Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  Luca throws his chin upwards in reproach. ‘Three years,’ he says, ‘but I been gone two now, so it’s almost wiped out. I don’t recognize you, Jonny Jonny Jonny. That’s why I had to make sure.’

  Jon tells him he’s only been in the Mission a year, and the wild boy says he reckoned as much; there’s hardly a scar on Jon Heather that wouldn’t wash off in a good thunderstorm. Jon says there are precious few thunderstorms here, but the wild boy says that isn’t true of all the places he’s been.

  ‘They still talk about me, do they?’

  Jon isn’t sure whether he ought to say yes or not. Perhaps it’s a matter of pride. ‘I sort of keep myself to myself,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to have rules.’

  Luca slumps, dramatically, onto a stone. When he lands, a pain ricochets up his bad leg, and his face contorts. ‘I hate rules.’

  ‘I mean rules for yourself,’ says Jon. ‘Not rules Judah Reed forces on you.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like — if you’re angry at them, don’t let them know you’re angry. I did that once and they lined all the boys up to beat me. Or — if you steal something, don’t brag about it. There’ll be a tell-tale waiting to drop you in it. You’ve got to keep it inside.’

  ‘What else?’

  Jon thinks. He hasn’t quite put this one into words. ‘Rule two …’ he says. ‘What you thought the first time, that’s the thing to think the rest of the time. Otherwise you’ll start to think it’s OK to be beaten, if it’s just a little beating. Then you’ll think it’s OK to have a bigger beating, just so long as it’s not a really big beating. Then you’ll …’

  Luca’s face scrunches. ‘Those seem like good rules.’

  Jon shrugs. ‘It’s just things I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘I wish I’d had those rules. Then maybe …’ Luca stops. ‘They got you yet?’

  ‘They got me after I ran away, when I wouldn’t hit George.’

  ‘They got George, then?’

  ‘He wets the bed.’

  ‘So they tied him to the tree?

  It is the beginning of a story Jon has never heard. He has seen boys taken into Judah Reed’s office to meet the end of a stock whip but he has never seen them taken into the shadow wood and tied to a tree.

  ‘I …’

  ‘There was a boy, when I was in the Mission. Kept getting the shits. He’d be in the fields or rolling up grain and he’d get the ache and want to go off to the long drop. But they’d be waiting for him when he got back and clout him round the ear for skipping out.’ Luca wears a strange expression, as if he is almost wistful. ‘It got that he was too scared to go to the shitter at all, so one day he just let it all fly. We were cutting grass and suddenly it was all down his legs and out of his short trousers … That’s when the cottage mother saw him. She made one of the other boys wipe him down like he was a baby, but then he still had to go to Judah Reed. Well, Judah Reed’ll swing his hockey stick at you all day long, ’til you promise you’ll be a strong old Aussie, but there’s some times he doesn’t like getting his hands filthy. So, instead of beating this boy, he led him up into the shadow wood and just …’

  ‘Tied him to a tree?’

  ‘It’s what happens if you’re so bad a beating doesn’t make it better. There’s some boys get to like beatings, ’cause if you like them it means Judah Reed can’t bother you anymore. But a couple of nights tied to a tree, with nothing to eat and no one to help you, and you soon learn.’

  Jon does not want to know the answer, but tentatively he asks, ‘What happened to that boy?’

  ‘Well, that’s just the thing. We all knew he was tied up in the wood. First night, I could even hear him crying. He cried a bit the next night too and one of the men in black, this old sort who was headmaster before Judah Reed, got so angry hearing him cry he said he was going to give him something to cry about. The Mission isn’t for little cowards, see. But when he went up to give that boy his medicine, he wasn’t even there.’

  Jon Heather feels an unseasonal chill. ‘Not there?’

  ‘Not even in the wood.’

  Emboldened, Jon pitches forward. ‘He got out, didn’t he? Just like you?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Luca snorts. ‘That boy wasn’t for running. He was just for crying and shitting.’

  ‘But if he didn’t get out, what happened to …’

  ‘No one went looking. There was one boy went to ask Judah Reed, but he had a bleeding backside that night, and he never went to ask again.’

  ‘Somebody has to …’

  ‘I can tell you what I reckon, for what it’s worth.’

