Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  ‘I know you’d never leave Jon Heather,’ Cormac says. ‘But, look, I’d miss the hell out of you if you ever made it back to England.’

  Pete considers it for the longest time. ‘We’re not going anywhere fast,’ he finally says. ‘Those savings of mine I mentioned — Cormac, between you and me, they wouldn’t even pay for this dinner.’

  Jon Heather has known a host of aboriginal stockmen and shearers, and he hasn’t once known any of them needing protection. Jon once saw Booty splint a wounded stockman’s leg and ride, without stopping, eighteen hours to bring back help. Up here, it’s those city boys who most likely need looking after.

  He stops where the road bends around the bay, watches Mr Cook duck into the doorway of a corrugated office and come out again, with a sheaf of papers under one arm. Somewhere south of Chinatown and the Old Arabia hotel, he pauses outside a place that proclaims to be a hospital, its low buildings looking out over the bay’s turquoise water. Jon has never been inside a hospital. He fractured ribs once, taking a tumble from a horse — but the foreman’s wife strapped him up and told him he would be ready to ride again in a matter of days. He supposes hospitals are places where good things happen — but, all the same, he shudders at the thought of walking inside.

  Mr Cook is inside for half an hour, probably more. When he emerges, he is not alone. At his side, there stands a man in uniform: not a doctor, nor a soldier. Possibly a policeman, though Jon hasn’t had cause to cross their paths since he left the Mission. Soon, a nurse joins them. Holding each of her hands, there are two little children. Jon judges them to be eight and nine years old. They are both girls, with pale black skin and features softer than Jon might have expected. They wear the same clothes: grey dresses and long white stockings, ill-fitting and obviously uncomfortable.

  Jon does not register at first that they are cowering, because they are children and children are always cowering.

  Mr Cook drops to one knee. He is slightly shorter than the elder girl, and slightly taller than the younger. He smiles a benevolent smile.

  Underneath the blossoms where he lingers, Jon Heather stops himself from crying out. He knows that sort of smile. It is the smile that tells you — bad boys must take their medicine.

  Mr Cook thanks the nurse, takes the girls’ hands and, with the policeman beside him, escorts them across the yard to a police ute that is waiting there. It is much like the wagon Jon and Pete have been scouring the continent in, but with four seats up front instead of two. Were it not for the cage that covers the flatbed, Jon might have thought them the same model.

  The girls are instructed to climb inside. They have obviously done this before, for they go without complaint. It was ever thus, Jon remembers: you cry and nothing happens; you scratch and bite and nothing happens; at last, you are still and silent and as obedient as they demand.

  Mr Cook climbs in the cab and the engine rumbles. Quickly, Jon crosses the dusty road, skittering in front of a fisherman’s wagon to a blaring of horns. When he reaches the opposite track, he is close enough to see the girls’ faces through the wire. The older has her head tucked into the points of her knees, but the younger one throws her head around, snapping at every movement in the corner of her eye.

  Their eyes do not meet Jon’s as the police ute pulls away. He only imagines that they do. It is what he will tell Pete. Their eyes met mine and, damn it Peter, they knew.

  He turns and slopes across the yards into the hospital. The place has a foul smell, like the cloakroom to a dormitory full of bedwetters. Somebody mistakes him for a patient. Somebody else barks out: in here, you have to wear boots. He ignores them both, because he has seen exactly who he wanted.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he says. He remembers how his mother once taught him manners, and summons it all up. ‘I’m terribly sorry. I was looking for Mr Cook, but I think I might be too late.’

  The nurse has a nonplussed look. ‘He just left,’ she finally says. ‘You might catch him at the lock-up. I don’t think he’s going anywhere for a few days.’

  She has a nice tone, mothering almost.

  ‘And … the little girls?’

  ‘Scared,’ she says. ‘But the poor darlings always are. They’ll be good as new once they’re settled.’

  Probably Jon should not ask anything else. Yet sometimes you just want to pick at the scab and see what is bubbling underneath. ‘Settled where?’

