be much good as hands.

Here lad, hold this one tight
, he said, and Dick held the bottom stick with both small hands while Thornhill rolled the other one between his palms. It was harder than he could have imagined, keeping the point of the stick pressing on the same place, keeping the thing rolling smoothly between his palms, and all the time crouched over so the blood began to pound in his head.
Me bloody
hands are burning
, he panted.
Not the bloody stick
.

Dick sat hugging his knees as he watched.
Let me, Da
, he whispered at last.
Give it here
.

Trying to keep the stick moving while he gave it to Dick, Thornhill felt the boy’s small rough fingers. He glanced at him, at his face lit up with the pleasure of trying this new thing, at how intent he was. He was an odd concentrated creature.

But Dick soon flagged and Thornhill took over again, rolling the stick in one last frenzy, and there it was: the tiny vapour of dark air. Quickly he tipped the whole lot into the tinder he had waiting on a leaf. It was all just as he had seen Jack do. He got clumsily to his feet, feeling his knees creak, and began to whirl it around his head.

Perhaps too fast. The package flew open and the sticks and tinder fell out, stone-cold. Dick looked away, making himself small, for fear he might be blamed.

Thornhill hated to see that.
Must be some trick to it, lad
, he said, still panting, and suddenly saw the funny side of it. A grown man, trying a savage’s trick!

Better get him to show you again
, he said. Dick glanced up at him,
uncertain. Thornhill laid a finger to the side of his nose.
Only not a
word to your mother
.

The boy’s anxious face split into a smile. But he was still a stranger to his father.

~

Even at twelve years old, Willie still had a few shreds of London left in his memory from his first five years there. He could describe the turn of the stairway at Butler’s Buildings and the way a twisted rope of shadow fell from the balustrade. He had a memory, too, of a fearful emptiness in which voices echoed and columns rose up on either side. Thornhill thought that was the Old Bailey. He remembered it too. It was a fresh scald every time.

As far as the other children were concerned, though, the place their mother and father called Home was nothing more than a word, something they needed to be taught.

Thornhill stood outside the hut where a convenient crack brought Sal’s voice to him and listened to her putting them to bed with the same stories she had told him in the days of their new-wed happiness.
Get the grape-scissors, the old thing says
. He remembered how the bed had shaken, the two of them laughing so much.
Get the grape-scissors and cut yourself a sprig
. The children did not laugh. They had never seen scissors of any kind, much less grapes, and were wary, guessing that this story carried a meaning for their mother that they could not know.

She sang them the old London songs, her voice a wavering thread in the attentive air of the twilight forest. He realised he had not heard her singing since they had been together in the room in Mermaid Row, in the days when they were happy, the first baby on its way, the wherry at the wharf, the future waiting for them. Her singing was as tuneless now as it had been then, but hearing it filled him with sudden gladness.

Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clements
, she sang.
Ha’pennys
and farthings say the bells of St Martins
. Dan came trudging up the track from the cornfield, and Thornhill signalled him to be quiet.
St Clements, that’s in Eastcheap
, Sal was explaining.
Dick, you remember
what I telled you yesterday about Eastcheap?
Dan made a noise that was not quite a snort, but was near to it, and turned it into a sniff.

The gladness in Thornhill closed down. The song was not for pleasure, then. It did not show that happiness might be possible under this different sky. It was instruction, pure and simple, and preparation for a return.

When the song was done, she walked them through the streets of Bermondsey.
Now, to go from Butler’s Buildings to Sufferance Dock
, she started, and he could hear the delight she took, seeing it in her mind’s eye. The children were silent, listening to a prayer.
Down
Bermondsey Street, left at White’s Grounds, across Crucifix Lane and then cut
down through
Gibbon’s
Rents
.

But that was wrong, and Thornhill spoke through the crack in the wall.
It ain’t left at White’s Grounds but right, left took you into the
almshouses, remember?
She called back,
Left, Will, the almshouses was the
next street over
.

Then Dan said that it was not right or left, because the almshouses were at the end of Marrow Street, on the other side altogether from White’s Grounds.

London, that place of hard stone and cobbles, was becoming just another story, its exact shape gone fluid.

~

Towards the end of January there was a few days’ respite from the heat. Fine shreds of high cloud muted the force of the sun and the air had a weight of coolness. One pearly morning they woke to the smell of smoke. Thornhill went out and saw a long grey plume drifting up from near the blacks’ camp.

They gone and lit a fire, Mr Thornhill
, Ned said. At close quarters like this, day after day, Ned’s love of the obvious was becoming
wearying. Sal came out of the hut and stood with them, looking down at the smoke, and then the children came out one by one. Bub said what they were all thinking:
They coming to get us?
No one answered.

They could see the fire moving slowly up the slope, but this was not the wild animal of flame, pale and furious, that they created when they set alight to their heaps of cleared timber. This was a different species altogether, a small tame thing that slid from tussock to tussock, pausing to crackle and flare up for a moment and then licking tidily on.

Around the edges of the fire the blacks were standing like part of the landscape, holding leafy green branches in their hands. When a flame began to swell, whoever was closest took a leisurely step and flapped with the leaves until it subsided. Black Dick was moving around with a firestick in his hand, dabbing it at any unburnt tussocks until they began to let off clouds of white smoke. Long Jack was behind him with a whisk of leaves in his hand.

Whisker Harry stood closest to the Thornhill household. His body was very straight, the smoke swirling around his head. Now and then he called out brusquely to one of the others. Thornhill watched his profile, waiting to meet his eye and smile or gesture, but the part of New South Wales that included the Thornhill hut seemed to have become invisible to the old man.