  Jon’s eyes beg it, but his lips will not ask the question.

  ‘Somebody came in those woods and got him. Snatched him from right under the nose of Judah Reed and the rest. Some rock spider got in those woods and whisked him away.’

  There it is again: rock spider, the same words Tommy Crowe used.

  ‘Probably one of the honoured guests, needed a boy on his own farm.’

  ‘Why do you call them rock spiders?’ Jon Heather whispers.

  ‘Well,’ Luca says, ‘a rock spider, see, he likes to get himself into little cracks as well.’

  The smell of the chicken is strong now, and the night flies have descended.

  ‘Don’t you ever let them give you your medicine, Jonny. Stock whips or hockey sticks, take it like you have to. But don’t go into those woods with them. There’s worse things than Judah Reed, and them woods are being watched.’

  The chicken is almost ready. Luca digs it up, prising up hot stones with a stick, and pulls out hunks of blackened flesh. He eats it ravenously, yowling from the heat, and licking blood and grease from his fingers. The insides of the hunks are barely cooked, but Jon eats them all the same; it’s still better than Mission broth.

  There are a hundred more questions Jon Heather needs to ask. Things he needs to know. There are five more years until he is old enough to leave the Mission. A boy cannot hunker down and barrel on for five years, not like he could for two months at the Home in Leeds. If it was hazings and hard work, perhaps it could be all right, even without a mother and a father and two sisters who love him; if it is more, Jon Heather needs to know.

  ‘Did you …’ he hesitates, unsure if he should ask, ‘… ever go out with an honoured guest?’

  Luca is gnawing on a leg bone but drops it from his lips. ‘Did you?’

  Jon Heather shakes his head.

  ‘The trick is not to look them in the eye. They’ll hardly see you, when they come round, if you don’t look them in the eye. There’s some boys think it’ll be a treat to go with an honoured guest, get out of the Mission even for a day … but they’re the boys who’ll end up going missing in the woods, you mark it down.’

  For a moment, Luca returns to his chicken leg.

  ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘I didn’t want to.’

  Jon sits in silence.

  ‘Yeah,’ Luca finally whispers. ‘I had to go with an honoured guest once. Is that what you wanted to know?’

  ‘No …’

  ‘They’d come round, looking for boys to help on their farms. They even pay Judah Reed for it. I know, ’cause I had to carry the envelope, stuffed with shillings. There was a farm not far from here. A man called Richardson and a bunch of blacks.’

  Jon’s mind whirrs. Images flash through his mind. ‘A man named Cormac Tate? Big white whiskers …’

  Luca shakes his head. ‘Not there. They had me in the fields. They had a man in black coming to check up … and …’

  The chicken bone snaps in Luca’s hand, drawing blood on its jagged ends. With a guttural snort, he tosses it into the scrub.

  ‘I tried my best, Jonny. Honest I did. I did it all like they wanted, ’cause by then I knew all about honoured guests. But …’ He cocks his head to one side, revealing his ragged, misshapen ear. ‘See this? That was the first time I ran. I made it back to the Mission, went up to those sandstone shacks.
’ His voice breaks. ‘I told Judah Reed every damn thing they’d done, and do you know what he did?’

  Jon can only mouth the word ‘no’.

  ‘He put me on his knee and gave me six more for good measure. Those men on that farm were helping me, he said. Didn’t matter what they did to me, every time I looked at them. If they were beating me, it was for my own good. I had to learn.’ Luca’s eyes are wide but there are no tears in them. He wrenches off another handful of the chicken and suckles on blackened flesh. ‘Well, I learned, Jonny. I learned what happens when you ask Judah Reed for help.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Luca …’

  ‘Pah!’ Luca snorts. ‘Sorry doesn’t cut it, not if you haven’t even been got.’ He pauses, seems to calm down. His whole body slouches. ‘It’s me who’s sorry, Jonny. I don’t want you to get got.’

  Jon looks at the stars, trying to gauge the time. When Luca sees what he’s doing, he starts nodding, like a demented clockwork toy. He remembers only too well what risks Jon is taking, creeping out after dark.

  ‘You got to go,’ he whispers, dragging his leg around the edge of the camp.