  ‘I think …’ She hesitates, uncertain if she is betraying a trust. When she looks at Jon, though, she is certain he could not mean anybody any harm; nobody with such boyish eyes could hurt a flea. ‘They have a Home for them, somewhere in the south. I wouldn’t know myself, but Mr Cook says it’s an excellent place, where they can get instruction. By the time they’re finished, by all accounts, you wouldn’t know they were from the bush at all. Just the thing for those sort of girls.’

  She must have said something wrong, because Jon’s brow creases.

  ‘You must think me awfully stupid, but … what sort of girls are they?’

  Now the nurse understands. He is playing a game with her. She will tell her sister about this strange boy tonight. ‘Bush girls,’ she explains. ‘You can’t just leave them out there, not when there’s so much more they could have. They have to be rescued. Just to think of them out there, rolling in the dirt …’ She lifts a hand to her breast. ‘It breaks the heart.’

  Jon thinks of Booty, the other blacks with whom he’s worked. ‘What about their mothers?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh,’ the nurse says, vaguely disinterested. ‘I’m sure they want what’s best.’

  Moments later, Jon Heather stands on the hospital steps, watching the town slope sluggishly by. Black faces. White faces. Chinamen and Japanese. It is a good thing that he came to this town. Sometimes, you follow the work — but sometimes there’s a job to be done and the work finds you.

  Pete and Cormac Tate have been back in the Old Arabia hotel for two hours, bitching about the flies and the heat, when Jon Heather shows himself. For some reason, Dog is trotting at his heel, head bouncing proudly and tail erect. Though Pete calls out to him, Jon does not look around; Dog gives him a cursory glance and follows Jon up the stairs.

  At the counter, Megan calls over: ‘Dad doesn’t like dogs in here, you know.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ answers Pete. ‘Dog’s barely half a dog in any case. He’s most of a dingo.’

  ‘Then why do you call him Dog?’

  ‘Got to be one thing or another. That’s what old Cormac says.’

  Jon reappears only minutes later, heralded by a bark from his faithful retainer. Passing them again, he heads straight for the counter, where he calls Megan over. Pete watches them closely and rolls his eyes at Cormac Tate — but Cormac pretends not to notice. Jon Heather has had women, but mostly, Pete likes to say, they’ve had him. There is a story Pete loves to tell of a landlady they had for a month when they were digging the pit in Kalgoorlie. She was Russian, old enough to be Jon Heather’s mother, and she’d coddled him as such; Jon didn’t pay his rent for a single night that month, proud to be adding the funds to the roll at the bottom of his packs.

  Pete sees Jon Heather reach into his back pocket and hand a note to Megan. The girl takes it, tentatively, and asks him a question. Jon looks back at Cormac Tate, then tells her: I’m paying; this is my thing now.

  Once the girl has gone, Jon turns and strides towards them. Like a boy whose foreman is fast approaching, Pete instinctively sits upright, smoothing the creases in his two-week-old shirt.

  Jon pulls a wad of notes out of his back pocket, flings it on the table.

  Pete’s eyes are agog. Jon Heather has always known how to save his earnings — but he has never seen as much money in his life.

  Jon sits, taking Dog’s head in his lap and teases his ears. ‘We’re going to be sticking around a few days,’ he says. ‘And Peter — we’re going to need a new ute …’

  XIII

  On the first day of January in the year of 1958,
Pete wakes to a hell of a hangover, in a campsite with a dozen other men. They have been laying a pipeline that will take water north — but, on a job like this, it is only to be expected that you cut yourself free once in a while.

  It takes him a little time to notice Jon Heather is missing — longer still to notice that the ute is also gone. In his pack, he finds a note: ‘Only to the highway, Peter’. It is a two-hour slog, under a malicious sun — and, by the time he gets there, he is dehydrated and cursing the day he ever met Jon Heather. Still, true to the idiot’s word, the ute is waiting there. To Pete’s surprise, Dog stands sentry, with a tin bowl beside him. He looks about as forlorn as Pete has ever seen him.

