Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  ‘So you three,’ she says, ‘must have seen more of Australia then us sorry sorts born here.’

  Jon supposes she is right, but it is not an idea he can warm to.

  ‘And you don’t like it?’

  It is such a very odd question that he can hardly believe she is asking it.

  ‘I see why so many people are coming, Megan. I’ve worked with them. English and Irish and Jewish and Hungarian. Two years ago, I was …’ He does not want to say where he was; that is like admitting to himself that he went there at all. It was only one moment at the beginning of that awful year, but it seems to haunt him. ‘I was working on a big project,’ he says, thinking of another story. ‘A water project. And there can’t have been a single Australian on it. I struck up with a man from Hungary. Took me three months, digging ditches with him, before he told me he was a doctor. A doctor, and he gave it all up, so he could come here!’ There were others: lawyers and teachers and bureaucrats, all of them working out their two years until Australia would welcome them to whatever profession they desired. ‘All those people, they’ve come here looking for a new beginning. But I never got to begin in the first place … It was them …’ The word might mean anybody; it might mean the Children’s Crusade; it might mean everybody in the whole wretched world. ‘… who decided we needed to start again. So it isn’t that I don’t like it here. It’s just that — it isn’t mine.’

  They finish their drinks and step back into the heavy night. Seconds later, the rain returns.

  ‘Happy birthday, you strange boy,’ Megan says, shrinking from the deluge.

  Jon is about to reply when a thought strikes him: this isn’t just my birthday.

  He forces the thought away and trudges on into warm, vertical rain. He is at the end of the road by the time he realizes her arm is not hooked through his — she has taken his hand.

  Pete has been holding the receiver for ten minutes before he dials the first number. It is an old phone, and he has to tremble each finger around a ring, listening to the click and whirr, before it registers. He has dialled only four digits when he is startled by somebody going up the stairs and hangs up.

  Damn, but he has never been this nervous before.

  Probably he should go back into the bar and drink with Cormac Tate — but a strange thing happened today while they were spending Jon Heather’s hard-saved money on a new wagon to toll them to Kununurra and back: Cormac went to buy them breakfast, and Pete felt guilty. It must be something to do with this smallholding. Pete has never thought there was a bargain being made in accepting hand-outs from Cormac Tate before, but the thought occurred to him today.

  He steadies himself. He begins to dial again. This time, he has only dialled three numbers when the doors open and in walks a drenched Jon Heather, with that girl Megan close behind.

  Happily, he slams the receiver down and spins around. ‘Jon Heather!’ he cries. ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes. Do you want to know what Cormac Tate and your pal Pete did today?’

  Megan is finding a towel for Jon, and throwing down newspapers so that he doesn’t trample dirty red water into her father’s mat.

  ‘We got ourselves a ute, Jon. A big bastard ute …’

  ‘Good,’ says Jon. He spies, through the bar-room doors, that Mr Cook and his entourage are holding yet another evening council. ‘I don’t know how long we’ll need to stay.’

  As Pete turns to contemplate the telephone yet again, he sees them heading through the bar towards Megan’s family quarters. Probably, he decides, this is the reason they’ve been lingering in Broome so long, forgetting all about his sister. He picks up the phone and slams it back down.

  The staff quarters are up a side staircase, beyond the bar. There are photographs along the walls, not of old pearlers and divers from the first days of Broome, but of a family through the generations, the young Megan and her mother in the very last shot.

  ‘Come in,’ she says. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’

  It is a dangerous game, going into Megan’s quarters. She opens the door and he has to steel himself before going through. Even in the years he has spent since the Mission, working with Pete, he has been careful not to go into a family home. Sometimes they were even invited — into farms or station houses, for meals with eager daughters or farmers’ wives. Pete was always ready to indulge himself on such occasions, but Jon Heather was made of sterner stuff.

  This time, curiosity gets the better of his valour.

  The quarters are not large. A small lounge room opens onto a kitchenette and, beyond that, a hall, where the bedrooms sit side by side, one for Megan, and one for her father. Megan begins to walk that way and, when Jon Heather follows, trying not to take note of the family photos on the walls, she gives a knowing look over her shoulder.

