Bereft

by Chris Womersley

  They stayed unmoving for a long time. It was the most peaceful moment he had experienced for many years. He felt secure. Shadows stretched over them as heat drained from the afternoon, and Quinn wondered what God would make of them, man and beast, as he cast his all-seeing eyes over the land.

  Crouching in the bush, Quinn continued to study his father’s house over subsequent days. Nathaniel often lingered uneasily on the veranda, apparently talking to himself. He realised his father—fearful of infection—was speaking with Quinn’s mother through the open window to her room. Before he departed on horseback, his father would stand in the dusty yard for minutes at a time and stare into the distance, as if waiting for everything to make sense. It was an attitude Quinn recognised, and he recalled his father gazing into the air as he considered the possibilities of the latest rumours he had heard at Sully’s or in the bar of The Mail.

  Nathaniel was an enthusiast. He considered himself at the forefront of modern thought and was at his happiest when seated with a stranger newly arrived from Sydney, brow knitted, chin in one hand, mulling over the latest outlandish idea shipped in from London. There were few notions Nathaniel Walker didn’t countenance, at least briefly. After all, he would say to those (namely Quinn’s mother) who sought to pull him up, hadn’t he taken a chance in bringing his young family to Flint in the first place? What of the money they had made, how they had prospered! If he had listened to the bloody naysayers he would still be digging ditches for some farmer out west. Quinn’s father had in his time flirted with growing rice, been a Fabian Socialist and invested in an oil called Gingerman’s Lotion, which was guaranteed to cure baldness but left the sufferer smelling like a sodden wombat. He was excited by electricity, by aeroplanes, at the myriad possibilities of alchemy. He was, in short, a man enamoured of possibility. Can you imagine? he would say, shaking his head in wonder. Can you just imagine it?

  There were other beliefs that lodged in his father’s imagination permanently and from which he refused to be swayed. He thought Chinamen lived in holes in the ground; he swore he had spoken with a yowie one night out near Sparrowhawk Mine; and he couldn’t shake the suspicion that Quinn and Sarah’s relationship was unhealthy and couldn’t his wife do something about it, look at the pair of them, people are starting to talk? So convinced was he that—when Quinn was twelve and Sarah eight—he forbade them from playing together, an edict that lasted two days before it was ignored.

  As Quinn watched from his hiding place, women arrived on bicycles carrying plates of food and baskets with other items they deposited on the doorstep before hurrying away. If he were present at the time, Nathaniel would exchange solemn greetings with these envoys from the Women’s Auxiliary, and they would chat uncomfortably for a minute or two before the ladies remounted their contraptions and wobbled away down the road.

  One such afternoon, Quinn waited until his father had left and stole again into the house, along the dark hall to his parents’ bedroom. This time his mother was awake. She regarded him with chilly hauteur.

  “You resemble my son,” she said after some time, “but I am reasonably sure he would not return to this place.”

  He stayed at the threshold.

  There followed a watchful silence until his mother drew herself up with obvious effort. “Come here, then. Let me touch you, boy.”

  He shuffled to her bedside and held out one hand.

  His mother prodded his palm with a finger. She cowered, as if scorched. “You are no ghost, then? My God. But are you able to speak?”

  Quinn touched the scarred side of his mouth. “Yes,” he said, aware of the watery lisp of the word snagging on his barbed-wire mouth.

  “Quinn? Is it really you?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “My … son?”

  He paused. “Yes.”

  “But they told me you were dead. I even have a letter.”

  “They were wrong.”

  She considered this for several seconds. “What could you want here?”

  “I came to tell you something.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I came to tell you I didn’t do it.”

  She glanced away and whispered words he couldn’t hear.

  “It wasn’t me,” Quinn went on, desperate now. “I swear to you. I didn’t do it.”

  She coughed, then faced him, eyes laced with fury. “You came to tell me this now, after ten years? Ten years, Quinn. Where have you been all this time? All these years I have wondered about that day. Did you not think of us—of me?”