This had the look of a routine that had happened countless times, and had nothing to do with the newcomers. As they watched, they saw the one they called Meg take a step forward towards the rim of flame and strike with a stick at something on the ground. She bent and picked up a lizard that struggled in her hand. With an unhurried movement she shook it and it hung limp. As she tucked it into the string around her hips, she called out high and shrill to Saucy Polly, and Thornhill could see Polly’s white laughing mouth as she called back and flicked her hand towards the lizard. Even the way they gestured was
different. Their hands were so fluid it seemed that they had extra joints in their fingers, and a wrist that was constructed in some other way altogether, along the lines of rope rather than bone and sinew.

Thornhill waited for them to turn towards him, hold the thing up, call out so that he could smile and call something back. Beside him, Sal seemed to have the same thought.
Polly!
she called.
Oy Polly, what are youse all up to?
And took a few steps towards them, her arm ready to wave.
Poll!
But none of the women so much as glanced at her, although it was evident from some slight alteration in the way they held themselves that they had heard.

Sal dropped her arm back to her side, came to stand by Thornhill.
She don’t know her name’s Polly
, she said, more to herself than him. He could hear an uncertainty in her tone.
I give her that
name but she don’t know that
. She was starting to believe as she explained it to herself.
She ain’t learned it yet
.

But she went on watching the women, waiting to catch their eye.

Lizard!
Ned blurted on a spray of spittle.
They’s going to eat that
lizard!

Lizard is real good!
Dick cried, but then his face closed down to take back the words. Sal glanced at him but said nothing.

The fire, having travelled up the side of the slope, was petering out along a buckle where the bones of the rocks showed through the ground. On those slabs of canted rock it faded away to smoke. The blacks had finished what they had come to do, and the shape of the place would put the fire out. They called backwards and forwards to each other and trailed back down to their camp.

The fire had left behind a blackened area a couple of hundred paces across, tussocks of coarse grass burned down to stubble, small bushes crisped up to nothing, the scattered trees singed around the base of their trunks.

Dan hawked elaborately and spat.
Burn the whole place for a
couple a lizards
, he said.
Got less sense than that babe there
.

At least the small slow fire had not been a threat. But it left an uneasiness in the Thornhills as they went about their morning. It had not been a threat, but it might have been the threat of a threat.

~

A few days after the fire, those high clouds combined and sent down rain: not the usual kind, bucketfuls hurled down out of clouds so black they were almost green, but a comfortable drizzle. Thornhill felt the dampness on his head, and for a moment was back at the steps at St-Katherine-by-the-Tower, watching the grey water roughened and Butler’s Wharf softened in the veil of rain. Sal came outside and stood bareheaded, holding her palms up to the sky as if for a blessing.

Then the heat returned, and overnight the burned patch was transformed. From the heart of each stubbled tussock long strands of green grew almost fast enough to watch and the bare dirt erupted into tiny bright leaves, like violets hugging the ground. With the tender green came the kangaroos, families bounding down from the ridge to feed late in the afternoons, springing lightly over fallen logs and rocks and becoming, as soon as they stood still, another grey rock in the dusk.

One afternoon Thornhill saw Black Dick stalking along with a small kangaroo dead over his shoulder. He felt the tongue shift in his mouth. He could not remember when he had last eaten fresh meat. They would have a chicken in the pot one day, but not until the few fowls had multiplied. He caught Sal’s eye as she came to the door of the hut. She went back inside and had the gun down as he came in.
Fresh meat, Will
, she said, her face alight with the prospect.
Think of it!

Thornhill hid himself behind a fallen tree with the gun. The
last of the sun slanted sideways, sending fingers of shadow across the grass. Six or seven kangaroos were grazing, a big buck and some females. One had a joey in her pouch that was invisible but for a single long foot sticking out.

Seen up close, a kangaroo was a creature out of a dream, put together from different parts: the ears of a dog, the muzzle of a deer, that thick tail like a furred python. Something was wrong with the proportions, so the back feet were nearly as long as the tail, while the forepaws were stolen from a child. Grazing along the grass they swung themselves forward between forepaws and tail, the tail curving, taking the weight as the animal shifted forward to another tuft.

A kangaroo was a freak of nature. But Thornhill was discovering that if a man looked at a kangaroo for long enough, it was the idea of a sheep that became peculiar.

He had his eye on the buck. Just that tail, as thick as his own forearm, would fill the pot. He felt the spit gush into his mouth at the thought of it: a savoury brown stew that would fill a man up the way the salt pork he brought back from Sydney never did.

The buck seemed to be moving closer to where Thornhill crouched behind the tree. He was getting pins and needles in his foot where it was bent under him and had been bitten on the tender flesh between his first two fingers by sharp ants. A mosquito whined at his ear but he would not wave it away. His finger on the trigger became like wood and his eye squinting along the barrel began to swim with tears. He felt invisible and soundless and hardly breathed. He had become part of the log, part of the air, part of the evening itself.

The buck was so close now that he could hear the little cropping sound as it pulled at the grass with its mouth. He could see a fly dancing around its ears and its delicate whiskers, lit up in the last of the sun. He could even see its long eyelashes. He was close, but did not trust himself or the gun to be close enough. The
animal was moving up the slope towards him. If he could remain nothing but wood and air for long enough, it would come so close he could not miss.

Finally he knew that he had to tell that wooden finger of his to pull back on the trigger, or something in him would break. He made no sound, there was no movement, only the small muscle in his finger, and yet the animal knew. Its head lifted from the grass and its ears swivelled around towards him. With one powerful thrust of its tail it sprang away, sailing over the grass, over the rocks, into the forest, and all the others bounded away after it.