  ‘You stay here,’ she says, with a smile that is half tease and half genuinely bemused. ‘I won’t be a second.’

  She is longer than that. While he waits, Jon Heather begins to feel like an intruder, a thief poring through the drawers of the houses that he burgles. On a shelf, he sees a photograph of a little girl and her mother, both of them beaming into the camera. It is a long stretch of beach, sand the colour of oyster shells, the little girl burnt the colour of a crab.

  He is lost in the photograph when Megan reappears, holding a tiny tea chest, only a quarter the size of Jon Heather’s suitcase.

  ‘My mother,’ she says, joining Jon at the photo. ‘She was beautiful.’

  A hundred questions he wants to ask: how old were you when she died? Do you remember her voice? Her smell? Do you wonder how it would have been, if she was still here?

  ‘Here, see,’ says Megan. She sets the tea chest down, sits on the arm of a chair and opens the clasp. When she gestures for Jon Heather to join her, he finds himself shaking his head.

  ‘I’d rather stand.’

  She gives him a look.

  ‘My leg …’ he lies. ‘It still twinges from when me and Pete …’

  Fortunately, lost in the chest, Megan is not interested. Inside, there are piled beautiful rare shells and brooches, a simple silver wedding band, a necklace of perfect pearls. She lifts it out and marvels at it, showing it to Jon.

  ‘My grandmother’s,’ she says, ‘from when they still dived for pearls. My grandfather had it made the day she agreed to be his wife. That was the day he signed the deeds on the Old Arabia as well. It all started with this.’

  She offers it for Jon to hold, but he dare not. Even so, she goes through each of the trinkets in turn, each an heirloom from somewhere in her history, the history of Broome, the history of this hotel.

  A part of Jon asks: why aren’t you disgusted? This should be like salt poured in a wound. But the greater part of him answers: I don’t know. I think … because it’s her.

  ‘I’m boring you,’ says Megan.

  ‘You’re really not.’

  ‘They’re things my mother wanted me to have. Things she’d want me to give, if I had a daughter.’

  ‘Or a son.’

  Megan gives a crumpled shrug. ‘A certain sort of son, maybe.’ She snaps the box shut and hugs it close to her chest. ‘Do you want to … stay for dinner? Dad will bring something back from the kitchens. I’m sure he’d like to hear about all of these places of yours too.’

  ‘They’re hardly mine,’ Jon says. His eyes, for some reason, are still on the closed chest.

  ‘Still,’ she says, aware that this boy can find an insult in the most mundane of things, ‘I’m sure he’d like to meet you. You know, since he’s been changing your bed and making your meals for the last two weeks.’

  He hesitates. When you were eleven years old, Jon Heather, you had a friend. She was called Laura and she loved to hear your stories of what you would do and who you would be when you got back to England. Perhaps she dreamed of being there with you. Yet, one day, you simply stopped talking to her, because to talk to her was to invite trouble, and trouble might mean you never got home unscathed
. Some people might say you were defeated, because you gave the men in black exactly what they wanted; triumph would have been to carry on, and never get caught. But those people would be wrong. To deny yourself the very thing you want in the name of something bigger is the most important triumph there is. And you learnt a lesson there, Jon Heather, one that your pal Pete has forgotten in his dogged devotion to Cormac Tate: never get attached; attachment is cowardice; loneliness is brave — and you are nothing if not brave.

  He leans in to hug her goodbye. ‘I had a really great night, Megan.’

  As he turns to leave, she stands and stares.

  This has never happened before.

  ‘You see?’ says Jon, idling the new ute. Dog is stretched across his lap with his muzzle on Pete’s knee.

  Pete slams his fist against the door. ‘Jon Heather, don’t you dare tell me this is why we’re still here instead of up and after my sister …’

  At midday, every day, the old policeman takes the two pale aboriginal girls out of the lock-up and leads them on a walk around the big dirt oval. Along the way there is a little mound of tough grass, and they are permitted to sit in the shade of a boab tree, while the policeman doles out sandwiches. Then they are permitted to go down to the mud flats, instructed to throw their leftover bread to the birds — this being the sort of thing that children like — and taken back.