  “Yes, Mother. Of course I did.” It was true. Rarely had a day gone by that he hadn’t pondered his mother and father or imagined his own return, but with each passing year, less was he able to envisage himself back in Flint. Even now, it was a quirk of history that he should find himself standing here. His new-found courage was purely accidental. He thought of the Military Medal he had flung into the ocean. “I’ll go to the police, I’ll tell them it wasn’t me.”

  “But what happened that day, Quinn? Tell me now.”

  He shook his head. It was almost too much to bear. “I don’t really know,” he lied. “I just found her there.”

  She searched his face for signs of deceit. Then she turned away and coughed into a handkerchief she had balled in one sweaty fist. “Of course I never thought you did it. Never. My God, such a thing. You were a lovely boy. But I should warn you—I am alone in thinking that.”

  Only then did Quinn realise he had been holding his breath waiting for this response.

  Neither of them said anything for several minutes.

  She faced him again. “They sent your description to police everywhere, you know. There was even a reward. They got a tracker out, but the storms had washed away any trace of you. Your disappearance was so”—she searched for a word—“complete. I have mourned for you, Quinn. Robert and your father told everyone what they saw—”

  He lurched forward, interrupting. “What they think they saw. What did they tell you exactly?”

  His mother closed her eyes. He thought she had fallen asleep, but presently her eyes flicked open. “I didn’t want to hear too much of it … My brother told me you were crying and that you were covered in blood. He said you had a knife in your hand, Quinn, and that you looked guilty. You ran away. I saw the way people stared at us with pity. There are things a mother doesn’t need to know, but the story is now carved, as if into stone. It was in the Sydney newspaper. Stories are difficult to rewrite, especially after so long.”

  “And they prefer to think I murdered my own sister?”

  “It is terrible to admit, but I was glad when they told me you had been killed in the war. It meant the dreadful story was over.” She studied him as if fearing he might leave at any second, then pushed aside a sheet and attempted to sit up. “My God, but you shouldn’t be here at all. Did you not see the flag? The house is quarantined. The yellow flag?”

  “I saw it, but I had to come in. I had to see you. The place looks abandoned.”

  Again she coughed. “It might as well be. Are you infected?”

  “No.”

  “Not yet. Even your father …”

  “What?”

  “He sleeps in the stable. Stays out of the house so he can keep working at Sparrowhawk. Until the quarantine is lifted. Only the doctor comes in. You should at least wear one of those masks.” She stared at the wall over his shoulder, as if the killer might be there in the shadows. “God will have his way with him, whoever it is. Whoever did that thing. God will see to it. One cannot escape such a crime. Remember Isaiah, Quinn. Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance. ”

  Quinn nodded. It was a thought with which he had attempted to console himself when troubled by thoughts of the man who had killed his sister.

  After a short silence, he said, “I will try and make things right, Mother.”

  “To make a crooked thing straight?”

  “If I can. I’ll tell Father it wasn’t me. It’
s not too late for some sort of justice for our Sarah.”

  “No, Quinn. Your father will kill you. There are things he refuses to believe, you know how he is. He is not the same man. It ruined him. It ruined all of us. Thank goodness for my brother. Robert has been my saviour in all of this. He was as devastated as anyone by what happened. He loved her, you know. He curses himself for not catching her murderer. He is as sure as anyone it was you. There is nothing to be gained. It is all too late now.” She coughed. “Quinn? Why did you stay away so long?”

  “I was afraid. I heard what people thought of me.”

  Again she inspected him, allowing her languid gaze to drop as if following the progress of a feather visible to her alone—from the scar at his mouth, to his throat, to the dull buttons of his tunic, until she stared at his hands now dangling at his sides. “You have been at the war? That at least is true?”

  Quinn nodded.

  She mouthed something and, when he indicated by a frown and shake of his head that he hadn’t understood, she repeated. “Was it terrible?”