  Jon Heather has left the ute in the scorching sun, and Pete has to leave the doors open for an age before he can bear to sit down or take the steering wheel. Thoughtful boy that he is, he has at least left behind a canteen full of tea, and a stack of dampers wrapped in old newspaper. Pete crouches in the shade and shares them with Dog. ‘Breakfast of kings,’ he mutters. ‘What do you think of your old pal Jon Heather now?’

  He sees a corner of paper folded under the windscreen wiper. Lifting it out, he reads the message to the attentive Dog: ‘Only a year, Peter. I promise.’

  Probably it is because of money. They have bickered about money, like an old husband and wife. Pete spends too much. He supposes this makes him the woman.

  True to his word, on the first day of January in the year of 1959, Jon Heather walks into the plantation where Pete is picking fruit, takes up a basket, and — to Dog’s ecstasy — joins in. Pete doesn’t ask him where he has been, nor how he found him again.

  He hasn’t asked him to this day.

  ‘You two,’ Megan says, with that same hint of reproach that is fast becoming her mark, ‘are like a pair of little boys.’

  She has her hands in Pete’s suitcase; Jon’s is lying open on the bed alongside.

  ‘Who ever heard of a grown man reading comic stories? And …’ Her eyes flash sideways. ‘… I wouldn’t even begin to know where these came from …’

  She lifts up the Mystery at Witchend and reads the first sentences. ‘Didn’t your mothers ever tell you it was time to grow up?’

  That is enough for Jon. Cormac Tate knows it, and suddenly raises his glass. ‘To our boy Jon Heather!’ he declares.

  They drink together, the best swill that not-so-much money can provide.

  It is the twelfth of December in the year of 1960, and Jon Heather is twenty years old.

  There is work in Broome, if you know where to find it. The pearl farms won’t take you and the diving’s all dried up — but beds always need changing and toilets always need scrubbing. Jon takes to helping about the Old Arabia, while Pete and Cormac make themselves busy at the port. Mostly, they harangue old fishermen for work, try it on for size and quit the next day. For them, the real work is about spending, not earning money: somewhere in this town, the perfect ute is waiting to be bought.

  Jon has not celebrated a birthday properly since before the Children’s Crusade. Games of stones around the back of a dormitory with a boy you used to call your friend don’t really count. Since he took to the road with Pete, birthdays have been a guarded thing, always with a new group of people, always in a new town or station. All a birthday really means is you’ve spent one more year trying to be some place you’re not.

  This year, he feels that weight especially heavily. He was nearly ten years old when his mother said goodbye; that is ten years gone. He has been in Australia half of his life, and now every day he is here is another day upsetting the balance.

  None of this Megan knows. She has taken quite an interest in Jon Heather since he waltzed into the Old Arabia and instructed his companions they were going to stay. He is like an overgrown child, wandering around with a constantly bemused expression on his face, as if to say: this does not make sense, and this should not be here. If he started asking questions about why the sky is blue, or where little babies come from, Megan wouldn’t be surprised.

  For his birthday, she wanted to get him boots, but her father wouldn’t allow it. In their quarters at night, he said: you can’t buy boots for every vagabond who tramps through here; he’ll only sell them for petrol money. Instead, she has her arm hooked through his and walks him north of the Old Arabia, into the dusty Chinese avenues. The air is cloying, and smells of rain tantalizingly near. Tonight, at Sun Pictures, they are showing Swallows and Amazons, the 1949 cut. She knew she had seen the name before, when she glimpsed into Jon’s suitcase, and resolved, then, that she would drag him here, even if he declared it would make it the worst birthday of his life.

  They reach the theatre, great sheets of tin around a paddock of deck chairs open to the air. There are people here already, and Megan urges Jon through. She is aware she has talked almost all of the way here — though at least Jon Heather seems content to listen. He moves to sit at the back, but she has to hurry him on.

  ‘It’s for the Filipinos, silly,’ she says. There is a single Filipino family sitting there, a pair of aboriginal girls just behind.

  Jon wonders where the English people sit, but Megan seems to be reading his thoughts. ‘We’re down there,’ she says. ‘Jon Heather, come on!’