  ‘I asked Megan. They come through five, six times a year, that man Cook and others like him. They get sent notes of where there’s girls out there. They rustle them, Peter, like any old sheep. They’re after anyone who’s got a white daddy, but …’

  ‘Do you know something?’ Pete interjects. ‘Me and Cormac Tate, we’d got it into our heads you wanted to stay because of the girl. That I could understand, Jon. Damn it, that would be something worth waiting for.’

  ‘I would have thought …’

  ‘You don’t think for shit,’ Pete replies. ‘This has got you all riled up, hasn’t it?’

  Jon turns. ‘It hasn’t you?’

  Pete breathes, itching to jump out of the ute and be away. He was going to go out fishing with Cormac Tate today — but instead he’s sitting in the blistering sun, watching this.

  ‘That place is a jail, Peter. They’ve barely closed it down. Used to lock up blacks in it.’

  ‘Might be they deserved it,’ Pete protests.

  ‘Might be they did,’ Jon says. ‘But they didn’t.’ The old policeman rounds the corner again, bringing the girls back after their daily jaunt. ‘I’ve been down here at night, Peter. I’ve heard them crying.’

  Dog lifts his muzzle, sensing something is wrong.

  ‘You come down here to listen to children cry? Jon, you’re …’ He knocks his finger against the side of his skull. ‘You don’t even know why they’re there. Might be they’re orphans …’

  ‘I’m not an orphan.’

  ‘… or might be they did something bad.’

  ‘It isn’t that at all,’ Jon breathes. His eyes are not on Pete, but on the girls instead. The policeman ushers them inside, dressed up as if, but for their skin colour, they might be his daughters. ‘They’re Protection Officers. Megan says they’re in charge of making sure there aren’t problems, looking after the blacks in the bush and out on the stations, but all it really is … they ship those kids to places down south, near where …’

  Finally, Pete understands. ‘It isn’t the same thing, Jon,’ he says levelly.

  ‘It’s exactly the same fucking thing,’ Jon returns, ‘and you’d know it, if they’d put you in that Mission with me.’

  Back to this, thinks Pete. Every time Jon might lose an argument, he summons it up: you weren’t there, Peter. As if it’s Pete’s fault the men in black threw him onto a station instead of sending him back to school.

  ‘Put your foot down, Jon. We’ve been loitering too long.’

  They cruise up to the rickety Streeter’s Jetty, to meet Cormac Tate. The silence in the cab is heavy. Dog looks, miserably, between his two best friends. Then he stands up, walks over Pete’s lap and sticks his head out of the window. Probably this is his way of resolving matters between them: he is showing both Pete and Jon his gaping backside.

  ‘I mean, Jon, what do you think you can do?’ He grins and needles at Jon’s arm with the tip of a finger. ‘You haven’t got a jailbreak on your mind, Jon Heather?’

  ‘It’s Cook,’ says Jon. ‘He’s still here. Megan says he keeps extending his stay at the hotel, day after day.’

  ‘So?’

  Jon looks at Pete. He might be his only real friend in the world. They haven’t once let each other down, not like that friend they used to have. ‘So,’ he says, ‘it means he hasn’t taken those girls to their Home yet.’ A cry goes up; Cormac Tate is just stepping onto the jetty, a pair of big snappers slung over his shoulder. ‘It means,’ says Jon, ‘that he hasn’t finished what he came here to do.’

  There is no work to be found in the following week — so, at last, Jon relents and drives Megan to the long stretches of Cable Beach, where they can walk for miles and not see another human being. At the Old Arabia, Pete and Cormac Tate watch them go. Pete tries to bundle Dog into the ute alongside them, but Megan will not be persuaded. Jon Heather looks back through the window grille as he leaves, giving a plaintive shrug.

  ‘Well, what do you make of that?’ Pete grins, slapping Dog around the scruff to stop his howling. ‘Jon Heather going off with a girl and leaving his mutt behind?’