  A rupture of the earth, a soldier sodomising a corpse at dusk, a tank marooned in the mire, the silence after the barrages as nations tallied their dead. He could tell her nothing of this. He could tell no one, for they would think him a liar; no one truly wished to know what humans were capable of.

  He had been laying rail tracks south of Grafton when he joined up and had foolishly thought war an elegant affair with clear results. He recalled the colour poster on the side of a cart with the slogan TAKE UP THE SWORD OF JUSTICE, the words accompanied by a painting of a handsome woman charging forth with one such weapon in her upraised fist. At the time it was exciting, and he had felt part of something—a sense that had been missing from his life for so many years. They told him there would be glory, that they would partake in something marvellous, but it was nothing but ruin and din.

  Mary ran a hand again across her damp hair. She licked her lips. “It has already been a dark century. Who knows what is still to come? At least God spared you, my son. At least he spared you.”

  At the auxiliary hospital at Harefield, a nurse had told him the same thing. The sudden waft of carbolic and boiled brussel-sprouts gone cold, the moist scrunch of rubber-soled shoes. God spared you, alright. You should see some of them. Make your bleedin’ hair curl. You been saved for somethin’.

  “What happened to your face?” his mother asked.

  “Shrapnel. From artillery in France.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “Not anymore. They fixed me up quite well. There are much worse. I was … lucky.”

  She coughed and drank from her water glass. “They say those Germans crucified a man against a shed. That they did … unspeakable things to girls.”

  Quinn recalled the dull winter afternoon the crucifixion rumour fevered through the trenches.

  His mother slumped back down. “We adapt to our sorrows, I suppose, as unpleasant as they might be. One cannot weep forever. One simply runs dry of tears. I would do anything to have Sarah back again. Anything.”

  Neither of them spoke for several minutes. His mother turned to peer through the curtain. Tears jewelled again on her lashes. Her grief was not exhausted, it seemed.

  At last she turned to him, and her mouth creased into a thin smile as if she were only now, after these twenty minutes in his presence, willing to truly believe he was here with her. “Ah, Quinn. You have returned. Against all hope. As I have prayed.”

  “And do you believe me?”

  She considered before answering. “I never really thought you would do something so terrible. Mothers always assume the best of their children. But it’s hard to believe anyone would do something like that.” And her eyes clamped shut, indeed her whole face closed over, excepting the few dry sobs that escaped her cracked mouth.

  After a few minutes she regained her composure. “My beautiful boy. My beautiful girl. You were like twins. The way she ordered you around. You, her older brother. You were so devoted. A lovely brother to her. She could make you do anything. You remember the running race, the time she made you and William dress up like fairies or something? Drove your father mad, of course.”

  He smiled, relieved. It seemed a border had been crossed. He waited while his mother appraised him again, and felt as if he’d been rendered an infant, awaiting punishment or love. She coughed, and grimaced with the effort of it.

  When the episode had subsided, she turned to him and said in her damp-gravel voice, “Come closer. Let me see you. It’s so dark in here.”

  He leaned in even further until he could sense the hot machinery of fever grinding away in her body. She rummaged among the bedclothes for her handkerchief, into which she coughed again, this time for some minutes. The attack exhausted her and, when she turned away, Quinn saw that her neck was patterned with purple spots. She closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  Emotions burrowed through him like mice. He should never have returned. He should have come sooner. He should not have left. His mother was feverish, so if she were to mention seeing him to anyone they would assume it an hallucination brought on by her illness. He wiped his mother’s brow with a damp cloth. Then he slunk away.

  5

  Leaving his father’s house, Quinn tramped through the bush, pausing here and there to reassess his direction or navigate past a rocky outcrop or fallen tree. He felt dazed by the conversation with his mother, but his despair at her condition was at least tempered by her belief in his innocence. For that alone it had been worth returning. The back of his neck grew tender under the afternoon sun.