  ‘Did you …’ Jon doesn’t know how to phrase it; it might almost be an insult. ‘Did you want to come in?’

  Luca reels back and spits out a tiny wing bone he’s been sucking. He turns around, bends over, shoves his shoulder in Jon’s face. Rising from the skin is a cross-hatch of welts, as if a stock whip had once been taken to him with an artist’s precision. ‘Ask it again,’ he says.

  Suddenly, Jon doesn’t want to.

  ‘Haven’t you been listening? I didn’t come back to the Mission,’ he insists. ‘I came back once and I won’t do it again. And if those dirty old men get me again, I’ll know who sent them.’ Luca slumps, folds his arms tight across his chest. ‘I brought you a goanna!’ he blurts out, as if it is some kind of blood oath.

  ‘I just thought, if you’d been running so long, why would you …’

  Luca’s eyes brighten, like an owl at the sound of a mouse.

  ‘That’s the thing, Jonny Jonny Jonny. I been wandering forever, and scrapping from stations and sleeping in holes, like that boy in the story they all tell. And …’ He stalls. ‘I never wanted to, but I been drifting back this way ever since it happened …’ He lifts his leg. In the fading glow of the stones, it has an unearthly pallor. Jon sees, for the first time, that there are scars higher up too, where the boy’s underpants are fraying.

  ‘You been in the wars out there?’ he begins. It is an old saying, one of his mother’s, and he is surprised to hear it come from his own tongue.

  ‘Oh no,’ chitters Luca. ‘I got them long before I ever ran away. I was one of the baddest boys ever sent to the Mission. But this …’ His body doubles over and he sniffs at the leg. As far as Jon can tell, the wound isn’t open; just a myriad of different colours, not one of them right. ‘Something’s wrong,’ he says. ‘Jonny Jonny Jonny, I think I need help.’

  IX

  ‘You see that?’ says Tommy Crowe, squinting into the dust. He and a gang of boys have been ferrying a pile of tall karri trunks across the breadth of the Mission, a full day sweating under the interminable sun. In the woodworking sheds, boys are measuring them up and cutting them down to size, while another crew hauls them further, over to the sandstone construction. The foundations are laid now, and a skeleton is growing up, ready to be filled with the piles of bricks the little ones are crafting. If you are clever, you can see the pattern of the rooms within, like an archaeological dig: here, the new offices for Judah Reed; here, a little room where bad boys can be kept until they have learnt their lesson.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Jon Heather. He peers, with a hand cupped to his eyes, into the distance. Out there, a dust cloud is stirring. It seems to be circling the Mission, growing closer like the tightening of a noose. Jon Heather narrows his eyes, can almost make out the angular shape of the wagon, a raggedy cargo heaped up in back.

  ‘Jon Heather,’ Tommy Crowe says. ‘This can’t be good.’

  Indeed it cannot; the dust cloud heralds Judah Reed’s return.

  This year, there are twenty-three new boys and girls to join the Mission. Last year, there were seventeen. Six lost children might not sound much, but to Jon it means everything: the Children’s Crusade is growing bigger, like a colony of ants getting more aggressive and intelligent as their numbers swell.

  Jon watches as the boys and girls are hauled out of the utes, stripped of their cardboard suitcases, and sent off to their new dormitories. Watching them go, Judah Reed stands high on one of the flatbeds, gazing over the Mission.

  When he steps down, a little one rushes to help him with his knapsack. Judah Reed reaches down and ruffles the boy’s hair. When his fingers hover over the scalp, Jon turns away, cannot bear to see. It will only, he thinks, be a few short weeks before that same boy is in the sandstone hut, begging to go home.

  ‘It feels good to be back,’ says Judah Reed, marching into the Mission. ‘Breathe it in, boys! The smell of home.’

  Jon looks up, feels the same fluttering in his chest that he felt that day he got hazed. He could march up to Judah Reed right now, spit in his eye, pile all the little ones back into the ute and drive straight back into the desert. But — you’ve got to have rules. He breathes it in, calms down. Let it fester inside. There is a bigger problem, now, than whether he wants to lash out at Judah Reed or not. Luca is depending on him — and, suddenly, sneaking food out at night is going to be a very different game.