  ‘I’ve seen stranger things,’ says Cormac Tate, lifting a can of coffee to his lips.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Indeed,’ he slurps. ‘But I’ve always been asleep.’

  When they get there, Cable Beach is empty, white sands fringed with a belt of rust where lizards scuttle in the scrub. Jon guides the ute down an incline of hard-packed red and rolls along the glistening sands. At a headland in the distance, where the rocks reach out to sea, there stands a tall tower of iron girders with what appears to be a white nest sitting on top. This, Megan tells him, is a lighthouse. She laughs when Jon’s face crumples. ‘Are lighthouses different in England?’

  Jon has only ever seen them in books but he nods all the same.

  ‘I used to come here when I was a girl. It was my mother’s favourite place.’

  ‘How old were you when she …’

  Megan looks at him sideways. ‘How old do you think I am?’

  ‘I’m playing a dangerous game, aren’t I?’

  ‘Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to ask a girl her age?’

  ‘That they did not,’ Jon says, trying to grin. ‘They taught me about crop rotation, if that counts?’

  ‘It counts.’

  ‘You shouldn’t plant the same thing in the same field for more than a couple of seasons. It kills whatever’s in the ground.’

  They drift towards the breakers, but the tide is out and they seem to walk forever. Seabirds wheel in strange, mismatched flocks.

  ‘So tell me … what is it with you and Pete? You squabble like brothers.’

  ‘I suppose we’re a bit like brothers.’

  ‘But brothers who make jokes about being …’ The smile is deliberate. ‘… more than brothers.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Jon, suddenly chagrined. ‘That joke probably ought to stop.’

  They walk in the sea spray — ‘this, Jon Heather, must be the reason you never wear boots’ — but even after an hour has gone, they have not yet reached the headland. Over his shoulder, Jon can still see the ute, barely any smaller than it was the last time he looked.

  ‘You’re tired, aren’t you?’

  Jon shrugs. ‘I could walk all day.’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? When I say you’re tired, what I really mean is, I’m tired. Let’s take a rest … Jon Heather, you need too much tutoring!’

  ‘Really,’ he says. ‘How old are you?’

  She throws him a disparaging look and marches out of the spray.

  They rest at the foot of
the fiery red cliffs before taking off again. There is no shade and suddenly the sun is directly overhead. Jon has walked through deserts before, but today is the first time it has dizzied him. Even when he looks over the ocean he cannot see a horizon.

  At last, they reach the headland. It looks unscalable, but Megan knows the proper paths and leaps up. On the first ledge, she reaches back to offer Jon her hand. Only after he has taken it does he realize what he has done.

  They climb to the peak, Megan blazing the way and taking delight in the way Jon Heather keeps stopping to make sure of his footing.

  ‘Here it is,’ she says, offering to haul him up the last scrabble of rock.

  In the rocks on the other side, there is a great crater, a perfect circle in which warm, clear waters ripple. Megan sits above and peers into it so that she can see her reflection blinking back. She looks at Jon Heather’s reflection. His face is furrowed, puzzled as to why she might bring him here.

  ‘The lighthouse keeper carved it. He had a wife, Anastasia. She was crippled, Jon, could hardly move … But the waters are warm, and every morning he would carry her down so she could sit in the water. She didn’t hurt when she was in the water. It took him every hour he had, but he built it for her. I always wonder if my dad loved Mum like that.’

  ‘Is it just a story?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it does.’

  They skid down the sharp red rocks and crouch by the pool. When Jon dips his hand in, it is, indeed, warm. The waves crash beneath them but the spray does not reach beyond the rocks.

  They find a place to sit, where they can gaze out over the ocean again. From the sun in the sky, Jon judges that it is the small of the afternoon. He finds the place where the sea meets the sky, tries to judge which way England might lie. To do so he must look back along the curve of the beach, but the red rocks rise all around them and he is not certain how far they have come. It is useless; England might be in any one of a dozen directions. It is, he realizes, the very first time he has lost track of it. Pete and Cormac Tate would clap him on the back and say: bastard good, Jon Heather!

  ‘You’ve got that look again …’