  It came as a shock to find himself at the town’s cemetery, situated on a low hill about two miles from Flint. At the rusted gate, he turned to look down at the town. In the distance, he could see the tip of the church spire and, beyond that, the mountains blue and simmering in the haze. Heat pulsed from the ground and cicadas blazed in the surrounding trees.

  Alongside the older, ramshackle graves with their carious, half-sunken headstones were fresh mounds of earth, each decorated with recently cut flowers and clean headstones. Ginny Reynolds, Les McMahon. Flu victims, all of them.

  He had not intended to visit the cemetery but found it curiously calming, and he stayed for some time, drifting among the dead, daydreaming. There were worse places to spend eternity, he supposed, and thought of those millions interred beneath the icy soils of France, in butcher-shop pieces.

  It was inevitable to ponder death in times of war and illness, but he could never imagine an afterlife. He had endured nights in France in close proximity to dead soldiers and always found their presence claustrophobic, as if their silence were an impossible demand. He remembered a man slumped over a roll of barbed wire, teeth bared, the dull gleam of his smile. To feel nothing, to know nothing, to be nothing, to have nothing. No wonder man invented heaven.

  Sarah’s grave was beneath a towering gum tree. A fly buzzed about Quinn’s face. He paused, panting in the drowsy afternoon. He stared at the headstone and felt a long way from anywhere, as if the rest of the world had drifted off, or he from it. He grabbed at a tree branch as one might the railing on a pitching ship until the sensation subsided. He waved away the damn fly, but it was replaced by another. His immense grief was precisely why he had not visited until now. He knew it would be like this. His sister. His poor, murdered sister. Would that he were able to exchange places with her—even for alternate days, as the twins of legend, Pollux and Castor, had been permitted to do.

  The inscription on the headstone was weathered but perfectly legible.

  Sarah Louise Walker

  1897–1909

  Taken too soon

  Blessed are the pure in heart

  He squatted by the grave and squinted out over the countryside. It was almost beautiful here. He pondered what his mother had said, over and over, until the words tolled like an incantation. A distant flock of birds caught his eye, and for a second, as they banked, they appeared not to be flying at all b
ut rather hanging in the blue sky. Indeed, the entire world seemed stilled. I would do anything to have Sarah back again. I would do anything to have Sarah back again. I would do anything to have Sarah back again. A light breeze ruffled his hair. The world continued its revolution. The illusion gave way.

  He plucked a length of dry grass and chewed on it. It was tender and sweet—grass that had perhaps been nourished by the remains of his sister, its threadling roots having sprung from her hollowed-out ribcage, the place where her heart had once thrived. He rested a palm on the baking earth, as if to reassure Sarah of his determination to help. He would do whatever she required of him, as soon as it was clear.

  Last year, Quinn had met people in London who believed the dead could communicate with the living, but he reasoned it had little purpose unless the living were also able to offer something to those who had departed. Not that he knew what he might say to Sarah, should he ever have the opportunity. I’m sorry was inadequate now. I’m sorry I was so late.

  Ever since Sarah’s birth, Quinn had been amazed by his sister. Like their mother, Sarah was renowned for her beauty, her wit and her exuberance. Her presence altered any room she entered, as if she possessed a current that charged the very air. She convinced William for a time she could fly but chose to walk so people wouldn’t know of her powers. She tried to hypnotise their father with his own fob watch. She could draw forth cicadas by means of a curious song she warbled in her throat. His mother was right: Sarah used to order him around, could make him do almost anything. Once she demanded he wheel her about in a red wooden trolley for an entire day after he lost a wager over some minor matter that he couldn’t even recall. Any other older brother would have refused—there was no way William would have ever agreed to such a demand, assuming he had been of the temperament to make such a foolish bargain in the first place—but Quinn acquiesced and endured the opprobrium of his brother and father, who suspended work on the fence they were repairing to watch. Look at that, they’d muttered. Bloody hell.