  She used to love coming here as a girl, she says. Her mother said they once did silent pictures, that the place went to the dogs as soon as the talkies came in, but for Megan it was always magical. It is what she remembers most about her mother. Often, you can barely hear the film for the wind or the rain or the chattering of bats, but that is hardly the point. The point is the sickly sugar drops they sell. The ice cream.

  ‘It’s going to rain,’ she says, sniffing the air. ‘Let’s take a higher seat.’

  Jon gives her a look.

  ‘It gets like that old song if it rains too hard: daddy, get the baby, the river’s rising …’

  When the picture begins, Megan is busy telling Jon what it was like when she was a girl, how she used to hide under the staircase at the Old Arabia with her mother and father at night. On the night Broome was bombed, she was only four years old. Probably she remembers other people telling tales of it more than she does the night itself, but it seems like she was there: a little girl, huddled on the jetty to watch the waters of the bay on fire.

  Though she quietens when the pictures start flickering, suddenly Jon is not interested in Swallows or Amazons anymore. He remembers, too, those nights huddled under the stairs.

  ‘They killed my father,’ he says. ‘The Germans.’

  She narrows her eyes, as if he has said another of those infuriating things designed to vex her. She just can’t tell, with Jon Heather, where the joke lies.

  ‘I’m talking about the Japanese, you roustabout,’ she says, aware that she has probably taken the bait for some joke she’ll never understand.

  Up on the screen, England crackles. A coracle spins on a river and the camera draws back to show open fens. Into the frame, a young boy gallops, cups his hands to his mouth and makes a hooting sound, somewhat like an owl.

  It is the England of all Jon’s books, the England of Witchend and Grey Walls and Snowfell and more. Yet, looking at it now, he realizes for the very first time that it is an England he has never seen. Not for Jon Heather a childhood gambolling in the woods, tracking down smugglers to their coves or uncovering wartime secrets high in the dales. Jon Heather’s England was red chimneystacks and grey slates, his whole world bordered by the roll of the endless terrace from which his mother never took him — until the day she signed her name on the pages of the Children’s Crusade.

  All the same, nostalgia burns in him. He looks away, peeking back in increments as the story unfolds. Is it possible, he wonders, to be nostalgic for something you never had?

  Before the hour is out, the rain starts to fall. It comes suddenly and heavily, like a faucet being ripped from the wall. Megan must know it is coming before Jon, because she cringes upwards. Then, the deluge begins.

  Megan drags
him upright by a sodden sleeve, but the higher seats have already been crammed. ‘Show’s over,’ she says.

  Jon doesn’t mind. He was beginning to think it didn’t really look like England at all. ‘We should be getting back,’ he says.

  ‘Not on your life, Jon. It’s your birthday! Don’t you want a drink?’

  Ordinarily, he doesn’t touch a drop — not because he’s a prude, but because drinks cost money, and that money could be put to better use. One tin of beer is equivalent to a tenth of a nautical mile.

  ‘Your treat,’ he says. He’s already thrown all of his money into a new ute, in any case.

  The canteen on Carnarvon Street is an empty little shack with a dour Malay attendant. Megan orders for Jon, dictating to him the things he will like.

  She has been speaking about herself all night, but now she begins to probe him. He is obviously not Australian, but she cannot pinpoint his accent. Probably they are Poms, but they don’t sound like any of the other Englishmen who, over the years, have come looking for riches in Broome. Jon shrugs it off. He is indeed English, he says.

  He thinks she might stop there, but she goes on. She wants to ask about his family, skirts around it until, like a carrion crow circling roadkill, she swoops in. Jon has been asked about his family a hundred times before, and he always has the same stock answer: Family? he replies. Who needs family!? Out on the stations and fences, a grin would erupt on the other man’s face. They wouldn’t be the men they were, Jon knew, if they needed families.

  Yet, he cannot bring himself to say it to Megan. She has a father she loves; a mother who loved her; a home that has sheltered generations of her family. He does not want to lie, but he does not want to tell the truth. He tells her how he grew up far away. Then, before she might pry, he reels out a list of places they have worked and bunked. Most of these places, she admits, she has never heard of. They are as far away and foreign as England and France.