  George reaches down and grabs hold of another stick in his pudgy fist. Something black and horrid scuttles out of the sand, and instinctively he throws the stick down. He’s never seen a spider quite that big before. Suddenly ashamed that he’s so afraid, he picks the stick back up and prods at where the spider stands. Too late, he realizes how fiercely he has poked. He lifts the stick up to the light and marvels at a spider skewered, just like a dragon with a spear.

  He is standing that way when the little one, Martin, jumps up to tug on his sleeve.

  Martin has a mop of dirty ginger hair, and a nose permanently encrusted with all kinds of grime. ‘I’ve got a message,’ he proudly whispers.

  George flings the spidery stick down, as if caught with his hand in a contraband biscuit tin. ‘For me?’

  The little one presses a finger to his lips. From this, George deduces, it must be a secret.

  ‘We’re meant to be on muster,’ he whispers. Ever since they watched Judah Reed roll in with the new boys, George has been careful to get on with his work and not look anyone in the eye. In truth, there was something reassuring about seeing the new boys arrive; it’s never good to be the newest, wherever you are.

  ‘He says it’s urgent,’ the little one answers.

  George can’t resist. He takes Martin’s hand and finds himself dragged along, down to where Jon Heather’s at work in the dairy. At first he thinks it must be Jon who wants to see him — perhaps there’s an epic game of stones going on — but Martin leads him on, down to the furthest fringe of shadow wood. George stops dead. The little one tugs at his hand, but he won’t be moved. He begins to tremble.

  Then suddenly, he takes off. Feet flying high, he barrels over the field, tumbling more than once but scrambling right back to his feet. The little one rushes to keep up — but nothing could be faster than George today.

  At last, he cannonballs into the boy standing at the edge of the shadow wood. The boy is strong, but still has to strain not to fall over. He starts laughing, wild and free, great whoops that have never before been heard in the Mission. George strains at his shirt, smothering him in the embrace.

  ‘Georgie boy,’ Peter says, kneading a watery eye. ‘It’s good to see you too.’

  ‘I thought you was dead!’

  Peter’s face wrinkles. ‘Dead?’

  ‘Maybe not dead.’

  ‘You never thought I was dead.’

  George releases his hold, shrugs his chubby shoulders. ‘I didn’t think
I’d see you again.’

  ‘Well, you have. Chin up, Georgie! It’s Australia — it isn’t hell.’ He looks down at the little one. ‘Go on, hop it!’

  ‘You promised!’ the little one squeaks.

  Peter fishes in a pocket and produces something that glistens like the treasure at the heart of an Incan tomb: a hunk of toffee. He throws it up in the air twice, and then pats it towards the little one. It falls in the dirt, but that doesn’t matter; he’s up and away with it almost instantly, hollering for his brothers.

  ‘Come on, Georgie,’ says Peter, hunching so that he is George’s height. ‘I don’t want to be seen …’

  He inches towards the shadow wood, but George tugs him back. He shakes his head, fierce in a way Peter has never seen before. It strikes Peter, then, how much George has grown. Somehow he’s stayed chubby, but he’s taller now, his hair entangled in great, grubby knots.

  ‘Is there a place we can go?’

  ‘A place?’

  A strange look has ghosted over Peter’s face. ‘I don’t want them catching me. Cormac Tate says …’

  George’s face has crumpled, as if to reflect Peter’s own.

  ‘Don’t bother, Georgie. It’s just …’ For the first time, Peter has the terrible feeling of being in a place of which he knows nothing. It is worse, he decides, than those first days after they came ashore. At least, then, everything was new: the sun, the sand, the sky. The world out there, on the other side of the shadow wood, he understands; in here, it is different — and he didn’t even have to break down a wall, or scramble through a fence.

  ‘Where’s Jon Heather?’

  George suddenly lets go of Peter’s hand. ‘You came to see Jon?’

  ‘Not on your life, George. I came to see you. It’s been a whole year, Georgie. You’re getting all growed up. But, if Jon Heather’s here, there’s something I need to ask him.’

  ‘You can ask me!’ George beams.

  ‘That I could. But this is going to get someone in a lot of trouble. And …’ He winks, conspiratorially. ‘… I’d rather that person was Jon Heather.’